Thank you for bringing attention to this, Matt. I’ve been following WOLF and talking about this issue online for over a year…and it’s just maddening how dismissive and nonchalant everyone is about this situation.
If you take into account the *staggering* percentage of female inmates who have suffered sexual and domestic abuse…who are often there *because* of their abuse…it’s clear that we are forcing cruel and unusual punishment on the most vulnerable, most abused population in our country.
As a woman, nothing has ever made me feel sadder, more helpless, or more hopeless than this issue. It tells you everything you need to know about how our society fails to value women.
Perfectly said. Many thanks to Matt for moving this issue front and center. The feminists working on this issue are so marginalized, they can't get any media traction at all. The issue is horrific. It makes Lia Thomas in the ladies' lane look like a dumb joke.
Now that our government has erased the definition of woman, it's open season on the most marginalized, vulnerable females in America. Imagine wondering every day if you're going to be awakened in the middle of the night with your cellmate raping you.
How many ways do we intend to punish incarcerated women?
Exactly right, Beeswax. The Chase Strange/ACLU throws real flesh and blood women under the bus so that violent, mentally ill, male predators can get their rocks off. It's disgusting and beyond belief. By the way, it was a $15 million donation to the ACLU from a medical industrial complex billionaire named Jon Stryker that sealed the deal on the capture of the ACLU by the "trans" crazies.
Today, Kelly Jay Keen (women's rights activists in UK) held a speaker's corner in Bristol, and a LOT of violent men showed up to try to drown out the women and intimidate and abuse them. It was pretty bad. Lots of the men were Antifa and had their faces covered (cowards) and used a bullhorn to yell obscenities at women the whole time, then followed them when they left the venue, continuing the abuse. The police did nothing.
Let us not forget the $4 million that Gilead donated to 'trans communities' a couple of years ago (you can google it, not at all hard to find - they were very proud of it).
Yes. The medical industrial complex pushes the "trans" nonsense because it's good for their bottom line. Every child or young adult who is brainwashed into believing they're "trans" becomes a lifelong patient to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenues.
Yes, Lis. When you follow the money, it all makes sense. And Jennifer Bilek of the amazing 11th Hour Blog has followed the money. So if you'd like full story, you can read about all the "trans" billionaires like "Jennifer" Pritzker, and "Martine" Rothblatt who use their vast fortunes to capture every institution: schools, universities, medical societies, the mainstream media, and government. They seek to normalize the perverse, destroy the next generation of girls and boys, and abolish the sex based rights of women. They can be stopped, and they must be stopped. https://www.the11thhourblog.com/
That's because people feel they can still play dumb speaking out about L. Thomas given he's built like a truck next to the female swimmers. The men and women in prisons are out of sight and out of mind. Without visuals to show clearly how dumb this all is, people don't dare to speak up less they be branded "transphobic". These days people have gotten so dumb you have to literally draw pictures.
Also these woke progressives pretty much have their heads stuck in the sand when it comes to trans issues. Thomas is literally competing against female swimmers. In prisons, the wokes want to stick to the belief that everyone will act and behave accordingly and no transwomen should be physically harming female prisoners. It's the same as their dumb argument how it's no one's business what's between peoples legs in bathrooms. Just go in there and do your business. As if people raising concerns are concerned about sex organs, when the real concern is men who would commit lewd to dangerous acts toward women and girls.
He will be (and is) attacked by the trans mob which always demands the stoning of the heretic, and atonement. I do not think Matt will comply. That's why he's on substack and not Rolling Stone so much any more. I have a LOT of respect for that. I watch other people cave for heresy accusations and it's so cringeworthy.
There are 2 reasons Lia got more attention. One is just the simple absurdity of seeing a guy try to dress up in a women’s swim suit with his male package bulging out. It’s just so over the top ridiculous. Two is that female athletes, current and former, are much louder about this issue.
As a former elite swimmer, with an athletic daughter who now swims, it was one place I could demand to be heard. Athletics create strong women, and many of us are conservative and not afraid of cancel culture, but the reality is our voices carry the most weight where we’ve earned the respect - in the sports world. I’ve earned respect from USA Swimming. I’ve earned a right to be heard. My kids haven’t ever stepped foot in a public school (they are in private), we have country club memberships so we don’t exactly utilize a lot of public amenities in our city, I left a very successful career opting to work part time so I could hang out with my kids more. Most of the places my life exist don’t create a platform for being heard, and I’m not giving up time with my kids to go be some raging activists, except sports.
All of it is cruel though. A naked and erect convicted sex offender walking around in front of young Black girls, minors, in a CA spa didn’t cause outrage among white liberals - the moms reporting it got attacked by a bunch of white liberals, physically in some cases. UPenn, and bunch of mostly white liberals, silenced the female swimmers who were humiliated in the pool then had to share a locker room where their ex-boyfriend “Lia” enjoyed prancing around naked. Women’s prisons are perhaps the cruelest of all of this, but in the end, white liberal women have never cared about poor women with pigment in their skin. This is no shock.
Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s white liberal “feminist” women demanded “equal pay for equal” work in factories - and tens of thousands of women lost their ability to help provide for their families because the biological truth is that few women can lug something weighing 50 pounds around than men. The factory owners got tired of the harassment from “feminists” activists for having different jobs specifically for women acknowledging the physiological difference in the sexes, so they eliminated the positions and many women weren’t physically capable of the new job descriptions.
My grandmother was a pour union organizer at the time. There is no single group she hates more than “feminists.” It was feminists attempts to claim equality= sameness of the sexes that laid the groundwork for gender ideology. While I have moderate to left leaning social values, I have never supported groups detached from reality, which the entire trans movement is dependent upon, and honestly so are many feminist movements.
I am all for accommodating people born with rare deformities of the sex chromosomes or genitals. Still, I refuse to call a delusional man with a functioning penis a “woman” - men have no right to my immutable biological identity. Those that think they do lack any morality as they openly advocating child genital mutilation and for male sex offenders to have free reign in women’s prisons. The whole thing is a joke - these people can’t even define the word woman.
I am definitely a classic liberal. I'll entertain new ideas, seek progress, and genuinely enjoy different people. I am also classic liberal in the sense the goal, both ideologically and pragmatically, is to judge policies and ideas based on their actual outcomes, and to seek objective truth. The best ideas should be able to withstand scrutiny and produce good outcomes. Failing either indicates the idea is crappy, most especially failing the latter. A great policy in outcomes outweighs a great policy in words. Socialism sounds great but fails miserably in outcomes. Libertarian economic policy sounds great but likewise fails in outcomes (the central control becomes corporate, rather than government, but both stink as central control always creates devastating results for regular people). I have nothing in common with modern leftists or the self-proclaimed "progressives" who in reality embody regressivity.
Thank you that your awareness of those of us born as sarisim (ancient Hebrew name) - I got booted from an intersex forum for asking if there was room for someone who equates trans surgery with any other elective plastic surgeries. The moral laws from my bloodline religion forbid castration on animals, never mind surgeries on healthy sex organs (I suppose temporarily in a lesser way: circumcision, which I also oppose), and I consider sexes in a way Jesus described in Matt 19. The answer was no, we support "bodily autonomy" and trans is us, and surgeries are miracles of modern medicine. Maybe because the surgeons practiced on people born like me on their way to that career with them.
You’re welcome. And truthfully I think that’s why FINA’s swimming rules were written as they were. I don’t think it’s to encourage child gender transitions, but to remain the inclusive sport that recognizes some males with y-chromosomes, though rare, will also never go through male puberty and should compete with more like bodied peers. I am so very proud of my sport especially after spending up to 20 hours a week for close to 15 years in a pool. I’ve been blasting people on DW who don’t realize AIS is real, and people are human beings who deserve compassion and understanding for things beyond their control. I am sorry a bunch of social activists have co-opted a very real birth difference to push a destructive ideology that has nothing to do with it.
Because it could blow my anonymity, I won’t say exactly what difference my son was born with, but it’s not related to sex differences. It’s the equivalent of being born without a hand. Anyone born without a hand should be given free space to chose to get a prosthetic hand or not, accommodated to participate in sports if they can either way. But, the fact that people are rarely born without a hand is no justification to push an ideology that claims kids born with hands they just might not like, fleeting or otherwise, should have the only real hands they will ever have chopped off simply because they don’t like their hands (or somebody tells them they have the wrong hands for their body so they start disliking them as teenagers). I’m shocked that people seem incapable of understanding the difference.
Thank you for putting words to the reality. Lia Thomas can never imagine living in your body or mine, and I’m tired of him pretending he is even capable of understanding what living in either of our bodies would be like, because he will simply never know, in the same way we will never know what it’s like to live in his.
It's all absolutely maddening. I feel exactly the same as you: helpless and hopeless.
I know it's hyperbolic, but it increasingly feels as if the attitude is that raping women is fine so long as the rapist is some kind of trans or non-binary gender. In fact, if you're against trans and NB people coercing women into sex, you're a bigot.
You're not far off. For years "lesbian" trans "women" have been loudly denouncing the supposed bigotry of actual lesbians who refuse sex with their "female" penises, trying to pressure and shame them into compliance [EDIT: including with threats of assault, rape, and death]. And the so-called "progressive" Left claims those narcissistic men are the class needing protections. It boggles the mind.
That was what initially made me think that something was off about the whole thing some years ago: the declaration that lesbians need to be open to sex with transwomen who have penises, and the derision of them as "vagina fetishists" and transphobes if they don't want to. The sense of something being very obviously wrong intensified after a bizarre conversation with someone who insisted that sexual orientation has nothing to do with genitalia, because attraction usually happens before you know what a person's genitals are. Therefore, any preference that links genitalia to gender is socially constructed and subject to implicit bias (nevermind that, the vast majority of the time, the outward presentation does in fact match the genitalia, because /biological men and women look different from each other/. Even the butchest of butch lesbians still look like women).
It seems so obvious that this is the work of bad actors trying to justify and normalize sexually manipulative and predatory behavior, and yet there's a whole arm of the woke apparatus devoted to propping it up. And what's bizarre is that it coincides with absolute hysteria over cis men: every last one of them has an outsized amount of power, and if we say no to them, they'll kill us (or they'll be upset and say mean things, which I've been told is just as bad). What is the source of the disconnect? What makes the same people who think Aziz Ansari is a hardened predator look the other way when a girl gets raped in a school bathroom by a genderqueer student?
I think you are asking all the right (read: intelligent/rational) questions. If you haven't already found Jennifer Bilek's 11th Hour Blog, which is a deep dive into the the money behind the movement, I HIGHLY recommend it. Here are a few links providing info that pulls back the curtain on the men orchestrating this debacle:
Same. I've been researching and reading a lot of what Leah posted for years. And it is mind-boggling. Not at all organic, but something really sinister cooked up and programmed for years. LOTS of $$ behind it. As I mentioned elsewhere up here, Gilead donated $4 million to the 'trans causes' a couple of years ago. Now, why would they do that? We know they don't just give money away, being uber-profit driven and all. It was an investment. That's why. The trans agenda creates patients for life, this is a big boon for big pharma and the medical industrial complex.
Thank you thank you thank you for posting these. I've been trying to get people to read Bilek for years. She resides politically on the left; however, most of the places (mainstream) she's had to publish have been right-leaning so that means the lefties can call her a Trumper and be done with it.
Yup. It's frustrating. I share her name in every Substack comment section I can when the topic is trans ideology. This is the first time I've shared links to specific articles and it seems to be more helpful than just mentioning her work. Another outstanding article I often share is this piece that is not specifically about trans ideology, but explains how NGOs are used by billionaires to push agendas, which definitely ties into how fast and far trans orthodoxy spread into our culture. It's a long read but eye-opening: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/29/the-billionaire-takeover-of-civil-society/
These articles are eye popping. Might I suggest that you repost as your own comment so more readers might see them. I've bookmarked them all to share with others. Thanks for posting.
The burden of having all that undeserved "power" must be what's weighing men down to such alarming levels of educational failure, drug addiction, suicide, social withdrawal. Of course those are just perks of the fucking Patriarchy to some, I suppose.
I've often heard it said that that's all the result of toxic masculinity, which ultimately means it's men using their own privilege to hurt themselves. It's Kafkaesque.
I worry for young men. We are very obviously failing them.
"What makes the same people who think Aziz Ansari is a hardened predator look the other way when a girl gets raped in a school bathroom by a genderqueer student?"
Madness, insanity, hysteria, fear, and good ol fashioned idiocy.
My mind, admittedly feeble as it is, is boggled. The argument seems to amount to "You should have sex with me because I say you should. I claim that this is society's norm."
Amen, because to me, it looks like a bizarre form of genocide.
When women observing that men were men and women were women started being attacked as TERFs, I started investigating a little, and the "Radical Feminists", while they often indulged in misandrist hatred, weren't wrong in this case. Lesbians are being erased by the Trans Activist arguments.
After seeing how horribly they've been treated by the bandwagon-jumping, Two-Minute-Hate-indulging, irrational part of the "woke" side, I have considerable sympathy, and admiration for their ability to think straight and hold their ground, man-haters or not.
I also have to feel some sympathy for the wokies, many of whom have tried to maintain a rational undergirding for their positions. I get the impression a lot of them are being dragged along in this insanity and cruelty, because the Trans Activists have hijacked the tools and thought processes of identity politics.
Which is why when right-winger groups call them “groomers” it freaks them out because they’re using the language of “sexual harassment” code against them
I read about this on the detrans subreddit. TERF could easily be a weapon that was entirely created to bludgeon gay women into sex and bludgeon straight women into submission on the subject. It’s also interesting how many people think using a slur like that is acceptable punishment for anything. Men, in the states anyway, have fetishized lesbian sex for decades. And incels advocate any strategy to get sex. Many incels think women should not be allowed by society to decide who they have sex with. Some might be members of the Texas Legislature and the supreme court.
Unherd had a great article on this!!! It’s so sad. It’s misogynistic. Telling lesbians it’s “different” to have a “trans woman’s” penis in them than a man’s is like like claiming stairs and steps are totally different ways to go up a floor. Gay men laugh off the demand to sleep with chics that think they are dudes, but lesbians fear being called a bigot and get bullied constantly. Sad.
<sarcasm>Rape is a mere trifle. Sort of like littering. Kicking Will Thomas off the UPenn women's swim team is worse than genocide. You have to get your priorities straight.</sarcasm>
Lesbians are being targeted like nobody's business. One would almost think there is a new male-based coordinated effort to force them to have sex with men. I've been working on this stuff for 5+ years, and it just gets worse and worse. The bottom line is though, it's just more subversion of women by men, they just got real creative about how they do it.
The assault on lesbians isn't limited to demanding that they have sex with men ('trans men'). Perhaps worse, is the effort to wipe out the next generation of lesbians by having them 'transition' to boys/men. Most (but not all) gender dysphoric girls used to grow up to become lesbian women. Historically, they were told 'you are gender non-conforming girl'. Now they are told 'you are actually a boy in a girls body'. This is not progress in my opinion.
No, it's regressive and homophobic. A good deal of the LGB community is figuring this out - or have done so a long time ago. But the political ideology makes it difficult. It's really a terrible situation for them, after all the progress they made.
I was gender dysphoria as a little kid. Most grow up to be cisgender completely straight adult women like me. The rate that turn out to be lesbians, historically, is higher than the general population - about double - but still a minority.
Lesbians and autistic girls are the #1 target of gender ideology. Misogynistic and sad.
This: "Or, as one “trans lesbian” put it: “Being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts.” WTF?
My impression is that you are correct. In real life, the male fantasy view of lesbians falls apart. However, the male fantasy view dominates online, books, etc.
You could not be more right. I would change your statement a bit. I would say "tells you everything you need to know about how our society fails to value low-status women.".
This is a super snowflake response. Your first.post was good. I am a man, currently drowning in child support debt to an ex wife who abused *me.* Life is hard for everyone, buy a helmet.
"Snowflake" is a dumb word and not descriptive of me in the least. Also an ironic insult from someone whining about financially supporting his own kids.
(This from a second wife to a guy who also left an abusive relationship and brought significant CS debt to our marriage...debt that I often paid when he was unable to do so.)
No child support debt even remotely compares to the way women of all stripes are treated and dismissed in their day-to-day lives, from the moment they can walk to the moment they draw their last breath.
I say this as someone who has actually experienced both kinds of hardship...child support debt and living as a woman. At least with the child support debt, there was a definitive end in sight.
It astonishes me how over and over again, half a century since Gloria S started Ms. magazine how tough it is for women to this day. (Nahhh...I ain't one of those 'male feminists'; I'm a Dad to 3 daughters)
Yes, and if we keep saying over and over - "If you have a penis you are a male human being; if you have a uterus and other lady parts, you are a female." PERIOD.
And, NO, you may not pretend otherwise, no matter how much you whine and demand taxpayers pay for your sex changes.
We just need to keep saying this as our complete response to the poor creatures who've had too much to Estrogen-imitating chemicals while in utero or later by pesticides, industrial chemicals, soft plastics, etc.
If would-be boy fetuses do not get the exact right amount of the male hormones Testosterone and Progesterone and, instead, get too much exposure to the female hormone Estrogen, they may well be damaged as fully human male........but that is no excuse for disgusting, repulsive behavior, trying to inculcate our children with their twisted ideas.
...exactly so. I’ve never understood the “transitioning “males that decide to keep the penis. If they truly feel they are a woman trapped in the wrong body, why are you not getting rid of the organ that marks you as male?
Because they still enjoy sticking said penis inside women's vaginas; they just prefer to self-ID as well-hung lesbians when they do it, as opposed to, y'know, straight dudes.
Since persons with gender dysphoria have existed long prior to estrogen imitating chemicals, industrial chemicals and pesticides these are unlikely to be the cause.
As beaten down as many women (and men) are, they are still elaborately privileged compared to children. (Turns out that having rights is pretty goddamn important. Huh!) Children will not be “ripe for the pickin’” AFTER anything: they are and have been sitting ducks forever, which makes childhood an extended ordeal, and everyone who gets to 18 years-old a survivor.
When kids do make it to 18, it's usually because they had a mother protecting them, is my point. Women are like mama bears. At least the healthy ones, who have not succumbed to Transhausen by Proxy insanity. Those will offer their kids right up for indoctrination and sterilization, all for social credit.
In a great many of the large number of childhood stories I've heard, mothers were NOT healthy. They were rage-a-holic, abusive tyrants. Yes, many mothers are deeply attached to their children, but many were and are not. Any parent, male or female, who is emotionally healthy is going to be protective of their child. We drastically underestimate the amount of anger among American women because that anger, in general, is not public, it's private. Their children are the objects of that anger, and a society that doesn't speak meaningfully or helpfully about childhood chooses to believe that men are angry and women are nurturing. It's just not that simple.
Yes I don't think it's simple. As I mention, that Transhausen by Proxy behavior itself is complex, and then our society/culture really does support violence against kids (e.g., spanking, hittting, emotional torture, emotional blackmail, etc). And of course our society is horribly narcissistic, so rewards that behavior. Has to be incredibly hard for kids to get a grasp on 'normality'. Oh and then let's throw in the horrible results of the pornhub availability for young kids!
Indeed! My job has been to protect my children, provide the structure and guardrails and in my house...faith. Without it, what's the point of living through this nonsense?!
That’s backwards - they are taking the children out the worst to make it easier to take us out. Kindergarten teachers across the country are talking to students about their genitals and where they masturbate. That is cruel. It’s grooming. It’s incredible damaging. It destroys the next generation of women and men.
eh, it looks like from reading the articles from the 11th hour blog, (posted by another commenter) that this has been a widespread, long term movement by the medical industrial complex, big tech, investors like Black Rock to make as much money as possible, and even our government (DARPA). I'd suggest reading the articles.....I'm pretty gobsmacked at the moment.
Good suggestion. This has been almost overwhelming . "gobsmacked" is good. "Stunned". Even "depressed", a little. (and thanx to all for the links. eye-opening.)
Still would quibble with the suggestion that this is "societal" in some grand way. Nobody wants this, except for some kind of...cabal? This isn't an outgrowth of the "normal" or "historical" abuse of women by men.
But I'm not sure that's the most important point anyway. I'd even venture to say this is unprecedented in the way it combines individual perfidy and the abuse of power/wealth. It 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑜𝑙𝑣𝑒𝑠 sex and gender roles, but I'm not convinced the evil aspect derives from them. This is just bad humans being bad.
Might help if more women stepped forward to fight against this kind of madness. When they first started putting biological males in women's restrooms I heard barely a peep. And what I did hear was mainly SJW virtue signaling and name-calling.
Critiques of trans ideology in relation to women have been thoroughly censored in the mainstream press for many years, and anyone who writes or talks about it is immediately cancelled, right up to the present minute. Women have been working to bring this issue to the fore for many years. For instance, Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, editor of Feminist Current, was banned from Twitter for life for refusing to refer to men as "she." The feminist activists Matt highlights in his articles on this topic are not newbies, they've been around for a long time, but for all the media attention they've received they might as well be living on a desert island. This is part of what makes Matt's current reporting so significant.
A lot of women have been trying, for many years. They've been dismissed as TERFs and generally denied a platform (the professional media declines to publish their work; social media censors and bans them. As you can see from Matt's reporting, they also, sometimes, lose their jobs). J.K. Rowling managed to break through only because she was famous enough that she couldn't be outright silenced, and the amount of energy that's been expended trying to cancel her and retroactively paint 'Harry Potter' as one big long bigoted screed speaks volumes.
That said, if you dig a bit, you'll find the women trying to fight it. It's getting harder to bury them over time.
The 2 groups that first noticed these problems ironically have very little in common with each other: radfems and gymbros.
Radfems noticed that female-only spaces were being obliterated, and gymbros noticed some very sketchy claims circulating about testosterone and about how gender self-ID could somehow supercede biology in athletic competitions without creating any inherent unfairness.
Did you read the article at all? WoLF IS WOMEN. So are the many other organizations, volunteers, allies, etc. that have been fighting this for 5 years. That being said, why aren't you asking men to step up? They are the ones CAUSING the problem. Jesus.
If you read my post again for clarity you will notice that I did not say it might help if SOME women stepped forward, I said it might help if MORE women stepped forward. Obviously there are some women speaking out; yes, that is what the article is about. But I am telling you my personal experience: all the women in my circle have either been silent about these insane develpments or supportive of them. And this tracks with polls, which show, for instance, that women disproportionately support biologically male athletes competing in women's sports, and women disproportionately support having biological men in women's restrooms.
I read it perfectly clearly. You asked why more women don't step forward, now you are telling us what we already know, that most women follow the establishment garbage about 'trans' 'women' and think they are harmless and invite them into our spaces. You're not telling me anything I don't already know.
"If there’s a better illustration of the upside-down state of politics in 2022 America, it’s a feminist activist group forced to seek cyber-refuge in a Christian fundraising company."
Please do. They have taken on a Herculean task, all out of a sense that someone needs to listen to women and stop the trans scourge attacks on us & children.
"... consider whether the continuation of liberal civil society rests on a coalition of which Christians are an important part."
Yes. We too often forget that Christians and Christianity were at the core of the abolitionist, woman's suffrage, and Civil Rights movements, just to name a few.
There are so many different Christian denominations that it is impossible to generalize. Some are small minded, ignorant and bigoted, and some are accepting, compassionate and true to Jesus' principles.
XX chromosomes and the nature given ability to give birth to other human beings equals a woman. How something this fundamental has been high jacked and distorted is beyond me. People with XY chromosomes are not female.
And you've hit on the problem. Both sides in this debate are conflating gender and sex. Sex is immutable. You would have to go back to fertilization of the egg to change an XX to an XY, or vice versa. Gender is social and psychological. In essence, it is whatever we decide it is as a society.
What really bothers me about this whole thing is that we fought to blend the "genders." Male or female, we decided, they don't have to have fixed roles, fixed characteristics, etc. Females can work outside the home and fight on the front lines. Males can stay home and raise kids and become interior decorators. Other than biologically fixed characteristics (wombs and penises, so the potential to carry a child or not), everything else was up for grab. This whole thing has set that back. It's like were essentializing gender again, returning it to stereotypes, such as if you like dresses, you must be "female," rather than a male/a man who likes dresses. If you are a woman and can't stand a dress (like me), you must be a man trapped in an XX frame. It's frankly insulting.
I don't disagree. We'd be foolish to suggest that the biological does not play a role. The point is that *society* decides, which means that we can *decide* that this has gone too far.
We call those sex-linked behaviors in other animals. If we'd stuck to that and stopped trying to divorce humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom we might not be where we are now.
that persistent temptation to "divorce humanity" from nature is extremely destructive. It was a big factor in our environmental catastrophe, too.
Personally, I trace it back to Christianity, but maybe that's just me. The philosophical division between "mind" and "body" i spart of it, too. They aren't actually separable; when you try, you wind up dead.
I agree, it is partly the disconnect from nature, but I also think there is an intention to force that perceptual gap wider with the corruption of language. Being forced to call things they aren't is an assault on personal and cultural sanity.
Well, a big part of the problem is that "society" (i.e. the mass of people half of whom are, by definition, of below average intelligence) seems to want 0/1, black/white, on/off binary for anything that has two poles.
Men are men...and range in nature from violent, to delicate, rational, self-indulgent, to artistic, to emotional, to stoic, and on and on and all complex combinations thereof.
And women are women, and range in nature and behavior from loving, nurturing, competitive, perceptive, active, creative, vicious and on and on with all the complex combinations thereof and both sexes gender expression also informed by the time, place and culture they live in.
It's sure as fuck not "Men are A and Women are B" wrt ANYTHING. But somehow we can't accept that and still accept that "Yes, men and women are different, in the aggregate." Nope. Too complicated.
I agree with you on the broad strokes, but I'd like to suggest that gender is not *only* social and psychological; it is also physical. To suggest that not only the way gender has developed historically but also how it continues to evolve today is not heavily influenced by biology is to miss a significant part of gender. Intellectually, we can draw distinctions between them as separate entities, but they are not entirely separate.
In other animals we would call that "sex-linked behavior" not gender because it's not culturally relative, it's species specific. E.g., which bird, male or female, builds the nest depends on species but we're not going to say it's because of social pressure.
Gender is an incredibly stupid term. It is conceptually about stereotypes and it's ridiculous to have it have conflated with any biological concept. Even historically it combines species specific evolutionary behaviors and ridiculous social mores. We're animals, the scientific terms are also appropriate for us. Gender includes everything associated with being a man or a woman and is relative to time and culture, not immutably a part of us as instinct as you would describe it with any other species. Women are probably more nurturing because of evolutionary reasons related to hormones and caring for offspring but that's behavior you can find in dogs, which would be sex-linked behavior. What you're not going to find is the preference for certain colors or wearing dresses, that's gender.
That’s a really good term, “sex-linked behavior.” You know, at some point the devotees of the brave new world of limitless human alternatives are going to have to consider whether we’re a really special kind of animal. Like maybe an “exceptional” one. Which might lead them to ponder anew whether we are or are not part of the rest of the world’s evolutionary line. They’re anti-science anyway, so might as well .
They're already there when it comes to brain development. Every other animal has biological roots for their temperaments and behaviours, but for humans we're supposedly uniquely exempt, and everything we think and do is the result of social conditioning.
Blank-slatism is the cognitive science equivalent of creationism.
A while back it dawned on me that men are jealous of women's ability to bear, birth and nurse babies and that this jealousy probably goes back to our earliest years as human beings. At some point, men realized that human families did not require male participation beyond protection and service. This could account for the multitude of compensatory laws and customs devised by our species ever since to define women as "secondary" humans, little more than chattel, the property of males. This basic physical inequality and consequent jealousy could account for the commonly observed male dislike of women. That dislike comes across quite convincingly in the smirking expressions on trans-female athletes as they accept their first-place awards. Freud, with his "penis envy" had it so backwards.
I think the native Americans had the right idea in raising male children to be proud and efficient braves devoted to protection of the tribe. The male ego needs continuous encouragement and support to rise above destructiveness.
It's not a small thing to provide "protection and service." It's actually a massive thing to be the half of the species that is expected always to die for the other half when circumstances necessitating that choice come around. This implies that men don't care on average if their own offspring survive of which there is no proof at all. If that was the case we wouldn't make it as a species because early humans and proto humans were such small family groups with such useless infants that stayed useless for so long that without males to go out and get food we wouldn't have made it past species bottle necks.
That's also a gross over simplification of the 500+ groups of indigenous Americans across thousands of years. Plenty of those groups just randomly slaughtered. Some existed entirely by theft and murder, some were matriarchies, some had end stages that were a lot like the circumstances that led to the French revolution where the ruling class treated 90% of their people like actual animals. Many groups took slaves, had different laws for women, owned not only their women and children but any they could capture in raids, etc. The "proud brave" is a trope, not a reality. Plenty of the groups were against homosexuality and made gay men a lower class of person than straight men, while basically requiring lesbians be raped forever because being unmarried as a woman was not allowed. Plenty of European groups gave equal rights to women far before feminism was conceptualized, but everywhere has at some point involved owning women as chattel to produce labor, including indigenous Americans. This is all pre-colonial. You're romanticizing them, they were still human and humans are often terrible to each other.
When I was in college in the late mid-90s I was introduced to the idea that sex is biological and gender is social, meaning that gender is simply the roles and characteristics that society assigns to a particular sex. In other words, the gender of "woman" was seen as the nurturer and the homemakers, whereas the gender of "man" was seen as the provider and the protector. The importance of distinguishing between sex and gender comes in allowing people to "break" gender norms. Women can look after men, men can be homemakers, women can lead, men can follow . . . in fact, we were coming to a point where the only thing "men" couldn't do was actually have the baby because, well, sex. Biology dictates that males can't carry babies nor nurse them.
So separating sex and gender, understanding that one is biology and one is psychology/sociology/tradition, were important for liberating women in even the most basic of ways. And we were working toward a society where society accepted that the only differences in gender were those that were inherently biological, so males were physically stronger while women were capable of child bearing and feeding. Which kind of goes to your point, I think.
But what happened was that now we have "essentialized" gender, so all those things women/females fought for (freedom to both take their place among men/males intellectually, legally, and financially because we realized that limits on women's rights were due to ideas about gender with no actual basis in biology *and* freedom to have their own physical spaces because we recognized that women physically could not compete against men) are being cast aside by very surface-level and petty ideas about gender while completely ignoring sex, or the biology of being either XX or XY. It's a very weird time.
~60 years ago. Perhaps even further depending on what crazy shit John Money was doing. Either way when you use "sex" you're using a biological term that is applicable to all sexual reproducing species. If people weren't so afraid of the word it'd be easier. This is a mixed bag of bullshit from the left and right that got us here.
Separating sex and gender is a new thing put forth by the gender ideologues. I am not going to do so and reify this alleged difference. Everyone has a sex. The rest is personality. There is no inherent "gender."
It's not only insulting, it's actively dangerous: kids are being told they need drugs and surgery to "correct" their bodies. This is happening in every school in the US.
Thank you for the discussion of sex and gender. One of the many things that are odd, if not downright wrong, about this country, is the Congressional approval of a female candidate for the Supreme Court who refused to define “woman.” As they say, WTF!
I am exhausted with the comments and discussions of “trans” people. Life was simpler when there was no gender that differed from sex. Is this happening to us because we are essentially Christian and uncomfortable with the need to talk with our children about sexual intercourse? Do other religions have similar experiences?
It was easier. I don't necessarily think it was "right." But at the same time, what we're dong now with sexualizing children and reducing gender to stereotypes is not right either. I have no problem with "trans" people. I have problems with people who want to go beyond acceptance (which most people "accept" trans people) to glorification or elevation or the ridiculous, like making an equivalency between a transwoman who has had the reassignment surgery, which shows commitment, agree with it or not, and men who just want to get out of male prisons and into a population they can abuse or sports where the males' advantage is ignored and women are forced to compete on an unequal playing field. That's when I have a problem.
This is an important point because if it is not recognized, the backlash will pitch us back to a 1950s conception of gender, which some of us have spent a lifetime trying to demolish. The assignment of certain nonphysical human characteristics to one sex or the other (the funniest one of all: “Wonen are emotional, men are rational” 😂🤣😂🤣😂) is the legacy of survival conditions (underpopulation, threat of starvation, heavy labor, hand-to-hand combat) that no longer exist. To survive now we need access to all our human capacities that at most are only filtered through, colored by, sex, the experience of living in a different kind of body (the rigidity of sex stereotypes doesn’t allow for individual differences that are even greater). It will be tragic if two groups of extremists conspire to destroy this necessary adaptation.
I read a fiction book a while back that is revealing of this mindset, Christina Henry's The Horseman. I love Christina Henry. She does dark retellings of fairy tales, and that book centered on the Sleepy Hollow tale. The main character was supposed to be a transman, a female who wanted everybody around her to recognize her as a man. "Pronouns" were a big deal. Why? Well, because she wanted to be taken seriously and be involved in the men's world and wear men's clothing. I read it and afterward I thought, "How far back have we gone when the only way to be a 'strong woman' is to become a man? And that the problem here wasn't how *women* were viewed and hobbled by society but that a strong *woman* wasn't considered a *man*." The message was frankly disturbing.
You move into a neighborhood and meet the stay-at-home mom next door. She's in a heterosexual relationship with a man and they have two kids that look a lot like them. She performs the typical motherly roles, works inside the house, homeschools the kids, cooks, cleans, etc. You know this couple for years and then one day you find out she's actually a man who had gender reassignment surgery long ago, and the kids are adopted, and she actually has XY chromosomes and you didn't know differently. Does that make her no longer a woman though that's what you've known her as for years? She isn't female, and she never will be. But is she a man? Modern society would suggest not. The accepted reality, how everyone has been treating her, is as a woman.
That's why gender is messy and why your equation is tricky. She took on all the "feminine" roles and the "feminine" phenotype. So she is, by most conclusions, a woman. To suggest differently for most purposes strikes me as more ideology driven than an actual conclusion based on what we can observe about modern American society.
That's a man. To suggest that "man" and "woman" aren't defined by sex vs stereotypes. What does it mean "for most purposes"? The only purpose of male and female are contribution in reproduction. There is no surgery that can change this.
I feel also that people who make this argument haven't met many trans people. You know almost immediately when someone is not the sex they are attempting to be read as. It is a courtesy to go along with this. It is such a stretch to say it would take years to notice. By definition this is a homosexual couple because they are the same sex, which is where we run into the gay erasure problem of this whole movement. This is a working dad and a stay at home dad, no female parent involved after birth.
Think also, what does it mean to be treated "as a woman"?
I am so tired of reducing the idea of "masculine" and "feminine" to reproduction. Humans are sentient. We are not flowers and birds. So yes historically the fact that women can only have one child every nine months and must have the biology to carry said children meant that they were safest staying near home, gathering and being protected, and men could have up to 365 children a year, and therefore were more expendable and took on the more dangerous jobs (say hunting) meant that the stronger men and the more nurturing women survived to pass on their genetics, and over time those genes contributed to the dimorphic nature of our species and the roles they came to play. But one would have hoped we have developed past the caveman days (which even in cave man days, females and males defied the gender stereotypes, but I digress). So while sex may be the basis for our ideas of gender, sex and gender are not synonymous as is evidenced by the fact that we have both concepts.
If you did not know that Caitlin Jenner was once Bruce Jenner, you would think she was just a very masculine looking woman. I've met women that I've known are female, but they had very little bust, straight lines, and deep voices. They could easily have passed as men. And down through history, it has at times been quite common for women/females to pass as men to access the same rights. Why? Because the difference between being able to own property and not was based on the gender *others* perceived you to be. The difference between being allowed to walk unescorted in public was based on the gender *others* perceived you to be. Gender is about *perception.* *Perception* is based on stereotypes. We assume, based on a combination of stereotypes and phenotypical characteristics, what gender a person is. And you don't have to "meet" a bunch of transpeople. You just have to meet a few people that you spend time "guessing" their sex to see how much gender is a perception.
Does that mean that Lia Thomas should be allowed to compete on a "women's" team? Not if you decide the "women's team" was designed to allow *females* a level playing field against each other and not against *males,* which Lia Thomas is and always will be. Should someone be able to put on a dress and be moved from a man's prison to a women's prison? Not if you decide "women's prison" was designed as a safe space for biologically weaker females to be safe from potentially predatory males. Those are things society has tacitly agreed: that in certain cases females need to be protected and separated from males. But society has also tacitly agreed that as long as someone looks and acts like a woman, they are a woman. Same with a man. We don't go checking people's privates because we have decided that "sex" does not matter for most purposes and people can be who they want. It's only when either side starts making a big deal about it that any of those agreements comes into question, and then when people become disingenuous (suggesting that either gender is the same as sex or not based on sex at all) that things get crazy, because neither is true in practice.
I said nothing about "masculine" and "feminine" being reduced to reproduction, that is what male/man and female/woman are, wholly based on reproductive role. Those are the necessary and sufficient conditions to be labeled as such not the totality of a everything a person may be capable of. It's the bare minimum someone is capable of under usual conditions of development and there are consequences to biology as a result of that. If you attach any other meaning to what being a man or a woman is then that's cultural and probably a stereotype. A man cannot be a mom and a woman cannot be a dad. A man in a dress is not a mother, because mother is "female parent." Every animal that comes from sexual mating has a female parent and a male parent, a mother and a father, a dam and sire. If a couple is gay or lesbian that is two dads or two moms, two male parents or two female parents.
Caitlynn Jenner looks and sounds like a man. If you see him move on video rather than posed and photoshopped he reads as a feminine man. If you hear his voice it reads male. So seriously, what is "treat as a woman" because he doesn't need a pap smear or a pregnancy test when he goes to the doctor. If he requests a same sex provider that's a man. He only now might need a mammogram because taking estrogen radically increases the incidence of breast cancer in men but they're not checking the silicon.
"But society has also tacitly agreed that as long as someone looks and acts like a woman, they are a woman." - not really. Most societies that designate a third category for people who don't fulfill expected cultural sex roles usually put feminine men above any women but below men because the roles are so strict that recognizing a failure to be conforming means you lose rights as a man. It is almost always only for men who want take a female role and the rare cultures that allow women equal status of men in the don't usually allow it full structure of the society. They're not on advisory councils full of men. Third categories almost only exist in cultures with strict sex divided roles that usually have religious consequences if they're not followed. The woman would still die in a menstrual hut but the man gets to be pretty. Digress all you want on caveman society, but there's nothing that will change the vulnerability and uselessness of infants and small children or the fact that women are/were tied to them for 2-3 years minimum until weaning is complete. That is not a gender role, that's a sex role based on the fact that we're the ones with developed mammary glands. In our societies being homosexual meant you could not get married everywhere, until 2010 in Washington DC and 2012 in the rest of the US, so no, they also weren't tacitly women even in a modern way because they weren't allowed to marry men unlike women. Anti sodomy laws are still on the books in the US, if Iran treated gay men as women then why don't all the women get fake breasts as a matter of course there? Because they're actually still treated as men.
"Woman" is adult human female not "anyone who participates in stereotypical culturally-specific female behaviors." Like I said, it's a courtesy to call a gay man with surgery in a dress "she" but it's not because people used to think that was actually a woman. We used to let him use our bathrooms because gay men are not generally known for raping women regardless of the probable outcomes of other types of assault. However, men with a cross dressing fetish have a ridiculously higher likelihood of being sex offenders and now they're legally allowed in too. Having one LGB night club in the area was actually pretty safe where no one cared much about bathrooms because men weren't interested in women until the fetish crowd tacked itself onto it.
I am so tired of people thinking that stating the simple fact that being a woman means you contribute eggs and being a man means you contribute sperm to reproduction, and that there are physiological consequences to those biological systems being in place, means literally anything else about what role someone should fulfill in society. YOU are now saying a stereotype is what makes someone a woman. Saying that being FEMALE is what makes someone a woman does not say anything else about that person. It doesn't make them bad at math or good at makeup. We don't go checking peoples genitals because we don't need to, despite what many people think, it's pretty easy to tell when a man or woman has entered a room. It matters in changing rooms, medicine, bathrooms, prisons, scholarships, women's orgs and position short lists, rape/dv shelters, maternity leave, birth classes, sports, sex segregated children's activities. Which incidentally are all the places men are now allowed because they say magic the magic words of "I identify as a woman." And even though genitals actually do matter in all those situations, in many places you legally can't say anything. Thus we have the WiSpa incident where a multiple time sex offender got his dick out in front of women and girls because no one could stop him at the door. So really, what do you think being treated as a woman is? Did you really think it was mostly about holding doors and using certain pronouns? Is that the sum of your life? "Acts like a woman." Please.
You are 99.99% (add some more 9s) right. A few XY persons are CAIS. They look like women and think like women. However, they can never have children. I would say that CAIS folks (it is very rare) are women and should be treated as women.
Thank you, Peter, for this truth on behalf those of us born with genetics and/or biology that doesn't neatly fit M or F. I think it's a vital message in this debate: many of us were the infant guinea pigs for the nation's best trans doctors. I wish they'd left well alone.
Our culture rushes to celebrate technology-altered bodies but ignores the history of un-consented trans whose surgeries and hormones often mean a lifetime of issues both physically and culturally
CAIS persons have a Y chromosome. However, it doesn't do them any good (for sports) because they can't use the androgens that their bodies produce. Earlier I stated the CAIS persons 'are women'. This is incorrect. They are not. However, the statement that they 'should be treated as women' stands. Treating them as men would be grossly unfair (to them). In a bygone era, this problem did not arise. CAIS persons were thought to be natal girls and treated as such. Some reports suggest that CAIS persons might gain a sporting advantage from height.
They are men with a disorder/disability, not women. Treat them as men with a disorder/disability that may need special accommodations as a man. That does not mean you just throw them in with the women. They have internal testes, testes = male. Probably shouldn't throw them into gen pop in a men's prison but if you let ANY MAN into a women's space based on whether or not HE LOOKS FEMALE ENOUGH then you open the door for ANY MAN who can pay for surgery. That's the problem.
K, Take a look at some photos of CAIS persons. Check out the YouTube videos by Benjamin Boyce (type Boyce CAIS into the YouTube search bar, watch the Claire Graham video). Genetically, CAIS persons are male. However, they are in almost all other respects female. Letting post-op men into women's prisons isn't really a problem. The problem is with intact men who just claim to be female so that they can abuse actual female prisoners (which has already happened).
They're still men with a disability not women. I'm pretty sure the person you're talking about on BB's channel actually lied about having CAIS, has PAIS and a lot of surgery, and if you see more pictures you see a major difference.
Your logic is really faulty. You cannot be "in almost all other respects" female because female is reproductive sex. If you have testes your reproductive sex is male as determined by your gamete potential. If you remove those testes you don't become female, you become a castrated male. There is no other aspect that makes someone male or female. External female genitalia does not make a person male or female it's just the most correlated indication that someone is male or female. So yes, letting post op men into women's prions is actually still a problem, because what you're setting as a standard is if you APPEAR female enough you get in. That's not the same as being actually female and is incredibly subjective. And also having your genitals cut off doesn't actually change the strength and safety imbalance and it is impossible to build genitals or change gamete production. An inverted penis is not a vagina, castrated men are men. By your logic cancer patients change sex if it affects their reproductive organs, that's not how biology works.
Yeah, that's true! But just thinking out loud now, variations in body shape and size are an occupartional hazard of competitive athletics, and swimming is one of those categories. What do we do with a person like Michael Phelps, with his famous wing span? Elite male swimmers half his size had to compete against him, knowing they didn't stand a chance. He was an outlier in terms of size, but also in terms of talent. Generally speaking, competitive athletes will gravitate towards a sport that their body type is best suited for but sometimes the superior biology of an opponent will just win out. But height isn't everything. Look at how tall and muscular Lia Thomas is. He still couldn't swim his way out of a paper bag when competing against other men.
As a rule, I'm completely opposed to allowing males to compete against females in any context. I'm even opposed to Caster Semenya competing in women's sports, because Semenya has XY chromosomes, and the Y is obviously expressed. Semenya is not CAIS. But CAIS strikes me as a very ambiguous intersex category in which an occasional superiority in height or strength might not make the individual a true outlier. Probably, for the sake of consistency, they should be banned from women's athletics, but I have experience some ambivalence saying that.
CAIS is an intersex condition in which the Y chromosome is present but is not expressed. “CAIS” stands for Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. In other words, these individuals are genetic males who lack male genitalia and appear as feminine as any XX woman you will ever see. They live as and identify as women, and their Y chromosome would not give them an unfair advantage in sports because they likely have never gone through male puberty and have no circulating testosterone (if the person was born with internal testes that are surgically removed).
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.
Men with PAIS have partial sensitivity, like Caster Semenya. That's where a benefit comes in. Although even in CAIS there is still SOME sensitivity to testosterone because it has effects other than virilization and a human without any level of sensitivity to any hormone would just be dead.
K, to the best of my knowledge Caster Semenya is not a PAIS male. Caster S. is a rather typical 46 XY 5-ARD (5-alpha-reductase deficiency) male. He was misidentified as female at birth. That is rather common in 46 XY DSD cases.
Caster Semenya is a standard male in most (but not all) respects. Testes? Of course. Male Testosterone levels? Of course (at least before medical suppression). XY chromosomes? Of course. Male internal (but not external) anatomy? Of course.
They tend to be taller, and hyper-female, since they lack receptors for testosterone. Apparently pretty common among models. Don't know about sports; apparently they get male size but not male muscles.
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.
I agree, and all the more reason for everything to be sex-related. Sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms should be divided by sex, not "gender identity." Prisons as well, with the caveat that trans women are a target for men in prison and should be housed separately for their safety, but should not be housed with women, for the the women's safety.
"The only treatment for severe sex dysphoria is palliative care in the form of medical transition"
That is not true by a long shot. You're being told that affirmative care is the only option but there are 100% people who have/had dysphoria and got good supportive but not delusion-affirming therapy which resolves or manages issues without hormones and surgery. This is a huge problem in treatment. Therapy is supposed to challenge irrational beliefs but now if a therapist challenges those irrational they can lose their practice. It results in real physical harm to patients.
I was banned from my intersex discussion group for stating this opinion. The whole thing scares me. I'm born intersex, received conforming surgeries as a child, and feel gender dysphoria for my born body. Medicine is whack
That's ridiculous. I have a hormone condition, I'm not intersex, I've also gotten garbage healthcare in relation to it. I've had people tell me I'm intersex or maybe trans because of it which is also ridiculous. The standard treatment for it is more hormones which increase cancer/stroke risk and mask the symptoms rather than manage them, and will do nothing to prevent any of the secondary conditions that usually result from this like T2 diabetes. This is even though it can be fairly well-managed with a very strict diet or different, safer drugs that might actually promote health and longevity. There are too many doctors looking at dollar signs in this, too many willing to cut up children and scare parents into helping.
Exactly, thank you! And the issue of trans people in sports also emphasizes the points you’re making re prisons: people object to self-identifying trans women in woman’s sports not because of transphobia, but because of FAIRNESS (the clear unfair physical advantage that trans women have over cis women); otherwise, if it was just hatred of trans people, people would also have a problem with trans men in men’s sports. But they don’t, because in men’s sports there is no unfair physical advantage for trans men over cis men, actually, it’s the opposite. And, like you say, isn’t it strange that these trans activists aren’t concerned about trans men being unfairly disadvantaged in men’s sports or even at risk physically in contact sports (same as trans men in men’s prisons)??? Looks like they care more about putting women at a disadvantage and trampling on them than they actually care about trans people (both trans women and men).
beautifully expressed, Penny. I so appreciate you writing from your experience instead of theoretical scare bites. May we grow love that doesn't need to lie. Only personal stories will get us there.
Love, a born eunuch constantly discarding the confusion and shame of a misaligned culture
From what you've written, it sounds like your son is not someone masquerading as a woman for personal reasons (such as entering a women's prison unit to either avoid men or exploit women).
How would you describe it? Trans men completely pass as male unless naked. Testosterone injections profoundly change the body. So why not call it a female to male transition?
Female and male have to do with gamete production and 99.9% of the time the structures needed to get those two gametes to meet match up to the gametes. I've been mistaken for a man without trying, that doesn't make me one. No surgery changes sex and it's not about serum hormone levels or growing a beard. None of the transmen I've met pass as male, at minimum a usually incredibly short stature, high voice, and small hands give it away. I'm closer to average male height and "swarthy" for a woman so in baggy clothes with short hair from behind it's easy to make the mistake. A 5'3 man is pretty rare being in the 1-2% but half of all women are that height or shorter. Even women at my size half have the upper body strength of men my size let alone men in the same percentile. A man at my height percentile is 6'2". There are real physiological differences between the sexes, it's not just a fashion choice.
Also "passing" presents an actual danger to women in this situation. There was a post long ago on reddit by a transman who got stuck in the men's jail cell for part of the night because they got into a bar fight or some shit. That's a woman locked into a jail cell with men, some probably violent. Think about that when you say someone can change actual sex and what it would really mean.
I would describe it as a fruitless attempt to mask an innate, immutable biological reality. Let me know when testosterone injections cause a woman to produce sperm; there is no "transitioning" from female to male or vice versa.
This is the problem: "a major shift in elite political attitudes." We have allowed elites to dictate too much of what goes on in this country at the expense of an ocean of non-elites. It's no accident that the people who run around defending Amber Heard are the same ones who would expose female prisoners to rape in the name of "social justice." We hear about "privilege" so much in this country. We're brow beaten with it day in and day out. But no one wants to talk about the real privilege, the privilege of class and how these people in their virtue-signaling have left a swath of damage behind them. And I hope you are right that the "worm is turning," but I have my doubts. I don't think we've redlined the craziness meter quite yet.
I agree entirely - from what I read and hear, the elites who drive the crazy train are nowhere near an awakening. I read that in the San Francisco recall of DA Chesa Boudin, the most elite and progressive (privileged and protected) neighborhoods voted to keep him and that many of those who did choose to recall (to ensure their personal comfort and safety) remain committed to the insane progressive agenda overall.
SF is a sick city. City leaders and residents took one of the most unique and enjoyable cities in the US and turned it into a dumpster fire. Haven't been back for a visit in 10 years and don't plan on it. Most of CA's politicians hail from the area.
SF residents and politicians calling themselves progressives are a sick joke. There's nothing progressive about enabling drug addiction, homelessness and crushing the poor.
Luxury beliefs - supporting Defund the Police et al as a flex for how hip/woke you are, with no thought given to how that policy actually affects real world people.
Yeah except, they didn’t actually defund the police. All across the country people are blaming crime on “defund the police” when police budgets have not been reduced almost anywhere, and where they have it’s by tiny margins that are usually accounting tricks that didn’t reduce police resources. This is a pretend narrative.
Certainly, but you're better off judging the content for yourself rather than accepting labels from people who need shorthand to avoid triggering ideas. Hell, even WaPo gets things right sometimes.
I suggest you consider adult privilege, which trumps every other kind. A child living on Park Avenue may have a decent life or a great one, but he is just as eligible for being abused and neglected by his parents. For THEM, class makes them immune to prosecution. For the child, having no right to walk away from abuse (even that which could kill him) makes his “class privilege” a cruel joke. That no one ever even breathes the words “adult privilege” tells you how thoroughly and invisibly screwed children are.
I have seen this first hand. I've worked (in education) in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country and one of the poorest barrios in the country. Abuse is everywhere. One family (married mother and father) with two children decided that one child would have the father's last name and one child would have the mother's last name. When you start out with that kind of (unnecessary) confusion, what's next? I mean why is this even a thing? Providing structure, guardrails and actual adult decision making are critical to effective, protective and loving parenting. Never ever be your chid's friend .... until they are adults.
I was simply commenting on the false idea that class privilege is the most consequential kind of privilege; that distinction belongs to adult privilege. Trans ideology would not be as established as it is without the substantial support given it by the left, and the left wouldn’t give a damn about trans issues if they affected only children. There’s a lot of talk in these comments about women being the most vulnerable group and the supposed primacy of class privilege. Correcting these ideas is important if we’re to unpack retrograde ideologies accurately and protect those harmed by them.
Privilege is a balance between two groups of ideas. On the one hand, you have autonomy, agency, influence, and access. On the other hand, you have responsibility, accountability, and liability. People of low privilege have little of the first set but a lot of the second. People of high privilege have much of the first set but little of the second, at least compared to what they have of the first. Children have are low on either. They have limited autonomy, agency, influence, and access, but they *also* have virtually no responsibility, accountability, and liability, at least outside the family unit and to society at large. (In fact, society and the family unit are seen as responsible to *them*.) This is well recognized in law. On the one hand, a child can end up in dire situations, particularly at the hands of parents, but on the other, children themselves can cause damage and death and still not be held liable because they are children.
On the other hand, adults (at least compared to children) do have autonomy, access, influence, and agency, but they also have liability, responsibility, and accountability, including for the children in their lives whose misdeeds are often visited on the adults responsible for their conduct and well being.
Children have other identities beyond that of a child. For example, the class of a child wildly affects that child's access and influence (even if they maintain about the same amount of autonomy and agency), but it also can reduce or increase their liability, accountability, and responsibility depending on where they fall on the socioeconomic scale (remember the whole "affluenza" excuse).
In other words, I see what you're trying to do, but I don't think you accomplish it because you are very narrowly defining privilege.
Children of any and all classes lack exactly the same rights. I grew up in a big house in a wealthy town, but because my father has no conscience and my mother was a disturbed, emotional cripple I was allowed to live with uncontrolled asthma for seven long years. This destroyed my life and almost killed me, and being white and middle-class not only did not give me the right to adequate oxygen but made me ineligible for help from child "protective" services because my parents passed the Demographic Test. The idea that a child's class "wildly" affects her "access and influence" is laughable to me and the many middle and upper-class children like the one I was, including the ones who were actually killed by their parents. I stand by everything I've said on this thread.
Children don't "lack" rights. There is a delicate balance between the role of the state in protecting children and that role being abused to turn parents into breeding cattle to produce warm bodies to serve the elite (meaning parents give birth but the state owns the children, who serve the best interest of those in charge of the state). You slipped through the cracks. People do.
But given that you write in a way that suggests a decent if not expensive education and you're spending Saturday arguing on a Substack where you have to be a *paid* subscriber to comment, it means you have no lack of means to compensate for what you see as your ill treatment as a youth.
Now imagine going through all you went through and not having the money to get an education and live as you do. What do you think would have happened to you? That, my dear, is the "privilege" of access.
And for the record, the two people I've know that were harassed by CPS were not poor (nor were they abusing their children--some do-gooder misinterpreted what was going on and called them in). They were middle class and decently well off. Monsters hide everywhere, but they're less apt to be caught in the "disposable" classes, the poor and the working poor, because the system is overtaxed, so if the child's not actively wounded and dying, they don't care.
The statement "women who have penises" has got to be one of the most insane sentences ever. That people can actually make that statement just shows that human beings are equivalent to lemmings. The future is shaping up to be both very strange and very disturbing.
Back in the 90s, the comedian Paula Poundstone had a hilarious joke about how she was so fed up with men she tried to become a lesbian, but unfortunately, her ideal woman was 6’2 with a deep voice and a penis. The idea was so ridiculous, it was literally a joke. Who knew at the time that in 30 years, it would go from a joke to orthodoxy.
I may speak only for myself, but I miss the "nasty women" of 1990s pop culture -- Poundstone, Roseanne Barr, Katey Sagal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It was a freer time.
Thank you, Matt! I'm one of those TERFs in the UK (a.k.a. TERF Island). I think I'll make some mugs and stickers with 'Fuck Etsy' on them & try to sell them on Etsy.
It should be noted that men's prisons are separated by severity of crime. Women's prisons are not separated. There's normally no need because the percentage of women convicted of violent crime is so low, there's no point. So murderers share a cell with tax evaders.
Matt, you should talk to Amie Ichikawa (Twitter @ichinita310). WoLF can put you in touch with her or just DM on Twitter.
Another reason I think that no-one wants to write about this case is because it brings to our attention the horrendous nightmare that exists in our prisons in our so called civilised society. In Feltham South London in 200O petty criminal Zahid Mubarak was beaten to death by his cellmate, a known racist. There were allegations that prison guards set up fights by housing black and white prisoners together and taking bets.
Female prisoners, as you say, are not separated as they more likely to be imprisoned for drug offences, shop lifting and self harming. Many have already been abused.
Men who commit violent sexual crime have to be separated (for their own PROTECTION) as they will be beaten to a pulp in prison. Understandably these men might claim to identify as women, and will also be able to assault women if transferred to a women's prison.
That is not to say that male sexual offenders have not themselves been abused. I think the vast majority have.
They deserve compassion just like anyone else who has been abused, but the point of incarcerating them is TO STOP THEM HURTING ANYONE ELSE.
This case exposes our deep lack or concern for anyone less fortunate than ourselves who ends up in prison. Punishing them makes us feel better, but does nothing to improve the economic and social divide and nothing to help them rehabilitate.
I don't believe the 'fuck Jk rowling' people really care for trans people- if they did they would also care for abused women and all people.
I think it's all a ploy to stir unrest.
But hopefully we can do something about our prisons as a result of it.
It’s also not necessary because women who choose violence for it’s own sake are vanishingly rare.
So a woman incarcerated for murdering her husband (For life insurance money or rage or because she was abused…doesn’t matter. Point is, there’s a motive.) is almost zero risk to a stranger or to her prison roommates.
Women kill for a reason. Motivated violence.
By contrast, male felons often are violent because they enjoy being violent without any relational or other outside motivations. The violence itself is the motivation.
Wow! So some men are born without the need for human connection and belonging, whereas women are never driven to violence in fits of blind rage? What would you make of my friend whose mother (a teacher) beat her and her siblings literally every day? “Motivated violence?” I do not understand how people can continue to believe that men enjoy being violent while women don’t have any anger or violence issues at all. Nor do I understand how adults can pore over every little fucking aspect of adult life while never ever putting themselves in children’s shoes. Is it dark in there with your head in the sand?
That’s not what I said at all. But nice straw men and false equivalencies there.
I’m speaking statistically about a certain population of people. i.e. the population of violent offenders / felons who wind up in prison.
We can (and do) study this population, and we have a pretty sophisticated understanding of why they do what they do, if they’re a danger to the broader population, if they’re likely to offend again.
Within this population…people who are *literally experts* on criminal psychology and criminal behavior have determined that male felons in prison for violent offenses ARE a danger to their fellow inmates and must be separated while female felons who are in prison for violent offenses typically ARE NOT a danger to their fellow inmates and can live communally.
This same statistical fact bears out in the broader population as well. The percentage of violent felonies against *strangers* that are perpetrated by women…is minuscule. It’s much higher with men.
That’s what I mean when I say “motivated” (Motivated does not mean rational or justified, as I’m sure you’re aware. It means done for an identifiable reason outside of the act itself. So, if a woman is feeling overburdened by motherhood and abuses or kills her own children…that’s horrible and a complete tragedy…but it doesn’t make her any more likely to take a knife to her cellmate’s throat.)
And that’s the point — women offend against people they know, have a relationship with, feel frustration and rage toward, can benefit from, etc.
Men are far more likely to commit violence for its own sake…whether that’s sexual violence or physical violence. Having a history of violence DOES make a man more likely to commit violence against his cellmates.
This has been studied and is simply an undeniable fact.
Not sure what your gripe with my comment is since we agree that women take their rage out on people they know, whereas male rage is often directed at strangers. I said nothing about prisons because I have never experienced or studied them. I do take exception to the idea that men commit violence “for its own sake.” That phrasing makes it sound—to me—as if there is no point in unpacking that violence because it makes no sense on any level, and with that I disagree.
Maybe that it didn’t begin to respond to the topic at hand…which was why it’s safe for female violent offenders to be housed communally but not safe to mix male violent offenders in with the general population.
And….You said nothing about prisons? What?! Who cares? Prisons and what to do about them are the topic of this article and this entire discussion thread.
I mean….You don’t get to come onto a discussion, take issue with something that’s been said (when it’s entirely removed from its original context), and then, when the person who made the comment reminds you of the context say: “Oh, well I never said anything about XYZ!”
Or maybe my “gripe” is that you came on and, instead of contributing to the discussion that was happening or offering anything of value…you made a lot of baseless assumptions about me…accused me of not caring about kids, not caring about men, and having my head in the sand.
Nothing you wrote had anything to do with what I said. It was just some weird delusional fantasy you concocted in your own head where you are the sole protector and defender of men’s value and men’s feelings…which is particularly ironic in the comments section of an article that proves that, once again, *our entire society* overvalues men and prioritizes their wants and their feelings, even at the expense of women’s bodily safety.
You go on the attack against me…remove my comment from all context…accuse me of a bunch of nonsense…and then, when I call you on it, turn tail, play the victim, ask what “my gripe” is with your comment. Lol. Ok.
Calm down. Some statements were made about men and women that I took exception to and gave my reasons for. I am not the protector of men's feelings and values, nor do I want certain ideas to go unchallenged, such as that some groups of women are the most vulnerable people in the country, which is ridiculous. I happen to agree with almost everything Matt wrote in this piece, but not with some of the response. That's all. I've been pretty specific about my objections and I feel I supported them well. You're free to disagree. (BTW, I agree that trans ideology has been pretty damn hard on women. I don't agree that women are more powerless than children--they're not--nor that class privilege trumps adult privilege. I also don't believe that men engage in violence for the sake of engaging in violence, whatever that means. That doesn't mean I'm the "protector and defender" of men's needs and feelings, lol.)
My comment was about the structure of prisons, not drivers of violence between sexes, which is off topic.
(OT: this is a broad generalisation. I think you've never met my oldest sister, who is a diagnosed narcissist. She enjoyed beating me every day as a child (her junior by over 6 years), locking me in small spaces & destroying my treasured possessions. (Amber Heard reminds me a lot of her).)
For some men, strength is their greatest virtue. Some become good at violence. They get paid to be strong and violent. It is 𝑏𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙 to them, not just enjoyable.
A lot of such men might not have a lot to offer in the galleries-and-studio-lofts art world, or computer programming world. And a lot of them have had that rubbed in their faces at an early age. (from a safe distance, of course) Not really disagreeing with you, just pointing out it isn't quite as mindless as it can appear. And of course, you know that.
I once again applaud Matt, as someone who has been a WoLF supporter for some time. I again urge Matt to follow the old journalistic adage: FOLLOW THE MONEY! The promotion of trans-activist extremism is no accident. There is big money behind it, which is why much of the corporate media is promoting the agenda and why so many people are joining the cancel-culture mob to attack any and all dissenters. Here are just some of the resources that we are compiling at the Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights [https://greenalliance.sexbasedrights.org/]:
Hugh Esco, ed. The lobby for gender ideology: a quick primer. [2022] Published by the Gender Critical Greens PAC https://archive.ph/wip/vRsZq
Gender Dissent [Canada] “Exposing the money and influence behind the gender industry in Canada https://www.genderdissent.com
100%! And there's more than one money trail. The complicity in so many quarters suggests a confluence of interests. I suspect that Big Pharma is the main culprit, but Hollywood seems to be a player. Then there's the echoing silence from the left-leaning media giants, suggesting a fear of losing advertisers. The fashion industry, toy makers, and publishers all have huge investments in the social stereotypes surrounding gender, which is also a driving force.
Oh my gosh! So true! I left the insane state of IL where Pritzker is governor and will likely win again. I don't think the majority of Illinoisans know how deep his family is in this. Then again, their apathy toward it may be the driver. What a sick family endeavor and use of a hotel fortune!
Exactly….I’m beginning to think that Robert DiNero in “Meet the Parents” devising a strap on mammary glands contraption so he could “breast feed” his grandson was taken seriously rather than the farcical non sense it is. Got milk? It’s a simple question.
I think there will be worm-turning on a lot of issues soon. On the transgender issues first because there are so many absurdities ("I can't define woman since I'm not one") but I think on other things as well. Lots of self-righteous people will be doing 180 degree shifts and pretending to never have supported things they shoved down everyone else's throats for years.
Did she bust out the old, “Why do you care so much?” I have a good friend who lives in SF and is thoroughly indoctrinated, and the barriers she has constructed in her head to avoid wrongthink are impressive. Any time I make what I think is a good argument about why men should not be in women’s spaces, she either says she doesn’t understand or she asks me why I care so much. I tell her that I care about women and I care about the truth. It never matters. I think both of us have just decided to steer clear of that topic because we are never going to agree.
She's been thoroughly brainwashed and is repeating all of the talking points. If her generation was outgrowing gender, then why have they created a "gender identity" for every tiny nuance of human feeling? Why do they believe that if a woman has "traditionally male interests" that she can't be a woman and must have surgery to become a man?
'gender and sex roles are outdated concepts" - so women are now asking men out and paying for the date? Taking the sexual initiative - the first time? There are other, similar questions.
Not that I've heard. If that was happening, a young man I know wouldn't be single. so the slogan is pretty self-serving.
One of these days, and I hope it's soon, there will be a great reckoning over this coordinated effort to establish a delusion in law and in everyone's minds.
Altering one's body does not magically transform anyone to the opposite sex. Merely cross-dressing and expecting access to sex-segregated spaces is the pinnacle of narcissism and extremely destructive to what little social cohesion remains. "I'm a woman because I say I am. My penis has nothing to do with it." How did so many people fall for this colossal lie?
The attempt to change sex does not (or should not) confer special social status or heroic status. The urge to do so is not whimsical like merely cross-dressing used to be, it is condition that is to be pitied, and that pity is being destroyed by the trans/gay lobby and its strident, deeply irrational campaign to wipe out commonsense understanding of sex and sex expression.
That our political "leaders" are so cowardly as to force the entry of cross-dressing rapists into women's spaces is a travesty, more of the feminist chickens coming home to roost. It is the social disaster of "equity" taken to its extreme and now even some DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) enthusiasts are having second thoughts even as this insane method of social leveling is destroying what's left of our institutions.
You'd better hope that if the Rs gain a majority some of these accommodations will be rolled back, but don't hold your breath. We need leaders who can stand up to the infantile whinging and hysterical claims of "genocide" and put an end to the advancement of professional sex agitators, fashionable gender benders, butchering sex-reassignment surgeons, and the lickspittle press that defends them in the public prints..
You're preaching to the choir. And people are compelled to affirm and validate or they'll lose their jobs. That's how they make it happen. By threatening to take away your livelihood. Not to mention making you and even your children social outcasts for "hate" and "bigotry"
The silence of most women in the face of these assaults on the gains of the feminist movement is astonishing.
More generally, why is it that gender and race are the ONLY drivers of identity to drive societal groupings? Why do those immutable characteristics override other characteristics the contribute to identity?
Here's a thought experiment: I'm a specialized professional who is a white male. If I walk into a room and there are two groups of people: a group white male construction workers and a group of non-white females who work in the same profession as me, which group will I want to mix with? I will prefer to mix with the female group becasue their experiences and thoughts are going to provide for stimulating conversation. Not that I'm hating on construction workers, it's just the reality that I will share more interests with the professional group. So what part of my identity is most important? On what basis are gender and race considered the most important components of identity and should drive social/governmental policies?
Construction workers code switch to avoid being talked down to by those who would stereo-type them. Carpenters, electricians, boiler-makers, operating enginees are unionists who know far more about politics than any one. They are not unobservant about the biases of professionals, but prefer to stay in the company of people who support unions. My father was IBEW and husband UBC. Eugene Debs was our hero. Most specialized professionals have no idea of the rich culture of labor and the labor greats who established unions.--the workers do.
I know you didn't mean it that way, but there is much perception among the craft trades that elites view them as non-thoughtful. In fact, they play to this stereotype to avoid having to be lectured by their (self-perceived) betters. My husband, the union steward, was working on a big project in the South run by a company from a Northern city. As the union steward he was expected to gain clarification about deductions taken from worker's pay. One was a library tax for the Northern city. The project manager (from the Northern City) explained that anyone who worked for them had to pay the taxes of the Northern city where the company was based, but of course as Southerners they had never heard of libraries.
A very good book is __Royal Blue: The Culture of Construction Workers__ by Herbert A. Applebaum .
Education equals indoctrination and more education equals more indoctrination. Anyone doubting that in the days of woke where the most extreme supporters of what's patently absurd can be found in the ivory tower's and the people that came from the ivory tower's. Noam Chomsky, Yes from the ivory tower's says and it makes sense that we're Born with natural critical thinking abilities and one of the jobs of education is, besides indoctrination is to take that natural ability and supress it; all the while telling us that they're teaching critical thinking. It's never been more obvious. Being a construction worker, you know, someone who builds real wealth; I've never been impressed with the "professional classes" who tend to be the most dogmatic and resistant to change people in society. None more so than the MD classes.
Most of the publicly visible women who have spoken against this have been persecuted in one way or another by losing their jobs, getting their articles and speaking engagements canceled, losing book contracts, receiving thousands of rape and death threats. etc. Other women without established careers or fame are also speaking out if you look in the right places, but many are terrified to do so, with good reason. And yes there is a vocal minority who have been totally brainwashed into thinking they are the "oppressors" and therefore have no right to object.
Pretty sure all of the old feminist leaders (Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, etc.) have all condemned this.
"I will prefer to mix with the female group becasue their experiences and thoughts are going to provide for stimulating conversation."
Orwell, I urge you to chat while with those construction workers. You might find them more interesting and more informed than you realize. And likely more intellectually "diverse" than your "professional" colleagues.
Not really - it's about shared experiences. My Work is a big part of my life - I think about it a lot. In my thought experiment, I don't believe I'd choose to mingle with finaciers or gender-studies professors.
"Bill C-16 also amended two parts of the Criminal Code:
It added “gender identity or expression” to section 318(4) of the Code, which defines an identifiable group for the purposes of advocating or promoting genocide (section 318) and inciting hatred (section 319).
It added “gender identity and expression” to section 718.2(a)(i) of the Code, which deals with sentences for hate crimes. This section allows courts that impose a sentence to take into account evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on a person’s gender identity or expression. It means judges should consider hatred based on gender identity or gender expression.
The Correctional Service Canada
In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to make sure transgender inmates are placed in prisons based on their gender identity. He stated:
I will make sure we look at it and we address it and we do right in recognizing that trans rights are human rights and we need to make sure we are defending everyone’s dignity and rights in every way we can.
After that promise, the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) – which governs the federal penitentiary – changed its transgender inmate placement policy. The CSC’s old policy was to place transgender prisoners according to their sex assigned at birth.
About the old policy, Boyer, Odeyemi and Fletchers stated:
As recently as January 2017, the CSC policy dictated that trans prisoners be assigned to either men’s or women’s penitentiaries based on their pre-operative sex. Consequently, trans women who had not undergone gender affirmation surgery were forced to live in men’s prisons instead of with the gender they identify with. This CSC policy has led to extreme difficulties for these women, who are often subjected to sexual harassment and assault. Frequently, they are sent to solitary confinement or are otherwise isolated for their protection."
As a Canadian, Bill, you may already be aware that the Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter originally allowed trans-identified males into the Shelter in accordance with the law and the assumption that such males would behave themselves because, after all, weren't they women too? The women who run the Shelter quickly discovered that trans-identified men, who had not surgically transitioned, was abusing and traumatizing the already-traumatized female residents. So they revised their policy, barring such men. And lost their funding from the city of Vancouver. Yet, they prevail.
And which women require the Shelter's services most of all? First Nations women, other women of color, homeless women, sex workers, all women who are subject to male violence in whatever sphere.
I was not. I used to work for Public Safety at the national level, but am not following these matters as closely as I once was. I regret working for them now.
Canada's treatment of First Nations people could hardly be worse. It's a disgrace.
These people are like the Stepford Wives. Their human, thinking brains, have been replaced by machinery that can only work along specific ideological lines.
The Chandler case has two big problems. First and foremost, the bad guys are trans. That’s an unthinkable no-no in contemporary American (really the entire Anglosphere) life. Trans is a sacred value and going against it make you a ‘very bad person’. The highest value of American life is protecting the ‘right’ of Will Thomas to cheat by joining the women’s UPenn swim team. TWAW and you had better not forget it.
Of course, class plays a role here. The core of feminist ideology (in practice, WOLF is an honorable exception) is promoting the interests of elite women. Ordinary women are of little or no interest to most feminists. Since, female prison inmates are at the bottom of society, they don’t count.
A long time ago after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse I pondered the situation and thought that Lynndie England, one of the prison guards, had also been subjected to abuse and deserved some support from women's groups. She had some disabilities and had worked at a chicken farm before deployment. I was never able to get anyone to care about her.
Kathleen, so good to recall the story of Lynndie England. She was an impoverished child of Appalachia living in a trailer who joined the National Guard for college money. She soon found herself doing duty as a prison guard in a war zone, under the command of a sergeant who raped and impregnated her. A tragic story, and nobody seems to care.
It was. while what she did was very wrong I am sure at that age and background she was manipulated. meanwhile Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis who threw a gasoline-filled bottle through a police car in NY (lawyers with elite degrees) in NY protests have been given
You are (somewhat) describing Liberal Feminism. Libfems embrace idpol "intersectionality" and have no problem with considering trans identified males as "women". Radical Feminists (and the small but growing Reactionary Feminists movement) are very much concerned with ordinary women. Radfems are all over class. And don't subscribe to gender identity ideology at all. Unfortunately, Liberal Feminism is the most prominent these days. The majority of mainstream women's organizations, from NOW to the League of Women Voters proudly embrace gender identity ideology, ironically undermining themselves. And driving those of us who are against it nuts....
which is why it's hilarious and maddening to see objections painted as solely Christian or right-wing. something tells me the religious right wouldn't see eye-to-eye with radfems on a whole lot! It's pathological denial of the reality that many people they agree on most issues with are not on board with this. It means they could be.....heaven forbid.....on the wrong side of history!
WoLF is fierce and has no problem taking on Goliath, obviously. And believe it or not, they don't make trans guys out to bad guys. They just state the facts: Men are more violent than women, gender is a social construct and trans does not exist (except in thinking). What they stand for was rational and globally understood 10 years ago.
Please stay with this issue Matt it is the most important issue of our time. Women and girls are under brutal assault promoted at all levels by the Biden regime
I’ve seen the attacks on you from “left” Twitter (actually broken-brained narcissistic — and really mean — grifter quacks who are in no way “left”) for these articles, and I know it must be difficult for you. This writing been empathetic and sensible and deeply reported, which is what people should want on this issue.
Thanks for this writing, and thanks for pointing out the work of Herzog and Singal; I’m a big fan of theirs.
I'd also like to give credit to the first person in the States (that I'm aware of, at least) to write about this issue in a mainstream context, Abigail Shrier, on her Substack, The Truth Fairy. She began by interviewing inmates at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.
I haven’t read much of Shrier’s work, although I’m familiar with the controversies (the ACLU calling for the banning of her book was one of the craziest stories ever).
I think Herzog and Singal’s work predates Shirer’s book and Substack by several years. They both wrote sensitive, deeply researched pieces on detransitioners that got them blackballed from their liberal spaces. They’ve both continued on that path with thoughtful, well-reasoned and often quite funny work that’s very at odds with the idea from some corners that they’re hateful bigots. I still contend that the extreme ostracization (and ignorance) of these two avowed liberal writers is what has allowed this issue to now become a conservative talking point and culture war issue, which in turn causes #resistance Dems to embrace some truly idiotic ideas.
I used to subscribe to the Atlantic (no more) and read Singal's cover story on teenage girls transitioning. It was very objective and balanced. Herzog had the temerity to write about detransitioners, which resulted in her having to move to another city because she was receiving death threats.
Shrier came to this topic from another angle, accidentally, you might say, but ultimately took things to a new level by figuring out how to get a mainstream book published despite the ACLU's campaign to ban the book and Amazon's initial refusal to sell it. (It went on to become a best seller.) Her research was extensive and groundbreaking. And she's continued to break stories on this topic, such as the prison issue and the trans medical professionals who are experiencing some remorse over the ideology they helped promote and the number of bodies they helped mutilate (a bit disingenuous if you ask me, but better than nothing).
The three of them are in the fray for good...I have tremendous respect for them.
FIST is another feminist organization doing outstanding work pushing back against the extremist trans-activist agenda. Check out this informative video presentation about autogynephilia, which explains much of the trans phenomenon. People need to understand that the trans-activist demand to allow males who "self-identify" as women to have access to women's spaces is another manifestation of patriarchal domination. It is being driven by male fetishists who want women to accept them as women for purposes of gratification (and, as noted in another comment of mine, they are supported by some big money, including money from the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex). See: https://feministstruggle.org/2022/03/31/agp-awareness-day-march-31st/
Thank you. May I add a video that explores the social media pressure on young people and the promotion of mental illness? The video mainly deals with trans but touches on other media and peer driven phenomena: https://gettr.com/post/pop6mrc030
Thank you for bringing attention to this, Matt. I’ve been following WOLF and talking about this issue online for over a year…and it’s just maddening how dismissive and nonchalant everyone is about this situation.
If you take into account the *staggering* percentage of female inmates who have suffered sexual and domestic abuse…who are often there *because* of their abuse…it’s clear that we are forcing cruel and unusual punishment on the most vulnerable, most abused population in our country.
As a woman, nothing has ever made me feel sadder, more helpless, or more hopeless than this issue. It tells you everything you need to know about how our society fails to value women.
Perfectly said. Many thanks to Matt for moving this issue front and center. The feminists working on this issue are so marginalized, they can't get any media traction at all. The issue is horrific. It makes Lia Thomas in the ladies' lane look like a dumb joke.
Now that our government has erased the definition of woman, it's open season on the most marginalized, vulnerable females in America. Imagine wondering every day if you're going to be awakened in the middle of the night with your cellmate raping you.
How many ways do we intend to punish incarcerated women?
Apparently repeated nightly rape is now the standard punishment for being poor, bouncing checks, welfare fraud.
So progressive.
Spare the rod, spoil the heretical dissenter from The Narrative.
"The rod" in this case seems like a particularly morbid pun.
Ha — indeed!
Exactly right, Beeswax. The Chase Strange/ACLU throws real flesh and blood women under the bus so that violent, mentally ill, male predators can get their rocks off. It's disgusting and beyond belief. By the way, it was a $15 million donation to the ACLU from a medical industrial complex billionaire named Jon Stryker that sealed the deal on the capture of the ACLU by the "trans" crazies.
Today, Kelly Jay Keen (women's rights activists in UK) held a speaker's corner in Bristol, and a LOT of violent men showed up to try to drown out the women and intimidate and abuse them. It was pretty bad. Lots of the men were Antifa and had their faces covered (cowards) and used a bullhorn to yell obscenities at women the whole time, then followed them when they left the venue, continuing the abuse. The police did nothing.
😏😙Did they “identify themselves as “”ANTIFA “”⁉️🥁🛎
Anti’s don’t want to be”identifies”, hence the masks.
Actually, yes. Their organization congratulated them afterwards on Twitter.
Yes. I saw part of it on youtube. today. Kellie Jay Keen is amazing.
She really is, and inspiring a LOT of other women to step up. A thing of beauty.
She's the heart and soul of radical feminism. Another Winston Churchill staring down the Nazis during WWII.
Let us not forget the $4 million that Gilead donated to 'trans communities' a couple of years ago (you can google it, not at all hard to find - they were very proud of it).
Yes. The medical industrial complex pushes the "trans" nonsense because it's good for their bottom line. Every child or young adult who is brainwashed into believing they're "trans" becomes a lifelong patient to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenues.
Oh my god. So much makes sense now.
Yes, Lis. When you follow the money, it all makes sense. And Jennifer Bilek of the amazing 11th Hour Blog has followed the money. So if you'd like full story, you can read about all the "trans" billionaires like "Jennifer" Pritzker, and "Martine" Rothblatt who use their vast fortunes to capture every institution: schools, universities, medical societies, the mainstream media, and government. They seek to normalize the perverse, destroy the next generation of girls and boys, and abolish the sex based rights of women. They can be stopped, and they must be stopped. https://www.the11thhourblog.com/
MSM has no shame. They parrot what their masters tell them to, and ignore everything else.
It's not just shame they lack. Principles, integrity, honesty, moral compass. I'm sure the list can go on.
Don't think for a second that MSM is nothing but courtiers to power. They've proven it over and over again.
How much of humanity is now like this? Lack of opportunity, staggering debt and gross inequality brings out the worst.
That's because people feel they can still play dumb speaking out about L. Thomas given he's built like a truck next to the female swimmers. The men and women in prisons are out of sight and out of mind. Without visuals to show clearly how dumb this all is, people don't dare to speak up less they be branded "transphobic". These days people have gotten so dumb you have to literally draw pictures.
Also these woke progressives pretty much have their heads stuck in the sand when it comes to trans issues. Thomas is literally competing against female swimmers. In prisons, the wokes want to stick to the belief that everyone will act and behave accordingly and no transwomen should be physically harming female prisoners. It's the same as their dumb argument how it's no one's business what's between peoples legs in bathrooms. Just go in there and do your business. As if people raising concerns are concerned about sex organs, when the real concern is men who would commit lewd to dangerous acts toward women and girls.
He will be (and is) attacked by the trans mob which always demands the stoning of the heretic, and atonement. I do not think Matt will comply. That's why he's on substack and not Rolling Stone so much any more. I have a LOT of respect for that. I watch other people cave for heresy accusations and it's so cringeworthy.
Kind of understandable in one way, though. Lia Thomas is one of them, the female prisoners are largely not.
You find class at the bottom of a lot of poisoned sociopolitical drinks.
There are 2 reasons Lia got more attention. One is just the simple absurdity of seeing a guy try to dress up in a women’s swim suit with his male package bulging out. It’s just so over the top ridiculous. Two is that female athletes, current and former, are much louder about this issue.
As a former elite swimmer, with an athletic daughter who now swims, it was one place I could demand to be heard. Athletics create strong women, and many of us are conservative and not afraid of cancel culture, but the reality is our voices carry the most weight where we’ve earned the respect - in the sports world. I’ve earned respect from USA Swimming. I’ve earned a right to be heard. My kids haven’t ever stepped foot in a public school (they are in private), we have country club memberships so we don’t exactly utilize a lot of public amenities in our city, I left a very successful career opting to work part time so I could hang out with my kids more. Most of the places my life exist don’t create a platform for being heard, and I’m not giving up time with my kids to go be some raging activists, except sports.
All of it is cruel though. A naked and erect convicted sex offender walking around in front of young Black girls, minors, in a CA spa didn’t cause outrage among white liberals - the moms reporting it got attacked by a bunch of white liberals, physically in some cases. UPenn, and bunch of mostly white liberals, silenced the female swimmers who were humiliated in the pool then had to share a locker room where their ex-boyfriend “Lia” enjoyed prancing around naked. Women’s prisons are perhaps the cruelest of all of this, but in the end, white liberal women have never cared about poor women with pigment in their skin. This is no shock.
Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s white liberal “feminist” women demanded “equal pay for equal” work in factories - and tens of thousands of women lost their ability to help provide for their families because the biological truth is that few women can lug something weighing 50 pounds around than men. The factory owners got tired of the harassment from “feminists” activists for having different jobs specifically for women acknowledging the physiological difference in the sexes, so they eliminated the positions and many women weren’t physically capable of the new job descriptions.
My grandmother was a pour union organizer at the time. There is no single group she hates more than “feminists.” It was feminists attempts to claim equality= sameness of the sexes that laid the groundwork for gender ideology. While I have moderate to left leaning social values, I have never supported groups detached from reality, which the entire trans movement is dependent upon, and honestly so are many feminist movements.
I am all for accommodating people born with rare deformities of the sex chromosomes or genitals. Still, I refuse to call a delusional man with a functioning penis a “woman” - men have no right to my immutable biological identity. Those that think they do lack any morality as they openly advocating child genital mutilation and for male sex offenders to have free reign in women’s prisons. The whole thing is a joke - these people can’t even define the word woman.
More commonsense liberalism from the NCMom! Yes, "liberalism" as we used to know it.
I am definitely a classic liberal. I'll entertain new ideas, seek progress, and genuinely enjoy different people. I am also classic liberal in the sense the goal, both ideologically and pragmatically, is to judge policies and ideas based on their actual outcomes, and to seek objective truth. The best ideas should be able to withstand scrutiny and produce good outcomes. Failing either indicates the idea is crappy, most especially failing the latter. A great policy in outcomes outweighs a great policy in words. Socialism sounds great but fails miserably in outcomes. Libertarian economic policy sounds great but likewise fails in outcomes (the central control becomes corporate, rather than government, but both stink as central control always creates devastating results for regular people). I have nothing in common with modern leftists or the self-proclaimed "progressives" who in reality embody regressivity.
Thank you that your awareness of those of us born as sarisim (ancient Hebrew name) - I got booted from an intersex forum for asking if there was room for someone who equates trans surgery with any other elective plastic surgeries. The moral laws from my bloodline religion forbid castration on animals, never mind surgeries on healthy sex organs (I suppose temporarily in a lesser way: circumcision, which I also oppose), and I consider sexes in a way Jesus described in Matt 19. The answer was no, we support "bodily autonomy" and trans is us, and surgeries are miracles of modern medicine. Maybe because the surgeons practiced on people born like me on their way to that career with them.
You’re welcome. And truthfully I think that’s why FINA’s swimming rules were written as they were. I don’t think it’s to encourage child gender transitions, but to remain the inclusive sport that recognizes some males with y-chromosomes, though rare, will also never go through male puberty and should compete with more like bodied peers. I am so very proud of my sport especially after spending up to 20 hours a week for close to 15 years in a pool. I’ve been blasting people on DW who don’t realize AIS is real, and people are human beings who deserve compassion and understanding for things beyond their control. I am sorry a bunch of social activists have co-opted a very real birth difference to push a destructive ideology that has nothing to do with it.
Because it could blow my anonymity, I won’t say exactly what difference my son was born with, but it’s not related to sex differences. It’s the equivalent of being born without a hand. Anyone born without a hand should be given free space to chose to get a prosthetic hand or not, accommodated to participate in sports if they can either way. But, the fact that people are rarely born without a hand is no justification to push an ideology that claims kids born with hands they just might not like, fleeting or otherwise, should have the only real hands they will ever have chopped off simply because they don’t like their hands (or somebody tells them they have the wrong hands for their body so they start disliking them as teenagers). I’m shocked that people seem incapable of understanding the difference.
Thank you for putting words to the reality. Lia Thomas can never imagine living in your body or mine, and I’m tired of him pretending he is even capable of understanding what living in either of our bodies would be like, because he will simply never know, in the same way we will never know what it’s like to live in his.
100% agree. Been saying so for months. Thank you.
It's all absolutely maddening. I feel exactly the same as you: helpless and hopeless.
I know it's hyperbolic, but it increasingly feels as if the attitude is that raping women is fine so long as the rapist is some kind of trans or non-binary gender. In fact, if you're against trans and NB people coercing women into sex, you're a bigot.
You're not far off. For years "lesbian" trans "women" have been loudly denouncing the supposed bigotry of actual lesbians who refuse sex with their "female" penises, trying to pressure and shame them into compliance [EDIT: including with threats of assault, rape, and death]. And the so-called "progressive" Left claims those narcissistic men are the class needing protections. It boggles the mind.
That was what initially made me think that something was off about the whole thing some years ago: the declaration that lesbians need to be open to sex with transwomen who have penises, and the derision of them as "vagina fetishists" and transphobes if they don't want to. The sense of something being very obviously wrong intensified after a bizarre conversation with someone who insisted that sexual orientation has nothing to do with genitalia, because attraction usually happens before you know what a person's genitals are. Therefore, any preference that links genitalia to gender is socially constructed and subject to implicit bias (nevermind that, the vast majority of the time, the outward presentation does in fact match the genitalia, because /biological men and women look different from each other/. Even the butchest of butch lesbians still look like women).
It seems so obvious that this is the work of bad actors trying to justify and normalize sexually manipulative and predatory behavior, and yet there's a whole arm of the woke apparatus devoted to propping it up. And what's bizarre is that it coincides with absolute hysteria over cis men: every last one of them has an outsized amount of power, and if we say no to them, they'll kill us (or they'll be upset and say mean things, which I've been told is just as bad). What is the source of the disconnect? What makes the same people who think Aziz Ansari is a hardened predator look the other way when a girl gets raped in a school bathroom by a genderqueer student?
I think you are asking all the right (read: intelligent/rational) questions. If you haven't already found Jennifer Bilek's 11th Hour Blog, which is a deep dive into the the money behind the movement, I HIGHLY recommend it. Here are a few links providing info that pulls back the curtain on the men orchestrating this debacle:
https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/the-gender-identity-industry-transhumanism-and-posthumanism
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/techno-capitalism/
https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/who-owns-big-pharma-and-the-billionaires-invested-in-the-gender-industry
Wow. Thanks.
Really, I suspected mass hysteria and social insanity were inadequate to explain this bizarreness.
Same. I've been researching and reading a lot of what Leah posted for years. And it is mind-boggling. Not at all organic, but something really sinister cooked up and programmed for years. LOTS of $$ behind it. As I mentioned elsewhere up here, Gilead donated $4 million to the 'trans causes' a couple of years ago. Now, why would they do that? We know they don't just give money away, being uber-profit driven and all. It was an investment. That's why. The trans agenda creates patients for life, this is a big boon for big pharma and the medical industrial complex.
Thank you thank you thank you for posting these. I've been trying to get people to read Bilek for years. She resides politically on the left; however, most of the places (mainstream) she's had to publish have been right-leaning so that means the lefties can call her a Trumper and be done with it.
Yup. It's frustrating. I share her name in every Substack comment section I can when the topic is trans ideology. This is the first time I've shared links to specific articles and it seems to be more helpful than just mentioning her work. Another outstanding article I often share is this piece that is not specifically about trans ideology, but explains how NGOs are used by billionaires to push agendas, which definitely ties into how fast and far trans orthodoxy spread into our culture. It's a long read but eye-opening: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/29/the-billionaire-takeover-of-civil-society/
Read this today. Didn't know we were in this deep. Great research
Whoa.......
These articles are eye popping. Might I suggest that you repost as your own comment so more readers might see them. I've bookmarked them all to share with others. Thanks for posting.
The burden of having all that undeserved "power" must be what's weighing men down to such alarming levels of educational failure, drug addiction, suicide, social withdrawal. Of course those are just perks of the fucking Patriarchy to some, I suppose.
I've often heard it said that that's all the result of toxic masculinity, which ultimately means it's men using their own privilege to hurt themselves. It's Kafkaesque.
I worry for young men. We are very obviously failing them.
And sadly, none of that harm seems to really be helping women.
no, it's just that those dudes are fucking losers and pussies
"What makes the same people who think Aziz Ansari is a hardened predator look the other way when a girl gets raped in a school bathroom by a genderqueer student?"
Madness, insanity, hysteria, fear, and good ol fashioned idiocy.
When I first heard about the Cotton Ceiling, I thought that had to be a right-wing parody. Nope, it's the real deal and it's rapey as fuck.
My mind, admittedly feeble as it is, is boggled. The argument seems to amount to "You should have sex with me because I say you should. I claim that this is society's norm."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/29/if-lesbian-prefers-same-sex-dates-thats-not-bigotry-desire-personal-thing
Were I a lesbian, I would be arming the fuck up.
Amen, because to me, it looks like a bizarre form of genocide.
When women observing that men were men and women were women started being attacked as TERFs, I started investigating a little, and the "Radical Feminists", while they often indulged in misandrist hatred, weren't wrong in this case. Lesbians are being erased by the Trans Activist arguments.
After seeing how horribly they've been treated by the bandwagon-jumping, Two-Minute-Hate-indulging, irrational part of the "woke" side, I have considerable sympathy, and admiration for their ability to think straight and hold their ground, man-haters or not.
I also have to feel some sympathy for the wokies, many of whom have tried to maintain a rational undergirding for their positions. I get the impression a lot of them are being dragged along in this insanity and cruelty, because the Trans Activists have hijacked the tools and thought processes of identity politics.
Which is why when right-winger groups call them “groomers” it freaks them out because they’re using the language of “sexual harassment” code against them
Gaslighting and rapey all at the same time.
As far as trans activist responses go, "ballistic" is "1" on the scale, apparently.
I read about this on the detrans subreddit. TERF could easily be a weapon that was entirely created to bludgeon gay women into sex and bludgeon straight women into submission on the subject. It’s also interesting how many people think using a slur like that is acceptable punishment for anything. Men, in the states anyway, have fetishized lesbian sex for decades. And incels advocate any strategy to get sex. Many incels think women should not be allowed by society to decide who they have sex with. Some might be members of the Texas Legislature and the supreme court.
Unherd had a great article on this!!! It’s so sad. It’s misogynistic. Telling lesbians it’s “different” to have a “trans woman’s” penis in them than a man’s is like like claiming stairs and steps are totally different ways to go up a floor. Gay men laugh off the demand to sleep with chics that think they are dudes, but lesbians fear being called a bigot and get bullied constantly. Sad.
<sarcasm>Rape is a mere trifle. Sort of like littering. Kicking Will Thomas off the UPenn women's swim team is worse than genocide. You have to get your priorities straight.</sarcasm>
Somebody saw Ricky Gervais on Netflix, huh? LOL
Lesbians are being targeted like nobody's business. One would almost think there is a new male-based coordinated effort to force them to have sex with men. I've been working on this stuff for 5+ years, and it just gets worse and worse. The bottom line is though, it's just more subversion of women by men, they just got real creative about how they do it.
The assault on lesbians isn't limited to demanding that they have sex with men ('trans men'). Perhaps worse, is the effort to wipe out the next generation of lesbians by having them 'transition' to boys/men. Most (but not all) gender dysphoric girls used to grow up to become lesbian women. Historically, they were told 'you are gender non-conforming girl'. Now they are told 'you are actually a boy in a girls body'. This is not progress in my opinion.
No, it's regressive and homophobic. A good deal of the LGB community is figuring this out - or have done so a long time ago. But the political ideology makes it difficult. It's really a terrible situation for them, after all the progress they made.
I was gender dysphoria as a little kid. Most grow up to be cisgender completely straight adult women like me. The rate that turn out to be lesbians, historically, is higher than the general population - about double - but still a minority.
Lesbians and autistic girls are the #1 target of gender ideology. Misogynistic and sad.
Yes, the "trans" movement is the revenge of the patriarchy.
I always put "trans" in quotes, because it is simply impossible to "transition" the sex of a mammal.
Well said. It is subjugating women in the trickiest way.
“Somehow, telling lesbians that they ‘just haven’t tried the right dick yet’ went woke” - https://unherd.com/2022/06/why-should-lesbians-have-sex-with-men/
This: "Or, as one “trans lesbian” put it: “Being shut off from the very idea of it, not even considering that having my penis inside you is different from having a man’s penis inside you? That hurts.” WTF?
What's beyond "speechless"?
Complete shutdown of Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain? I can't form language-based models to aid comprehension of this crap.
IOW, he wants social permission to commit rape, and any woman who says 'no' to that is a bigot.
Excellent headline. Unherd is doing great work these days. I just read that article yesterday - it's spot on.
Speechless.
This was the article I was thinking of above. Thank you for posting.
If you check you porn search results, lesbians are always highly targeted.
My impression is that you are correct. In real life, the male fantasy view of lesbians falls apart. However, the male fantasy view dominates online, books, etc.
But Strangio Chase , and many other supporters of this profound misogyny, are women.
You could not be more right. I would change your statement a bit. I would say "tells you everything you need to know about how our society fails to value low-status women.".
Will have to disagree.
I’m not a “low-status” woman and it’s no cake-walk either.
This is a super snowflake response. Your first.post was good. I am a man, currently drowning in child support debt to an ex wife who abused *me.* Life is hard for everyone, buy a helmet.
"Snowflake" is a dumb word and not descriptive of me in the least. Also an ironic insult from someone whining about financially supporting his own kids.
(This from a second wife to a guy who also left an abusive relationship and brought significant CS debt to our marriage...debt that I often paid when he was unable to do so.)
No child support debt even remotely compares to the way women of all stripes are treated and dismissed in their day-to-day lives, from the moment they can walk to the moment they draw their last breath.
I say this as someone who has actually experienced both kinds of hardship...child support debt and living as a woman. At least with the child support debt, there was a definitive end in sight.
Yeah, I agree w/ you.
It astonishes me how over and over again, half a century since Gloria S started Ms. magazine how tough it is for women to this day. (Nahhh...I ain't one of those 'male feminists'; I'm a Dad to 3 daughters)
Important distinction.
Yes, and if we keep saying over and over - "If you have a penis you are a male human being; if you have a uterus and other lady parts, you are a female." PERIOD.
And, NO, you may not pretend otherwise, no matter how much you whine and demand taxpayers pay for your sex changes.
We just need to keep saying this as our complete response to the poor creatures who've had too much to Estrogen-imitating chemicals while in utero or later by pesticides, industrial chemicals, soft plastics, etc.
If would-be boy fetuses do not get the exact right amount of the male hormones Testosterone and Progesterone and, instead, get too much exposure to the female hormone Estrogen, they may well be damaged as fully human male........but that is no excuse for disgusting, repulsive behavior, trying to inculcate our children with their twisted ideas.
...exactly so. I’ve never understood the “transitioning “males that decide to keep the penis. If they truly feel they are a woman trapped in the wrong body, why are you not getting rid of the organ that marks you as male?
Because they still enjoy sticking said penis inside women's vaginas; they just prefer to self-ID as well-hung lesbians when they do it, as opposed to, y'know, straight dudes.
And let's face it, it's hard to fap to sissy porn without one.
Bingo
Since persons with gender dysphoria have existed long prior to estrogen imitating chemicals, industrial chemicals and pesticides these are unlikely to be the cause.
Children are the most vulnerable, most abused population in this country and every other.
That's why they are targeting women first. After they take us down, the children are ripe for the pickin'.
As beaten down as many women (and men) are, they are still elaborately privileged compared to children. (Turns out that having rights is pretty goddamn important. Huh!) Children will not be “ripe for the pickin’” AFTER anything: they are and have been sitting ducks forever, which makes childhood an extended ordeal, and everyone who gets to 18 years-old a survivor.
When kids do make it to 18, it's usually because they had a mother protecting them, is my point. Women are like mama bears. At least the healthy ones, who have not succumbed to Transhausen by Proxy insanity. Those will offer their kids right up for indoctrination and sterilization, all for social credit.
In a great many of the large number of childhood stories I've heard, mothers were NOT healthy. They were rage-a-holic, abusive tyrants. Yes, many mothers are deeply attached to their children, but many were and are not. Any parent, male or female, who is emotionally healthy is going to be protective of their child. We drastically underestimate the amount of anger among American women because that anger, in general, is not public, it's private. Their children are the objects of that anger, and a society that doesn't speak meaningfully or helpfully about childhood chooses to believe that men are angry and women are nurturing. It's just not that simple.
Yes I don't think it's simple. As I mention, that Transhausen by Proxy behavior itself is complex, and then our society/culture really does support violence against kids (e.g., spanking, hittting, emotional torture, emotional blackmail, etc). And of course our society is horribly narcissistic, so rewards that behavior. Has to be incredibly hard for kids to get a grasp on 'normality'. Oh and then let's throw in the horrible results of the pornhub availability for young kids!
Indeed! My job has been to protect my children, provide the structure and guardrails and in my house...faith. Without it, what's the point of living through this nonsense?!
That’s backwards - they are taking the children out the worst to make it easier to take us out. Kindergarten teachers across the country are talking to students about their genitals and where they masturbate. That is cruel. It’s grooming. It’s incredible damaging. It destroys the next generation of women and men.
I've been here since 2014. About time someone with clout paid attention.
Sry, I don't think you can generalize this outrageous abuse to being an aspect of wider society.
This belongs 100% at the feet of the Trans Activist community and their "reality-be-damned!" attempts to figure out ethical behavior.
eh, it looks like from reading the articles from the 11th hour blog, (posted by another commenter) that this has been a widespread, long term movement by the medical industrial complex, big tech, investors like Black Rock to make as much money as possible, and even our government (DARPA). I'd suggest reading the articles.....I'm pretty gobsmacked at the moment.
Good suggestion. This has been almost overwhelming . "gobsmacked" is good. "Stunned". Even "depressed", a little. (and thanx to all for the links. eye-opening.)
Still would quibble with the suggestion that this is "societal" in some grand way. Nobody wants this, except for some kind of...cabal? This isn't an outgrowth of the "normal" or "historical" abuse of women by men.
But I'm not sure that's the most important point anyway. I'd even venture to say this is unprecedented in the way it combines individual perfidy and the abuse of power/wealth. It 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑜𝑙𝑣𝑒𝑠 sex and gender roles, but I'm not convinced the evil aspect derives from them. This is just bad humans being bad.
Might help if more women stepped forward to fight against this kind of madness. When they first started putting biological males in women's restrooms I heard barely a peep. And what I did hear was mainly SJW virtue signaling and name-calling.
Critiques of trans ideology in relation to women have been thoroughly censored in the mainstream press for many years, and anyone who writes or talks about it is immediately cancelled, right up to the present minute. Women have been working to bring this issue to the fore for many years. For instance, Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy, editor of Feminist Current, was banned from Twitter for life for refusing to refer to men as "she." The feminist activists Matt highlights in his articles on this topic are not newbies, they've been around for a long time, but for all the media attention they've received they might as well be living on a desert island. This is part of what makes Matt's current reporting so significant.
A lot of women have been trying, for many years. They've been dismissed as TERFs and generally denied a platform (the professional media declines to publish their work; social media censors and bans them. As you can see from Matt's reporting, they also, sometimes, lose their jobs). J.K. Rowling managed to break through only because she was famous enough that she couldn't be outright silenced, and the amount of energy that's been expended trying to cancel her and retroactively paint 'Harry Potter' as one big long bigoted screed speaks volumes.
That said, if you dig a bit, you'll find the women trying to fight it. It's getting harder to bury them over time.
Maybe read again for clarity? We lose our jobs, are doxxed, threatened, etc. for speaking out. That was one of the big points of the article.
The 2 groups that first noticed these problems ironically have very little in common with each other: radfems and gymbros.
Radfems noticed that female-only spaces were being obliterated, and gymbros noticed some very sketchy claims circulating about testosterone and about how gender self-ID could somehow supercede biology in athletic competitions without creating any inherent unfairness.
Did you read the article at all? WoLF IS WOMEN. So are the many other organizations, volunteers, allies, etc. that have been fighting this for 5 years. That being said, why aren't you asking men to step up? They are the ones CAUSING the problem. Jesus.
If you read my post again for clarity you will notice that I did not say it might help if SOME women stepped forward, I said it might help if MORE women stepped forward. Obviously there are some women speaking out; yes, that is what the article is about. But I am telling you my personal experience: all the women in my circle have either been silent about these insane develpments or supportive of them. And this tracks with polls, which show, for instance, that women disproportionately support biologically male athletes competing in women's sports, and women disproportionately support having biological men in women's restrooms.
I read it perfectly clearly. You asked why more women don't step forward, now you are telling us what we already know, that most women follow the establishment garbage about 'trans' 'women' and think they are harmless and invite them into our spaces. You're not telling me anything I don't already know.
This is the new ACLU......Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
https://www.thefire.org/
Smart observation:
"If there’s a better illustration of the upside-down state of politics in 2022 America, it’s a feminist activist group forced to seek cyber-refuge in a Christian fundraising company."
New York Times headline: "fringe anti-trans feminist group teams up with radical religious right".
That's barely a parody. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I saw that headline tomorrow.
Completely realistic. Although more likely they'll ignore it altogether as to not give it exposure.
Good news is I now have the want and the know how to donate to these feminists.
Signed, not a feminist.
We welcome you, sir.
I haven't encountered a worthier cause in a long time.
Signed,
even less of a feminist...but still kindly disposed towards women
Same!
Please do. They have taken on a Herculean task, all out of a sense that someone needs to listen to women and stop the trans scourge attacks on us & children.
"... consider whether the continuation of liberal civil society rests on a coalition of which Christians are an important part."
Yes. We too often forget that Christians and Christianity were at the core of the abolitionist, woman's suffrage, and Civil Rights movements, just to name a few.
There are so many different Christian denominations that it is impossible to generalize. Some are small minded, ignorant and bigoted, and some are accepting, compassionate and true to Jesus' principles.
I would volunteer Westboro Baptist Church as an example
XX chromosomes and the nature given ability to give birth to other human beings equals a woman. How something this fundamental has been high jacked and distorted is beyond me. People with XY chromosomes are not female.
And you've hit on the problem. Both sides in this debate are conflating gender and sex. Sex is immutable. You would have to go back to fertilization of the egg to change an XX to an XY, or vice versa. Gender is social and psychological. In essence, it is whatever we decide it is as a society.
What really bothers me about this whole thing is that we fought to blend the "genders." Male or female, we decided, they don't have to have fixed roles, fixed characteristics, etc. Females can work outside the home and fight on the front lines. Males can stay home and raise kids and become interior decorators. Other than biologically fixed characteristics (wombs and penises, so the potential to carry a child or not), everything else was up for grab. This whole thing has set that back. It's like were essentializing gender again, returning it to stereotypes, such as if you like dresses, you must be "female," rather than a male/a man who likes dresses. If you are a woman and can't stand a dress (like me), you must be a man trapped in an XX frame. It's frankly insulting.
Well Gender isn't a totally social construct, it is pretty heavily informed by the XX or XY too, though yes society has a big role to play as well.
The people acting like it is only nurture are deluding themselves.
I don't disagree. We'd be foolish to suggest that the biological does not play a role. The point is that *society* decides, which means that we can *decide* that this has gone too far.
We call those sex-linked behaviors in other animals. If we'd stuck to that and stopped trying to divorce humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom we might not be where we are now.
that persistent temptation to "divorce humanity" from nature is extremely destructive. It was a big factor in our environmental catastrophe, too.
Personally, I trace it back to Christianity, but maybe that's just me. The philosophical division between "mind" and "body" i spart of it, too. They aren't actually separable; when you try, you wind up dead.
The idea that we are spirits that inhabit bodies is far older than Christianity.
I agree, it is partly the disconnect from nature, but I also think there is an intention to force that perceptual gap wider with the corruption of language. Being forced to call things they aren't is an assault on personal and cultural sanity.
I’ve seen a meme floating around that says “If you are still unsure about gender, go try milking a bull!!!”
Stxbuck, that gives new meaning to the phrase "tits on a bull"...we could live to see that happen. Sigh.
This is extra funny in the pronoun wars. Somehow we always know to say about our pets "she's such a good girl" without asking them how they identify.
Yes! (Substack is not letting me upvote posts like yours that have a reply on them so I am saying, "Yes" here.)
If you go back and refresh the page, the heart will appear. There has been a glitch in this function for quite some time.
Katansi, please, don't bring animals into this, they will be next!
I'm only half kidding. It is by no means unreasonable to think that, if we continue on the path we are on, we will be asked to "normalize" bestiality.
Well, a big part of the problem is that "society" (i.e. the mass of people half of whom are, by definition, of below average intelligence) seems to want 0/1, black/white, on/off binary for anything that has two poles.
Men are men...and range in nature from violent, to delicate, rational, self-indulgent, to artistic, to emotional, to stoic, and on and on and all complex combinations thereof.
And women are women, and range in nature and behavior from loving, nurturing, competitive, perceptive, active, creative, vicious and on and on with all the complex combinations thereof and both sexes gender expression also informed by the time, place and culture they live in.
It's sure as fuck not "Men are A and Women are B" wrt ANYTHING. But somehow we can't accept that and still accept that "Yes, men and women are different, in the aggregate." Nope. Too complicated.
Watch out. Ask Steven Pinker what happens when you say such cruel things.
I agree with you on the broad strokes, but I'd like to suggest that gender is not *only* social and psychological; it is also physical. To suggest that not only the way gender has developed historically but also how it continues to evolve today is not heavily influenced by biology is to miss a significant part of gender. Intellectually, we can draw distinctions between them as separate entities, but they are not entirely separate.
In other animals we would call that "sex-linked behavior" not gender because it's not culturally relative, it's species specific. E.g., which bird, male or female, builds the nest depends on species but we're not going to say it's because of social pressure.
Gender is an incredibly stupid term. It is conceptually about stereotypes and it's ridiculous to have it have conflated with any biological concept. Even historically it combines species specific evolutionary behaviors and ridiculous social mores. We're animals, the scientific terms are also appropriate for us. Gender includes everything associated with being a man or a woman and is relative to time and culture, not immutably a part of us as instinct as you would describe it with any other species. Women are probably more nurturing because of evolutionary reasons related to hormones and caring for offspring but that's behavior you can find in dogs, which would be sex-linked behavior. What you're not going to find is the preference for certain colors or wearing dresses, that's gender.
That’s a really good term, “sex-linked behavior.” You know, at some point the devotees of the brave new world of limitless human alternatives are going to have to consider whether we’re a really special kind of animal. Like maybe an “exceptional” one. Which might lead them to ponder anew whether we are or are not part of the rest of the world’s evolutionary line. They’re anti-science anyway, so might as well .
They're already there when it comes to brain development. Every other animal has biological roots for their temperaments and behaviours, but for humans we're supposedly uniquely exempt, and everything we think and do is the result of social conditioning.
Blank-slatism is the cognitive science equivalent of creationism.
A while back it dawned on me that men are jealous of women's ability to bear, birth and nurse babies and that this jealousy probably goes back to our earliest years as human beings. At some point, men realized that human families did not require male participation beyond protection and service. This could account for the multitude of compensatory laws and customs devised by our species ever since to define women as "secondary" humans, little more than chattel, the property of males. This basic physical inequality and consequent jealousy could account for the commonly observed male dislike of women. That dislike comes across quite convincingly in the smirking expressions on trans-female athletes as they accept their first-place awards. Freud, with his "penis envy" had it so backwards.
I think the native Americans had the right idea in raising male children to be proud and efficient braves devoted to protection of the tribe. The male ego needs continuous encouragement and support to rise above destructiveness.
It's not a small thing to provide "protection and service." It's actually a massive thing to be the half of the species that is expected always to die for the other half when circumstances necessitating that choice come around. This implies that men don't care on average if their own offspring survive of which there is no proof at all. If that was the case we wouldn't make it as a species because early humans and proto humans were such small family groups with such useless infants that stayed useless for so long that without males to go out and get food we wouldn't have made it past species bottle necks.
That's also a gross over simplification of the 500+ groups of indigenous Americans across thousands of years. Plenty of those groups just randomly slaughtered. Some existed entirely by theft and murder, some were matriarchies, some had end stages that were a lot like the circumstances that led to the French revolution where the ruling class treated 90% of their people like actual animals. Many groups took slaves, had different laws for women, owned not only their women and children but any they could capture in raids, etc. The "proud brave" is a trope, not a reality. Plenty of the groups were against homosexuality and made gay men a lower class of person than straight men, while basically requiring lesbians be raped forever because being unmarried as a woman was not allowed. Plenty of European groups gave equal rights to women far before feminism was conceptualized, but everywhere has at some point involved owning women as chattel to produce labor, including indigenous Americans. This is all pre-colonial. You're romanticizing them, they were still human and humans are often terrible to each other.
This. Thank you for your reasonable and measured, succinct response.
Gender is nothing without sex stereotypes. Gender is an irrelevance to any situation in which sex based protections for women are essential.
"Intellectually, we can draw distinctions between them as separate entities, but they are not entirely separate."
Yes. Time to set the "Gender Studies" crowd straight, so to speak.
I don't really disagree with you. See my comment to Martin Blank above, who made a similar point to yours.
I think sex and gender are the same, as they always were until around 30 years ago.
When I was in college in the late mid-90s I was introduced to the idea that sex is biological and gender is social, meaning that gender is simply the roles and characteristics that society assigns to a particular sex. In other words, the gender of "woman" was seen as the nurturer and the homemakers, whereas the gender of "man" was seen as the provider and the protector. The importance of distinguishing between sex and gender comes in allowing people to "break" gender norms. Women can look after men, men can be homemakers, women can lead, men can follow . . . in fact, we were coming to a point where the only thing "men" couldn't do was actually have the baby because, well, sex. Biology dictates that males can't carry babies nor nurse them.
So separating sex and gender, understanding that one is biology and one is psychology/sociology/tradition, were important for liberating women in even the most basic of ways. And we were working toward a society where society accepted that the only differences in gender were those that were inherently biological, so males were physically stronger while women were capable of child bearing and feeding. Which kind of goes to your point, I think.
But what happened was that now we have "essentialized" gender, so all those things women/females fought for (freedom to both take their place among men/males intellectually, legally, and financially because we realized that limits on women's rights were due to ideas about gender with no actual basis in biology *and* freedom to have their own physical spaces because we recognized that women physically could not compete against men) are being cast aside by very surface-level and petty ideas about gender while completely ignoring sex, or the biology of being either XX or XY. It's a very weird time.
What you are calling 'gender' is what I call a 'gender role.'
~60 years ago. Perhaps even further depending on what crazy shit John Money was doing. Either way when you use "sex" you're using a biological term that is applicable to all sexual reproducing species. If people weren't so afraid of the word it'd be easier. This is a mixed bag of bullshit from the left and right that got us here.
Last sentence sums it up nicely.
Separating sex and gender is a new thing put forth by the gender ideologues. I am not going to do so and reify this alleged difference. Everyone has a sex. The rest is personality. There is no inherent "gender."
It's not only insulting, it's actively dangerous: kids are being told they need drugs and surgery to "correct" their bodies. This is happening in every school in the US.
Thank you for the discussion of sex and gender. One of the many things that are odd, if not downright wrong, about this country, is the Congressional approval of a female candidate for the Supreme Court who refused to define “woman.” As they say, WTF!
I am exhausted with the comments and discussions of “trans” people. Life was simpler when there was no gender that differed from sex. Is this happening to us because we are essentially Christian and uncomfortable with the need to talk with our children about sexual intercourse? Do other religions have similar experiences?
It was easier. I don't necessarily think it was "right." But at the same time, what we're dong now with sexualizing children and reducing gender to stereotypes is not right either. I have no problem with "trans" people. I have problems with people who want to go beyond acceptance (which most people "accept" trans people) to glorification or elevation or the ridiculous, like making an equivalency between a transwoman who has had the reassignment surgery, which shows commitment, agree with it or not, and men who just want to get out of male prisons and into a population they can abuse or sports where the males' advantage is ignored and women are forced to compete on an unequal playing field. That's when I have a problem.
Thank you!
This is an important point because if it is not recognized, the backlash will pitch us back to a 1950s conception of gender, which some of us have spent a lifetime trying to demolish. The assignment of certain nonphysical human characteristics to one sex or the other (the funniest one of all: “Wonen are emotional, men are rational” 😂🤣😂🤣😂) is the legacy of survival conditions (underpopulation, threat of starvation, heavy labor, hand-to-hand combat) that no longer exist. To survive now we need access to all our human capacities that at most are only filtered through, colored by, sex, the experience of living in a different kind of body (the rigidity of sex stereotypes doesn’t allow for individual differences that are even greater). It will be tragic if two groups of extremists conspire to destroy this necessary adaptation.
Reminds me of the gender studies joke:
Patriarchy = the woman does the dishes
Equality = everyone should pitch in with the dishes
Gender Theory = doing the dishes makes you a woman.
I read a fiction book a while back that is revealing of this mindset, Christina Henry's The Horseman. I love Christina Henry. She does dark retellings of fairy tales, and that book centered on the Sleepy Hollow tale. The main character was supposed to be a transman, a female who wanted everybody around her to recognize her as a man. "Pronouns" were a big deal. Why? Well, because she wanted to be taken seriously and be involved in the men's world and wear men's clothing. I read it and afterward I thought, "How far back have we gone when the only way to be a 'strong woman' is to become a man? And that the problem here wasn't how *women* were viewed and hobbled by society but that a strong *woman* wasn't considered a *man*." The message was frankly disturbing.
I can only "like" this but actually, I LOVE it.
There's a substack bug that isn't letting me "like" certain comments, including yours. So here's a verbal "like."
just have to refresh the page to see the like sometimes
Gender = masculine/feminine, not man/woman
You move into a neighborhood and meet the stay-at-home mom next door. She's in a heterosexual relationship with a man and they have two kids that look a lot like them. She performs the typical motherly roles, works inside the house, homeschools the kids, cooks, cleans, etc. You know this couple for years and then one day you find out she's actually a man who had gender reassignment surgery long ago, and the kids are adopted, and she actually has XY chromosomes and you didn't know differently. Does that make her no longer a woman though that's what you've known her as for years? She isn't female, and she never will be. But is she a man? Modern society would suggest not. The accepted reality, how everyone has been treating her, is as a woman.
That's why gender is messy and why your equation is tricky. She took on all the "feminine" roles and the "feminine" phenotype. So she is, by most conclusions, a woman. To suggest differently for most purposes strikes me as more ideology driven than an actual conclusion based on what we can observe about modern American society.
That's a man. To suggest that "man" and "woman" aren't defined by sex vs stereotypes. What does it mean "for most purposes"? The only purpose of male and female are contribution in reproduction. There is no surgery that can change this.
I feel also that people who make this argument haven't met many trans people. You know almost immediately when someone is not the sex they are attempting to be read as. It is a courtesy to go along with this. It is such a stretch to say it would take years to notice. By definition this is a homosexual couple because they are the same sex, which is where we run into the gay erasure problem of this whole movement. This is a working dad and a stay at home dad, no female parent involved after birth.
Think also, what does it mean to be treated "as a woman"?
I am so tired of reducing the idea of "masculine" and "feminine" to reproduction. Humans are sentient. We are not flowers and birds. So yes historically the fact that women can only have one child every nine months and must have the biology to carry said children meant that they were safest staying near home, gathering and being protected, and men could have up to 365 children a year, and therefore were more expendable and took on the more dangerous jobs (say hunting) meant that the stronger men and the more nurturing women survived to pass on their genetics, and over time those genes contributed to the dimorphic nature of our species and the roles they came to play. But one would have hoped we have developed past the caveman days (which even in cave man days, females and males defied the gender stereotypes, but I digress). So while sex may be the basis for our ideas of gender, sex and gender are not synonymous as is evidenced by the fact that we have both concepts.
If you did not know that Caitlin Jenner was once Bruce Jenner, you would think she was just a very masculine looking woman. I've met women that I've known are female, but they had very little bust, straight lines, and deep voices. They could easily have passed as men. And down through history, it has at times been quite common for women/females to pass as men to access the same rights. Why? Because the difference between being able to own property and not was based on the gender *others* perceived you to be. The difference between being allowed to walk unescorted in public was based on the gender *others* perceived you to be. Gender is about *perception.* *Perception* is based on stereotypes. We assume, based on a combination of stereotypes and phenotypical characteristics, what gender a person is. And you don't have to "meet" a bunch of transpeople. You just have to meet a few people that you spend time "guessing" their sex to see how much gender is a perception.
Does that mean that Lia Thomas should be allowed to compete on a "women's" team? Not if you decide the "women's team" was designed to allow *females* a level playing field against each other and not against *males,* which Lia Thomas is and always will be. Should someone be able to put on a dress and be moved from a man's prison to a women's prison? Not if you decide "women's prison" was designed as a safe space for biologically weaker females to be safe from potentially predatory males. Those are things society has tacitly agreed: that in certain cases females need to be protected and separated from males. But society has also tacitly agreed that as long as someone looks and acts like a woman, they are a woman. Same with a man. We don't go checking people's privates because we have decided that "sex" does not matter for most purposes and people can be who they want. It's only when either side starts making a big deal about it that any of those agreements comes into question, and then when people become disingenuous (suggesting that either gender is the same as sex or not based on sex at all) that things get crazy, because neither is true in practice.
I said nothing about "masculine" and "feminine" being reduced to reproduction, that is what male/man and female/woman are, wholly based on reproductive role. Those are the necessary and sufficient conditions to be labeled as such not the totality of a everything a person may be capable of. It's the bare minimum someone is capable of under usual conditions of development and there are consequences to biology as a result of that. If you attach any other meaning to what being a man or a woman is then that's cultural and probably a stereotype. A man cannot be a mom and a woman cannot be a dad. A man in a dress is not a mother, because mother is "female parent." Every animal that comes from sexual mating has a female parent and a male parent, a mother and a father, a dam and sire. If a couple is gay or lesbian that is two dads or two moms, two male parents or two female parents.
Caitlynn Jenner looks and sounds like a man. If you see him move on video rather than posed and photoshopped he reads as a feminine man. If you hear his voice it reads male. So seriously, what is "treat as a woman" because he doesn't need a pap smear or a pregnancy test when he goes to the doctor. If he requests a same sex provider that's a man. He only now might need a mammogram because taking estrogen radically increases the incidence of breast cancer in men but they're not checking the silicon.
"But society has also tacitly agreed that as long as someone looks and acts like a woman, they are a woman." - not really. Most societies that designate a third category for people who don't fulfill expected cultural sex roles usually put feminine men above any women but below men because the roles are so strict that recognizing a failure to be conforming means you lose rights as a man. It is almost always only for men who want take a female role and the rare cultures that allow women equal status of men in the don't usually allow it full structure of the society. They're not on advisory councils full of men. Third categories almost only exist in cultures with strict sex divided roles that usually have religious consequences if they're not followed. The woman would still die in a menstrual hut but the man gets to be pretty. Digress all you want on caveman society, but there's nothing that will change the vulnerability and uselessness of infants and small children or the fact that women are/were tied to them for 2-3 years minimum until weaning is complete. That is not a gender role, that's a sex role based on the fact that we're the ones with developed mammary glands. In our societies being homosexual meant you could not get married everywhere, until 2010 in Washington DC and 2012 in the rest of the US, so no, they also weren't tacitly women even in a modern way because they weren't allowed to marry men unlike women. Anti sodomy laws are still on the books in the US, if Iran treated gay men as women then why don't all the women get fake breasts as a matter of course there? Because they're actually still treated as men.
"Woman" is adult human female not "anyone who participates in stereotypical culturally-specific female behaviors." Like I said, it's a courtesy to call a gay man with surgery in a dress "she" but it's not because people used to think that was actually a woman. We used to let him use our bathrooms because gay men are not generally known for raping women regardless of the probable outcomes of other types of assault. However, men with a cross dressing fetish have a ridiculously higher likelihood of being sex offenders and now they're legally allowed in too. Having one LGB night club in the area was actually pretty safe where no one cared much about bathrooms because men weren't interested in women until the fetish crowd tacked itself onto it.
I am so tired of people thinking that stating the simple fact that being a woman means you contribute eggs and being a man means you contribute sperm to reproduction, and that there are physiological consequences to those biological systems being in place, means literally anything else about what role someone should fulfill in society. YOU are now saying a stereotype is what makes someone a woman. Saying that being FEMALE is what makes someone a woman does not say anything else about that person. It doesn't make them bad at math or good at makeup. We don't go checking peoples genitals because we don't need to, despite what many people think, it's pretty easy to tell when a man or woman has entered a room. It matters in changing rooms, medicine, bathrooms, prisons, scholarships, women's orgs and position short lists, rape/dv shelters, maternity leave, birth classes, sports, sex segregated children's activities. Which incidentally are all the places men are now allowed because they say magic the magic words of "I identify as a woman." And even though genitals actually do matter in all those situations, in many places you legally can't say anything. Thus we have the WiSpa incident where a multiple time sex offender got his dick out in front of women and girls because no one could stop him at the door. So really, what do you think being treated as a woman is? Did you really think it was mostly about holding doors and using certain pronouns? Is that the sum of your life? "Acts like a woman." Please.
Sure, doesn’t mean it isn’t in part genetic, which it clearly is.
"People with XY chromosomes are not female."
Say it loudly and proudly, again and again...
You are 99.99% (add some more 9s) right. A few XY persons are CAIS. They look like women and think like women. However, they can never have children. I would say that CAIS folks (it is very rare) are women and should be treated as women.
Thank you, Peter, for this truth on behalf those of us born with genetics and/or biology that doesn't neatly fit M or F. I think it's a vital message in this debate: many of us were the infant guinea pigs for the nation's best trans doctors. I wish they'd left well alone.
Our culture rushes to celebrate technology-altered bodies but ignores the history of un-consented trans whose surgeries and hormones often mean a lifetime of issues both physically and culturally
Except maybe not in sports - a Y chromosome might be a dealbreaker for competing in the female division.
CAIS persons have a Y chromosome. However, it doesn't do them any good (for sports) because they can't use the androgens that their bodies produce. Earlier I stated the CAIS persons 'are women'. This is incorrect. They are not. However, the statement that they 'should be treated as women' stands. Treating them as men would be grossly unfair (to them). In a bygone era, this problem did not arise. CAIS persons were thought to be natal girls and treated as such. Some reports suggest that CAIS persons might gain a sporting advantage from height.
They are men with a disorder/disability, not women. Treat them as men with a disorder/disability that may need special accommodations as a man. That does not mean you just throw them in with the women. They have internal testes, testes = male. Probably shouldn't throw them into gen pop in a men's prison but if you let ANY MAN into a women's space based on whether or not HE LOOKS FEMALE ENOUGH then you open the door for ANY MAN who can pay for surgery. That's the problem.
K, Take a look at some photos of CAIS persons. Check out the YouTube videos by Benjamin Boyce (type Boyce CAIS into the YouTube search bar, watch the Claire Graham video). Genetically, CAIS persons are male. However, they are in almost all other respects female. Letting post-op men into women's prisons isn't really a problem. The problem is with intact men who just claim to be female so that they can abuse actual female prisoners (which has already happened).
They're still men with a disability not women. I'm pretty sure the person you're talking about on BB's channel actually lied about having CAIS, has PAIS and a lot of surgery, and if you see more pictures you see a major difference.
Your logic is really faulty. You cannot be "in almost all other respects" female because female is reproductive sex. If you have testes your reproductive sex is male as determined by your gamete potential. If you remove those testes you don't become female, you become a castrated male. There is no other aspect that makes someone male or female. External female genitalia does not make a person male or female it's just the most correlated indication that someone is male or female. So yes, letting post op men into women's prions is actually still a problem, because what you're setting as a standard is if you APPEAR female enough you get in. That's not the same as being actually female and is incredibly subjective. And also having your genitals cut off doesn't actually change the strength and safety imbalance and it is impossible to build genitals or change gamete production. An inverted penis is not a vagina, castrated men are men. By your logic cancer patients change sex if it affects their reproductive organs, that's not how biology works.
Sign them up for the WNBA!
Height is also an advantage in swimming
Yeah, that's true! But just thinking out loud now, variations in body shape and size are an occupartional hazard of competitive athletics, and swimming is one of those categories. What do we do with a person like Michael Phelps, with his famous wing span? Elite male swimmers half his size had to compete against him, knowing they didn't stand a chance. He was an outlier in terms of size, but also in terms of talent. Generally speaking, competitive athletes will gravitate towards a sport that their body type is best suited for but sometimes the superior biology of an opponent will just win out. But height isn't everything. Look at how tall and muscular Lia Thomas is. He still couldn't swim his way out of a paper bag when competing against other men.
As a rule, I'm completely opposed to allowing males to compete against females in any context. I'm even opposed to Caster Semenya competing in women's sports, because Semenya has XY chromosomes, and the Y is obviously expressed. Semenya is not CAIS. But CAIS strikes me as a very ambiguous intersex category in which an occasional superiority in height or strength might not make the individual a true outlier. Probably, for the sake of consistency, they should be banned from women's athletics, but I have experience some ambivalence saying that.
CAIS is an intersex condition in which the Y chromosome is present but is not expressed. “CAIS” stands for Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. In other words, these individuals are genetic males who lack male genitalia and appear as feminine as any XX woman you will ever see. They live as and identify as women, and their Y chromosome would not give them an unfair advantage in sports because they likely have never gone through male puberty and have no circulating testosterone (if the person was born with internal testes that are surgically removed).
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.
That’s interesting. Thank you for the information.
Men with PAIS have partial sensitivity, like Caster Semenya. That's where a benefit comes in. Although even in CAIS there is still SOME sensitivity to testosterone because it has effects other than virilization and a human without any level of sensitivity to any hormone would just be dead.
K, to the best of my knowledge Caster Semenya is not a PAIS male. Caster S. is a rather typical 46 XY 5-ARD (5-alpha-reductase deficiency) male. He was misidentified as female at birth. That is rather common in 46 XY DSD cases.
Fair, but either way, still pretty obviously should have been checked for testes around puberty.
Caster Semenya is a standard male in most (but not all) respects. Testes? Of course. Male Testosterone levels? Of course (at least before medical suppression). XY chromosomes? Of course. Male internal (but not external) anatomy? Of course.
They tend to be taller, and hyper-female, since they lack receptors for testosterone. Apparently pretty common among models. Don't know about sports; apparently they get male size but not male muscles.
There is a suggestion in the literature that CAIS persons might gain some sporting advantage from height. Apparently, they have (on average) intermediate heights between standard XX females and standard XY males. See "Height and bone mineral density in androgen insensitivity syndrome with mutations in the androgen receptor gene" in PubMed.
I agree, and all the more reason for everything to be sex-related. Sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms should be divided by sex, not "gender identity." Prisons as well, with the caveat that trans women are a target for men in prison and should be housed separately for their safety, but should not be housed with women, for the the women's safety.
Penny, thanks for this humane and commonsensical comment. Best wishes to you and your son
"The only treatment for severe sex dysphoria is palliative care in the form of medical transition"
That is not true by a long shot. You're being told that affirmative care is the only option but there are 100% people who have/had dysphoria and got good supportive but not delusion-affirming therapy which resolves or manages issues without hormones and surgery. This is a huge problem in treatment. Therapy is supposed to challenge irrational beliefs but now if a therapist challenges those irrational they can lose their practice. It results in real physical harm to patients.
I was banned from my intersex discussion group for stating this opinion. The whole thing scares me. I'm born intersex, received conforming surgeries as a child, and feel gender dysphoria for my born body. Medicine is whack
That's ridiculous. I have a hormone condition, I'm not intersex, I've also gotten garbage healthcare in relation to it. I've had people tell me I'm intersex or maybe trans because of it which is also ridiculous. The standard treatment for it is more hormones which increase cancer/stroke risk and mask the symptoms rather than manage them, and will do nothing to prevent any of the secondary conditions that usually result from this like T2 diabetes. This is even though it can be fairly well-managed with a very strict diet or different, safer drugs that might actually promote health and longevity. There are too many doctors looking at dollar signs in this, too many willing to cut up children and scare parents into helping.
Yes. r/intersex needs voices like yours, for as long as you can stand it!
Exactly, thank you! And the issue of trans people in sports also emphasizes the points you’re making re prisons: people object to self-identifying trans women in woman’s sports not because of transphobia, but because of FAIRNESS (the clear unfair physical advantage that trans women have over cis women); otherwise, if it was just hatred of trans people, people would also have a problem with trans men in men’s sports. But they don’t, because in men’s sports there is no unfair physical advantage for trans men over cis men, actually, it’s the opposite. And, like you say, isn’t it strange that these trans activists aren’t concerned about trans men being unfairly disadvantaged in men’s sports or even at risk physically in contact sports (same as trans men in men’s prisons)??? Looks like they care more about putting women at a disadvantage and trampling on them than they actually care about trans people (both trans women and men).
beautifully expressed, Penny. I so appreciate you writing from your experience instead of theoretical scare bites. May we grow love that doesn't need to lie. Only personal stories will get us there.
Love, a born eunuch constantly discarding the confusion and shame of a misaligned culture
Oh my gawd.
From what you've written, it sounds like your son is not someone masquerading as a woman for personal reasons (such as entering a women's prison unit to either avoid men or exploit women).
Her son is biologically female, and medically transitioned to male.
Her son is a female-to-male trans man, so would not be a danger to women.
You can't transition from female to male, something she herself admits at the start of her post. Please don't lose your grip on reality.
How would you describe it? Trans men completely pass as male unless naked. Testosterone injections profoundly change the body. So why not call it a female to male transition?
Female and male have to do with gamete production and 99.9% of the time the structures needed to get those two gametes to meet match up to the gametes. I've been mistaken for a man without trying, that doesn't make me one. No surgery changes sex and it's not about serum hormone levels or growing a beard. None of the transmen I've met pass as male, at minimum a usually incredibly short stature, high voice, and small hands give it away. I'm closer to average male height and "swarthy" for a woman so in baggy clothes with short hair from behind it's easy to make the mistake. A 5'3 man is pretty rare being in the 1-2% but half of all women are that height or shorter. Even women at my size half have the upper body strength of men my size let alone men in the same percentile. A man at my height percentile is 6'2". There are real physiological differences between the sexes, it's not just a fashion choice.
Also "passing" presents an actual danger to women in this situation. There was a post long ago on reddit by a transman who got stuck in the men's jail cell for part of the night because they got into a bar fight or some shit. That's a woman locked into a jail cell with men, some probably violent. Think about that when you say someone can change actual sex and what it would really mean.
I would describe it as a fruitless attempt to mask an innate, immutable biological reality. Let me know when testosterone injections cause a woman to produce sperm; there is no "transitioning" from female to male or vice versa.
This is the problem: "a major shift in elite political attitudes." We have allowed elites to dictate too much of what goes on in this country at the expense of an ocean of non-elites. It's no accident that the people who run around defending Amber Heard are the same ones who would expose female prisoners to rape in the name of "social justice." We hear about "privilege" so much in this country. We're brow beaten with it day in and day out. But no one wants to talk about the real privilege, the privilege of class and how these people in their virtue-signaling have left a swath of damage behind them. And I hope you are right that the "worm is turning," but I have my doubts. I don't think we've redlined the craziness meter quite yet.
As far as "Luxury Beliefs" go, males in women's prisons might even top Defund the Police when it comes to collateral damage inflicted on the poors.
I agree entirely - from what I read and hear, the elites who drive the crazy train are nowhere near an awakening. I read that in the San Francisco recall of DA Chesa Boudin, the most elite and progressive (privileged and protected) neighborhoods voted to keep him and that many of those who did choose to recall (to ensure their personal comfort and safety) remain committed to the insane progressive agenda overall.
SF is a sick city. City leaders and residents took one of the most unique and enjoyable cities in the US and turned it into a dumpster fire. Haven't been back for a visit in 10 years and don't plan on it. Most of CA's politicians hail from the area.
SF residents and politicians calling themselves progressives are a sick joke. There's nothing progressive about enabling drug addiction, homelessness and crushing the poor.
Luxury beliefs - supporting Defund the Police et al as a flex for how hip/woke you are, with no thought given to how that policy actually affects real world people.
https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-status-symbol-for-rich-americans/
Yeah except, they didn’t actually defund the police. All across the country people are blaming crime on “defund the police” when police budgets have not been reduced almost anywhere, and where they have it’s by tiny margins that are usually accounting tricks that didn’t reduce police resources. This is a pretend narrative.
"Real defund has never been tried" lmao
Show me where.
Ah, the NYP, beacon of free thought and defender of the down trodden.
I'm Canadian and can't keep all the American newspapers straight. Is that sarcasm?
Certainly, but you're better off judging the content for yourself rather than accepting labels from people who need shorthand to avoid triggering ideas. Hell, even WaPo gets things right sometimes.
Not recently, so much, but I'm sure they have.
I suggest you consider adult privilege, which trumps every other kind. A child living on Park Avenue may have a decent life or a great one, but he is just as eligible for being abused and neglected by his parents. For THEM, class makes them immune to prosecution. For the child, having no right to walk away from abuse (even that which could kill him) makes his “class privilege” a cruel joke. That no one ever even breathes the words “adult privilege” tells you how thoroughly and invisibly screwed children are.
I have seen this first hand. I've worked (in education) in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country and one of the poorest barrios in the country. Abuse is everywhere. One family (married mother and father) with two children decided that one child would have the father's last name and one child would have the mother's last name. When you start out with that kind of (unnecessary) confusion, what's next? I mean why is this even a thing? Providing structure, guardrails and actual adult decision making are critical to effective, protective and loving parenting. Never ever be your chid's friend .... until they are adults.
I'm not sure how this relates to the topic at hand.
I was simply commenting on the false idea that class privilege is the most consequential kind of privilege; that distinction belongs to adult privilege. Trans ideology would not be as established as it is without the substantial support given it by the left, and the left wouldn’t give a damn about trans issues if they affected only children. There’s a lot of talk in these comments about women being the most vulnerable group and the supposed primacy of class privilege. Correcting these ideas is important if we’re to unpack retrograde ideologies accurately and protect those harmed by them.
I see where you're going with this.
Privilege is a balance between two groups of ideas. On the one hand, you have autonomy, agency, influence, and access. On the other hand, you have responsibility, accountability, and liability. People of low privilege have little of the first set but a lot of the second. People of high privilege have much of the first set but little of the second, at least compared to what they have of the first. Children have are low on either. They have limited autonomy, agency, influence, and access, but they *also* have virtually no responsibility, accountability, and liability, at least outside the family unit and to society at large. (In fact, society and the family unit are seen as responsible to *them*.) This is well recognized in law. On the one hand, a child can end up in dire situations, particularly at the hands of parents, but on the other, children themselves can cause damage and death and still not be held liable because they are children.
On the other hand, adults (at least compared to children) do have autonomy, access, influence, and agency, but they also have liability, responsibility, and accountability, including for the children in their lives whose misdeeds are often visited on the adults responsible for their conduct and well being.
Children have other identities beyond that of a child. For example, the class of a child wildly affects that child's access and influence (even if they maintain about the same amount of autonomy and agency), but it also can reduce or increase their liability, accountability, and responsibility depending on where they fall on the socioeconomic scale (remember the whole "affluenza" excuse).
In other words, I see what you're trying to do, but I don't think you accomplish it because you are very narrowly defining privilege.
Children of any and all classes lack exactly the same rights. I grew up in a big house in a wealthy town, but because my father has no conscience and my mother was a disturbed, emotional cripple I was allowed to live with uncontrolled asthma for seven long years. This destroyed my life and almost killed me, and being white and middle-class not only did not give me the right to adequate oxygen but made me ineligible for help from child "protective" services because my parents passed the Demographic Test. The idea that a child's class "wildly" affects her "access and influence" is laughable to me and the many middle and upper-class children like the one I was, including the ones who were actually killed by their parents. I stand by everything I've said on this thread.
Children don't "lack" rights. There is a delicate balance between the role of the state in protecting children and that role being abused to turn parents into breeding cattle to produce warm bodies to serve the elite (meaning parents give birth but the state owns the children, who serve the best interest of those in charge of the state). You slipped through the cracks. People do.
But given that you write in a way that suggests a decent if not expensive education and you're spending Saturday arguing on a Substack where you have to be a *paid* subscriber to comment, it means you have no lack of means to compensate for what you see as your ill treatment as a youth.
Now imagine going through all you went through and not having the money to get an education and live as you do. What do you think would have happened to you? That, my dear, is the "privilege" of access.
And for the record, the two people I've know that were harassed by CPS were not poor (nor were they abusing their children--some do-gooder misinterpreted what was going on and called them in). They were middle class and decently well off. Monsters hide everywhere, but they're less apt to be caught in the "disposable" classes, the poor and the working poor, because the system is overtaxed, so if the child's not actively wounded and dying, they don't care.
K
That’s a bingo.
The statement "women who have penises" has got to be one of the most insane sentences ever. That people can actually make that statement just shows that human beings are equivalent to lemmings. The future is shaping up to be both very strange and very disturbing.
Back in the 90s, the comedian Paula Poundstone had a hilarious joke about how she was so fed up with men she tried to become a lesbian, but unfortunately, her ideal woman was 6’2 with a deep voice and a penis. The idea was so ridiculous, it was literally a joke. Who knew at the time that in 30 years, it would go from a joke to orthodoxy.
I may speak only for myself, but I miss the "nasty women" of 1990s pop culture -- Poundstone, Roseanne Barr, Katey Sagal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It was a freer time.
Have you seen Veep? Louis-Dreyfus shines.
It's not even a satire. It's a documentary about how business is conducted in Washington DC.
Thank you, Matt! I'm one of those TERFs in the UK (a.k.a. TERF Island). I think I'll make some mugs and stickers with 'Fuck Etsy' on them & try to sell them on Etsy.
It should be noted that men's prisons are separated by severity of crime. Women's prisons are not separated. There's normally no need because the percentage of women convicted of violent crime is so low, there's no point. So murderers share a cell with tax evaders.
Matt, you should talk to Amie Ichikawa (Twitter @ichinita310). WoLF can put you in touch with her or just DM on Twitter.
I will buy the "Fuck Etsy" mug.
Me too!
As would I.
Hi,
Another reason I think that no-one wants to write about this case is because it brings to our attention the horrendous nightmare that exists in our prisons in our so called civilised society. In Feltham South London in 200O petty criminal Zahid Mubarak was beaten to death by his cellmate, a known racist. There were allegations that prison guards set up fights by housing black and white prisoners together and taking bets.
Female prisoners, as you say, are not separated as they more likely to be imprisoned for drug offences, shop lifting and self harming. Many have already been abused.
Men who commit violent sexual crime have to be separated (for their own PROTECTION) as they will be beaten to a pulp in prison. Understandably these men might claim to identify as women, and will also be able to assault women if transferred to a women's prison.
That is not to say that male sexual offenders have not themselves been abused. I think the vast majority have.
They deserve compassion just like anyone else who has been abused, but the point of incarcerating them is TO STOP THEM HURTING ANYONE ELSE.
This case exposes our deep lack or concern for anyone less fortunate than ourselves who ends up in prison. Punishing them makes us feel better, but does nothing to improve the economic and social divide and nothing to help them rehabilitate.
I don't believe the 'fuck Jk rowling' people really care for trans people- if they did they would also care for abused women and all people.
I think it's all a ploy to stir unrest.
But hopefully we can do something about our prisons as a result of it.
Jo
It’s also not necessary because women who choose violence for it’s own sake are vanishingly rare.
So a woman incarcerated for murdering her husband (For life insurance money or rage or because she was abused…doesn’t matter. Point is, there’s a motive.) is almost zero risk to a stranger or to her prison roommates.
Women kill for a reason. Motivated violence.
By contrast, male felons often are violent because they enjoy being violent without any relational or other outside motivations. The violence itself is the motivation.
Wow! So some men are born without the need for human connection and belonging, whereas women are never driven to violence in fits of blind rage? What would you make of my friend whose mother (a teacher) beat her and her siblings literally every day? “Motivated violence?” I do not understand how people can continue to believe that men enjoy being violent while women don’t have any anger or violence issues at all. Nor do I understand how adults can pore over every little fucking aspect of adult life while never ever putting themselves in children’s shoes. Is it dark in there with your head in the sand?
That’s not what I said at all. But nice straw men and false equivalencies there.
I’m speaking statistically about a certain population of people. i.e. the population of violent offenders / felons who wind up in prison.
We can (and do) study this population, and we have a pretty sophisticated understanding of why they do what they do, if they’re a danger to the broader population, if they’re likely to offend again.
Within this population…people who are *literally experts* on criminal psychology and criminal behavior have determined that male felons in prison for violent offenses ARE a danger to their fellow inmates and must be separated while female felons who are in prison for violent offenses typically ARE NOT a danger to their fellow inmates and can live communally.
This same statistical fact bears out in the broader population as well. The percentage of violent felonies against *strangers* that are perpetrated by women…is minuscule. It’s much higher with men.
That’s what I mean when I say “motivated” (Motivated does not mean rational or justified, as I’m sure you’re aware. It means done for an identifiable reason outside of the act itself. So, if a woman is feeling overburdened by motherhood and abuses or kills her own children…that’s horrible and a complete tragedy…but it doesn’t make her any more likely to take a knife to her cellmate’s throat.)
And that’s the point — women offend against people they know, have a relationship with, feel frustration and rage toward, can benefit from, etc.
Men are far more likely to commit violence for its own sake…whether that’s sexual violence or physical violence. Having a history of violence DOES make a man more likely to commit violence against his cellmates.
This has been studied and is simply an undeniable fact.
Not sure what your gripe with my comment is since we agree that women take their rage out on people they know, whereas male rage is often directed at strangers. I said nothing about prisons because I have never experienced or studied them. I do take exception to the idea that men commit violence “for its own sake.” That phrasing makes it sound—to me—as if there is no point in unpacking that violence because it makes no sense on any level, and with that I disagree.
My gripe with your comment?
Maybe that it didn’t begin to respond to the topic at hand…which was why it’s safe for female violent offenders to be housed communally but not safe to mix male violent offenders in with the general population.
And….You said nothing about prisons? What?! Who cares? Prisons and what to do about them are the topic of this article and this entire discussion thread.
I mean….You don’t get to come onto a discussion, take issue with something that’s been said (when it’s entirely removed from its original context), and then, when the person who made the comment reminds you of the context say: “Oh, well I never said anything about XYZ!”
Or maybe my “gripe” is that you came on and, instead of contributing to the discussion that was happening or offering anything of value…you made a lot of baseless assumptions about me…accused me of not caring about kids, not caring about men, and having my head in the sand.
Nothing you wrote had anything to do with what I said. It was just some weird delusional fantasy you concocted in your own head where you are the sole protector and defender of men’s value and men’s feelings…which is particularly ironic in the comments section of an article that proves that, once again, *our entire society* overvalues men and prioritizes their wants and their feelings, even at the expense of women’s bodily safety.
You go on the attack against me…remove my comment from all context…accuse me of a bunch of nonsense…and then, when I call you on it, turn tail, play the victim, ask what “my gripe” is with your comment. Lol. Ok.
Calm down. Some statements were made about men and women that I took exception to and gave my reasons for. I am not the protector of men's feelings and values, nor do I want certain ideas to go unchallenged, such as that some groups of women are the most vulnerable people in the country, which is ridiculous. I happen to agree with almost everything Matt wrote in this piece, but not with some of the response. That's all. I've been pretty specific about my objections and I feel I supported them well. You're free to disagree. (BTW, I agree that trans ideology has been pretty damn hard on women. I don't agree that women are more powerless than children--they're not--nor that class privilege trumps adult privilege. I also don't believe that men engage in violence for the sake of engaging in violence, whatever that means. That doesn't mean I'm the "protector and defender" of men's needs and feelings, lol.)
My comment was about the structure of prisons, not drivers of violence between sexes, which is off topic.
(OT: this is a broad generalisation. I think you've never met my oldest sister, who is a diagnosed narcissist. She enjoyed beating me every day as a child (her junior by over 6 years), locking me in small spaces & destroying my treasured possessions. (Amber Heard reminds me a lot of her).)
For some men, strength is their greatest virtue. Some become good at violence. They get paid to be strong and violent. It is 𝑏𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙 to them, not just enjoyable.
A lot of such men might not have a lot to offer in the galleries-and-studio-lofts art world, or computer programming world. And a lot of them have had that rubbed in their faces at an early age. (from a safe distance, of course) Not really disagreeing with you, just pointing out it isn't quite as mindless as it can appear. And of course, you know that.
I once again applaud Matt, as someone who has been a WoLF supporter for some time. I again urge Matt to follow the old journalistic adage: FOLLOW THE MONEY! The promotion of trans-activist extremism is no accident. There is big money behind it, which is why much of the corporate media is promoting the agenda and why so many people are joining the cancel-culture mob to attack any and all dissenters. Here are just some of the resources that we are compiling at the Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights [https://greenalliance.sexbasedrights.org/]:
Hugh Esco, ed. The lobby for gender ideology: a quick primer. [2022] Published by the Gender Critical Greens PAC https://archive.ph/wip/vRsZq
Gender Dissent [Canada] “Exposing the money and influence behind the gender industry in Canada https://www.genderdissent.com
Jennifer Bilek. “Big Pharma exploits and monetizes ‘Trans Identity.’” [2021] https://archive.ph/lJ02b
“Transgenderism is just Big Business dressed up in pretend civil rights clothes.” [2018] https://archive.ph/LzwJU
“Who are the rich, white men institutionalizing transgender ideology?” [2020] https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/f
“Who owns Big Pharma and the billionaires invested in the trans industry?” [2021] https://archive.ph/YTV76
The Data Lounge. “Martine Rothblatt: a founding father of the transgender industry.” [2020] https://archive.ph/utSFX
Alexandra DeSanctis. “Planned Parenthood jumps into the hormone-therapy game.” [2021]
https://eppc.org/publication/planned-parenthood-jumps-into-the-hormone- therapy-game/
Dialoguenotexpulsion.org. “NLGC [National Lavender Greens Caucus]--vs–GaGP [Georgia Green Party] Testimony.” [n.d.] https://archive.ph/ZTbCw
Sue Donym. “Inauthentic selves: The LGBTQ+ movement is run by philanthropic astroturf and based on junk science.” [2021] https://archive.ph/dFfh3
100%! And there's more than one money trail. The complicity in so many quarters suggests a confluence of interests. I suspect that Big Pharma is the main culprit, but Hollywood seems to be a player. Then there's the echoing silence from the left-leaning media giants, suggesting a fear of losing advertisers. The fashion industry, toy makers, and publishers all have huge investments in the social stereotypes surrounding gender, which is also a driving force.
Quick follow-up: Jennifer Bilek just published this recently: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers?fbclid=IwAR0b7WdqntswFybsPxvbmI2vPfMpw6p4B2WCJXjt2c6bngYf0k8Xfx_eFwY
when you have so much money you spend all your days trying to fuck up humanity, you no longer deserve it.
Oh my gosh! So true! I left the insane state of IL where Pritzker is governor and will likely win again. I don't think the majority of Illinoisans know how deep his family is in this. Then again, their apathy toward it may be the driver. What a sick family endeavor and use of a hotel fortune!
Wow, what the hell.
Thank you for all the great links! Hugh Esco is wonderful, as are you.
Thanks for that reference. Too bad it's something that splits the Green Party, or is likely to, but I think it's needed.
If we are looking for humans that can be categorized as “women”, maybe Martina Navratilova said it right, “A penis is a deal breaker”.
Greenwald had to give up on his idea of making a film about Navratilova due to backlash over her beliefs on gender.
She gave her brave and honest opinion.
Yes, kudos to her!
If your girlfriend has a penis, something's wrong. 💁🏾♀️ 🥒 🎶
Exactly….I’m beginning to think that Robert DiNero in “Meet the Parents” devising a strap on mammary glands contraption so he could “breast feed” his grandson was taken seriously rather than the farcical non sense it is. Got milk? It’s a simple question.
I think there will be worm-turning on a lot of issues soon. On the transgender issues first because there are so many absurdities ("I can't define woman since I'm not one") but I think on other things as well. Lots of self-righteous people will be doing 180 degree shifts and pretending to never have supported things they shoved down everyone else's throats for years.
You are an optimist! I hope your vision comes true for all of us.
Did she bust out the old, “Why do you care so much?” I have a good friend who lives in SF and is thoroughly indoctrinated, and the barriers she has constructed in her head to avoid wrongthink are impressive. Any time I make what I think is a good argument about why men should not be in women’s spaces, she either says she doesn’t understand or she asks me why I care so much. I tell her that I care about women and I care about the truth. It never matters. I think both of us have just decided to steer clear of that topic because we are never going to agree.
She's been thoroughly brainwashed and is repeating all of the talking points. If her generation was outgrowing gender, then why have they created a "gender identity" for every tiny nuance of human feeling? Why do they believe that if a woman has "traditionally male interests" that she can't be a woman and must have surgery to become a man?
'gender and sex roles are outdated concepts" - so women are now asking men out and paying for the date? Taking the sexual initiative - the first time? There are other, similar questions.
Not that I've heard. If that was happening, a young man I know wouldn't be single. so the slogan is pretty self-serving.
One of these days, and I hope it's soon, there will be a great reckoning over this coordinated effort to establish a delusion in law and in everyone's minds.
Altering one's body does not magically transform anyone to the opposite sex. Merely cross-dressing and expecting access to sex-segregated spaces is the pinnacle of narcissism and extremely destructive to what little social cohesion remains. "I'm a woman because I say I am. My penis has nothing to do with it." How did so many people fall for this colossal lie?
The attempt to change sex does not (or should not) confer special social status or heroic status. The urge to do so is not whimsical like merely cross-dressing used to be, it is condition that is to be pitied, and that pity is being destroyed by the trans/gay lobby and its strident, deeply irrational campaign to wipe out commonsense understanding of sex and sex expression.
That our political "leaders" are so cowardly as to force the entry of cross-dressing rapists into women's spaces is a travesty, more of the feminist chickens coming home to roost. It is the social disaster of "equity" taken to its extreme and now even some DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity) enthusiasts are having second thoughts even as this insane method of social leveling is destroying what's left of our institutions.
You'd better hope that if the Rs gain a majority some of these accommodations will be rolled back, but don't hold your breath. We need leaders who can stand up to the infantile whinging and hysterical claims of "genocide" and put an end to the advancement of professional sex agitators, fashionable gender benders, butchering sex-reassignment surgeons, and the lickspittle press that defends them in the public prints..
You reap what you sow.
Is there any other concept so nebulous that is being enshrined into law? I can't think of one.
They don't want pity. They want affirmation and validation.
Then they're barking up the wrong tree. How can anyone affirm or validate the patently absurd claims and evasions of the trans/gay lobby?
You're preaching to the choir. And people are compelled to affirm and validate or they'll lose their jobs. That's how they make it happen. By threatening to take away your livelihood. Not to mention making you and even your children social outcasts for "hate" and "bigotry"
The silence of most women in the face of these assaults on the gains of the feminist movement is astonishing.
More generally, why is it that gender and race are the ONLY drivers of identity to drive societal groupings? Why do those immutable characteristics override other characteristics the contribute to identity?
Here's a thought experiment: I'm a specialized professional who is a white male. If I walk into a room and there are two groups of people: a group white male construction workers and a group of non-white females who work in the same profession as me, which group will I want to mix with? I will prefer to mix with the female group becasue their experiences and thoughts are going to provide for stimulating conversation. Not that I'm hating on construction workers, it's just the reality that I will share more interests with the professional group. So what part of my identity is most important? On what basis are gender and race considered the most important components of identity and should drive social/governmental policies?
Construction workers code switch to avoid being talked down to by those who would stereo-type them. Carpenters, electricians, boiler-makers, operating enginees are unionists who know far more about politics than any one. They are not unobservant about the biases of professionals, but prefer to stay in the company of people who support unions. My father was IBEW and husband UBC. Eugene Debs was our hero. Most specialized professionals have no idea of the rich culture of labor and the labor greats who established unions.--the workers do.
I agree completely, and was concerned peple may read my comment that way when I wrote it.
My point was simply to make the thought experiment - not a suggestion about the depth of people's mental life based on their line of work.
I know you didn't mean it that way, but there is much perception among the craft trades that elites view them as non-thoughtful. In fact, they play to this stereotype to avoid having to be lectured by their (self-perceived) betters. My husband, the union steward, was working on a big project in the South run by a company from a Northern city. As the union steward he was expected to gain clarification about deductions taken from worker's pay. One was a library tax for the Northern city. The project manager (from the Northern City) explained that anyone who worked for them had to pay the taxes of the Northern city where the company was based, but of course as Southerners they had never heard of libraries.
A very good book is __Royal Blue: The Culture of Construction Workers__ by Herbert A. Applebaum .
Education equals indoctrination and more education equals more indoctrination. Anyone doubting that in the days of woke where the most extreme supporters of what's patently absurd can be found in the ivory tower's and the people that came from the ivory tower's. Noam Chomsky, Yes from the ivory tower's says and it makes sense that we're Born with natural critical thinking abilities and one of the jobs of education is, besides indoctrination is to take that natural ability and supress it; all the while telling us that they're teaching critical thinking. It's never been more obvious. Being a construction worker, you know, someone who builds real wealth; I've never been impressed with the "professional classes" who tend to be the most dogmatic and resistant to change people in society. None more so than the MD classes.
Your nose gets longer
Most of the publicly visible women who have spoken against this have been persecuted in one way or another by losing their jobs, getting their articles and speaking engagements canceled, losing book contracts, receiving thousands of rape and death threats. etc. Other women without established careers or fame are also speaking out if you look in the right places, but many are terrified to do so, with good reason. And yes there is a vocal minority who have been totally brainwashed into thinking they are the "oppressors" and therefore have no right to object.
Pretty sure all of the old feminist leaders (Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, etc.) have all condemned this.
"I will prefer to mix with the female group becasue their experiences and thoughts are going to provide for stimulating conversation."
Orwell, I urge you to chat while with those construction workers. You might find them more interesting and more informed than you realize. And likely more intellectually "diverse" than your "professional" colleagues.
YES -- that is, if they'll have you!
You’re basically saying class is the most important driver of identity.
Not really - it's about shared experiences. My Work is a big part of my life - I think about it a lot. In my thought experiment, I don't believe I'd choose to mingle with finaciers or gender-studies professors.
Grant you that, but not withdrawing my comment.
I understood your point.
My country, Canada, is committing the same idiocies.
An astonishing and dismaying 50% our female prisoners are First Nations.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/indigenous-women-half-inmate-population-canada-1.6289674
The current situation can be read about here: https://www.lawnow.org/transgender-inmates-in-prison/
"Bill C-16 also amended two parts of the Criminal Code:
It added “gender identity or expression” to section 318(4) of the Code, which defines an identifiable group for the purposes of advocating or promoting genocide (section 318) and inciting hatred (section 319).
It added “gender identity and expression” to section 718.2(a)(i) of the Code, which deals with sentences for hate crimes. This section allows courts that impose a sentence to take into account evidence that the offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on a person’s gender identity or expression. It means judges should consider hatred based on gender identity or gender expression.
The Correctional Service Canada
In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to make sure transgender inmates are placed in prisons based on their gender identity. He stated:
I will make sure we look at it and we address it and we do right in recognizing that trans rights are human rights and we need to make sure we are defending everyone’s dignity and rights in every way we can.
After that promise, the Correctional Service Canada (CSC) – which governs the federal penitentiary – changed its transgender inmate placement policy. The CSC’s old policy was to place transgender prisoners according to their sex assigned at birth.
About the old policy, Boyer, Odeyemi and Fletchers stated:
As recently as January 2017, the CSC policy dictated that trans prisoners be assigned to either men’s or women’s penitentiaries based on their pre-operative sex. Consequently, trans women who had not undergone gender affirmation surgery were forced to live in men’s prisons instead of with the gender they identify with. This CSC policy has led to extreme difficulties for these women, who are often subjected to sexual harassment and assault. Frequently, they are sent to solitary confinement or are otherwise isolated for their protection."
As a Canadian, Bill, you may already be aware that the Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter originally allowed trans-identified males into the Shelter in accordance with the law and the assumption that such males would behave themselves because, after all, weren't they women too? The women who run the Shelter quickly discovered that trans-identified men, who had not surgically transitioned, was abusing and traumatizing the already-traumatized female residents. So they revised their policy, barring such men. And lost their funding from the city of Vancouver. Yet, they prevail.
And which women require the Shelter's services most of all? First Nations women, other women of color, homeless women, sex workers, all women who are subject to male violence in whatever sphere.
I was not. I used to work for Public Safety at the national level, but am not following these matters as closely as I once was. I regret working for them now.
Canada's treatment of First Nations people could hardly be worse. It's a disgrace.
This is one of the first places I'd donate to if I became rich.
Every dollar helps. Imagine if a million people each gave one dollar...
Yes, I didn't mean that it stops me from donating what I can. I just fantasize about being able to give millions one day.
Same.
These people are like the Stepford Wives. Their human, thinking brains, have been replaced by machinery that can only work along specific ideological lines.
The Chandler case has two big problems. First and foremost, the bad guys are trans. That’s an unthinkable no-no in contemporary American (really the entire Anglosphere) life. Trans is a sacred value and going against it make you a ‘very bad person’. The highest value of American life is protecting the ‘right’ of Will Thomas to cheat by joining the women’s UPenn swim team. TWAW and you had better not forget it.
Of course, class plays a role here. The core of feminist ideology (in practice, WOLF is an honorable exception) is promoting the interests of elite women. Ordinary women are of little or no interest to most feminists. Since, female prison inmates are at the bottom of society, they don’t count.
A long time ago after the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse I pondered the situation and thought that Lynndie England, one of the prison guards, had also been subjected to abuse and deserved some support from women's groups. She had some disabilities and had worked at a chicken farm before deployment. I was never able to get anyone to care about her.
Kathleen, so good to recall the story of Lynndie England. She was an impoverished child of Appalachia living in a trailer who joined the National Guard for college money. She soon found herself doing duty as a prison guard in a war zone, under the command of a sergeant who raped and impregnated her. A tragic story, and nobody seems to care.
It was. while what she did was very wrong I am sure at that age and background she was manipulated. meanwhile Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis who threw a gasoline-filled bottle through a police car in NY (lawyers with elite degrees) in NY protests have been given
reduced sentences. education and class provide support. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ny-lawyers-plead-guilty-molotov-cocktail-case-shorter-sentences-likely-2022-06-02/
Granier was absolute garbage , England was guilty of crimes , but she was also exploited and a victim of criminal supervisors
You are (somewhat) describing Liberal Feminism. Libfems embrace idpol "intersectionality" and have no problem with considering trans identified males as "women". Radical Feminists (and the small but growing Reactionary Feminists movement) are very much concerned with ordinary women. Radfems are all over class. And don't subscribe to gender identity ideology at all. Unfortunately, Liberal Feminism is the most prominent these days. The majority of mainstream women's organizations, from NOW to the League of Women Voters proudly embrace gender identity ideology, ironically undermining themselves. And driving those of us who are against it nuts....
which is why it's hilarious and maddening to see objections painted as solely Christian or right-wing. something tells me the religious right wouldn't see eye-to-eye with radfems on a whole lot! It's pathological denial of the reality that many people they agree on most issues with are not on board with this. It means they could be.....heaven forbid.....on the wrong side of history!
WoLF is fierce and has no problem taking on Goliath, obviously. And believe it or not, they don't make trans guys out to bad guys. They just state the facts: Men are more violent than women, gender is a social construct and trans does not exist (except in thinking). What they stand for was rational and globally understood 10 years ago.
Please stay with this issue Matt it is the most important issue of our time. Women and girls are under brutal assault promoted at all levels by the Biden regime
I’ve seen the attacks on you from “left” Twitter (actually broken-brained narcissistic — and really mean — grifter quacks who are in no way “left”) for these articles, and I know it must be difficult for you. This writing been empathetic and sensible and deeply reported, which is what people should want on this issue.
Thanks for this writing, and thanks for pointing out the work of Herzog and Singal; I’m a big fan of theirs.
I'd also like to give credit to the first person in the States (that I'm aware of, at least) to write about this issue in a mainstream context, Abigail Shrier, on her Substack, The Truth Fairy. She began by interviewing inmates at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.
I haven’t read much of Shrier’s work, although I’m familiar with the controversies (the ACLU calling for the banning of her book was one of the craziest stories ever).
I think Herzog and Singal’s work predates Shirer’s book and Substack by several years. They both wrote sensitive, deeply researched pieces on detransitioners that got them blackballed from their liberal spaces. They’ve both continued on that path with thoughtful, well-reasoned and often quite funny work that’s very at odds with the idea from some corners that they’re hateful bigots. I still contend that the extreme ostracization (and ignorance) of these two avowed liberal writers is what has allowed this issue to now become a conservative talking point and culture war issue, which in turn causes #resistance Dems to embrace some truly idiotic ideas.
I used to subscribe to the Atlantic (no more) and read Singal's cover story on teenage girls transitioning. It was very objective and balanced. Herzog had the temerity to write about detransitioners, which resulted in her having to move to another city because she was receiving death threats.
Shrier came to this topic from another angle, accidentally, you might say, but ultimately took things to a new level by figuring out how to get a mainstream book published despite the ACLU's campaign to ban the book and Amazon's initial refusal to sell it. (It went on to become a best seller.) Her research was extensive and groundbreaking. And she's continued to break stories on this topic, such as the prison issue and the trans medical professionals who are experiencing some remorse over the ideology they helped promote and the number of bodies they helped mutilate (a bit disingenuous if you ask me, but better than nothing).
The three of them are in the fray for good...I have tremendous respect for them.
FIST is another feminist organization doing outstanding work pushing back against the extremist trans-activist agenda. Check out this informative video presentation about autogynephilia, which explains much of the trans phenomenon. People need to understand that the trans-activist demand to allow males who "self-identify" as women to have access to women's spaces is another manifestation of patriarchal domination. It is being driven by male fetishists who want women to accept them as women for purposes of gratification (and, as noted in another comment of mine, they are supported by some big money, including money from the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex). See: https://feministstruggle.org/2022/03/31/agp-awareness-day-march-31st/
Thank you. May I add a video that explores the social media pressure on young people and the promotion of mental illness? The video mainly deals with trans but touches on other media and peer driven phenomena: https://gettr.com/post/pop6mrc030
Thank you! Very good video that deserves wide circulation.
Thumbs up.
Thank you for the link.