By Jaqueline Sephora Andrews

Being black in the United States of America is really difficult; we have been oppressed by a white supremacist culture which has been used to enslave black people for about 450 years. We are still oppressed as a race, so it is necessary to work toward completely abolishing white supremacy. However, if the focus is solely on race then we ignore a patriarchal structure which has been here for thousands of years and has infected the black community, where black men have chased after the “ideal man” which has been presented to them by their slave masters. In chasing after their masters, black men have also become oppressors. Black men who are oppressed because of race have found their dominance through sex. The patriarchy has denied black men the highest status within the patriarchal hierarchy, so many black men have held to the power they could obtain in order to dominate anyone they deemed as weaker. Therefore, I am left to admit a painful truth, that there are a few black men who I am afraid of; it’s not because they’re black but because they are misogynistic and in many cases homophobic. This was the case as I was told, “you shouldn’t be afraid because you’re both guys,” when I was faced with a man who charged me in full homophobic rage. They claimed that I was an abomination because of the “Word of God,” but the reality is that to them I represented the “emasculated.”

It is one of the conspiracy theories that some black people have chosen to believe, the emasculation of black men. Marque-Anthony writes about emasculation; he states that, “according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, emasculation is ‘to make a man feel less masculine, to deprive a man of his male strength, role etc.'”  Clearly, Marque-Anthony is speaking of the black man’s role in the patriarchal hierarchy.  Marque-Anthony then adds that, “Demoralizing African American men by having them wear dresses has become ‘funny’ and all too acceptable.”  My question is, who has determined that dresses are for women?  When faced with these questions, someone will quote the scripture which says that, “Women must not wear men’s clothes, and men must not wear women’s clothes. Everyone who does such things is detestable to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 22:5 CEB).  But what are women’s and men’s clothes?  Many Christians let a patriarchal capitalist society determine what are considered men’s and women’s clothes, and claim that these beliefs come from God.  The truth is that clothes are clothes no matter who wears them, and the perception of what is considered for men or for women changes over time.  This belief that it is demoralizing for a black man to wear a dress is not based in reality but based in a system which has helped to keep black people in bondage.

Marque-Anthony further adds that, “They laugh and gain satisfaction from seeing and knowing that African American men can be bought off to the point of humiliation.”  Marque-Anthony is showing his misogyny as he has determined that dresses are for women and that it is humiliating for a man to dress like a woman.  Why is that?  Could it be that if a black man is “dressed like a woman” then he isn’t being the “man’s man” that his slave masters have taught him to be?  Marque-Anthony also talks of the black actors who have worn “women’s clothes,” saying that, “These are not men, they are compromising cowards who will drop the values and morals they were raised with in order to make a dollar. They are not examples for real African American boys to become men.”  So African American manhood is based in what one wears?  Wouldn’t that make African American masculinity fragile?  I am not understanding this logic.  Maybe African American men should look within themselves to find inner strength and not rely so much on the opinions of the patriarchal overlords.  Now that we know that real men are men who don’t wear dresses, Marque-Anthony further says that, “we must require our women to respect us or we must go elsewhere.”  Here is the call for black men to establish their patriarchal authority, which has caused some black men to become terrors in their homes.

After the misogyny is established, Marque-Anthony then adds an “important requirement.”  He says that, “He must not be a homosexual because such perversion distorts roles in the family, goes against God, presents an awful example, confuses the young male children, decreases reproduction within our ‘race’ and plays directly into the hands of those who want to take our manhood through emasculation.”  What does sexuality have to do with “emasculation?”  There are many “masculine” men who are still homosexual.  There is a belief among some that a man must be attracted to women to be considered a “real man.”  There is also the “preservation of the race” which is at stake, but honestly what does this entail?  The belief that we need to preserve our race has caused many abuses within the black community.  The belief that our race needs to be preserved has caused many black men to try to control who we date or marry, where we live, or who we associate with.  If we have this belief that our race needs preservation then how can we truly be free to be ourselves?  If our race needs to be preserved then I am one of the biggest violators for being attracted to men.  Race was created to establish an oppressed exploitable class.  We are not truly free until race is completely abolished.  I am not saying that we are to be “color blind,” but I am saying that we can’t be free while we still live within the structures which were design to oppress us.  The belief that our race needs to be preserved leads to homophobia, where homosexuals are considered a threat to the race.  Rather than worry about preservation, we need to learn to love and accept each other regardless of who we are or who we love.  We need to reject the patriarchy.

It is absolutely necessary to fight against white supremacy, but we can’t afford to fall into the trap of the black liberation movement.  Solely focusing our attention on black liberation will allow the patriarchal aspirations within the black community to go unnoticed.  It is important to speak out against the abuses of black people, but it is also important to speak out against the abuse that many black men have inflicted on others within our community as they have sought status in the patriarchal hierarchy.  It is imperative that we work toward abolishing the patriarchy.  Even among some black families, where women have held families together, there has been a desire to return to a patriarchal structure.  It was established, through slavery, that this is the “will of God.”  To be free, we have to break our master’s chain which can only be broken by completely rejecting the patriarchy.  It is only until then, when we can say we are truly free from the chains of slavery.  It is time to be free.

The post The Hidden Patriarchy appeared first on Gender Apostates.

“Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters.” -Ti-Grace Atkinson

Sisterhood is an uncomfortable word for me. I don’t have any female siblings, so the first time I found myself calling anyone “sister” was when I became involved in online radical feminist spaces. Unfortunately, it was not long before those “sisters” turned on me for befriending the wrong sort of people: transwomen.

After over a year of being stalked, mocked and misrepresented for the crime of feeling affection and respect for and partnering with the formerly be-penised, I am now wary of using the term “sister” for political allies, and anyway I wouldn’t call the transwomen I write with sisters, because it is a sexed term, and clarity of language is too important, what with the words “woman” and “female” being forcibly emptied of all meaning these days.

That said, what I feel with my transsexual male colleagues is very much akin to what I imagine real sisterhood is like. We provide each other comfort, praise and encouragement, but we also disagree, productively – pushing each other to be better. We make fun of each other’s differences, quirks and faults even as we simultaneous accept those differences, quirks and faults. I trust each of our hearts are in the right place. I trust we will protect each other’s privacy. I trust we will have each other’s backs.

Furthermore, this bond is never used against women. None of the transwomen in our group would ever force themselves into women’s spaces or language. In fact, they spend their time tirelessly defending women’s spaces and language, often more fiercely than many female people would dare – leveraging their male privilege for good, even at great personal cost (exile from their communities, loss of employment, threats of doxxing.)

Surely this kind of close, warm, secure and happy feeling between males and females is something to be celebrated? Surely it speaks to the fact that human souls are not sexed? That males and females are not doomed to be pitted against each other in sexualized power plays? That real friendship and partnership between males and females is possible? That selfless kindness and genuine nurturance can exist inside male bodies?

I have always accepted and defended the right of women to exclude males from their lives, including their politics. This blogpost is not aimed at feminist separatists.

This blogpost is aimed at the men of the Left who think supporting transwomen means forcing women to tell lies, accept abuse and subjugate ourselves. There is simply nothing “transgender” about males demanding coercive, abusive relationships with females. That is gender in a nutshell.

Instead, look at these males who so sincerely and extremely reject masculinity that they not only voluntarily shed the phallus (unlike the ~80% of self-labeled transwomen who love their penises) but who also build real, equal relationships with women based on truth and openness. Males who do not use their sex dysmorphia as an excuse to hide away from injustice, or even more egregiously, leverage that injustice for their own personal benefit – but who instead analyze and fight it, shoulder to shoulder with women. If only more Leftist men could accept these wonderful people as their fellow males. If only more Leftist men had hearts like the hearts of my transwomen comrades.

The post A Feeling Like Sisterhood appeared first on Gender Apostates.

I haven’t written for a while. I feel I should apologize, though that presumes I have an audience. I can say I’ve had reasons or make excuses, but the truth is I did not have much to say; or rather I wasn’t certain how to say it. Writing about gender is hard, especially when taking a contrary position to mainstream contemporary thought. I do not possess a degree in Philosophy, Women’s Studies, or any other discipline, which would give me an assertion of authority. I write about my experiences, my feelings and my life. If I’m being pretentious, I say I am writing from a phenomenological perspective. To a large part that is true. I hope by exploring the micro and the personal, I can comment on a broader scope. I am aware by writing about personal events and experiences I open myself up to attack and abuse in a way a straight academic approach does not. I have come to terms with this. It is who I am. Long ago I learned to suffer the slings and arrows to be me, and I would not have it any other way.

I have not written of late, because the holiday season past was, and this is not exaggeration, one of the most important events of my life. The first Christmas with my family, post-transition, was something I had waited for my entire life. I have written at length about my relationship with my parents and my broader family. I have talked about what it was like to come out to them, of the difficulties we faced, and the awkward times we suffered. My family has always been important to me. I went through a prolonged period (My thirties) when I attempted to deny their importance. I thought I could live without them that I, and they, would be better off without one another. Love is a funny thing. I’m not sure I truly understood its power until I was honest with them. Love can be challenging. It is oft tested and our fear of losing, of being rejected, drives our insecurities. We become our own worst enemy forgetting that to truly love someone is to embrace them no matter what.

My family embraced me, and I them, with a big exception. My grandparents are well into their nineties. They both maintain their faculties. In fact, I would consider my grandfather brilliant. At Ninety-Three he is witty, observant, and a critical thinker. (He does hold rather strong conservative political views. Nobody is perfect.) Growing up he and my Grandmother were love personified. They were an idealized vision of what grandparents should be. Only later would I hear the stories of how they treated their actual children. To say they were stern is a profound understatement.   When I talk of exception, I do not imply they rejected me, or had a negative reaction. They simply weren’t told. The general consensus amongst my family had it that they wouldn’t understand. They were too old; too set in their ways.

When I made the decision to return to Detroit for Christmas, keeping them in the dark was no longer an option. My mother decided she would tell them. Unbeknownst to me, she, and her sisters, concocted an elaborate plan. The details of which aren’t really important suffice to say they put a lot of thought into it. When the time came to actually tell my grandfather, she didn’t even get through her first sentence. He stopped her halfway through and said: “I already know.” My mother was dumbstruck. I…am not surprised. The man is very smart, very perceptive, and let’s be honest my appearance had been trending in this direction for years. I’m more surprised nobody else figured it out. It goes to show just how much people rely on their own ideas about who you are over who you actually are. My grandmother had not noticed. She was surprised, and a bit confused. How did she finally wrap her head around it? I hate to say this…but it was Caitlyn Jenner. (It pains me to have written that sentence.) All of the articles, the news stories, and the hype during this year of Caitlyn permeated my grandmother’s bubble and her consciousness. Life is weird.

I had previously decided I would visit my grandparent’s prior to Christmas Day. I didn’t want my appearance to be an issue. It’s best to deal with the awkwardness beforehand, and let’s face it there is always awkwardness. I was nervous as I walked up their front walk. They did not know we were coming. My partner knocked. I could hear my Grandmother’s voice beyond the door. I wanted to run. I always want to run. She opened the door and embraced my partner. Before I continue I need to tell you how much my family loves my partner. From the first, they embraced her as if she was part of the family. I’ve often joked they love her more than they love me. (I’m not really joking.) My grandmother and her share a special bond. When she saw my partner her face blossomed in happiness. Their embrace was long, heartfelt, and tearful. My heart melted. The love they show one another means the world to me. When she finally saw me my grandmother hugged me. It was not as long or as tight as the one she gave my partner, but it was genuine. She was truly happy to see me.

My grandfather was otherwise occupied fastening a ribbon to a wreath in another part of the house. He was, as ever, engrossed in his work. Our arrival wasn’t going to deter him. I wanted to climb out of my skin. It would take time for the nerves to disappear. My grandmother really looked at me for the first time. She told me “You look really good. You should be a model.” I blushed then wandered briefly out of the room before returning. I don’t take compliments well. Eventually my Grandfather joined us. I mumbled a sheepish “Hi Papa.” He rumbled, (My grandfather possesses an amazing bass voice.) “Hi Diane.” He hugged me. I hate “Diane.” It’s Diana, but I wasn’t going to quibble. In that moment, I didn’t care. We were good and that was all that mattered.

I would see my Grandparents three times over the course of Christmas Week. We talked very little about me, about being trans, or transition. We talked about family. We talked about the past. They told me stories of their life, of things that happened long ago before my mother was born. How I looked didn’t matter to them. I was family. That’s all that matters. At one point, I tried to broach the topic of transition, and my disappearance from their lives, with my Grandmother. She didn’t really want to talk about it, or maybe it truly didn’t matter. All she offered in response was: “We are all God’s children. We are all the same.”   This simple declaration is the most honest, most profound statement of Catholicism I have ever heard. So often religion is used to push others away. For my grandmother it is this love under God, this equality, which cuts through all of the other barriers we erect. I was one of God’s children, and she loved me.

Perhaps you’re asking what the point of all this is, besides some sort of rambling humblebrag. Perhaps you’re thinking: “Yay Diana! Your family sees you and accepts you as a woman. Bully for you!” Well, here’s the thing. My family does not actually see me as a woman. I don’t know how they see me. Christmas was amazing. I was able to be myself. I was able to dress how I wanted. I fluttered through family gatherings like a social butterfly. I was unfettered from my social anxiety, my eternal sense of awkwardness, and my shame. Some in my family used female pronouns. Others used male pronouns. Some used my old name, some my new. My grandmother, after complimenting me on my hair and my dress, told me “You will always be M-, to me. You will always be my grandson.” She spoke out of love, and I love her all the more for it. Honestly, all I felt from my family was love. Names…pronouns…none of it mattered. By not dwelling on labels, by not policing pronouns, or asking them to rewrite their memories, I avoided the awkwardness and the pain too many experience. I know who I am. I know what I am. I’m comfortable with this. How others see me does not validate me, nor threaten my self-esteem.

Would I have reacted the same way five or ten years ago? I can say with some certainty I would not have. Only after educating myself on gender, and feminism, only by reading the words of my friends, and working through my own internalized transphobia and male socialization have I arrived at a place free from the need for validation. It’s a pretty great place, to be perfectly honest. I can talk about my childhood honestly. I can remember the good times I had with my friends, and with my family. None of us have to compromise our memory. My transition, and post-transition existence is as much a part of my life as my boyhood, my adolescence, and life as a young man.

I watch so many young transwomen dissolve, or lash out, at the notion that they aren’t female, that they haven’t always been female. The conflict arises because deep down they know they aren’t female. They know they cannot be. Any insistence they are male triggers an existential crisis. I wish I could show them how it doesn’t have to be this way. I want them to feel what I felt during Christmas: The joy and freedom the truth allows. I wish other transwomen would listen to that voice that knows what you really are. I want them to embrace it. To deny the truth, to insist otherwise, is internalized transphobia. To speak this truth is not self-hatred. It is self-love. It is self-care. I speak from experience. The truth will set you free.

Originally published on neopythia.com.

The post Veritas Liberabit Vos appeared first on Gender Apostates.

Hey son. Hey, hun. What would you rather be called? I mean, what are your preferred pronouns? Hun, right? Because that’s what we think girls say to each other (probably while they’re doing each other’s hair and nails). Maybe you don’t like my tone, but stick with it. You’ve been through worse, right?

I’m a bit like you. I was a boy who didn’t fit in, who grew into a young man who didn’t fit in, and wanted, and wished, to be a girl. You were the same. But maybe you don’t think about it that way any more. You’re going to tell me you were ‘assigned’ male. You were never a boy, you declare, you were just a baby, and the docs forced maleness on you! Maybe you now tell people you were always female, and the people around you, in your life or on social media (which might be most of your life anyway) agree and say, hun, you were always female, don’t let anyone tell you different!

That’s a recent thing, and you wouldn’t have said that five, ten years ago. Your friends wouldn’t have told you that either. Because times change, and trends change.

I was born a bit earlier, see, which means I had slightly different experiences and didn’t get told all that stuff. My story is going to be the same as yours in many ways, because that’s how we know what we are – we all tick the same boxes, don’t we, and compare it to a ‘trans narrative’, and realise it fits us better than the normal masculine one – but it’s also slightly different.

You don’t like what I’m saying, so let me tell you, I went through the same hoops. Wanted girl toys. Wanted to play with girl things, Barbie dolls and Strawberry Shortcake. Wanted to hang with the girls at school and do hair and nails. Took every opportunity to wear dresses. Then as I grew up, that kind of thing wasn’t cute any more and no doubt like you, I got caught doing it and made to feel ashamed.

I felt ashamed about it all through my teens into my twenties. People made me feel bad. At college I went to a club night wearing a skirt and make-up, and a woman from the feminist society told me to get out of the girls’ bathrooms. She said, wearing a skirt doesn’t make you a girl. That felt bad. It felt so bad I still remember it clearly, every word.

I found some other club night, for guys like me who wanted to dress that way. It was on the other side of town, a little place down side streets, and it took all my guts to go out on the street in my girl disguise, and catch a train into the city like that. Some jerk with his friends shouted at me. ‘Hey, woman-man! Hey, woman-man!’ They laughed. I was lucky they didn’t come over and hit me I guess. That felt bad.

See, I still remember it. I remember every bad thing people said about me, even if it was years ago. I remember when I came out to my close relatives and they said it was weird and sick. I kept doing it, and feeling the way I did, because I couldn’t change it. So yeah, there is bravery involved, I know.

I kept on doing it, and times changed. Famous people came out, in the media. There were TV shows and movies about trans women. Suddenly the way people reacted to me changed, and it took me by surprise. They almost treated me like a celebrity! Girl friends seemed to love the idea. They invited me out to their ‘girl nights’ and told me I was so brave. One of them was a lesbian, and when she said how brave I was and how special, and how hard it must be for me, something kind of clicked in my head: a little caution sign, like a TILT warning on a slot machine. Sure, it was wonderful to be accepted and embraced like that, but I knew lesbians had it really hard. It just didn’t seem right for her to put me first and make out I was the victim.

Another of my friends, a bisexual girl, asked me if I was attracted to men or women. I said women, and she was all, oh cool, you’re a lesbian. TILT! Sure, it was great to feel like I was special guest on their chat show, but it wasn’t right for them to think of me as a lesbian. Even though they were being super-nice, something in me started to resist. There’s an old song that popped into my head, by another guy who also didn’t fully conform to masculinity: Morrissey, the singer in The Smiths. He used to sing, ‘you just haven’t earned it yet, baby. You just haven’t earned it, my son.’

Well, I definitely hadn’t earned being called a lesbian, and though it was really tempting to accept these girls calling me a woman, I started to feel I hadn’t earned that either. But by now, things had changed, and anyone calling me names or shutting me out of places was being considered as bad as a racist. How things changed! I went to a club, wearing a skirt and make-up, and the organizers made it clear that if you identified as a woman, you should go in the women’s bathroom. And nobody complained or said a word against it. But you know what. When the women came in and saw me, standing at the mirror, I knew they didn’t feel fully comfortable about it. Sure, they didn’t say anything. They wouldn’t. But anyone who wasn’t totally focused on their own self-importance can sense it when someone else is uncomfortable, and if they’re a decent person, they take action about that.

I wasn’t brainwashed. I wasn’t indoctrinated. I just started thinking about it, and I realized what was going on, and inside me, it crossed a line between right and wrong. Are you going to say now that I was never truly trans, and that my story doesn’t count? Well, that would go against what you believe and preach, wouldn’t it? About how everyone can define their own identity and we shouldn’t question what someone says they are, and how they feel inside. So don’t twist your own rules in an effort to exclude me and discount my experiences. Yes, I fit the trans narrative. I just chose to get a little perspective, and I’m sharing it with you in case you want to get a different perspective too.

Those women around me, the ones I knew, and the strangers? They were all feminists, the nice kind of feminist. They were great people. They were generous, and kind, and accepting. But you know why? Because women have been told they have to be that way, ever since they were little girls and someone tells them to share, and to not be unladylike, and to be polite and not be loud or difficult. They were feminists – a certain type of feminist, the nice type – and they weren’t going to say anything even if they felt uncomfortable. Which means it was for me to take some responsibility, and not put myself and my own wants and needs first.

‘You just haven’t earned it yet, baby.’ And maybe I was never going to earn it. I had to think hard about what it really meant, to be a woman. Growing up, ‘being a girl’ meant nothing much more to me than pink toys, dresses, sitting around talking and doing nice stuff, instead of having to play rough games about soldiers, and pretend to be interested in sports. Even as a teenager and young man, what were my ideas based on, when I felt I wanted to be a woman? The reality of being at risk from rape every time I went out alone? The fact of earning less than men and not being promoted, or not getting hired because I might get pregnant? The pressures of wearing make-up because otherwise people were going to think I looked ill or ugly? No. I didn’t even have any real idea about basic biological stuff like menstruation, outside what I learned at school. No. My idea of being a girl was based on cute stuff I saw on TV and in movies; having best friends, going shopping, confiding in sisters, talking about emotions. It was the stuff that masculinity made it hard for me to do, and I mistook that for ‘being a woman’.

I’m never going to truly know what it’s like to be a woman. But what I believe is that being a woman in our culture isn’t just about the cute stuff, or even the biological stuff that men are never going to understand, however much you might want to twist words and facts into some fairytale about ‘female penis’ and ‘male periods’. Being a woman is, I believe, about being an oppressed minority group, being put in a different, inferior social class because you’re female. It’s bending biological facts out of recognition if you try to make ‘female’ into some flexible category that anyone can fit into, just cause they feel that way inside. It’s also truly insulting. If you do that, you’re saying the oppression of women isn’t a thing at all, because anyone can be a woman; anyone can opt in and out.

But it gets worse. The second worst aspect of that implication is: since anyone can opt in and out, based on how they feel inside, the women who still ‘identify’ as women must be actively choosing their own oppression. And the worst yet is, that those women are now told they’re privileged, because they don’t have the trouble of being trans! They’re told to accommodate trans women or get labelled a bigot, and they do it because women are trained all their lives to put other people first, to be ‘nice’, to not speak out or make things difficult. That’s why they do it. That’s why they accept you and call you the pronouns you want, and let you into their spaces. It’s not necessarily because they want to, or because they believe deep inside that you’re just like them. It’s because they have been told all their lives to be nice, kind and decent, and to make other people feel comfortable, accepted and welcomed.

Well, here’s an idea. Why don’t you also try to be nice, kind and decent. Why don’t you try to genuinely show respect and understanding.

Yes, not fitting into the role and expectations of your gender is rough. I know that, and ironically, the majority of women know that: unless you genuinely think they want to be considered inferior and put in the box of impossible, contradictory pressures and demands that women experience for their entire lives.

You want to act like a woman? Start by being a decent human. Respect people’s boundaries. Respect their need for space and their experience of oppression, which you will never truly understand. Yes, trans people are an oppressed minority, and yes, the prejudice you’ve experienced overlaps in some ways with the way our culture treats women, but it is not the same, and please get it out of your head that it’s worse.

Being female is a biological fact. Being a woman is a social category. Some feminists may feel that a person born male can truly become a woman, in the social sense, if they genuinely engage with, address and dismantle the male privilege they grew up with. Other feminists will tell you that you can never be a woman, and while that’s upsetting and distressing, they’re saying it for a reason – because being a woman is a lifelong experience from the day you were born with female biology, not something you can cross over into. It’s not something you become when you put on lipstick, and it’s definitely not something you can become by just waking up one day and changing your mind. It’s the experience of belonging to an oppressed class of people.

But if you genuinely like and respect and ‘identify with’ womanhood, then the way to get closer to that is not to insist that women follow your whims, and listen to your voice, and accept your definitions and your rules, and let you into the few safe spaces they have. You know what that makes you look and sound like? That makes you come across as the worst kind of man.

The post To Boys Who Don’t Fit In – A Guest Post by Jesse appeared first on Gender Apostates.

Imagine being unable to describe yourself, unable to give voice to your thoughts, your sense of being. Imagine being told your body is wrong, that you are a freak for simply describing your reality. Though it may sound as if I’m describing the cruel world transpeople face, I am not. This is the reality women now enjoy. This is the tyranny of ‘cis.’ I’ve thought a great deal about this label of late.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I abhor its use. As a transwoman, I find it unnecessary to further distinguish others from myself.  “Woman” works just fine.  I am a transwoman, they are women. Besides, most women do not wish to label themselves ‘cis.’ Who am I to insist they should? Recently, I have taken to re-reading Simone De Beauvoir’s feminist classic ‘The Second Sex’. On this particular read through, the following passage leapt out at me:

No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One.

Suddenly the insidiousness of the cis label became readily apparent.  I felt it must be so obvious, to everyone, and maybe it is.  I am always willing to confess my own ignorance and blinkered thinking. So forgive the naivety and potential obliviousness. Sometimes you hear a song a thousand times before truly hearing it for the first time.

In ‘The Second Sex’, De Beauvoir talks at length about the oppositional nature of minority classes. For example, blacks possess an alterity to whites.  Homosexual people possess an alterity to heterosexual people, etc. As such they can be said to be “Others” in relation to the Normative or ruling class. Another word for the ruling class would be the “One.”  In the quote above De Beauvoir posits that no person, no group considers itself the unnecessary, secondary, or inessential. They do not define themselves as the Other.  It is only the ruling class who can name the oppressed class Other. They do this when they proclaim themselves “normal.” When they are the default, everything oppositional to them is othered.

So what about trans people who insist upon the use of ‘cis’ for non-trans people?  It’s a special case, fascinating in the attempted inversion of oppression.  Transwomen frame themselves as the default. Though they wrap themselves in the mantle of victimization and oppression, they rely on their male privilege to push a narrative which flips the normative. Alterity would suggest that trans and cis are simply oppositional descriptive terms. As a minority, transwomen should lack the power to push a cis label onto anyone. Remember, only the One, the default, can name the Other.  Transwomen are not used to being the other.  They are uncomfortable being the minority.  Male privilege and entitlement has taught them the world is their’s for the taking.  ‘Cis’ is a way of claiming the default. As males, they retain the power of naming.  Not only will they define what a woman is, but they police who is allowed to call themselves woman. Transwomen have flipped the narrative. The Other is defining the One in hopes of becoming the One.

Perhaps things are still unclear.  De Beauvoir is writing from a different time, with different societal norms. At no point does De Beauvoir mention transgenderism or transsexuality. Such things simply didn’t exist. She speaks of men and women.  She speaks of power and oppression. What we have today is no different, though the shadings may be different. To observe the power dynamics, it is important we look at how ‘cis’ is used today.

Transgerdist advocates will claim this internet meme is nothing more than a post-punk metaphoric neologism for the destruction of gender.  I could get behind that, but it isn’t.  The transgenderist movement does not wish to abolish gender, they strive to enshrine it. The transwomen who adopt this worldview, who wrap themselves in this flag of “trans pride” view themselves as our evolutionary betters.  They are are the new mutants, the X-Men.  They are the next stage in human development. They hold the non-trans world, 99% of the population, in contempt. They believe themselves central to all concerns. Their specialness must be acknowledged, except when it shouldn’t be, or is inconvenient. (Non-Binary has its privileges.) They proclaim that the suffering they endure, the hate and abuse heaped upon them, often through language alone, is far greater than any other people face. The threat of actual physical violence, predominately experienced by trans women of color, and almost universally by women is almost irrelevant, except as an endless source of mana to appropriate..

Twitter is hardly ground zero for the misogynistic movement that is ‘cissexim’ but it’s a good source of examples. This is but the tip of the iceberg. The Orwellian use of ‘cis’ would be astonishing, if it were new, but naming women is an age old trick. Transgenderists are simply following the tricks of their fathers.  Following transgenderist logic, Transwomen are women.  Female people are “ciswomen.” Therefore, the only “women” who have the right to call themselves women are transwomen. Through these language games transwomen further the othering of women. They define womanhood, just as men have done for centuries before them. It is not the place of transwomen, or men, to define what woman is.

Transpeople and their allies need to stop using the term ‘cis.’  As transpeople are we so delicate, are we so fragile that we cannot handle truth?  Must we behave like MRAs and other misogynists who seek to silence women? Of course we don’t. We’re strong. It takes strength to transition and challenge gender norms, but we are not challenging anything if our “radical actions” maintain, and reinforce, the patriarchy. Adopting language that silences women, denies them their biological reality, and contributes to their othering is the action of men.   We could be in the vanguard challenging gender, gender roles, and what it means to be men.  Instead we cower, fearful of language, of hurt feelings, of the truths and the awkwardness which is central to our condition.

I will never refer to any non-trans person as ‘cis.’  I will not demand anyone refer to themselves as “cis.” “Cis” is not an identity.  It is not the opposite of trans.  It is an Orwellian silencing tactic.  It is male entitlement wrapped in a frock. If someone refers to you as ‘cis,’ if someone insists you label yourself as such, think about what they are asking. Think about how they are trying to define you.  You do not have to bear a label, because transwomen are uncomfortable with themselves. You do not have to wear an identity someone else has handed you.

Dearest allies, by using ‘cis’ you are not helping the trans community, you’re enabling it.  You are not being a good ally, a feminist, or a radical.  We are not simply women and men  We are transwomen, and transmen. We are male and female. We are strong enough to embrace this, help us to do so. Be honest about what we are, speak the truth. We’ll all be better off for it.

The post ‘Cissexism’ and You appeared first on Gender Apostates.

Women have always been called names for saying no. Frigid, bitch, prude. These words are meant to shame us into saying yes.

Women are supposed to be available, welcoming, obedient, and it has been the aim of the women’s movement since its inception to challenge these preconceptions, to say no to men’s definition of us.

It is thanks to feminism that since 1991 wives can say no to their husbands and have that ‘no’ backed up by law. It is thanks to feminism that women no longer have to accept dismissal if they marry or become pregnant. It is thanks to feminism that women in the West are beginning to feel confident in saying no to men in myriad different situations.

Prude, bitch, frigid don’t sting like they used to. Misogynists in the west are losing society’s assumption that women should say yes. Increasingly, it is they who are shamed for insisting. As feminists we applaud this.

However, when it comes to transgender males, men who wish to call themselves women – or more to the point want us to call them women – the story is very different. If we say no to the appropriation of our name, our bodies, our struggle, it is we women who are shamed. We’re being re-named: TERF, cis, transphobe. We’re being re-named by men who wish to try on the costume ‘woman’; they think it doesn’t fit us any more, us no-sayers are not the pliable girls of their dreams, and we must share.

When transwomen are women and women are ciswomen, we are asked to give up our very selves, deny that we are disadvantaged because of our bodies, our potential to bear children. That ultimate female power that men from the beginning of time have sought to control. When women are ciswomen we are compliant in our inequality, we are asking for it. We cannot say no. We must sit down and listen to the men tell us what we are, what we must say yes to.

We must say yes to men. Yes to men in our safe spaces, where we are naked or vulnerable. Lesbians say yes to men in your beds. Say yes to men at your smear test and yes to men in your prisons. Say yes to your new names: uterus-owner, menstruator, person with a vagina. We say no, and we are shamed for it.

We are being lied to. ‘Woman, daughter’ says the headline next to a picture of a man. A man who murdered his father and ‘soiled’ his female boss’s underwear. For now, history will call him ‘woman’ because men say so.

In January, the women and equalities minister Maria Miller released a report into transgender equality. She wants the law changed so that a woman is whoever says the words ‘I am a woman’. Quite apart from this Orwellian tautology of a definition, this would leave women’s safe spaces open to anyone who wishes to enter them. It would leave women unable to protect the boundaries that are drawn in public for our dignity and privacy. If anyone were to object to, say, a man in the women’s changing rooms, it is the objector who would be asked to leave.

Many women and women’s organisations said ‘no’ to this, in written evidence. They were all ignored. These magic words, when spoken by a man (please note it doesn’t work the other way round) have the power to disarm us, to turn our sisters against us. Our ‘no’ becomes unkind, abusive, violent.

Learning to say no is part of shrugging off female socialisation. ‘No’ is feminism in its elemental state. Yet when women say no to these men, liberal feminists call us gross, call us TERF. Compare our legitimate objections and questions to racism and ableism and call us ‘white feminists’.

When women say no on the websites of the left wing press, or of once woman-centered feminist publications, we are deleted. Our non-compliance might be catching, other women must not see it. Women uncomfortable with this attack on our rights must believe they are a lone bigot, they must ‘check their privilege’, they must be kept afraid to say ‘no’.

You are not alone, no-sayers. If you know that woman is not a feeling but a biological, tangible reality that we share with one another and not with men, you are thinking forbidden thoughts. We are legion, no-sayers, and we are right. For this reason our silence is insisted upon. The truth gets in the way.

Be proud, no-sayers. Speak to your friends, your mothers and sisters. Tell them what is being done to us, what we are in danger of losing.  Say no in public, say it in writing to your MP, say it to those complicit in our silence. You will change minds.

Say no over and over and never be ashamed to draw your own boundaries: if we say it together we will be deafening.

The post Women Saying ‘No’ – A Guest Post by Kate C. appeared first on Gender Apostates.

By Jaqueline Sephora Andrews

Aoife is someone who I once considered a friend, even though it was against my better judgement.  I knew that Aoife was a trans activist, but I was hoping that she had made a change and was willing to stand in support of women.  I was hopeful because there weren’t very many transwoman who were willing to support women.  Aoife played the part, an expert manipulator who targeted women.  Aoife is a person who knows how to flatter, and did convince women to support her even at the expense of their own security.  I honestly always had mixed feelings about Aoife.  I wanted to support her because I felt that she needed support, and I was going to do my best to be a true friend.  Of course, I was also deceived.  Maybe I just wanted to believe that Aoife was different?  I wanted to believe that she was truthful, so I took Aoife at her word.  The reality was that everything in me was telling me to be cautious.  And now I am left with one of my biggest regrets, that I was ever friends with Aoife.

I remember my conversation on Twitter with a radical feminist, when I was first told of Aoife’s actions. She asked me, “did you peep the racist white TG try to sneak in racism to undermine the rights of women?”  I was surprised when she said that she was talking about Aoife.  Our conversation continued in a private message, where we could both talk honestly and openly. It was the first time where I really began to become skeptical of Aoife.  I was trying to be her friend, but I did take notice every time I saw something about her.  I might have responded to a few tweets, where I thought people were lying (I now believe every tweet about her), there were tweets from radical feminists that I took notice of and they did make me more cautious about Aoife.  The radical feminists who warned about Aoife were vilified, but the truth is that they were right all along.

I always try to be a loyal friend, even to Aoife.  But what Aoife did not understand is that I would never turn on radical feminists; there was never an us versus them.  The truth is that the person who I trust more than anyone, who I love dearly and consider family, is a radical feminist; I am and will always be on her side, and I will always stand with her.  About 90% of people who I communicate with regularly on social media are radical feminists.  Aoife might have thought I was on her side, but I would never let anything or anyone come between my sister or radical feminists who I also communicate with.  And please make no mistake, I am also completely against the trans movement, of which Aoife is a part of.  I believe that Aoife was an infiltrator, who was also seeking validation from radical feminists.  However, I did not know that Aoife was actually declaring herself to be a radical feminist; I also did not know that Aoife tweeted about being into a convent, which is a boundary violation.  Honestly, I was always uncomfortable with her nun fetish.  And now, knowing that Aoife did violate boundaries; it makes the fetish even more creepy.

Aoife was also considered a “gender critical transwoman,” and one of the main reasons why I became skeptical of some transwomen who identified as “gender critical.”  So, in an article where I wrote that safety is within relationships, I also critiqued the concept of a transwoman being gender critical.  It wasn’t that I distrust transwomen who claim to be gender critical, it ‘s just that I know that there are some who will use the label “gender critical” as an attempt to be validated by radical feminists.  I am critical of the system of gender, but I am skepital of “gender critical” as an identity.  It is the seeking of validation which can make a “gender critical” transwoman a threat to the safety of relationships.  Aoife was given a platform because she claimed to be “gender critical.”  There seems to be a belief among these validation seeking “gender critical” transwomen that radical feminists hate transwomen, so if they could prove to be zealous in their hate, radical feminists will acknowledge them as women. However, I haven’t met a radical feminist who hates transwomen.  Being against a movement does not equal hatred toward individual people within the movement.  But for these transgenderists in disguise, radical feminists are so awful because they won’t declare that these males are women; it is the typical misogyny and bullying that so many transwomen have shown.  Aoife also used her platform to bully liberal feminists.  Agree or disagree with ideology, liberal feminists are still people and did not deserve to be bullied by Aoife.

Aoife caused division, which I did not want to be a part of, so I took a break from twitter believing that it was the people Aoife was fighting who were causing division; I was still under the impression that they were lying.  I was really nervous about reengaging on twitter, and I still did not engage even after I reactivated.  And then it was, on a night where I could not sleep that I logged onto Twitter and saw Aoife calling women Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs).  I also saw that Aoife befriended abusive transwomen.  Like other transgenderists, Aoife plays the victim, saying that “TERFs are so scarry,” but Aoife is the one who is the misogynistic bully.

You claim “TERFs are scarry,” Aoife, but you would friend a sick and perverted man who would dare name his body parts after a woman?  You want people to sympathize with you, but you would friend a man who is either a rapist or potential rapist, who believes that “TERFs want to be plowed,” and you want to play the victim?  You are the misogynist.  You want to be the innocent delicate victim, but you not only friend a rapist, but imply that you both would doxx women?  You are not the victim, but you are a bully.  Even for me, the problem with Twitter was Aoife, and before I could reengage, I had to unfriend/unfollow Aoife.  And shortly after I unfriended, every thing came to light; I believe everything that was said about Aoife is the truth.

It is completely disgusting that Aoife would garner sympathy, when it was Aoife who targeted women. Was this how you got your kicks Aoife?  You would use flattering words seeking to gain the trust of women. Was it fun for you to see women defending you against those “scarry TERFs,” until they too became “scarry TERFs?”  But let’s all play your game, you’re the victim, right?  No, you are a misogynistic bully who demanded to be validated by feminists.  You caused division and demanded that women come to your defense to prove their worth to you, but do you understand what it means to be a friend?  There were radical feminists who did support you, but if you were a true friend then you would not demand that they be caught in the middle of your attempts to divide women.  If you were a true friend then you would have cared as much about their safety and well-being, as you expected them to care about your’s; you would have not made fighting in your Twitter battle a requirement for friendship.  Aoife, you are a liar!  Even to the women you flattered, who did defend you at a risk to their own well-being. You promised them that you would always be their friend, but when you had no use for them you disposed of them.  Aoife, you are a user!  Did you enjoy seeing women fight over you?  We spent a day on twitter talking about you and the hurt you caused.  There were women who were hurt because of you, and you want to play the victim?  You want to associate with your violent friends, while you blame the women who trusted you?  Aoife, you are a bully and a misogynist.

It is absolutely necessary to support women.  As much as Aoife demands to be validated, she will never be an actual woman.  If we say we are for women, then there is no need to coddle a misgoynist like Aoife.  I don’t have time to play the let’s validate Aoife game.  The “gender critical” transwoman who is seeking validation is a threat to the safety of relationships.  This may seem like a rather harsh critique, but I have to be true to what I stand for.  I was a friend to Aoife, but I will not be a friend to someone who would threaten the security of people I care about.  I will not be a friend to a misogynist, who has no regard for the women she hurt.  How can anyone say that they support women, if they support a misogynistic bully like Aoife?

The post A Misogynist will be a Misogynist appeared first on Gender Apostates.

There’s a lot of understandable confusion out there regarding what “gender crit” (gender critical) means, so here’s a concise chart to which you can refer as needed – also available as a one page PDF here.

PATRIARCHY: enforces gender stereotypes to keep women dependent on men,
thus ensuring men’s access to women’s bodies & labor

*No, a hysterectomy does not render a woman no longer a woman. We know humans are bipedal mammals and we don’t think amputees lose their humanity. Get a grip.

FEMINISM: gender recognized as harmful social construct and abolished

TRANSGENDER IDENTITY POLITICS: patriarchal gender stereotypes determine sex (basic reproductive biology erased)*

*I am not going into “non-binary” here. Feel free to go down that rabbit hole on Tumblr, along with otherkin etc.

**Some AFTAs claim they do not like “feminine” things, as well as not wishing to undergo physical transition, in which case one must ask why they so vociferously claim to be women – the answer is, of course, to access (and dominate) women’s spaces, language and politics. As ever, more evidence and analysis at thenewbacklash.blogspot.com.

The post Gender Crit Cheat Sheet appeared first on Gender Apostates.

Assigned Male is a propaganda cartoon that puts genderist nonsense into the mouth of a little “trans girl.” Because I take issue with this propaganda, I will be accused of “hating trans people.”

I do not hate transsexual people. I don’t hate any group of people suffering from a rare medical condition. There are several transsexual people – many writing here, in fact – who have become very dear to me. I think sex dysmorphia is an understandable though heartbreaking result of the gender straightjacket. Furthermore, I do not oppose medical transition for adults who suffer from sex dysmorphia – not that my opinion would sway the medical-pharmaceutical complex in any way.

But I do hate that non-dysmorphic males are using transsexual people as their human shields. I furthermore hate that so many so-called Leftists are more interested in using transsexual people as their disgust-tolerance merit badges than in doing any real power analysis of gender and male violence. And I especially hate that we are now seeing gender non-conforming children being referred to (*shiver*) gender clinics. Instead of letting go of the pervasive gender stereotypes that cause people to feel alien in their own bodies, we are now actively inducing sex dysmorphia in our kids, and calling that progressive.

Hey Leftists, you know how we don’t “support our troops” by sending them into wars that only kill innocents and line the pockets of war profiteers? Well, we don’t support transsexual people by spreading their suffering to the next generation and lining the pockets of medical/pharmaceutical profiteers.

With all that said, my take on Assigned Male Fail:

Their propaganda:

My response:

Their propaganda:

My response:

Their propaganda:

My response:

I am no artist, but my final word (graphic, rather) on the matter:

The post Assigned Fail appeared first on Gender Apostates.

Imagine being unable to describe yourself, unable to give voice to your thoughts, your sense of being. Imagine being told your body is wrong, that you are a freak for simply describing your reality. Though it may sound as if I’m describing the cruel world transpeople face, I am not. This is the reality women now enjoy. This is the tyranny of ‘cis.’ I’ve thought a great deal about this label of late.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but I abhor its use. As a transwoman, I find it unnecessary to further distinguish others from myself.  “Woman” works just fine.  I am a transwoman, they are women. Besides, most women do not wish to label themselves ‘cis.’ Who am I to insist they should? Recently, I have taken to re-reading Simone De Beauvoir’s feminist classic ‘The Second Sex’. On this particular read through, the following passage leapt out at me:

No subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset; it is not the Other who, defining itself as Other, defines the One; the Other is posited as Other by the One positing itself as One.

Suddenly the insidiousness of the cis label became readily apparent.  I felt it must be so obvious, to everyone, and maybe it is.  I am always willing to confess my own ignorance and blinkered thinking. So forgive the naivety and potential obliviousness. Sometimes you hear a song a thousand times before truly hearing it for the first time.

In ‘The Second Sex’, De Beauvoir talks at length about the oppositional nature of minority classes. For example, blacks possess an alterity to whites.  Homosexual people possess an alterity to heterosexual people, etc. As such they can be said to be “Others” in relation to the Normative or ruling class. Another word for the ruling class would be the “One.”  In the quote above De Beauvoir posits that no person, no group considers itself the unnecessary, secondary, or inessential. They do not define themselves as the Other.  It is only the ruling class who can name the oppressed class Other. They do this when they proclaim themselves “normal.” When they are the default, everything oppositional to them is othered.

So what about trans people who insist upon the use of ‘cis’ for non-trans people?  It’s a special case, fascinating in the attempted inversion of oppression.  Transwomen frame themselves as the default. Though they wrap themselves in the mantle of victimization and oppression, they rely on their male privilege to push a narrative which flips the normative. Alterity would suggest that trans and cis are simply oppositional descriptive terms. As a minority, transwomen should lack the power to push a cis label onto anyone. Remember, only the One, the default, can name the Other.  Transwomen are not used to being the other.  They are uncomfortable being the minority.  Male privilege and entitlement has taught them the world is their’s for the taking.  ‘Cis’ is a way of claiming the default. As males, they retain the power of naming.  Not only will they define what a woman is, but they police who is allowed to call themselves woman. Transwomen have flipped the narrative. The Other is defining the One in hopes of becoming the One.

Perhaps things are still unclear.  De Beauvoir is writing from a different time, with different societal norms. At no point does De Beauvoir mention transgenderism or transsexuality. Such things simply didn’t exist. She speaks of men and women.  She speaks of power and oppression. What we have today is no different, though the shadings may be different. To observe the power dynamics, it is important we look at how ‘cis’ is used today.

Transgerdist advocates will claim this internet meme is nothing more than a post-punk metaphoric neologism for the destruction of gender.  I could get behind that, but it isn’t.  The transgenderist movement does not wish to abolish gender, they strive to enshrine it. The transwomen who adopt this worldview, who wrap themselves in this flag of “trans pride” view themselves as our evolutionary betters.  They are are the new mutants, the X-Men.  They are the next stage in human development. They hold the non-trans world, 99% of the population, in contempt. They believe themselves central to all concerns. Their specialness must be acknowledged, except when it shouldn’t be, or is inconvenient. (Non-Binary has its privileges.) They proclaim that the suffering they endure, the hate and abuse heaped upon them, often through language alone, is far greater than any other people face. The threat of actual physical violence, predominately experienced by trans women of color, and almost universally by women is almost irrelevant, except as an endless source of mana to appropriate..

Twitter is hardly ground zero for the misogynistic movement that is ‘cissexim’ but it’s a good source of examples. This is but the tip of the iceberg. The Orwellian use of ‘cis’ would be astonishing, if it were new, but naming women is an age old trick. Transgenderists are simply following the tricks of their fathers.  Following transgenderist logic, Transwomen are women.  Female people are “ciswomen.” Therefore, the only “women” who have the right to call themselves women are transwomen. Through these language games transwomen further the othering of women. They define womanhood, just as men have done for centuries before them. It is not the place of transwomen, or men, to define what woman is.

Transpeople and their allies need to stop using the term ‘cis.’  As transpeople are we so delicate, are we so fragile that we cannot handle truth?  Must we behave like MRAs and other misogynists who seek to silence women? Of course we don’t. We’re strong. It takes strength to transition and challenge gender norms, but we are not challenging anything if our “radical actions” maintain, and reinforce, the patriarchy. Adopting language that silences women, denies them their biological reality, and contributes to their othering is the action of men.   We could be in the vanguard challenging gender, gender roles, and what it means to be men.  Instead we cower, fearful of language, of hurt feelings, of the truths and the awkwardness which is central to our condition.

I will never refer to any non-trans person as ‘cis.’  I will not demand anyone refer to themselves as “cis.” “Cis” is not an identity.  It is not the opposite of trans.  It is an Orwellian silencing tactic.  It is male entitlement wrapped in a frock. If someone refers to you as ‘cis,’ if someone insists you label yourself as such, think about what they are asking. Think about how they are trying to define you.  You do not have to bear a label, because transwomen are uncomfortable with themselves. You do not have to wear an identity someone else has handed you.

Dearest allies, by using ‘cis’ you are not helping the trans community, you’re enabling it.  You are not being a good ally, a feminist, or a radical.  We are not simply women and men  We are transwomen, and transmen. We are male and female. We are strong enough to embrace this, help us to do so. Be honest about what we are, speak the truth. We’ll all be better off for it.

The post ‘Cissexism’ and You appeared first on Gender Apostates.

Writing this is an act of contradiction. Every act of writing creates an opportunity for betrayal. In letting loose my thoughts, I betray my sense of self and I betray others’ sense of me. I invite criticism, disappointment, scorn, and even anger. Every honest admission comes with a cost. It is a cost I willingly pay, and while never light, it is cheap to the price paid by women. Over time I’ve learned it is easier to watch the world pass and say little.  I’ve learned that in silence I am powerful.  Other transwomen would have you believe their power is in their anger, in victimization, in their non-stop flow of words. They argue everything, confront everything, if there is an argument concerning gender somewhere on the internet they will find it.  They scream at women, they scream at other transwoman, yet rarely scream at men. They recruit others to fight at their sides and bury opposition in an onslaught of verbiage.  I will not add to that raucous indignant fury. Instead, I offer another choice, one more men and transwomen need to embrace, I offer the power of silence.

Male socialization has taught me, and all males, that my opinion is important.  Whether or not that opinion is informed, or welcome, it is perfectly reasonable for me to express it, in any context, at any time. I have been taught that arguments I disagree with are flawed, simply because I disagree with them. I have been taught all I need do is to scoff and dismiss them out of hand. It is my prerogative as a male to do so. My thoughts do not have to be logical or internally consistent. They are simply right. Should someone disagree with me, especially a woman, it is my right, nay my obligation, to talk down to them, to explain to them why they are wrong, even talk over them if necessary.  My sense of absolute right shall not be challenged.

Such bollocks.

A funny thing happened on the road to silence. I stopped to listen. As I progressed further in transition, and started interacting with the “trans community” I encountered questions to which I could not find answers.  I learned that even asking these questions was to risk excommunication.  I stopped talking, took on a cloak of silence and listened.  I listened to women. I read their words and their thoughts. I read conversations from those I followed on twitter. I witnessed the abuse they faced for simply speaking out, and more than anything I realized how women, and feminism, provided answers to the questions I asked. I realized I didn’t stumble upon gender like some lost continent.  There is a thriving community of women, women born into a caste from which they cannot escape.  Women rebelling against the system which trapped them and for whom gender is not a playground.  I realized that no matter what I write, what I think, that a woman somewhere has already thought and written about it with far more brilliance and eloquence than I could ever muster.

I should be content in this silence, to listen, and learn from some truly amazing women. Yet I cannot do so, not yet, probably not ever. I cannot stop because there are males who say they are like me, males who, unlike me, make claims they women, who browbeat, stalk, abuse, and harass women for the crime of speaking their mind. I cannot turn a blind eye to this behavior and it is to these “women” I wish to now speak.

Stop. Just Stop.

Stop believing your words and opinions are wanted, especially about feminism. Do not think you have a better understanding of feminism then women who have lived and understood what it is to be female from birth? Do not think your thoughts matter.  This is not to say that you are not intelligent nor have worthwhile ideas to express. It is simply to say you do not need to express them about everything, at all times.  Just because a thought enters into your mind, does not mean it needs expression. One of the most important things we can do as transwomen is to protect the boundaries women establish from intrusion by other men, and by men I include transwomen.  Men will take over any space open to them. We will seize control of the conversation in mixed environments. We will, by virtue of our presence, silence women.  This is what we are taught to do and what we must guard against.

This isn’t easy, I know. It is in direct contradiction to our socialization, but we can overcome our male socialization. With work, and self-awareness, we can succeed. It is not without difficulty or without cost.  Having broken my silence to write, I have been subject to criticism, both good and bad.  While the good is uplifting, the bad can be really, really bad.  I’ve seen intensely personal things written about me, entire psychological profiles imagined from my words.  I’ve read the rants of those I once called friend.  I witnessed them all, but have said nothing.  One of the most difficult things I’ve ever read about me was an intense discussion, by a group of women, on the first piece I published on this site.  I’ve not said a word about that discussion until now, and this is all I will say: I am glad that my words sparked conversation and I believe it is important for women to discuss it and me in the same manner as any group of men would. They should not have to fear reprisal, or my intrusion into their space, a vigorous defense, or me mansplaining “what they don’t understand.” While I may not agree with all they say, it is important they say it. My words are written. It is out of my hands.

If I can endure this criticism, if I can read words which challenge my thoughts and beliefs and not collapse into a gibbering puddle of tears, then so can all transwomen.  Listening is hard. As we listen, we open ourselves to words we may not want to hear. By listening, and understanding, we can move toward cooperation.  We can listen to and accommodate the concerns of women and work together to find solutions which don’t ignore them entirely. In short we can stop acting like the men we were raised to be.  If for some reason you believe yourself immune to male socialization, think about this. The way you attack women online, the way you argue with them, dismiss them, tell them they’re wrong, is no different than any other man.  Those who claim to be our allies do it.  Those whose misogynistic righteousness leads them to be MRAs do it.  You call yourself a women, yet claim to be different? Think how your behavior matches those you claim most to despise, and consider what that says about you.

If you’ve made it this far, and are willing to challenge yourself, I have a homework assignment.  There is a book I would like you to read: Pornography by Andrea Dworkin. It is available for free, here. Pornography is probably the most difficult book I’ve ever read. It is not the prose or the syntax which makes it difficult, but the ideas which cleave to the very heart of your being.  It is a difficult read for men and women alike, but I believe it is important.  Dworkin pummeled me into silence.  Every critical argument I wanted to raise, every time my mind cried out “Yeah, but…” I was defeated by her brilliance.  It is a transformative book. It will change the way you look at sex, porn, and gender forever.  It will change the way you view women and the world. It will teach you silence, if you’re willing to submit. Open your mind to Dworkin’s ideas, and you will understand.

Silence is difficult, but I want to believe in a world without gender.  A world in which people can be who they want and say what they want without fear of repercussion. I want to live in a world where the thoughts and ideas of women are recognized and disseminated as widely as those of men. Yet I understand we still live in a patriarchal world, and I’m aware of my place in it. My socialization says my opinions matter.  I say they do not.  My socialization says I should speak up.  I say I should not.  I rebel in silence. It is a simple, yet powerful act.  I do not have the answers, but someone else may, and when she speaks, I want to be certain she is heard.

The post The Power of Silence appeared first on Gender Apostates.

The devastating breadth of male violence against women and transwomen alike is under-reported and under-acknowledged, and the violence perpetrated by transwomen against women is flat out denied. Much of the venom some transwomen feel towards the lives and beliefs of women is visible within the war that rages on the internet, and increasingly in the real world, between feminists and transgender activists, a war over what it means to be a woman, a transwoman and a member of a sexually dimorphic species. As a transsexual male who wishes to analyse the system of gender within which I live, and who wants to challenge the culture of transwomen mirroring the behaviours and attitudes of non-transsexual males, I hope to use this piece to analyse this disagreement, and the attitudes and behaviours that come to the surface within the confines of this discussion.

Male violence is real, perverse, disgusting, abysmal, and a global epidemic. Women and girls are on the receiving end of levels of violence at the hands of males across the globe at a level that is truly horrific: 35% of women have experienced either “physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence”. 35% of OVER HALF OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION experiences sexual violence. This is violence that is committed against women by men for the sole crime of being female. This culture of male violence is also prevalent with regards to violence against transsexual people. A survey of violence against transsexual people within the European Union found that 79% of the 2669 respondents to the survey experienced some form of harassment that ranged from transphobic comments to physical and sexual abuse. Another report found that 50% of trans people have experienced sexual violence. All of these studies, regardless of how honestly they represent reality, can be used to come to the same conclusion: all over the world, there is a culture of Men committing violence, including sexual violence, at a truly under-acknowledged level, against people these men view to be not-men and therefore deserving of violence (for being female, or for not being masculine enough).

Male violence is a problem that does and will mar many people’s lives, and this is true for myself. I was bullied relentlessly during my schooling for not fulfilling the role of “male” well enough, for being visibly homosexual and for being gender non-conforming. This has damaged me irreparably, inhibited my ability to form friendships and healthy relationships with Men, and will forever force me to live under the shadow of a serious suicide attempt. So forgive me for having a shaky relationship with men and those who act in ways that mirror the way I was treated by other males, and this includes other transwomen. My experience is not unique; during conversations with many of the transwomen I know this history of not fitting into the male gender-role, and experiencing the violence directed at us as a direct consequence for our gender-non-conformity, is common.

Before I continue, let me make clear my definition of “transwoman”, just so there are no misunderstandings. My understanding is transwomen are males who alter their bodies to enable themselves to live, to the best of their ability, within the social role of “woman”. The desire for this behaviour / treatment can be for a number of reasons including: intense sex dysphoria, a disgust for masculinity, or more commonly and as is the case for myself, a mixture of the two. This is my understanding of transsexuality and transwoman-hood and if you wish to know more you’re welcome to read my piece titled Transwomen Are Women Period… Or Not (And That’s Okay).

Returning to the original point, and in light of this definition, if it is the wish of transwomen to live within the social role of “woman”; transwomen should, insert a massive “in theory”, be tolerant individuals who act and behave in a way that shows empathy for women. As human beings we should respect each other, but we also have some shared experiences and both understand (to different and varying degrees) the struggle of living under patriarchy whilst being viewed as inferior (women for being female, transwomen for being unable to perform violent masculinity and therefore being “useless males”). Sadly, however, this is not the case- instead we live in a world where women are attacked by transwomen for understanding that biology exists, and women and transwomen are biologically different and lesbians are told they must view males as sexual partners if an exclamation of “female identity” is given. This is increasingly common with “transwomen” who transition after a lifetime of benefiting from male privilege and patriarchy through being gender conforming males. The very men who enacted and enact misogynist and homophobic violence, against women and gender non-conforming males respectively, as a display of their masculine dominance, and who did not struggle within the confines of the male gender role, but who thrived.

The behaviours exhibited by these “transwomen” (I use quotation marks because who are we kidding? but also to acknowledge these people are “the same as me” despite my continued dismay) are inexcusable, and explicitly mirror those of the violent males who attack women and transwomen alike. There is a growing culture of this behaviour being committed and not just being excused, but being encouraged -those who engage in spouting violent vitriol at women are being rewarded with praise. I, for one, find that the fact this behaviour is committed in the name of a movement that supposedly exists for me, trans activism, incredibly upsetting. Equally, the growing use of the term “transphobe” as a label to enable the socially acceptable silencing of women is very troubling. These “transgender rights activists” are advocating not for a world where we can live free from male violence, but for a world where we can live a life free from criticism by those we aim to “identify” with (or “as,” as is more commonly stated) – much to my continued disgust.

If you are still under any illusion that this behaviour is not a mirror of the behaviours males use against women and transwomen, then look no further than non-transsexual “male allies” of the transgender movement who pick up, with joy, the terms used by transgender activists to silence women. As luck would have it for these men, in doing so they get to gain *liberal-super-justice points* whilst simultaneously enacting male oppression of women. These “male allies” show that transgender activism truly is a movement that exists to silence females into submission and obedience, and enable males to live free from the constraint of thinking of females as humans and equals, humans with their own experiences, lives, rights and opinions.

Increasingly those who claim to be like me and to share my experiences are people who mirror the words, behaviours and actions of those people who have harassed, name-called, bullied and enacted violence against me. The people who are “championing my rights” in this war against women are using the same techniques and actions that were used to push me into attempting to take my own life, and this causes me anguish. We have these “transwomen” who demand I view them as my equal, or else I’m a “Truscum”, who demand to speak for me and who demand I do as they tell me “or else”. We have these “transwomen” who are predatory in their behaviours and who refuse to acknowledge that my experiences exist and are valid and then tell me they are “just like me” and that we have this unbreakable “sisterhood”. Every action, every movement is a step further away from actually helping me and people like me (transsexuals) and a step closer to erasing my lived experiences as a transsexual who was a gender non-conforming boy prior to transition. It’s becoming impossible for me to talk about my past or to analyse my life, because as soon as I suggest I’m not and have not ever been female I get shouted down, called out and told I must denounce “The TERFS” and resign my opinions.

I wish to suggest that the “gender wars” are less a war than a one way attack. An attack that mirrors the power dynamics already in place within society of males on the top calling the shots, and females on the bottom being forced to make amendments to how they live their lives (referring to themselves as “cis-women” and giving up the term “female”, for example) so that they can navigate delicate male egos and the threat of and use of violence. The attacks that are made against women in the name of “trans activism” are uncalled for, disgusting and do nothing but throw smoke over the fact that the real problem and the real threat comes from Males, gender and patriarchy.

The ultimate truth is I try my best to rid from myself my male socialisation, but I can only do so much. I am and always will be a transwoman, so by definition a male, and the 18 years I spent socialising as a man will always pervade my experiences  and existence. I have, despite my attempts to fight against and reject it, been socialised into the class of the oppressor, the one who commits violence and the one who commits the subjugation of women. This is not something I can help and this is not something I can change.

The post Male Violence Is The Problem And Transwomen Commit It Too appeared first on Gender Apostates.

This piece presents thoughts on “Jazz Jennings: The Transgender Teen and Wannabe Mermaid the Internet Needs”

Jazz; an art form which appears to transcend usual musical convention. Affected and nonsensical, it is studiously performed in order to appear natural, free form and released from the mundane. Its fans are almost fanatical in their devotion to it as musical ‘truth’.

Listen carefully, dear ones, for I have a cautionary tale to tell. It is the story of two daughters, one born, one made.

Born, one daughter to be the dutiful, dowdy, dull-feathered common bird, full of the usual eggs, who, with her flawed, ordinary female body, will suffer the familiar dangers, disappointments and hatred, and be expected to serve her family, not just in the everyday ways of always being the one to contact, to come over, to care, and to clean, not just in the usual expectations of continuing the family with her own offspring, but to also be the mere vessel, the incubator, for however many children her more-important sibling may desire for their perfect, pink, dazzling Disney fantasy. 101 Dalmations for Cruella, coming right up.

Made, one daughter-once- son forced Phoenix-like to transcend the limits of his parents’ misguided care to mimic  a bird of paradise, all dazzling plumage, encouraged squawks, and apparent glee at the gilded cage they have been told is freedom. All cuckoo and magpie, this glittering creature has its lesser sister to tend to its young, whilst it gets on with the more important job of delighting us with its beauty and sweet gibberish.

Two daughters, to be both aspects of Cinderella at once; the rags and scraps slave of the hearth, and the enchanting, magical, captivating party princess. This Cinders will serve herself. It won’t just be the Ugly Sisters getting bits cut off themselves to win the heart of Prince Patriarchy.

Whilst the first sister stays forever landlocked, the second can swim. This Ariel, this sparkly fun mermaid, can live in water and on land. All the entitlement of breathing rarefied air, all the glamour of appearing to live in unexplored depths. Remove her tail and she only gets more perfect: what men truly want. Her breasts will never sag, stretch, pucker or leak, or be wasted on keeping a baby alive, or be lopsided or deemed the sum of her worth (the bright new jewel of privilege). Her factory-fresh vulva will be crafted to be porn perfect; trim, pink, childlike and hair free. No natural asymmetry, wild bush, secreting or bleeding for her. No birth to wreck it. She will be taller and leaner than mere mortal females, her belly untouched by growing life, never contorted with cramps, never anything but a smooth doll blank, inside and out. Her wardrobe will be sublime; as practical and mundane as the shell bras all true mermaids wear, all the time. Under the sea, you and me, where the waves distort the sound of truth being told…

… I need to wake up. To stop writing like this. This is a nightmare, but it is no fantasy land, it is all too true. We will have to save ourselves, and the children, because the prince has chopped off Rapunzel’s hair for himself.

I will put this bluntly: I believe that transing children is a form of child abuse. Furthermore, I feel that there is a sexual element to that in this case. What the hell are adults doing making such a big deal of sexual issues with a child?! Hypersexualisation is one of the most clear-cut signs of abuse in a child, yet here we have a child talking about being pansexual, about his sister’s vagina, like he’s reciting his times table, and everyone seems to be applauding instead of being alarmed.

I see the hidden message: here is a child we can sexualise and legitimise feeling sexual about, because they are apparently opting into adult notions of female sexuality. You can’t be a creep who fancies teenage girls when that girl is really a boy, oh no. Your arousal is just approval of *her* empowerment and choice. Right. Right. The fact that it will also encourages real girls to think of themselves as objects for sexual consumption doesn’t interest you, oh, of course not.

These cases, of transed children fool the public, like an evil stepmother’s (played by ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner)  mirror telling us all that this way is the fairest of them all. But the truth is ugly, and downright wicked. Now, I do believe that virtually all of these cases are driven by either a well-meaning ignorance or unexplained psychological need of one or both parents, and that they genuinely believe they are going what’s best for their child. It’s pretty clear to me that having a child who’s a transgirl psychologically relieves the parents because they can indulge in a fantasy of believing that one ‘daughter’ is living a life free of the usual oppressions, dangers, etc., that actual females face. Instead of the hard work of supporting their real daughter, she must be sacrificed for her parents enjoyment and self-indulgent delusion of relief, of freeing at least one girl. What’s more, a mother can live out her fantasies of what being a girl is without the intrusions of the reality of her own limited body and its very real material oppression. They get to deny not only the pain of a daughter battling a lifetime of misogyny, but the mother’s own oppression as a woman, AND their own very real homophobia and gender brain-washing that led them to unconsciously psychologically abuse their toddler by telling him that he must be a girl because he loved pink.

Of course, this is no excuse. If your child is suffering mentally because they cannot physically bear a child or be a mermaid, you no more encourage their delusions of gender and cope with your pain at their pain by telling them they can be what they’re not, and especially not by offering up a sacrifice of the womb of your other child than you would hold their head underwater in the bath until their tail appears. Parenting is not always about making your child happy at any cost. It is certainly never about lying to your kids, or swapping truth for make-believe and placatory promises, because you, the adult, cannot control your emotions in the face of their distress. And creating family myths that become ‘truths’ is extremely irresponsible parenting: Jazz has been convinced that they knew they were female at 16 months old. This is developmentally impossible. A child of that age has no concept of gender or even sex, never mind if there’s some sort of perceived problem. Children of that age still think they and mummy are the same, for god’s sake. Oh, and Newsflash! Small boy with a sister wants to share and copy sister’s toys, clothes and activities – not exactly a Nobel-worthy breakthrough in understanding gender play, is it?

Transing children does not offer them a way to ‘truly be who they are’, as we are constantly told. It does the exact opposite of that. Everything opposite to that. Telling a boy he must be a girl because he likes pink is no different than telling him he can’t like pink because it’s for girls. The only difference is cowardly semantics, self-delusion, and a nicer intention. The message remains the same. What transing children does is offer parents the chance to see themselves as the good guys, the best parents, to deny their ignorance, narrow-mindlessness and bigotry, however unconscious they may be. The only true transformation is for the adults. In this crass new world, where fairytale is the new reality, transing kids is just the new way in which the witch can fatten Hans for the oven and get Gretl to open his mouth for her. Transing children is just the modern version of gay conversion therapy – and at least that doesn’t have a potential final outcome of extreme and irreversible genital mutilation surgery. When gay conversion therapy is the lesser of two evils, you really need to step back and think sensibly for a minute.

The really shocking aspect of that interview for me, and all women I know who’ve read it, is the casual discussion of using his sister as the incubator for any future children he may desire. Putting aside his scientific ignorance about conception, and my disgust that an adult female journalist would encourage, much less even tolerate this kind of talk from an interviewee, this is grotesque and proprietary male entitlement at its extreme. There is nothing female about the way he views his sister. This is a boy talking as though the future of his sister’s life and body has been decided in terms of what it can and will do for him and the family as a whole: give him children. He is saying that, even when I become a woman *like* you, I get to keep all my ownership and control over you. Is Jazz’s talking about ‘chucking my hubby’s sperm’ into his sister so a baby can come out of her ‘vag’, any less disgusting than a brother policing his sister’s body and rights in the name of ‘family hnour’? How come we demonise, say, Muslim males with that attitude towards their sisters, yet applaud and encourage Jazz treating his sister like she is no more than his personal breeder?!  A combination of mixing bowl and oven to bake him a baby, not even vaguely human.

Where are HER rights? Where is the celebration of HER actual femaleness? Where is the support for HER dreams? When does SHE get to be a person with agency over her own body, someone who actually matters?

I believe that all the children in that family are, on some level, being emotionally and mentally damaged. The fun and spangles of this obscene indulgence don’t stop this being merely a modern twist on the classic Golden Child/Scapegoat sibling dynamic, and just, if not more, as damaging. Jazz is not just blatantly the favourite child, but he gets to be his own sister better than she ever can. Yet he can never actually be that either. I sincerely hope, however, that I’m wrong, and that Jazz’s sister will receive the same support and acceptance for declining to be his surrogate in the future that Jazz gets for his issues (for, of course, he deserves nothing less, even if I don’t agree with the manner in which its expressed).

Moving beyond Jazz’s family now, what implications does this case, and others like it, have for the female sex as a whole? I didn’t choose ‘A Transmaid’s Tale’ purely because it’s catchy; I really do see a potential for a actual dystopia that mimics Atwood’s sublime classic, where, instead of class separating women into breeders, servants or Wives, false classifications of ‘woman’ will be used so that we will see Transwomen being posited and legally protected as ‘real’ women, with us true, biological females being only of use as breeders for their babies, and skivvies for their homes.

Will people have daughters just to produce children for their Trans-sisters, the way some couples have a child to be a donor for a sick or dying existing sibling? At least one can see a justifiable motive in the latter, whatever your opinion on it as a whole.

What else could we see in the future – girls pretending to be transgirls in order to feel allowed, or even be allowed to have the same freedom, admiration, approval and fun as kids like Jazz, without all that lame and oldskool sense of material oppression? Girls having phalloplasties to look like transgirls?! If the choice becomes breeder-servant-TERF or Transwoman, what would young women do to escape that first fate?! As it becomes clearer every day that equality for women actually just means ‘do as men do, do as men say, but pretend you’ve chosen it for yourself’, are these ideas really so far-fetched? The neoliberal solution to patriarchy seems to be ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. As it’s part of our female socialisation to yield and adapt and accept to whatever extremes men demand of us, this seems like a horribly possible next step.

And we know that porn has so warped the minds of our young people that, when shown pictures of normal, healthy breasts and vulvas, both teenage boys and girls will recoil and presume they are being shown photos of abnormal body parts, with the boys declaring that they’d never have sex with females with bodies like that. Transgirls can have the ‘perfect’ breasts and vulvas required for this porn-poisoned new generation: fake, always available to men, always arousing, and with none of the actual functions they exist for in women. We know that in the UK alone, in just the last few years, the numbers of girls and women under-25 going to their doctors to enquire about labiaplasty has skyrocketed, so unable are they to cope with having lovely, normal vulvas. The same generation of girls and young women who are rightly protesting the horrors of FGM are demanding minor mutilation of their own genitals in the name of empowerment. How far can this cognitive dissonance go?!

What makes all this even more dubious is that it’s an interview for Cosmopolitan, a famous, popular magazine for young women. They’re sending out the message that boys can even do being female better than they ever could. They’ll have all the fun and fame, the glitz and glamour, whilst you just get to be a boring, dull, invisible, servile breeder for them. Have we not heard the last part of that message before?! At least in the bad old good old days, we were told to be servile breeders because that’s all we we’re fit for, not because we are so useless as human beings that even men are better at being women than women are. At least when we were servile breeders in our own right, we got to keep our own children.

Isn’t it time to break the spell? We are in serious danger of transgenderist poison apples ruining, even mutilating, the lives, minds, and bodies of younger generations. This is child abuse, not just of the children being transed, but their siblings and peers, all being taught these hideous new ‘truths’, and it has to end. It is time to close this chapter before it gets even scarier.

The post Thoughts on Jazz Jennings: A Transmaid’s Tale appeared first on Gender Apostates.

I am not a person quick to anger. I do not generally believe rants are productive. I believe respectful, honest discourse is the only path to real understanding but I’m tired. I’m sick and tired of what I see within the trans community, the community of which I am supposedly a part. I’m tired of the misogyny and narcissistic rage I see directed at women, and other transwomen. It’s time for it to stop, so I’m going to try to talk to the misogynists among us. I want to have an honest conversation about what you’re doing, or what you think you’re doing, because misogyny is misogyny whether you “feel like a woman” or not.

Let us start with the obvious. I am not the first person to point this out. Women, and some men, have been chronicling the misogyny within the transgender community for years. The community has taken a “circle the wagons” approach to deflecting criticism. The community, especially its leaders at GLAAD and elsewhere, are desperate to show that we are simply people wanting to live our lives. We are not sexual predators, nor freaks to be ostracized. Guess what? I mostly agree with that. Most transwomen and transsexuals only want to live quiet, ordinary lives.

However, the community is also a haven for those possessed of narcissistic rage, sexual predators, and beta male misogynists. Wander through any online transgender community and you will see post after post, tweet after tweet directed at women and bizarrely enough at other transwomen, accusing them of all sorts of vile things up to and including the eradication of all transwomen. There are tweets demanding “TERFS” (a shifting acronym in the tradition of “witch” or “feminazi”) die, burn, suck a transwoman’s dick, and all other manner of threats. For an archive, which isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, click here. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ann Lawrence wrote a fantastic essay on “Shame and Narcissistic Rage in Transsexualism” , which explores the source of this rage as a manifestation of shame within a developed narcissistic personality disorder.

If there is a disagreement I have with Lawrence’s essay is that she relies too heavily on Bailey’s “The Man who would be Queen” which relies too heavily on Blanchard theories of transsexualism. I don’t believe there is a simple topography that delineates all transwomen based solely on sexual orientation. Orientation itself is more complex than the “born this way” dogma would suggest. It’s also tempting to dismiss both Blanchard and Bailey’s ideas as “gender essentialism” Too often their words conflate traditional feminine behavior and personality traits as female. It’s a similar error many transgenderists make by using a fondness for “girl things” to validate their identity. If we can look past Bailey’s theories, I think there is a clear portrayal of the transgender narcissist.

Lawrence states:

After gender transition, the situation often becomes no better and may become worse. Nonhomosexual MtF transsexuals who transition to live as women want to be regarded as women and treated as women. The male-typical aspects of their appearance and behavior, however, often make it difficult for them to be seen as other than transsexual women. Sometimes they may be seen simply as men pretending to be women. This makes it likely that they will experience frequent unempathetic reactions, including overt disrespect or derision, harassment, denial of basic civil rights, or violence, as Dreger observed. Because their feelings of being or wanting to be women are so central to their sense of self, they may experience the negative reactions of others as implying that they are inadequate in a deep and fundamental way, leading to further feelings of shame (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Autogynephilic transsexuals may also find it harder to fully identify with women after transition than before, because the differences they inevitably observe between themselves and natal women become harder to rationalize after transition. Before transition, these differences can be attributed to the necessity of temporarily maintaining a socially acceptable masculine persona; after transition, when this excuse evaporates, autogynephilic transsexuals may be forced to confront reality. Nonhomosexual MtF transsexuals often seem to expect that, with enough effort, they will be able to pass undetected as natal women after transition; but because their appearance and behavior are rarely naturally feminine, this expectation usually proves to be unrealistic. Tangney and Dearing (2002) observed that persons prone to narcissistic disorders ‘‘typically develop many unrealistic expectations for themselves…that, in effect, set the stage for shame. With each failure to achieve ambitions—ambitions that are often grandiose— the narcissistic individual is apt to feel shame’’

The most striking thing about the essay is how antiquated the concept of “transition” is. Transition, in the traditional sense, or at least my understanding of it, involves the physical and social transition out of one gender role into that of the other. It is a journey made at great monetary and personal cost, but involves abandoning masculinity as much as is possible. Womanhood is not a declaration. Transition is not a declaration. I’ve witnessed males, (and lest you think I’m making a value judgment we’re all males. There is no way around that.) With full beards, or scruff, put on eyeliner and a bra and shout down women. I’ve watched them aggressively claim their femininity, their womanhood.   They will even claim to be “Butch.” as a way to turn the essentialist essence of Blanchard and Benjamin on their ears. They will use feminist ideas about gender, so long as it benefits them, but forget them when they do not. If a woman dare challenge them, they are labeled a transphobe, bigot or TERF. They are the ones who are ridiculed for not “accepting” a person whose outward appearance fully indicates male as a woman. This has to stop.

(And yes I know hormones are expensive, and hair removal is expensive, and transition takes time and is awkward, but too many use those very real economic conditions as an excuse. Playing the victim is easier than honesty.)

We are not women. We are not female. We will get nowhere by badgering everyone into agreeing with us. We must be open and honest about our feelings, our history, and our true nature. Indulging in this delusion not only harms our relationship with women, but it harms us as the lack of data and understanding about our healthcare leads to both awkward and possibly dangerous encounters with medical professionals.

But let me talk to the ragers themselves. The world doesn’t owe you anything. Nobody is required to accept you, and if they do not, bullying them will not change their minds. I fail to understand how so many who believe they are women, who want to be women, can treat women so terribly. How they can spend their time online badgering, stalking, harassing, and bullying the very same people they claim to be. When you take a step back, and look at the behavior and demands of both the transgenderist and MRA communities, they look nearly identical. This should cause every self-identifying transwoman shame. They should look at their community, their peers, and their “sisters” and be horrified by what they see. Yet they do not. Attack dogs are praised or ignored. The truly harmful, the mentally unstable, are embraced and cloaked in an extra layer of victimhood.   Transwomen should call on fellow transwomen to stop harassing women. They should stop trying to make everything about us and realize whom the enemy is, and how we need to ally with women.

I know you may be hurt. I know you may have suffered. I know you feel you are a woman and maybe you are jealous of those you deridingly label cis. I understand. I truly do. Being trans is difficult. But you have to realize these women have done nothing to you. What you are feeling is your male socialization and entitlement. Being raised male, we are taught how to view women. It is very difficult to recognize these influences let alone eliminate them, but it can be done. It has to be. It is the most important part of transition. The rage you may feel toward women for questioning your identity or actions is your male socialization. Men are taught we are entitled to certain things, and frankly women are not. The next time you feel angry towards a woman, the next time you want to tell a woman to “die in a fire” or “suck your girldick” I want you to think about why you feel that way. I want you to think about how masculine that feeling is, and I want you to walk away. Just close the window and let it go. You’ll find that the first step towards transitioning away from masculinity is to stop acting “like a man.”

The post Transwomen and Narcissistic Rage appeared first on Gender Apostates.

There’s a lot of understandable confusion out there regarding what “gender crit” (gender critical) means, so here’s a concise chart to which you can refer as needed – also available as a one page PDF here.

PATRIARCHY: enforces gender stereotypes to keep women dependent on men,
thus ensuring men’s access to women’s bodies & labor

*No, a hysterectomy does not render a woman no longer a woman. We know humans are bipedal mammals and we don’t think amputees lose their humanity. Get a grip.

FEMINISM: gender recognized as harmful social construct and abolished

TRANSGENDER IDENTITY POLITICS: patriarchal gender stereotypes determine sex (basic reproductive biology erased)*

*I am not going into “non-binary” here. Feel free to go down that rabbit hole on Tumblr, along with otherkin etc.

**Some AFTAs claim they do not like “feminine” things, as well as not wishing to undergo physical transition, in which case one must ask why they so vociferously claim to be women – the answer is, of course, to access (and dominate) women’s spaces, language and politics. As ever, more evidence and analysis at thenewbacklash.blogspot.com.

The post Gender Crit Cheat Sheet appeared first on Gender Apostates.

Assigned Male is a propaganda cartoon that puts genderist nonsense into the mouth of a little “trans girl.” Because I take issue with this propaganda, I will be accused of “hating trans people.”

I do not hate transsexual people. I don’t hate any group of people suffering from a rare medical condition. There are several transsexual people – many writing here, in fact – who have become very dear to me. I think sex dysmorphia is an understandable though heartbreaking result of the gender straightjacket. Furthermore, I do not oppose medical transition for adults who suffer from sex dysmorphia – not that my opinion would sway the medical-pharmaceutical complex in any way.

But I do hate that non-dysmorphic males are using transsexual people as their human shields. I furthermore hate that so many so-called Leftists are more interested in using transsexual people as their disgust-tolerance merit badges than in doing any real power analysis of gender and male violence. And I especially hate that we are now seeing gender non-conforming children being referred to (*shiver*) gender clinics. Instead of letting go of the pervasive gender stereotypes that cause people to feel alien in their own bodies, we are now actively inducing sex dysmorphia in our kids, and calling that progressive.

Hey Leftists, you know how we don’t “support our troops” by sending them into wars that only kill innocents and line the pockets of war profiteers? Well, we don’t support transsexual people by spreading their suffering to the next generation and lining the pockets of medical/pharmaceutical profiteers.

With all that said, my take on Assigned Male Fail:

Their propaganda:

My response:

Their propaganda:

My response:

Their propaganda:

My response:

I am no artist, but my final word (graphic, rather) on the matter:

The post Assigned Fail appeared first on Gender Apostates.

I have written a very detailed blog about transgender identity politics, which is meant to be read from page 1 through page 16, located here: thenewbacklash.blogspot.com. Blog stats tell me not many people get to the end, so I am taking the liberty of posting page 15, which is about the male supremacy of the Left, here:

For AFTAs, the benefit of transgender identity politics is the ability to perform their fetish for women’s subjugation in public, while still exercising their male privilege by forcing women to comply. They use the category “woman” as a kind of S&M Barbie vacation.

However, AFTAs are a very small group of people. We’re much better served by looking at the benefits of transgender identity politics for the much larger group of people who, you know, run the Left: men.

Transgender identity politics A) work to make male privilege unnameable, while simultaneously B) framing the male violence that props up male supremacy as inevitable, which C) allows the men of the Left to get their blatant sexism on, all in the name of “trans inclusion” (which really just means the inclusion and prioritization of be-penised people in all female spaces!)

A. Making male privilege unnameable

The necessary flipside of making femaleness and female oppression unspeakable is the inability to name male people, and talk about male-specific privilege.

Misogynists on the Left use transwomen as human shields against feminists who insist sex-based socialization matters – and when that doesn’t work, they also like to point at the men of the conservative Right, as if that is women’s only other option – suck all the Left Wing cock or get back in the Right Wing kitchen.

Misogynists on the Left spend all this time pointing their fingers at other people, be they human shields or bogeymen, because they’re desperate to take any critical focus off men.

Screw that. We’re gonna talk about the social category “man.”

~~~

AFTAs and their allies love to accuse feminists of being “obsessed with genitals,” because we point out that people born with penises are male and male people have male privilege:

This is as ridiculous as accusing anti-racism activists of being obsessed with skin color.

Just where exactly do they think male privilege attaches?

Let’s conduct a brief thought exercise. We’ll use SPH and OPH (sperm-producing humans and ova-producing humans) instead of the now-objectionable terms “men” and “women”. You can attempt to derail via the tiny percentage of people born intersex, or with cries of sensitivity for the infertile—it does not matter, because this statement still stands:

SPH control the world. Not just the “global south.” Everywhere.

Politics, law, law enforcement, commerce, media, medicine, science, technology, even the arts … all dominated by SPH. Why?

Do world leaders use their penises to perform diplomacy? Maybe they use their penises as microphones when making important speeches? Do lawmakers sign bills with their penises? Do police actually use their penises as guns? Are businessmen joining important conference calls via the Bluetooth in their penises? Maybe bankers discuss pie charts using their combination penis/laser pointers. Do doctors perform surgery with their penis-scalpels? Are artists painting with their penis-brushes? Et penis cetera?

No? Yet all these fields are dominated by people-with-penises. I see three possible explanations:

1) The vast majority of people who identify themselves and are identified by others as talented in these fields just *happened* to be born with penises. This is all just a big, centuries-long coinkydink.

2) SPH are naturally superior to OPH in all these fields. (If this is your opinion, kindly fuck off out of feminism.)

3) SPH have been unfairly privileged and OPH have been oppressed (sane people call this sexism,) in which case we can all stop pretending genitalia doesn’t matter.

~~~

People born with penises are raised by their families and encouraged via media, merchandisers, schools, workplaces, governments and the general public to think of themselves as both [superior to] and [entitled to the servitude of] people born without penises (which is to say, with ovaries+uteruses+vaginas+clitorises, as there’s not actually an endless sucking void betwixt our legs.)

We’re disallowed from discussing this fact so nakedly because naked male genitalia is… hilariously stupid, as far as a symbol of superiority goes:

Yes, through millennia of rape men have made the phallus a symbol of sexual violence – but it is only via men’s lifetimes of sex-based social entitlement and women’s lifetimes of sex-based social subjugation that rape can stand as a (for all intents and purposes, accepted) cultural practice. The absurd banality that “penises don’t rape people” is meaningless precisely because people born with penises are for that reason alone raised to consider themselves entitled to female bodies. It is therefore no wonder they so often use those penises as weapons against those female bodies. And it is therefore unthinkable that women should ever act like the possession of a penis doesn’t really matter.

My favorite male-genitalia-related story: I was dating a fella, and when we would rassle, he would say “Darling, do you really think you could stop me?” The first time he said this, my blood ran cold. I warned him, “Don’t ever say that to me again.” The second time he said it, I responded, “Fair warning: you may have superior upper body strength, but your genitals are on the outside. Don’t make me prove I can stop you.” The third time he uttered that vile, threatening phrase, I brought my knee up and lightly tapped his balls. He fell to the ground and rolled around in pain. It was the most pleasure his crotch ever gave me.

I do NOT tell this story to shame any woman who was not able to utilize this technique to escape sexual assault, though some opportunistic victim-blamers may take it that way. I tell this story because it is important to note that this man, a self-identified Leftist who supposedly cared about me, felt such impunity in “playfully” threatening me, even after repeated warnings. It *never* occurred to him that I would *ever* harm his magical, sacred male parts.

Just as male supremacists, ever experts at reversals, would have us associate shame and weakness with the female organs that CREATE HUMAN LIFE, they would also have us associate male organs, frightfully vulnerable as they are, with unassailable power. And apparently these days, unnameable power. Do not say p—s. P—s is whatever p—s says. Do not look behind the curtain/zipper. DO NOT SAY VOLDEMORT’S NAME.

I will bet you one million dollars these people have penises:

It should not be a shock that we end up here:

Or here:

You can pomobate (that’s short for postmodern intellectual masturbation, obvs) about the words “woman” and “man” all you want; whenever [a person born into a body with a reproductive system meant to produce sperm] tells [a person born into a body with a reproductive system meant to produce ova] that [being born into a body with a reproductive system meant to produce sperm] entitles him to dominate her – whether via economic control, or threats of violence, or the emptying of her language, including her right to say “no,” (just for examples) – he is being an obnoxiously entitled sexist pig. And he is obnoxiously entitled because he was socialized to be that way, because of the genitalia with which he was born.

And that is as inescapably true as it is inescapably absurd.

The human penis is:

1) The MALE organ of sex and peeing.

2) Out of context, rather unimpressive (sorry not sorry).

3) In context:

1. A) A lifelong lightning rod of unearned (and most often, unexamined) privilege, and
2. B) A universal marker of membership in a violently oppressive class.

The good news, women, is that every time you stubbornly insist on seeing, naming and analyzing male privilege, you are metaphorically punching patriarchy right in the dick.

B. Framing male violence as inevitable

If gender is just “how you feel inside,” and if that feeling is totally self-defined and above critique, then what can we do about men who “feel” entitled to maintain dominance through violence? After all, if gender identity is innate, so is masculinity– which is simply the “gender identity” ascribed to “cis” men. And when masculinity is viewed as innate rather than socially constructed and validated, male violence is viewed as inevitable and is therefore always-already excused. And if male violence is always-already excused, we will never dismantle male supremacy.

We expect gender-conforming males to attack gender-non-conforming males because we all know how much men hate and fear the idea that the human qualities/tendencies we label “feminine” – whether gentleness or self-objectification or what have you – do actually exist/occur in male bodies. So transwomen say, “But we’re not men. We’re just women trapped in men’s bodies,” and everyone goes along with it. Femininity = not a man. Woman = garbage box for not-men. As long as “real” men’s superior position in the patriarchy remains their biological right as “real” men, nobody has to die.

Except: they’re still killing. Men are still killing transwomen. Men are still killing women. Men are still killing children. Men are still killing each other. Because the gender hierarchy is still in place, and it doesn’t just keep women subordinate. The gender hierarchy strips men of their empathy, and tells them the way to prove their worth is through dominance. We’d all be much better served if, instead of this constant, absurd deconstruction of “What is a woman?” we started asking “What the hell is wrong with men, and how can we change it?”

Let’s take the question of shelters. “Transwomen need access to rape resources” cries one “activist,” hell bent on shutting down a female-only shelter. What goes unsaid in that statement is that 1) transwomen are male victims of male violence; 2) the resource in question was built and is sustained by female people; and 3) the female victims in that shelter matter, and have the right to female-only space. The sentiment can be restated more accurately and honestly as “female people must put male victims of male violence first.” Refusing to name male violence and assuming female care-taking and self-subordination is not “transing” gender roles – it’s enforcing them. Why can’t Leftist MEN take on the problem of male-on-male violence?

Another common battle cry is that transwomen must be allowed to use women’s bathrooms and changing rooms because they face violence in male spaces. Again, we must never name the basic problem there — that men may behave violently when faced with another male who defies gender norms. We simply assume that women will be the ones to solve the problem, by giving up our boundaries. There’s an obvious flaw in this logic, of course: what are transwomen afraid of in the men’s room? Violent males. Hmm.

In the above picture, a woman and her transwoman friend are headed to the ladies room. An unknown male (the red figure) looms. What is to stop that male from entering the ladies room? According to transgender identity politickers (and their bathroom bills) all he has to do is say he “feels like a woman” – if asked – though asking itself is verboten:

As long as any male person can legally access female spaces based solely on his say-so, neither women nor (actual) transwomen are safe in those spaces. Yet the entirely reasonable compromise of allowing access with documentation of medical treatment for transsexuality is rejected as transphobic [see page 4 for links]. This is very obviously not about safety, for women or transwomen – this is about appeasing men, both those men who get a kick out of exposing their genitalia to women and girls [see page 10 for links] AND those men who refuse to grow up enough to accept the presence of a “feminine” male person in their spaces. Any true “gender outlaw” would be aiming their pistols at those men, rather thandemanding women ignore the gift of fear that comes from our lifetimes of experience with male predation.

C. The same old sexism, in a shiny new rainbow-sparkle package

Just as no man must enact male violence against women on an individual level in order to benefit from the male privilege that such violence enforces for men as a class, individual men on the Left do not have to engage transgender identity politics in any meaningful way in order to reap the benefits provided by widespread social acceptance of those politics, which enable Leftist men to:

*Label other male people Not Real Men, thus making themselves feel like Yes Real Men in comparison.

*Excuse themselves from feeling any guilt about their male privilege. After all, as long as they don’t want to call themselves women, they were simply born with manbrains and thus destined to be the Manly Men in Charge!

*Enjoy watching women being forced to confess to “cis privilege” – one can only assume this is because they agree with MRAs that we have it easy, that we are spoiled princesses with no real complaints.

*Reap the rewards of transwomen insinuating themselves in women’s spaces to make sure male feelings and orgasms are centered within feminism. And when they support AFTA efforts to fully colonize feminism, they get to feel right-on!

*Use [the violence inflicted by homophobic males on gender non-conforming males] to shame women for not being “empathetic” enough. Blaming women for male-on-male violence means they get to 1) put us back in our place of mandatory care-taking and self-abnegation and 2) excuse themselves from confronting that violence, even though they are members of the class that both inflicts and experiences it.

*Perhaps most importantly, sit back and let the Paris “I would rather have a ‘sticky fuck’ than analyze oppression” Lees of the world show women how “woman” should be done – See woman number four, below.

*And finally, transgender identity politics enable Leftist men to casually dismiss as “TERFs” any feminists who might make them question any of the above.

The post How transgender identity politics serve Leftist men appeared first on Gender Apostates.

This piece presents thoughts on “Jazz Jennings: The Transgender Teen and Wannabe Mermaid the Internet Needs”

Jazz; an art form which appears to transcend usual musical convention. Affected and nonsensical, it is studiously performed in order to appear natural, free form and released from the mundane. Its fans are almost fanatical in their devotion to it as musical ‘truth’.

Listen carefully, dear ones, for I have a cautionary tale to tell. It is the story of two daughters, one born, one made.

Born, one daughter to be the dutiful, dowdy, dull-feathered common bird, full of the usual eggs, who, with her flawed, ordinary female body, will suffer the familiar dangers, disappointments and hatred, and be expected to serve her family, not just in the everyday ways of always being the one to contact, to come over, to care, and to clean, not just in the usual expectations of continuing the family with her own offspring, but to also be the mere vessel, the incubator, for however many children her more-important sibling may desire for their perfect, pink, dazzling Disney fantasy. 101 Dalmations for Cruella, coming right up.

Made, one daughter-once- son forced Phoenix-like to transcend the limits of his parents’ misguided care to mimic  a bird of paradise, all dazzling plumage, encouraged squawks, and apparent glee at the gilded cage they have been told is freedom. All cuckoo and magpie, this glittering creature has its lesser sister to tend to its young, whilst it gets on with the more important job of delighting us with its beauty and sweet gibberish.

Two daughters, to be both aspects of Cinderella at once; the rags and scraps slave of the hearth, and the enchanting, magical, captivating party princess. This Cinders will serve herself. It won’t just be the Ugly Sisters getting bits cut off themselves to win the heart of Prince Patriarchy.

Whilst the first sister stays forever landlocked, the second can swim. This Ariel, this sparkly fun mermaid, can live in water and on land. All the entitlement of breathing rarefied air, all the glamour of appearing to live in unexplored depths. Remove her tail and she only gets more perfect: what men truly want. Her breasts will never sag, stretch, pucker or leak, or be wasted on keeping a baby alive, or be lopsided or deemed the sum of her worth (the bright new jewel of privilege). Her factory-fresh vulva will be crafted to be porn perfect; trim, pink, childlike and hair free. No natural asymmetry, wild bush, secreting or bleeding for her. No birth to wreck it. She will be taller and leaner than mere mortal females, her belly untouched by growing life, never contorted with cramps, never anything but a smooth doll blank, inside and out. Her wardrobe will be sublime; as practical and mundane as the shell bras all true mermaids wear, all the time. Under the sea, you and me, where the waves distort the sound of truth being told…

… I need to wake up. To stop writing like this. This is a nightmare, but it is no fantasy land, it is all too true. We will have to save ourselves, and the children, because the prince has chopped off Rapunzel’s hair for himself.

I will put this bluntly: I believe that transing children is a form of child abuse. Furthermore, I feel that there is a sexual element to that in this case. What the hell are adults doing making such a big deal of sexual issues with a child?! Hypersexualisation is one of the most clear-cut signs of abuse in a child, yet here we have a child talking about being pansexual, about his sister’s vagina, like he’s reciting his times table, and everyone seems to be applauding instead of being alarmed.

I see the hidden message: here is a child we can sexualise and legitimise feeling sexual about, because they are apparently opting into adult notions of female sexuality. You can’t be a creep who fancies teenage girls when that girl is really a boy, oh no. Your arousal is just approval of *her* empowerment and choice. Right. Right. The fact that it will also encourages real girls to think of themselves as objects for sexual consumption doesn’t interest you, oh, of course not.

These cases, of transed children fool the public, like an evil stepmother’s (played by ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner)  mirror telling us all that this way is the fairest of them all. But the truth is ugly, and downright wicked. Now, I do believe that virtually all of these cases are driven by either a well-meaning ignorance or unexplained psychological need of one or both parents, and that they genuinely believe they are going what’s best for their child. It’s pretty clear to me that having a child who’s a transgirl psychologically relieves the parents because they can indulge in a fantasy of believing that one ‘daughter’ is living a life free of the usual oppressions, dangers, etc., that actual females face. Instead of the hard work of supporting their real daughter, she must be sacrificed for her parents enjoyment and self-indulgent delusion of relief, of freeing at least one girl. What’s more, a mother can live out her fantasies of what being a girl is without the intrusions of the reality of her own limited body and its very real material oppression. They get to deny not only the pain of a daughter battling a lifetime of misogyny, but the mother’s own oppression as a woman, AND their own very real homophobia and gender brain-washing that led them to unconsciously psychologically abuse their toddler by telling him that he must be a girl because he loved pink.

Of course, this is no excuse. If your child is suffering mentally because they cannot physically bear a child or be a mermaid, you no more encourage their delusions of gender and cope with your pain at their pain by telling them they can be what they’re not, and especially not by offering up a sacrifice of the womb of your other child than you would hold their head underwater in the bath until their tail appears. Parenting is not always about making your child happy at any cost. It is certainly never about lying to your kids, or swapping truth for make-believe and placatory promises, because you, the adult, cannot control your emotions in the face of their distress. And creating family myths that become ‘truths’ is extremely irresponsible parenting: Jazz has been convinced that they knew they were female at 16 months old. This is developmentally impossible. A child of that age has no concept of gender or even sex, never mind if there’s some sort of perceived problem. Children of that age still think they and mummy are the same, for god’s sake. Oh, and Newsflash! Small boy with a sister wants to share and copy sister’s toys, clothes and activities – not exactly a Nobel-worthy breakthrough in understanding gender play, is it?

Transing children does not offer them a way to ‘truly be who they are’, as we are constantly told. It does the exact opposite of that. Everything opposite to that. Telling a boy he must be a girl because he likes pink is no different than telling him he can’t like pink because it’s for girls. The only difference is cowardly semantics, self-delusion, and a nicer intention. The message remains the same. What transing children does is offer parents the chance to see themselves as the good guys, the best parents, to deny their ignorance, narrow-mindlessness and bigotry, however unconscious they may be. The only true transformation is for the adults. In this crass new world, where fairytale is the new reality, transing kids is just the new way in which the witch can fatten Hans for the oven and get Gretl to open his mouth for her. Transing children is just the modern version of gay conversion therapy – and at least that doesn’t have a potential final outcome of extreme and irreversible genital mutilation surgery. When gay conversion therapy is the lesser of two evils, you really need to step back and think sensibly for a minute.

The really shocking aspect of that interview for me, and all women I know who’ve read it, is the casual discussion of using his sister as the incubator for any future children he may desire. Putting aside his scientific ignorance about conception, and my disgust that an adult female journalist would encourage, much less even tolerate this kind of talk from an interviewee, this is grotesque and proprietary male entitlement at its extreme. There is nothing female about the way he views his sister. This is a boy talking as though the future of his sister’s life and body has been decided in terms of what it can and will do for him and the family as a whole: give him children. He is saying that, even when I become a woman *like* you, I get to keep all my ownership and control over you. Is Jazz’s talking about ‘chucking my hubby’s sperm’ into his sister so a baby can come out of her ‘vag’, any less disgusting than a brother policing his sister’s body and rights in the name of ‘family hnour’? How come we demonise, say, Muslim males with that attitude towards their sisters, yet applaud and encourage Jazz treating his sister like she is no more than his personal breeder?!  A combination of mixing bowl and oven to bake him a baby, not even vaguely human.

Where are HER rights? Where is the celebration of HER actual femaleness? Where is the support for HER dreams? When does SHE get to be a person with agency over her own body, someone who actually matters?

I believe that all the children in that family are, on some level, being emotionally and mentally damaged. The fun and spangles of this obscene indulgence don’t stop this being merely a modern twist on the classic Golden Child/Scapegoat sibling dynamic, and just, if not more, as damaging. Jazz is not just blatantly the favourite child, but he gets to be his own sister better than she ever can. Yet he can never actually be that either. I sincerely hope, however, that I’m wrong, and that Jazz’s sister will receive the same support and acceptance for declining to be his surrogate in the future that Jazz gets for his issues (for, of course, he deserves nothing less, even if I don’t agree with the manner in which its expressed).

Moving beyond Jazz’s family now, what implications does this case, and others like it, have for the female sex as a whole? I didn’t choose ‘A Transmaid’s Tale’ purely because it’s catchy; I really do see a potential for a actual dystopia that mimics Atwood’s sublime classic, where, instead of class separating women into breeders, servants or Wives, false classifications of ‘woman’ will be used so that we will see Transwomen being posited and legally protected as ‘real’ women, with us true, biological females being only of use as breeders for their babies, and skivvies for their homes.

Will people have daughters just to produce children for their Trans-sisters, the way some couples have a child to be a donor for a sick or dying existing sibling? At least one can see a justifiable motive in the latter, whatever your opinion on it as a whole.

What else could we see in the future – girls pretending to be transgirls in order to feel allowed, or even be allowed to have the same freedom, admiration, approval and fun as kids like Jazz, without all that lame and oldskool sense of material oppression? Girls having phalloplasties to look like transgirls?! If the choice becomes breeder-servant-TERF or Transwoman, what would young women do to escape that first fate?! As it becomes clearer every day that equality for women actually just means ‘do as men do, do as men say, but pretend you’ve chosen it for yourself’, are these ideas really so far-fetched? The neoliberal solution to patriarchy seems to be ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. As it’s part of our female socialisation to yield and adapt and accept to whatever extremes men demand of us, this seems like a horribly possible next step.

And we know that porn has so warped the minds of our young people that, when shown pictures of normal, healthy breasts and vulvas, both teenage boys and girls will recoil and presume they are being shown photos of abnormal body parts, with the boys declaring that they’d never have sex with females with bodies like that. Transgirls can have the ‘perfect’ breasts and vulvas required for this porn-poisoned new generation: fake, always available to men, always arousing, and with none of the actual functions they exist for in women. We know that in the UK alone, in just the last few years, the numbers of girls and women under-25 going to their doctors to enquire about labiaplasty has skyrocketed, so unable are they to cope with having lovely, normal vulvas. The same generation of girls and young women who are rightly protesting the horrors of FGM are demanding minor mutilation of their own genitals in the name of empowerment. How far can this cognitive dissonance go?!

What makes all this even more dubious is that it’s an interview for Cosmopolitan, a famous, popular magazine for young women. They’re sending out the message that boys can even do being female better than they ever could. They’ll have all the fun and fame, the glitz and glamour, whilst you just get to be a boring, dull, invisible, servile breeder for them. Have we not heard the last part of that message before?! At least in the bad old good old days, we were told to be servile breeders because that’s all we we’re fit for, not because we are so useless as human beings that even men are better at being women than women are. At least when we were servile breeders in our own right, we got to keep our own children.

Isn’t it time to break the spell? We are in serious danger of transgenderist poison apples ruining, even mutilating, the lives, minds, and bodies of younger generations. This is child abuse, not just of the children being transed, but their siblings and peers, all being taught these hideous new ‘truths’, and it has to end. It is time to close this chapter before it gets even scarier.

The post Thoughts on Jazz Jennings: A Transmaid’s Tale appeared first on Gender Apostates.