Why I talk about trans at all

“Dana,” people tend to say, “why do you obsess about trans in the first place? They’re not hurting anyone. We should let people live their own lives the way they see fit and be who they really are.”

I kind of understand where these people are coming from. I wish it were that simple.

My talking about this topic was probably inevitable even if I had never come down on the gender-atheist side of the argument. I have long been fascinated by human reproduction and sexuality and, well, biology in general. Under very different life circumstances — like me having actually competent parents or me not being neurodiverse in my particular way — I might have wound up a biologist or a doctor. That level of interest. The kids call it “sperging,” or drilling down into a topic the way someone with Asperger’s (“high-functioning” autism) might do. And for all I know, I’ve got that. I was never tested.

So that was enough to make me explore the topic and pontificate upon it. But alongside my strong interest, the particulars of this topic have meant that my rights and safety and those of my daughter are now at severe risk. If you expected me to just shut up and take the L, boy have you got the wrong woman. I am not, unless in a white-hot rage (and that takes some doing), one of those strident “fishwife” types of women who gets into your face and yells over every little perceived transgression. But if I don’t speak up then, I’m taking notes for later. You’re gonna get called out one way or another. Going by the number of personal conflicts I’ve gotten into over the years for similar reasons, I find people generally don’t like being called out on the internet much more than they like being yelled at in person. I also find I usually don’t fucking care, so that’s fine. People who don’t like being called out should stop providing me with the material. I will not be taking personal responsibility for your behavior as well as for mine. Glad we could sort that out.

But let’s look at how “harmless” gender identity is, shall we?

There is a feminist bumper sticker that says:

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.

Given that gender identitarians are now using the word people in place of the word women, with sometimes disastrous or mathematically hilarious results, I would amend it to read:

Feminism is the radical notion that woman is not a social role.

Because emphasizing that women are people was feminism’s way of calling out the cultural practice of making womanhood into a conditional social role (it also does this with manhood — a major source of cultural stress for men, by the way). But apparently everyone missed, or deliberately overlooked, the bit about womanhood being made a social role under patriarchy. So I think it’s time we brought that to everyone’s attention.

Saying that woman is a gender identity, however, erases feminism’s work in this regard and drags womanhood right back into the social-role category. The polar opposite of what women needed to happen. A culture that sees us as a role designed to be servants for men can’t see us as the adult female human beings we are. This is literally dehumanizing. We are now a play-act, a costume — not female people.

Another point: I mentioned that saying people when you mean women sometimes has “mathematically hilarious” results. It isn’t actually all that funny. I will explain what I mean, using completely made-up statistics. Not to mislead you but to demonstrate how the math would work.

Let’s say that there are 150 million women in the United States and that thirty percent of American women are pregnant in any given year. That means 45 million American women are pregnant in any given year.

Now if you said, “Thirty percent of American people are pregnant in any given year,” the math becomes completely different. Because even though you’re using people as code for women, a random person encountering your statistic doesn’t think women, they think all people. Let’s say there are 300 million people in the United States. “Thirty percent of American people” would therefore mean 90 million people are pregnant in any given year.

If you’re just Random Person on the Street, maybe that doesn’t matter. If you are a politician trying to make official decisions about pregnancy-services funding, that becomes a bigger deal. No federal budget is unlimited, and doubling the budget for a service that only needed half that funding means some other needed service gets unnecessarily shortchanged. So you are going to have to be more specific about who needs pregnancy services than just the vague people.

I haven’t seen this actually affect funding yet, but I have seen citations like this in mass media, and people are reading that crap and forming opinions based on it, and at least some of them are going to lobby their elected representatives. Shouldn’t they be accurately informed before they do that? I could totally see a voter calling their congressional representative’s office going “forty percent of people cannot access HRT for menopause,” and whoever takes the call writing down the wrong figures and the wrong math because they were in a rush to get off the call, and totally throwing everything off. Precision is important.

Then there’s the way percentages work. The rate of known female-perpetrator childhood sexual abuse is so low that allowing one male pedophile who identifies as a woman to be counted in the female statistics makes it look like we suddenly have a female baby-rapist epidemic. One percent of five hundred thousand is a lot smaller than one percent of five hundred is. And yes, I know. If my comments were free you’d be down there blowing me up about how no one EVER reports the female pedophiles and so the reported rate should be far higher than it is. Okay, but how does counting men as female pedos help with accuracy of reporting? Answer: It doesn’t. Plus, one of the reasons people think transgenderism is so “harmless” is because we’re not counting these assholes as transgender, we’re counting them as real women. If you want to know what’s going on, we’re going to have to start calling this shit as it actually is.

And then there was the sex segregation issue. I can’t decide whether people really are confused about this or else they’re playing dumb. Having women’s restrooms and men’s restrooms (locker rooms, dressing rooms, etc.) isn’t about having one set of rooms for one social role and another set of rooms for the other social role. The whole point of sex segregation of privacy facilities is to keep penises out of the facilities marked “women,” and especially to keep adult penises out. Do people not understand that most men who pretend to be women now are keeping their dicks, love their dicks, and do not experience distress from owning dicks? Because that is the reality. Do people also not understand that most men pretending to be women are heterosexual men, not gay men, and also pretend to be “lesbians” who expect to use their penises on women, not on other men? And you want to provide them with free public fucking rooms? Why?

And then there are the men in women’s sports. I saw a meme the other day claiming that 96 percent of sports funding goes to male sports, leaving only four percent for female athletes. With men now being allowed to pretend to be female athletes, that means they’re getting a piece of that four-percent pie. If you aren’t familiar with sex differences in athletic ability and performance but still think you have a right to an opinion on this, fuck off but also, even if men and women were exactly the same physically, every man in a sport earmarked for women means one more woman shut out of women’s sports. If you have a sport where the men’s league has fifty men in it and the women’s league has forty-eight women and two men in it, that’s fifty-two men and forty-eight women in that sport, and two women got shut out who would have qualified just so two more men could play. Simple fucking math. A nine-year-old could figure this out. There have been literal men in the Olympics walking away with women’s gold medals, meaning women were not allowed to win women’s gold medals in the Olympics for those particular events, and that didn’t start this year. It’s been going on for a while. What is the point of having women’s sports in which women are not allowed to participate? Do we like this? Why?

They’re admitting male prisoners to women’s prisons now. I already had a problem with the fact of male prison guards in women’s prisons. Now they are putting the men, many of whom are domestic abusers or rapists, INSIDE the cells with the women TO LIVE with them. We’re already hearing about rapes and accidental pregnancies. IN WOMEN’S PRISONS. And if the women are caught complaining, the system punishes them and they lose out on parole. Last I checked we have a federal constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Legally sanctioned sexual harassment and rape would both qualify.

Most, if not all, of men pretending to be women have a condition called autogynephilia, meaning they get boners from pretending to be women. For a long time I didn’t care what a man wears in public as long as he doesn’t expect me to call him a woman, and then I realized what was going on. These guys are acting out a fetish in public and forcing us to participate. This is sexual harassment. This is not okay.

This is all before you get into the harms that come as part of the package with “gender-affirming care.” Look. If women can have penises, then getting your dick turned inside-out is not “gender-affirming.” (Woman isn’t a gender, but these people behave as if it were.) What it is is a surgical procedure that produces a permanent open wound that must be tended regularly to prevent infection and complications. And if you don’t know how they do “bottom surgery” on a woman to help her pretend to be a man, and if medical stuff grosses you out, don’t google it. That will give you nightmares. And the puberty blockers they put kids on now? Yeah, you can’t reverse that. Physical maturation has a developmental window, just like talking and walking do, and if you don’t do it on time you will miss your chance. Puberty doesn’t just mature the sex organs, it matures your whole body including your brain. We’re stopping that from happening in children now. The irony is that in boys who want to pretend to be women, if they don’t let their penises fully develop but want bottom surgery later, that surgery has less material to work with, so they have to use riskier techniques. That’s what happened to Jazz Jennings. It’s been a nightmare for him. Even the “top surgery” is bad. I have seen some seriously botched results and nasty scarring. At least half the time they are not even preserving the nipples. That’s considered “extra” and they charge separately for it. What a fucking scam.

And this whole ridiculous movement is based on insulting sex-based stereotypes, which is what gender actually is, and basically doing the opposite of what feminism would do, which is free female (and male) people from those stereotypes. The end result is that actual feminists are being no-platformed, shunned, fired from jobs, and alienated from friends and family. I live with a published author who can’t even get speaking gigs most of the time anymore and they were kind of her bread and butter, but she’s now been branded a “transphobe.” Never mind her longtime work for women and girls. Never mind that she published a book which got a lot of people to reconsider the vegetarianism fad, with the result that they saved their own health. She won’t agree that a man can be a woman or vice versa, so she’s next to a Nazi in their books.

This is affecting activists on other issues, too. My housemate’s significant other is a longtime eco-philosopher and activist who founded probably the only environmental organization which doesn’t suck up to Big Industry. He has also seen speaking gigs dry up, he’s lost publishers, he’s seeing public libraries deplatform his books (so much for “libraries championing free speech”; my own public library back in Ohio de-shelved most of his print titles in favor of ebooks which no one will think to ask for if they are not already aware of him), and he’s honestly looking at going into retirement completely indigent if this continues. If he didn’t own the land he lives on free and clear — and he inherited it from his mother — he’d be in a right mess. His crime? Standing up for women and girls. He won’t concede that men and boys can be women and girls, so he might as well be Hitler. I have seen similar things with other environmental activists who are actually doing good in the world. One example is a guy who works with homeowners and businesses to re-introduce beavers onto their property to protect the watershed and restore the land. He’s had quite a bit of success at it, but he could be doing a lot more if he hadn’t been basically unpersoned by the mainstream environmental movement. His crime? Retweeting and interacting with a “transphobe” on Twitter/X. This has seriously cut down his funding and range of influence. We’ve got organizations to protect prairie dogs and bison which are facing similar issues and the earth NEEDS that work done. The earth is literally on fire and this is what we’re prioritizing: a bunch of liars, cheats, and perverts, to the extent that we’ll let the earth keep burning just so they can get what they want. Okay.

If you don’t care about the earth (or think I’m exaggerating — reader, I am not), maybe you care about human families. Those are going away too. It has gotten to the point that parents have to choose between poisoning and mutilating their own children or losing those children to the system. Even if it doesn’t get that far, there is a LOT of parent-child alienation going on that wouldn’t have otherwise. These are kids who often grow up lesbian or gay but believe they’re actually trans and end up estranging themselves from the parents trying to protect them. And I’m talking about parents we would normally label as progressive. Meanwhile we give publicity and support to parents who are medically abusing their kids by pretending to “transition” them. The punchline is these kids aren’t turning into anything at all. They’re being poisoned and mutilated instead. The parents who refuse to buy into this are being treated as monsters and left socially isolated and forgotten in our grief.

I know I’ve written a lot here, but this is just scratching the surface, and this is for everyone who’s asked. I don’t know why I am bothering, because every time I have tried to have conversations about this, the other person ignores everything I say and resorts back to thought-terminating buzzwords, catchphrases, and canned arguments. They have no idea what they’re talking about. They’re just absolutely sure I’m wrong.

Y’know, people used to argue for legal slavery like this, too. The same lack of thinking, the same trust in the system. And you’re gonna look just as good in the history books when this insane fad finally ends.

Enjoy. At least I can live with myself.