Oh, let’s make it two in a row.
Over the weekend I was pondering the words of a self-described progressive white Christian who is all about the decolonization. But is also all about the trans.
For the life of me, I do not understand how people – especially women – who claim to be progressive and feminist, or even feminist-adjacent – can uncritically accept male claims to female identity or fail to be appalled at the regressive gender stereotyping (not to speak of paraphilia) and noping-out-of-womanhood that seems to animate so much “transition.”
I wrote about this at length here.
And no, this won’t be a repeat of all of that – but do go read it! – but simply an excuse to toss a couple more recent links out there for you.
First is a Washington Post profile of two teen boys. I don’t have an archived version for you, but here’s the link – and if you don’t have an account, you can just enter an email and read it. Anyway, the salient quotes:
Ever since I was little, I would wear dresses and wigs and heels. I remember one Halloween, I went as a Disney princess… I wanted to be like [Barbies], look like them….
…I feel like femininity is an almost goddess-like power…
…Cis women don’t get it. They can wake up, have no makeup on, not do their hair, wear the laziest outfit ever, and people will see them as a woman. I have to wake up early to do my hair for two hours, I have to put on makeup, I have to duct-tape my body parts, I have to put on the most hyper-feminine outfit, I have to do all of that to even be perceived as who I am, and even then it’s a risk. Even then people might not believe me…
…Instead of looking at it as, “I’m a trans woman,” I can look at it as, “I’m a woman who has more to offer, and a woman who has fought her way to be a woman. And all my suffering has made the strength that I have now.”
Ponder that bolded part. Really, really think about it. It’s very sad.
We’re told we need to just listen to “trans” people. Just! Listen!
I agree. 100%.
Listen to that, and tell me how it doesn’t express (besides sad emotional and mental issues) an image of “being a woman” that is not only unrealistic but also damaging to women.
And for the allies – if a girl came to you and said that they find having beautiful, well-done nails very “gender affirming…” what would you say? Would you might want to encourage her to expand her understanding…just a bit…of what it means to be a woman?
Today, the BBC announced a new project:
Who is Paris Lees? A man with a past centered on rent-boy prostitution and a little violent crime before he moved to appropriate womanhood. Here’s something he wrote in Vice a few years ago.
“Last summer I went to Ibiza, where I was catcalled, sexually objectified and treated like a piece of meat by men the entire week. And it was absolutely awesome.”
To sum it up – and now, a lot of you will not like this because of the explicit Marxist framing, but I think after reading it you might conclude…she’s not wrong. It’s a piece – that I linked in the Tweet up above – that centers this movement as a colonization of women’s experiences and spaces.
Even if this is not where you are coming from ideologically, you might find the perspective helpful. When I wrote in the previous post about being somewhat relieved the US bishops didn’t attempt some kind of comprehensive look at this issue in the past, this type of analysis is one of the reasons why.
In my experience with church people’s public discourse on various matters, I’ve found that the fear of being associated with Those People plays a huge role in what is said out loud. Unfortunately, because that’s cowardly, lazy thinking, but also very true. The more arguments against gender ideology from folks of a leftist persuasion, the more robust the conversation – and effective the activism – can be.
Just listen? Yes. Do.
1. First of all, transgenderism dominates and colonises the very category of women by changing the definition of women so that men can freely enter into it or gain access to it…
2. Transgenderism reduces ‘womanhood’ to practices of dressing, having long hair, applying makeup, and behaving in ways that are largely considered ‘feminine.’ Then, some men take possession of ‘womanhood’ reduced to such external adornments.
3. Trans ideology encourages so-called ‘gender reassignment surgery’ for some men to create fake sexual parts of women on their own bodies to more directly possess and colonise womanhood.
4. Trans ideology makes girls believe they are men if they behave in a ‘non-girly’ way, and it denies their womanhood by giving them puberty blockers, cross hormones, and breast removal. This is another form of the colonisation of women.
The transition of children makes global pharmaceutical and medical capitalist’s profit through drugs, surgery, and re-surgery for the rest of their lives. The economic basis of 21st-century imperialism is global capitalism, and the same is true of trans ideology. Capitalism as an ever-expanding economic system requires new areas of expansion to sustain itself and feed upon. Alongside the development of the global sex industry, the global development of the trans ideology movement creates a constant and ever-expanding source of profit for global capital.
5. The trans ideology movement physically colonises women’s spaces, by assuming that women-only spaces are transphobic and by allowing men (who self-identify as women) to freely enter them.
6. Trans ideology allows men who self-identify as women to occupy women’s political positions as ‘female legislators’, to deprive women of honour as ‘women’s successes’, and to break into women’s sports, women’s contests, and all other women’s events to dominate and colonise them.