Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: transwomen

  • a trans man

    Yesterday when he asked I told a trans-identified friend over coffee, No: you’re not a woman. I told him how male-privileged he sounded, to me, when he dreamily explained playing around with his prescribed hormones so as to reconstruct the experience of a menstrual cycle. He felt the reason he wasn’t experiencing it for real was to do with age – “at 54 if I had been born female my menstruation would have stopped by now, anyway.”

    He is a kind man and would never intrude himself into female change rooms or bathrooms but has appeared in local films and performances about vulvas and about womanhood. I was nearly in tears, we both were. He explained how much it hurts him that I cannot accept that his dysphoria, with which I empathise, makes him female. And I explained how much it hurts me for him to think he knows what it is to be female better than I. I told him it made me feel like to him I’m invisible.

    When he was telling me I surely don’t believe I get to define him, and I was dealing with the familiar, programmed feelings of feminine accommodation and trying to think clearly, it all of a sudden came to me: it’s not me sitting here telling you I know better than you do who you are.

    It’s you. You are telling me, telling the world, telling yourself you know better than I do what makes someone a woman. You think you, born and raised male, a man whose very skeleton if dug up a thousand years after our lifetimes, whose dental records show you to be male, get to tell me, tell all women, what we are. And that we daren’t exclude you.

    I told him all women experience dysphoria. All of us are told constantly our bodies are wrong. It was a very sad and painful conversation and I told him I admire his courage for living radically outside the masculine patriarchal role. Nevertheless he interrupted me repeatedly, grew angry when I disagreed with his pronouncements on reality, and claimed greater ownership of science. Male, male, male. And he seemed very preoccupied with the difficulties of living outside the male role and had not one thought to spare for the scorn and violence experienced by butch lesbians who eschew the performance of femininity.

  • transmisogyny

    Transactivism has usurped the struggle of genuinely marginalised vulnerable people and become swollen with the entitlement of spoilt male narcissists.

    Those people and their acolytes are now telling women to shut up. They are trying to ban lesbians from Pride march because lesbianism excludes the male. Men in frocks now regularly threaten violence and rape and have turned an oppressed marginal culture inside-out. It’s misogyny unmasked.

    San Francisco Public Library last month held an ‘art exhibit’ featuring barbed wire baseball bats painting in trans colours and bloodied t shirts printed I PUNCH TERFS. In a women’s online group yesterday I watched in horror as a man calling himself Natalie laid about him threatening rape and boasting about the size of his penis in order to compel us to ‘respect his pronouns’: ‘she’ and ‘her.’ Womanhood is not a costume to be donned by men who are so entitled they want the one thing they cannot have: to be female.

    Native American ‘two spirits’ culture, the Black civil rights struggle, the intersex community, and now lesbians have all complained in turn about the theft of their language and struggle by white males who now claim they are ‘lesbians’ because they sleep with women. The ‘cotton ceiling’, chillingly, is used to convey the crotch of lesbians’ underwear that, like a glass ceiling, must be forced. Small children are encouraged to believe they cannot play with non-conformist toys (dolls, if a boy, trucks if a girl) and still be a boy, or a girl. It’s ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians, and corrective homophobia, in pink.

    This homophobic misogynist racist insanity has turned liberal communities upside down and ruined countless friendships between compassionate people as transactivists insist on framing themselves as the ultimate victims. It is happening at a time when more than ever in human history we need to pull together and stand up to the terrifying ecological and social damage wrought by narcissism and power hunger.

    Every time I post about this I get emails from women thanking me for having the courage to speak up. I’ve seen black women told to stand down and check their privilege when they object to racism from white, upper class, trans-identified males. Meanwhile men are never called TERF. It is women who are silenced: same as it ever was.

    I’ve been called Nazi, a bag of shit, bigoted, and phobic because I point out that women deserve our own spaces and that young women, Muslimas, and survivors of rape and sexual assault are unable to safely share changing rooms with men. Convicted rapists are now demanding they be called women and transferred to women’s prisons. It is seen as more important to respect Ian Huntley’s pronouns than to remember the two young girls he tortured and killed. Trans-identified men like Hope Lye, Jenn Smith, and Miranda Yardley who know they are not female are now routinely banned from Twitter and women are becoming too afraid to speak. Meanwhile women are expected to refer to ourselves as ‘vagina bearers’ who ‘chestfeed.’ If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.