Seems so, doesn’t it?
Let’s do a quick roundup. I wrote most of this last week, so it already feels dated.
Just remember: you can get a good weekly roundup of bad and even good news related to the War on Women at the Graham Linehan site. It tends to be UK-heavy, but worth working through, if you’re interested.
First – why does this matter? Because material reality matters. And because children shouldn’t be experimented on. Is that enough?
I’ll begin with a link to a piece from the Telegraph by Conservative MP Miriam Cates. The link to the piece is here, but in case you can’t get through the paywall, head to Linehan’s site, where he’s reprinted the text. And if that has to be removed, try the Ovarit discussion.
But it hasn’t gone away, and when we have senior elected politicians making statements saying that those who deny males access to women’s spaces are “dinosaurs who want to hoard rights” (David Lammy MP), or that there shouldn’t be sex segregated facilities for women in schools and hospitals (Alex Sobel MP), I think we have to recognise that women are in danger. Again.
Because the fact is that, far from being hoarders of rights, women – and many men – have had to fight very hard for us to have any rights at all. And whilst we may be equal with men now by law – and that should be celebrated – there is still one area where we are very much unequal and probably always will be: the area of physical and sexual power.
For all sorts of biological reasons, men can choose to exert sexual power over women with abhorrent results. Every woman knows what the threat of that feels like, and many, sadly, have experienced much worse than just threat.
It is this inequality that demands that women be protected when we are most vulnerable – in the privacy of changing facilities, in the indignity of a hospital ward, in the vulnerability of a prison estate, or when fleeing domestic abuse.
To suggest that women who want to be protected in these most vulnerable of areas are somehow bigots or transphobes is to completely deny the truth of the situation. Women’s sex-based rights are protected by law, and that includes the right to single-sex spaces where these are necessary to preserve our safety and dignity.
In a tolerant and liberal society, adults should be able to live how they choose within the law, free from discrimination and abuse. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t believe that trans people – just like everyone else – should be treated with respect, compassion and dignity.
But this is not the limit of what is being demanded by campaigners, who are pressing for trans people to be treated in every respect as if they were the opposite sex, even if they have yet to go through any form of hormonal or surgical gender reassignment.
It’s not profound, but it’s succinct, and fantastic to see it in the Telegraph.
Last Monday, Abigail Shrier ran an interview with two males-presenting-as-women medical professionals. Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage – a book examining the preteen and teen female-to-male craze, recorded both as saying they had doubts as to whether it was a good idea to give gender questioning and non-conforming children puberty blockers.
Oh rhilly?
You can read the piece here. Bowers, by the way, was the main doctor involved in the Jazz Jennings surgeries.
Shrier summarizes in another post a few days later:
For the first time in the U.S., top gender medical providers collectively acknowledged four facts: early puberty blockade can lead to significant surgical complication and also permanent sexual dysfunction; peer and social media influence do seem to play a role in encouraging the current, unprecedented spike in transgender identification by teen girls; and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) – of which both Bowers Anderson are board members – has been excluding doctors who question current medical protocols to its detriment.
There’s much speculation online about why these two have come out in this way at this point. They are not, of course, questioning their bread-and-butter of actually enabling the transitioning of young people – just saying, well, maybe not the blockers? And maybe not affirmative care so much?
Some suspect that these practitioners and others sense a change coming in public attitude, and maybe even are receiving more and more questions and concerns from patients and former patients – as in, why did my neophallus fall off? And why is this wound between my legs not healing? And maybe even I am still very miserable – you didn’t help, and I’m thinking you might have even hurt me.
So, it’s CYA time.
Then this hit the Twitters and Tik Toks last week: A trans (MTF) person at a Texas Sonic trying very hard to get misgendered and raise bloody hell about it. It’s…not working, with an unintentionally comedic mic drop, to boot.
Clearly, narcissism and/or mental illness at work here. I don’t have a good single link, but just look it up. You might be entertained.
Then, of course – Dave Chappelle. Not my style of comic, but in his new Netflix special, let’s just say ….awareness was raised, as he made the very-easy-to-understand analogy between these issues and blackface, and then as millions probably headed to the internet to look up What’s a TERF?
So on 12/17/20, the fellow had posted this:
And then three days later – three days – “Hi. I’m a girl.”
You know that’s all it takes to be female, right? Toss on a dress and tilt that head.
I must read too much Brit-based material, because all I can think when I see garbage like this is…bollocks.
Also: absolutely not a fetish, right? Not. At. All.
Finally, the inestimable Titania McGrath sums it up for us:
Why do bigots find gender identity so confusing?
It simply means the immutable yet fluid feeling that one is male or female or neither or both based on conceptions of masculinity and femininity that are innate but also social constructs that don’t exist.
This really isn’t hard.
First step in dealing with all of this?
Don’t be gaslit.
Especially by kind-hearted Christian folk. Don’t. Be. Gaslit.
It’s not an “identity.” Depending on the person, it’s tragic mental illness, it’s an quite understandable, but still misguided rebellion against a deeply misogynistic, pornified culture or it’s a gross and stupid fetish.
Don’t. Be. Gaslit.
Here’s a horror story for the file, even though I’d bet my salary the rapist isn’t transgender. But he knew he wouldn’t be questioned, either.
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2021/10/12/horror-father-accuses-loudoun-school-board-of-covering-up-sexual-assault-n421769
The school preferred to lie than to risk offending the people who have forced the victim’s family to erect protective fencing.