Category Archives: Trans Gender Critical

The Transgender Movement: Unfit for an Ecological Future

By Jeanne Neath

When non-essential surgeries including ‘gender reassignment surgery’ became difficult to obtain during the COVID-19 pandemic, many ‘transgender’ people became distressed. As NBC News reported, 31 year old Katalina Murrie, a Canadian ‘transgender’ male, had scheduled a facial feminization procedure “to soften one’s facial features and bone structure” with a surgeon in Guadalajara, Mexico for March 27th 2020. Even pre-COVID-19, the Canadian health system considered this cosmetic surgery non-essential and would not pay for it. With the pandemic, international travel no longer felt like an option to Murrie. Distraught at having to miss his surgery, Murrie told NBC News:

“What if all the borders closed around the world and I am stuck in a foreign country?” Murrie recalled asking herself. “My face would be covered in stitches. I’d have to travel through popular airports where there have been confirmed reports of staff members with COVID-19. My dream surgery all of a sudden became very stressful.” (NBC News, “Trans surgeries postponed indefinitely amid coronavirus pandemic“)

Murrie considered the facial feminization procedure anything but “non-essential” and groused about his situation, saying “I’m not gonna last to my 40s if I don’t have this surgery.”

facial feminization in Guadalajara Mexico

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced hospitals facing an overload of patients and procedures to prioritize what kinds of care they will provide. Cosmetic surgeries done on the healthy bodies of ‘transgender’ people became clearly inappropriate, impossible to perform in the face of an overload of sick and dying patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic, a result of human-caused ecological disturbances, is providing a preview into an unfolding ecological society. With the overconsumption in the global North the Earth is being pushed to her limits and she is forcing society onto a budget. As a result, ‘gender reassignment’ medical treatments, including surgeries, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are likely to become socially unacceptable, even impossible for society to provide as we shift into ecological sanity. Neither the Earth nor society can afford for queer ideology and the Internet driven transgender fad to continue pushing so many young people into a life of medical complications and dependency on medical services.

Insatiable Desires

When Katalina Murrie told NBC News “I’m not gonna last to my 40s if I don’t have this surgery”, he provided a clue to the mental state of many in the transgender movement. ‘Transgender’ people have placed themselves in the very unsettling situation of building a movement and individual identities based in a lie and a theft. The lie, of course, is that sex can be changed. The theft takes place when ‘transgender’ males assume the identity of an oppressed group – women. Since ‘transgender’ people cannot change their sex, all the surgeries and hormones in the world will never give them what they want, will never allow them to feel satisfied with their bodies or secure in their identities.

The impossible goals and insatiable desires of ‘transgender’ people remind me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s discussion of the Windigo in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass.[1] A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer explains that the Windigo is the “legendary monster” of the Anishinaabe people of the north woods of North America, a human being whose inability to cope with winter’s starvation time drives them into cannibalism. In Kimmerer’s word:

“It is said that the Windigo will never enter the spirit world but will suffer the eternal pain of need, its essence a hunger that will never be sated. The more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes… its mind a torture of unmet wants.”[2]“

Mimi and Eunice cartoon

Of course, the vast majority of ‘transgender’ people are in no way monsters or legendary, but Kimmerer’s description of the “mind a torture of unmet wants” seems to fit. Kimmerer uses the story of the Windigo as a powerful means of critiquing the unrestrained consumption of so many in the dominant society and their complicity in the destruction of the natural world.

“The fear for me is far greater than just acknowledging the Windigo within. The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgiveable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as ‘quality of life’ but eats us from within. It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.”[3]

Insatiable desire “eats us from within” and leads to a person who can’t stop taking, attempting somehow to sate the desire. Like the rest of consumer society, ‘transgender’ people, who want to be what they can never be, indulge in a frenzy of taking – usurping women’s identity, pirating women’s and Lesbian spaces, snatching symbols from Lesbian-feminist culture, insisting on medical services for non-essential needs, taking Earth’s “resources” used in providing those non-essential medical services.

Like the rest of consumer society, ‘transgender’ people, who want to be what they can never be, indulge in a frenzy of taking – usurping women’s identity, pirating women’s and Lesbian spaces, snatching symbols from Lesbian-feminist culture, insisting on medical services for non-essential needs, taking Earth’s “resources” used in providing those non-essential medical services.

What creates the insatiable desire that leads to all this taking? For ‘transgender’ people, an obvious cause is a patriarchal society that forces girls and boys, women and men into suffocating sex roles. In a society that tears apart and builds over nature, society’s sex roles can seem more real, more fixed than nature. Rather than work to change society’s deadly sex role prescriptions, most ‘transgender’ people have elected to deny and reject their own sexed bodies.

Our bodies, of course, are part of the natural world – part of our internal nature [4] – as are our minds, our emotions, our selves. Denial and rejection of the physical realities of one’s body is a sign of a deep and dangerous alienation from nature. The dominant society routinely creates people who are alienated from both internal and external nature and this alienation is another root of the transgender phenomenon.

So-called sex reassignment clinics in Thailand

Western Civilization Creates the Alienated Self

What creates an alienated self? It is not just transgender people who are alienated from their bodies and from nature. The alienated self appeared in Western civilization at least as early as Homer’s era in ancient Greece when “a dominant warlike race established themselves over the mass of vanquished natives.” [5] To understand the creation of the alienated self, I want to turn to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1945 book, Dialectic of Enlightenment. These two philosophers can be difficult to read, so Carolyn Merchant can serve as our interpreter in this section. Here’s Merchant on the central character in Homer’s The Odyssey:

“Odysseus represents the struggle to overcome the imitation of nature and immersion in the pleasures of animal life and tribal society. Through the emergence of his own identity as an individual self, he is able to break the hold of the mythic past and control his animal instincts, his men, his wife, and other women. He becomes alienated from his own emotions, bodily pleasures, other human beings and nature itself.”[6]

Where people in more peaceful societies experienced themselves as part of nature, imitated nature, and experienced nature as sacred, Merchant explained that “In the ancient world the emergence of a sense of self as distinct from the external natural world entailed a denial of internal nature in the human being.”[7]

The alienation of self increased dramatically during the European Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. At this time the elevation of mind, reason, prediction and control resulted in the “disenchantment of the world”[8] (and increasing domination of nature and humans with the expansion of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism). The deeply felt perception that nature (and women) are sacred was further lost in the West.

Today most people living in cities rarely think of nature as the provider of all the physical materials they need to live – materials for shelter, water, energy, food, medicine. Many don’t know much about the natural world and don’t feel a spiritual connection to nature. Many live “in their heads” and feel deeply dissatisfied with their bodies.

‘Transgender’ people are not that different. But, they do take alienation to an extreme when they deny the physical reality of their sexed bodies. The alienation escalates even more when they take action against their own bodies by undergoing ‘gender reassignment’ treatments. This desecration of ‘internal nature’ leads to the desecration of external nature. As Merchant explained, “The disenchantment of external nature was achieved by despiritualizing a human being’s internal nature.”[9]

Pigs Can Fly? Growth is Green?

Pigs Can Fly? Growth is Green? Males Claim To Be Women? Technology Saves All?

The only strand of the environmental movement compatible with a trans-ideology that pushes ‘gender reassignment’ and medicalization is “ecomodernism” or, more broadly, “green growth.” Environmentalists subscribing to “green growth” philosophies are, like many ‘transgender’ people, stuck in fantasies about an impossible future where technology saves the day and overcomes biological, ecological and even thermodynamic limits. Both “green growth” and transgender ideologies are based in the anti-ecological and old-fashioned Enlightenment perspective that underlies “modernity” and the myth of progress.

Ecomodernists want the living standards of industrialized societies to continue rising and for high consumption lifestyles to spread into the global South. They believe, contrary to all evidence, that economic growth can be “decoupled” from environmental damage. What magic will they use to accomplish the impossible? New and improved technology, of course, with some population reduction and efficiency improvements tossed into the mix. All this “progress” would require an increase in energy production that could only be powered by nuclear energy. The authors of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” explain:

“Transitioning to a world powered by zero-carbon energy sources require energy technologies that are power dense and capable of scaling to many tens of terawatts to power a growing human economy. Most forms of renewable energy are, unfortunately, incapable of doing so.… Nuclear fission today represents the only present-day zero-carbon technology with the demonstrated ability to meet most, if not all, of the energy demands of a modern economy….In the long run, next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.”[10]

Nuclear energy is a dangerous technological choice to hang your hat on. At least the surgeries and drugs that many transgender people depend on do not have the power to irradiate the Earth. These technologies can never be the “cure-all” that ecomodernists and transgenderists desire. They just avoid dealing with the real problems which are social.

Ecomodernism debunked

Most modern technology has grown out of systems of thought belonging to a patriarchal, colonialist, and capitalist system. These technologies must always be questioned. The transgender project is a crude early step on the techno-utopian[11] path that wants to create humans who are essentially different from the species nature created many millenia ago. For example, researchers are now using CRISPR technology for germline genetic engineering to create superhumans. Researchers studying artificial intelligence may soon have machines that are smarter than humans. All these technologies, including the ones used for ‘gender reassignment,’ would be carefully controlled or outlawed if this society were not based in domination and profiteering.

Ancient Connections

The ecologically unsound transgender project will not withstand the force of nature’s revolt. Already more and more girls and women who ‘transitioned’ are in revolt against the squelching of their female nature. They are detransitioning, re-identifying as female. Nature’s revolt is forcing a paradigm shift on the dominant society and the coming ecological society will not be able to afford the non-essential surgeries, unnecessary medical dependencies, insatiable desires and thefts from women, alienation from nature and use of questionable technologies for questionable purposes. An ecological society will have to be based in hard reality and this will not leave room for fantasies of becoming a different sex.

The way “forward” in these volatile times will include a spiraling “back” toward our species’ ancient connections with Earth and with our own nature. It isn’t hard to start forming these connections. Take a walk and let your feet feel the Earth with every slow step you take.[12] Find out how to use the different species of lichen and mosses to determine direction.[13] Learn what is going on outside your house by becoming familiar with what the birds are telling you. Then listen to the bird’s language every chance you get.[14] The changing Earth and the changing times are unsettling. But this part can be an adventure!

Carolina wren

*****

Footnotes

1. Please note that I am the one making the link between ‘transgender’ people and the Windigo. Robin Wall Kimmerer does not discuss this.
2. p. 305, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.
3. p. 308, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.
4. As humans we are, of course, influenced by both our biology and our society in much of what we do and experience. I am using the concept of ‘internal nature’ here to include human biology, but also other aspects of our internal being. In a broad sense human society in all its many forms is part of nature. So-called ‘gender identity’ is a socially created self-perception derived from deep internalization of male or female sex roles and the belief that those socially-created sex roles are fixed, even biological. ‘Gender identity seems to be based in a self-evaluation of how well one’s physical characteristics, preferences and predispositions fit with male vs female sex roles and stereotypes of what male vs. female bodies look like. There is no fixed, essential, biological gender identity as the transgender movement claims. Take away sex roles and sex stereotypes and “poof”, ‘gender identity vanishes too.
5. p. 48, “The Concept of Enlightenment” by Max Horkheimer and theodor Adorno. In Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory edited by Carolyn Merchant
6. p. 3-4, Carolyn Merchant, Introduction to Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory
7. p. 3, Carolyn Merchant, Introduction to Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory
8. p. 44, “The Concept of Enlightenment” by Max Horkheimer and theodor Adorno. In Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory edited by Carolyn Merchant
9. p. 4, Carolyn Merchant, Introduction to Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory
10. An Ecomodernist Manifesto, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69fcdbb/1429026747046/An+Ecomodernist+Manifesto.pdf
11. See Part Three, beginning on page 133 in Bill McKibben’s book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out for a discussion of chilling technologies under development that will change what it means to be human – unless they are stopped.
12. See Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking
13. See The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals―and Other Forgotten Skills by Tristan Gooley
14. See What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young

American robin

Can I Get a Witness: Impressions and Notes

By Woody Blue

Note to readers from XX Amazons: XX Amazons welcomes your comments about all our blogs. We also welcome comments about the “Can I Get a Witness” event, including discussion about any of the speaker’s presentations and your thoughts about the inclusion in the conference of right wing speakers. XX Amazons values discussion of difficult or controversial topics that are of importance to radical feminists.

Aug 8, 2020.
I attended the Zoom conference, “Can I Get a Witness”, a conference devoted to opening up the discussion about the trans movement with those who have studied various aspects about it and have tried to speak out against it. Mostly they were met with backlash, deplatforming and other forms of silencing.

The conference tapped into many aspects of the trans movement and the interviews I listened to were primarily from people in UK or US; others were from Brazil, Canada, Sweden and Australia.

Can I Get A Witness Flyer I tried to take notes on every speaker. The conference was 13 hours long and had 28 speakers, with an occasional video or song between speakers. At times my computer acted up or I had to take a small bathroom or food break and so some things were missed.

In typing up my notes, I looked up the webpages of the various speakers to get a better handle on who they were and how or why they were involved with these issues. I invite you to visit the websites of any of the people here if you want to investigate further.

Joey Brite, a butch lesbian and organizer of the conference, has been watching the trans community decimate her own lesbian world. There is an interview with her on the Women Are Human website. In that interview she states,

“I would like people reading this to understand that this is a secular, self-financed enterprise. This is important. Women who have gone before this event and continue to have fantastic sessions online are constantly getting accused of taking money from right-wing organizations. I’m working class, and I’ve scraped everything I can together to make this happen. It’s taken me more than a year and a half.”

Continue reading “Can I Get A Witness”: Interview with Organizer of Virtual Event on Gender Non-Conformity That Has Social Media Abuzz here.

For a list of speakers and the schedule, go here. The organizers state that in a few months they will have the recorded sessions available for purchase for a small fee.

Can I Get a Witness: Speakers and Notes

By Woody Blue, with help from Sally Tatnall, 8/11/2020

In order of appearance:

1. Abigail Shrier, author of the book “Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” She gave a short introduction of herself and why she wrote the book. She found that no one was willing to publish information, whether an article or book, that criticized the trans movement. This is why there is such little info in mainstream written media.

Sasha Ayad & Lisa Littman 2. Sasha Ayad, a therapist for teens and their families specializing in ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria). She was very informative and gave statistics concerning the rapid rise of ROGD in the last few years. She referenced Lisa Littman’s experiences and studies a few times. Lisa Littman is a researcher from Brown University who ran into a lot of trouble when she tried to publish her findings on ROGD. She stated that 30% of transitioning children are autistic.

Authenticity seems to come from body sculpture. Using the term “assigned at birth” removes it from biological reality.

3. Jennifer Bilek, author of “The 11th Hour” blog. She has been following the money that supports the trans movement. All the money flows through the Arcus Foundation. There are a few philanthropic billionaires that throw money into the trans movement. The money going into the movement increased in 2014. They work at deconstructing sex by normalizing trans and body dissociation. They claim that sex, (not gender) is on a spectrum using the intersex community as proof. It is social manipulation by the elite.

Jennifer stated that the trans movement is driven by the IT industry. Transhumanism is the result which is basically the concept that technology has the ability to modify bodies. If we aren’t connected to our bodies, we can reduce them to body parts. Thereby a womb can be transplanted, a penis can be built, mothers can have beards, never covering the harms.

The trans movement provides the people and the advertising to promote these concepts. Hollywood is heavily involved as the movie industry glamorizes actors who change gender, and fashion magazines put them on covers. Now it’s fun and cool to be disconnected from your body.

Jennifer Bilek spoke of the colonizing and commodifying of women. Sex trafficking, prostitution and porn are major players to promote fetishes.

She says the movement is mainly led by autogynes. A women’s body is the object and without women’s biology, trans doesn’t exist. The trans movement unmoors us from our sex, which is where the transhumanism ideology is taking us.

Many of the later speakers referenced Jennifer Bilek and stated that she had compiled and researched this topic extensively. She is highly regarded.

4. Jane Wheeler, President of ReIME, an acronym for ReThink Identity Medicine, a non-profit research and education organization dedicated to improving and optimizing ethical long term care and treatment for gender variant children, adolescents and youth.

She talked about the rising numbers of teens being referred to clinics dealing with gender. The average age is 14 years old. At this point, 2% of High school students identify as trans.

She explained that the medical world has changed drastically in the past several years due to its monetary value, which is now $3.6 trillion dollars in the US, 20% of the GNP. Some of the ways it has changed is with the advent of patient’s rights, disease advocacy, direct marketing, treatment chat rooms, and over 10,000 advocacy groups. Gate-keeping has been minimized and it has become patient-centered, meaning patients can shop for drugs, treatments, doctors.

These changes are available to adults and minors. The age of consent is between 14 – 16 years old. Marketing to minors has increased. Used to be $100 million annually, now it’s billions.

They are selling gender in very restrictive terms. Democrats are out of sync with this because they want the LGBT’s on their side.

She had more to say but my notes aren’t clear.

5. Kara Dansky, lawyer for WoLF. I don’t have much written down, but I recall that she talked about some of the court cases that have happened in the past and a few that are ongoing now. She was asked about the Religious Right in the Q&A, and she didn’t promote their agenda but stated that they have their own reasons for making this their issue. She said there is no support on the Left at all.

6. Don Smith, concerned citizen. This is a Black man who spent most of his worklife in Great Britain, then moved to Sweden. He is married and has been closely watching the trans movement. He views transgenderism as another arm of Colonization. He described the War Model of Transgenderism as a progression. In this case, the boundaries of this war is gender. First comes Invasion, then Annexation, then Assimilation, Domination and Subjugation. These are the progressive steps when one nation is colonizing another.

He expressed a lot of concern about the colonization of women, explaining that as a Black man, these were the steps to colonize the Blacks when they were stolen from Africa. Trans treat women as commodities, similar to Black slaves being treated as commodities. They aren’t considered fully human, perhaps subhuman. Sex trafficking and prostitution are ways that women are treated as property, rather than humans. When slavery was abolished, a free Black was worth only 3/5 of a White man.

He explained that all colonization works this way throughout history and now the trans are colonizing women. This destroys a woman’s humanity and reduces them to objects which can be fetishized.

When confronted, the trans community resorts to DARVO, an acronym for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. His observations are that the queer community has become a Men’s Rights Activity.

He feels that the way to disrupt the trans movement is to dismantle pornography, as this is the way men are taught. He brought up sissy porn, which shows feminized men. He says that feminized men don’t look at themselves as women and don’t want to be women. He brought up the example of Hula men in prison and told us to look it up as he was running out of time.

Don Smith is happily married and said that understanding more about women’s issues and the ways they are treated has helped him become a better husband. He feels it’s extremely important to take down the trans movement before it takes down women.

7. Dr. Quentin Van Meter, pediatric endocrinologist. President of the American College of Pediatricians. Dr. Van Meter has spoken out about the danger of puberty blockers. He has been working with children of puberty age for many years and says that puberty is a time when the body starts changing into its reproductive role. This can be frightening but after a year or so, things settle down and the child adapts to the changes. Puberty is not something that should be blocked, as it prevents the person from maturing. 98% of children who are put on puberty blockers go on to enter the trans world and become infertile because their bodies can no longer mature.

He said that gender is a state of mind. There is absolutely no test of any kind that will determine gender.

He told us that doctors who know better don’t speak out because of fear of losing their jobs, reputations and being bullied. He practices in Atlanta, Ga.

Gendercator DVD 8. Catherine Crouch, lesbian filmmaker. In 2007, Ms. Crouch made a movie called “The Gendercator.” It was a story about a lesbian who had an accident and woke from a coma many years later. When she woke up, she was informed that the society had changed and sexual relations could only be between a man and a woman. Butch lesbians were operated on and given hormones to make them men. They could choose to be a man or a woman but they had to sexually be with a member of the opposite sex. The purpose behind the film was to point out what an evangelical world would be in regards to lesbians.

Her film was shown in 3 or 4 film festivals. It was accepted in the LA G&L film festival, but the day before it was supposed to be shown, the producers called her and said they had to cancel the show because much objection about it had been raised. It became a huge issue, with some lesbians picketing about the right to show it and others wanting to ban it.

It ended up being shown and Ms. Crouch had to defend her position. Her position was really about having a good discussion about evangelicals, sex stereotypes and body/mind control. She sat on forums and panels with other directors and was harshly criticized by audience members. As the film traveled, the controversy became stronger.

It was the end of her career. She wasn’t able to get funding or grants to make films again. We saw parts of her movie and she now lives in SF. She is soft-spoken and open minded and feels the role of the moviemaker is to explore issues. Her movie, “The Gendercator” is available on DVD.

9. Vaishnavi Sundar, filmmaker. This filmmaker is from India and is a feminist. She is well-known but received a lot of backlash. Her sin was that she tweeted that “men shouldn’t be in women’s sports.” She talked about the trans movement in Indian society and the way women are dominated. She is basically making a documentary underground called “Not My Cup of ‘T’.” She showed us the first part which is a talking heads film with doctors, activists, lawyers, etc, talking about the trans movement. She hopes to circulate this movie in various countries to raise awareness.

10. Stephanie Davies-Arai (Transgender Trend) and Julia Long (lesbian feminist activist). This was a conversation to explore the use of language in the trans movement. My computer was acting up and I couldn’t follow the conversation too well, but the gist of it was that we should not be calling people trans. Instead a “transwoman” should be called a man or male when describing them. Because males cannot be female, it would be better to not say “transwoman” if the truth is he’s a male.

11. Jamila Bey, African American journalist and hosts a weekly radio show called “Sex, Politics and Religion: SPAR with Jamila. She explained that the US doesn’t have a centralized medical system and so it’s hard to get national statistics. The UK has socialized medicine and they document statistics nationally so it’s possible to gather and analyze the medical trends.

As a Black woman she asks, “Isn’t sterilizing a child wrong?” She is told not to ask such questions. That was her experience whenever she was looking for info. Either answers were not there or she was told, “Don’t Ask.” We are being asked to deny reality. This is a dangerous thing to be learning. It’s also going along with the idea that anti-intellectual and anti-science is good.

12. Sydney Wright, detransitioner. Sydney is a young woman and transitioned while a teen. She started to detransition in her early twenties and feels she was pushed into claiming trans. She realized after surgeries and hormones that it didn’t make her feel better about herself but she had made everyone accept her as the opposite sex for years. She had to swallow her pride to admit that she had been wrong and that was difficult. She would like to work with teens to help those with body dysphoria and tell them not to rush into transitioning. She tried to sue but couldn’t find a lawyer who would take her case pro bono and not be afraid to take the case.

13. Eugenia Rodriguez, founder of No Corpo Certo (Brazilian Campaign Against Transing Kids). I don’t have any notes on her. My reception was poor and it was hard to understand what she was saying so I took a short break.

14. JD Ghassan Robertson, Award-winning Author and Senior Editor at The Velvet Chronicle. Julia had many observations about the way butch and femme lesbians are used in the media. Mostly lesbians don’t play lesbians even in shows like The L Word. She points to Lea Delaria in “Orange is the New Black” as the only butch lesbian on mainstream TV that she knows of.

As an author, her experience is “if you don’t believe in gender ideology, you can’t participate in the culture.” Lesbians are excluded in the name of inclusion and PIV (penis in vagina) sex is called lesbian sex. Old, dead butches are being identified as trans. She loudly says, “NO, THEY ARE NOT.”

Writing about trans issues in mainstream media has to be underground.

15. Diana Shaw, Women Are Human. This website focuses on criminalization and politics of the trans movement. 50% of “transwomen” are heterosexual. A large majority are sex offenders. There is a history of them using women’s public toilets.

The Trans movement has tied itself to the Black movement. In reality, Black women are the most heavily raped, sex trafficked, have the highest teen pregnancy and have the highest poverty rate. Black “transwomen” claim all this also, even though they are male. Lowered testosterone levels in men are still higher than those in women.

She relayed a story about a Black “transwoman” making up (fetishizing) stories of violence against himself because he wanted it to happen to him (in his fantasy). The root of the issue is that “transwomen” view women as a collection of parts rather than a whole human being.

Women Are Human

16. Mary Kate Fain, creator of Spinster.xyz, a women-centric social media platform to promote safe space for women to discuss issues. Mary Kate explained that there are very few platforms on the Internet that are focused on women and are safe. She mentioned Fair Play for Women, which is centered on the rights of women in the UK, posting news in politics and other venues. She also mentioned Ovarit, which promotes discussions among women.

I don’t understand much of how social media works, but Mary Kate Fain explained that the IT industry is mainly designed and staffed by men. The Internet tech culture is hostile to women and includes a LOT of porn. Mary Kate has had to fend off attacks on her platform to keep control of content. She explained the term “incel,” short for INvoluntary CELibate, which is a dark, twisted form of internalized misogyny. The majority of incels are those in the IT tech industry whose entire life is sitting behind a computer screen, saturated with porn images. It instills rage in young males, who insist that women are at the bottom of all the insults and lack of sex they get. They spout a lot of violence against women and make the Internet hostile to women.

17. The DeProgrammer, Exposing and connecting the dots…transgender, pedophilia, transhumanism. The producer of these YouTube videos hid her face behind a black stripe in order to protect her identity. The videos are stark graphic images with an overlying narrative to explain the mechanisms, strategies, history and people behind the pedophile/transgender/transhumanism movement. The videos are shocking exposès of the dark elements that influence us through media. They describe the evolution of the porn industry, the sex trafficking world, the child molester ways of thinking and acting.

These videos have been banned from Twitter and Instagram, but the person behind these videos is a young feminist who is adept in graphic arts. Not for the light of heart. Very compelling.

18. Thistle Petterson, radio podcast host. WLRN. Women’s Liberation Radio News. Thistle got her start several years ago by signing up to be a guest host for an hour for WORT, a progressive radio station in Madison, Wisconsin. In that hour, she interviewed Sheila Jeffries. She received a lot of backlash but also caught the ear of feminists. Long story short, she and a group of women created weekly podcasts which have aired once a week for the past few years. The collective is committed to reporting news and conducting interviews for women and by women. They operate with a very small budget and have matured as a group. They are going strong.

Save Women's Sports 19. Beth Stelzer and Linda Blade, Save Women’s Sports. These two women teamed up to fight trans inclusion into women’s sports. Beth Stelzer lives in Idaho and is an amateur weightlifter and mother. Idaho passed a Fairness in Women’s Sports Act to protect women’s sports. Immediately a call was put out to boycott Idaho. She created the website Save Women Sports to reach out to NCAA (National College Athletic Association) athletes to voice their opinion by signing a letter to not give in to bullying tactics. Over 300 athletes signed including Olympic superstars and Champions. This was then forwarded to the Idaho Legislature to hold their ground.

Linda Blade lives in Canada and is part of the coalition that works with Save Our Sports. They have drafted a petition to send to the Olympic Committee to address their policy allowing males to participate in female sports because of their identity. Their goal is 25,000 signatures and they are halfway there. They would like you to visit their webpage and sign the petition as well as forward the petition to others.

20. Meghan Murphy, author of Feminist Current. Meghan is a Canadian journalist who has been permanently banned from Twitter and other social platforms. She is outspoken and critical about 3rd Wave Feminism, sex politics, transgenderism, female exploitation and censorship. She spoke about Free Speech. She warned us to recognize how quickly we have lost ground because we don’t pay attention. We must remember the work done previously and galvanize energy again.

21. Lynn Meagher, “Compassion Coalition”. Lynn is mother of 2 transgendered children. She created a support network of mothers who have lost their children to transgender movement. Her talk was very emotional and heartfelt. She says she will never let go of her children because that’s what mothers do.

22. Hacsi Horvath, male detransitioner and epidemiologist. Horvath transitioned when he was older and lived his life as a woman for 13 years. He spoke about the validity of the studies that support transgenderism. He is a Cochrane medical reviewer, specializing in epidemiological studies. This means that he has the highest ranking in reviewing scientific medical papers.

Horvath retold the story of “The Emperor New Clothes” to make his points. The clothes were stitched by the finest craftsmen of many nations. The various craftsmen used the finest materials of high quality and spent many months to create the garment. They presented it to the Emperor and everyone praised it despite the fact that it was invisible.

This is what the studies and testimonies of the trans world amounts to. They don’t hold up to scientific examination but most people don’t look closely at the methodology which is sloppy and inconclusive. There is absolutely no science behind the transgender movement. Nothing.

Lesbian's sign attacked 23. Sherri Golden, SF Dyke March, 2019. Sherri joined up with a small group of lesbians to march in the dyke march. Their signs said things like “Puberty Blockers Harm Children” and “Lesbians are Female”. During the march they were surrounded by young female transactivists who shouted “Terf” through bullhorns and pushed them down more than once, tearing up their signs. The police did very little to stop the harassment and the group eventually dropped out. They had to have a police escort to the Bart Station to stay safe. All the women were 60 – 75 years old.

24. Donovan Cleckley, gay male academic. I missed much of his talk but the gist of it is that he agrees that women are being erased. He would like to see more men speaking out about it.

25. Courtney Catearth, midwife from Womb Room, a FB page. Courtney described the stealthy way the trans movement infiltrated the midwifery conferences and associations. The language of birth has been changed so that mothers are ‘parents’ or ‘pregnant people,’ breasts are ‘chests’ and “men can give birth”. Women are oral people and our language is very important to us. Changing language is an anti-female stance. She identifies as a witch and explained that midwifery and female medicine is really the purview of female witches and herbalists.

26. Alicia Strada, young Black feminist. Alicia was beaten up about a month ago by female transactivists. A male friend of Alicia’s had transitioned and had asked Alicia to use the ‘correct’ pronouns. Alicia is relatively new to feminism and she refused and told him he was still a male. The hostilities escalated and the “transwoman” wanted to physically fight with her, but Alicia said she didn’t fight men.

The “transwoman” sent 3 transactivists to beat her up. She was in the middle of moving from her apartment when they attacked. Fortunately her family was there and was able to intervene, but Alicia walked away with a busted lip, a black eye and several bruises. The story is unusual because all of the participants were Black.

It was hard to listen to this story because Alicia says she no longer trusts anybody, doesn’t look at Twitter or social media anymore and is afraid to go outside her apartment. She is traumatized and still recovering physically from the attack.

27. Sam Reiger, The Terf Exhibit. FB page. The FB page was started as a way to respond to a San Francisco Public Library exhibit called “Degenderette Antifa Art”. The exhibit promoted violence against women who spoke out. The library refused to take it down, so the FB page was created to dispel myths and report misogyny from the Trans movement.

Sam had a slide show that showed several steps to creating a dialogue with someone on the other side. It started With “Listen” and “Find Common Ground” and followed through to the end step which was “It is OK to disengage.” The presentation was aimed at trying to be productive in discussion rather than destructive.

28. Tara, female detransitioner. This was a short video. Tara is 23 years old and would like to sue Tavistock (Gender Clinic in UK) that she feels pushed her into transitioning. She has no money to do this. (A former speaker explained that it’s very hard to sue because of the difficulty of finding a lawyer to take it on at the risk of ruining their career. It would also have to have the “right person” to sue, meaning that the plaintiff would have to be willing to put up with lots of harassment, public shaming for years.) Tara was told her life would get better if she transitioned. No other options were offered.

She stopped taking hormones about a year ago and she is dealing with negative health effects. She regrets her decisions and would like to warn other teens.

Good-bye to Gender Identity!

2 Replies

By Jeanne Neath

What distresses you most about how the transgender movement is hurting women, girls and Lesbians? For many of us, it is the loss of our women-only or Lesbian-only spaces – from our festivals, to feminist organizing meetings, to Lesbian lands, to goddess circles and more.

M2T persons not only think they can become women, but also that they should be accepted as Lesbians. When Lesbians refuse to consider them as sexual partners, they accuse us of creating a “cotton ceiling” that shuts them out. The poster is saying that these demands for Lesbians to have sex with males is a form of rape. The photo is from a ReSisters United radical feminist protest at Lancaster Pride in the UK.

We may feel enraged that male-bodied transgender people are allowed to compete in women’s sports and take trophies that rightly belong to women. Knowing that M2T (male to transgender) people are pushing their way into girls’ locker rooms and women’s domestic violence shelters may worry us terribly. Personally, it makes me crazy that Lesbians are being shamed and accused of discrimination in the queer/trans world for not being willing to have sexual or intimate relations with M2T people. Lesbians are supposed to want to have sex with males just because they become transgender, even males with a penis?

Now, ask yourself, what do all these assaults on women, girls and Lesbians have in common? Every single one of these losses for women (and there are many more) is the result of the transactivists’ claim that males can become women and the widespread acceptance of that claim. If it were recognized that males can never become women, M2T people would have no claim on women’s identities or women’s spaces. There would be no basis for them to demand entry into women-only spaces, to compete in women’s sports, to invade girls’ locker rooms, to complain that Lesbians don’t want to have sex with them, and so on. Please take a look below at the informational chart that XX Amazons has developed. You can easily see the central role that the M2T claim that “transwomen are women” plays in harming women on The (Trans) Gender Problem chart displayed below. (Or see a large, easy to read copy of the chart.)

The claim that “transwomen are women” is a preposterous claim. How have transactivists managed to make this strange idea believable to so many people? You can probably guess where I am going with this and, yes, “transideology” and its concept of “gender identity” is the answer.

Click on the chart above to see the (Trans) Gender Problem chart in an easy to read size. The M2T claim to be women shown in the green circle at the center of the chart creates all the many harms to women displayed on the bottom row of the chart. “Gender identity” ideology provides the rationale for the M2T redefinition of who is a woman.

The Fabrication and Selling of Gender Identity

Gender identity is defined by the American Psychological Association (APA) as “a person’s deeply-felt, inherent sense of being a boy, a man, or male; a girl, a woman, or female, or an alternative gender…” (listed under their Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People). Transgender people (not intersex people) are male or female, as determined by their biological sex. Their only claim to being the “other gender” is that they feel like they are that “gender” and that they present with the “appearance, mannerisms, or other gender related characteristics” prescribed for the other sex (i.e. they conform to sex stereotypes, just the supposedly wrong ones for their sex). Take away the concept of gender identity and M2T people no longer have any basis for their claim to be women.

Origins of “Gender Identity”
Gender Hurts by Sheila Jeffreys Sheila Jeffreys traced the origins of the concept of “gender identity” in her book, Gender Hurts. In the 1950s and 1960s the medical profession became increasingly engaged with males who wanted to take advantage of advancing medical technologies in endrocrinology and surgery to become transsexual. At that time, the medical profession could not agree on what kinds of treatments were ethical. Some medical professionals strongly believed that treatment should be limited to psychological methods. The sexologists who offered physical treatment hit upon the use of the word “gender” to justify the harms they were inflicting on healthy bodies. Jeffreys quotes Bernice Hausman, who explained in her book, Changing Sex, Transsexuality, Technology and the Idea of Gender, that this justification required “construction of a rhetorical system that posits a prior gendered self.” (p. 27, Gender Hurts) Hausman described gender as “the idea of an identity prior to and within the body that theoretically should dictate the appearance of the subject.” (p. 27, Gender Hurts) (Note: the word “gender” was being used then, but today, “gender identity” would be used.)

The sexologists who offered physical treatment hit upon the use of the word “gender” to justify the harms they were inflicting on healthy bodies.

Jeffreys emphasized the impact that transsexuals had on the medical profession with their demands for medical services. These “demanders” were quick to see the usefulness of the idea of an innate “gender” as a justification for their desire to become transsexual. At the time, cross-dressers and transsexuals were easily seen as sexually motivated, having a “paraphilia.” Jeffreys explains:

“The association with sexuality created problems for their access to treatment, and to the seriousness with which they were regarded in the public world. The idea of a ‘gender’ mistake, in which they mysteriously incorporated a ‘feminine essence’, washed them clean of sleaze and enabled them to constitute themselves as a confident rights-bearing minority who were just born different.” (p. 28, Gender Hurts)

According to Jeffreys, the change in language from “transsexual” to “transgender” was likewise motivated by the wish to avoid association with sex and sexual motivation. (p. 28, Gender Hurts)

Is Gender Identity a Ruse?
We have come a long distance from the sexologists of the 1950s and 1960s, but the idea of an innate gender identity has become the centerpiece of transgender ideology. The “born that way” explanation has served to garner public sympathy for both the gay and transgender movements for decades now. Today’s transactivists are well aware of the effectiveness of their essentialist argument, and use it, even though some do not believe it is true. Listen to Emi Koyama, a M2T person who identifies as a so-called “transfeminist”:

“As trans people begin to organize politically, it is tempting to adopt the essentialist notion of gender identity. The cliché popularized by the mass media is that trans people are “women trapped in men’s bodies or vice versa. The attractiveness of such a strategy is clear, as the general population is more likely to become supportive of us if we can convince them that we are somehow born with a biological error over which we have no control. It is also often in tune with our own sense of who we are, which feels very deep and fundamental to us.” (The Transfeminist Manifesto, Emi Koyama)

Koyama and, no doubt, many other transgender people understand that transgender people are not “born that way”, but instead are “made that way” by social forces and by their own choices. Here’s Koyama again:

“Transfeminism believes that we construct our own gender identities based on what feels genuine, comfortable, and sincere to us as we live and relate to others within given social and cultural constaints.” (The Transfeminist Manifesto, Emi Koyama)

Where would the transgender movement be today if the public understood that transgender people are not victims of a “biological error”?

Born or Made?
Dragon trapped in human body The “born that way” ideology still provides many medical practitioners and researchers with a meal ticket. The work of these professionals props up gender identity ideology. Consider Milton Diamond’s study of transgender identical and fraternal twins published in the International Journal of Transgenderism in 2013. In Diamond’s study of 110 transgender twins (74 identical and 36 fraternal twins), 33% of the male identical twins had a transgender twin. The percentage was smaller for female identical twins; just 23% had a transgender twin. These data are damning for the “born that way” argument. Since identical twins have identical genetic makeup, all of the transgender identical twins should have had a trans twin, if the “born that way” argument were true.

Diamond did find a very low rate of “concordance” for the fraternal twins in his study (one out of 21 for male twins and zero out of 15 for female twins were both transgender). Expected discrepancies in the genetic makeup of the fraternal twins could explain these extremely low rates, far lower than that of the identical twins. But, who can say what role differences in the life experiences of identical vs fraternal twins played? Are identical twins (who typically look very similar) expected by others to be similar? And do some of them then become similar?

Finding that only 23%-33% of transgender identical twins have a trans twin suggests that the snare for “transwomen trapped in men’s bodies” is primarily set by social forces.

Finding some degree of genetic component to transsexuality would not be surprising – almost any human characteristic is influenced by both biological and social factors. But, finding that only 23%-33% of transgender identical twins have a trans twin suggests that the snare for “transwomen trapped in men’s bodies” is primarily set by social forces. Yet Diamond would have you believe that genetics are extremely important. Much of the discussion section in his research report was geared toward explaining away the role of environmental factors and then advancing genetic arguments, including his pet theory that “transsexualism will eventually be seen as an intersex variation due to brain (nervous system) intersexuality.” (See “Transsexuality Among Twins: Identity Concordance, Transition, Rearing, and Orientation” by Milton Diamond)

The American Psychological Association, despite its nearly wholesale acceptance of transideology, has come to acknowledge the importance of social forces in forming gender identity. The APA Dictionary of Psychology (2nd edition, 2015) explains gender identity as:

“[O]ne’s self identification as male or female. Although the dominant approach in psychology for many years had been to regard gender identity as residing in individuals, the important influence of societal structures, cultural expectations, and personal interactions in its development is now recognized as well. Significant evidence now exists to support the conceptualization of gender identity as influenced by both environmental and biological factors.” (See listing for “gender identity” under APA Dictionary of Psychology)

The APA would probably like to stick 100% to the trans party line, but data like that of Diamond’s twin study make it impossible to deny the role of social factors in creating a transgender identity. The rapidly growing number of detransitioners likewise cannot be accounted for by biological theories. As Carey Callahan recently wrote in The Economist:

“When I first detransitioned, my community consisted of online groups of fewer than 100 women. Five years later the detransition discussion-forum on the popular site Reddit has just hit 7,000 people of both sexes.” (See “Gender identity is hard but jumping to medical solutions is worse“)

Those numbers are set to balloon even further. As transideology gains in popularity, social factors like Internet exposure and social contagion are contributing to the new phenomenon of rapid onset gender dysphoria in teenage girls (as has been documented by Lisa Littman).

Yes! Do Away With Gender Identity (and Gender)!

Since ‘gender identity’ is influenced by social/environmental factors, this throws open the question of just where in society a transgender person’s “deeply felt inherent sense of being” the “other” gender comes from. As feminists, we know the answer to this question. The short answer is patriarchy. It’s clear that male violence plays a key role for many girls and women who become “transmen” in order to avoid being a target for males. But, a transgender gender identity could not even exist without sex stereotypes, the patriarchal standards of masculinity and femininity that no one can measure up to. Since transgender people cannot change their sex, their only means of appearing as the “other” gender is to take on the sex stereotypes associated with the desired gender, including sometimes mimicking physical appearance.

Purposeful adoption of sex stereotypes is not an innocent undertaking. But, it gets worse. As radical feminists understand, standards of masculinity and femininity result from the needs of a patriarchal social system to maintain itself. Males are trained to have “masculine” characteristics like aggressiveness so they can serve as dominators of women (and others). Females are trained to have “feminine” characteristics like submissiveness so that they will be subservient to men. No wonder feminists want to free everyone from sex stereotypes by bringing an end to gender! Yet, when transactivists push the idea of an innate gender identity, they are pushing the idea that some people are destined to dominate and others to submit. What a pernicious dogma!

***When transactivists push the idea of an innate gender identity, they are pushing the idea that some people are destinedto dominate and others to submit. What a pernicious dogma!***

The trans movement depends on the concept of an innate gender identity to sell itself to the public, just as the sexologists needed that frame to justify sterilization and surgery for transsexuals in the mid twentieth century. Take away the concept of an innate gender identity and the ideological underpinnings of their lie/line about being a “woman trapped in a man’s body” disappears.

Rhino trapped in a human body? Hmm! I thought it was a dog.

Take away the concept of gender identity altogether (including even versions like Koyama’s that emphasize choice) and M2T claims that they are women disappear. Eliminating gender identity does not mean the elimination of transgender people.There is no reason that transgender people cannot act like every other minority group and claim and celebrate their transgender identity (and abandon their efforts to steal women’s identity). If we should be so fortunate as to eliminate gender itself, then the whole idea of transgenderism would lose its meaning (though perhaps the emphasis would then return to transsexual body modifications).

There are times when radical feminists and others resisting transdomination must fight back against specific assaults on our spaces and our existence as females made by TEAFs (transactivist extremists attacking feminists). But, I believe that we can be most effective by focusing on invalidating the ideology that is allowing males to make their claim that they are women. That claim is supported by transideology, specifically the concept of gender identity. If we want to go to the root of the problem (and that is what radical feminists usually strive to do), then invalidating and eliminating the concept of gender identity is a key goal.

One excellent means for invalidating the concept of gender identity is to educate people about feminist understandings of sex stereotypes. With that strategy we are working toward two critical goals: the elimination of gender and gender identity. I remain a novice in the art of framing, but I believe that a focus on gender and gender identity would be a fruitful area for radical feminists skilled in framing to explore.

One excellent means for invalidating the concept of gender identity is to educate people about feminist understandings of sex stereotypes. With that strategy we are working toward two critical goals: the elimination of gender and gender identity.

This blog began when I wrote about the modifications to the Equality Act recently developed by Feminists in Struggle (FIST). The version of the Equality Act currently under consideration in the U.S. Senate would entrench the concept of gender identity in U.S. law, making gender identity equivalent to sex and essentially eliminating female only public spaces. We need an Equality Act to protect Lesbians, gay men and transgender people, but the Senate version is a disaster for women, girls and Lesbians.

FIST’s feminist version of the Equality Act is, on the other hand, a brilliant advance for women. In FIST’s Equality Act, transgender people (and everyone else) are protected from discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes. I was so very pleased when I discovered that gender identity is never even mentioned in the FIST document. Women-only spaces are explicitly protected. FIST has taken a critical step forward with their model Equality Act. We each now have the opportunity to support their Equality Act and the feminist goals put forward there. Good-bye to gender identity! Good-bye to gender!

Who Becomes Transgender and Why?

1 Reply

By Llora Coatrischie

male-female symbol with arrow Do you believe that men who fetishize the female body need and deserve the same types of social support as women and men who have been hurt by homophobia, harassment, and violence? As girls and women who have been harshly criticized and degraded for breeching the expectations of traditional femininity? As victims of childhood sexual abuse who have come to dissociate how they feel in their bodies? If you feel that these very distinctive experiences conjure unique social solutions, then it is vital to think critically about how very different types of people with different needs and experiences come to embrace transgenderism. It is crucial to ask how transgenderism fails to address diverse social problems. It is important to consider how the growth of transgenderism creates new harms and constraints for people who want freedom from traditional gender roles.

In an expanded article, “Understanding the Many Pathways to Transgender”, I explore some of the most documented reasons different people choose transgenderism as a solution to very different social experiences. These include a resurgence of traditional gender roles, internalized and coercive heterosexism and homophobia, a male-festishized ideation of the female body (by men who fantasize about participating in lesbian spaces), and the expanding social contexts of gender trending and lucrative big pharmaceutical interests.

Transgender individuals have become an increasingly visible and vocal class among the LGBT spectrum. But people come into transgenderism for very different and sometimes contradictory reasons. And the experiences of women who transition to male and men who transition to female are dynamically different as are the effects of these changes. Transgenderism is not a sexual minority sui generis. It has become, over time and through much effort, a widely embracing ideology, that presents a common solution to a diverse range of very different social problems. Poorly understood problems are rarely helped by radically transformative solutions that sweep differences and complexities under the rug. I invite you to consider more carefully why many different types of social experiences have led different individuals to adopt transgenderism as a solution and how this most often fails to really address the root of those social problems.

Oppressive Gender Roles

Gender dysphoria may be one form of dissociation from oppressive gender roles rigidly imposed on individuals for whom these roles rarely fit perfectly, but it is also commonly confused with other forms of dissociation and more importantly, its causes as likely deeply social, are being overlooked. Beyond the idiosyncrasies of gender role socialization, severe childhood abuse, for example, creates dissociation that can look like and manifest as gender dysphoria. One study of female to male transitioners found that 60% of the interviewees reported one or more of several types of severe child abuse. For clinicians to offer sexual body modification and not treat underlying forms of trauma could be a risky, ethical, and damaging misstep. Clinicians with long-standing experience treating gender dysphoria have also begun to rethink how many other serious psychological disorders are being lost to this quick catch-all, consumer driven diagnosis. The trans movement is encouraging these diagnoses, and individuals are walking into clinics requesting them.

Heterosexism and Homophobia

With so many young men and women who have de-transitioned recounting experiences of homophobia and repressive sex roles factoring into their decisions, the question has been raised if increasing pressures to transition should not also be considered a human rights issue: the cultural and biomedical erasure of young butch women and effeminate men. In one gender clinic in London, there has been a 4000% increase in the number of girls seeking treatment for transgenderism, with parents supporting their requests for double mastectomies.

Embodied Objectification

By far, the most visible and well-known transgender celebrities are men who have biomedically transitioned to embody what has long been stereotypically considered ‘sexy’ female bodies. They are thin and curvy with perky breasts, wear revealing form-fitting clothes and are slathered in make-up, fingernail polish and hair extensions. To celebrate these presentations as displays of idealized femininity contradicts women’s autonomy over defining what makes a woman beautiful. Feminists are deeply concerned that supporters of trans-rights have failed to call out the misogyny and toxic masculinity of some of the movement’s most visible public advocates. Furthermore, in a world with rampant rates of violence against women, sexual assault and sexual harassment, feminists find it gravely troubling that men who desire the experience of becoming a sexually appealing female do so according to misogynistic standards. We must ask the question of whether these men are contributing to and not working against rape culture.

The Market-driven Approach of Big Pharma and the Medical Industry

The pharmaceutical industry has consistently been the largest industry to lobby Congress, clearly demonstrating it‘s political agenda. Just as pundits charge that the industry and its close collusion with lawmakers is “feeding the Opioid crisis”, it is now feasible to say it is also “feeding the transgender scramble”, as a growing number of supporters argue for expanded ways of getting these drugs and surgeries to transgender patients and pharmaceutical companies donate millions of dollars to LGBT causes. Who benefits from all these high cost lobbying ventures? Investigative reporting traces the money to “exceedingly rich white men and women”.

A ‘Social Contagion’ Effect and the ‘Gender Revolution’

Finally, individuals who may have been distantly supportive of transgender surgeries, or moderately curious about the process of socially transitioning one’s body into a new gender identity, are going to be much more likely to do so the more those around them are doing so, and the more transitioning becomes visible and accepted as a way of confronting the limits of traditional gender roles. Lisa Littman’s 2018 publication in the journal Plos One, “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: a study of parental reports”, documents a process of social contagion among young persons who transitioned following one or several close friends’ transition. Statistics collected in the study indicated that 82.8% of the children reported on were female at birth with a median age of 16. In 36.8% of friendship groups, all members of the group transitioned.

For Those Considering Transition or How to be an Ally to Someone Considering Transition

Transitioning does not alleviate the sexism that constrains how certain forms of behaviors, preferences, interests, and tastes are associated with very stringent gender roles. To the contrary, stringent gender roles are now upheld by medically transitioning bodies to make personalities match traditional notions of man and woman and sexuality that complies with heterosexual norms. When young girls are now among those most frequently taken to gender dysphoria clinics for their inability to conform to traditional displays of femininity, it suggests transgenderism is, in part, responsible for conversion therapy and the widespread elimination of butch lesbians, what some consider a “genocide of lesbians”.

If you are considering transitioning, if everyone around you would support your personal choices in who you love, in how you choose to dress, in your preferences and tastes, would you still feel the need to transition? If you live in and around others who criticize you and pressure you to be different, how can you find safe and supportive relationships where you are loved and respected for who you are in your body and in your life? Do you really want to give full power over defining and maintaining your gender to a lifetime of medical management?

If you are wanting to be an ally to an oppressed minority, then support solutions that undo sexist gender roles, homophobia, the objectification of bodies, and the domination of the pharmaceutical industry in defining and controlling gender. Support women and girls to realize their full potential beyond traditional notions of femininity. Support all human beings to become better human beings, beyond how their accessories match their genitals.

With heartfelt thanks to Jeanne Neath for many helpful comments, insights, and suggestions.

How Trans-Ideology Harms Women and Girls

1 Reply

By Jeanne Neath

1. The word woman is in danger of losing its meaning, an adult human female who has had the experience of living as a girl and a woman. Transactivists want their term, “gender identity,” to replace sex in defining “woman.” Male transgender people (“transwomen”) want to be considered women. They can’t change their sex – they can never become female – so want to use “gender identity” instead. Anyone can claim the “gender identity” of “woman” because “gender identity” is a person’s “internal sense” of being a woman or man. With self-identification laws, a male can be considered a woman just because he says he is.

2. The movement for the liberation of women is at serious risk. Women are oppressed on the basis of our sex, not gender identity. Many social structures, including gender, are created by patriarchal societies to justify and carry out that oppression. If women can’t organize as women, meet in women only groups and speak freely there can be no liberation of women. See #10 and #11 below.

3. Harmful sex role stereotypes are strengthened by acceptance of the practice of transitioning. Even young girls who violate norms of femininity (by liking toy trucks or boys clothes) are targeted for transition. Changing bodies to match “gender” is a conservative approach that says sex, a biological reality, is easier to change than “gender identity,” a feeling that can change over time and that the two have to match. Girls and women should be free to act in masculine or feminine ways.

4. Women and girls lose their rights to privacy and safety in public places where they undress and sleep. This includes battered women’s shelters, girls’ locker rooms in public schools, nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters, prisons, and public restrooms.

Bathrooms according to trans

5. Women and girls are being shamed for our female bodies. We are being told we shouldn’t talk about the functioning of our female bodies because to do so makes male transgender people feel left out. Like other males they do not menstruate, can’t get pregnant and have a penis instead of a vulva.

6. Male transgender people have an unfair advantage when they are allowed to compete in women’s sports due to the structure of their male bodies and testosterone levels higher than women.

7. Crime data becomes inaccurate and women appear to be more violent than we are when demographic data lumps transgender people with male bodies together with women.

8. Medical data is compromised. Feminists had to fight to force medical researchers to study women’s medical conditions and symptoms. Now research may categorize male-born transgender people as women or female.

Quote about trans superiority to genetic women from 1977

9. Females who transition (i.e. “transmen”) engage in painful and harmful practices. These can include hysterectomy, double mastectomy and binding of breasts. Breast binding commonly results in back and chest pain, bad posture, shortness of breath, and itchiness. Many report numbness, dizziness, and fatigue. At Fenway Health Clinic, females taking testosterone therapy sign a consent form acknowledging possible permanent baldness, facial and body hair growth, and sterility. Risk is increased for diabetes, endometrial and breast cancer, liver damage, heart attack, and stroke.

10. Women who speak of these consequences or criticize transgender beliefs or practices are at risk of threats, including death threats, physical violence, de-platforming, being fired, and silencing. This repression is a direct attack on feminist thought, an attempt by transactivists to control what is permissible for feminists to think and say.

11. Feminist and other female only groups are forced underground through hostile campaigns by transactivists. Venues refuse to allow women only groups to meet for fear of transactivist attack.

Gerda Lerner on women only space

Identity Theft: Transgender Movement Takes Wrong Turn (Part Two)

6 Replies

By Jeanne Neath

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From Part One… Over decades of activism, not a single marginalized group tried to claim any identity other than that of their own group. What does it mean that a newly-created minority group, transgenders, is now asking for something that no other minority group has ever asked for? When male transgenders claim that they are women, they are attempting to usurp an identity that very clearly belongs to another oppressed group of people – women. This is not a legitimate claim! What does it mean that the transgender minority group is not satisfied to simply and proudly claim its own identity as “transgender”? This is all any other minority group has ever wanted.
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THE TRANSGENDER MOVEMENT appears to be very strong, but that strength largely comes from its outside support: big Pharma, the medical industry, extremely wealthy trans supporters, funding from philanthropic organizations, and run of the mill liberals who are not (yet) thinking beyond their concern with the prejudice and discrimination faced by transgender people. The transgender movement itself has a critical flaw – the refusal of the movement and its members to be satisfied with the transgender identity that they can legitimately claim.

Consequences for the Transgender Movement

A misdirected social movement. By taking a wrong turn from the path established by other minorities, the transgender movement has created strong opposition among many people who otherwise would have been allies. Almost anyone outside the right wing would support transgender people claiming a transgender identity. But, when transactivists insist that male to transgender (M2T) people have the right to usurp the identity that belongs to women, feminists who think through the implications for women, girls and lesbians become strong critics of this illegitimate claim.

Graph showing increasing referrals to gender clinic in London

Referrals to children’s gender clinics have increased from very few in 2010 to around 2000 in 2017. Data shown are for the Tavistock clinic in London.

A great mix of gender critics have emerged, many concerned with the harm inflicted on children and adults by the practice of transitioning (i.e. claiming the identity of the “other” sex instead of claiming a transgender identity). Gender critics can include anyone from parents who don’t want their children subjected to hormone treatments, to concerned teachers, men opposed to patriarchy, detransitioners, and transgender people who don’t buy the party line. Gender critics find radical feminist understandings of sex roles and gender of great use. As GenderCriticalDad writes:

“I had to learn from feminism, it was the only discourse that made sense of a transcritical perspective, but also forced some hard questions about myself and how I live my life. Encounters with feminism on my journey as GenderCriticalDad have made me realize how deep sexism goes, how it leads me to be a misogynist sometimes and how this limits me. The Radical Feminism I found teaches me that I need to reject masculinity, not as a grand gesture to the world, but in life and actions with those I care about.”[1]

The transgender movement does not respond well to criticism. Transgender people with their “shaky” selves and easily hurt feelings (as discussed in Part One) require an unusual amount of social validation. Transgender ideology is shaky too because it is based in the defense of illegitimate claims and the need to protect the insecurities of transgender people. Transactivists are desperate to silence critics, prevent open discussion, and censor deviations from the party line. As a result, radical feminists and gender critics are the primary targets of the transgender movement, instead of the dominant society. Every other social movement has had great clarity about the need to fight its actual oppressors.

The Radical Feminist Threat: Get Rid of Gender! Radical feminists understand that gender is deadly for women and girls. Training in ‘masculinity’ creates male dominators; training in ‘femininity’ creates females who will submit to male domination. Without male dominators there could be no patriarchy, so patriarchy depends on gender for its existence. Gender does not just harm transgender people, but constricts everyone’s behavior. Gender is socially constructed; gender can, and must, be abolished.

The conflict with transideology is obvious. Radical feminists want to do away with gender while transgender people base their lives on the belief that their own gender preferences (and “gender identity”) are set in stone. They believe their only option is to change their sexed bodies to try to match their “gender identity”. Transgender people need gender to exist or “transgender” makes no sense at all. They need sex role stereotypes to provide the script for the act of appearing as the “other” sex.

The Radical Feminist Threat: Sex, Not Gender Identity.

Several years ago I ran across the “Spectrum of Spectrums” chart created by the trans-friendly Rhizome Consulting Project which depicted many forms of oppression, including colonialism, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age, religion and more.[2] The chart included “gender,” but this referred to the oppression of transgender (and intersex) people by “cisgender” people. I was stunned to find that sex oppression and male domination of women were nowhere to be found!

Sex oppression is not included in this chart showing types of oppression

The Spectrum of Spectrums chart of many, many oppressions completely leaves out sex oppression. For gender, “cisgender” oppresses transgender. This is a small slice from the entire chart.

The absence of sex oppression on that chart was no accident. The transgender movement tries to erase concern about sex oppression and replace the concept of sex with their own concept, “gender identity.” Transgender people can claim whatever “gender identity” they want to because “gender identity” is a concept made up for and by transgender people. Sex is a big problem for transgender ideology because transgender people cannot, despite all efforts, change their sex. Most don’t even try very hard: transgender males usually want to keep their “ladysticks” and “bottom” surgery has never been very effective for transgender females. The cost is prohibitive for most. Transactivists just want people to stop paying attention to that pesky sex concept.

Who stands smack in the way? Radical feminists are not about to let go of our own understanding that women are oppressed on the basis of sex and that men (males trained in masculinity/domination) oppress women. Many radical feminists are not shy about saying that women are female and that transgender males can never be women. Is this threatening to transgender people? Off the charts!

Transgender movement attacks another minority group – women! The transgender movement is not the only misogynist social movement, but transactivists have taken misogyny to an extreme with its erasure of females, erasure of sex oppression, and attacks on its critics, many of whom are women and radical feminists. Transideology has taken and twisted words of power from feminism and the gay and lesbian movement and transactivists hurl accusations like “transphobe” and “transmisogynist” at its critics to silence them.

Anti Terf Kids Long Sleeve T-Shirt Design. This t shirt is for children!

The transactivist’s invented word, “TERF” (i.e. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) targets radical feminists. Slogans like “shoot a TERF today,” “kill all TERFs” and “I punch TERFs” appear all over the Internet, on t-shirts and in an exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library in 2018. Threatening language and behavior has spilled over into physical violence, as happened at Hyde Park in London on September 13, 2017 and at the 2018 San Francisco Dyke March.

Transactivists feel threatened by the most basic understandings of feminism and their response has been a desperate, vindictive attack. Sadly for those in the spell of transideology, radical feminism is the only system of thought that offers people troubled by sex roles and gender (everyone!) an understanding of the the roots of these problems and directs resistance at the actual enemy – patriarchal society.

Consequences for Girls, Women and Lesbians

We have here an odd case study. What happens to the targeted minority group – women – when another minority group lays claim to its identity? What happens when the intruders are, yes, a minority group – transgender – but also male (i.e. M2T) and therefore part of the dominating group in this patriarchal society? The consequences for girls, women and lesbians unfortunately could fill a book, but here is a partial overview:

Women and girls lose their rights to privacy and safety in public places previously reserved for females: public restrooms, locker rooms, shelters for battered women and homeless people, women’s prisons, semi-private hospital rooms, nursing homes, services for women who have been raped.
The grassroots women-only groups that are the backbone of the Women’s Liberation Movement are harassed, invaded, prevented from meeting, and forced underground.
Feminist women are silenced, censored, de-platformed, erased, threatened and physically assaulted by transactivists, most of this with the strong backing of liberals.
Male-bodied transgenders unfairly outcompete women in women’s sports and win scholarships and awards meant for female athletes.
Lesbian culture is disappeared and lesbians are accused of discrimination for wanting sexual/emotional relationships only with females.

Conclusion

What would the transgender movement be like if it fought a legitimate battle for the rights of transgender people and its members claimed only their transgender identity? There would be an end to dangerous medical treatments for transgender people. Transgender people could proudly embrace their own biological sex as male or female. If they did not want to identify as a man or woman, they could proudly proclaim they are transgender.

Blood and Visions booklet of stories by detransitioners

Blood and Visions contains the stories of detransitioners.

Anyone experiencing gender dysphoria could use coping techniques pioneered by detransitioners. Transgender people could stop performing an act and be free to be themselves, behaving in whatever “masculine,” “feminine,” or other ways come naturally to them.

The transgender movement would be able to turn its full attention to ending prejudice, discrimination and violence against gender non-conforming children and adults. Instead of viewing sex roles and gender as immutable, transgender people could join feminists in changing society so that no one is forced into “masculine” or “feminine” behaviors on the basis of their sex. The movement could follow the lead of gender critical transgender people, like Miranda Yardley, who reject transgender ideology as it exists today. Yardley sounds like a radical feminist:

“Here are some of the things that transgender ideology needs to do so that it may support the lives of women: …Accept that innate gender identity is based on ideas with such a tenuous link to observed science it is barely a conjecture. The transgender claim to womanhood (or manhood) is completely dependent on this concept of an innate gender identity, and taking this away strips the movement of its cloak of being a civil rights movement, championing the fight of an oppressed minority… [A]ccept that sex and gender are not the same thing. Sex is a biological reality based on reproductive potential, and gender is a social system that harms women through stereotyping behaviour, by giving women the negative stereotypes and men those that are positive; gender itself is oppression, not a civil liberty. All transwomen by definition are biologically male…”
(From “Transgender Ideology Does Not Support Women by Miranda Yardley”)

Transactivists could develop a new ideology based in an understanding that the dominant patriarchal society is the problem. The movement and many of its members (and supporters) would need to do some serious work dealing with their sexism and misogyny. The transgender movement would then be free to fight against its actual enemy instead of attacking radical feminists. When radical feminists criticize the transgender movement we are extending a hand to assist transgender people back on a time-tested path toward liberation. We could become powerful allies in the fight to end patriarchy and free everyone from sex roles and gender.

Footnotes

1. Quote from GenderCriticalDad is taken from “I’m not a hideously bigoted parent who doesn’t ‘get’ it’” in Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body edited by Heather Brunskell-Evans and Michele Moore.

2. “Spectrum of Spectrums,” by Rhizome Consulting Project. In Earth First, March-April 2015, p. 20-21.

Identity Theft: Transgender Movement Takes Wrong Turn (Part One)

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By Jeanne Neath

What does it mean that a newly-created marginalized group, transgenders, is now asking for something that no other marginalized group has ever asked for?

Over many decades Western societies have come to a clear understanding that members of minority groups should be able to live free from discrimination and be free to embrace their own cultures, ways of life and self-expression, provided no one is harmed. As one of the newest groups to claim minority status and rights, transgender people clearly deserve:

Freedom from discrimination in employment, education, housing, public accommodations
Freedom to express masculinity and femininity as they wish, regardless of their sex

But, transgender people are demanding far more than an end to discrimination and freedom of self-expression!

“Taking Back Our Hair”: Activism and Self-Love

One of the terrible effects of prejudice and discrimination is the way members of minority groups are made to feel ashamed of themselves and their own group. Sometimes group members go so far as to hide their own identities. Just think about all the lesbians and gay men who have lived or are now living in the closet. Other examples include how ethnic group members may feel embarrassed about and reject family and cultural traditions, racial minorities may desire and seek to appear similar to the dominant group (as Toni Morrison portrayed in The Bluest Eye), and women may prefer spending time with men and think men are superior to women.

Rosa Parks’ refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus to a white man precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama. Her action was the spark that ignited the U.S. civil rights movement.

One of the excellent results when a marginalized group organizes and fights for its rights is that group members develop a strong identification with and pride in their group. Pride in the group leads group members to develop love and respect for their own selves. The lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts and marches of the Civil Rights movement, the gay pride parades, dyke marches, and disability rights activists wielding wheelchairs and protest signs in front of the Supreme Court and Congress all forced change on society. Participating in, or even knowing about, these activities changed the internal experiences and self-expression of many minority group members.

By the late 1960s and 70s the Civil Rights and Black Power movements stimulated a celebration of African roots and pride in African American history and culture. Even the physical appearance of many African Americans, such as adopting the natural afro hairstyle, began to reflect the pride they felt in being Black. As Ebony magazine explains:

“In the 1960s, Black folks finally said, “To hell with that!” After decades of subjecting ourselves to European beauty standards, we decided to take back our hair. This newfound self-acceptance was widely known as the Black Is Beautiful movement, which sprang from the Black Power movement.

With political activists such as Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton and Jesse Jackson proudly rocking Afros while fighting oppression, the hairstyle quickly emerged as a symbol for Black beauty, liberation and pride.” (From Princess Gabbara’s Ebony article on The History of the Afro)

Angela Davis with afro.

In the same time period women flocked to consciousness-raising groups and took to the streets. We then expanded our grassroots movement to include everything from self-health groups where we learned about our own female bodies to goddess spirituality that replaced a male god with the original female goddesses. Feminism made women proud to be women. Feminism helped us to love our female bodies. Women who’d assumed they had no choice but to be heterosexual came out as lesbians and loved each others’ female bodies.

Disability activists demanded society accommodate disabilities, but also came to value their own capabilities and what they learned from their own disabilities. They proudly claimed their identities as people with disabilities.

The pattern held true across every marginalized group – activism helped group members shed shame they felt in themselves and their group and become proud of their group and their own identities.

A Special Minority? Transgenders Ask Too Much

Over decades of activism, not a single marginalized group tried to claim any identity other than that of their own group. Each minority group was very simply proud of their own identity and demanding an end to the oppression against their group. African Americans did not claim to be Asian. Native Americans did not claim to be Black (though mixed race individuals might legitimately claim more than one identity). Lesbians did not claim to be gay men. Gay men did not claim to be women.

What does it mean that a newly-created minority group, transgenders, is now asking for something that no other minority group has ever asked for? When male transgenders claim that they are women, they are attempting to usurp an identity that very clearly belongs to another oppressed group of people – women. This is not a legitimate claim! What does it mean that the transgender minority group is not satisfied to simply and proudly claim its own identity as “transgender”? This is all any other minority group has ever wanted.

What about females who transition (i.e. F2T or “transmen”)? The situation is different for women because they are transitioning into the dominant group – men. They are not claiming to belong to an existing minority group, but most of them support the male to transgenders’ (i.e. M2T or “transwomen”) claim to be women. Thus, both the male and female camps in the transgender movement must be considered responsible for the attempts by the M2Ts to usurp the identity of women.

The primary concerns addressed in this blog are the illegitimate claims made by M2T people and the consequences of those claims for transgender people, the transgender movement, and for women and girls.

Consequences for Transgender People

The transgender movement has stepped off the well worn path travelled by other marginalized groups with serious consequences for transgender people. Other social movements have been very clear that society is what needs to change, not the members of an oppressed group. But, what transgender people seem to want most is to change themselves enough to appear as the “other” sex or “gender.” Here we have a social movement strangely advocating change in individuals. The consequences are not pretty. Transgender people could be like other minorities and celebrate their transgender identities. Instead their impossible attempt to take on an identity that does not belong to them is destructive for transgender individuals and their movement, as described below. Even when the transgender movement does work for social change, its activity is misdirected when it targets radical feminists and other gender critics, instead of the dominant society.

Lupron is a hormone blocker prescribed for gender non-conforming children.

Changing vs. celebrating the natural body. Transgender people reject their biological sex and their own physical bodies. Other minorities celebrate their bodies and reject damaging physical regimens like hair straightening, girdles, high heels, plastic surgery, and dangerous psychiatric medications. The desire to make changes to their bodies so as to appear as the “other” sex is so strong that transgender people risk their health to take cross-sex hormones and hormone blockers and undergo risky surgical procedures. Girls as young as sixteen are subjected to double mastectomies, removing perfectly healthy breasts. Pre-adolescent children are prescribed very expensive and dangerous hormone blockers like Lupron, used to delay puberty. All these hormonal drugs are prescribed off label, untested and unapproved for use by transgender people. They all have dangerous side effects. Remember what happened to menopausal women when they were routinely prescribed hormones!

Passing vs. celebrating a transgender identity. No one can change their sex. M2T persons can never be women because women are female and they are male and they have had the life experiences of males from birth on. A large percentage of M2T persons still have a penis! Transitioning is an impossible dream. No matter what lengths transgender people go to they cannot become the woman or man they want to be.

The ethics of usurping the identity of another minority group are terrible. The psychological consequences of taking on that false identity are not much better. When M2T persons claim to be women they inevitably create for themselves a “shaky”, insecure self. They become locked in an impossible attempt to convince themselves and everyone else that they are something – a woman, female – that they can never be. Transgender people choose to transition for many different reasons, but for some males the desire to appear as female is driven by an insatiable discomfort with one’s male body. As Andrea Long Chu describes in his essay, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy”:

“Dysphoria feels like being unable to get warm, no matter how many layers you put on. It feels like hunger without appetite. It feels like getting on an airplane to fly home, only to realize mid-flight that this is it: You’re going to spend the rest of your life on an airplane. It feels like grieving. It feels like having nothing to grieve.” (From Chu’s New York Times essay, My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy)

Instead of simply acting as they naturally feel, M2T people go to great lengths to imitate women in their attempt to pass (or “blend” is their currently preferred term). They have to think about how they walk, their mannerisms, their speech. Some pay for voice lessons or for apps like the Exceptional Voice App (EVA), sold in 55 countries, that teach them how to sound more like women. Others hire “femme coaches” like Monica Prata of Nouveau She who assists with a complete makeover:

“For around $130 an hour, Monica’s standard rate as a stylist (“I’m not going to upsell them just because they’re trans”), she will provide hair, makeup, and wardrobe makeovers, not to mention guidance on facial feminization and gender reassignment surgery, vocal training, home redecoration, and “comportment.” (From Alex Morris’ article on How Exactly Do You Teach Femininity?)

Transgender people may obsess about how they appear and can feel desperate for confirmation from others that they have successfully “blended”. All the efforts to appear as female may just increase feelings of discomfort with one’s body, as Chu describes:

“Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.” (From Chu’s essay, My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy)

Other minorities learn to value their natural appearance and identity, while transgender people, male and female, are caught in a lifelong act.

The act could be dropped. Transgender people can stop trying to pass and claim only their transgender identity. Then no acting is required. Transgender people would be able to just be themselves and express “femininity” or “masculinity” in the ways that come naturally to them. Those with gender dysphoria would still need to find ways to handle those feelings (as detransitioners do), but they would no longer be trapped in an act or in the false hope of transitioning. What a relief!

Like other gender non-conforming people (such as butch lesbians) transgender people would face the risks of violence and disapproval from an intolerant society, but they would do so feeling secure in who they are – transgender.

Coming soon! Part Two of this blog asks (and answers) these questions:

How is the transgender movement burdened by its illegitimate claims and the “shaky” selves of its members?
What happens to the targeted minority group – women – when another minority group lays claim to its identity?
What would the transgender movement be like if it fought a legitimate battle for the rights of transgender people and its members claimed only their transgender identity?

“Ain’t I a Woman?” No, Males are Not Women!

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by Paula Mariedaughter

Challenging Extremist Views

Challenging the extremist views present in our woman-hating culture is never easy! A handful of brave women handed out educational leaflets on Wednesday night, October 3,2018 in front of the Town Center auditorium. The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville was hosting its first distinguished lecturer event of the school year. We wanted to express our own point of view about men who claim to be women. We are not criminals or bigots for expressing our constitutional rights to free speech. The trans activists held the stage (literally) that night. The U of A invited this person who is a trans-activist as their “Distinguished Lecturer” –certainly not an invitation extended to anyone with a trans critical voice. See the press release from the university below this article.

The trans voice is now the dominate voice, and that is what they want to protect. Those of us who have concerns for all the unexpected consequences of permitting males to claim womanhood for themselves have every right to express our legitimate concerns. People who are trans activists and some trans supporters do not want our critical thinking views to be expressed in public and have gone to extremes across the country to silence our voices.

Deplatforming of feminist events

Deplatforming of feminist events is a favored way to silence our voices. Tactics often use to target women only events include threats of physical violence, verbal harassment, pressure on employers of our speakers/performers, or pressure on organizations that rent to us. Read about our own experience in Fayetteville when we were deplatformed at the 2017 Goddess Festival by trans activists pressuring and threatening the venue and the organizers of the Goddess Festival. https://xxamazons.org/story-of-the-goddess-festival/

That male celebrity, invited by the university, has stolen Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech from 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio! He is being paid to do a presentation he calls, “Ain’t I A Woman: My Journey to Womanhood”. Sojourner Truth’s passion was about women’s rights! He chooses that incredible speech by an incredible woman, then twists it into a pro-trans thing. I still feel violated by his decision–that is why I was out there at town center last Wednesday!

Our handout and our approach to people at town center that night was respectful and polite. We are acting not only for ourselves, but for women and girls everywhere, including those women who so strongly criticize us. Free speech is central to our freedoms. We may loose our legal right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, if we do not resist now.

Inspired by Mary McLeod Bethune

Here are the words from Mary McLeod Bethune, famed civil right activist, that I took to heart when I read them this week: “[I urge] you to fight until it’s over. Never stop. If you stop now, it might be a generation before somebody else comes along to take up the fight. Why not this generation?” She was referring to implementation of equal education opportunities for all as required by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling declaring racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.

It seems to me there is a parallel here–doing all we can to protect women and girls. We, in this generation of women, must not give up our voices. When the university creates an atmosphere for young scholars where even to ask questions about the claims of the trans voices is dismissed as “hate speech”, clarity will not come from those in that generation. Unless, of course, we listen to the voices of the many brave de-transistioners or other young people who somehow escape the indoctrination. These are the people who have seen the inside story of the mass movement to eliminate young lesbians and gay men! These are the people who can testify to the pressures to conform to the feminine and masculine stereotypes that dominate the mainstream culture in 2018.

Our carefully crafted flyer

Here is our carefully crafted flyer–feel free to duplicate our efforts in your own community using this flyer!

My thoughts about the university press release

The provocative, sexualized poster that the university chose to use, is itself, a message about stereotypes proscribed for females. The large photo accompanied the press release. The press release from the University of Arkansas became a messenger for “the dominate forces of the dominate culture”. As radical feminists, we are always seeking the root/radical source of oppressions. We have long named the educational institutions as distributing the propaganda serving the patriarchs. Here is an excellent example–the university is “thrilled” to indoctrinate young people with the current assertion that men can be women should they so choose. In fact, it is fees extracted from young people and their parents that paid for this message!

Actual university press release

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Emmy Award-winning actress, documentary film producer and civil rights advocate Laverne Cox will open the 2018-19 student-sponsored Distinguished Lecture Series with “Ain’t I A Woman: My Journey to Womanhood” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3, at the Fayetteville Town Center.

Doors open at 6 p.m., and tickets are required. The event is free and open to the public. Because students fund the lecture series, tickets will be made available to students first who will be able to reserve tickets starting at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 19, by going to osa.uark.edu. Tickets are limited to one per student.

“We are thrilled to be able to bring such an accomplished woman to campus this early in the school year,” said Christine Carroll, chair of the student Distinguished Lecture committee. “The committee has planned a slate of excellent and diverse speakers, and we look forward to kicking off the series with this dynamic presenter.”
Darinda Sharp, director of communications
School of Law
479-575-7417, dsharp@uark.edu

article by Paula Mariedaughter

OMNI Center Claims To Be “Fair”? Apparently Lesbians and Women Don’t Count

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By Jeanne Neath

In 2017 the OMNI Center in Fayetteville Arkansas and the Goddess Festival de-platformed the XX Amazons, Paula, Susan and Jeanne, preventing us from giving our workshop on “The Disappearing L – Lesbians Rise Up”. This was the result of transactivists and their supporters protesting the workshop. (See “The Story of the Goddess Festival” for details of the de-platforming and our resistance.) A few days ago I received the OMNI Center’s weekly newsletter touting itself and its members on their fairness: “You and your neighbors are right here, working our tail ends off to make the world FAIR, FREE and HEALTHY.” OMNI always advertises itself as the “Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology.”

I find OMNI’s continued absolute favoritism toward the transgender community difficult to stomach on an ordinary day, but this kind of self-congratulatory lie coming from a group that is so unfair and unjust made me angry enough to email the OMNI director and OMNI Board of Directors the following statement.

Jeanne Neath’s Letter to the OMNI director and Board

OMNI is not doing everything it can to make the world “fair, free and healthy” (as you pretend to be at the top of your recent newsletter) when OMNI will not even allow women-only groups to meet at OMNI and you host a so-called Goddess Festival that silences and excludes radical feminist voices. OMNI has taken sides in the conflict between transactivists vs lesbians and all the many women who want and need women only space. This is an incredibly unfair position.

I don’t think the OMNI board has a clue as to what a woman hating and lesbian hating position it has taken (or if they do understand, then I am even more appalled at OMNI’s behavior). I suggest that OMNI educate itself on the harm that transactivists and their supporters are creating or at least stop pretending to “work its tail off” to make the world fair. Women only space is an essential prerequisite for a women’s liberation movement to exist. OMNI is acting to prevent the liberation of women and at the same time pretending to be fair. Pretty appalling!

Lesbians attacked at 2018 San Francisco Dyke March.

For starters, I suggest you inform yourselves about the attacks by transactivists on lesbians at the 2018 San Francisco Dyke March. (See the accompanying image showing what happened to a lesbian’s sign at the SF Dyke March which said “You can’t silence us with violence. Resist Lesbian Erasure.”) I also suggest reading the blogs (including one about the SF Dyke March) and other materials on xxamazons.org, reading relevant materials on feministcurrent.com, and reading the book Female Erasure, edited by Ruth Barrett and now available at the Fayetteville Public Library. There is no excuse for OMNI Board members to be informed only by the transactivist political perspective!

I don’t particularly want to hear back from you about this correspondence until OMNI is prepared to start making things right in its policies and practices toward women. I would appreciate an invitation for women’s groups to once again be able to hold women-only events at OMNI (and women-only means no “transwomen”). I am still waiting for a real apology from OMNI regarding the events around the 2017 Goddess Festival.”

Jeanne Neath, Former OMNI Board Member

OMNI Director Responds

The director of the OMNI Center responded in a semi-private, personal email to me saying only that she was sorry I was badly hurt. This was not an official OMNI response. I have no idea if the OMNI Board of Directors will even read or discuss my communication to them or respond in any way.

However, members of a local group of women who are resisting transactivist domination and fighting for women only space jumped into the fray with their own comments to the OMNI director.

Darlene Clubb writes to the OMNI director

What kind of response is this? This is a dismissal in my opinion. Please do not lay this at Jeanne’s feet like she is some isolated, wounded individual. From where I stand, OMNI has totally been positioning itself in support of the trans view of reality and appears to have dropped all pretense of concern or interest in the issues raised by lifelong lesbians and radical feminists concerning serious violence against women and the destruction of women’s legal standing/rights that the trans ideology poses. Billionaires are funding the trans agenda. Billionaires from corporate, pharmaceutical dynasties are funding think tanks that are designing and coordinating this homophobic and misogynistic social engineering project that is having devastating effects on lesbians and women’s very basic concerns in general (such as the ownership of the legal term “woman”, issues concerning birth and midwifery, menstruation,etc.)

Paula Mariedaughter’s comments to the OMNI director

Your crass dismissal of Jeanne’s concerns is an indication of your own loyalties. The war on women includes the war on women only spaces! Omni is a collaborator in the efforts to silence women and our strong political differences with all of you so ready to redefine woman.

In Female Erasure, edited by Ruth Barrett, she wrote, “Political disagreement is an opportunity for discourse that is part of a free society, and should be encouraged. When any questions or concerns are written off as hate speech, bigotry or ‘transphobia’, discourse cannot take place.” This is the situation here in Fayetteville, Arkansas where your “fair-minded” organization refuses to sponsor any opportunity for discourse that differs from your political decision to support trans activist’s version of reality.

“As part of the conservative backlash, segments of the left have shifted away from political and structural analysis of oppression and injustice, towards an individualistic politics whose primary demand is for the recognition and validation of individual identities. Gender becomes an identity based on an internal set of feelings that must be believed and accepted without question, and that is unrelated to biological sex. They claim that one set of traits is inherently masculine and another set of traits is inherently feminine, and our identity is dependent on how we align with those traits. Gender identity is seen as innate, and being transgender is entirely a matter of self‑identification. They do not see gender in our patriarchal society as a hierarchical construct of a male supremacy.” This is a quote from Pelican Lee written on the XX Amazons website.

We will not be silenced by the exclusions and expulsions and the threats. Women and girls, our children and our grandchildren are depending on us women!

Linda Barnes writes to the OMNI director

The fact that we are even having to discuss who is a woman is really unbelievable to me. A man can never be a woman and vice versa. We know that is biologically impossible. The confusion seems to be with the word sex and gender. A person may change their appearance to look like a woman (in some cases) because society says a woman should look and dress a certain way and men should look and dress a certain way, but that is not sex, that is gender straitjacketing. We know from the beginning of time there was a man and a woman because otherwise there would not have been anyone else. So we know there are two sexes, but race has been a social construct, yet when Rachel Dolezal tried to present herself as a black person and was found out to be white, she was removed from her job and highly criticized for trying to cross a racial barrier. And, yes, blacks have been and still are an oppressed race, but women have been oppressed and held back and their long history of matriarchy almost erased from history. The black man got the vote before women did. And yet the left and the many trans sympathizers seem to have no problem with men saying they are women. Yes, let them go into women’s bathrooms and changing areas, even though most of them still have penises. They are now trying to develop uteri to implant into male bodies so they can have children. The midwifery is eliminating mother from their vocabulary and using birthing parent instead. Have you read “Female Erasure”?

The Disappearing L Here is a quote from Jenn Smith, a male to trans person, “It is my contention that young people today are being brainwashed and turned into Orwellian servants of the state for a much larger agenda. It has been suggested by others that the assault on sexual distinctions and on the perception of basic biological reality is part of a game to give absolute power to the state in the interpretation of reality itself. If the state can force people to admit that men are women, they can force them to believe anything. War is peace. Slavery is freedom. Men are women. All of these are equally contradictory.” I truly believe there is much more to this trans movement than we know and it is really scary. Have you questioned how this has come about so fast and tracked down where the money is coming from? Many lesbians and gays feel that the T should be removed from LGBT because they are just out for themselves and care nothing about gays or lesbians, except to try to force lesbians to have sex with the male to trans so they can feel more validated.

I think you and Omni are going to be on the wrong side of history when this mess gets straightened out. When people try to change the very definition of half of the world’s inhabitants then they are trying to distort reality itself. If the trans people had really wanted to be non-controversial they should have called themselves what Ruth Barrett suggested, “gender non-conforming men, a no less sacred expression of humanity.

Jeanne Neath Sends a Second Communication to OMNI

After reflecting on the OMNI director’s condescending response and the obvious ignorance of the OMNI Board about gender critical thought, I decided to send a second communication in an attempt to educate the OMNI leaders about just how deadly the transgender ideology they are supporting is.

Jeanne’s second communication to the OMNI Director and OMNI Board:
Everyone – women, lesbians, “transgender” people, OMNI, you and me – is being seriously harmed by the misunderstandings about sex and gender that transactivists are proclaiming as a truth that no one is allowed to question. OMNI is not doing itself, or anyone else, including “transgender” people, a kindness by unthinkingly subscribing to an inaccurate view of reality AND silencing the women who have legitimate criticisms of the transactivist position on sex and gender. What does it mean for OMNI and you, its director, an organization and woman concerned about justice, about “fairness”, to take sides in a conflict between oppressed groups and act to silence lesbians, radical feminists and me, a former OMNI board member with over forty years of experience as a feminist activist investigating the problem of sex and gender in patriarchal society? Every day you and OMNI continue on this misogynist path you are on and then congratulate yourselves on how “fair” and just you are, you stray further and further from your mission of “justice.”

“Gender,” the sex-typed behaviors and characteristics society trains males and females to perform, is constructed by society. The behaviors considered masculine and feminine change over time within a society. Do you think that girls were showered with pink clothes and toys one or two hundred years ago in this society? Gender is set up differently in different societies around the world too. The transgender movement is built around the notion that people have an innate, biological “gender identity,” but this is impossible because what is masculine and feminine is set up by each society. Do you think that our foremothers living in gathering and hunting societies over the millenia prior to the development of agriculture wore pink? But, more important, do you think OMNI should be silencing women who want to talk about gender and the ways that patriarchal societies use gender to maintain male power over women?

People who identify as “transgender” are being terribly hurt by their own movement and ideology. Feminists have fought for decades to eliminate the constrictions of gender for everyone. Since gender has been created by society, society has the power to do away with gender and free girls and boys, men and women from being forced into harmful sex roles. But, transgender ideology insists that gender (and “gender identity”) is not changeable and that, instead of changing (eliminating) the social institution of gender, the people who are unhappy with the gender prescribed for their biological sex must become transgender. This would not be problematic – many lesbians, for example, identify as butch and act in so-called masculine ways – but the transgender movement advocates changing one’s body to correspond to (socially constructed) gender (as well as confusing sex and gender and appropriating – stealing – the identity of being a woman). Because trans ideology is supported by progressive organizations like OMNI, by powerful national non-profit organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, and by obscenely wealthy individuals, many of whom are tied to the pharmaceutical industry, being transgender has become “cool” and more and more children and young people are identifying as transgender, especially girls and young women. Many of these children and young people are taking hormone blockers and hormones and having irreversible surgeries to remove breasts, testicles and to reshape genitals. Children are being sterilized and given off label drugs with unknown long-term effects. When OMNI supports the transgender movement and silences lesbians, silences radical feminists, silences me, OMNI supports all of these dangerous, often irreversible medical treatments and the sterilization of children, children who probably would outgrow their desire to become “transgender” (a likelihood demonstrated by the scientific evidence).

______, you were seriously off-track in your comment about being sorry I am (supposedly) hurting so badly. Stop trying to dismiss my concerns! OMNI took a serious wrong turn when it bowed to pressures by transactivists and their supporters to de-platform Susan, Paula and me at the 2017 Goddess Festival for our workshop on the “Disappearing L – Lesbians Rise Up”. Your attempt to have a “dialogue” group to bring transgender people and gender critical women into discussion was deeply biased from the start when you selected two trans supporters who were completely ignorant of gender critical thought as moderators. I am asking the OMNI director and OMNI board members to educate yourselves about gender critical/radical feminist perspectives and to make reparations to the women and lesbians you have silenced. Making space at OMNI for women to hold publicized women-only events (that exclude “transwomen”) is a necessary part of these reparations. I, personally, would like a real apology from OMNI once your organization has educated itself enough to understand the great harm you have done to women, to lesbians, to the people who identify as transgender, and to everyone else who is being harmed day in and day out by the pressures to conform to “gender” prescriptions

Conclusion

I am proud of all the women in northwest Arkansas and at XX Amazons who are resisting the silencing of women, transgender ideology, and transactivist attacks. We stand together fighting these patriarchal forces attempting to control women.

Lesbians Not Welcome at a Women’s Center started by Lesbian Feminists!

5 Replies

by Paula Mariedaughter
Lesbians Not Welcome at a Women’s Center started by Lesbian Feminists! How could this be? This local women’s center in Fayetteville, AR began three decades ago. It was funded, in part by a lesbian organization, the Lesbian Natural Resources.

Here is an excerpt from the Fayetteville public radio program describing the organization in an interview on June 3, 2015. The “intentional retirement village for elder lesbians and women in rural Madison County, conceptualized thirty years ago, is finally being established–but as a senior women’s community center in Fayetteville.”

Two years later, The Gayly newspaper on October 1, 2017 in an interview with the manager of that community center declared that the organization “has come to be an inclusive retreat for people of varying genders/orientations”.

However, lesbians and feminists who wish to have women only meetings or events are rejected based on our desire to experience women only groups. For over a year, many of us have tried to work with the board of directors. We are denied meeting space because we do not wish to include male to trans persons as women. We are considered noninclusive and our position is considered unacceptable. Therefore the board of directors continues to deny us women only meetings. The lesbians and women who support the claims of men to be women refuse to see our stance as a legitimate political disagreement.

In Female Erasure, edited by Ruth Barrett, she wrote, “Political disagreement is an opportunity for discourse that is part of a free society, and should be encouraged. When any questions or concerns are written off as hate speech, bigotry or ‘transphobia’, discourse cannot take place.” This is the situation we are facing as members of that un-named organization here in Fayetteville, Arkansas!

Early last February, several member women who want space for women only events spoke about our strong desire to use this facility to meet with like-minded women. We attended the organization’s annual meeting, but we entered a hostile environment that night.

Proud to be women identified and women centered!

This is my statement to the board and the members at the annual meeting:

Discrimination as Boundaries
I am a lesbian. I came out in 1973. Choosing to be with women is the best decision I have ever made. Being a lesbian means I discriminate against men every day of my life. I do not wish my life to be dominated by the needs and desires of men.

For forty-five years I’ve lived as a dyke. I am a gender non-conforming woman! I am proud to call myself a Radical Lesbian Feminist. At times, I have been considered too “femme” by some of my dyke friends. At the same time, I have been considered too “butch” by the straight world. My desire is to live as my authentic self. I want this for everyone. Socially enforced “femininity” and “masculinity” are straight-jackets meant to restrict all of us.

I cannot accept the view that there are people born in the wrong body. The biological fact of being born female or being born male is based in physical reality. Discomfort with the roles assigned to each sex is a healthy rebellion to sex role stereotypes, otherwise known as “gender.” The world view of people pushing transgendering as a solution to the oppression of sex roles is a dangerous concept — especially for young people.

I understand that others have embraced another world view. I do not condemn those people. I am an advocate for peaceful coexistence. Women like me, who want to meet in women only space, must be respected. We will resist every effort to allow men to claim womanhood for themselves. Male domination is central to patriarchy. Men claiming to be women is stealing our birthright.

I want women like me to have equal access to the use of the space since we are members. I want young women to experience the reality of women supporting each other in women-only space. I welcome male allies to all open events. We all need for this women’s center to thrive as a unique community resource.

I have a right to set my boundaries. Yes, I am willing to discriminate against men. As I said earlier, I do not wish my life to be dominated by the needs and desires of men, especially the men who call themselves women.

I left that meeting depressed and numb. I walked alone, in the dark, to find our car parked a block away. I could not tolerate another moment in that threatening space.

In trying to comprehend how exactly this disregard of women’s and lesbians’ strong desire to meet together has become illegitimate, I found understanding in these words from Pelican Lee: “In response to the conservative backlash, segments of the left [including women, my addition] have shifted away from political and structural analysis of oppression and injustice, towards an individualistic politics whose primary demand is for recognition and validation of individual identities.” Full article: https://xxamazons.org/emperors-clothes-radical-feminist-view-gender-transgender/

Women and girls are victimized daily by men and by the male dominated institutions of patriarchy. By refusing to acknowledge this reality, many on the left and many liberal lesbians deny the oppression of women and name women and lesbians as oppressors when we refuse to accept the notion that men can be women if they so choose.

In reading and thinking and feeling about all these events and my own experiences, I’ve often encountered a disdain or dismissal of those of us who have lived as lesbians for decades and powered the lesbian feminist rebellion of the 1960s, 70s ad 80s. How did this happen?

Jocelyn Macdonald helped me see into today’s queer culture in her article, “Today’s Shameless Lesbians Won’t Be Queered”. Macdonald provided me with vital information about myself as one of those lesbians who will not even consider being “queered”!

She explained in that Feminist Current article that, “In queer circles, ‘lesbian’ is synonymous with second wave feminism. In a way, this is right on, as it was during the second wave that women fearlessly occupied what it meant to be woman-loving and many of radical feminism’s fiercest sisters are members of the “lavender menace.’ Queer women owe their rights to the radical resistance and separatism of their lesbian foremothers, but are embarrassed by lesbian culture and history.” Read the full article on Feminist Current here: https://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/01/13/todays-shameless-lesbians-wont-queered/

I’m going to close with a favorite photo sure to embarrass those young and middle-aged queer women who have turned their backs on lesbians like me who choose women, not men, as the center of our lives. To be embarrassed by us and to dismiss our radical feminist analysis of the oppression of women is directly related to their attitudes of ageism, misogyny, lesbian-hating and especially to their worship of pop culture! We are led to believe that, as old dykes with our unfashionable dress and generally uncool image, our determined loyalty to women and girls is outmoded. However, we are the dykes who can boldly testify to the rich connections we have built with other women in our woman-loving lives. Queer women have no idea what they are missing. Come join us! We need all the lesbian energy we can get!

Paula (on left) and Martha carrying our Lesbians Unite sign at the Anita Bryant protest in downtown Kansas City MO, 1977.