Which gender are you?

[guruilla]

Exiles in their own flesh: A psychotherapist speaks
A guest post submitted (anonymously) by a practicing psychotherapist to the site 4th Wave Now (2015)

Read the full post here.

This link is very cogent, and worth quoting in case it got overlooked in the frenzy of rapid-fire posting.

When I am suddenly and without warning discouraged from exploring the underlying causes and conditions of certain of my patients’ distress (as I was trained to do), and instead forced to put my professional stamp of approval upon a prefab, one-size-fits-all narrative intended to explain the complexity of my patient’s troubles, I feel confused. It’s as if I am being held hostage. No longer encouraged or permitted to question, consider or discuss the full spectrum of my patient’s mental health concerns, it has occurred to me that I am being used, my meager professional authority commandeered to legitimize a new narrative I may or may not wish to corroborate.

It’s been perilous to simply admit to not fully understanding it all–let alone disagree with the trans narrative. There was no training or teaching. I was just suddenly told that some of my patients thought they were trapped in the wrong body and that was that.

....

There are so many complex forces, from many different realms, coming into play with this trans wave. Most people are completely unaware of these intersecting interests.

Unfortunately the culture war has done a number on the concept of critical thinking. I have considered myself liberal my entire adult life, and I still am. But for a long time I couldn’t find anyone questioning this trans explosion who wasn’t on the far right. It made me feel like only conservatives were allowed to think, to consider this issue, but ultimately their thoughts were rendered meaningless due to their branding by the culture war. It’s essential that left-leaning people model critical thinking for the masses in this regard.

It’s important to link people like us together, who have been silenced, so we can resume contact with our critical thinking skills and reduce our growing sense of self doubt. Divide and conquer is best accomplished through silencing, through calling into question those who speak out. There is so much of this attached to the trans movement. Even just wondering about a profound concept such as transgender is labeled transphobic. What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think. Not that our intuition always tells the truth with a capital T, but it is a critical piece of who we are. Without it, we remain profoundly directionless, and more susceptible to coercion of all types.

What frightens me most about the trans movement is that the establishment has gotten involved and is leading it. I think that’s really weird. Clearly they are benefiting from it financially. So sad. It disturbs me to see how giddy my former medical director is to be part of this growing craze. We used to treat kids with mental health problems, but now it’s all about validating their emergent and shifting identities. As professionals, if we don’t loudly prioritize their identities as being the most important thing about them (and identities do shift constantly in kids and teens), we risk coming across as unsupportive and even immoral. Identity development has always been a teen task, but in the past it wasn’t necessarily supposed to become a lifestyle, or colonize the entirety of your existence.
...

What saddens me the most is the way children are being trained to think their parents do not love them if mom and dad don’t jump aboard the trans train. To me, this is a brutal aspect of a near-dictatorship being foisted on everyone.

....

One common trait I’ve noticed in nearly all the trans kids I’ve met has been their profound sense of being different, and too alone. They often have had little success with making friends, or what I would call contact with “the other.” Because of their psychic isolation, they are prime targets for group think narratives. But in addition to looking for a way to belong, they are also craving protection and the stamp of legitimacy, perhaps because they feel a profound lack of it.

Now that the government and medical communities are involved in the creation of who trans folks are, this class of individuals have finally found their safe havens. Now, rather than being merely invisible and awkward, they have been transformed into veritable leaders of a revolution. Now, rather than cower in the shadows, they have commandeered the narratives of others into a similar dark and brooding place where they once were. The tables, as they lived and viewed them, have now turned.

....

A large part of the problem comes with the revolution in health care. More and more, we are giving people the power to define their own treatments. This is good in many ways, but the trans movement is using this moment, and is actively recruiting young, psychologically undefined and frightened people to push their agenda through the medical community. It’s clearly not that difficult to do. These kids are just pawns. That’s how it looks to me anyway. The trans community needs more converts so that the narrative becomes more cohesive. I’m guessing the push for this comes from a need to further cohere so they will have more members to fully cement a fragile, constructed reality.

From the comments section, this therapist's response to a question from a transitioning-gender person, as to how she would approach someone wishing to make the change:

This development of the self would be a process whereby a client is assisted in the difficult task of creating a kind of consolidated sense of who they are. Personally, I think these core parts of us should function, or ideally function best when they are functionally somewhat autonomous, yet healthfully interdependent with others. I guess what I’m saying is, if a person doesn’t really yet know who they are independently, if they have a sort of “empty center looking to be filled from without”, I would work with them until they were able to find some weight within their own psychic core before they engaged in any sort of drastic changes. Signs that this consolidation is happening would be the individual not requiring others to excessively validate who they are. Ideally the individual should not be excessively too dependent upon the thoughts and opinions of others to maintain their sense of self.

As I have worked exclusively with teens, I cannot speak to the adult experience of gender transition. Teens by their nature are seeking identity. They don’t tend to have strong core selves just yet, and those with mental health issues are often extremely deficient in having fulfilled this developmental task. Neuroscience now shows us that chronic Instability of affect and mood inhibits the development of the self, or the capacity to observe the self. Unstable folks are neurologically incapable of observing others outside of how these others can fulfill their immediate needs (think narcissism, which is basically a sign a person is too dependent upon external others to construct the self. In being overly dependent in this way, the empty person uses others to create an image of themselves, they use others to literally ” feel” who they are. Obviously, this is all unconscious. Most people with a lack of a cohesive self are not aware they are using others in this way, but they will feel the effects of this habit and often not understand why they continue to have poor interpersonal and disrupted relationships with others).

So, for me, to get back to your question, I would work to look at whether or not a person has accomplished basic psychological developmental tasks before I would encourage their transitioning. However, this is all a bit of a mute point, for my exploring such with people who come to me saying they seek to transition will now classify me as transphobic and out of compliance if I explain what I’ve here explained to you. The fact is, not one of the kids I met with who wanted to transition was manifesting psychological health. They were very hurt individuals and had attributed their very real pain to the theory that their bodies and gender brains were misaligned. The vast majority of them had severe deficits interpersonally, experienced profound social anxiety, suicidality, to name just a few of the issues I saw emerging. These were souls fearing psychic extinction, living with the terror of being too different, too alone. They nearly all found their new identities, along with a whole new slew of friends, in others who experienced similar or equal psychic terror. How could I take seriously their sudden belief that they were trapped in the wrong body? How could I not see that they had stumbled upon a very viable and critical path to locating themselves amongst similar others.

Of course, I could not say this to any of them as they would claim, as they had been schooled online, that I too didn’t understand and was transphobic.
http://4thwavenow.com/2015/08/22/exiles ... mment-3690

I haven't personally read anything in this thread that seems particularly offensive. Controversial? yes. Offensive? No. There are a few posters coming from a pretty reactionary position which they cloak in cryptic, weasely words. But they're entitled to their opinions.

I have not seen any reactionary positions at this thread, weaselily disguised or otherwise, besides from those supposedly defending the trans-rights, which makes me suppose that I am considered by BPH as one of the reactionary weasels (perhaps for using the word "strangely" instead of "ironically"). It depresses me a bit to have to lay out my credentials as a non-hater, but on the other hand, misunderstanding proliferates through too much pride, so I'll offer this brief anecdote, from 2008, in the period that coincided with meeting my wife.

I was for a time in contact with a transgender person who called herself the Dream Queen (she did online dream interpretations). She was a very intelligent, insightful person and our correspondence was very rich. I found her charming and likable (she was still biologically male but I didn’t find it difficult to think of him/her as a female at that time), even to a degree attractive. She described her self-transformation in a similar way to Genesis P. Porrige, i.e., in alchemical terms, a sort of coniunctio oppositorum by which s/he desired to enact the alchemical marriage through surgery. My feeling, then and now, was that s/he was over-literalizing a subtler psychological journey; but if I said as much, I was delicate about it and no conflict arose between us.

At a certain point s/he began to suggest that I was like hir, and that I too would someday go through the same process, undergo surgical intervention in order to realize my true alchemical/hermaphrodite nature. I began to feel mild panic: what if s/he was right? I knew deep down that it was not for me, and yet still, my identity at that time (I was forty) was sufficiently wobbly for me to have vague feelings of doubt. By that age, I’d come to accept that life is so unbelievably strange, so full of unexpected curves, that nothing could be ruled out completely. The Dream Queen was so convinced of it, I felt briefly afraid that this might really be my future!

I assured her she was mistaken and gave my reasons. It didn’t create a rift between us (though we did lose touch over time), but I suppose it did make clear that there was already a gulf between us: I was not willing to make the leap which she saw as our shared destiny, and, by the same token, I was not able to fully endorse her own choice (at least not if endorsement depended on imitation).

Hopefully, this illustrates that, if anything, I’m flexible and open to a fault, when it comes strange anomalies and my own affinity with them. And that my “problem” with this transgender person only began when s/he tried to impose hir worldview onto me, and to recruit me into the trans-agenda. And even then it was not actually a problem (unless it was for hir), simply a clear boundary. The same applies at this thread.

I seriously doubt that the most strident defenders of transrights at this thread have ever got as close to contemplating their own transgender potential as some of us who are rigorously questioning the narrative. Seriously.

Aside from intersex individuals (who have a more fundamental anatomical problem arising during embryonic development), to the extent that there is any physiologic basis to transgenderism, it is a problem in the (possibly embryonic) development of the CNS, not the neuroendocrine system.

CNS = central nervous system? What would be a likely cause of this hypothetical problem (i.e, a reason for the rapidly growing numbers of TG-aspirants)?

[slomo]

We've been circling around the class issue, so I might as well bring it up in full rather than just alluding to the fact that it's important. I'm using a model that I posted in the Schadenfreude thread, but for easy reference I reproduce the link here. What is compelling to me is that the model is based on social network rather than solely income. As such, it is more explanatory of class phenomena. Note that the author attributes no moral judgments to any stratum other than the very very highest ("E1"), which is seen as uniformly evil. I.e., aside from E1, in every rung of the ladders both good and bad people can be found.

Basically, I do think women in the Labor ladder classes have it worse off than men. Male dominance is a key virtue in that class, so it stands to reason that women will always be seen as contributing less to society (other than their value as walking wombs). In the Gentry ladder classes, I think men and women experience different advantages and disadvantages, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that women in these classes have a slight advantage over men, because the legal and policy frameworks that govern these classes have been heavily influenced by feminism and they also favor talents and skills that are typically more common among women than men. For the Elite classes, it's really hard to say which gender has it better, but I would submit that whatever advantages one gender may have over the other, they pale in comparison to the advantages that Elites as a whole have over other classes.

Where does the TG phenomenon fit in? Access to medical intervention is really mostly available to Gentry and Elite classes, so we'll start there. I don't find it hard to imagine that Gentry men see advantages that accrue to women in that class, and begin to develop a resentment that becomes a very deep desire to access those advantages, and this desire combines with a deeply felt shame for ones masculinity (I'm vastly oversimplifying here, but I am almost certain that something like this is going on with at least the lesbian MtFs). Something similar may be going on with MtFs, and it's possible that the same process is operating in reverse, since the benefits experienced by women are not absolute. Note that I am not denying that there may be deeply felt identities in all cases, but as a quasi-Buddhist I don't really believe in the reality of core identity, and I'll just remark anecdotally that as a child I went through a phase where I wanted to be Marsha Brady (now look where I am). I can't fathom what's going on in the Elite classes, except that the most prominent Elite TGs are actually very low on the Elite ladder and probably heavily influenced by Gentry norms. As for the Labor classes (and Underclass), most TGs here do not have access to medical intervention and they end up working in the sex industry. I suspect that many of these TGs would probably turn out to be garden variety gay men or lesbians if they weren't so heavily influenced by the strict gender norms of their class ladder. In addition, I think there is a glamour factor influencing some of these TGs (look what kind of life I could have if I were a woman!) which eventually bumps against the cold hard reality of how difficult it is to climb the class ladder.

These musings are all in the hypothesis realm, and if they are backed up by data, I haven't seen anything systematically presented. I'm open to other hypotheses and interpretations.

[guruilla]

I still don't see the correlation between transgender and transhuman.

Pulling out to the wider picture, then . . .

The overlap between transgenderism and transhumanism is very basic, which may be why it’s invisible to some people. Also, because it shows an underlying fabric to the entirety of modern ideology, in other words, it’s in everything, it’s the water we swim in, only that with transhumanism it’s writ large enough that no one can miss it, but also too large for many to see that it’s the same ideology that underlies all of our choices these days, namely, belief in an identity-self that’s 100% independent of biology.

Weirdly, at the same time, both transhumanism and the majority (though not all) of the arguments for transgenderism as a lifestyle seem to also be dependent on a pretty much total (100% total in the case of transhumanism) denial of the existence of the unconscious, i.e., the psyche. I say weirdly because the idea of an identity-self independent of biology most obviously corresponds with the idea of the soul, and soul = psyche.

So then what is this identity-self that’s supposedly independent of biology? I mean, what is it that is supposed to have the “right” to be able to “choose” what identity it is given, by society, surgery, and technology? Who is this hypothetical “person” in search of a true identity independent of the cruel impositions of biology?

I already raised the question of the need for sex-change related to “being a woman in a man’s body” (or vice versa), and how this surely requires the existence of a soul, i.e., something pre-existing conception, or at least pre-existing the determination of gender in the fetus, a mysterious something that itself has gender (or sex). The idea that souls are gendered is not one I’ve heard of in metaphysical or religious systems, and AFAIK people who believe in reincarnation almost always believe they have had (or that it is usual to have had) past lives as both sexes.

For various reasons, the existence of a soul-psyche would seem to throw into disarray the majority of arguments for transgenderism as a healthy life choice to be encouraged. Not the least of these reasons is that a psychological view invariably brings up questions as to what may have caused an individual to feel like they were born in the wrong kind of body ~ what sort of early trauma, sexual interference, psychic enmeshment with a parent, and so on. As the psychologist quoted above herself experienced, all of these essential questions are thrown out of the window once the notion of a choosing identity-self independent of biology replaces that of a psyche and unconscious that is indwelling the body (or trying to).

From a more metaphysical view, there are questions about whether a person experiencing gender-identity confusion might be possessed by a soul of an ancestor or other non-physical/inorganic entities with their own agendas, and so forth. None of these questions are being raised at this thread. (I don’t think the psyche has once been mentioned here, but then the psychological viewpoint is almost entirely absent at RI, as it is in the larger discussion these days, which is very much the “point” ~ as well as the cause ~ of all of these scientistic/transhumanistic materialist agendas, IMO.)

Transhumanism, little and large, does away with all such annoying questions by bringing it all down to a viewpoint in which the body is simply a machine that can be tinkered with in any way necessary or possible in order to better suit the needs of its “driver.” So in the absence of a soul-psyche of unconscious self (or Self), who or what is this driver? The answer is the ego, the constructed identity. But the ego/constructed identity is a false identity; it’s not real, and its wants and needs are not healthy or constructive wants and needs; they are drives rooted in trauma, a fight or flight reaction that was so severely and repeatedly triggered in early childhood that it got stuck at the “on” position, until the body armor becomes the man.

I know this because I grew up watching it happen, and I have seen the consequences, up close and personal. My brother’s creed was: “I am a lie who points to the truth, and the truth is that we are exactly what we pretend to be.” Or what we choose to identify as. I agree with the part about the lie.I don't see any truth in it, only narcissistic despair.

[Elvis]

I see that of 38 poll respondents, only five are Female. Don't be shy, ladies! Vote! We want this to be a safe place where you can speak your heart out.

It's a complex topic, so don't be intimidated by all the esoteric conceptual and scientific language—if you have any questions or are unsure about something, just ask one of the guys. There's an abundance of knowledge here of which we can all take advantage, and a little women's intuition never hurt, either.

C'mon pipe up now, girls!—even if it's just a special recipe or clever household 'hack'!

[slomo]

Yes, CNS = central nervous system, which in this context really just means the brain (I doubt the spinal cord has anything to do with TGism). Plainly put, I think there may be developmental issues in-utero that lead to greater or lesser mix of male/female traits in the mature organism.

A more fruitful angle of inquiry is this one, even while I've tried to leave spirituality out of my remarks:

She described her self-transformation in a similar way to Genesis P. Porrige, i.e., in alchemical terms, a sort of coniunctio oppositorum by which s/he desired to enact the alchemical marriage through surgery. My feeling, then and now, was that s/he was over-literalizing a subtler psychological journey; but if I said as much, I was delicate about it and no conflict arose between us.

In reality, this is exactly what I think is happening: over-literalizing an internal psychological/spiritual journey. It's fine with me if that's what you really want to do, but I think we should discourage people from making drastic anatomical changes until they're absolutely sure they're necessary.

[slomo]

Oh, FFS, really?

BTW, the black girl with the fist raised at her computer? Easily could be me on any given work day.

[Elvis]

Oh, FFS, really?

Sorry

I am learning quite a bit here, not least from you, Slomo, sincere thanks.

[Agent Orange Cooper]

Yes, CNS = central nervous system, which in this context really just means the brain (I doubt the spinal cord has anything to do with TGism). Plainly put, I think there may be developmental issues in-utero that lead to greater or lesser mix of male/female traits in the mature organism.

I'll go you one further and say I think that it quite likely has to do with actual pollutants and contaminants in the brain, namely mercury, aluminum, and other heavy metals, which concentrate heavily in the brain in utero and don't ever leave (unless forced to), creating a whole smorgasbord of complications throughout a person's lifespan, body/sexual dysphoria included. As the saying goes, if you want to detox heavy metals from your body, have a baby.

Re: Genesis P-Orridge, it's worth pointing out that his wife (who underwent that transformation with him) died prematurely from cancer. I'm sure that the heavy surgical alterations to her body (including breast implants, which are literally poisonous) had nothing to do with that.

[slomo]

Environmental exposures in-utero: active area of medical and environmental research. Not sure anyone's looking at gender issues, but certainly a whole host of other conditions.

[slomo]

Oh, FFS, really?

Sorry

I am learning quite a bit here, not least from you, Slomo, sincere thanks.

No worries. I may make the black girl my new avatar in a couple of days.

[Project Willow]

Who cares???

Please read: guidelines for posting on the RI board
Postby Jeff » Wed Nov 08, 2006 9:38 am

Welcome to the RI board.

While Rigorous Intuition welcomes a range of informed perspectives, it is not intended to be a forum for the re-fighting of elemental human values. It should be assumed that this is a place where the dignity and rights of all people are respected. Members who challenge these rights may be regarded as disruptive, and members who habitually challenge them will be banned.

This is an anti-fascist board. Propagation of fascist, neo-Nazi and "white pride" causes, including sympathetically linking to sites which advocate such, will not be permitted. This includes revisionist histories of the Holocaust.

This is an anti-sexist board. We correctly assume that women, as a group, have been and continue to be the object of oppression based upon their gender. It is expected that members will respect the rights of women to justice and equality in all spheres of life, and to a positive experience of RI. Contending that feminism is a "New World Order plot" will not be permitted.

Posts advocating violence, or espousing hatred of a people based upon race, religion, gender or sexuality, are not permitted.

On edit: Tried to bring this post back to original, after an unfortunate error...

Oh, how ironic, from the person who is uncritically posting anti-woman, anti-feminist rhetoric.

J. Rogue

De-essentializing Anarchist Feminism: Lessons from the Transfeminist Movement

Written after the work of, and influenced by, transfeminist pioneers like Sandy Stone, Sylvia Riviera, and her Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), the Transfeminist Manifesto states: “Transfeminism believes that we construct our own gender identities based on what feels genuine, comfortable and sincere to us as we live and relate to others within given social and cultural constraint.”[11] The notion that gender is a social construct is a key concept in transfeminism, and is also essential (no pun intended) to an anarchist approach to feminism. Transfeminism also criticizes the idea of a “universal female experience” and argues against the biologically essentialist view that one’s gender is defined by one’s genitalia. Other feminisms have embraced the essentialist argument, seeing the idea of “women’s unity” as being built off a sameness, some kind of core “woman-ness.” This definition of woman is generally reliant on what is between a person’s legs. Yet what specifically about the definition of woman is intrinsic to two X chromosomes? If it is defined as being in possession of a womb, does that mean women who have had hysterectomies are somehow less of a woman? Reducing gender to biology relegates the definition of “woman” to the role of child-bearer. That seems rather antithetical to feminism. Gender roles have long been under scrutiny in radical communities. The idea that women are born to be mothers, are more sensitive and peaceful, are predisposed to wearing the color pink, and all the other stereotypes out there are socially constructed, not biological. If the (repressive) gender role does not define what a woman is, and if a doctor marking “F” on a birth certificate do not define gender either,[12] the next logical step is to recognize that gender can only be defined by the individual, for themselves—or perhaps we need as many genders as there are people, or even further, that gender should be abolished. While these ideas may cause some to panic, that does not make them any less legitimate with regards to peoples’ identities, or experiences, or the kinds of difficult political projects we might have ahead of us. Trying to simplify complex issues, or fighting to maintain a hold on how gender was taught to us, does not help us understand patriarchy and how it functions. Instead, it does revolutionary feminisms a disservice.

Continues at: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ ... t-movement

This is total bunk, and I can only imagine, an intentional misstating of gender critical feminism, which is itself critical of "biological essentialism", a phrase the author is twisting here. Gender is the system of behaviors assigned to people based on their genitalia. If you don't have female genitalia, you aren't assigned the problematic sex role, and you aren't conscripted to a system designed to control your reproductive capacities (FGM, forced marriage, restrictive religious beliefs). You cannot magically remove genitalia from any honest critique of patriarchal sex roles, as the whole point is to control female sexuality. If the goal is to do away with gender roles, then these folks should be allying with feminists in their gender critical stances, not attempting to supplant them with clearly faulty logic.

I can copy-pasta too, here are the words of a trans woman who is actually a feminist:

See original for images http://aoifeschatology.com/2015/10/26/whos-afraid-of-germaine-greer/

“Women have had the power of naming stolen from us.”
–Mary Daly
fak
“Reminder that sex is fake”
— Jenna Costigan (male transwoman)
^can you spot the difference?^

Early on in my transition, when I was living in Vancouver, I was physically assaulted whilst boarding a bus. My back had been turned, my hands occupied with digging in my purse for a ticket . . . when a solid fist struck me from the side, a peripheral sucker punch in the form of a hockey player’s slug.

He yelled “TRANNY!” and trotted away at a mild gait, unhindered by any witnesses.

This thug’s annoyance resulted from me having just declined his offer of a nugget of crack cocaine (or meth, as if I can tell …) in exchange for an alleyway blowjob. Since I was a transwoman waiting for public transit, I was clearly available to be propositioned for sex.

One thing I know for certain as I look back on that incident: this viscious bloke had never read Simone de Beauvoir. He had never read Germaine Greer.

He was a homophobic arsehole whose insecurities and male privilege entitled him to random acts of violence.

But, in the butterfly-effect politics of transgenderism, an academic lecturing in Wales who can define woman (adult human female), without mealymouthing around the issue, is somehow responsible for me getting smacked on the skull in YVR … and more so for the murder of transwomen (too often poor and of a racial minority) by savage men (always by men).

Let’s be honest about liberals and their armchair activism: slagging off older women on twitter or from the ivory tower is a hell of a lot easier than confronting actual male violence.

As is well known . . . and I’m right glad it’s well known: people are finally paying attention . . . Germaine Greer, global bestselling author, is the latest in the almost weekly occurrence of prominent feminists being no-platformed in the very spaces they should most be free to speak: publicly funded universities.

Greer’s thoughtcrime? The smug rational for this uni perversity of censoring one of the most respected, prominent, paradigm-shattering feminists that the English-language has given us? The justification for gagging a renowned writer whose words and activism paved a path of liberation for generations of young women?

Because Greer is firm and candid in her analysis as a feminist: a feminism that centres females (re: what feminism actually is). She speaks plainly of her unwillingness to reject the entire field of physical anthropology, and the understanding that oppression is based on female biological sex, to satisfy the egocentric whims of trans identity politics.

She knows male and female are not a mythology, but a corporeality.

Greer is rejecting a world in which a bepenised Jenner is dubbed woman of the year . . . without having actually lived as a woman for an entire year . . . indeed, arguably, hasn’t lived fully “as a woman” at all, given his penchant for being a bro amidst the old boys’ club of the golf course.

I thus signed a petition in support of Germaine Greer, because I support her right to speak. As an academic: I’m not afraid of lively and vigorous dialectics. As a transsexual: I’m tired of my experience being erased in service to genderism. And most importantly I signed as a human person: I would like a world without gender, where we’re free to express ourselves regardless of sex. Imagine there is no gender. I have no investment in servicing ‘gender’ as a system of rules imposed upon bodies to restrict personality according to artificial, harmful prescriptions. Whatever myself and Greer disagree on, we both acknowledge that making up new words doesn’t end oppression. I concur with Greer and Daly as to the motivations driving men to empty “woman” of any corporeal or material referent . . . it’s the ideal prelude to perfect and enshrine the femme-fantasy of all access erotic phantasm of ideation.

This was Daly’s prescient promise: men will take women’s words in order to take their bodies. We’re told “gender is not sex” like a mantra bereft of enlightenment. Well, what is gender? They never answer. Where did it come from? They never answer. Perhaps an outward gaze rather than inward self-idolatry? Reality is that male/female sex dimorphism is how mammals reproduce. Define gender, I ask. They can’t.

lousy

Gender is a socially constructed hierarchy of sex based norms imposed onto bodies. There. That wasn’t difficult, was it?

It’s only difficult because trans activists, to maintain their house of cards tautologies, must abstract into oblivious this one essentialist claim: a male must ‘really’ be female if ‘she’ possesses a subjectively-identifiable cache of feminine personality traits. And, by command, she was always female, will always be female, regardless and despite any lack of material correlation or correlative. To transgenderists, biological sex is a fantasy, but “I feel; therefore, I am” is the sole ontology.

Now, it’s pretty obvious that such is absurd immaterialism. “Inner, transcendental gender essence” can’t hold under scrutiny, according to any understanding of self and subjectivity.

Transgenderists well know this.

So, to protect this essentialism, transgenderists bully anyone — women or transsexuals in particular — who know females (women) and male transwomen have differences. A mature political movement would negotiate and address these differences honestly. But transgenderists threaten, cajole, bludgeon, manipulate, and thrash. Instead of critical discussion, they turn to the most regressive of chauvinism: to aggressively enforce silence. This is so much so that, recently, an American professor sought to ban the word female from the classroom, since it might hurt male feelings.

I kid you not: Biology is now considered offensive.

It can seem Wonderlandy at first, if you’re new to gender identity politics, and feeling overwhelmed by it all . . . but just ask yourself: why are trans so abusively opposed to debate? Not even debate — just a request for an honest conversation in which transwomen and women acknowledge our similarities, and our very obvious differences? Why is it so verboten to reference that transwomen and women have a lot in common, and a lot not in common?

And if you do dare question, despite their riot act?

CSP-1FhUwAA59d4CSQpG4PWsAA-HXs
Transactivists: actually threatening in a way that Radfems are falsely accused of doing and getting no-platformed for.

Come on now: let’s be real. Who’s the one inciting violence?

Likewise, because I support Greer, transgenderists — realising I’m a threat and no longer useful — routinely harass me.

CSNiU_rUEAAaEXD

CSNiU_0UsAAyy2z
The noose is a reference to my suicide attempt in 2011, which I’ve written publicly about. The weight comment refers to my #anarecovery (I’m doing great by the way — my doc is really pleased and so am I!)

As of this morning, I’ve yet to see a single transgenderist confront @cateatsu for urging my suicide and telling me I deserve to die. We know what would happen were a woman to have uttered the exceptionally vile abuse that was hurled at me, right? Why do trans get free license?

Can we be truthful, without affect hustling in lieu of an actual rational argument?

It’s not transphobic to have a definition of woman that doesn’t include males, no matter how arbitrarily feminine their inner disposition.

By addressing that sex is material facticity, and not imaginary “assignment,” Greer is stating an anthropological truth. You may not fancy her tact, rhetoric, discourse, tone, vocabulary . . . but those are ancillary details to actual engagement with the political opus of the gender-obsession she critiques. We are stymied in intellectual dishonesty: convert to newspeak or be condemned as a heretic:
“Young liberal feminist women have been given terms like “queer” and “cis” to confuse them into believing that their suffering is not real or, if it is real, it does not result from being born female.” (Phonaesthetica)

But transgenderists have an agenda: to ‘redefine realness’ in service to their ideology, regardless of whom this pseudo reality hurts.

CSOt0L_UsAAiw9s
24/7 language surveillance

Pop feminism has willfully abandoned political analysis for the feel-good factor of disposable aphorisms. See for example Laurie Penny (@pennyred) who recently performed the ultimate no risk “coming-out” of announcing she’s a femme-presenting, female-assigned at birth, no-transition “genderqueer” . . . which is the LGBT equivalent of claiming one retroactively looooved punk rock before it was mainstream.

And to prove her gendercred to her fans, she’s been eager to defend Caitlyn Jenner’s perpetual womanhood — that Bruce was female when winning the decathlon. Egregiously, Penny backs this up with the usual cut-and-paste misinterpretation of Simone de Beauvoir.

I’ll say it again: Beauvoir is spinning in her tomb over the intellectually dishonest, quote-mined appropriation of her life’s work. It is simply wrong that Beauvoir means “one … becomes a woman” as an endorsement of gender/femininity as empowering to female persons. It is embarrassingly clear that Penny, and her cadre of retweeters, hasn’t actually bothered to give Beauvoir the decency of a good read.

Such is what academic feminism has become.

Because even the most cursory of glances at the context reveals that Beauvoir insists ‘woman’ is an invented configuration imposed on female bodies. Beauvoir, following Virginia Woolf, is rebuking the sexist/sexualizing formulations imposed INVOLUNTARILY on female persons.

It’s really simple: women (female humans) are oppressed as a class in distinct ways because female embodiment is possessed of specific reproductive capacities. That’s why the book is called The Second Sex and not The Second Gender.

Gender is a synthetic ideology cruelly imposed on sex. To claim male-persons expressing strongly coded feminine preferences must actually be female inside . . . that is to reinscribe in an essentialist manner what is obviously a harmful rubric of sex-based stereotypes. In the introduction to her brilliant collection of essays on feminist phenomenology, Iris Marion Young cautions us: “We reduce women’s condition simply to unintelligibility if we ‘explain’ it by appeal to some natural and ahistorical feminine essence” (29).

Such a reduction is of course the very foundation and mandate of transgenderist misogyny.

Why are people afraid of Greer? Because she says no.

The bottom line here beneath the headlines is that more and more women are saying “No, enough. Stop!” to male transwomen robbing the power of naming from them, as Daly warned. And we well know what happens when women assert themselves through the word no. As a friend pointed out to me, “No is the most feminist act; society defines woman as the receiver/yes giver.”

I agree. That’s why the last word of Joyce’s Ulysses, the “greatest” novel of the twentieth century, is a woman saying “Yes”, not out of personal empowerment, but acquiescence to circumstance.

Who’s afraid of Germaine Greer?

Gender, and its idolators, are afraid of Germaine Greer.

[guruilla]

The only thing I'd add to that is that male humans have exactly as much to lose as female, because we are both/all losing the same thing: the ground of our being.

[tapitsbo]

We may be doing just that, but the ironic thing is that the program of ideas you and others are questioning in this thread comes out of a left-Heideggerean tradition ultimately reaching back to a similar sentiment... this doesn't mean a whole lot necessarily but it is interesting.

[guruilla]

We may be doing just that, but the ironic thing is that the program of ideas you and others are questioning in this thread comes out of a left-Heideggerean tradition ultimately reaching back to a similar sentiment... this doesn't mean a whole lot necessarily but it is interesting.

I'll have to take your word for it, but if so this may be a case of how every attempt to fix the problem only makes it worse. This is something I, and I imagine others here, have experienced firsthand within the crucible of marriage, both alchemical and mundane.

I just heard a spiritual teacher called Bernie Prior, talking about how all the worlds problems come down to the rift between men and women and our inability to recognize that we are not separate at the deeper level of being, but one soul with dual expression. So maybe the attempt to get 'back' to that, if it's based in a deep ignorance that we are already there, just takes us further and further from being able to experience it.

[tapitsbo]

Haha I think what I mentioned just comes down to a coincidence with the language used

After saying we're already whole or whatever other uplifting message, there sure are an awful lot of directions to choose from afterwards. "Better" or "worse" is up for grabs usually, I feel