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I stand with Jo
Like a lot of women — like Jo Rowling — I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject of transgenderism over the last couple of years.
In my case, I went looking after receiving rape threats for saying “you need a uterus to have periods”. What on earth was so staggeringly wrong about saying that you couldn’t shed your uterine lining without having a uterus? How did a statement of biology lead to such a violent and sexualised response?
So I went looking. I spoke to lots of people, and read lots of articles, on all three sides of the debate.
All three sides? As well as the gender critical feminists, who believe that gender is a nonsense concept but that you can dress however you like as long as you accept that biology is immutable, it turns out that the trans side of things is split in two. On the one side are those variously described as transsexuals, transmedicalists and, by those who dislike them, truscum; they tend to believe that to be trans one must experience gender dysphoria and make, or fully intend to make, the fullest possible hormonal and surgical transition, and many are just as critical of both the concept of gender and the idea that one can change sex as are the gender critical feminists. On the other side are those who believe that a man (and they do tend to be men) can simply state “I am a woman” and so become one; some might go on to take hormones, or have breast implants, but many do neither.
This was something of a revelation to me. I knew about — know members of — the first group, but found the second group harder to understand. I went looking for more information.
I learnt about Karen White, a convicted paedophile and sex offender, who transitioned while on remand, went into a women’s prison, and sexually assaulted inmates. I learnt about Katie Dolatowski, who was convicted of voyeurism and sexual assault in a public toilet against two girls aged ten and twelve years old. I learnt about Rachel McKinnon, Hannah Mouncey, Laurel Hubbard, Maxine Blythin and other athletes who went through male puberty before beginning to compete in women’s sports, effortlessly beating world-class female opponents.
And I thought “Hang on a minute.”
I wondered if it was really the case that all of those people are actually women, or if maybe some of them are men who’ve seen some advantage in claiming to be women. After all, women’s prisons are more pleasant places than men’s; there are far more unaccompanied pubescent girls in the women’s toilets than in the men’s; and even a mediocre male athlete can beat a top-ranked female athlete in most sports.
(I’m not even going to get into the terrifying and irreversible side effects of the off-licence chemotherapy drugs being given to delay puberty, the schoolgirls being told that they must share changing rooms with boys, the rising number of detransitioning women, the rape survivors being told that they can’t request female medical personnel. If you want to read more about them, Helen Joyce of the Economist wrote an excellent article.)
And I learnt about the seemingly endless barrage of death and rape threats, of instructions to “suck my girl dick”, that descend upon any woman who has the temerity to ask those sorts of questions aloud. Look what Jo Rowling got just for saying that sex is real. Look at where I started, with rape threats for saying that you needed a uterus to menstruate.
So, big old coward that I am, I noped out of there and shut the fuck up, which was just what they wanted: scare women, rely on women being socialised to be nice, threaten their jobs. Whatever it takes to shut them up, so that they can pretend that no one disagrees with them.
But, you know what? Fuck it.
Sex is real. It is binary. You can be either male or female, and you can’t change that, no matter how you dress or what surgeries you undergo. Your body is of the type that produces either eggs or sperm, even if you are infertile, even if you remove your gonads. There are no in-between gametes, there is no spectrum.
(Something like 0.018% of the population has a disorder of sexual development. They aren’t hermaphrodites and they generally really, really hate it when people trot them out as an argument in favour of sex not being binary. As someone with a chromosome abnormality put it to me recently, “If I’d been born with only one leg, would that prove humans aren’t bipedal?”)
It’s because sex is real that baby girls are selectively aborted in the womb. It’s because sex is real that women undergo forced pregnancy. It’s because sex is real that getting a blood transfusion from a woman can be deadly for men. It’s because sex is real that only men get prostate cancer.
Sex-specific toilets let women go out in public for more more than a few hours at a time, especially when menstruating; sex-specific changing rooms let us exercise and maintain healthy bodies away from prying eyes and wandering hands; sex-specific domestic violence refuges let us escape from dangerous residential situations; sex-specific medical and nursing care lets us get necessary treatment without embarrassment or fear; sex-specific educational opportunities and awards give less-outgoing girls a chance to shine; sex-specific employment and salary statistics let us monitor equality in the workplace: all of these hard-won rights will be removed from women, if one allows men to access them purely by stating that they are now also women.
Wear what you like. If you’re an adult and can afford it, have whatever surgery you like. Just don’t deny that sex is real, and that women, female people, have and need sex-specific rights.
So, anyone still reading? Where does this leave us, I wonder?
I am exactly the same person that I was before you read this, but it’s possible that you have changed.
Are you thinking that I’m a TERF? If you’re using the term to refer to its actual meaning, I can assure you that I’m not, because Radical Feminism has very different political views to mine. If you’re using it as a more polite form of “bitch”, perhaps you should re-think your language.
What about “transphobe”? Does that one fit?
Well, I don’t cower in corners to avoid passing trans people (ok, maybe one or two of them who tell really boring anecdotes). I’m certainly not afraid of transsexuals as a class of people, they mostly seem to quietly live their lives.
The other trans people, though? The ones who threaten to rape and murder women who disagree with them? Yeah, they’re pretty fucking terrifying.
In my case, I went looking after receiving rape threats for saying “you need a uterus to have periods”. What on earth was so staggeringly wrong about saying that you couldn’t shed your uterine lining without having a uterus? How did a statement of biology lead to such a violent and sexualised response?
So I went looking. I spoke to lots of people, and read lots of articles, on all three sides of the debate.
All three sides? As well as the gender critical feminists, who believe that gender is a nonsense concept but that you can dress however you like as long as you accept that biology is immutable, it turns out that the trans side of things is split in two. On the one side are those variously described as transsexuals, transmedicalists and, by those who dislike them, truscum; they tend to believe that to be trans one must experience gender dysphoria and make, or fully intend to make, the fullest possible hormonal and surgical transition, and many are just as critical of both the concept of gender and the idea that one can change sex as are the gender critical feminists. On the other side are those who believe that a man (and they do tend to be men) can simply state “I am a woman” and so become one; some might go on to take hormones, or have breast implants, but many do neither.
This was something of a revelation to me. I knew about — know members of — the first group, but found the second group harder to understand. I went looking for more information.
I learnt about Karen White, a convicted paedophile and sex offender, who transitioned while on remand, went into a women’s prison, and sexually assaulted inmates. I learnt about Katie Dolatowski, who was convicted of voyeurism and sexual assault in a public toilet against two girls aged ten and twelve years old. I learnt about Rachel McKinnon, Hannah Mouncey, Laurel Hubbard, Maxine Blythin and other athletes who went through male puberty before beginning to compete in women’s sports, effortlessly beating world-class female opponents.
And I thought “Hang on a minute.”
I wondered if it was really the case that all of those people are actually women, or if maybe some of them are men who’ve seen some advantage in claiming to be women. After all, women’s prisons are more pleasant places than men’s; there are far more unaccompanied pubescent girls in the women’s toilets than in the men’s; and even a mediocre male athlete can beat a top-ranked female athlete in most sports.
(I’m not even going to get into the terrifying and irreversible side effects of the off-licence chemotherapy drugs being given to delay puberty, the schoolgirls being told that they must share changing rooms with boys, the rising number of detransitioning women, the rape survivors being told that they can’t request female medical personnel. If you want to read more about them, Helen Joyce of the Economist wrote an excellent article.)
And I learnt about the seemingly endless barrage of death and rape threats, of instructions to “suck my girl dick”, that descend upon any woman who has the temerity to ask those sorts of questions aloud. Look what Jo Rowling got just for saying that sex is real. Look at where I started, with rape threats for saying that you needed a uterus to menstruate.
So, big old coward that I am, I noped out of there and shut the fuck up, which was just what they wanted: scare women, rely on women being socialised to be nice, threaten their jobs. Whatever it takes to shut them up, so that they can pretend that no one disagrees with them.
But, you know what? Fuck it.
Sex is real. It is binary. You can be either male or female, and you can’t change that, no matter how you dress or what surgeries you undergo. Your body is of the type that produces either eggs or sperm, even if you are infertile, even if you remove your gonads. There are no in-between gametes, there is no spectrum.
(Something like 0.018% of the population has a disorder of sexual development. They aren’t hermaphrodites and they generally really, really hate it when people trot them out as an argument in favour of sex not being binary. As someone with a chromosome abnormality put it to me recently, “If I’d been born with only one leg, would that prove humans aren’t bipedal?”)
It’s because sex is real that baby girls are selectively aborted in the womb. It’s because sex is real that women undergo forced pregnancy. It’s because sex is real that getting a blood transfusion from a woman can be deadly for men. It’s because sex is real that only men get prostate cancer.
Sex-specific toilets let women go out in public for more more than a few hours at a time, especially when menstruating; sex-specific changing rooms let us exercise and maintain healthy bodies away from prying eyes and wandering hands; sex-specific domestic violence refuges let us escape from dangerous residential situations; sex-specific medical and nursing care lets us get necessary treatment without embarrassment or fear; sex-specific educational opportunities and awards give less-outgoing girls a chance to shine; sex-specific employment and salary statistics let us monitor equality in the workplace: all of these hard-won rights will be removed from women, if one allows men to access them purely by stating that they are now also women.
Wear what you like. If you’re an adult and can afford it, have whatever surgery you like. Just don’t deny that sex is real, and that women, female people, have and need sex-specific rights.
So, anyone still reading? Where does this leave us, I wonder?
I am exactly the same person that I was before you read this, but it’s possible that you have changed.
Are you thinking that I’m a TERF? If you’re using the term to refer to its actual meaning, I can assure you that I’m not, because Radical Feminism has very different political views to mine. If you’re using it as a more polite form of “bitch”, perhaps you should re-think your language.
What about “transphobe”? Does that one fit?
Well, I don’t cower in corners to avoid passing trans people (ok, maybe one or two of them who tell really boring anecdotes). I’m certainly not afraid of transsexuals as a class of people, they mostly seem to quietly live their lives.
The other trans people, though? The ones who threaten to rape and murder women who disagree with them? Yeah, they’re pretty fucking terrifying.
no subject
Personally, I don't believe that trans people in general, including trans women in general, are a threat to the rights and safety of female-assigned women. You mentioned some predatory trans women specifically and you've obviously had some run ins with aggressive, threatening trans people yourself. There's no excuse for this kind of behaviour. But you could cherry-pick examples of female-assigned women who behave the same way and threaten the rights and safety of other women. My own experience of trans women, on the whole, is that they are very mindful and considerate about entering women's spaces, and quite nervous about doing so.
While I know you are the kind of person who stands up for people's rights and safety, it's my belief that spreading ideas about trans people always remaining the sex they were assigned at birth actually works against their safety. For example, you suggested I disclose that I'm not genetically male on my medical records. This can be a safety issue for trans people: disclose to the wrong doctor and they will focus all their attention on your trans status and miss the actual diagnosis (this has become so common that it's known in the community as "trans broken arm syndrome" - you go into hospital because you broke your arm and the doctor suggests it might be because you're trans).
Aside from that, the specific medical issue you raised, heart attack symptoms, when I started hormone treatment, I was advised that doing so raised my risk of heart attack into the male range, but no one really knows whether transgender men are likely to display heart attack symptoms that look like those displayed by male-assigned men or female-assigned women. There haven't been any clinical studies on that. Same when it comes to risk of breast cancer: I was exposed to estrogen for more of my life than most male-assigned men, but have less breast-tissue than most female-assigned women, but no one has done the studies. Similarly, no one knows how long to prescribe antibiotics when I get a UTI: my urethra is surgically constructed, longer than a female-assigned woman's, but shorter than a male-assigned man's. Again, the studies have not been done. I've never actually had a genetic test done, so, strictly speaking, I don't know my genetic sex. Given the amount of unknowns and the limited amount of information in a gender marker and the risks involved in disclosing to some medical professionals, this is something I play by ear and use my judgement on. I pick my doctors carefully, worry about whether I should get a medic alert bracelet about the fact that I need paediatric instruments to be used to be catheterised, and try like hell to stay healthy and keep away from the medical establishment. In short, healthcare is stressful and a hell of a lot more complicated than a gender marker.
One of the reasons why these studies haven't been done is because of beliefs like the ones you shared: that we are simply our assigned sexes, so it's all a known quantity. Why do studies on things when trans women are male and trans men are female and we know all about risk factors and dosages for males and females? That's a safety risk.
no subject
I think, very broadly, that longer-standing trans people present minimal threat to women and girls. As I said in my OP, the old-style transsexuals tend to respect women’s spaces and rights, as well as generally being nice people. More recently, though, there have been far more troubling transitioners. Half of the male-born trans prisoners in the UK are sex offenders. They make up one percent of the women’s prison population, but carry out over five percent of the sexual offences. It is unfortunate if keeping those predatory people out of women’s spaces also keeps out some non-predatory ones, but I’m not sure that there’s any better solution.
(To go back to a late thought on your first comment: being Jewish is also, I think it’s fair to say, part of your core identity (I think? Ignore if not). I don’t believe that your god exists, I don’t believe that the worship rituals that you take part in and draw strength and a sense of community from are meaningful. Does this make me anti-Semitic, or make you question whether we can be friends?)
no subject
The idea that sex is binary is damaging to trans people and it's damaging to people with intersex variations. Intersex people are not disordered, the term disorders of sexual development is a pathologising term from the medical world that is not generally liked or used by intersex people themselves. The intersex community also estimate the rate of intersex variations to be more like 1.7% - the 0.018% figure you cite is based on a conservative estimate that places a heavy weighting on genetic factors when defining sex and does not take intersex people's lived experience into account. It's this limited view of what sex is, a view that does not incorporate the lived experiences of either intersex or trans people, that leads both to intersex infants being forced to undergo surgeries and hormone treatments to "normalise" their bodies, while transgender youth are denied access to the exact same medical care.
It's interesting that you brought up my Jewish identity, because yes, there are some very strong parallels there. I was raised to think of myself as culturally Jewish and have affirmed my identity as a religious Jew with the Progressive, Masorti, and Orthodox movements of Judaism. Being Jewish is a core part of who I am and how I live my life. And yet, because my mother isn't Jewish, and because I haven't converted with their specific rabbinic board of choice, there are certain sectors of the Jewish community who do not accept me as a Jew. I tend to avoid coming into contact with those parts of the Jewish community, to be honest, because I honestly don't feel I can be friends with people who deny a core part of my identity. You and I have different beliefs, but you still respect that I am a Jew. These are people who hear me tell them that I am Jew and respond by telling me that this is not true and that I am not Jewish. That feels incredibly disrespectful and dismissive. As someone who has spent most of my life not having core parts of my identity seen and recognised in my social relationships, this is not something I'm able to tolerate from someone who supposedly cares about me as a friend.