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.
Eliza, thanks for writing the letter we all want to send to Chase Strangio! It always feels so confusing to me when the trans-identified accuse gender critical people of pretending they don't exist or trying to erase them. Um--yeah, we know only too well that you exist, and we know what you demand. Why would we be devoting our precious human moments on earth to fighting this ideology if you did not only EXIST with your peculiar religion, but DEMAND that the rest of the world play make-believe in your dangerous games? We do understand that you get unhappy when reality intrudes. We don't relish your pain (at least I don't) at this disruption of your fantasy. But your distress with reality is less important than the fight for women to have autonomy over our bodies.
I am still offended by the gender Identity philosophy in their conservative patriarchal insistence that all feminine presenting humans must be women and all male presenting humans must be men and then call that non-binary. Do I have that right? I'm still not sure but that seems to be the result. Women turning magically into men because of their hair style and clothes and men turning into women for the same reason. That takes a shit ton of pretending. Can't we have short hair and wear trousers and still be women? Why not? According to the supposed rules of the philosophy, I should have been a man for my entire 62 years because of how I comfortably presented my external preferences. Because that's all they are.
Frankly, people like Ms Chase are the ones literally erasing their own existence by denial of their own sex and sex class.
Chase et all can present and pretend all they like - lie to themselves to their heart's content - but they do NOT have the right to demand, compel and bully everyone else, to lie as well.
This is the crux of the matter.
Lying about the material reality of dimorphic sexed bodies.
Thank you for letting people post comments on your articles. I am an elderly gay man. Until the trans issue became front and center, I viewed liberals as the rational people in society, but that has changed. The conservatives have their Trump fantasy man, and liberals have their trans fantasies. What I don't understand is how 1% of the population has managed to brainwash all the liberals. There seems to be something about people trapped in the wrong bodies that pushes the empathy buttons of liberals. Liberals imagine that it is such a horrible existential torture to be trapped in the wrong body that they are willing to accept whatever B.S. trans people throw at them.
Trans activists have also been very effective at creating an image of trans people as murder victims. True, a lot of trans people are murdered -- BUT, a lot of natural women are also murdered by men. Also, fewer trans women would be murdered if they didn't go into the sex business, which a lot of them do. But what else is a woman with large breasts and male genitals to do?
Trans activists have also been successful at convincing liberals that there are millions of trans children out there whose suffering is all the more intense because they are young and don't have an adult's emotional defenses. Such children need to see a medical professional immediately to start getting hormone injections and to plan for their first surgery.
Never having previously encountered Chase Strangio -- who, from the photo, appeared to be male -- I was too thrown by trying to figure out the grammatical structure of his inscrutable Twitter question, to have any idea what it meant:
(a) "For those of us who are not women, who can become pregnant, ..." -- but how can a man become pregnant?
or (b) "For those of us who are not women-who-can-become-pregnant" -- ie, for men?
"... is the preference that we pretend that we don't exist or that we simply stop existing?"
Whose preference? and why any such binary supposition on the part of whom, that men should pretend they don't exist, or should stop existing?
Ah -- but I'd forgotten this is a Substack about TRANS people. So what looks like "he" must be "she": a trans-identified female talking (for a change).
But denying she is a woman? or denying that she is a woman-who-can-become-pregnant? (as a result of testosterone treatment?) Or implying that she is a man but can become pregnant -- which would mean (a) is probably the grammatically intended meaning -- which is a conceit too far for me...
But unfortunately she's wrong. The effort required to figure out what the hell she is on about makes my preference far simpler: that she stops pretending to be something she's not, and learns how to use punctuation.
Anything and anyone who de-centers women's sex-based oppression and concerns like this is just a patriarchal tentacle--acting on behalf of patriarchy to reinforce women's subordination. What's basically being said is "I'm threatened by women centering their rights". If she wasn't invested in patriarchy, there would be no threat.
It is at times like this that hashtag no debate should be turned around. But I understand why you felt the need to respond.
Two other issues come to mind.
First this pervasive notion that there is some inner sense of who we are. My sense of who I am is very complicated and has changed throughout my life. The most enduring aspect of this is that I am a philosopher. At no time have I been comfortable identifying as male. My body is male, yes, but I refused to be socialised according to the usual stereotypes and recognise that quite a lot of maleness in the west is absolutely toxic. I must also admit that have sometimes looked back at what I though about myself and acknowledged that it was complete nonsense. So there has to be a great deal more research done into the inner sense of who we are before we can simply affirm what a person says of themselves.
Secondly this pretending thing. Is it not possible simply to be who one is? And for this to be accepted? This seemed to me to be the case as I was growing up and learning about psychology, sociology (including feminism) and philosophy during the 1980s. In any case by pretending to do or be something one has to do or be that thing. In which case pretending is not what it purports to be.
Thanks again for another stimulating piece of writing.
“The most dangerous of all psychic epidemics is the ‘mass psychosis’: an epidemic of madness that occurs when a large portion of a society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions...Individuals who make up the infected society become morally and spiritually inferior…[and] sink unconsciously to an inferior intellectual level and become more unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable." Carl Jung
We need complete detransification (as in denazification) of ALL our institutions. Some of them, including and especially the ACLU, are so far gone that they have to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Cracking analysis of this whole area of 'pretending'.
We know they're pretending.
They know they're pretending.
We know they know they're pretending.
They know we know they know...
(Now I'm just like Joey in that episode of 'Friends' where he gets all confused...)
I do miss one little phrase from your original twitter thread though.
Here you tell Chase to 'put the toys away'. Fair enough.
But in the original, you told him to 'take your head out of your arse'.
There was something unexpectedly delightful in reading that from your elegant pen..
Eliza, thanks for writing the letter we all want to send to Chase Strangio! It always feels so confusing to me when the trans-identified accuse gender critical people of pretending they don't exist or trying to erase them. Um--yeah, we know only too well that you exist, and we know what you demand. Why would we be devoting our precious human moments on earth to fighting this ideology if you did not only EXIST with your peculiar religion, but DEMAND that the rest of the world play make-believe in your dangerous games? We do understand that you get unhappy when reality intrudes. We don't relish your pain (at least I don't) at this disruption of your fantasy. But your distress with reality is less important than the fight for women to have autonomy over our bodies.
I am still offended by the gender Identity philosophy in their conservative patriarchal insistence that all feminine presenting humans must be women and all male presenting humans must be men and then call that non-binary. Do I have that right? I'm still not sure but that seems to be the result. Women turning magically into men because of their hair style and clothes and men turning into women for the same reason. That takes a shit ton of pretending. Can't we have short hair and wear trousers and still be women? Why not? According to the supposed rules of the philosophy, I should have been a man for my entire 62 years because of how I comfortably presented my external preferences. Because that's all they are.
Frankly, people like Ms Chase are the ones literally erasing their own existence by denial of their own sex and sex class.
Chase et all can present and pretend all they like - lie to themselves to their heart's content - but they do NOT have the right to demand, compel and bully everyone else, to lie as well.
This is the crux of the matter.
Lying about the material reality of dimorphic sexed bodies.
It helps no one. It harms everyone.
Perfection, I am this close (real close) to sending to my daughters.
Thank you for letting people post comments on your articles. I am an elderly gay man. Until the trans issue became front and center, I viewed liberals as the rational people in society, but that has changed. The conservatives have their Trump fantasy man, and liberals have their trans fantasies. What I don't understand is how 1% of the population has managed to brainwash all the liberals. There seems to be something about people trapped in the wrong bodies that pushes the empathy buttons of liberals. Liberals imagine that it is such a horrible existential torture to be trapped in the wrong body that they are willing to accept whatever B.S. trans people throw at them.
Trans activists have also been very effective at creating an image of trans people as murder victims. True, a lot of trans people are murdered -- BUT, a lot of natural women are also murdered by men. Also, fewer trans women would be murdered if they didn't go into the sex business, which a lot of them do. But what else is a woman with large breasts and male genitals to do?
Trans activists have also been successful at convincing liberals that there are millions of trans children out there whose suffering is all the more intense because they are young and don't have an adult's emotional defenses. Such children need to see a medical professional immediately to start getting hormone injections and to plan for their first surgery.
Never having previously encountered Chase Strangio -- who, from the photo, appeared to be male -- I was too thrown by trying to figure out the grammatical structure of his inscrutable Twitter question, to have any idea what it meant:
(a) "For those of us who are not women, who can become pregnant, ..." -- but how can a man become pregnant?
or (b) "For those of us who are not women-who-can-become-pregnant" -- ie, for men?
"... is the preference that we pretend that we don't exist or that we simply stop existing?"
Whose preference? and why any such binary supposition on the part of whom, that men should pretend they don't exist, or should stop existing?
Ah -- but I'd forgotten this is a Substack about TRANS people. So what looks like "he" must be "she": a trans-identified female talking (for a change).
But denying she is a woman? or denying that she is a woman-who-can-become-pregnant? (as a result of testosterone treatment?) Or implying that she is a man but can become pregnant -- which would mean (a) is probably the grammatically intended meaning -- which is a conceit too far for me...
But unfortunately she's wrong. The effort required to figure out what the hell she is on about makes my preference far simpler: that she stops pretending to be something she's not, and learns how to use punctuation.
Anything and anyone who de-centers women's sex-based oppression and concerns like this is just a patriarchal tentacle--acting on behalf of patriarchy to reinforce women's subordination. What's basically being said is "I'm threatened by women centering their rights". If she wasn't invested in patriarchy, there would be no threat.
It is at times like this that hashtag no debate should be turned around. But I understand why you felt the need to respond.
Two other issues come to mind.
First this pervasive notion that there is some inner sense of who we are. My sense of who I am is very complicated and has changed throughout my life. The most enduring aspect of this is that I am a philosopher. At no time have I been comfortable identifying as male. My body is male, yes, but I refused to be socialised according to the usual stereotypes and recognise that quite a lot of maleness in the west is absolutely toxic. I must also admit that have sometimes looked back at what I though about myself and acknowledged that it was complete nonsense. So there has to be a great deal more research done into the inner sense of who we are before we can simply affirm what a person says of themselves.
Secondly this pretending thing. Is it not possible simply to be who one is? And for this to be accepted? This seemed to me to be the case as I was growing up and learning about psychology, sociology (including feminism) and philosophy during the 1980s. In any case by pretending to do or be something one has to do or be that thing. In which case pretending is not what it purports to be.
Thanks again for another stimulating piece of writing.
“The most dangerous of all psychic epidemics is the ‘mass psychosis’: an epidemic of madness that occurs when a large portion of a society loses touch with reality and descends into delusions...Individuals who make up the infected society become morally and spiritually inferior…[and] sink unconsciously to an inferior intellectual level and become more unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable." Carl Jung
We need complete detransification (as in denazification) of ALL our institutions. Some of them, including and especially the ACLU, are so far gone that they have to be burned to the ground and rebuilt.
Brilliantly said.Thank you Eliza.