January
The new global empire of disembodiment:
The ideology that underlies transgender identification relies on problematizing and denying basic truths about what it means to be embodied, to be human. Language can't alter these realities, but language can mask them. 'Female' doesn't.
If you can convince everyone else to use your words, through a combination of carrots and sticks, you can bury what's at stake in the conflict over gender identity and rope off potential exit ramps.
This way lies "reconstructive surgeries" (elective double mastectomies for teenage girls). This way lies woman not as an adult human female with any personality, but 'woman' as consumer of identity props and medical services.
This language of "bodies with vaginas" and gestators and chestfeeders serves an ideology. It's a disconnected, consumption-oriented way of thinking and talking about women.
Instead of 'woman,' I might mean "someone I want to fuck" ("one body with vagina, please!"). "Uterus-haver" or "gestator" is someone I might contract as a surrogate.
"Person with breasts" might as well be a (mixed-sex) category of pornography content, or a candidate for cosmetic surgery (reduction, removal, enhancement, or creation).
Or "woman" becomes "a patient who takes estrogen supplementation," whether for purposes of transition (MTF), identity, appearance, aging, mood regulation, birth control.
This is taking women and slicing us into market segments: by services sought or rendered, by what we consume and who wants to consume us.
Loyalty tests: Calling a deer a horse and a man a woman:
So loyalty is a function of disparity. The greater the disparity between what actually is and what someone attests to, the greater the loyalty that person demonstrates.
There are plenty of ways allies can voice support for trans identities. A trans ally might say something like 'transwomen are transwomen,' an (admittedly rather bland) statement that recognizes the unique status of males who identify as women. But 'transwomen are transwomen' isn't saying very much, is it? A male who identifies as a woman is a male who identifies as a woman. Why bother? Better to kick it up a notch: 'Transwomen are women.'
Enforce a line like "transwomen are women" and you'll learn something about the people who repeat it—or don't.
‘Transwomen are women’ is the perfect loyalty test because ‘transwomen are women’ is not a conclusion it’s possible to come to based on observation or inquiry or even just sitting alone in a room thinking your thoughts all the way through to the end. You have to take some other route to reach such an absurd conclusion.
Maybe you’re prone to taking mental shortcuts and making lazy associations and analogies (“This is just like marriage equality!”—except for all the ways it’s nothing like that).
Maybe you succumbed to emotional manipulation or lack confidence in your own judgment. Maybe you bought the line that it’s not your place to ask questions, just lend support.
Maybe you bought the marketing campaign.
Maybe you crib your political positions from your social circle.
Maybe you don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.
Maybe you think it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not.
Maybe you’ve been indoctrinated.
Maybe you got there by motivated reasoning (‘if we agree transwomen are women, that would justify and advance my political goals, like putting transwomen in women’s sports, spaces, etc.’).
Maybe you’re craven or just ambitious, and willing to say whatever magic words are currently fashionable to smooth your ascent.
Maybe you’re afraid of the consequences — personal or professional — if you don’t go along.
Maybe you’re driven by your self-image as a progressive, and your desire to hold onto that identity makes your thought process easy to hack: progressive people believe X, therefore, as a progressive, I too should believe X.
Maybe you’re not willing or able to think your thoughts all the way through to the end, as Helen Joyce put it.
All this makes ‘transwomen are women’ a useful tool to sort those pesky people who insist on using their own two eyes from those who will let others tell them what they see. ‘Transwomen are women’ exposes both dissenters and those willing to go along with absurdities, whatever their reasons for doing so—and those private reasons never matter so much as the public willingness to spout and submit to absurdities.
February
Trans exceptionalism and ordinary children:
Trans activists, ‘affirmative’ medical providers, and parents tend to see kids who identify as transgender as exceptional. To these children, none of the normal rules and nothing we know about child development seems to apply.
But children who identify as transgender are just that: children. They hurt, like other children. They’re trying to figure out themselves and the strange world they live in, like other children.
They’ll change over time, like other children, in unpredictable ways, like other children.
And they will grow up, like all children. They will surprise themselves and us.
Children who identify as trans only have one body and one life, like all children. They are—as Ian McEwan put it—“easily torn and not easily mended.”
Children who identify as trans don’t have endocrine conditions or birth defects. They’re not the vanguard of some transhuman future. Rather, they’re made of the same stuff that children have always been made of, with the same needs for care and attention.
What’s changed are the ideas and expectations that we’ve raised children on and the way we’ve turned them loose in an online world whose terrain no one has mapped. Many of these children have grown up with extended experiences of online disembodiment. They may not be free to run around outside with their friends but they’re free to roam the darkest corners of the Internet. Who knows what strangers and strange ideas they encounter there.
These children have grown up hearing a very new and confusing set of fairytales about gendered souls that can end up in the ‘wrong bodies.’ Adults who should know better (and on some level do know better) have made them impossible promises.
Children who identify as trans aren’t sages. They aren’t sacred. They haven’t been endowed with wisdom beyond their years. It’s not fair to treat them as exceptions to the safeguards we place around children, so that when they grow up and change their minds and ask why we let them do this, we say: You wanted it. You asked for it. You were so sure. What else could we have done?
We need to remember that we are working with children. That children have one childhood, one body, one life, and endless ideas, pressures, pains, and theories about how the world works that they test against the grownups in their lives.
There’s a way in which everything that touches trans must be exceptional—the children, the stakes, the feelings, the possibility of knowing anything for sure—because if these kids aren’t exceptional, then we threw everything we knew out the window. We didn’t ‘help’ exceptional children but harmed ordinary ones, struggling with ordinary challenges of development, sexual orientation, identity, meaning, and direction.
March
What do you do when the story you’ve been telling yourself falls apart?
The ways gender clinicians talk about detransition are so illuminating. They'll stick "detransition" in scare quotes, they'll say detransitioners are "transitioning to" their “assigned gender at birth.” They talk about gender journeys where patients transition and transition back, on a quest to discover their true selves—never mind that those “journeys” may include sterilizing pharmaceutical regimens and surgeries. In short, gender clinicians will do and say anything to avoid confronting the reality of harm and regret that it was their responsibility to prevent.
To avoid this reckoning, clinicians must trap detransitioners in the ideological framework that legitimizes transition. Sometimes, this trap is quite a literal one: requiring patients to demonstrate gender dysphoria and live in as their “desired gender” (read: actual sex) before they can change their legal documents and access medical procedures to reverse the effects of transition. Mostly, clinicians do this rhetorically, refusing to recognize detransition for what it is: a rejection of the belief system that justified transition. Clinicians tell detransitioners that they might just be genderfluid or nonbinary, or warn them that they need to work on their “internalized transphobia.” The patient isn’t allowed to say "I'm just female,” and that means the patient isn’t allowed to break up with gender identity and a way of thinking about gender and sex that harmed the patient in the first place.
So to detransition medically, legally, and (in many settings) socially, detransitioners are forced to keep playing the same mind game. Is it any wonder many detransitioners don't go back to the medical providers who harmed them in the first place and who refuse to open their eyes to the reality of what they’re doing?
May
Trans thought experiments: Heads, you’re trans. Tails, you’re not cis!
These thought experiments deal in bloodless and total transformations. Doubts and hard facts melt away. Within online trans communities, your answers to these casual and bizarrely detached questions are meant to spark epiphanies. But in real life, transition is something else: you will run up against the limits of your body, you may never be seen by others as you desire to be seen, and that eventually you will be forced to accept that transition is never total and never complete. Maybe you’d push the magic sex-change button but nevertheless every cell in your body will remain stubbornly male or female. You will not become a new person; at most, you will only learn to devise ever-more convincing masks.
If I had been born in a different time, a different place, a different body, I would be somebody else.
But let’s step away from questions of what’s possible or impossible. These thought experiments remind me of nothing so much as fairytales where characters’ fanciful—inevitably half-cooked—wishes are granted: the king whose touch turns everything to lifeless metal; the eternal youth doomed to outlive all loves, even the love for life, condemned to the inhumanity of immortality; the desire to compel—with a potion or a spell—what can only have value if it’s freely given.
Many fairytales spring from runaway metaphors, marrying whimsical fancies with utter ruthlessness. Often these metaphors spiral out of control because they have been taken too literally. I wish everything I touch would turn to gold. Everything? Really? The bunch of grapes in your hand and your daughter, too? Whatever you ask for, you will pay and pay and pay for it, and what you end up with will be something other than what you imagined.
There’s a ruthlessness to any attempt to live out one’s fantasies. Be careful what you wish for: maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it will be as you imagined, or maybe it will obey the forms and defy the substance of your hopes and expectations…
I wouldn’t normally waste my time responding to Chase Strangio—one of Twitter’s most shameless traffickers in dishonest hyperbole and outright bullshit—except that this bizarro line of thinking—if we can call it thinking—is rife among woke progressives and represents a fundamental misunderstanding between trans-Kool-Aid chuggers like Chase and gender-critical feminists like me.
So let’s talk about pretending: who is being asked to pretend, about what, and why? And where does all this pretending lead?
We’re supposed to pretend everything we know about sex is wrong: that legislatures never knew just who they targeted when they denied women the vote. That pimps and johns never knew whose bodies they sold. That the reproductive potential of child brides is pure guesswork. That the burdens of human reproduction settle, if not evenly, then at least mysteriously across the population.
It’s an interesting conceit, in a revisionist-history ‘what if the Mongols had taken Vienna?’ kind of way. It’s also, as everybody knows—no matter their claims to holy ignorance—bullshit.
When everything is going well, some people can afford to pretend. But as with every game of make-believe, there’s a limit. Eventually, wishful thinking runs up against a hard fact. Roe going down and what that means for female people, regardless of how they identify, is a hard fact.
We can argue about whether it makes sense to reorganize society on the basis of individuals’ personal identification with gender stereotypes, but whether we recognize sex or not, whether we name it or not, whether we like it or not, sex will continue to matter. Half the human race bears the burden of human reproduction. That means that these people—even if the language that keeps these people together dissolves in an acid bath of ideology—share experiences, needs, and interests. We used to call these people ‘women’ and the feminist movement used to center these very issues. Now mainstream ‘feminism’ has become a mixed-sex movement that prioritizes male identity claims over female realities, while self-identified feminists attempt to defend women’s most basic rights to determine the shape of our own lives by reducing us to “birthing bodies,” to reproductive functions and services. As if treating women like walking wombs isn’t what got us here in the first place.
June
Fantasy lives and Muggle dreams:
I was 11 years old when I picked up The Sorcerer’s Stone, the same age as the main characters, and so we were children together on the cusp of adolescence.
I remember falling into that book and knowing it was fantasy and knowing what fantasy meant and knowing that Hogwarts didn't really exist and yet—that summer—a part of me thought: But perhaps a letter will come by owl. The universe of Harry Potter fitted so neatly into the universe I inhabited that nothing ruled out its existence. Invisible edges separated the two worlds. Perhaps I would find such an edge and peel it back. Of course, I would never have said such things out loud. I knew those fantasies were ridiculous and yet—
—if there were witches—and witches don’t exist, of course, I knew that, everybody knows that—but if there were witches, I was surely a witch, and if I were a witch, everything would make sense: that misfittedness I could never shed, that shapeless longing I had...
In any case, I was terribly lonely then. My runaway imagination kept me company, nourished me. I clung to the possibility that fantasy could be more than fiction.
Take the 11-year-old girl I once was. What if my desires had taken some other form? What if I had wanted to be not a witch but a boy? Could I—at that age when I couldn't quite separate fantasy and reality, no matter how cleanly I would have divided the two if asked—have consented to trade my open future for the circumscribed one transition offers? Even if adults had made the limits of transition clear to me—even if I said I understood—would I have understood what inexorability means? Wouldn't my fantasies of transformation have survived underground, out of sight, nurtured by the strength of feeling that made those fantasies necessary to me?
“I ask this one thing only: Let me go mad in my own way.” But no one ever does:
Even and especially our most intimate self-understandings aren't really ours. Even our desperate escape routes are predetermined, mapped out. Even in rejection, we act out in sensible, legible ways. Cultural recruitment, medical shaping, and the unconscious search for a symptom presentation that will be taken seriously all play a role in the way distress manifests.
Again—and again—and again—throughout the dark history of medicine—medical providers and young female patients alike converge on diagnoses and ‘treatments’ that pathologize and discipline the female body.
In both anorexia and gender dysphoria, the patient dissociates mind and body, then submits the body ruthlessly to the mind’s will. Forget Merleau-Ponty’s body-subjects. Forget Beauvoir’s “first radiation of subjectivity.” For anorexics and gender-dysphorics, the mind rules over the body like a brutal despot, beating the body—whittled by starvation or surgery, sacked and pillaged—into submission.
Medical providers tend to frame anorexia as the pathological pursuit of an (objectified) female form. I tend to see it as the opposite: a pathological rejection of objectification and sexual development. The fear isn’t becoming fat so much as becoming flesh. The anorexic persecutes the body that betrays ‘the self’ by its very existence: by its femaleness, by its soft curves and dark secrets, by blood, by the reproductive potential written into female flesh and by the things society writes on that flesh. Anorexics aspire to be pure spirit, pure intellect. They need only one food: not to violate the ‘self’ by becoming flesh.
Transition, too, scapegoats the body for its failure to faithfully represent ‘the self.’ Gender-dysphoric people talk about feeling like a ‘brain in a jar’ or a gender identity stuck in a ‘meat vehicle’ or ‘flesh suit.’ Major surgeries are spoken about with cool disregard, as though they were minor home-remodeling projects.
I also wrote about the pressure lesbians are under to accept males as sexual partners, for UnHerd:
These days, a woman who calls herself a lesbian invites suspicion. Over the past 20 years, bars, bookstores, and festivals, once set aside for women attracted to other women, have rebranded themselves as “trans-inclusive” or “queer”, shut down, or gone underground. Lesbian playwrights such as Carolyn Gage see their plays shelved. Lesbian role models such as Ellen (now Elliot) Page come out as transgender. Even gender-nonconforming girls and women from the past fall victim to the new gender creed. Joan of Arc — the subject of Gage’s cancelled play — has undergone a posthumous transition nearly 600 years after she was burned at the stake.
This month, media organisations and mega corporations will bend over backwards to find an LGBTQ angle to cover. But what you won’t see or hear is the underside of Pride: a culture of intense social and sexual pressure that’s pushing some lesbians back into the closet and encouraging others to identify out of womanhood altogether.
It started with the push to redefine “lesbian” to be inclusive of heterosexual males who identify as women. But it didn’t stop there. Now same-sex attraction is out, redefined as a problematic “genital preference”. A surprising number of hardline activists vilify lesbians as “genital fetishists” and accuse them of practising “sexual apartheid”.
Meanwhile, lesbians are bombarded with suggestions on “how to have lesbian sex with a trans woman”. Safe-sex guides for lesbians provide information on avoiding pregnancy and performing blowjobs. Healthline’s “How Do Lesbians Have Sex?” guide, which targets sexually inexperienced women and girls, reminds readers that “any person can have any type of sex”. “[D]on’t apply assumptions you apply to cis men to us, our body works in different ways,” a columnist for Allure scolded readers: “Keep an open mind, and remember you’re having sex with a woman who knows more about her body than you do about hers.”
Not convinced yet? “Estrogenized dicks are… a lot like if a vagina was shaped like a dick and testes… Sex with an estrogenized dick is its own experience, but it’s MUCH MORE like sex with a vagina than sex with a man’s dick!” This remarkable advertisement concludes with a denial of what’s being pushed and why:
“Don’t have sex with anyone you don’t want to! You don’t ever have to give a reason why you don’t want to have sex with someone… But if you go out of your way to tell everyone that you won’t have sex with trans women, and your reasoning is that you think trans women are men, and that sex with us is like sex with men, don’t be surprised when people call you out as an uninformed bigot!”
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.”
July
For UnHerd, I wrote about what gender-affirming medical providers must believe to transition kids:
Rather than bending the arc of history toward justice, the Biden administration has put the full force of the federal government behind a treatment model that amounts to little more than an unregulated medical experiment on vulnerable children and adolescents. Don’t let the language of civil rights fool you.
To understand gender affirmation and the people who push it, we need to take a closer look at their belief in the utterly exceptional “transgender” child. What do affirmative clinicians believe about such a patient, who arrives in their office with a label firmly affixed? Affirmative care starts not with a question or a clinical assessment but with a moral imperative: validate the patient’s transgender identity.
Presented with a “transgender” patient, what else matters? Does a patient’s age or developmental stage matter? What about his or her sex or sexual orientation? What parts of a patient’s life story — or medical history — stand out?
Gender clinicians such as Johanna Olson-Kennedy prefer to talk about gender-questioning three-year-olds as “people”. And they are people. But when we talk about three-year-olds as “people”, rather than toddlers, important information gets lost, with consequences. When we talk about “people”, we think adults. We think autonomy. When we talk about “toddlers,” we think: tiny humans who need constant care and guidance, who cannot be trusted to brush their teeth or cross an empty street, much less start down a medical pathway.
That’s the reason Olson-Kennedy talks about “people” when she’s referring to toddlers. The ideas that underpin gender-affirming care lose their moral force when translated from “people know who they are” to “toddlers know who they are”.
My medical malpractice is now your dynamic desire for gender-affirming medical interventions:
Gender clinicians are desperately trying to bury mounting evidence of medical harm, regret, and detransition, mostly by draining meaning from language and redefining mountains as rainbow-spangled molehills that it would be ever so edifying to visit, even if you ultimately decide you’d rather move on.
Their best bet for getting out of this with their reputations and business models intact is to destroy the possibility of speaking clearly and objectively about the situation: that a growing number of young people regret medical interventions they received under an affirmative-care model that did not take the possibility of medical harm, regret, and detransition into account. Gender clinicians want to make the conversation about how "regret" is "too binary" and "detransition" merely reflects “dynamic desires for gender-affirming interventions.” They want to make the conversation about the interiority of flighty patients, not the responsibility medical providers have to all patients.
After all, if there’s no reality of the situation, what does it mean to say that someone—like a patient—got hurt or that someone—like, I don’t know, a doctor who took an oath to do no harm or something—did something wrong? How can we talk about harm if everything—mastectomies, hysterectomies—can be written off as part of someone’s “gender journey”?
If there’s no reality of the situation, does that mean that no one was responsible, nothing was preventable (and why should any of it have been prevented, in the first place?), and no one was harmed? Does it mean that nothing really happened? That we simply ‘let’ someone—a child, perhaps—be their ‘true self’ and then their true self changed?
There's a terrible inexorability to language like this—a promise not to learn from what critics might be unkind enough to call “mistakes.” Clinicians are in effect saying: By affirming children and adolescents in line with their current self-identification, we did the only thing that we could have done at the time. Then the times changed! It turns out self-identification was a moving target! That’s all. It was nobody’s fault. Nothing could have unfolded in any other way. (Notice all the passive voice?)
In the language of gender ideology, it's wrong to deny “trans children” “life-saving” “gender-affirming care.” Some people later experience "dynamic desires for gender-affirming interventions."
In plain English, it's wrong to drug, cut up, and sterilize children and young people, no matter what you call it. Harm is harm. Regret is regret. Detransition is detransition.
For Wesley Yang’s Substack, I wrote about how progressive nonprofits went over the waterfall, in a piece called Think-tanked:
In this climate, I watched my organization radicalize, righteously. Ideas no one would have entertained five years ago were elevated to doctrine. The focus on ‘inclusion’ unseated real-world action. We shifted from carving out small material gains to taking on immense systems of oppression—strictly rhetorically, of course. We went from advocating for victims of domestic violence to be able to break leases and phone contracts to preaching about how domestic violence organizations could be more supportive of LGBTQIA2S+ staff, who might find the gendered nature of their work triggering. In other words: less doing, more talking. And, of course, we could no longer talk straightforwardly about sex.
A strange sort of arms race kicked off, where whoever could brainstorm the most byzantine ways someone could feel marginalized or excluded by anything we wrote or said—or (decreasingly) did—won by demonstrating a superior sensitivity. The belief that making something more complicated meant you’d contributed predated the identity panic. But doing so took on a new moral urgency. Action alerts that deployed phrases like “stand up for ___” sparked outcry from junior staffers on the harms of ableism. (“It’s a metaphor. Did you stand up when you read the email?” didn’t go over well.) The cause got lost.
And let’s talk about those junior staffers, my fellow Millennials. One young woman with two sets of pronouns in her email signature exhorted us in all-staff emails to vary the pronouns we used for her to reflect the full spectrum of her ever-fluctuating gender identity. She bombarded us with ‘helpful suggestions’ that read like rejected submissions to Everyday Feminism: Don’t say ‘tone-deaf. Don’t assume anyone’s gender identity but do notice it’s a ‘they’ day when she stomps into work in Doc Martens. Do say ‘women and femmes.’ Do consider slipping in a few words about how actually ‘sex work’ is empowering into a statement about a shooting spree that killed ‘sex workers.’ She couldn’t understand disagreement as anything but the product of regrettable but correctable ignorance. She couldn’t accept the possibility that someone could understand her perfectly and yet go another way. And she wasn’t alone in that.
Directors—newly insecure in the authority they wielded—liked to talk about ‘sharing power’ with younger staff. But in practice, ‘sharing power’ usually meant ‘handing off independent judgment.’ If the demands younger staffers issued didn’t make any sense, directors took it as a sign of just how out of touch they were, how little they understood: they hoped no one would ever uncover this perilous ignorance.
August
Phobia indoctrination and trans communities:
A healthy, open, supportive trans community would not look or sound like the trans community we've got. It would be honest about the risks trans people face, rather than wildly inflating those risks to instill fear.
It would foster resilience and self-sufficiency in gender-questioning youth, rather than telling kids that anyone who disagrees with their worldview hates them or that exposure to ‘misgendering’ or ‘dead-naming’ can lead to suicide.
A healthy, open trans community would accept that transition doesn't work for everybody and that there are legitimate reasons to detransition and exit the community.
A healthy, open, supportive trans community wouldn't seek to drive a wedge between gender-questioning youth and their family members or friends who sincerely want the best for them but question whether transition is the right answer.
A healthy, open, supportive trans community would invite ethical research into transition outcomes and alternatives—rather than trying to shut down inquiry—because trans-identifying people deserve high-quality care, not just ideologically-compliant ‘care.’
And a healthy, open, supportive trans community would encourage young people to explore their questions and doubts openly—recognizing transition as a serious undertaking—without fear of censure or expulsion from the group.
These toxic dynamics aren't contained within the community either, spilling out into the public sphere whenever any issue that touches gender identity is discussed.
Trans activism and the road not taken:
It wasn’t necessary to put the trans movement on a collision course with reality, fairness, common sense, medical ethics, toleration for difference, freedom of speech and conscience, and the basic recognition that sex matters to achieve the movement’s stated goals. Rather, it’s the trans lobby’s unstated goals that put us on this dark path. We can make a case for certain reasonable accommodations for people who are uncomfortable with their sex. Reasonable claims and demands can withstand scrutiny. Unreasonable claims and demands require a different approach. It’s impossible to make the case for putting male rapists in women’s prisons if you have to use plain language. It’s impossible to justify indoctrinating and then sterilizing confused children. You can only advance such goals if you’re willing to break the language, keep the public in the dark, and punish anyone who tries to drag your antics into the light. (In other words, you have to follow the Denton’s playbook.)
That trans activism took this form tells us something about what’s driving the movement and what’s not.
People with gender dysphoria benefit from rigorous research and quality healthcare and suffer when these issues become political and bitterly polarized. People who seek acceptance as they are don’t need to erase sex in law and society. Erasing sex erases not only an important part of who we are as individuals, but also who we are as a species. It’s not possible to understand the trans experience without understanding the reality of sex, and erasing sex therefore removes the possibility of understanding and empathy. When medical records lie about sex, patients suffer.
September
You are a good person because you get it. You aren't one of those reactionaries who balks at hysterectomies for troubled teen girls. You affirm that this is life-saving, gender-affirming care. Any good doctor would provide it. You don't feel the horror anymore.
You know that you're a good person because you don't feel horror but exaltation. Only bad people feel horrified at such things because they haven’t done the work.
The endpoint of this education in 'allyship' is a person who cannot question what she supports because she cannot see it, because she lacks the language to formulate the question, because she lacks the confidence of her own perceptions, because she has 'problematized' away any ground she might stand on or any principle she might insist on. She looks on real horrors with starry eyes because she must.
Of course the bad feelings don't really go away. The horror doesn't go away. But you lose touch with its true sources. You project it on the only people against whom you're allowed—encouraged—to vent bad feelings: the people trying to warn you you’re causing harm.
The more horror you must sublimate, the more horrible your detractors must become, even if the worst thing they say is simply: look. Look at what you’re doing.
At a certain point, left, right, progressive, conservative stopped meaning very much to me. The distinction for me became that I could talk to anybody that could talk and listen to anybody who could listen. Around the same time, I lost the ability to make disclaimers and statements of positionality, laying out what right, what grounds I have to speak. I have the same right to speak as everyone else. No more or less. I oppose this ideology for reasons that are both widely shared among gender dissidents of many stripes and also utterly individual to me and the life I’ve led. Every person in this fight has his or her own reasons. Maybe you’re a parent and see families like yours being torn apart over this issue. Or you’re a radical feminist who sees transgender ideology as just the latest innovation in generations of female erasure. Or maybe you already left one patriarchal religion and resent being subjected to another. Or maybe you’re a lesbian and refuse to be pushed back into the closet. Or maybe you know you’d have been transed if you’d been born in 1995 rather than 1965. Or maybe you have a duty of care, a duty for which you would forfeit your career. Maybe you won’t be made to lie about reality, no matter what it costs you. Or maybe it’s because you’re a writer and language matters. Or you’re a public servant and process matters. Which is all to say that nobody owns this cause. A thousand individual paths lead to these frontlines.
October
Why trans activism keeps running afoul of civil liberties, for The Freethinker:
Civil libertarians who have sat this conflict out so far may be startled to see free speech set up in opposition to human rights and equality. But when it comes to gender, an atmosphere of wartime censorship has set in. Trans activists claim these strictures save lives, but in reality it is the survival of the cause itself that requires such exceptional treatment.
So why do civil liberties violations and calls for further clampdowns follow trans activism wherever it goes?
The short answer is that the trans movement threatens civil liberties because the movement is not what it claims to be and thus is threatened by free and open enquiry. If a movement cannot withstand scrutiny, it will create and enforce taboos—and undermine civil liberties in the process. One of the trans movement’s central claims is that there is no conflict between its claims and demands and the rights of any other group. Stonewall, a leading trans rights organisation in the United Kingdom, states upfront that ‘we do not and will not acknowledge a conflict between trans rights and “sex based women’s rights”.’ Merely ‘claiming [that] there is a conflict between trans people’s human rights and those of any other group’—such as women, children, religious minorities, or lesbian and gay people—is defined as transphobic hate speech that governments and private corporations alike should censor.
Unfortunately—for the trans movement and the rest of us—the conflict exists, whether we are free to acknowledge it or not.
To put the conflict in plain language: trans activism argues that gender identity should override sex in law and society. Trans activism redefines ‘women’ and ‘men’ from sex classes based on reproductive role into mixed-sex classes based on individuals’ inner sense of being a man, woman, both, or neither. A mixed-sex definition of ‘woman’ will put males on women’s shortlists, in women’s sports, prisons, and domestic violence refuges. Even if we were to believe that redefining women as a mixed-sex class inclusive of males who identify as women is an urgent and just cause—that is, even if we believe that the outcome should be settled in a particular way—there remains a conflict between two clashing interpretations of the law and two distinct groups of people.
Rather than acknowledge this conflict and propose a satisfactory resolution, trans activists seek to deny it altogether—largely by stripping meaning from language. This is how the ubiquitous claim that ‘trans women are women’ functions. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter if ‘trans women’ outcompete female athletes in women’s sports. In fact, if ‘trans women are women’, then questioning whether Lia Thomas should compete against female athletes becomes part of a ‘long tradition of “gender policing” female athletes’. Rather than make a compelling case for why trans inclusion should trump fairness, trans activists seek to make sex—the very crux of the conflict—unspeakable. If ‘trans women are women’, then it does not matter whether or not placing trans-identified males in women’s prisons puts female prisoners at risk. ‘Trans women are women’ means no scrutiny and no debate.
The medical establishment declares war on gender ‘disinformation’:
But it’s not complicated. There is no child whose personality, likes, dislikes, even whose distress warrants sterilization. Sex is not a spectrum. Gender is not so very hard to understand. Children are being indoctrinated to believe it’s possible to be born in the wrong body, then subjected to pharmaceutical and surgical interventions under the guise of medicine to ‘correct’ this invented defect. But no child is born in the wrong body. Every child—every person—has a sex and a personality and some relationship to sex-role stereotypes, whether this relationship is central or marginal to the way they live their lives. Some people call the combination of personality and relationship to sex-role stereotypes ‘gender.’ The aspects of ‘gender’ that are so very hard to understand are not the important parts and they are only ‘hard to understand’ if you are already well down the road to being indoctrinated yourself.
I wrote about the parallels between eating disorders and trans identification for Genspect:
Like trans identification, eating disorders and self harm sweep through social networks. Well-intentioned efforts to raise awareness about these conditions—in the classroom or through the media—may spread the contagion by popularizing templates for young women to understand and express distress, and outline action steps for distressed girls to undertake. Research documents a “near-perfect link” between media exposure and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. We see something similar happening with media coverage of trans issues and referrals to youth gender clinics, but few want to talk about the relationship between media consumption (in the case of trans: media celebration), behavior, and identity.
There are other links too many are failing to recognize. Medical professionals have long recognized that peer-support groups can unintentionally fuel disordered eating and spread harmful behaviors. Clinicians often police patients’ speech in group-therapy settings, forbidding “numbers talk” and cutting off discussion of the emotions that drive disordered eating. Medical providers discourage anorexic patients from focusing too much on food or crafting elaborate rituals around eating, and often track disordered eating behaviors through multiple iterations, as patients ‘move on’ from anorexia to fasting for religious purposes or the adoption of restrictive diets like veganism or ‘clean’ eating.
But when an eating-disordered patient comes out as trans, everything clinicians know about how harmful behaviors and identifications spread goes out the window. Suddenly, negative self-talk in group-therapy sessions is OK—as long as the patient says she hates her breasts and hips because she’s not a girl or a woman at all. She’s offered breast binders, even top surgery, to ‘affirm’ her new identity. Her eating disorder suddenly makes sense—she was uncomfortable with her developing body because she was developing the wrong kind of body altogether—and her struggles with weight loss and restriction take a backseat. Suppressing her female form goes from a recognized pathology to a ‘gender embodiment goal.’
And here we can see how the moral imperatives that cluster around trans identities are clouding clinical judgment when it comes to understanding and treating eating disorders themselves.
November
I reread Whipping Girl so you don’t have to:
Who needs to stay up all night stitching together a transgressive feminist political analysis when you’ve got emotional blackmail?
After all, you couldn’t possibly be narrow-minded and “gender-anxious” enough to question his claims and refuse his demands, could you? You’re better than that, Serano simpers. You’re a feminist.
That’s how I found myself—just 10 pages into Whipping Girl—Googling how confidence men exploit their marks’ credulity, naivety, compassion, or vanity.
Serano goes on to play a 432-page shell game with sex and gender and femaleness and femininity, hoping the reader will lose track and won’t notice they’ve been conned. Any writer who seeks to inform and empower his readers will give them the language and foundation they need to think deeply about the topic in question. Serano deals in guilt and shame and obfuscation, trading whatever solid ground his readers might seek out for quicksand. The credulous reader ends up with nothing left to stand on. If she takes Serano seriously, she learns very little about gender but a great deal about how to distrust and undermine herself. Whipping Girl is a bootcamp where good little intersectional feminists go to train in self-doubt.
I talked to Benjamin Boyce about totalitarian language games and going undercover to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Conference:
Millennial women weren’t bottlefed gender ideology, so how did we fall for it?
If you buy into this belief system about 'cisgender' and 'transgender,' no woman with any self-respect is going to maintain a 'cisgender' identity for very long. Even if she starts out as the most self-effacing 'cis' ally, she’s not going to be able to continue to demean herself like that. Eventually, she’ll balk at the sexism even as she buys into the sexism. She's inevitably going to come to a deep, personal revelation about her gender identity. She’ll damn other women and exempt herself.
Look, if I genuinely believed Andrea Long Chu was the authority on what women are (expectant asshole/blank blank eyes), I wouldn't identify as a woman either. You can't take porn-addled headcases like Long Chu half-seriously and continue to identify as a woman. (So, it turns out women are not as masochistic as men who identify as women think, after all. Some women are prepared to take these men at their word about what women are but ultimately they can't accept the insult themselves. They'll nope out.)
December
The role of suggestion in creating ‘trans’ kids:
If someone believes that trans identification is not an idea that can be planted in somebody’s head—that trans is not a belief about the self—they won’t understand what they’re doing when they suggest such an idea to a child. So if a therapist or a doctor or a teacher or a peer or a stranger on the Internet suggests the idea to you, it will have no effect on you unless you are ‘really trans.’ It doesn’t matter what condition you’re in when you encounter the idea. It doesn’t matter how often or how insistently you’re prompted to consider it. If you are not transgender, then this idea will not speak to you because being trans is not a belief about the self.
This is where people whose hearts are in the right place make a terrible mistake. They think raising awareness around trans is just like increasing visibility and representation for kids who are different in other ways, where visibility and representation help these kids accept themselves as they are and imagine themselves into adulthood.
Under this way of thinking, we need to teach all kids about what it means to be trans—and how you’d know if you were trans—so that the few ‘trans’ kids in the mix will know they’re not alone in the world, so that they will look out at the world and see themselves reflected back. This is what many adults think they’re providing to ‘trans’ kids. And if ‘trans’ kids were like kids with disabilities or kids with incarcerated parents or refugee kids or kids whose names nobody can pronounce or kids who will grow up to be gay, they’d be right. You don’t turn a child into a refugee by reading children a book about refugees.
But ‘trans’ is a belief about the self. Of course it can spread. Of course it can fall apart. Of course we shouldn’t inscribe it on children’s flesh.
Reflecting on how I’ve changed my mind over the past six years, e.g.:
In civic life, your sex (and only your sex) matters. Your private beliefs about your sex don't matter. Anyone is free to hold wacky beliefs about sex/gender but not to enforce those beliefs on others by, e.g., violating single-sex spaces or coercing 'affirming' speech. People should not be discriminated against for gender nonconformity or for holding wacky private beliefs about sex/gender (akin to religious beliefs) but that's it.
What a wonderful set of articles you have given us throughout 2022.
You've had a great year, and should be immensely proud of your achievements - your writing, and latterly your podcast appearances.
I wish you the very best for 2023, and hope your star continues to rise.
thank you for all your beautiful writing, the depth and bravery of your research and most of all for being a wonderful role model showing younger women feminine strength and wisdom.