There’s a new catchcry in town. It’s been flying around New Zealand media like a ball in a pinball machine since February 20, when Family First launched a campaign called Ask Me First. The campaign amplifies the voice of Laura, an 18 year-old student who has challenged policy changes at a New Zealand all girls’ high school. The policy changes were made to accommodate a student who identifies as trans. Liberal media is reacting to Laura’s concerns with loud wails of “transphobia!” – but have any of these journalists really considered what “transphobia” might actually mean?
Does transphobia really mean, never questioning or turning over in one’s mind the views or demands of a trans person? Couldn’t obliging with haste and without question to someone’s demands, be a sign of fear?
And could noisy, flailing overcompensation perhaps be a symptom of deep discomfort, too?
I’m thinking of that Fawlty Towers episode where a party of Germans comes to dine at the hotel, and Basil Fawlty desperately tries to hush Sybil and make sure that she doesn’t “mention the war”. Meanwhile, Fawlty can’t contain his own state of panic, and winds up yelling at the top of his lungs about the invasion of Poland and marching around with his index finger crossed above his top lip.
So. How’s about that liberal media on the so-called “bathroom wars”?
The Herald’s Lizzie Marvelly avoids addressing 18 year old Laura. She prefers to lay into Family First, because it means that she can write off Laura’s concerns as part of a homophobic (ahem – Marvelly clearly has a problem with same-sex spaces!), conservative agenda. Things become very different when you take account of Laura’s voice independently, if you recognise her as a young woman who has been offered a platform, and not simply an empty-headed Bob McCoskrie puppet. Laura is 18, she has a mind of her own – who knows, perhaps in four years she’ll run for mayor – but she is not a fully fledged right wing lobbyist. She had been challenging her school for a year before McCoskrie entered the picture. Marvelly cannot handle her one bit.
Why are Marvelly, or indeed Alex Casey on The Spinoff, or Alison Mau on RadioLive, so desperate to sweep Laura under the carpet? Why does Laura make them so nervous? Why must they work so hard on their “some of my best friends are trans” routine, and flash their rainbow credentials like there is no tomorrow? It’s a bit suspicious really, watching them all run about handing out cups of milo to trans people just because a girl has some relevant questions to ask about major policy changes at an all girls’ school.
A phobia is an extreme irrational fear of something, and in this case “trans” indicates people whose identities are built around having made a social “transition”, namely from one gender to another. Perhaps transphobia is a fear of looking at or exposing this reality, and perhaps Marvelly, Mau and Casey see that that’s what Laura does – expose the nature of gender transition – and that’s why they are running aghast.
After all, Marvelly and Casey are proud liberals. And most liberals have swallowed the notion that ‘transphobia’ is a particular variety of homophobia, like an offshoot of it. That is blatantly untrue: transgenderism is not even consistent with gay rights, let alone an offshoot of gay rights. Take, for example, the role of biological sex in each case.
Gay rights advocates for the freedoms of people who choose to engage in same-sex relationships.
Marvelly cannot even admit to the reality that biological sex exists in the first place. In fact, transactivists generally are all over the place on this issue of sex – it’s just majorly inconvenient to them that sex exists. Sometimes, they deal with this by denying it outright, saying that because, you know, there are intersex people, it follows that there are no males or females. Even as they advocate for reassignment surgery for people with male or female genitals. Other times biological sex does exist, and provides a reason to shut women up. “Cis” women, whose biological sex supposedly “naturally” matches our gender, are just all white and privileged empty-headed know-nothings with no right to speak about dysphoria or oppression.
And look, if you think an 18 year old girl wanting to defend a changing room is bad, then you will really hate these lesbians I’m going to tell you about. Lesbians do not only have a long history of creating and defending female-only spaces, their most intimate relationships are with females only. Gosh! What fascist, privileged, conservative bigoted behaviour, for these women to want intimate, same-sex relationships only with other females, and not to want penis, even if it’s wearing a dress. In fact, most lesbians don’t think that wearing a dress or make-up has anything to do with being a woman – it’s called being gender non-conforming. It’s called, rejecting the standards of compulsory heterosexuality, which dictates that women must be sex objects for men.
If Marvelly and Casey want to go out crusading for the rights of males to enter female spaces and claim womanhood whilst undermining sex, they better drop the “L” from their LGBT flag waving, as their attitudes are certainly hostile to lesbians.
Consider this further vital difference between gay rights and transactivism. Historically and currently, homosexuals as a community are threatened by medical establishment intervention, because of the routine pathologisation of homosexuality. Transactivists, on the other hand, promote intervention by the medical establishment: they lobby for it constantly. That fundamental difference alone should have us questioning how closely bound the interests of these two movements really are.
There are many lesbians today who say that if gender identity politics were as prevalent when they were young as they are now, that instead of growing up to recognise and embrace their gender non-comformity and same-sex attraction, they would have thought they were boys. They would have bound their chests and opted for double mastectomies and testosterone pills, and social transition – despite the negative health impacts and increased risk of self-harm and suicide. Given no means to reflect on the nature of patriarchy as a hierarchy of male dominance over women, that forces women into heterosexuality – but every encouragement to swallow a gender identity ideology, they would have thought they were boys.
Indeed, there are many critics of transactivism who say that this new trend for medicating young people on the basis of gender identity is a form of gay eugenics. Transactivist Scout Barbour-Evans said, himself, on RadioLive, that gender is a “social construct”, and he was right about that. And when young people are medicated, to the point of sterilisation, just to better align with and conform to social constructs – that is eugenics. And because gender conformity has so much to do with compulsory heterosexuality – it’s a form of gay eugenics. Liberals: don’t come at me. Think about it. These kinds of social trends have never been dominated by evil sadists, but by well meaning individuals too scared to think for themselves.
Think.
Liberals are not only unthinkingly contradicting their own supposed stances on gay rights, but also on women’s rights. Marvelly prides herself on initiating the My Body My Terms campaign. Now she is shaming an 18 year old girl in The Herald for taking that very stance on private female spaces. Matt Walsh sums up this hypocrisy perfectly on The Blaze:
The very people who so often claim that we’re living in a “rape culture,” and who are apt to cry harassment when a man so much as compliments a woman in the wrong way, and who often say that America is such a misogynistic hellhole that women can’t even walk down the street without fearing assault or rape, are the same ones who tell young girls to shut up and stop complaining when men with penises stroll into their locker rooms and bathrooms. In every other context, men are chastised for their “male privilege” if they act in a way that makes women uncomfortable… but if a girl is uncomfortable looking at penises in her locker room, suddenly she’s the one who gets yelled at for being inconsiderate.
There’s a reason, too, why the catchcry is always “transwomen are women” and not “transmen are men”. After centuries of fighting to gain access to privileges only afforded men – education, voting rights, political representation, the job market – women know damn well we can’t simply erase our oppression and gain male privilege with the flick of a switch. Some of these liberals are fighting the pay gap, for Chrissakes, whilst denying that sex is real and gender is an oppressive system of male dominance over women. Why do they think that women earn $7 less on average per hour? Because we identify as $7/hour less valuable than men? No – it’s because we were born female, and ascribed roles and discriminated against on that basis. A girl can’t “identify” her way out of a brothel or child marriage either – the idea itself is offensive and sexist.
Surely, to fight for the rights of men to enter female only spaces in spite of all of this and without even having sound reasoning behind you is men’s rights activism.
And why the hypocrisy? Why decry rape culture, whilst chastising a girl who wants her safe spaces protected? Why wave the rainbow LGBT flag, whilst supporting the notion that lesbians are bigots? The reason is that these liberals cannot look “trans” in the eye, because they are too scared.
Many times these people even engage hypocrisy within transactivism. One minute, they are all about trans rights and trans visibility. The next minute, they are going – what, trans? Who is trans – “she” is just a girl, an ordinary girl – there’s no “trans” issue to see here! If that erasure of the reality of gender transition – the choice, the process, the lobbying for policy change – does not indicate some kind of fear and denial, then I don’t know what would.
And what is there to be afraid of, but – unpopularity. Transgenderism has been deemed, by liberals, not a contemporary phenomenon that needs to be discussed and examined critically in the interests of the safety of girls and women and children – but a way to signal one’s love and support for marginalised people. This is how liberals are saying to one another, “I’m not part of the problem”. “Are you? No? Well neither am I!”
But we are.
If we are too scared to think – we are.
Reblogged this on Dead Wild Roses and commented:
Wow. Insightful writing. 🙂
Well said, thank you!
Reblogged this on A butterfly's diary and commented:
Great post to start the week
Very true. I’ve been shouted down and actually wept at by a group of women *one of whom was bloody PREGNANT at the time* for saying that a woman is always and only an adult human female. They yelled that I was a bigot, accused me of transphobia, and insisted that sex is a matter of choice.
Next day one of them told me how cute it was that her daughter wanted time with just her and not Daddy or her brother because sometimes you just need “girl time.” Giant pause, squirming discomfort (hers not mine). I acknowledgment. The woman is afraid of biology – with good reason I must admit, it’s been the basis of our oppression forever – and afraid of not coming up to the liberal mark. She no more believes that transwomen are women than she believes that onions are automobiles, but she can’t bring herself to admit it.
That unfortunately happens more and more often… I know you posted this comment a while ago now, but if the situation you describe still has not changed, I would recommend you to introduce her to Magdalen Berns’ Youtube channel (particularly the video “Agenderphobic YouTube Girls-Two Genders” -at least as a starter). I don’t know if you know this channel, but if you don’t, it’s really solid stuff. I can’t guarantee it will help, but I can tell you it has worked for me.
Great piece! Thank you!
This is so freaking good. Thank you for writing unapologetically!
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One of the best posts I’ve read for a while, and I consume them voraciously! Thank you for stating what many of us are thinking. LBG drop the T! Fun fem libfems, wake up! Democrats, liberals, progressives, leftists, etc, wake up! THINK. We also need to think about who we are donating our time and money to. Only donate to orgs that acknowledge that biology is real and the basis of women’s oppression. Drop all orgs that support using the T as a stalking horse enforcing patriarchy.
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The trans lobby would have you believe that, while it wants to change who has access to sex segregated spaces (now gender identity segregated spaces), it does want to retain some form of sex/gender segregation—otherwise what would be the point of trans women, for example, needing a “safe space” apart from “men”? I don’t think this is true. I think the trans lobby is smart enough to know that Western society is not ready to end sex segregation, particularly when it comes to showering spaces. Even though trans activists suggest that it’s “no big deal” to have biological males in the showers with biological females—to suggest otherwise is to be automatically branded a regressive sexual conservative—they know what a radical social and ideological change this represents. That’s the whole point. The trans movement is a radical social movement bent on destroying sex as a social category. Universal unisex bathrooms and showering spaces—the movement’s ultimate though usually unstated aim—is perhaps the most important step toward realizing this goal. My question for radical feminists who oppose the abolition of sex segregation is…why? I don’t quite buy that it’s all about the safety of females against male violence. Doesn’t ending sex segregation also advance your vision of a genderless society?
Hi there,
Ending sex segregation might advance the vision of a genderless society if there were no male violence epidemic.
Sex-segregated bathrooms and changing rooms were fought for by first wave feminists so that women could enter public space, could leave the home.
It would be hard for us to go shopping, to go swimming, to participate in public life if we did not have use of female only facilities to change, to go to the bathroom.
Taking those away is regressive, and it does not represent “progress” toward a “genderless society”.
On the contrary, it would represent an extraordinary removal of power from women, should males occupy both male and “female” bathrooms and changing rooms, leaving us again either at home or constantly vulnerable. Any time that men gain more power, like this, over women, we move AWAY from any possibility of a genderless society.
It is not sex-segregation in the interests of women’s safety that reinforces gender.
It is male dominance and the removal of women’s rights in the face of male dominance, that reinforces gender.
As long as there is male violence, women will need safe spaces, away from males, in order to engage in public life.
Wherever those spaces are taken away, that is the result of the advance of men’s rights activists seeking to bolster male power and entitlement.
good explanation
Sex is not gender.
If you can’t wrap your brain around that, nothing a radical feminist ever says to you will make sense.
Sex is not gender, hence sex segregation has nothing to do with whether we put an end to gender. A 100% sex-segregated locker room will admit femmey women, butch women, long-haired women, short-haired women, women who played with Barbie as kids, women who work as mechanics, women who are into men and women who are into women, women who wear heels and women who wear Birks and coveralls. In short, as progressives like to put it, all sorts of “gender presentations” will be present in that room. But they’ll all be women.
After Bill C-16 on gender identity and gender expression was voted in Canada, Prime minister Justin Trudeau tweeted #LAmourCestLamour» ( Love is love) and the minister of Justice said she was «ecstatic». Very deep political statements that illustrate your point.
Please carry on. You are impeccable in your ability to point out the complete insanity of this movement and those who for whatever crazy reason have a need to fear it. We all need to keep bringing the hypocrisy out so more will have courage to speak up. This is no small thing either.
Free speech is on the line.
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Again, my beloved wife of 41 years would have been forced into the ‘male’ gender box from childhood, if this nonsense had been around back in the fifties. If there had been trans activists back then they would have pressured her to transition (although I doubt my in laws would have gone along with it!). But it’s gender roles that are BS, not biological sex. Just let people have their own wants, dreams, and likes….and don’t force them into a gender box because of them!