#not every intersex person is trans and calling the two identities the same thing is just not correct

[nexus-nebulae]

oh my god hearing someone say "character a is intersex" and then immediately after say "character b is a trans ally for being the doctor to tell character a they are intersex" when like. character a was not implied to be transitioning after finding this information out. like. what. that's not the same thing

[genderqueerdykes]

i get a lot of "don't talk about bigender trans women who are also men because being a man means you can't be a woman and being a man cancels out womanhood and being a man means that they would be dysphoric and not feel like a girl so it would make the trans girls feel bad so never call them a man ever"

we're still collectively stuck on "man cancels out woman" that people literally plug their ears and call you transphobic when you talk about trans women who specifically also identify as men in their own words. people will piss and cry and say its transphobic to refer to this person as a man, ever, because they're a woman and being a man means they'll be dysphoric because it's cancelling out their womanhood. like this is the level of mental gymnastics we're performing at this stage

not all trans women are men. not every trans woman is also a man. most trans women do not want to be referred to or thought of as men. and that's important. but some trans women are also men and if you refuse to accept their male identity you are misgendering them. however you're not easing their dysphoria. you're not doing them any favors by aggressively acknowledging their womanhood and ignoring and even denying their manhood. you're not doing anyone any favors by saying that it will make other trans women dysphoric of a different trans woman also identifies as a man

people are doing a great job of speaking for transfemmes by telling us this is transphobic and dysphoric, instead of letting us speak to say that there are in fact bigender, multigender, genderfluid, non binary, genderqueer, intersex and two spirit trans women who do, in fact, identify as men and it's not a begrudging or painful thing, but another beautiful part of our identities that does not and will not ever cancel out our womanhood. sorry that bothers you, but its your own internal transphobia you must work past, because you are the one who is uncomfortable- not the trans woman who is also a man. they're only uncomfortable when you refuse to acknowledge both or all of their genders.

like can we all finally get on the same fucking page that forcefully only acknowledging a trans woman's identity if she's only a feminine woman and she only uses she/her pronouns isn't helping anyone. can we finally start acknowledging that denying the existence of bigender, multigender, genderfluid, non binary, genderqueer, two spirit and gender vast trans women isn't helping anyone and and that being non binary applies to all AGABs and genders

can we stop fucking telling trans women what to do and how to have a gender "correctly". let's all fucking do better.

[rjalker]

Cannot believe I had to read with my own two eyes, somebody calmly pointing out the fact that some people, indeed, do not experience racism and are not oppressed by racism, and then somebody else responding, completely unironically, by repeatedly telling this person that they're stupid and chronically online and need to go outside and touch grass because it is apparently just such an absurd concept that... Some people don't experience racism and this is just a fact of how racism and white supremacy work.

you people would be a lot less racist if you would stop insisting upon co-opting the struggles and language of black and brown people to copy and paste queer politics onto, and then deciding to make insisting that these are the exact same thing the hill you have chosen to die on when you are literally choosing to die on the hill that it's violently exclusionary to say that some people don't experience racism and you are claiming that this is the exact same thing the exact same thing as saying that trans people are not oppressed.

You are literally making up people to get mad at you are literally deciding that the basic fact that some people do not experience racism and you are trying to pretend that this is saying that mixed race people don't experience racism because you have decided for some fucking reason that the experiences of mixed race people and non-binary and intersex people are exactly the same thing and that actually racism is just a metaphor for hatred against trans people so acknowledging the fact that some people don't experience racism is what you have now decided to translate to saying that non-binary and intersex people don't experience oppression.

Because you are racist, and think that queer politics aren't good enough to stand on their own that now you have to co-opt the struggles of black and brown people to make them seem more dramatic, like the kind of people who refuse to just call it emotional abuse and instead insist upon calling it narcissistic abuse because they think that emotional abuse doesn't sound cool or dramatic enough

It is 2024. Something has gone deeply wrong with you if you think the factual statement "some people don't experience racism" has anything to fucking do with whether or not people who do not conform to the gender binary are oppressed.

Queer politics and racial politics are not the same thing.

Racism is not a secret metaphor for hatred against queer people for you to decode and declare that somebody saying some people don't experience racism means that what they're actually saying is that people who break the cissexist gender binary aren't oppressed.

You are simply fucking racist and have decided to die for no fucking reason on this hill. This is your sign to fucking cut that shit out right fucking now because holy fuck.

If you are reaction to transrad fems is going to be to declare that every single person on this fucking planet is oppressed by every single fucking system of oppression at all times, then you are just going to become worse than fucking useless, it's just a matter of time before you start saying All Lives Matter If you are choosing to take the basic fact that some people are not oppressed by racism as a personal and violent attack against queer identities that are not even remotely involved.

[sstrangedoctorr]

my piece on being non-binary:

i’ve learned throughout the years that gender really is a mental concept. sex, is scientific, it’s pretty easily understandable. however gender is so broad and complex, it’s pretty much weaved into every little nook and cranny of your brain.

you’ll get the question, “what is a women,” or “what is a man,” and to that my answer is: an experience.

it’s a known fact that gender and sex are two completely separate things. both impact your body in different ways, a simple way to say is that sex is physical and gender is mental.

but what i’ve found, is that me being non-binary, is me being devoid of gender. not in that i’m intersex, or that i refuse to label myself, but in the way where i don’t feel anything connected to gender. i’m not sure what gender is supposed to feel like, but i can be certain that whatever experience it is, i am missing the pieces to form it.

to me, it’s like the numbness of the emotions. a cis man can say ‘i am a man’, and not think twice, because his brain his hardwired to feel like that. in every sense, masculinity is deep-rooted into him. and the same goes for trans-men, women, and trans-women. they simply are, because that is how they are hardwired.

my experience is more of feeling like someone skipped out on that step. gender is a forign concept to me. just like how i’m asexual, it’s all fact, and no experience. when i think of being called he, or she, neither feel right. because i don’t feel feminine, or masculine, i simply am just human. albiet it may have ties to my depersonalization, i feel completely detached from it.

someone could call me she, sure. you can call me he. i do not care. but it won’t fully describe and embrace who i am as a person. if someone chooses not to respect that, it’s on them. my feelings won’t ever be hurt by that. i’ll know that my identity isn’t worth the extra effort to acknowledge my lack of feeling towards gender.

all in all. i’m nonbinary because i don’t feel gender at all. this isn’t the case for everyone, but it’s my case.

[transmaverique]

you're assuming a lot about binary trans people, and if anything it makes me think that our understandings of our genders aren't actually that different? Not every binary trans person wants to pass as a cis person. I don't want to pass as a cis woman, I want people to understand me for what I am, a collection of internal beliefs and thoughts that I've constructed an identity with. It sounds like we both have created identities for ourselves! If you think that non binary people are the only people capable of creating their own identities and striving to be seen as them, that's on you

im gonna try one more time. i cant really tell if youre being sarcastic or not so im gonna assume youre being genuine when you say you think we have similar understandings of gender. but to me it sounds like you are deliberately ignoring the Actual Words i am saying.

we need words to describe our experiences, both different and common ones. those words may be in themselves faulty or somewhat inaccurate, but they are what we have to discuss important concepts, and they function well enough if they have a generally agreed-upon meaning. right?

so. the dominant culture of the imperial core is one of strictly binary sex. anything that breaks this, is deviant of the "rules of nature", to this dominant culture. right?

so then we call people who are NOT of this binary system multiple different things depending on cultural context and personal identity and personal circumstance. right?

'nonbinary' is only one of those words. to each individual it may mean any one of hundreds upon thousands of different things. everyone has their own personal identity, and while we may use the same word to describe said identity, no two people will have the same definition.

this is true of 'manhood' and 'womanhood' as well. every individual, cis trans both neither intersex perisex and so on and so forth, every single one of them has different PERSONAL interpretations of these words and the concepts they are meant to describe.

but 'woman' has to mean something in order to function as a real concept. it has to have some semblance of shared meaning, shared experience, shared conceptual feeling and vibe, for it to work within the imperial core as a means of systemic control and oppression, for it to work as a communicable identity, and for it to function as a word in a language.

in the same vein of thought, 'binary' is a word we are using to describe someone whose gender, in some way, shape, or form, fits into the schema of 'man and woman'. your internal definition of your own gender does not actually matter very much to other people who do not know it exists.

for me, it matters that i am percieved as a binary gender no matter what i do. it matters, and hurts, a lot. and for some people, it matters and hurts less. for some people, it matters and hurts not at all.

whether you consider yourself binary or not is entirely up to you and how you interpret your own navigation of the world. its very strange to act as if im saying anything otherwise. YOU defined YOURSELF as binary in your responding to me. you said you were also agender, so, like i said in my prev tags, i dont think youre the target audience. but the way youre reacting, it seems you think you are. i am also going to reiterate that 'binary' is not a bad thing to be - binary trans people and for that matter, binary cis people, are not my enemies. but i deserve to have the language to talk about my experiences as they compare to binary people. that's all it is.

[icaruskey]

I'm sorry I'm even asking, but what on Earth does "transandrophobia truther" even mean. Really poking the beehive with that one, but I've been drowning in the "radfem kool-aid" to borrow your very succinct phrasing, so I might as well, fuck it. - Yours sincerely: a very tired and confused trans man who hasn't been on Tumblr for a while. I'd send this off anon, don't give too much of a shit, but Karen has a reach greater than God it seems.

Basically, "transandrophobia truther" was coined by a person who decided a bunch of trans men loosely associated with a dude called Saint (who initially coined the term transandrophobia) were all bad, white, meanie TMEs who hate trans women despite several of the names belonging to POC trans people and many of the blogs explicitly supporting trans women as well as men and nonbinary identities. All because we want to talk about the issues trans masc people face and call a spade a spade when they're being a fucking idiot.

Let's break this down further...

Saint is considered an Awful Person because someone leaked screenshots from his password protected smut blog. He had been engaging in some squicky kinks that the person who leaked the screenshots decided meant he hated trans women and lesbians (despite all interactions being consensual mind you). They also label him a racist because he had been talking about omegaverse shit with the shorthand "abo", which apparently is also a slur against aboriginal tribes. Because you know, acronyms and shorthand can only mean one thing.

Anyway, this has kicked off a harassment campaign that's apparently lasted for months, and this blog eventually curated a "block list" with pretty much anyone who might've interacted with Saint or other people that's been victim to the harassment perpetuated and continued by two people.

This block list was apparently only supposed to be used by this person's followers, but it alerted every single person on the list through the @ system and of course was spread around. They also have been accepting additional names from anons and the like without apparently doing much background checking so. Yanno. Sure.

The term transandrophobia was created as an alternative to transmisandry in an effort to allow trans men to discuss the unique challenges that trans men face as trans men. Sort of the opposite side of the same coin from transmisogyny if you will (the coin is transphobia, but the metaphor breaks down when you remember intersex and nonbinary people are included in the umbrella as well. lol rip poetic language).

People protested transmisandry because it connected with misandry, which people (who argue against trans men having language to talk and make block lists because one person decided to force their followers to look at squicky kinks) don't believe exists (my feelings on misandry are far more complicated than what can be got into here without a massive derail). Transandrophobia is a step away from misandry, but since it was coined by Saint, people are using that as an excuse to shoot it down.

It's an excuse because elsewhere you find hints of their true intent: not allowing trans men and masc people the language to speak about their issues at all. First, there's the absolute asinine complaint that it's "basically the same thing as transmisogyny," like... okay, yes. They complain it's ripping off transmisogyny like transmisogyny isn't a ripoff of misogyny so. Whatever on that. Then you have people saying we should just use the word transphobia instead, completely ignoring the fact we're wanting to talk about issues that specifically face trans men and people who identify as trans masc. Shit like that.

Then you have the people who believe that trans women are the most oppressed and thus men should never have a say. This is rooted in radfem rhetoric, as with the advent of second wave feminism, one of the main schools of thought was that a radical (lol) shift away from men... wait let's not go so far back for now. That's another massive derail.

Anyway, there's a strong undercurrent of man hating that's been lurking around in feminism since second wave feminism. It's been evident through ideologies like lesbian separatism (see, gold star lesbians and how lesbians often treat bi women) and the "wombyn" movement that I in particular noticed in 2013 on tumblr -- I still believe TERF ideology against trans women is rooted in this explicit anti-man movement, but it was just under people's radar until trans women came more in the spotlight.

This man hating is even within trans circles, as you will often see trans women and femme people declaring T being a poison, hating their manhood and men in general, etc. It's understandable given their transition that they'd feel this way, but it's done in front of and oftentimes to trans men and masc aligned folks as well (re: the one poor trans boy who was talking to a girl and got told T was a poison in a gen chat. The girl apologized but claimed she was right. So this was both in a gen space but directly to a trans boy).

I also have a pet theory about how men are expected to be quiet in feminist spaces, and a lot of trans men and masc folks have grown up understanding the social struggle of women so it's easier for us to sit down and shut up, etc, etc but I won't get into that here cause that's it for explaining how radfem is everywhere let's move onto

TME/TMA mean Transmisogyny Exempt and Transmisogyny Affected. I won't get into the linguistics or where these terms originate, though I think it's from baeddel discourse --

baeddels being a group of trans women who mistakenly believe baeddel is a slur against trans women (and conveniently push out femme men and intersex people from the discussion) and started to "reclaim" the term, becoming extremely cultlike, narrowminded, and man-hating themselves, ending when the core group defended a rapist who had assaulted another member of the core group though there are people who identify with baeddels today

-- while TME/TMA might have its merits in a very limited context, it's become a way to say "trans women (TMA)" and "everyone else (TME)". This is incredibly stupid as it just creates another binary where trans women are the Most Oppressed but it locks the terms down so that they can't even be used properly (a cis woman getting beat up for using the woman's bathroom is, in that moment TMA. But she's not always TMA so...).

Soooo... because Saint is labelled a "bad man," transandrophobia becomes a really convenient scapegoat to try and push trans men from another word they can use to describe their unique situation in life.

But really, they don't want men to have language to speak about the things that hurt them.

Because in their minds men always have privilege... because they think every man is white, able-bodied, neurotypical, financially well-off and/or stable, passes perfectly, and never ends up in a situation where they must either out themselves and/or be forced off their HRT for some reason.

They think the pushback they are receiving is coming from above them (because we're men, so we're automatically above women), but it's not. It's a lateral push because at the end of the day... the world sees us as they do trans women. They don't see woman or man or person. They see trans.

And it's upsetting honestly that they don't understand that.

[flightlessnightingale]

On Lesbianism

I’ll state it at the top here, because many have not understood my stance. The purpose of this essay is not to say that Lesbian cannot mean “Female homosexual.” Rather, my objective is to show that Lesbian means more than that single definition suggests. Female Homosexuals are lesbians, unless they personally do not want to use that label. Now, on with the show: Lesbianism is not about gatekeeping, and I don’t want to have to keep convincing people that the movement popularized by someone who wrote a book full of lies and hate speech then immediately worked with Ronald Reagan is a bad movement. In the early ’70s, groups of what would now be called “gender critical” feminists threatened violence against many trans women who dared exist in women’s and lesbian spaces. For example, trans woman Beth Elliott, who was at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference to perform with her lesbian band, was ridiculed onstage and had her existence protested. In 1979, radical feminist Janice Raymond, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, wrote the defining work of the TERF movement, “Transsexual Empire: The Making of the Shemale,” in which she argued that “transsexualism” should be “morally mandating it out of existence”—mainly by restricting access to transition care (a political position shared by the Trump administration). Soon after she wrote another paper, published for the government-funded, National Center for Healthcare Technology — and the Reagan administration cut off Medicare and private health insurance coverage for transition-related care.

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism is a fundamentally unsustainable ideology. Lesbianism is a fundamentally sustainable existence.

There used to be a lesbian bar or queer bar or gay bar in practically every small town — sometimes one of each. After surviving constant police raids, these queer spaces began closing even Before the AIDS epidemic. Because TERFs would take them over, kick out transfems and their friends. Suddenly, there weren’t enough local patrons to keep the bars open, because the majority had been kicked out. With America’s lack of public transportation, not enough people were coming from out of town either.

TERFs, even beyond that, were a fundamental part of the state apparatus that let AIDS kill millions.

For those who don’t know, Lesbian, from the time of Sappho of Lesbos to the about 1970′s, referred to someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. It was not only a sexuality, but almost akin to a gender spectrum.

That changed in the 1970′s when TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, working with Ronald fucking Reagan to ban insurance for trans healthcare.

TERFs took over the narrative, the bars, the movement, and changed Lesbian from the most revolutionary and integral queer communal identity of 2 fucking THOUSAND years, from “Someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy” to “A woman with a vagina who’s sexually attracted to other women with vaginas”

How does this fit into the bi lesbian debate? As I said, Lesbian is more of a Gender Spectrum than anything else, it was used much in the same way that we use queer or genderqueer today.

And it’s intersectional too.

See, if you were to try to ascribe a rigid, biological, or localized model of an identity across multiple cultures, it will fail. It will exclude people who should not be excluded. ESPECIALLY Intersex people. That’s why “Two Spirit” isn’t something rigid- it is an umbrella term for the identities within over a dozen different cultures. In the next two sections, I have excerpts on Two-Spirit and Butch identity, to give a better idea of the linguistics of queer culture: This section on Two-Spirit comes from wikipedia, as it has the most links to further sources, I have linked all sources directly, though you can also access them from the Wikipedia page’s bibliography: Two-Spirit is a pan-Indian, umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional ceremonial and social role that does not correlate to the western binary. [1] [2] [3] Created at the 1990 Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg, it was "specifically chosen to distinguish and distance Native American/First Nations people from non-Native peoples." [4] Criticism of Two-Spirit arises from 2 major points, 1. That it can exasperate the erasure of the traditional terms and identities of specific cultures.           a. Notice how this parallels criticisms of Gay being used as the umbrella           term for queer culture in general. 2. That it implies adherence to the Western binary; that Natives believe these individuals are "both male and female" [4]          a. Again, you’ll notice that this parallels my criticisms of the TERF definition of Lesbian, that tying LGBT+ identities to a rigid western gender binary does a disservice to LGBT+ people,—especially across cultures. “Two Spirit" wasn’t intended to be interchangeable with "LGBT Native American" or "Gay Indian"; [2] nor was it meant to replace traditional terms in Indigenous languages.  Rather, it was created to serve as a pan-Indian unifier. [1] [2] [4] —The term and identity of two-spirit "does not make sense" unless it is contextualized within a Native American or First Nations framework and traditional cultural understanding. [3] [10] [11] The ceremonial roles intended to be under the modern umbrella of two-spirit can vary widely, even among the Indigenous people who accept the English-language term. No one Native American/First Nations' culture's gender or sexuality categories apply to all, or even a majority of, these cultures. [4] [8] Butch: At the turn of the 20th century, the word “butch” meant “tough kid” or referred to a men’s haircut. It surfaced as a term used among women who identified as lesbians in the 1940s, but historians and scholars have struggled to identify exactly how or when it entered the queer lexicon. However it happened, "Butch” has come to mean a “lesbian of masculine appearance or behavior.” (I have heard that, though the words originate from French, Femme & Butch came into Lesbian culture from Latina lesbian culture, and if I find a good source for that I will share. If I had to guess, there may be some wonderful history to find of it in New Orleans—or somewhere similar.) Before “butch” became a term used by lesbians, there were other terms in the 1920s that described masculinity among queer women. According to the historian Lillian Faderman,“bull dagger” and “bull dyke” came out of the Black lesbian subculture of Harlem, where there were “mama” and “papa” relationships that looked like butch-femme partnerships. Performer Gladys Bentley epitomized this style with her men’s hats, ties and jackets. Women in same-sex relationships at this time didn’t yet use the word “lesbian” to describe themselves. Prison slang introduced the terms “daddy,” “husband,” and “top sargeant” into the working class lesbian subculture of the 1930s.  This lesbian history happened alongside Trans history, and often intersected, just as the Harlem renaissance had music at the forefront of black and lesbian (and trans!) culture, so too can trans musicians, actresses, and more be found all across history, and all across the US. Some of the earliest known trans musicians are Billy Tipton and Willmer “Little Ax” Broadnax—Both transmasculine musicians who hold an important place in not just queer history, but music history.

Lesbian isn’t rigid & biological, it’s social and personal, built up of community and self-determination.

And it has been for millennia.

So when people say that nonbinary lesbians aren’t lesbian, or asexual lesboromantics aren’t lesbian, or bisexual lesbians aren’t lesbian, it’s not if those things are technically true within the framework — It’s that those statements are working off a fundamentally claustrophobic, regressive, reductionist, Incorrect definition You’ll notice that whilst I have been able to give citations for TERFs, for Butch, and especially for Two-Spirit, there is little to say for Lesbianism. The chief reason for this is that lesbian history has been quite effectively erased-but it is not forgotten, and the anthropological work to recover what was lost is still ongoing. One of the primary issues is that so many who know or remember the history have so much trauma connected to "Lesbian” that they feel unable to reclaim it. Despite this trauma, just like the anthropological work, reclamation is ongoing.

Since Sappho, lesbian was someone who rejects the patriarchal hierarchy. For centuries, esbian wasn’t just a sexuality, it was intersectional community, kin to a gender spectrum, like today’s ��queer”. When TERFs co-opted 2nd Wave feminism, they redefined Lesbian to “woman w/ a vag attracted to other women w/ vags”. So when you say “bi lesbians aren’t lesbian” it’s not whether that’s true within the framework, it’s that you’re working off a claustrophobic, regressive, and reductionist definition.

I want Feminism, Queerness, Lesbianism, to be fucking sustainable.

I wanna see happy trans and lesbian and queer kids in a green and blue fucking world some day.

I want them to be able to grow old in a world we made good.

[cutual]

equally as pissed abt RvW as i am about the hordes of brainless transphobic cis women boiling over with scathing victim complexes and are already screaming & thrashing literally any fucking time that trans men, nonbinary & intersex people are included in the talk about roe v wade overturning as if every person with a uterus is infertile unless theyre a woman🗿 and it's literally no coincidence with the dismantling of trans rights either since the attempts to quash our visibility & freedom are blatantly in hopes to enforce a strict gender binary that ties in with what the supreme court is doing to strip those of childbearing ability of their rights to their own body (shocker! not all of them are women like those christofascist spineless hounds want to think) + besides the fact these gonad-fixated perverts constantly froth at the mouth like rabid fucking animals when theyre told to respect someones identity & personhood for who they are & to stop equating someones gender identity to their genitals & reproductive functions (hence their tireless obsession of claiming "only feemalez get babies!! so femalez = wamen!1!!" with their reactionary gender essentialist views that always route back to supporting patriarchy & inability to understand the sex spectrum & gender identity as two very different things)

like i cannot make this up because its always shown one way or another that they are deadass as useful as a broken wrist with the way they constantly parrot & perpetuate that same patriarchal shit they always claim (and fail) to stand against if it harms transgender/intersex people in favor of the cisgendered being the only ones in the spotlight of course

but its so simple really (who am i kidding transphobes & terves thrive on being dense) stop thinking u can choose someones identity for them when all theyre asking is to be fucking VISIBLE & accurately represented in an era where we are also in peril from the overturning. times five with recent transphobic legislation. call it just a womens issue & you already participated in ignoring the plight of thousands to millions who are affected! youll either leave them out entirely as if we're all inactive inside or you'll drag them in the conversation only to misrepresent them as a ciswoman and reduce it to a gendered issue ["men cant talk about abortion at all!"] vs an entire human rights violation to anyone of childbearing ability

[mostly-mundane-atla]

I enjoy learning from your blog sm—ty for all you share. Especially since I’ve found there’s very few sources. Sry if you’ve talked about this before, but if you’re still open to answering questions I was wondering what the culture surrounding lgbt+ identities? You talked a bit about gender roles and co-husbands, but is homophobia still prevalent? (Would it be less so in-universe versus a modern au?) Also, if you’re willing to share any terminology (whether two-spirit is used?) used?

Alright, here's where things get a little tricky.

It's hard to really talk about queerness in other cultures because the idea that sexuality and attraction is an inherent part of your identity is not in any way universal. This is where you get a lot of people claiming certain historians and anthropologists are homophobic (and that's not to say some of them aren't but people tend to make really harsh assumptions without reading into what's actually being said) for saying that x or y doesn't mean this person was gay as we understand it. In a lot of cultures, the people you persue personal relationships with isn't a part of who you are, just something you do. So a man who prefered the companionship of other men, say in medieval England, would likely still marry a woman and have children to help him with work as he ages and take care of him when he's old. Does that mean he couldn't have a loving relationship with his wife, just because she wasn't a man and he wasn't attracted to her? No. Is it wrong if he wouldn't consider this not being himself, because he grew up in a world where attraction and sexuality is what you do rather than who you are? I can't really answer that.

And so you take this idea that romantic relationships are something you do rather than an ingrained part of your identity, and you add to that this concept practically unheard of nowadays that romance really isn't important. That doesn't mean that people never had romantic feelings or acted on them, just that this idea of courtly love, that being in love makes you a better person and thus is inherently righteous, was never a part of the culture. You got together with someone because you weren't related and they were someone you didn't mind surviving and having kids with, not strictly because you were in love with them. And then, unlike medieval England, sex was not something to be considered shameful or sinful, and definitely didn't have to be exclusive between spouses.

There was a bit off accidental accuracy in Kya saying that sort of thing isn't talked about in the comics. You wouldn't hear stories about a romantic love between two men or two women, but you also wouldn't really hear about romantic love between a woman and a man; not unless that was your parents' or grandparents' experience and they shared that with you. The important loves are considered to be between family members. You'll notice in Inuit stories a lot that if a girl is kidnapped and force into a marriage, it's her brother who rescues her, not her sweetheart.

I'm sure there would be some prejudiced people, because let's face it, you can't please them all. But I think the main reason you wouldn't see many gay couples as we understand them to be would have more to do with needing children without access to artificial insemination, as well as very different and comparatively irreverent attitudes toward sex and romance. (In fact, I'm reminded of a story this elder woman shared when my class went to learn a bit about Native cultures back in elementary school. She and her friend left their village and started living among white people. They were still learning English and these two white men, friends themselves, were friendly with them and helped them out, not just that first day, but over the course of, I wanna say some months? Anyway, one of them proposed to the lady telling us this story and the other to her friend. The men had fallen in love and already considered themselves in romantic relationships with these women. The women got a good laugh out of this because they hadn't realized that being so personal and familiar and generally happy to be around someone could be interpreted as romantic interest. Their response to these guys was basically "sure, why not" because romantic feelings or no, they genuinely enjoyed their company.)

If we wanna talk gender, the cultural understanding there is a little different there too. Sipiniq is Inuktittut for "baby that changed its sex at birth" which, as far as I understand, has been used for both intersex and trans people. I can't find anything on the way they specifically were seen by the community, let alone regional specifics but to speak on gender as a whole the cultures are interesting for a few reasons. Inupiat names and third person pronouns aren't gendered. You are named after a person to carry on their soul, and this person is not guaranteed to be your gender. So if you're afab, no one is calling you "she" as opposed to "he" because that's not how the language works and a few people might actually call you "grandpa" or "uncle" because that's who you were named after and that's whose soul is kept in your body. You might be seen as having the body of a man or woman, and the limitations that come with it, but that which makes you yourself is not a gendered thing. King Islanders even had a Messenger Feast tradition where women would dress as men and men would dress as women. They had masks for it and everything.

Queerness is such a nebulous thing and so often we approach it with such a limited understanding, insisting ours is the only right way to treat it. Sometimes the answer to "well were they gay/trans?" can only be "it's complicated" and we all have to be more okay with that. Not every culture has the same concept of or places the same importance on sexuality, romance, or gender.

[beauthebaker]

And yet transphobes move goal posts tall the time. "Women are people who have vaginas and boobs" Trans-women can get them through surgery and some cis-women don't have breasts or vaginas for various reasons.

"Women can give birth!" Not all cis-women can give birth for various reasons. Not all cis-women want to give birth for various reasons. Are we going to deny them their identity?

"Women have XX chromosomes!" There are plenty of people that we would call women that do not have XX chromosomes. Do say that exclusively XX chromosomes people are women denies the existence of intersex people.

Do you see what I'm saying here? That is textbook moving the goal post, and transphobes do it all the time.

"Proving" that something exists has never mattered to them.

Explain what you mean by concrete pronouns? They/them pronouns are pretty concrete. They've existed for 100s of years. So have neopronouns.

Or are you saying that the basis on which we call someone by these pronouns? Because I would agree. The basis by which we call people by certain pronouns is not very concrete. We judge based on how a person looks and hope we got it right.

Don't tell me that you are checking peoples pants or taking blood samples from every person you meet.

A person telling you their pronouns is way more definitive.

Nobody reasonable is asking for laws to be passed banning the improper use of pronouns, that's a silly argument. Discrimination based on gender identity and calling someone the wrong pronouns are not the same thing. We can ask all we want but if people want to be assholes these nothing we can do about that.

There are no laws requiring anyone to refer to anyone by a specific word. Just social convention. We're just asking people not to be assholes. If you (fictional person wanting to use the wrong pronouns) wanna be an asshole then be an asshole. Just don't be surprised when you get shit on; comes with the territory.

If rapists want to rape they will find a way. For one, statistically a child rapist is someone known to the family that has access to the child. Family members, aunts, uncles, babysitters, teachers, coaches, etc. Trusted people that abuse that trust. Are we going to ban those people from being around kids too? Because if the goal is stopping rape those targets are far better targets.

Two, the evidence (we're still following science here right, not our feelings?) Does not support this claim that rapists are dressing up like the opposite gender to assault people. Show me evidence that shows that as acceptance of trans folks increases and so too does the incidence of sexual assault.

Three: What about trans folks? You wanna force trans-men to use women's washrooms? Or trans-women to use the men's washroom? Cause there is a lot of evidence to show that cis people do assault them when forced to use those washrooms despite it aligning with their agab.

Walks like a duck. Quacks like a duck. Sure seems like a duck.

(Yes I am acutely aware of the irony of using this joke in a conversation about transphobia)

For someone who isn't transphobic you sure like using transphobic arguments.

The basis of your arguments were about science. None of these have any basis in reality.

No one is legislating that you must call people the correct pronoun *or else*. People are free to say what they want. What people do not have is freedom from consequence. Yeah, you can call me by the wrong pronouns. But I also have the right to call you a bigoted asshole if you are doing it on purpose.

They are creating new laws every day that put trans people in danger and try to make our lives illegal. That is a thing that is currently happening in countries worldwide.

The dangers you are suggesting have never been. Just like they weren't when people of color were fighting for their rights, and when gays and lesbians fought for theirs.

It is fear mongering pure and simple.

Lesbians and straight men have three areas in their brains that are larger in size compared to straight women. I read this in a scientific article. ( I can link it if you like)

This might be due to more testosterone.

For example visual perception, impulsiveness and abstract thinking are greater in lesbians and straight men.

Yet lesbians are not masculine enough to be trans. So if this data is true ( it is) it would suggest that there is a biological explanation for what the youth today calls "non binary" I wouldn't say it's a gender thing but a masculine "energy" thing. It obviously is all neurological and not physical...so it proves that it exists outside of reproductive organs.

I do think the leftist lgbt activists are going about it the wrong way by demanding they/them pronouns instead of talking about science. Maybe the right will respect their argument more. And maybe they shouldn't command people to call them pronouns based off of androgynous neurology instead of chromosomes. Leave the concrete labeling for the xy or xx biology. 🤔

[khali-shabd]

Gender Theory

Readers, let us begin with a simple question- what is gender?

The Biological Theory Of Gender, and a majority of society, would say that gender is defined by biological sex, namely hormones and chromosomes. If you release estrogen and have XX chromosomes, you are female, and if you release testosterone and have XY chromosomes, you are male. However, this is an extremely flawed vision of gender for two reasons: one, that whatever proof of hormones altering gendered behaviour has been found only in lab rats1, which possibly will not exhibit the same extreme change in behaviour if the hormones were administered to them naturally in their own environment- and rats are not human- we have far too many differences as species for this study to be considered valid for homosapiens as well. And two, chromosomes are not strictly XX or XY- around 1 percent of the world population is intersex (and a similar percentage is redheaded, so its not inherently ‘anomalous’ or ‘unnatural’) , which means that they can have chromosomal variations such as XXY, X, XXXY etc, all of whom develop differently as compared to people with the traditional chromosome combinations. 

Further, there are far more things that define ‘biological sex’, namely:

chromosomes

gonads

sex hormones

internal reproductive anatomy (such as the uterus)

external genitalia.

Out of these, in humans, genitalia and internal reproductive anatomy can be changed without there being a significant change in gendered behavior. Sex hormones, when administered to bodies change secondary sex characteristics more than any sort of behavior; with the exception of testosterone increasing sex drive and sometimes increasing ‘ego’. Every single part of this definition of binary biological sex is challenged by the existence of intersex people, henceforth proving that sex is not binary and never has been, unfounding the existence of a sex-based gender binary in itself. Further, transgender individuals have a completely different gender identity as compared to their biological sex, and it has been scientifically proved that this is because their brains develop in the same way the brains of the children of the gender they identify with do. That essentially means that the brain of a transgender woman develops similarly to the brain of a cisgender woman, and the brain of a transgender man develops in the same way the brain of a cisgender man develops. All in all, there are far too many differences in the experience of biological sex to confine it to a binary, hence unfounding the theory that gender is based on biological sex.

Then how do we define gender?

There are a number of theories, but the most logical one at the moment would be Judith Butler’s Theory of Gender Performativity. Butler says that gender, as an abstract concept in itself, is nothing more than a performance. We ‘perform’ our gender by carrying out actions that we associate with it. They further say that this does not mean that it’s something we can stop altogether, rather something we’ve ingrained so deeply within us that it becomes a part of our identity, and it's the part of it we call gender identity. Gender, hence, is created by its own performance. Butler also implies that we do not base gender on sex, rather we define sex along the lines of established lines of binary gener, i.e. male and female- despite the fact that more than 10% of the population does not fall into this binary sex, and has some variation in their biological sex that does not ‘fit’ into either category. Gender in itself is so culturally constructed by western society that anyone who does not perform their assigned gender ‘correctly’ is punished- this applies to not only queer individuals but even men who do not ascribe to or criticise predefined ideals of masculinity. They are made social pariahs and excluded as outcasts, leaving them to find and create their own communities and safe spaces. This is shown in the way society ostracises queer-presenting individuals, makes fun of ‘soft’ men, and forcefully tries to ‘fix’ intersex children whose variations in biological sex cause no harm to them. I quote:

“Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production. The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness.”

One of the criticisms of Butler’s theories is that it does not seem to apply to transgender individuals, whose innate gender identity is not the one that they have been assigned to perform at birth; whose brains develop the same way that their cisgender counterparts’ brains do from birth. Butler themselves have responded to this, saying:

“I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support.”

Later on, Butler goes on to say that the main point of their theory is that identity is constructed, which means that it allows us to change how we view it as a concept. It leaves room for us to subvert gender roles, challenging the status quo on what it means to identify as someone of a particular gender, and re-structuring society such that we rally for change not along gender lines, rather on the basis of what’s right.

Further, if we combine the work of the psychologist Sigmund Freud with Butler’s theories, the latter does actually apply to transgender individuals. Freudian theory states that we internalize concepts of gender based on our parental figures at birth. That is, if you are born female, you begin to look towards the person who closest resembles your gender identity; which in this case would be your mother, to be your role model for your behavior as to how women are meant to act. Your mother would be your guide to how you perform your gender. If she crosses her legs, you cross your legs. If she dresses in a particular way, you would too, until you were exposed to the exterior world and allowed to develop your own sense of style. As such, you create your own gender identity within your mind, and perform that identity the way you have been taught to by your maternal figure. When you are transgender, you view yourself as innately as the gender you identify with, hence you base your gender identity off the parental figure of that particular gender. This means, if you are female to male trans, you would base your gender identity on your father, and accordingly perform your gender in that way.

Now the question arises: How do we create gender identity outside of gender roles? How do we identify anywhere on the gender spectrum while abandoning the performance that comes with that identity? Why is it important?

Well, the answer isn’t simple. For its importance, I allude, once again, to gender performativity theory- Butler even uses some evolutionary stances to support her views, saying that gender performance stems from gender roles which stem from the fundamental differences between the prominent male and female sex at the very beginning of evolution. Now that 'evolutionary' behaviors don't matter at this stage of societal, cultural, and psychological development, it renders gender roles and hence the performance of gender redundant. However, we still perpetuate these ideas regardless of their importance, or rather their lack of such. And in this process, we end up defining and segregating far too much on the basis of gender- from small things like friendships to even the feminist movement, which is majorly perpetuated and held up by people who identify as female. Other groups like men end up purposely excluding themselves from a movement that can benefit them as well(through deconstructing and eradicating ideas of toxic masculinity) just because of how strongly it is divided on the basis of gender lines. And as for how we create gender identity outside of gender roles; it takes a lot of work, at first, to unlearn all the biases you have internalized about what it means to be a certain gender. You have to actively work towards deconstructing what gender and gender identity means to you, and how much of it comes from societally misguided stances about the ‘role’ of a gender is. It may mean ridding yourselves of the school of thought that women belong in the kitchen and men belong in workplaces or even identifying and removing hidden biases such as those of toxic masculinity and/or toxic femininity. Lastly, it takes an understanding that often, gender expression is not the same as gender identity; and also that most gender expression is how people show how they feel the most comfortable viewing themselves. Once you’ve managed to deconstruct your biases, it’s just a matter of how you feel comfortable viewing and expressing yourself; and what label, among the myriad, you identify with the most. That would be your unique self-expression and identity.

[a-room-of-my-own]

This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Burns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.

If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.

But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).

So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’

The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

[thewolfofthestars]

Questions to Ask When You’re Questioning Your Gender

So I'm trans myself and I've spent a lot of time thinking on this subject and talking to other trans people, as well as people who are questioning their genders. I've learned a lot over the past couple of years about what gender is, what it means to me, what it means to others, what it means to society, and most relevant to this post--how to figure out what your gender actuallly is. Cuz this shit ain't always easy. In fact, most of the time it's pretty hard. So I'm putting together a list of questions you can ask yourself if you're questioning your gender.

Please keep in mind: you probably won't relate to everything on this list! There are trans people who don't relate to this stuff and there are cis people that do relate to this stuff. Not every single thing on this list is a 100% surefire sign you're definitely trans, and you don't need to agree with every single point on the list in order to be trans. I am merely making this list in order to get you thinking in a more helpful and productive way to figure out your gender. Additionally: You do not have to figure out your gender if you don't want to! If you're perfectly content just to call yourself by a big umbrella term like "nonbinary" or "genderqueer", or if you just don't want to put a label to your gender at all, that is absolutely fine. This list doesn't need to be for you.

Highly reccommended reading, btw: The Null HypotheCis--https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/

-Do you ever find yourself wishing that you were another gender? How often? How intense are these feelings when they arise?

-Do you ever find yourself wondering what your life would be like if you were born as a different gender? How often? How do you feel when you think about it?

-Do you find yourself looking at or admiring people of another gender very often? Is this admiration not really the same as romantic/sexual attraction--it feels different, somehow? Do these people just look really good or cool to you, in a special way that you can't really explain?

-Do you find yourself feeling jealous of other genders at all? Why do you think you feel this jealousy?

-If you are not otherwise LGBTQ+, do you find yourself feeling connected to or attracted to the LGBTQ+ community in a way you can't really explain? Do you feel attracted to the trans community in particular?

-Do you feel more comfortable or happier around trans/nonbinary people? Do you feel as though you can relate to trans/nonbinary people better than you can relate to cis people?

-If you are attracted to people of the same gender as your AGAB (Assigned Gender At Birth), does "gay" feel like the right word for that attraction or not?

-If you are attracted to people of the opposite gender as your AGAB, does "straight" feel like the right word for that attraction or not?

-Do you have trouble understanding your sexual/romantic orientation? Have you changed your labels several times, or perhaps never put a label on your attraction at all? Have you just kinda slapped a label on at random until further notice?

-Do you feel very uncomfortable engaging with your sexuality at all? Do you identify as asexual or sex-repulsed, because of this discomfort?

-Do you experience distress or discomfort when in sexual situations, for no otherwise discernable reason (i.e. nonconsensual situations or dealing with past sexual trauma)? Do you find yourself dissociating during or after a sexual situation? What about anxiety or panic? Do you find yourself becoming depressed after sex or masturbation?

-Do you find that you need to "get into a different headspace" in order to have sex or masturbate?

-When you wear clothes commonly associated with your AGAB, how does it make you feel? Happy? Sad? Do the clothes feel like you, or does it feel more like a costume, like you're cosplaying or performing in a play? How does it feel when you wear clothes more commonly associated with other genders?

-How do you feel when you imagine yourself far into the future, living as an elderly person? Do you find it hard to imagine yourself in old age as your AGAB? How does it make you feel? What about as other genders?

-Do you find yourself coming up with excuses for reasons that you aren't trans that, when held up to scrutiny, don't actually work? Phrases such as "Well, I didn't know when I was little, I didn't start questioning until I was X age (people of any age can question their gender and figure out they're trans)", or "I don't have genital dysphoria, so I can't be trans (trans people can have all sorts of feelings about their genders--no particular kind of dysphoria is required to be trans, or even any dysphoria at all)".

-Do you find yourself thinking things like "Well, statistically, trans people are so rare, there's no way I'm trans"? What about "I'm already (other marginalized identity(ies)), I can't possibly also be trans"? What about "I have a friend/family member/someone else in my life that's trans, I'd just be copying them"? (None of these things need to mean that you're not trans!)

-Do you have a very "mind over matter" mentality? Were you more of a smarts or arts kid than you were a sporty kid in school? Are you the kind of person who wishes your consciousness could be uploaded to the cloud or something like that, so you can leave this fleshy body of yours behind?

-Do you find yourself frustrated with society's emphasis on gender and gender roles? Do you ever feel that gender doesn't even matter at all, and you're confused as to why everyone cares about it so much?

-Do you feel constrained or trapped by being your AGAB? Do you feel like you would be so much freer and happier as a different gender?

-If you could press a button right now and wake up tomorrow as a cis member of the opposite gender, as if you'd always been that way, with a body of a cis person and with everyone referring to you like that, would you press it?

-Do you believe that everyone of your your AGAB probably wants to be a different gender, at least a little bit? Are you baffled when people of your AGAB don't agree with this sentiment?

-Did you ever wonder if or secretly hope that you were intersex? Did you ever get tested by medical professionals for an intersex condition? If so, how did the results make you feel? Were you happy to learn that you're intersex, or dissappointed to learn that you aren't?

-Does it seem difficult for you to be your AGAB, like it doesn't really come naturally to you, and you have to learn how to do it and actively try to be it? Have you felt like you've needed to construct and maintain an identity for yourself as your AGAB? Do you think being a different gender would feel more natural to you, and you wouldn't have to work at it?

-Do you find yourself thinking thoughts like "Well, I don't hate being my AGAB, but I would prefer to be a different gender/would be happier as a different gender"? (I'll give you a hint--you don't need to hate being your AGAB in order to justify being a different gender! You can just be a different gender if that makes you happier.)

-Do your genitals or reproductive organs upset you? Do you wish you didn't have them? Do you think you'd be happier having the opposite set of genitals/reproductive organs? What about having no genitals/reproductive organs? What about having a mix between the two?

-Do your genitals or reproductive organs not really feel like they're a part of you? Do they feel like a seperate entity that's just attached to you or inside of you, but they aren't really you? Do you dissociate when you look at or think about your genitals/reproductive organs? Do you try to avoid looking at or thinking about them?

-Regarding the above two points--ask yourself these same questions about your secondary sex characteristics (i.e. breasts, body hair, hips, the pitch of your voice, etc.)

-Do you only feel these feelings sometimes? If so, when you don't feel these feelings, do you actually feel good about these aspects of yourself, or do you just feel less bad?

-What if I told you right now that you are absolutely, definitely, 100% a cis person, and that you're not trans at all? How does that make you feel? What if I told you that you're definitely, 100% for-sure a trans person? How does that make you feel?

-Were you a particularly androgynous child or present yourself in a gender non-conforming way when you were younger? Did you ever have a "phase" of presenting in this way?

-Alternatively, did you ever present yourself as a very gender conforming person when you were younger (i.e. hyperfeminine if AFAB or hypermasculine if AMAB)? Did you ever have a "phase" of presenting in this way?

-According to the last two points--did you ever alternate between these two modes of presentation? How did these types of presentation make you feel?

-Are you afraid of the idea of this "trans phase" or "questioning phase" being over? Are you afraid of going back to identifying as the gender you were born as?

-Do you like the idea of being a crossdressing or GNC person of the gender you were assigned at birth, or does the thought of being a different gender make you feel happier? (i.e. if you're AMAB, are you happiest when you think of yourself as a crossdressing boy/drag queen, or do you think you would be happier if you were a girl instead? Or perhaps some other gender?)

-Have you ever taken a "guess your gender/am I trans" quiz online, even just for fun? What were the results? How did the results make you feel? Did you intentionally try to skew your answers toward or away from a particular result? Did you go back and take the quiz again, wanting to get a different result?

-What sorts of gendered terms are you happiest and most comfortable being called by? Do you like the idea of being "mom" or "dad" better? What about "brother" or "sister"? "Girlfriend" or "boyfriend"? Or do you dislike both gendered options, and prefer gender-neutral terms like "parent" or "sibling" or "partner"?

[cats-moss-gays]

@terflies

You’ve been all over my posts so I’m just going to consolidate into this one. I’m tired of scrolling past your long and quite frankly boring responses. This post will be divided into sections. If you’re going to respond please say something interesting. However I doubt either of us will ever change the other’s mind. These are kind of like closing statements and I doubt I’ll make anymore major responses because I’m trying to stay focused on offline things.

1. Unanswered Questions

There are some questions and statements in my reblogs that you conveniently ignored.

Definition of a woman? You responded with some generic bs that very clearly isn’t an answer. I’ll be more specific, what should the dictionary definition be? Any ideas?

If I don’t feel like a woman am I allowed to identify as one? You said you weren’t going to humour this question but it is applicable to me and many other gc women. I definitely don’t have any internal feeling of womanhood, or any gender. Does this mean I have to be agender? Is the female gender label restricted to a certain feeling? Or is there absolutely nothing that women have in common?

What is the feeling of womanhood? You kind of answered this but I have a follow up question. You say the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being perceived as a woman. If I feel indifferent to this does it mean I’m not a woman? Additionally, many women feel uncomfortable with being perceived as a woman because of the misogyny associated with the label, does this make them men?

2. Inaccurate Statements and Lies

I don’t believe any “TRAs” define women by gender roles

You may not but there are many who do. It’s also important to point out how deeply ingrained gender roles are in society; you can’t stop them by just saying your choices exist in a vacuum. I’m sure you think I’m just making this up for fun, so here are some examples ;)  x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

So this whole…thing is dishonest from the start. Gender does not replace sex.

In another post you said that laws should be based on gender instead of sex. So which is it, either gender isn’t replacing sex or it is. When feminists talk about sex based oppression they’re called terfs. When gay people say their attraction is based on sex they’re called transphobic. When people were saying that only females get cervical cancer, they were called violent transphobes. Gender is absolutely attempting to replace sex as the basis of legal protections, safe spaces, political movements, etc. Two of the top post on my blog are more extreme example of this. x - x

BONUS: You’re saying TERF rhetoric

3. The “Questions” Post

You seem very confused about how to define biological sex and to some extent I understand that but you have to stop playing dumb. There must be some way that doctors are able to identify the sex of a fetus before it’s even born in the vast majority of cases, right? And before you try to say I’m just ignoring the existence of intersex people or trying to deny science, I’ll point out that I have watched and read a lot of “sex is a spectrum” stuff. I understand that DSDs exist and that biology is complicated. Our disagreement is mostly not over the facts but over how to define them. I know that however I explain it you’ll pretend you don’t understand it, so instead I’ll just link you to some other sources that explain it more in depth. x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x - x

A third sex—and many creatures have more than two—does not necessarily mean a third gamete. Mostly this question is a childish distraction, but if you were to use a strict, gamete-based definition of sex the answer would be “none”.

So all infertile people are a third sex? To be female you have to be able to bear children? And you call me regressive, yikes. This can be debunked with the same sources from above but I wanted to feature it in my post because I want people to know that you think there’s a third sex.

I made a quick little chart to compare all the things gender has been compared to! The difference is that while many are socially defined, gender is socially constructed. If someone never interacted with other humans, they would still have a skin color, have or not have specific abilities, have a sexual orientation, and be male or female. They would not have an observable gender identity.

1 - You refuse to humor my questions about being a woman who doesn’t feel like one, however this is not in bad faith; I do want to know what you think. Many gc/radfems, including myself, and many women in general do not have a specific feeling of gender. This is especially true for gnc women, who often feel a disconnect from the feminine gender role and subsequently, the feminine gender. The solution is to realize that there are no standards to conform to to be a woman, no clothes or interests or feelings, just the biological reality one is born with.

2 - You say “the feeling of womanhood is enjoying being called a woman” but what does that mean? It’s circular reasoning, a fallacy called begging the question. How do you know you are a woman? If I gave up being a terf on tumblr, how would you advise that I identify if I don’t think I feel like a woman? My current plan was to just pick the mogai flag with the prettiest colors, but I’m thinking maybe there’s more to it than that...

3 - See my explanation above. Sex is comparable to race or disability or sexuality; gender is not.

4 - You say genders are social classes. If they are indeed social classes, they are unnecessary ones that reinforce oppression. They are undefinable when not based on biological sex or gender roles. The other example of classes I can think of is wealth. Wealth classes have obvious divisions, you can’t just identify into more money. Gender has nothing that is shared by every woman, man, or nonbinary, so you can just identify in and out of classes. Additionally, if there are like 100 genders, are there 100 classes? 

4. The “Biological” Sex Post

Gender does not replace sex

Then why are TRAs trying to say sexuality, legal protections, bathrooms, spaces, political movements, etc should be based on gender instead of sex? You keep contradicting yourself; you should talk to your fellow trans activists because many would disagree. Also see my response in part two.

A number of points here aren’t factually wrong but simple (*simply) irrelevant

So you would agree that biological sex is important and that it is relevant to many conversations? Then why were people getting mad about this?

Or this?

On to the specific examples. This post is long enough already and I’m not going to spoon feed basic biology to you because you’ll probably just ignore it. I referenced a variety of sources earlier. I’ll just reference Invisible Women since it’s an amazing book.

1. This first point is, appropriately enough, true in isolation; it just doesn’t support Paradox Institute’s argument. Listing it leads the audience to believe that truth is on their side, but PI do nothing at all to justify that.

So nothing here is true? They’re just lying? Here are their sources btw.

2. Generally irrelevant, but not entirely biologically accurate, either. It isn’t that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are categories intrinsic to nature that produce small, motile and large, immotile gametes respectively; ‘male’ and ‘female’ are labels we assign (generally, but not always) according to gamete size.

So it’s not relevant that one sex has the ability to carry children or menstruation or get an abortion? It’s not like there’s any issues women face specifically for that, right? So we assign the labels male and female to gametes. If you want to play semantics, sure, we created the words, but the gametes themselves already existed. Not really sure what you’re trying to say here other than disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing and moving some words around. Are you implying that the categorizations of gametes are subjective? Are you saying there’s a spectrum of gametes?? Are eggs just big sperm and sperm just small eggs??? Genuinely have no idea what the fuck you’re trying to prove here.

3. Whatever your opinion of evolutionary psychology, this does not preclude gender. (On the contrary, we ought to include gender in our understanding of cultural development with respect to sex.)

The only gender in history was gender roles, and both were tied to sex in most cases. Sex absolutely came before gender and is more integral to our existence. In any time before the last few decades, gender and sex were basically synonyms.

4. Entirely a straw argument. And, to the contrary, precision greater than two sex categories would be beneficial (i.e. specific sex characteristics, history, endocrinology etc.).

Obviously doctors don’t just diagnose based on sex, they factor in medical history and other traits. Precision is irrelevant because it still focuses on sex not gender. If it’s “entirely a straw argument” why did someone else reblog your response with this?

Speaking as a member of a medical family, the medical one fucking OFFENDS me.

Blood type HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GENDER. Or biological sex! Both are totally irrelevant! And medication dosage is determined by AGE and SIZE. A 25-year-old 160-pound person with a penis needs the exact same dose as a 25-year-old 160-pound person with a vagina. In fact, possibly LESS of a dose, if the person with a penis is 5’10” and the person with a vagina is 5’5”. (The taller person may be underweight.)

This is just. UGH. I could scream.

@prismatic-bell​ this is one of the funniest and dumbest replies I’ve ever gotten. First of all “member of a medical family” tf is that lmao. This reminds me of that post where the “medical worker” tra turned out to be a garbage collector guy. I have no idea why you brought up blood type when it is literally never mentioned in the original post. Strawman much? Fucking obviously blood type isn’t affected by sex, and you’re completely missing the point if you think gender has anything to do with this. Medication dosage is decided by age and size, yes, but also biological sex. This is like basic medical science, dumbass. Mandatory reading from Invisible Women as punishment for your stupidity crimes:

People called her a terf for this :)

5. How sports are best divided is a far broader question than this point implies. We could, for example, segregate sports by relevant physical attributes (as is already the case in some sports) rather than by sex or gender. This point also presupposes (but does not justify) that a woman having an advantage in women’s sports by dint of being trans is significantly greater than an advantage any woman might have by dint of her natural attributes (which, empirically, she does not) and hence would be unfair. That said, enforcement of “female” sports is already marred by racism and perisexism.

You agree sex and gender are different, yes? So then why should males be in female sports? You’re trying to distract me with that stuff about physical performance and whatever. Focus on the question at hand, should males be allowed into female sports? We cannot eradicate sex-segregated sports because female athletes will be even more systematically disadvantaged. If you were truly a feminist you’d understand that female sports are the result of the movement you claim to support. More Invisible Women facts plus some interesting info about the plough hypothesis:

6. Simply untrue. Excluding trans women from statistics about women on the basis that doing so would affect those statistics is arbitrary at best. Those statistics may change, but that does not mean they are unsuitable or inappropriate. The exclusion of any subset of women can be justified in exactly the same way.

Nope! Stop trying to use women of color and intersex women as justifications for why we should let men pretend to be women. You’ve seen the hundreds of receipts of trans women committing all sorts of male violence. Has anyone found anywhere near a comparable number of trans men doing similar things? They have not, even though if trans men were truly men they would be much more violent.

7. The majority of single-sex spaces are, functionally, just as much single-gender (owing to the traditional equivalence of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and to the majority of the population being cis. Trans people have been using spaces appropriate to their gender for decades, whereas concerns about them doing so are based on speculation and hypotheticals rather than fact. (Aided, as with a lot of bigotry, by bad and manipulated statistics.)

I’ve spoken about my opinions on the bathroom debate before. If a passing trans person uses the bathroom of their choice I don’t really care, but there have already been many examples of men making women uncomfortable in their bathrooms, or worse. Making all bathrooms gender neutral is by far the worst idea, but unfortunately that seems to be where we’re headed. More Invisible Women, just for fun:

8. This is the worst red herring, exploiting violent misogyny for the sake of argument. It is another straw argument, too, since—even ignoring trans-positive feminism in practice and assuming trans people act only in self-interest—trans people are concerned with addressing such injustice.

Sure, many trans people are supportive of feminism. But we can’t effectively dismantle the patriarchy if we can’t accurately describe the (sex-based) oppression involved. Women are routinely silenced when talking about our biology, even when there is no “transphobic” language involved. “Trans-positive feminism” also often reinforces misogyny by supporting sex work and porn, and by shutting down analysis of things like femininity and makeup because “some women like it.” See also from trans activists: misogyny racism homophobia + lesbophobia

9. Similar to (7) there is no consistent distinction between sex and gender across law. Even so, this is another red herring as it is possible to recognise both sex and gender in laws and policies. Some laws already do (at least functionally, if not explicitly).

You can deny it but the TRA train is leaving without you and they’ve been clear about their goals. As you’ve seen in this post, gender is intended to replace sex. Those who bring up sex-based issues are silenced as “terfs” who deserve the hatred thrown at them.

Sorry for making such a long post but I was on a roll so I just kept writing. I don’t expect @terflies​ to respond to all of this but I wanted an excuse to make some sort of masterpost that links to a lot of my other posts and can be used in the future. Online school is going pretty well and I’m trying to start some doing some hobbies that are better than tumblr blogging.

[frogburglar]

on why sexual dimorphism and phrenology are not the same thing

since @guccigramsci so kindly requested that i do this, here’s a quick little analysis on why understanding that sexes are different does not make radfems racist!

to begin, i’m going to define sexual dimorphism and phrenology, so anyone coming into this with a blind eye can understand this and follow along.

sexual dimorphism: the condition in which two sexes of the same species exhibit different characteristics beyond the differences in their sexual organs. 

phrenology: the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities. 

so i’m going to begin by dispelling the myth that sexual dimorphism and phrenology are the same thing, since they’re not. sexual dimorphism in humans shows a clear difference between male and female bodies (not accounting for intersex individuals). what’s really cool about humans is that, while we are a species that abides by sexual dimorphism, our structures aren’t too different at all! they’re still more than enough to be noticeable, however. 

humans, for the vast majority of us, differ in the following ways:

1. males have narrower hips while females have wider ones. the female pelvis is larger than the male pelvis, which is more compact and narrower. the male pelvis is also less tilted than the female pelvis. (sources: b, e, f, g, k) 2. males are larger than females (in both weight and height). (sources: a, g)  3. females have more breast tissue than males. they are nearly the same, save from the fact that females develop means for the production of milk. (sources: h, i) 4. the fat distributions in males and females are vastly different. females naturally hold more body fat than males, as female bodies account for the care of a growing baby while males do not. females and males also store fat in different areas. females often will store fat in the butt, hips, and thighs, while males will often store fat in the stomach. (sources: c, d) 5. the skulls of males and female are different. females have a more rounded forehead and more rounded eye sockets. males have squarer jawlines, while females have more pointed ones. female skulls are lighter than male skulls. (sources: a, j, k)

sources for these claims: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k

sometimes, there are outliers! there are outliers in every species, after all. but statistically speaking, these are some of the ways in which males and females differ biologically due to sexual dimorphism. (again, humans are on the lower end of the spectrum of abiding by it, but we still do!)

my arguments: acknowledging sexual dimorphism as a biological fact is not the same as acknowledging phrenology as a biological fact. acknowledging sexual dimorphism as a biological fact also does not make a person racist. 

1. sexual dimorphism, while not as extreme in humans as it is in other species, has been proven to exist in humans (look at all of the sources above). while this can be shown in the differences between male and female skulls, that is not only not the only evidence for sexual dimorphism, but it also is based in biology and not a pseudoscience. 

2. male and female is a biological reality. sex is a biological reality. gender is not. race is not. @guccigramsci seems to be claiming that race is a biological reality (X), but to claim that women of color have different bone structures than white women is often the same racist logic that TRAs will use to claim that trans women are women, since black women are women. in my claim that race is a social construct, i am saying that the differences between people within the same race have the same variance as the differences of people between different races (X). oftentimes, people will claim that you can tell someone’s race by their skull alone, but that is not entirely true. some anatomical features are more commonly found among certain races, but that does not make said anatomical feature a certainty for that race. 

“...can you really determine race from a jawbone? Probably not. Forensic anthropologists try to infer the ancestry, gender, and age of human remains by measuring their dimensions and observing their features with the naked eye. ...researchers have compiled a number of mandibular traits... that they think differ slightly between races. ...Racial classification is an inexact science, if that’s even the right word for it. Forensic anthropologists never make definitive ancestry pronouncements. They say a bone is “consistent with” European ancestry or “likely” of Asian ancestry. ...the discipline has its roots in the pseudoscientific 19th-century practice of using skull measurements to prove Caucasion intellectual superiority.”

3. race is a social construct, not a biological one. "If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities.” (i’ve already cited this source above but this section in particular is incredibly important).

“In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson... and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.”

4. phrenology (the claim that you can tell a person’s personality by seeing what the bumps in their skull are) and sexual dimorphism (observing the differences between secondary-sex characteristics in males and females) are not comparable. (X - this source shows the difference between craniology and phrenology, and even straight up says that race is an indefinite science and sex is not)

in conclusion: i’m not a nazi you dork ass loser lmao

[carlyraejepstein]

potentially upsetting topics: sui, gender dysphoria, abuse and parents, sex

Elliot Page’s coming out rescued an awful day. Its wording is unbelievably powerful, a comment I have made once before and will continue to do so. In it, he so strongly encompasses the fears, the sorrow, the rage, but most importantly the determination and the defiance of not only him but every trans person. I hesitate to use the word “community” because it implies a certain connection that might just not be there; I play a bit of Counter-Strike but I don’t consider myself part of the Counter-Strike community; yet when I read Elliot’s words I feel solidarity, I feel a pull to the trans community that I often don’t feel I pay my dues to, and it feels good, really good. Like I said on Twitter once, other trans people being, existing, living, is just rad. Inspiring, even, despite how that word has been worn out by cis people.

However, there’s a certain something that Elliot didn’t write, for Elliot never wrote “I am a man”; only his name, and pronouns, how he wishes to be referred to. Of course, we cannot possibly know what this omission means or does not mean to Elliot, but it’s something that concurred with a shift in how I perceive my own gender.

I remember first properly ruminating on gender in 2012 or 2013. My understanding was primitive, coming from Wikipedia. Once I knew what transgender or, given the time period, transsexual, the curiosity never really went away. I knew at this point about transition, and I knew about deed polls because of my resentment of my parents, I knew about HRT and I even knew about the GICs. I felt compelled to be an ally in that turbulent period in both my life and in the online culture I immersed myself in from around 2015 to 2017. At this time a friend was going through their own transition and seeing them gave me pause for thought; partly pride, partly worry but a small kernel of imagination, wondering if that could ever be me. It was when I went to sixth form, with its environment permitting greater yet still constrained self expression, that I felt gender dysphoria hit me with its full weight. Thinking, wondering, worrying about being transgender has been the central dialogue of my internal and external monologue ever since. Not a day passes where I don’t think about the dysphoria I feel over my continued closet-dwelling and the malignantly gendered properties of my body. On a January morning in 2019, at my very lowest point, motionless under the covers, I gave myself a choice between transition and death, and I chose transition.

It’s been a complex journey. When I was 13 I shortened my gender neutral name to make it more masc (which I have now happily embraced as my middle name). I leant into the deepening of my voice because I thought it gave me authority, conditioned through the harsh words of people from public Team Fortress 2 servers. I’ve done almost everything under the sun that gets people to say “I’d never have known!” when you come out to them; I worry that I still do and that nothing has changed. I’ve gone and cross-dressed when my parents were out, and I’ve been traumatised by Susan’s Place. I am autistic, no one who has met me can escape that fact; not that I would want to, and as a consequence I am so much more confident in my presence on the internet than I ever have been in the flesh, despite me still not knowing how to make friends; hence I’ve ended up trying to piece my transition together through 4chan (I know, bad) and Reddit and Twitter.

Perhaps the biggest reason I am not out is the time when I decided I would come out to my mother as trans. When we were in Munich we had walked past a pride parade, and when we got back to the apartment I revealed off hand that I was bi. My mother chided me for not telling them before hand since it was “polite” to do so, as if it were not my choice to make because, as I still believe to this day, it’s not a big deal and it’s none of their business. But I decided this time it was important, and that I could trust her. It turns out that just like every other time, trusting my mother is a bad idea that is guaranteed to cause me pain every time I make that mistake. She told me that because she “knows more about [me] than [I] do”, that she thought that I was just straight up wrong, couched it in rhetoric about how she thought that I was too weak to be trans, and quoted the shockingly offensive “autism is extreme male brain” theory to me. It was really devastating at the time and I think it still affects me to this day, especially as she constantly tries to worm her tendrils back into my life after I moved out.

But enough about my mother; she is a fucking flat out abuser. She has emotionally abused me, and undoubtedly my brother, all our lives. I was relieved that my dad chose not to react aggressively as she did, but with a modicum of respect and agreement not to make such a big deal out of it, something I would never expect my mother to match. In the middle of writing this piece I had to decide that I could not do it any longer, and I would never let her back into my life again.

Where that conversation in late 2018 relates to Elliot Page’s statement is my mother’s purported belief that “you don’t have to define yourself as a man or a woman”. Going past the fact that she is lying, since her tolerance for all trans people is thinner than the grey hairs on her head going on the basis that she couldn’t bring herself to say one positive thing to her own daughter that afternoon, it struck me recently that I can more eloquently describe my gender through elimination rather than a label. I am happy to call myself a woman, a trans woman, and I don’t feel as if I really am wavering in or around the binary. But what I can say for definite is that while I have been a boy for almost all my life, and am holding onto that, I am not, and never will be, a man.

Where that leaves me is that I am not a man, but must I be a woman? If I am perhaps not a woman, am I non-binary? No; it doesn’t feel right. However, if I attach just a convenience to the label woman, I can give myself that flexibility in how I feel and how I present myself, and perhaps the biggest example of that is how in recent months I have made peace with my voice. It is not really a femme voice; I hit vocal fry just speaking normally. But I know how to be expressive with it; it is my voice that I have honed over 19 years after all. One day I want to find someone who will help me upgrade my voice (and yes, upgrade) but keeping it means I fulfil one cool thing about being trans, and that is saying fuck you to the very existence of the gender binary. I keep this voice out of necessity, but I’m still trans femme, I am still a woman and I still want my facial hair zapped off.

As well, I reserve the right to say I used to be a boy. Not a man, but a boy. That’s why they call it boymoding, right? How else can I describe the first 17 years of my life? I can be a boy all the same now, although I may be pushing it aged 20, and at the point at which I am really stretching that concept which at this point I am adhering to solely for my safety and comfort, I shouldn’t need to use it anymore. Wishful thinking, of course.

I think we should consider why we use “man” and “woman” in the first place. From my perspective they are simply words to describe people with two different sets of primary and secondary sexual characteristics, convenient because, well, being cis is unavoidably common. But they are not discrete, as we so often have to reiterate using intersex people as an unwilling crutch, where one does not occur in the other they are so often analogous and often they overlap! Supposedly 60% of teenage boys develop further breast tissue, and 40% of women have some form of facial hair. Thinking that the two are discrete gives rise to the idea of “biological sex”, a concept developed by cis people either to misgender trans people in a way they think is philosophically rigorous, or to reconcile their tenuous support for trans people with a continuing belief in the gender binary. Personally I would like to smash the concept of biological sex to bits because it is not useful to us. At the very least it may describe one’s primary sexual characteristics but bottom surgery exists, and I don’t happen to think that it is “mutilation”. I don’t need to argue that “biological sex can be changed”; they are not discrete categories, and I don’t need to move between them, or seek validation for having moved between them. It is not a helpful generalisation for bodies, diverse as they are.

I must add that as a trans woman the fact that I may have a penis doesn’t mean that I use it in the same way as a man. I use mine to pee, primarily, and it’s definitely not going inside anyone except myself any time soon; a whole zine was written about how trans women fuck and use their bits to fuck, so I definitely don’t need to anyway.

Another bullshit concept is “biological destiny” or “biological reality”, although I will give less breath to this one because at it’s core it is fundamentally misogynistic, and it so often is divorced from any sensible definition of reality. It’s like if I had to have my arm amputated and then someone came up to me and said “you’ll always have two arms, you were born with them and you’ll die with them”.

I’ve heard and thought a lot about gender abolition but it seems to me that its proponents expect that like the state, gendered differences will just disappear over time. But I don’t want that to happen. If the binary is done away with I don’t want gender to disappear I want it to flourish! Because gender is beautiful, men are beautiful, women are beautiful, and everyone in between or outwith are beautiful. On the other hand, me and you don’t need to be men, or women, or call ourselves non-binary to be beautiful. Being trans is about cultivating your own beauty and your own identity. When cissiety demands that the only identity and presentation we’re allowed is one that corresponds to what they decided was between our legs when we were born, why give ourselves only one other choice?

I don’t really know how to end this piece because I wrote one half of it one day and the other half a couple of weeks later. At the very least I’m glad I can attribute my peace with not necessarily being a woman but a femme to Elliot Page, and not my rotten bastard mother.