For screencaps and links to back up each point, see The New Backlash.
Preface: a note on the word “gender”
People outside of academia commonly use the word “gender” to mean “sex class of male or female” (in contrast with the act of sexual intercourse.) Feminist theorists, however, use the word “gender” to refer to the social expectations thrust upon women and men, otherwise referred to as sex stereotypes or sex roles. Transgender identity politickers, further clouding the language, use “gender identity” to mean an innate inner feeling that overrides and in fact determines biological sex.
Always stay alert to the context in which you see the word “gender,” and ask for clarification when needed.
1. As the continuance of any species is important to that species, sexual reproduction is important to humanity.
2. Human beings reproduce via the fertilization of female eggs by male sperm, and the work done by female humans to gestate fetuses and birth infants. (That work is arduous and dangerous and should always be freely chosen.) Every single human being on Earth was created in this way, as were their parents, and their parents’ parents, et cetera.
Woman: An adult female person.
Female: Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes.
Man: An adult male person.
Male: Of or denoting the sex that produces gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.
4. There is nothing shameful about human reproduction or the existence of female and male bodies.
5. The existence of infertile women does not render these definitions unusable any more than the existence of bilateral amputees or people born without feet means we can no longer class humans as bipeds. (To say men can identify as women-who-cannot-carry-babies is as sensical as saying fish can identify as footless people. Both experience a lack, but only for one is that lack unusual, for the other it is definitional.) If you actually care about infertile people, good – support them rather than using them as a weapon against women’s language.
6. The existence of intersex people does not mean men can “identify as” women any more than the existence of bi- or multi-racial people means white people can “identify as” black. If you actually care about intersex people, good – support them rather than using them as a weapon against women’s language.
7. The simple act of classifying human beings by sex does not assign to either sex any innate dispositions nor pre-determined behaviors, and is therefore not essentialist nor determinist.
8. Knowing that women are female does not somehow “reduce” them to their female organs, any more than knowing someone’s age “reduces” them to that age, or knowing their ethnicity “reduces” them to that ethnicity, etc.
9. Having words for classes of people is not only not-essentialist, not-determinist, and not-reductionist, but very obviously necessary for describing the material conditions, lived reality, oppression, and possible liberation of those people.
10. Every single large-scale classification of people will have a) in-group differences and b) a small percentage of outliers/exceptions. Consider why it is *only* the category “woman” that is under relentless philosophical/linguistic attack on the Left.
Feminist Gender Analysis
1. Female humans are expected and raised from birth to be submissive (“feminine”). Male humans are expected and raised from birth to be dominant (“masculine”). Feminists call this gender, and feminist gender analysis deconstructs the notion that there is anything “natural” about it.
2. Gender is a social tool to naturalize women’s dependence on men, and thereby ensure male access to female bodies and labor.
3. We are expected to signal our maleness or femaleness in various visual ways specific to our time and place, but gender is not about fabric color or hair length. Those are merely signals for others to know where we fall in the social hierarchy of male over female.
4. Femaleness does not naturally equate to the human personality traits labeled feminine, nor does maleness naturally equate to the human personality traits labeled masculine. Human personality development should not be limited based on sex, nor, as in the case of male violence, excused because of it.
5. In a post-gender world, all the stuff of human life would still be there, but access to it would no longer be limited by (real or perceived) reproductive potential.
6. Intersectionality does not threaten feminist gender analysis but expands upon it. Sex is one axis of oppression/privilege. Women are always oppressed based on sex but may have privilege based on race, class, or any other axis. Men are always privileged based on sex but may be oppressed based on race, class or any other axis.
7. Women’s sex-based oppression still matters, independent of any other oppression that can be shared by men.
8. Female people are punished whether they do conform to gender expectations (as the feminine gender is about subjugation) or whether they don’t.
9. Male people, while diminished in their humanity by gendered socialization, acquire male privilege in the trade. All too often, men want relief from the costs of masculinity without giving up any of the concomitant privileges, including a) the privilege to define women as they see fit, and b) the privilege to expect women will bend over backwards to meet their needs/fulfill their desires.
10. Feminist gender analysis is central to women’s liberation and the act of deliberately suppressing, mischaracterizing or erasing it is a misogynist act.
1. Transsexual people experience a psychiatric condition, referred to as gender dysphoria, perhaps better labeled sex dysmorphia, which makes it very difficult to live in their sexed bodies. This is a painful and poorly understood condition occurring in less than one percent of the population.
2. Sex is chromosome-deep and expressed in physical morphology beyond that of the genitals and breasts. It is not possible to change one’s sex, any more than it is possible to change one’s genetic ancestry. However, one can undergo hormone treatments and surgery in order to more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex, and this can help relieve sex dysmorphia.
3. Social transition is just as important as physical transition, particularly for males who must work through their male privilege and learn what it is like to live in a sexist world while being perceived by others as women.
4. The term “transwomen” is a concession, made out of sympathy and respect, for males who experience sex dysmorphia and undergo physical and social transition. [This list focuses mainly on transwomen not because we don’t care about transmen but because we are concerned here with how men are using transwomen against women/feminism.]
5. Transsexual people are capable of building healthy, happy lives for themselves, and do not need to be treated like they are made of glass or like their physical reality must be papered over with magical thinking. Transwomen are capable of accepting that they are male and grew up with male socialization.
6. Transsexual people deserve legal protection of their human rights to safety, education, employment, and housing. Furthermore, they deserve caring and effective medical treatment.
7. It is, however, absurd to expect any woman who wants to talk about feminism to have an opinion on the proper medical treatment for a rare, complex and poorly understood medical condition.
8. It is furthermore absurd to expect feminists to center males who experience a rare, complex and poorly understood medical condition; pretend reproductive difference does not exist or matter; or call themselves “cis women” in order to differentiate the 52% of the human population that is female from the less than 1% of males who experience sex dysmorphia.
9. Most transwomen are just trying to live their lives without receiving nor giving harm, and are not making the above (#7&8) demands. Furthermore, some transwomen have braved exile from their own communities by publicly objecting to those demands. To center transwomen as feminism’s enemies is as foolish as centering them as feminism’s overlords.
10. Women and transwomen will have some important things in common (e.g. fear of male violence) and some important things not in common (e.g. socialization as a girl from birth, vulnerability to pregnancy). Accordingly, women and transwomen will share some goals and spaces and not share others.
11. Gender non-conforming males experience violence at the hands of other males. Women are not responsible for putting male victims of male violence ahead of female victims of male violence – that expectation is grounded in the gender hierarchy. Many women will, however, partner with anyone who wishes to help name and confront the social pandemic of male violence.
12. Forcing feminists to call transwomen female will have no effect on male violence against transwomen, because violent men a) don’t listen to feminists and b) attack female people all the time.
13. Men who attack transwomen are enforcing gender. Only abolishing gender will protect transwomen.
14. As for sex-segregated spaces, feminists have already proposed rational compromises such as simple documentation of medical treatment for sex dysmorphia before accessing opposite-sex nude and semi-nude spaces, along with the enforcement of improper purpose clauses. See Elizabeth Hungerford’s work at sexnotgender.com.
Transgender Identity Politics
1. It is an act of aggression to take away oppressed people’s language. This applies to women, and also to transsexual people.
2. Transsexual people experience sex dysmorphia and therefore undergo physical and social transition. Transgender identity politickers, however, dismiss the necessity of any experience of sex dysmorphia OR transition to claim the label “transgender” or “trans.” Someone claiming the label “transgender” or “trans” could be transsexual, or they could be a part-time cross-dresser. You can’t know and you are not allowed to ask.
3. Transsexual people who object to this colonization of their language are labeled “truscum,” quisling or TERF, and dismissed/monstered/silenced.
4. According to transgender identity politickers, any male who simply states he “feels like a woman” is 1) “trans” and 2) a woman and also 3) female and also 4) has always been female, 5) because he says so. If a male person “feels like a woman,” his penis is female. Such is the power of “gender identity.”
5. No one has yet distinguished “gender identity” from “sex-based stereotypes of human personality” but, when pressed, transgender identity politickers will fall back on brain sex.
6. Brain sex is sexist pseudoscience, just as brain race is racist pseudoscience.
7. However, according to transgender identity politickers, because less than one percent of people experience sex dysmorphia, and because those people are subject to suicidal depression and male violence, the rest of us must accept (or at least politely pretend) that there are male and female brains, that our brains not our reproductive capacity determine our sex, and if you disagree with this, it must be because you hate transsexual people, not because you understand a) how babies are made and b) how sexism works.
8. In effect, male people are telling female people they must either accept brain sex – meaning, placate men by parroting the idea that any man who is not sufficiently masculine is not really male, neverminding that the necessary flipside of “masculinity is innate to males” is “femininity is innate to females” – or else be held responsible for male violence against those insufficiently masculine males. They are using transsexual people as hostages/human shields in their war on feminism.
9. We call these transgender identity politickers “AFTAs” (anti-feminist trans activists) to avoid tarring all trans people with the same brush.
10. AFTAs have only managed to compile political power due to the sanctimony and ideological totalism of the Left.
11. Leftists will naturally feel sympathy for anyone with a painful psychiatric condition, yet conversely feel an equally natural aversion to major surgery on healthy genitals, leading to an aversion to considering this condition too closely. Combined with their pride in a high “disgust tolerance” (central to Leftist identity) this leads them to the knee-jerk projection that anyone questioning transgender identity politics is operating out of a low disgust tolerance (labeled “transphobia”).
12. If you can push Leftists past this point, they still have to confront the idea of larger systems of power outside of individual “identity,” especially systems of power based on sex (what feminist theorists call “gender.”) This point of existential crisis -between individualistic identity politics and radical class analysis- renders the Leftist vulnerable to ideological totalism, at which AFTAs excel: Nevermind that difficult thinking stuff, our magical “truth” is all there is. Brain sex transcends mere science, all questioners can be renounced and declared sub-human, thought-terminating cliches (“trans women are women”) are all the effort required. Just relax and submit.
13. Thus, here we are: If a male person says he “feels like a woman,” then we all must pretend he is a woman, and all blatant displays of male privilege and aggression no longer count as such. In this way, transgender identity politics provide men a “get out of male free” card, under cover of political correctness.
14. An oppressed group cannot maintain boundaries against their oppressors if they are not allowed to identify those oppressors. By rendering maleness unnameable, transgender identity politics enable male people (most of whom experience no sex dysmorphia at all) to destroy women’s boundaries.
15. Women who object to this destruction of their boundaries are labeled “TERFs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and dismissed/monstered/silenced.
1. Many AFTAs cling to sexed labels for their personalities because they fetishize women’s oppression; specifically, they wish to live the male fantasy of a female sex object who is somehow empowered by her ability to sexually arouse her oppressors.
2. The pornsick men of the Left, who think women’s liberation is about servicing as many Leftist penises as possible, have no problem with these AFTAs showing women how “woman” should be done.
Why does all this matter so much?
1. Males can now claim transgender identity in order to access female sports competitions, women’s colleges, girls’ and women’s locker rooms and bathrooms, and women’s shelters (both as residents and counselors.)
2. Males can now claim transgender identity in order to plead innocent to violent crimes against women, be placed in female prisons, and/or secure free SRS as well as a new legal identity. Their crimes are now counted as women’s crimes.
3. Any talk of female biology is now verboten. Vital work for female reproductive rights is sidelined by accusations of “cissexism.”
4. Any talk of sex-based socialization is now labeled bigotry.
5. The “Cotton Ceiling:” AFTAs and their allies call lesbians transphobic for not having sex with be-penised people.
6. Female-only events, such as conferences and festivals, are being shut down.
7. Any public analysis of gender as a coercive social system is being shut down.
8. Gender non-conforming children (likely but not necessarily gay and lesbian) are being referred for medical treatment.
9. The real concerns transsexual people have about their safety – particularly the safety of poor transwomen of color involved in the underground economy, particularly in 2/3 world nations – are being pushed to the side by middle class white transvestites performing histrionic hair-tearing about pronouns.
10. When masculinity is naturalized via brainsex, both male privilege and male violence are accepted as inevitable.
Let’s Talk About Men
There are very few transsexual people in the world, certainly not enough to have had this kind of chilling effect on feminism. We must ask ourselves who really benefits when women lose our privacy, our away-spaces, our language, our right to say no, our right to name the problem. The answer, of course, is men.
Transgender identity politics allow men to:
1. Label other male people Not Real Men, thus making themselves feel like Yes Real Men in comparison.
2. Excuse themselves from feeling any guilt about their male privilege. After all, as long as they don’t want to call themselves women, they were simply born with manbrains and thus destined to be the Manly Men in Charge!
3. Enjoy watching women being forced to confess to “cis privilege” – one can only assume this is because they agree with MRAs that women have it easy, that they are spoiled princesses with no real complaints.
4. Reap the rewards of AFTAs insinuating themselves in women’s spaces to make sure male feelings (and orgasms) are centered within feminism.
5. Use [the violence inflicted by homophobic males on gender non-conforming males] to shame women for not being “empathetic” enough. Blaming women for male-on-male violence means they get to 1) put women back in a place of mandatory care-taking and self-abnegation and 2) excuse themselves from confronting that violence, even though they are members of the class that both inflicts and experiences it.
6. Sit back and let the Paris “I would rather have a ‘sticky fuck’ than analyze oppression” Lees of the world show women what “feeling like a woman” should mean.
7. And finally, transgender identity politics enable Leftist men to casually dismiss as “TERFs” any feminists who might make them question any of the above.
Let’s Demand More of Men
1. Men need to stop trying to redefine “woman” as a garbage chute for (supposedly) defective men. A. Women are not defective men. B. Unmasculine men are not defective. C. As long as men can boot unmasculine men out of the category “man,” masculinity will remain unchallenged.
2. We desperately need men to sincerely confront, analyze and reject masculinity – to start redefining “man.” When violent and exploitative behavior is acceptable but nail polish is verboten, your club needs some work.
3. Masculinity is intimately tied up with femininity in the system of gender that allows men to feel entitled to women’s bodies and labor. Any meaningful rejection of masculinity will first involve letting go of that entitlement.
4. Instead of looking to feminists to solve all their problems, men could look to feminist history for examples of how to build their own communities of support for gender resistance. This would include embracing very “feminine” men as their brothers, and defending them from violence.
5. If their fellow males need specialized spaces in re. bathrooms or shelters or prisons, etc. ? MEN SHOULD BE CAPABLE OF BUILDING THEM.
6. Furthermore, any man who truly believes in liberation from gender roles should want every male child to grow into his full human personality – no matter how “feminine” that personality may be – without being subject to the psychic violence of being told he was born into the wrong body.
7. It is vital, in fact, that “man” comes to mean *only* adult human male, with thousands of ways to inhabit a healthy, happy male body, none dependent on the exploitation or bullying of others.