Dear Future,
Greetings from 2017, when we’re having Peak Trans. In 5-8 years this will be over. A generation of children currently being treated with hormones and surgery for being “born in the wrong body” will be suing their doctors and parents. People will no longer say that a penis is female if the penis-haver “identifies as a woman”. The current trend of allowing male athletes to compete “as women” as long as they’re taking estrogen will be history (to refresh: male-to-trans runners, weightlifters, volleyball players, etc. are currently thrashing female opponents because women’s sports organizations are unwilling to appear “bigoted.”)
My (former?) friends are sharing memes (will they still call them “memes” 5-8 years in the future?) that compare males’ demands to access female bathrooms to the Civil Rights Movement, and women who say no to them as white racists. Liberals are insisting that sex – biology – is a social construct, that humans aren’t sexually dimorphic because of the existence of intersex people and clownfish. They pass along sciency-sounding science-denial articles that use the same rhetoric as “creation science.” They denounce “creation science” because it is a tool of the Right, and they fear the Right. Their science denial is of the Left, and they deny it’s science denial. Science denial denial.
My (former?) friends support changing the legal definition of sex from biology to “identity.” If a man says they “feel like a woman,” and someone like me asks, “what does that mean? How do you ‘feel like a woman’? Is ‘woman’ a feeling?” they rush to support the male and condemn me.
I have recently come out as one of those witches who refuses to say males are female; who believes females need sex-segregated spaces like women’s shelters and prisons; who believes women are entitled to say “no” to males for any reason. I have been banned from Facebook* twice and my reddit* account has been suspended permanently. Friends have sent me messages saying they can’t associate with me any longer because I’m so “hurtful” and “ignorant.” I just lost a $2,000 speaking gig with no explanation; since women like me are regularly “no-platformed” as “TERF“s, I assume it’s because of my recently exposed politics.
So right now we’re in the midst of a kind of Liberal mass hysteria. There have been crazes like this in the past: actual witch hunts, McCarthyism, the lobotomy fad of the mid-20th century, the “false memories” of the 1980’s. It could be worse; maybe it will still get worse. But like other trendy hysterias, this will pass.
And when it does, what will you, my (former?) friends, be saying about it?
“Oh that, that time was so weird!” you’ll say, perhaps with an eyeroll or giggle.
Or, “I always knew it was wrong.” You’ll think you were the one who stood up for sanity back then. You’ll forget that you were in fact declaring you were on “the right side of history,” virtue-signaling with your civil-rights-appropriating memes, while shunning and condemning women like me. You will forget.
You will forget that you said “sex is a spectrum, we don’t understand biology.” You’ll forget you vehemently argued that “female brains” can be trapped in male bodies, “it’s SCIENCE!!!” You’ll forget you said “assigned male at birth” as if sex is assigned by transphobic doctors and not observed by anyone with eyes and a brain. You’ll forget that every time someone pointed this out you said “intersex and clownfish!!!” as though they disproved reality, because of some creationist-style sciency-science-denial that supported your politics.
You won’t be that dumb in the future. But right now, you are.
You didn’t know, you weren’t paying attention, it wasn’t your thing, you have to pick your battles. While women like me were screaming about the transing of children and the male pattern violence of males, you “didn’t know.” It was convenient not to know. Meanwhile you got head-pats and excitement in the “movement” (what movement? Against Trump? Why does opposing Trump mean you can’t think critically?) for repeating thought-terminating, loaded language like “trans women are women” and “assigned male at birth” and “cis”.
What will you blame, future? You will probably minimize the problem. It was just women, after all, they’re a minority, right? And so many women are white and middle-to-upper class, they did fine, it didn’t hurt them. OK, some kids got transed and regretted it, we went too far there, we meant well, why are you making such a big deal? It wasn’t that many, they were almost all homosexual anyway. It’s history, it’s over, we know better now.
Oh, Future, we’ll be lucky if you can read this. We’ll be lucky if you’re even there to ignore me.
*Facebook and reddit are social media sites. Will there be social media in the future? Will there even be electricity in the future? Since we’re on the brink of ecological and social collapse, I realize you might not even be able to read this. But if society and the planet are still holding together enough that you can: PAY ATTENTION.
Good points. Thanks for writing (and drawing).
This is probably the best thing I read on the subject. Maybe because I agree 150 %. I always thought that the end of this nightmare would come trough sports, where the physical advantages of the self identified women are obvious. Of course, one would have thought that in a world where women’s rights are recognized, the threats and the violence against women would have been the key factor to put en end to this nonsense. But alas, no. Not at all. On the contrary. Women are accused of being the cause of murders, nothing less, just because they call a cat… a cat.
Thank you.
I only started to pay more attention to the subtleties. My generation was open to whatever two consenting adults…I can understand the bell shaped curve in the nature of biology, with outliers. However, I also understand the aggression of rape and I want women and children protected from the possibility of anyone with a penis, when they want protection. Thank you for giving me a sensitive and sensible analysis of what is currently happening here. I can now go on with other issues and hope that this continued oppression of women ends. Peace.
Fantastic article, Nina, I have bookmarked it. I have shared many trans/gender critical sentiments and articles on facebook, including this one and have never been banned by them. Perhaps because I don’t have a huge number of facebook “friends” with which I am sharing my “toxic” pro-woman viewpoints.
There is a middle ground here, though it’s mighty narrow. We know most and maybe all societies have men who feel female and women who feel male. Some societies make it easier for them by giving them a role like two-spirited or trans; others make it taboo. I had friends in the ’70s who were considered drag queens then who would be trans today. They had to deal with far more nonsense from society than anyone should.
Without unisex bathrooms, there are simply going to be problems for people who don’t fit the conventional dichotomy.
But supporting practical things like bathroom access does not mean it’s right for people with male bodies to compete and defeat people with women’s bodies when the male body brings advantages of size and upper body strength.
Ah, well. I don’t know what history will say about sex and gender. But I hope to God history will say trying to solve social problems with censorship is insane.
I’m sorry people are coming after you personally and inappropriately.
I’m a parent of one of those young kids that identifies as transgender. I hope you’ll believe me when I say there is nothing simple, easy, or unexamined that happens when you realize that your kid may have gender dysphoria.
If there’s a greater motivator than “I need to figure out what to do to help my kid with this potentially life-changing issue” to dig into research, I’ve not found it. And I’m also willing to admit that I read every study I could hoping to find evidence that the whole issue was one we could dismiss and/or ignore, that it would sort itself out, etc, etc.
But that’s not what I found, at all.
So here I am, with a kid that I am supporting in a transgender identity, and trying to help figure out how trans folks fit into the institutions and societal structures that assume at best that they don’t matter or don’t exist, and at worst that they are actually perverts/mentally ill/dangerous.
I’m not going to try to convince you in this comment to change your views. What I do hope, is that you’ll consider that people on the other side of this issue from yourself are not all just blundering about, tearing down many of the gains of feminism because we’re idiots.
I’m pretty sure that the future history you’re appealing to in this post will judge you as having been on the wrong side of this issue. We’ll see. But regardless, it doesn’t justify the sorts of personal attacks you’ve been receiving for speaking up for what you believe.
Gender-critical radical feminists don’t want you to “dismiss and/or ignore” (some are trans/detransitioned/gender dysphoric themselves). Kids are definitely, drastically suffering. Parents are going to any lengths to try to do the right thing. You might be interested in some resources shared by other parents/therapists of trans kids:
https://4thwavenow.com/
https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/
http://gendercriticaldad.blogspot.com/
love the header; The Banality of Stupid.
https://www.facebook.com/franka.smith.568/posts/1655960101366757
Using greek tags like “Gender Dysphoria” lends faux-credibility to superstitious nonsense. We are not distinct from our bodies. We do not “inhabit” flesh. The idea that one can have a brain of particular sex inhabiting a body of another completely ignores the facts of physiology, since the brain is formed by the same processes the other organs are. In 1930’s soviet camp doctors used terms like ‘avitaminosis’ or ‘gastric disress’ in diagnosis. It sounded better than ‘starvation’ but it was more honest than ‘gender dysphoria’, which btw. Almozt rhymes with another immaginary syndrome of the 19th century – ‘female hysteria’.
I am in your club–I have former friends for the same reason you do and I have considered just capitulating as the social costs have been high and it can feel pretty lonely. However, I simply can’t give in to such an incoherent and pernicious ideology. I sure hope you are right that it will only be 5 – 8 years before we are vindicated.
JC, there are plenty of stories of children who had gender dysphoria and it eventually sorted itself out as they grew up and became comfortable not adhering to gender norms. The proble is our society’s gender norms, not the physical bodies they were born with.
Transmania is obviously a cultural trend and malaise. Any honest observer with the slightest historical perspective can see this and admit it. That is, Peak Trans is not the effect of mere discovery of existing trans people, but rather the subtle and pervasive cultural *promotion* of it.
HR – It’s certainly true that a nontrivial number of people with GD end up OK without any sort of transition. It’s also true that some people that transition end up with regret, which is a real problem and one that all health providers should work hard to avoid.
However, neither one of these points is particularly germaine to the question of whether or not transitioning is the right thing to do in other cases. The relevant question is not “is this right for *everyone* who has GD”, but rather, “does this help a significant proportion of the people who have GD”.
On that point, I think the research is actually pretty clear that transitioning *is* the right thing for many people with GD.
This area is also complicated by the fact that lots of people conflate gender nonconforming behavior with gender dysphoria. One of the tropes that I’ve seen a lot in gender critical forums takes the form of a story which is some variant of “My kid was a tomboy and we still called her a girl and she turned out fine, therefore this isn’t a real thing.” There seems to be this persistent notion that parents of trans kids have jumped straight from “my kid likes these things which doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes” to “my kid should transition genders”, which just isn’t how it works at all.
I keep wondering how long the gay community is going to stand for being bullied over their “cissexist genital preferences”… Or how long liberal feminists will put up with males telling them that reference to uteruses or periods is hateful and bigoted.
Your interpretation (or the interpretation of the site you linked to) of Dhejne’s study is woefully (and one might say deliberately) inaccurate.
The study found that trans women in the later (1989-2003) cohort do not retain male rates of criminality (because of proper mental health care, reduced social stigma and discrimination etc.). And at any rate it only talks about conviction rates, not conviction type (violent or otherwise).
Dhejne herself has spoken out against these misinterpretations several times: http://transadvocate.com/fact-check-study-shows-transition-makes-trans-people-suicidal_n_15483.htm
Try getting your facts straight in future.
If there is a comparison to be made to creationists, by the way, it’s to the “gender critical” feminists who reject the evidence for a biological basis for transsexualism, and whose understanding of biological sex is extremely shallow. “My political ideology says you shouldn’t exist, so please stop existing so I can protect the integrity of said ideology” is a really crappy argument. You sound like a creationist who dismisses evolution because it contradicts your dearly held religious beliefs.
Wonderful post.
I wonder if TG people, especially M to F, would feel the same drives in the other cultures. Would they want to be women here…
http://www.infinitesafariadventures.com/dog_collars_for_africa/meet_the_women/Dog_Collars_for_Africa_Women.jpg
or as an Inuit in Alaska? or in an ashram with no access to TV or western media, if they were entirely alone? I wonder how much is costuming vs being a woman. If they can only be women by wearing women’s fashion clothing and makeup that’s not about being a woman, but something else.
This is a great article and I agree with everything you write about the trans-topic. I hope you’re right with the 5 to 8 years.
But you are wrong on the so called “false memory syndrome”. If anything is an invention it is this. And it serves an interest, namely pedocriminels who don’t want the flashbacks of memories of their violence to be taken seriously. The fact that also the youthtranscriticals buy into it, doesn’t make it right.
Also read the comment of Anna Djinn below the article: “Research has shown that amnesia for childhood trauma is common and that recovered memories are not less reliable that other memories. Here are some links with more information:
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/05/its-easy-to-implant-false-childhood.html?m=1
http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/
The dynamics of the trans cult is very different to this and usually there is pressure to conform to the cult and approval and attention when one does so. This should not be compared with a patriarchal ploy to silence and discredit women who report sexual violence.”
Riverstreet writes: “Ive studied this a bit last year and realized people arguing against ‘false memories’ have benefit of that. I think its very false to compare this with the transining of kids/the transcult. It were actually feminists that were at the forefront of this and getting sexual violence against women and children taken seriously.”
To spread the lie of “false memory syndrome” is damaging for survivors of child sexual abuse. The fact that youthtranscriticalprofessionals published that article make them suspicious to me.
To JC. I wish you the best as a parent. No one said there aren’t sometimes legitimate cases of trans where transitioning may be the best choice, they’ve been around for awhile. The trans community however is off the rails and needs reigning in. Your people.
Also. What does it even mean? To feel as a woman? Or man? Or do you prescribe to man brain lady brain?
This article is ignorant and hateful. May god have mercy on your souls for promoting hatred toward vulnerable people ðŸ™ðŸ™
Nina and her friends are all dumb TERFs I guess
@You’re Wrong That study absolutely shows that male violence does not change post transition. Why one of the researchers attempts to backtrack on a trans advocate’s blog (a male by the way who is known to cyberstalk and harass women) is bizarre. I don’t really care about Dhejne’s words—the study says it all. Learn to read a scientific study, dude.
LOL, I’m not the one who needs to learn how to read studies. Dhejne has made it crystal clear that your interpretation of her study is completely off the mark.
My biggest fear is that Nina’s going to find a lot of new ‘friends’, who are awful, awful people.
Ever seen the movie ‘Mister Death’?
JC, I really feel for you. That is a tough situation. I don’t know what I would do in your shoes but I hope I would at least give my child time to be sure, and not risk mistakenly blocking puberty and potentially disfiguring them and leaving them infertile for the rest of their lives. A lot of tomboy and effeminate boys grow out of it and either turn out gay or straight. You know all this already. I am sure you’ve asked yourself what if this situation happened 10 years before peak trans. What if. Best of luck.
Will, there is a lot of confusion about two spirits these days. One thing we do know is likely is that if it was ever an identity natives happily self-adopted, it not as widespread among the tribes as tumblr would lead you to believe. Unless you mean it in the modern sense of native Americans reclaiming the word. Otherwise it sounds like a noble savage argument, “weren’t they so enlightened!”
You’re Wrong, I haven’t read the study yet but I will. However, I have read Galileo’s Middle Finger and I do know that some leading figures in the trans lobby have gone to extraordinarily shameful lengths to silence and attack any scientists whose findings don’t support their narrative. Honestly, vile, vile stuff. Mostly in the name of silencing scientists who theorize that most transsexuals are autogynephiles.
This reminds me of taqiyya, the Islam-sanctioned form of lying, which encourages Muslims to lie if that lie advances the cause of Islam, “by gaining the trust of non-believers in order to draw ot their vulnerability and defeat them.” It’s like a trap. If you are suspicious of a Muslim saying things like “true Islam is good for women and gays,” you have to wonder if that is a taqiyya.
Similarly, autogynephiles get off on living as women and part or all of the enjoyment would be ruined if that was well known. So they do whatever it takes to keep that secret.
Anyway, no doubt there are rare cases a la phantom limbs of gender dysphoria. But also no doubt they are much, much rarer than we are seeing.
Leaving aside troubling questions (like why, if you feel you’re a woman, do you keep your penis? One would think like those with body integrity disorder you’d want to get rid of it asap.), the way that trans supporters attack and shame and witch-hunt even the mildest of critics does no one any good whatsoever.
Wow, Nina. The is really brilliant an soo provocative. Still my favorite contrarian, and you’re really kicking ass on this on!
Nina, I am also offended by your anti-lobotomy position, you lobophobe.
Thanks for having the balls to write this.
Ooops – wot????
Thank you for speaking out about the whole TERF issue.
I’m not sure where I stand on the issue, but I feel like I need to hear a variety opinions and I find yours valuable.
I’m a 65-year-old straight liberal white guy. I’ve never had any problem with gays and lesbians.
I’ve known and worked with a few trans people and never had an issue with them.
Of course, as you rightly point out, it’s less of an issue for men than women.
This all recently became much more relevant to me when my 25-year-old son came out as trans
and now calls himself a woman. While I’ll always love him whatever happens, and accept
whoever he shows up as, I’m still mulling things over to figure out what I really think down deep.
We used to have a good talking relationship when he was in high school, but he left the area for college
and stayed away after and the close communication has faded. I wish I could have been involved while
he was weighing it, (he’s already taking physical steps). I would have tried to be a friendly skeptical
voice, a devil’s advocate. I think he was mostly surrounded by “supportive” people who helped him
decide one particular way. Not that I have illusions that I could talk him out of it or something.
I would just have liked to have watched him weigh the various sides of it before seeing him come down
so certain that he “is a woman”.
I don’t know. I’m still trying to think things through. I value your opinion and appreciate that you have
publicly articulated it, even in the face of such hostility.
Deeply disappointed. The current revolution in allowing individuals to set the parameters of their own identities is no fad; it is a step in the realization of human dignity. I’ve seen you say online that you reject all identities, which is easy to say if you have a relatively comfortable identity assigned to you by society. I’m thankful to say that we’ve passed Peak Transphobia, but it isn’t dead yet, evidently.
On behalf of my friends who are adult and trans (and arrived at that conclusion after years of painful questioning and rejection by romantic partners and family), I’m utterly ashamed to read these words. I deeply admire you as an artist, especially your commitment to freedom and new, interesting thoughts. This is not a new, interesting line of thought you have presented here, but fear of people who are different. This is sad and denies people the right to their identities. I hope you learn and become better educated in the future.
Many or most of these are good points, but I have to say, I find it very unlikely that many people who chose to become transexual will be regretting it later on. There are certainly plenty of men who prefer living as women (or something close in many ways).
Brilliant commentary Nina.
I’m cheering you every step of the way. I agree this silliness cannot, and will not stand. I do not care what you slice off, sew on, or whatever holes you drill in your body wherever, if you were born with a penis you are male, if you were born with a vagina, you’re female. End of discussion. Two genders, the rest are mental illnesses. Is it any skin of my butt if a man wants to call himself transgender and dress as a female? No, but don’t expect me to cater to his delusions. The same goes for “trans-speciesism, trans-racialism, and dingalings who identify as Napoleon Bonaparte.
thanks for encapsulating this thorny territory so deftly! i have battled on fora, and encountered all of this, point-for-point. your coming out under much greater scrutiny has to be tough, and you need to know how valuable that is, for women now, and the ones in the future who won’t understand what it was like.
thank you,thank you,thank you,
cub (i <3 sita)
Whatever happened to “Those who’d give up safety for liberty” and all that? Guess pronouns are important enough for the leftists and the nazis to put aside their differences and all that.
Thanks for posting this!
I can’t say I 100% agree, but that is the point! To experience other perspectives is the stuff of life. I honestly didn’t see the perspective of female safe spaces. It makes sense that at least a Quarter of all women would feel unsafe in the company of a person who may or may not have a peen, and not specifically knowing could make that fear reaction worse.
I personaly don’t feel safe in any public bathrooms. I use to be very agressivley abused by other women in washrooms. I’m not a “pop”-minority. Being female on the autistic spectrum meant that almost no where in public was safe, and everyone was constantly abelist.
So I want to ask, what is your opinion on other types of safe spaces, and how far is too far? Everyone has triggers, and I personally feel that attempting to accomodate for all potential triggers may be impractical, but some amount of accomodation is reasonable. I have to live in a world where anywhere outside my home is “unsafe”, do I have the right to somewhere outside my home to feel safe in? Do you think having a place outside your home to feel safe is a right or a privledge? Who should decide how and where accomodations and a sense of safety should be granted?
sorry if I butchered the HTML tag, I forgot if it was hack or slash to close. 😐
I admired you as an artist, I’m so disappointed. You chose wrong friends, a lot of your statements are misinformed and spread panic. Please don’t hurt trans people. We just want to live as ourselves.
May you, at one day, be at the white hot center of right wing culture wars.
You do realize this is not a new phenomenon. I hear the critique that there is no historical precedent for trans people. If you really look at history you will see that many cultures that have addressed non conforming genders, gender fluidity, or being transgender. There are many depictions in Egyptian art of clearly female goddesses with phalluses, there is a sizeable collection of Greek and Roman literature that talk about experiences similar to those of people who identify transgender today, and there is also those in the Hopi culture who believe in the twin souls concept. Also, no one is saying that sex is not biology. Our focus is on gender which is a social construct. This is not a fad, it only comes into the public eye because the people who felt so alone finally were able to come together through the internet. You are an amazing artist and activist, and I believed in a lot of what you stood for. Please come to the side of reason.
Brilliant essay – absolutely brilliant! Thank you Nina!
LGBTQ has recently given way to LGBTTTQQIAA. Some Universities even offer LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM residences.
Many teens resort to self-injury/cutting, a sad condition (a result of teen angst) requiring intervention. Today, we now witness what could be a similar phenomenon; i.e. pseudo-Gender Dysphoria (again, a result of teen angst). However, instead of intervention, conventional wisdom would make us all codependents enabling teenage angst even to genital self-mutilation at an early age, before they are old enough to make a mature decision. By no means is gender-dysphoria always unreal. However, it would seem, there exist many false positives when diagnosing gender-dysphoria today.
Here in Canada, Kenneth Zucker, a renowned psychologist has taken a more conservative (and common sense) approach. He counsels confused teens while encouraging them to wait. As a result, over 88% eventually reconcile with their birth gender and do not transition. A new BBC documentary, (Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?) highlighted Doctor Zucker’s “successâ€. Of course, Canada’s moral and intellectual superiors responded by shutting down the BBC documentary before appearing on Canadian Television, not to mention shutting down Dr. Zucker’s clinic. Political Correctness will brook no compromise!
Can Sex and/or Gender be nonbinary from a scientific point of view? Yes, continua exist, but only in very rare cases. Well then; is Gender a “social construct†and/or can Gender be “fluidâ€? From a Biological stance: the answer remains “Noâ€! Gender Identity is Biologically determined as is genitalia as well as sexual orientation. Intermediates are rare. This is different than Gender Expression or some expressed predilection for various sexual fetishes; which explain the alphabet soup of Gender/Sex self-identification labels popping up name tags at a Slavic Linguistics’ Shriners’ Convention. Each addition to LGBT-QWERTY is admittedly a social construct.
Deeply disappointed. Love you as an artist, but cannot believe you feel this way. Wow…
I would call you a fucking idiot but I think your Bitcoin donation button says it for you.
Thanks for speaking out for reality.
I understand why trans people must seem like a very silly bunch when you ignore the actual lived experiences of trans people around the world who have transitioned and are much happier for it, myself included. I find it fascinating how you think being trans is some bandwagon that people are going to regret jumping on in a few years, despite there being plenty of historical evidence of trans people existing throughout history, particularly in Greek and Native American cultures, and I have a friend who’s currently 76 who had sexual reassignment surgery in 2002, and she’s still entirely happy with her decision.
It’s also funny how you claim people who support trans rights are denying science, when all the recent science is in support of being trans being a totally legit thing. Just to take the most surface-level example, trans women generally neurologically resemble cis women, and the same goes for trans and cis men. I know this may seem surprising, but science can be true despite you not learning it in high school, also, the broader scientific understanding of things can change, if they didn’t Einstein’s theories would have been dismissed in favor of sticking to Newtonian physics.
While I love your artistic works, I’m really disappointed to see you believe these things. I don’t think you’re some evil hateful monster, just ignorant and scared of something you don’t understand.
Thank you! I can’t believe what is happening!
Thanks to the transreich who must be obeyed without question I am no longer a woman, I am a feeling and a walking stereotype. With a uterus. Donald Trump could stand up and say he is a woman and he wouldn’t even have to put on a dress. But he can’t say grab women by the pussy because that would be transphobic (not sexist!)
The future is frightening.
Absolutely on point. In the future, we will point out an old story called, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and laugh about the weak-minded followers who PRETEND they can magically convert their BIOLOGICAL sex on command and COMMAND the rest of humanity to pretend right along with them. The only people I’ve read about who suffer “dysphoria” are self-hating Gays and Lesbians who would rather pretend to be the opposite sex and STRAIGHT than be happy gay people. The rest and vast majority of trans “women” are autogynophiles who get off pretending to be female sex objects and also get off having the power to make everyone else address them as REAL WOMEN. You have to be mighty slow on the uptake and have zero common sense not to see this for what it is. Who REALLY “believes” they are the opposite sex? I doubt anyone. But don’t expect the rest of us to “believe” something that is factually IMPOSSIBLE. Tired of the bullying and suspension of even a modicum of critical thought or logic. Tired to the SCIENCE DENIAL. The left is just as ignorant of scientific concepts as the right. They just choose different subjects to be willfully ignorant about.
Well done!
People should absolutely be free to walk, talk and dress any way they want, regardless of their sex. The notion of ‘genders’ and their stereotypes are completely made-up and change across cultures, so we should break them whenever we feel like it.
Men shouldn’t feel the need to be masculine and women shouldn’t feel the need to be feminine. You have a dick but you want to wear a dress? Fine! You’re a woman and you don’t wanna wear make-up and high heels? Can’t blame you! Those gender stereotypes should have been burned in a fire a long time ago.
Here are two things that I believe are unchangeable facts:
1. ‘Sex’ is a biological reality that cannot be altered.
2. “Sexual orientation” is similarly hard-wired and cannot be changed. (Or do you wanna tell me that gay conversion therapy was really ok?)
However, both statements are now heretical, and instead of shredding the Big Bullshit Book of Gender Stereotypes, it has become the new bible. There’s no longer a definition of ‘woman’ that talks about sex. It’s all about ‘feeling’ and ‘identifying’ which typically means wearing makeup, getting fake tits and ‘acting’ a certain way. Yup, the precise gender stereotypical bullshit that thinking-women have been trying to escape from for decades. But not only do they identify as women, YOU must identify them as women too. Believe that they’re women. Date them like they’re women. Yeah, really. Something I saw on Reddit (paraphrasing): if you’re a lesbian, you’re transphobic if you don’t want to “suck a woman’s dick”. In the same thread, I saw another trans woman say “Uh, honestly, I don’t like dick, sorry – I only want to date lesbians with vaginas”. Double-standards? Or is it just not possible to be a TERF if you’re trans?
Trans women are women
Trans women are women
Trans women are women
Trans women are women
Trans women are women
Trans women are women
Trans women are women
Trans women are women
Wake up, it’s 1984.
So what is ‘feeling’ like a man/woman? I don’t know! I don’t have a particularly strong “feeling” of being a man. I just am one. What I do feel, *very* strongly, is that I am only sexually attracted to women and DEFINITELY NOT MEN. Just like my gay friend has no interest at all in women and ONLY LIKES MEN.
What do gay/lesbian people think about this? They fought hard for the right to their sexual orientation, but suddenly it’s hard to express that orientation, when sex no longer means what they thought. They’re being told that sex is just a ‘feeling’, and therefore there is no right to be attracted to a biological sex or genital type. You now have to consider people who ‘feel’ that they fit into your sexual category, valid partners.
This is not progress.