Transphobia: An Action Pack (Pt. 8)

An authoritative collection of details on what transgender means, the current medical status, public perception and backlash.

The man says “I shall drown and no-one will save me!”, so the English teacher keeps on walking.

Hey, you! Yes, you. Are you normal? You didn’t change gender, or anything? Then you might have heard a lot of barking about those transes!

Maybe you’re feeling just a bit intimidated by all? Well, I’m here to help, best beloved. I’d like to show you how people talk about me and those like me, what it means and where we are now.

Entries

Glossary entries

1. Gender Identity
2. GSM, transgender, trans man, trans woman, cisgender, anti-trans campaigner, biological essentialism, misgendering, deadnaming, dogwhistle
3. Stochastic violence, conversion therapy, trans-away-the-gay, rapid onset gender dysphoria.
4. Autogynephilia

The Arguments

1. Arguments 1 (Part 5 overall)
   “What about the minority who are dangerous?”
   “Calm down and stop being hysterical!”
   “I’m just asking questions…”
   “I’m not transphobic I’m just against extremists!”
   “We have concerns but the transes silenced us!”
   Some variation on “men”…
2. Arguments 2 (Part 6 overall)
   Linking together gay/drag/sex/kink/abuse/pædophilia
   Falling back on accusations of perversion
   Using Trans Rights Activists / Lobbyists as a derogatory term
   Appealing to “the gut” or common sense
   Likening trans people to a contagion
3. Arguments 3 (Part 7 overall)
   An appeal to ‘bringing reality’ into the conversation
   - Declaring that sex is ‘baked into every cell in your body’
   - Declaring that ‘you cannot change sex’
   - Declaring that ‘men will always out-compete women’ in sports
   Appealing to protecting women and girls
4. Arguments 4 (this part!)
   An appeal to “ineffable womanhood”
   An appeal to being generally “silenced” or “cancelled”
   Any line that starts with “Well why can’t I identify as…”
   Appealing to a shared experience that trans women cannot have
5. More soon!

The Arguments

This is the penultimate set of anti-trans arguments. The last piece will be about the language of “experimentation”, especially as applied to young trans people. Then… that’s it for the arguments! After that, we’ll take a look at the long list of facts about trans people, as understood by current medical best-practice and the vast majority of medical authorities.

A little content warning — this focusses heavily on some specifically anti-trans-women arguments. I’ve not forgotten about you lovely trans men and non-binary peoples, I promise! We get too much attention, you don’t get enough.

Okay, for the second-to-last time, best beloved, let’s look at some anti-trans arguments and see if they hold up to scrutiny:

An Appeal to Ineffable Womanhood

Don’t look now, but there’s a few things wrong here…

This is a different sort of argument from what we’ve seen before — it’s philosophical, metaphysical and spiritual. It doesn’t try to appeal to data or research, so much as it appeals to a notion of sisterhood that only contains cisgender women “because” and excludes transgender women “because”.

It’s a perspective that many Second-Wave Feminists (1960–1980), such as Suzanne Moore, hove closely to. It’s not so much a theory, rather a particular lens for looking at the world in which “real” women are grouped together as a distinct, discrete, defined bloc.

Now, I’m not going to critique it — because it’s just an opinion. It’s not provable one way or another. It’s like trying to argue whether God exists or if there’s a teapot floating in space. Because of that we can apply Hitchen’s Razor and say that ‘as a way of creating legal and social policy, it doesn’t have value’.

It is purely a perspective: a way of looking at the world and constructing mental models for how it operates. It’s actually similar, in that regard, to Blanchard’s work, which we discussed about 100 years ago in Part 4. Think of it like this: you can study the stars using a reflecting telescope, a refracting telescope, a radio telescope, a space telescope or an empty toilet roll tube… and any of those could lead you to an observation or data-point of interest. None are wrong, not even the toilet-roll tube.

But, precisely because of its nature as an observational lens that can never be proven right or wrong, it is (in itself) of limited use in practical applications. It might help stimulate ideas, as a perspective, but that’s about it.

The appeal to ineffable womanhood seems to draw extensively on 1960s and 1970s feminist theory, putting emphasis on physicality: menstruation, physical oppression, violence and sexual abuse. Blood seems to be a recurring theme.

As a woman who does not menstruate, I don’t feel I have much to add to that discussion. I have been on the receiving end of oppression, violence and sexual abuse, but I don’t personally see the value in setting those experiences — or, indeed, any other traumatic experience — as essential prerequisites for joining The Sisterhood.

If you, yourself, best beloved, are one of those people who subscribe to the concept of ineffable womanhood, if you derive spiritual bonding with other women from shared experience of menstruation, or abuse at the hands of the patriarchy, I’m not going to argue with you. You’re not wrong — it’s an opinion, it can’t be proven right or wrong — and you’re entitled to that view. I wish you Godspeed with it.

You can think I’m not a real woman, and you can devise whatever criteria for womanhood you like. My only provision is that it must stop when it leaves the boundary of you and reaches the boundary of me. As long as we can agree that you’ll respect my liberty, my freedoms and my dignity… we’ll have no issue.

If you refer to me as “her”, let me use the ladies’ washroom and let me go swimming once in a while… we’re golden, best beloved. I will likewise treat you with dignity, and will stand up beside you against the threats all women face: sexism, appalling rape conviction rates, extreme-Right misogyny, government control over uteruses etc.

If, however, you want to take the approach that your opinion must become legislation, for example by campaigning to have my rights restricted or have me barred from using the washroom, then we will have an issue. Over the course of eight instalments now, I’ve provided enormous quantities of detail on the history, philosophy, factuality and data-points behind transgender identities — and there’s only more to come. You don’t get to hand-wave that away because of sisterhood.

That’s all I have to say about that, and I wish you luck. Let me know if you need anything, and maybe you will return the favour to me, sometime.

An Appeal to ‘Being Silenced’ or ‘Cancelled’

We’ve covered similar angles already (“We have concerns but the transes silenced us!”, Arguments Part 1). This has variations, like ‘chilling effects on free speech’, or ‘silencing women’.

Just to linger on that last thought for a moment, it’s worth observing that this accusation of being silenced only applies in relation to women who are anti-trans… women who are pro-trans can’t be silenced fast enough:

And before someone accuses us of “nut-picking”, this person and their sentiment is very much not alone. On the subject of Wizard C*nt alone, she has public figures lining up to criticise her detractors for daring to disagree with her.

The line is that we in the trans lobby (see The Arguments Part 2 (Part 6 overall) “Trans Rights Activists”) are so mind-bendingly powerful that we can silence our detractors with but a word!

“PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER!!! … itty-bitty representation in public debate!” Image © Walt Disney Pictures, all rights reserved.

Man. I wish. So far, in the UK, some very prominent anti-trans campaigners have actually gotten more exposure rather than less when it became apparent how anti-trans they are!

Witness the career of Maya Forstater — a wealthy contract worker who became a hero to anti-trans campaigners when her contract was not renewed after she started discussing transphobic talking points on work Slack then took them to court. Dr. Stock… yeah, that skank again. JK “I have the face I deserve” Rowling, who cannot go a week without the same photo of her appearing in a news article about the latest trans oogedy-boogedy nonsense. Ricky Gervais’ endless bloody stand-up specials. Dave Chapelle, not a huge name in the UK until his transphobic turn, which awarded him $24,000,000 and a Grammy.

Those are only sampling platters. Take a bite — you no like? There’s plenty more! The list just goes on to the point that the assertion “I’ve been cancelled by the transes” is just beyond laughable. People like Suzanne Moore and Julie Bindel are transphobic, mainstream British columnists, only leaving publications when they get even better offers from other publications.

Bindel is a founding member of a campaign group ‘The Lesbian Project’, whose stated aim is to work for lesbians (and explicitly against trans people) by publishing in the media and lobbying government. They have exposure and the ears of important members of parliament.

Incidentally, best beloved, if you have a mental image of Bindel (and Stock) climbing into a treehouse and sticking a sign outside saying “Lesbian Club: No Tranzez” (with the “L” in lesbian backwards), you’d be about right.

Columns in The Times, columns in the Mail, columns in The Telegraph. For the anti-trans foghorns too unspeakable for just Right-wing outlets, they can go to The Spectator and UnHerd — both sitting politically to the Right of Ghengis Khan.

That is called “being cancelled”.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. Transphobia is very much tolerated on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, it’s a quick publicity win for any university lecturer who wants to create controversy, any newspaper wanting a headline and any radio/television special wanting eyeballs.

About the only person who has legitimately been ‘cancelled’ is Graham Linehan. And he hasn’t so much had it all snatched from him by trans people… it’s more like he has driven himself beyond the point of howling at the moon as part of his bizarre crusade against us. Erstwhile friends and colleagues don’t want to be associated with him because he is completely deranged, not particularly because they disagree with him about LGBTQ people. If it wasn’t for his descent into lip-bibbling, Napoleon-hat-wearing bats-in-the-belfry’ing dementitude, he would almost certainly still be working regularly.

Anyway, on the whole ‘being cancelled’ and ‘saying-the-unsayable’ straw man, here’s British comedian Stewart Lee torpedoing it better than I ever could in a hundred years of trying:

Stewart Lee on Ricky Gervais, Boris Johnson and Netflix Specials

Note: it’s easy to confuse being cancelled with being dogpiled. Dogpiling is when a person, usually a private citizen not in the public eye, is singled out on a platform like Twitter when their name “trends” due to something they said or did being re-shared. This then leads to them being the subject of the daily two-minute hate. They can get thousands of abusive comments and, worse yet, become the targets of some unspeakably bad actors like Kiwi Farms. Dogpiling can ruin people’s lives and, generally speaking, I think we can agree it’s a bad thing. Even if the person being dogpiled is a jackass, such matters should be dealt with locally by proper authorities (where needed), not by mob Internet weirdos.

Another angle of approach to “being cancelled” is that best-loved topic of newspaper opinion pieces everywhere: university students protesting “controversial” (read: awful) speakers that have been engaged by their institution to give a lecture.

My hot-take, because secretly I figure you want to know, is that in the UK we have created a system whereby a university education costs a fortune and the students are effectively customers of the university. If they’re customers, whose funds go to paying a uni’s speakers and lecturers, then they should get a say on who’s in and who’s out. If you want to inflict speakers upon students, “because it’s for your own good” or some other gamon’ery, then you can’t expect them to pay for that speaker’s time, can you?

Those students have the right to protest — that’s their free speech and freedom of demonstration in action. They have a legal right to do that. Conversely, Milo Yoghurtopolis, Nick Effluentes or whomever doesn’t have a legal right to demand paid speaking gigs from institutes of higher education.

Whilst the centrist-minded outlets fret over this, over in the US, you have whole states passing bans on books mentioning queer and trans people. And should, God forbid, some bigot be asked to use a pronoun he didn’t like… well then, my stars, where’s Judge Dredd when you need him? What about Academic Freedoms? Whither spirited debate?!

Incidentally, Kathleen Stock (again) resigned after her students protested her transphobia, but luckily she got a job at an anti-woke university that isn’t at all a money-making grift by Right-wing weirdos. What a fortunate stroke of luck, I say to myself through gritted teeth.

In summary: being some bozo with a nasty opinion — especially an opinion about whoever The Right has decided to hate today — can be a right wheeze, a boon for both exposure and bank balance. You can net all the column inches, interviews, book deals, speaking engagements and honorary board positions you can manage. Oh, and when you get called on any of that just say that you’ve been “cancelled”, and you’ll only become more valuable!

Best beloved, you might ask me now “why? Why are people like this rewarded in this way?” Well, you see, it plays very well to the large group of people in our countries who are angry, disengaged, frustrated and hopeless. They get an enemy to blame and something they can actually do (eg harass trans people). Meanwhile, big media and business make a pretty penny whilst deflecting blame that should rightly land on their heads with the force of the Chicxulub asteroid.

If I were a cynical person, I’d say “that’s why”.

Any Line That Starts With “Well Why Can’t I Identify As…”

What I especially like about this image is the inane excitement on the comedian’s face. It really sums up the energy of the “I identify as” bit in one glorious expression. It embodies ‘trying too hard’, ‘not really understanding comedy’ and ‘desperately wanting attention’.

Yes, the joke that launched a million grifter’s comedy careers and has been deftly employed to keep Right-wing-minded people in tears of laughter for literally years.

Just for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, let’s dismantle this. We can use a jam-jar to hold the screws so we don’t lose ‘em.

Here is the basic formulation of this line:

“If a man can identify as a woman, why can’t I identify as a chimpanzee?” [pause for tsunami of laughter and, possibly, awards]

I think this came originally from Gervais, it’s been co-opted by many others since. First thing to note: it isn’t designed to actually ask a question, it’s designed to mic-drop the conversation and prevent any further discussion.

Here’s are the antibodies against it:

1. People assigned male at birth can and do identify as women. ‘If’ is a disingenuous word to use.
2. The speaker doesn’t actually think they’re a chimp, they don’t want to live as a chimp and they don’t want to do ‘chimp things’ like move pianos or drink PG Tips. Conversely, trans people live our lives in our chosen genders and accept everything that goes with that, both positive and negative.
3. There’s nothing actually stopping the speaker saying “I believe I am a chimpanzee and I’d like to be referred to as such. Ook.” Friends and loved ones may oblige, or they may not. Whilst there is no law on the subject to protect the trans chimp, there is also no law stopping them.
4. Chimp-identities aside, human beings identify as many things that are completely mutable and which gain us access and privileges that differ depending on what we identify as. For example: our nationalities, our preferred sporting teams, aspects of our family heritage with which we choose to strongly associate and our religions. We can, all of us, move between different groups in these categories with various levels of ease and paperwork.

Another variant on this is “I’m 50, why can’t I identify as younger?” and the answer is exactly the same: you can, nobody is stopping you. Hollywood stars have been doing it for nearly a hundred years. But, if you feel you need more, then what more do you need? What obstacles in your life do you feel need redressing that aren’t remedied by you just giving a different age when asked?

Richard Dawkins (dabbler in Islamophobia and Eugenics), Scott Adams (professional enraged divorcee with a chip on each shoulder) and Elon Musk (the most loathsome robber-baron to walk the Earth since Henry Ford) are all adept at mic-drop argument techniques like this. They’ll throw an intellectually dishonest question out into the online ether, like a digital hand grenade, and then chuckle to themselves whilst their stooge supporters comically throw the grenade back-and-forth trying not to be the one holding it when it goes off.

If an argument is not in good faith, then it is not worth discussing. These nimrods are just trying to waste time. If we ignore them, eventually they will drive themselves insane for lack of attention.

Appealing to a Shared Experience that Trans Women Cannot Have

And what I like about this image is that, at a glance, it looks pretty, interesting and wholesome… but look closer and it’s just a garden of demonic nightmare imagery. Much like (white, middle-class) Feminism in general.

This is different from our earlier notion of appealing to the ineffable nature of womanhood. It’s similar, but in this case it’s what happens when nitwits take a philosophical opinion and then try to prove it as a physical reality.

The line goes like this: “all women have been brought up in a men’s world and have developed a shared experience of that — no trans woman can ever have that because they were brought up male, therefore they cannot be women”.

Well, let’s set trans women aside and see how this argument plays out. Let’s consider how a woman’s life will be if:

• they are a Black, middle-class woman in Berlin.
• they are a white, working-poor mother-of-three in Flint, Michigan.
• they are a pregnant Chinese woman who runs a multimillion dollar company in Shanghai.
• they live in a small village, 200 miles out of Darfur, suffered FGM and need to walk 4 miles to get clean drinking water.
• they are a middle-manager at a tech startup in Nairobi.
• they are a member of the Nukak people in Colombo, hunter-gatherers who were (until 1981) un-contacted, isolated populations.

Each one of those women’s lives will be different in fundamental ways. They will have various levels of privilege and various challenges. The multimillionaire is likely to have a different set of experiences to the middle-class woman in Berlin. The Patriarchy — that configuration of society, politics and economics that generally favours men more than women — will affect them all differently. And yet they are all still women with a shared experience, according to this appeal.

Right-o. Now, let’s bring me into this as a further case-study:

I knew I was very different at a very young age. I did, in fact, grow up with a disadvantageous experience of the Patriarchy because I was a woman — even though I was not consciously recognised as one and I didn’t have the words to describe myself as one.

• I was used and manipulated at the point of force by men, at numerous points in my life, because they felt they had that power over me.
• I’ve been used as an emotional crutch by men, because they saw that as my role in service of them.
• I’ve been used as a whipping-boy (girl) for men to take their frustrations out on, because that was how they saw my position in our relationship.
• I’ve been passed over as not “manly” enough for business roles, because “leaders are men”.
• I was told, as far back as I can remember, that I was too sensitive and emotional and that I shouldn’t take on, so… because those were traits that would trigger other men to use and abuse me.

I received misogyny even before I transitioned, because I acted like what I was, and that was identified by society-at-large as feminine and female.

“What a delightful little trip down Trauma-Memory Lane! But what does that tell us?”, you could reasonably ask. My point, best beloved, is simply this: as a trans woman, I bring a new set of experiences… but that shouldn’t disqualify me any more than it would an upper-class, white cisgender woman. Not all women are oppressed in the same way or to the same extent.

And where do young trans people fit into this? Some of us realise we should be something else at a very young age and want to be treated as such — despite the best efforts of legislation to stop them. Are they being brought up male?

Dang. It turns out that there is no One True Experience. Women may be anything; almost any adjective one cares to think of: dynamic, exciting, poor, rich, motherly, hard-working, lucky, privileged etc.

Disqualifying trans women from the Women Only Treehouse Club is specious and spurious until someone can (a) come up with a concrete definition of “shared female experience” and (b) explain why it does not include me, but does include every cisgender woman on Earth with all their varied experiences.

I won’t hold my breath, and I advise you not to either, best beloved.

This is part of a multi-part series. New additions will appear when they are ready. All images used were created using DALL-E 3 via OpenAI. Use them if you like, AI sucks and should go in the bin.