The Pride industrial complex ignores threats against women and doubles down on the myth of 2SLGBTQ+ ‘hate’

NYC Pride – 6/25/2023
My name is K. Yang, I’m a former trans rights activist & LGBT non-profit whistleblower. I was just kicked, hit, pushed, mobbed by dozens of people in Washington Square Park. who identify as called me “bitch” & assaulted me. @KnownHeretic @bjportraits pic.twitter.com/4J9AaFXSEf

— Stop Female Erasure / K Yang (@StopXXErasure) June 25, 2023

“Two [men] followed me calling me a “bitch.” They began to explain misogyny to me. I was called a “cis bitch” by a [man] who claims to be a [woman]. Another begins the gang assault by hitting me, yet another kicks me from behind. #CisIsASlur“

Many of you have likely observed the endless stream of fear-mongering propaganda force-fed to us by mainstream media outlets, politicians, and NGOs, insisting “attacks” against the  “2SLGBTQ+ community” are on the rise. In the month leading up to Pride, these claims have been amplified in what has become an ongoing war against reality.

On June 6, the Human Rights Campaign declared a national “state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States… following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year.”

What they are referencing is not, in fact, any actual “assault” — legislative or otherwise — but a series of bills passed in various red states preventing youth from being given harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on account of a declared “trans” identity.

What has happened is that states like Oklahoma, Iowa, North Dakota, and Kentucky (among others) have passed laws preventing the medical transition of kids. This legislation protects minors from making adult-influenced decisions that cause irreparable damage, rendering youth sterile before they have even had a chance to explore intimate relationships and their sexualities. The long term effects of these drugs are both known and unknown, leading to bone loss, increased risk of cancer, and all sorts of other obvious and perhaps less obvious problems related to interference in the natural, healthy development of human bodies. We don’t have enough long term research on this kind of experimentation to know the extent of the damage, but we do know there is damage.

The tragic story of Jazz Jennings, whose mother thrust him into the spotlight as a “trans child,” and who has now undergone four “sex reassignment” surgeries, all of which have resulted in painful complications, should have acted as a warning. Today, the 22-year-old struggles with eating disorders and depression, and will likely never experience sexual pleasure or be able to have children.

You cannot simply stop puberty, feed a developing child or teen hormones that increase cancer risk and result in a host of other side-effects in adults, and assume no harmful repercussions for youth. Yet, that’s what these NGOs insist, claiming these treatments are “life-saving” and medically necessary, and that laws limiting these interventions constitute an “assault” on “LGBTQ+ people.”

The response to this legislation has been hyperbolic, to say the least, suggesting that kids feeling confused or troubled by their changing bodies and entry into adulthood flee their hometowns in search of states that will allow these interventions.

An HRC guidebook directs youth in their decision to leave their homes for “friendly states” that allow minors to alter their IDs and bodies, no questions asked, and encourage them to find their “chosen families,” described as “people who are in your life, not because of biological ties, but for love and support, to celebrate you and help you no matter what.”

This kind of rhetoric is common to trans activists, who often recommend youth identifying as trans abandon their “non-supportive” families (labelled “abusive” for failing to encourage transition) for a “chosen family,” who support and validate their transition. “Come talk to me about your secrets — your parents don’t really love or understand you, but I do” should be treated as a red flag of epic proportions, but within trans activism is normalized.

Moreover, the irony of describing a “dizzying patchwork of discriminatory state laws that have created increasingly hostile and dangerous environments for LGBTQ+ people” becomes obviously rich when we look at how women are treated by these groups. In the past five odd years, women and girls have not only lost the right to women-only spaces — including change rooms, shelters, and prisons — and lost the right to compete on fair grounds, among females, in sport, but have lost the right to speak out about this. Women who have challenged gender identity legislation and policy have been fired, assaulted, censored, threatened, blackballed, ostracized, deplatformed, and banned from social media.

And all this has been perpetrated against women with impunity while being gaslit into oblivion by public officials, the media, institutions, corporations, progressives, activists, NGOs, and human rights organizations. We are told over and over again that it is not women, but the “LGBTQ community” who are under attack and in dire need of our support.

Nonetheless, yesterday, GLAAD, a non-profit originally founded to fight for gay rights (recently expanded to advocate the LGBTQ cultural revolution) published an open letter calling on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter to “Stop the flow of anti-trans hate and malicious disinformation about trans healthcare.” Signed by a dizzying number of celebrities such as Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Haley Bieber, Elliot (nee Ellen) Page, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the letter claims “Dangerous posts (both content and ads) created and circulated by high-follower anti-LGBTQ hate accounts targeting transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people are thriving across your platforms, directly resulting in terrifying real-life harm.

The letter labels “misgendering and deadnaming” as “hate speech,” claiming that correctly sexing individuals or daring to acknowledge a name change is “utilized to bully and harass prominent public figures while simultaneously expressing hatred and contempt for trans people and non-binary people in general.”

By framing pushback against and discussion of the harms of transing kids as “disinformation and hate,” and claiming refusal to call men women as “dangerous,” GLAAD is able to demand censorship, insisting these social media companies “urgently take action to protect trans and LGBTQ users on your platforms (including protecting us from over-enforcement and censorship).”

It is all very urgent. An emergency. People are dying because of true statements and free speech. Not any real people, but certainly people in our imaginations. Either way, we are not used to being challenged and it is triggering.

On June 1, Marci Ien, minister for women and gender equality and youth, issued a statement to mark the start of what the Canadian government has rebranded as “Pride Season,” saying:

“While it is important that we take the opportunity to recognize the hard-earned victories of the Pride movement, we must continue pushing back on the sharp rise in anti-trans hate and anti-2SLGBTQI+ legislation, protests at drag events, the banning of educational books in schools, and calls against raising the Pride flag.”

She followed this statement with the announcement that the Liberal government would be “moving forward with the development of a new Action Plan to Combat Hate – that will address hate faced by 2SLGBTQI+ communities and, specifically, hate faced by trans people.”

Where is the Canadian government’s action plan to address the silencing, marginalization, and harassment of women who speak up about their sex-based rights and about biological reality? Where is our “feminist” Prime Minister on women’s rights and the actual assaults perpetrated against female inmates by the violent male criminals he has allowed to be transferred to female prisons?

Nowhere.

Justin Trudeau’s government didn’t stop with an action plan. On June 5, Ien announced that the government would be pledging $1.5million in “emergency funding to ensure Pride festivals stay safe across Canada.”

Safe from what? Where is the emergency?

Half of the population are losing their rights without any genuine public consultation or debate, and the government leaps to action, pouring money into a trend that is already the most well-funded marketing campaign I have seen in my life.

Today, Pride is a corporate-sponsored event that is celebrated as though it is the national religion. Dissent is unacceptable, but even if it were allowed, who is attacking Pride-goers? Nothing of the sort has been reported, nor was anything of the sort even threatened. What I did see was a lone woman mobbed by deranged, violent Pride fanatics, enraged that anyone would dare challenge their faith.

I would, frankly, never attend one of these things out of fear of being assaulted or worse, so clearly Yang is braver than I. We should all be enraged at the lack of support for women and women’s voices from those in power, who dare lie to our faces while we suffer the consequences.

The post The Pride industrial complex ignores threats against women and doubles down on the myth of 2SLGBTQ+ ‘hate’ appeared first on Feminist Current.

Speaking to Men at Parties

“The thing you love most when you are thirteen is the thing you love forever,” Adi says. He has his leg crossed over his lap, hand on his knee in a scholarly position.

“You’re bound to it,” I add, leaning forward. “You can’t put it down.” I am drunk and twenty years old and my voice aches—I have been shouting for most of the night, but the music isn’t really that loud. I tilt my body toward the group to understand them, a hand around my ear in what feels like a theatrical gesture. The boy Adi and I are chatting with is soft-spoken mumbling-drunk, with dark eyes that scrunch up beautifully when he smiles. “Say again?” I repeat over and over. He stands up to grab a beer off the table between us, jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and Adi and I look at each other with our eyebrows raised. I giggle and he glares back—we are always passing sly glances back and forth like handwritten notes between school desks.

The boy’s name is Alan and he is disarmingly handsome, the kind of man I would have avoided in high school out of shame and fear. I am fascinated by beautiful men, their ease of movement, the carelessness of their limbs. I watch them and think of Margaret Atwood: “When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss…My love for them is visual: that is the part I would like to possess.” A desire that stems from a sense of possession; I would like to inhabit them, to take up space and know that everyone around me feels grateful. To be a beautiful white man and never know fear—how simple and glorious.

 

There are moments when the light passes just right over the high point of someone’s cheekbone and I imagine my whole life as it would have been in a different universe, tracing the events of this imaginary life from that spot on their face to my death. In another world, I fall in love with this boy who shares my taste in music and laughs generously at my less-than-clever drunken commentary. In another world, things are easier. In this world, we dance and sing Talking Heads to each other across the kitchen as we spin in circles: I guess that this must be the place. In another world, I do not go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, watching my reflection careen across the glass. In another world, I do not make myself sick with want and worry at every turn.

Alan sits back down beside Adi and we talk about California. Whenever I meet someone who’s left California for New York, they can never shut up about being from California and how much they miss it, as if they hadn’t chosen to leave. Alan tells us that in California he met Paul McCartney once, and I clutch my hand to my collarbone in a mockery of a swoon because that is what I loved when I was thirteen, what I am bound to forever, the thing I cannot put down. There will always be a part of me that starts at the mention of The Beatles, that blip of recognition when you come across your own name in an unexpected place.

“I know this sounds corny,” he says, “but I swear to God he just made the whole room brighter.”

The enthusiasm in Alan’s voice strikes me. He tells me he saw Arctic Monkeys seven times in one year because he was in love with Alex Turner and again I am envious of him, this time because I never allowed myself to notice any women as a teenager. I instead fixated on male celebrities and characters, as if I could convince myself that I loved them the way I was supposed to love them. I want to know, suddenly, if he went to those concerts because he knew he wanted to see the lead singer, or if he had convinced himself it was because he just really liked their music. But I do not ask. Instead I stare at the mole on his right hip, made visible by his low-slung trousers. The mole is largish, about the size of a dime, and raised slightly. I try to imagine myself putting my mouth on it, on this bit of flesh which has so captured my attention, and am immediately repulsed.

This is where it always stops, the insurmountable stutter of my fantasies. This is the part I find difficult to explain even to myself, the way I can simultaneously want and so clearly not want. I picture the thoughts in my mind as a strip of film: reversed, softened, made grand by my drunkenness, mimicking how things are always beautiful onscreen. I can desire this boy as if from afar rather than with the blistering intensity I feel when a girl sits too close to me on a stranger’s bed at another party as she speaks to someone else, the air soft with smoke, my insides folding in on themselves. The universe is reduced to the point at which our hips are touching and I cringe at the clichés this meaningless contact inspires in me.

I think about Paul McCartney, his boyish features still apparent in old age: wide, down-turned eyes and full cheeks and always that charming smile. My favorite Beatle fluctuated between him and George, whose quiet demeanor intrigued me; I have always been inclined toward the fantasy of quiet men. I would watch videos of early performances for hours, unable to tear my eyes away from George’s legs, how dreadfully slender they were in his dark slacks as he stood off to the side of the stage. Ringo was about as attractive to me as a post (though darling) and John looked far too much like my father, so my desire, or what I thought was desire, had to be cast onto Paul and George. This was how I amused myself throughout most of my early adolescence: poring over photographs and watching footage from decades earlier of a half-dead, long-fractured band. Maybe The Beatles were easy to love because the group had already run its course—I could discover new information but nothing new would actually happen, and there was a comfort in this impassable distance. I cannot say that if, in another world, I would have been reduced to tears like all the girls in A Hard Day’s Night, wordlessly mouthing George-George-George as the crowd around me fell into hysterics, or if the illusion would have been ruined by seeing them in the flesh.

I think about the sightless stare of a Roman bust in a museum, terrifying and opalescent, made lovelier by the fact that I cannot touch it. In another world, I step past the line on the floor of the gallery and run my fingertips over the marble despite the docent’s protests. In another world, I tell Alan the truth: I will never be happy with what I have or what I am.

Says Alan of Alex Turner: “I don’t think I even realized who he was, the first time—he walked right past me, in those fucking Chelsea boots, and I was just so turned on,” and I laugh because it’s always those fucking Chelsea boots. The Beatles wore them, too.

I tell Alan that I’ve been in the same room as David Byrne, white-haired and gracious, those darkly intense eyes gentle with crow’s feet and laugh lines, and Alan concedes that this is indeed “very, very cool.” In high school, I would have recorded such a statement from a hot boy in my journal. Now it just seems obvious. It was a screening of a documentary about competitive color guard that David Byrne had produced, with a Q&A afterwards. My friend was a huge fan of Talking Heads and I came along because I was a huge fan of her; I barely paid attention to the the Q’s that David A’ed because I was swept up in the thrill of watching someone I love watch something she loves. Her sardonic voice was made sweet as she described her enjoyment of the evening, tucking herself into a red raincoat ill-suited to the frigid March weather. Now whenever I listen to Talking Heads’ bizarre, frenetic music, I think of her with a twinge in my chest not unlike heartburn. People sometimes ask me about her, mention her to me in passing: didn’t you know—? weren’t you—? I smile, tight-lipped, and nod. In another world, I tell Alan that I buy the shampoo she used because I miss the smell of her dark hair as it wafted toward me, head on my shoulder.

“Stop, don’t talk about it,” I say to Adi when he mentions her. “If I talk about it, I’ll cry.” I’ve been saying this for the past few months, begging friends to help me maintain the illusion that I wasn’t deeply hurt by her decision to return to Texas. The less we say about it the better.

We talk about how it would be nice to leave New York, but none of us stay away for very long. We all have our reasons. Mine is a sense of obligation to my younger self, the anxious, dirty-haired creature who collected postcards from Manhattan and watched The Beatles with a thumb-sucking compulsion and dreamt of someday ending up in a different body in a different place. She needs me to remain in this city, for at least a little longer, regardless of the people who come and go and the women I watch and want and the men I may or may not speak to at parties.

Most people have left the party by the time Adi and I declare mutiny and claim the aux cord for ourselves. Alan stretches as he makes room for me on the couch. His grey sweatshirt again rides up across his belly and I think about Saint Sebastian: his long, muscled torso, the agony and eroticism of his death as it is depicted in art. How I should like to be an arrow and glance off the flesh of some beautiful thing before falling, unbroken, to the ground. I think about Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of Saint Sebastienne as a martyred pregnant woman, the same sketch repeated over and over in a monotonous procession of bodies, smudged and headless: the grotesquerie of gestation. How awful is the practice of becoming alive.

Weeks later in Boston, my friend Laura and I discuss the dreams we’ve been having since we were little girls, nightmares in which we are pregnant despite never having had sex and everyone tells us we should be grateful to be so immaculate. But Laura is Jewish and I was never baptized and neither of us believe in anything beyond the miracle of blood and tubing that is the body itself. The nightmares persist as a reminder of what that body may be capable of, both within and without ourselves.

Hours past midnight, Adi and I walk to my apartment from the party. “Do you wish you were straight?” I ask him. He shrugs. I say, “I do, sometimes. I think it would be easier. Don’t you think it would be easier?” I hope he knows I mean easier just in the simple act of existence: would it be easier to be alive? Would I hate myself for something else if not this?

Adi doesn’t answer, but his gaze is warm behind his glasses, his jaw set in the near-pout he wears when he considers something seriously. He is a dear friend, one of the first I made at college, and one of the first people I heard utter the word “lesbian” with a gravity that implied strength and meaning rather than disdain. I lean into his shoulder and we stand like that, quiet, until Adi’s Lyft arrives.

A month and some weeks later, I stand in the living room of another apartment, once again speaking loudly over the music to an acquaintance. The theme of the party is blue, as in Maggie Nelson’s seventh book, as in Derek Jarman’s final film, as in Nina Simone’s debut album Hey, blue, there is a song for you. My acquaintance’s eyelids are a bright teal, in lovely contrast to her copper hair that falls into her face as she leans in to hear me. I feel a touch at the back of my neck and I turn around and it is Alan once again, tucking the tag back into the collar of my shirt. This is an urge I have to resist when I glimpse a misplaced tag or loose thread on a passing stranger, the same compulsion that makes me check the locks on the front door nightly before bed, a desire for security through control. Alan has not shied away from this impulse to put things in their proper place. His face, cast in cobalt, grins back at me when I turn.

 

Already I can feel the sense of infatuation ebbing away as I greet him, repeat my name, raise my arms around him in a clumsy approximation of an embrace. Names are important, and it bothers me on a primal level when people forget them. Alan is still handsome with his watery-drunk smile and half-lidded eyes. The man asleep, like the man in quietude, was another adolescent fixation of mine: a feral animal tranquilized to be observed more safely.

The apartment is so small and so full of bodies that we can hardly do more than shuffle in time with the music. While waiting for the bathroom, I get into an argument with a man about Kate Bush, and how would he understand the anguish conveyed in her warbling falsetto, anyway? I don’t know what’s good for me I don’t know what’s good for me.

 

I spend the next two years moving farther away from my body. I try to date casually and discover that I am perhaps incurably afraid of intimacy. I become catatonic in the presence of my own desire, though I spend a summer trying to convince myself that it’s the heat and humidity rather than the rush of blood in my ears that makes me nauseous every time someone tries to touch me. I sit across from a man on the subway and stare at the soft curve of his jaw as he tilts his chin downward; his dark eyes rove across the pages of a book whose title I can’t quite make out. In another world, it is the 1950s in the United States of America and I am engaged to this beautiful man whom I will never love and this is better, somehow. It’s a mid-century sitcom marriage where we sleep in separate beds and only ever kiss on the cheek. I am miserable, but it’s better than being miserable in reality because in this dream I have what feels like a justifiable reason to be miserable. My life is unfulfilled, uninspired. I see East of Eden at the cinema and masturbate to the thought of James Dean the same way I did as a teenager, silently rocking back and forth in a chair, disgusted by the idea of actually touching myself. In this world I never figure out that I’m a lesbian because I could barely figure that out in 2016 with contemporary resources. It’s easier anyway, following an assigned path, filling a prescription month after month at the pharmacy—doctor’s orders. In another world, my sadness has sharp contours, clear edges that I can press into my skin. It is not amorphous and it does not expand to fit every space I inhabit.

I try to describe some of this world to Laura in a taxi, drunk and newly twenty-two on the hottest night of last summer. “Do you ever wish that’s how it was?” Laura tells me she doesn’t—she’s tired, and she turns away from me to look out the window as we arrive at my apartment. “It’s almost light out,” I say to change the subject, waving a hand in the direction of the sky.

I am glad that I didn’t tell her the extent of my dreams, the tragic details that lull me to sleep. It is so perversely appealing to me, this fantasy of a loveless, sexless, meaningless existence in which I am freed from any expectations of self-possession or choice. In another world, no one asks me what I want to do with my life because they do not assume that I will ever do anything. I know this way of thinking is self-indulgent and wildly privileged, and that Laura’s reaction to my modest proposal was appropriate: a snort that went from surprised to scornful, a firm “No.” And yet I greet sleep that morning with dreams of pin curls and bathroom tiles scrubbed clean and never being touched by my beautiful imaginary husband, asleep beside me in his bed across the room.

 

Adi and I watch A Hard Day’s Night and he touches my arm when he notices I’m crying and we can pretend, briefly, that we knew each other when we were thirteen. Laura tells me that she is a lesbian, too, and this more than anything makes me feel like I may someday be able to overcome my shame because Laura is someone who did know me when we were thirteen. Through my love for her I may be able to forgive myself the trespass of being who I am. She tells me she sometimes still dreams of having children, but since realizing she is a lesbian she is no longer so afraid of the possibility.

I see David Byrne again and this time he sings. I wonder what it’s like for him to play those songs from another time when his band all lived together in the same room, cutting each other’s hair, muddling through waves new and old only to end up estranged forty years later—no talking, just head. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were dogged by other people’s hopes of a reunion from the day The Beatles broke up until that night at the Dakota, and I wonder if it bothered them to know that the best thing they ever did was be part of something beyond themselves. In another world, rooftops are only for concerts, never for leaping. In another world, I am not afraid of heights or the way my body moves through time and space, toward the ground or toward another body.

 

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde

Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’”

“One of the things that helps define Latino identity is this sense of having a history but also not knowing the history.”

The post Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’” appeared first on Public Books.

Jill Ovens resigned from New Zealand’s Labour Party to start the Women’s Rights Party

After women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was mobbed and assaulted in New Zealand, longtime feminist and socialist Jill Ovens decided she’d had enough. The following week, Jill resigned from the Labour Party and founded the Women’s Rights Party, which states, on their website:

“We want a world that is safe and fair for women and girls

The Women’s Rights Party is a party of women and men who believe in democracy, equality, and biological reality.

Sex is binary

Human beings cannot change sex

Women are adult humans of the female sex”

Jill had been an active member of the Labour Party but had become increasingly angered as women’s voices were not being listened to. Since retiring from the union movement, she has thrown her energy into the Women’s Rights Party, which has set out to recruit 500 members so they can register as a political party and be on the ballot in the New Zealand General Election in October.

The Women’s Rights Party aims to give women an option on the ballot paper who
find themselves politically homeless as mainstream parties have stopped listening to women and their concerns. In addition to contesting Parliamentary and local body elections, they hope to influence cross party policies to promote and uphold the rights and status of women and girls.

In this episode, I speak with Jill about her political history and why she formed the Women’s Rights Party. 

The post Jill Ovens resigned from New Zealand’s Labour Party to start the Women’s Rights Party appeared first on Feminist Current.

My mother is courageous, but faced with a man in her change room at Ottawa’s Nepean Sportsplex she went silent

For the past 40 years, my mother, Lynne Cohen,* has gone swimming several times a week at her local pool in Ottawa. Beginning in her teens and continuing off and on throughout her life, she swam competitively on teams and in triathlons. Her local pool has served both as her training ground and as her go-to for regular exercise. After decades, she knows most of the other regular swimmers, some of whom have become good friends. The pool has been a central part of her life for years now, but last month her once innocuous activity became unsafe.

Last week, as always, my mother finished her swim and went to the changerooms to shower. She and the other ladies — also regulars at the Nepean Sportsplex — chatted in the showers, catching up on news as they always do. My mother wrapped herself in a towel as she stepped out of the shower. There, facing away from her, was a naked man. Shocked, my mother hurried over to a corner of the changeroom to get dressed. The man, now standing across the changeroom, was over six feet tall, with a combover. He got dressed, turned around and leered at her, then left the changeroom.

Shaken, my mother rushed over to her friend, asking if she had seen “the man in the women’s changeroom.” The other woman nervously confirmed that yes, she had. They continued their conversation in hushed voices, afraid and feeling violated, yet did not mention a thing to community centre staff.

My mother is 66 years old and no shrinking violet. A longtime journalist in Ottawa, her writing reflects her heterodox views and tenacity for challenging dominant narratives. I have never known her in any circumstance to shy away from confrontation. In the decades she has been swimming at this pool, she has had several run-ins with the lifeguards, management, and other swimmers. From too-slow swimmers clogging up the fast lane to the Covid-related mask mandates, my mother has always fearlessly spoken her mind. During Covid, she fought back so relentlessly against having to wear a mask on the pool deck for the few minutes before entering the water that we worried she might end up in handcuffs. She wasn’t charged, but she did face a short-term suspension from all City of Ottawa pools as a result of her protests.

Yet when a man walked naked through the changeroom while she was in her most vulnerable state, my mother went silent.

Ten years ago, this incident would have been viewed unequivocally as a crime. Someone would have called the police, and the man would have been arrested. He would have been labelled a sexual predator and likely charged with voyeurism. But today, not one woman in the changeroom dared speak up, complain, or request help from staff in dealing with the issue.

These women would have very recently been considered the vulnerable population in this situation, and had the power of both social norms and the law on their side, yet now were self-silencing. Why?

We all know why: with four magic words — “I am a woman” — the intruder and potential predator becomes the vulnerable one, thereby protected from criticism, punishment, or accountability. Today’s political climate demands he be welcomed with open and loving arms into the female-only spaces, and that anyone who says different is labelled not only insensitive, but hateful.

The most astounding part of this story is that no one in the changeroom even asked if he identified as a man or a woman. For all anyone knows, this anatomically male individual may have been totally unaware that he had access to a convenient loophole. For all we know he might have answered, “Of course I’m a man, but I wanted to undress in the women’s changeroom.” Why then, did not a single woman say anything?

After my mother told me what happened to her, my initial reaction, like that of my father’s, was outrage. I was furious. To my mind, she was the victim of a crime. I kept asking her, “Why didn’t you say something?” Her answer was, “What’s the point?”

For the rest of the day, I was disturbed and shaken. I had to force the incident out of my mind just to function, to take care of my kids, to act normal. I was afraid not only for my mother, for myself, and for my daughter (how could I ever safely take her to the pool or any other place where she would have to undress, knowing at any moment she could be exposed to a naked man?), but for the entire world.

There is a saying, “Where there is no God, there is absurdity.” I am a religious person and believe this statement in a literal sense. I believe that human beings are not only physical beings, but deeply spiritual ones. Once our food and shelter are managed, we search for meaning. Humans have souls that require sustenance just as our stomachs do. A Higher Power and religion meet the needs of our spiritual longing and free our minds to deal with this physical world and all of its infinite challenges.

But I also believe that in this quote “God” can be interpreted to mean “objective and universal truths” — transcendent truths, immune to the whims of man. Where there is no truth, there is absurdity.

Postmodernism and gender ideology have helped society cast off the chains of objective, universal and verifiable truths. Mercurial self-identification is now the North Star that guides us. We left God and are now knee-deep in absurdity.

I won’t even address the massive issue that is decades of hard fought for women’s rights eroded within just a handful of years on account of gender ideology and the belief that “trans women are women.” Many more intelligent and stronger women have taken this issue head on.

I’m just a little person: a stay-at-home mom trying to launch each one of my children into this world. But what is a world or society where a woman is violated and can’t speak up because everyone will turn on her and call her a bigot? Where a person cannot name a crime and perpetrator? Where a person cannot speak the truth about the reality before her eyes?

We’ve become two different peoples speaking two very different languages and believing in two modes of living. One camp believes in some form of objective truth and labels humans as either male or female. There are endless variations in the ways that humans express themselves, but there are only two sexes. The other camp believes in a post-modernist version of constructed truth and that there are dozens of “fluid” genders that negate sex and biology. They also believe that anyone who does not subscribe to this belief is a heretic and as evil as a Nazi.

How do these two camps speak to one another? The two belief systems require very different laws and social norms. If there are only two sexes, the man in my mother’s story is not allowed in the women’s changeroom. If sex is a social construct and can change through self-declaration or self-perception, that man can be a woman and is therefore allowed in the women’s changeroom. Today, it seems the latter camp has won, and we no longer share a common understanding of basic truths or even of language. Words like  “man” or “woman” that were once universal are no longer.

A society that does not have a shared language cannot share thoughts. A society that is divided on whether or not there is an objective truth, outside of our own feelings and emotions, cannot set laws or policies that work for the broadest range of people.

A society where women and girls are cowed into silence when a crime is perpetrated against them for fear of being labelled the enemy is a shaky society indeed.

*Editor’s note: Lynne Cohen, the author’s mother, gave permission to publish her full name in this piece on June 11, 2023, after original publication.

Lindsy Danzinger is a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her three children. She lives with her husband and children in Toronto, Ontario.

The post My mother is courageous, but faced with a man in her change room at Ottawa’s Nepean Sportsplex she went silent appeared first on Feminist Current.

Perceptual diversity and philosophical belief

Reading up on Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity as part of my research on non-essential accounts of self in literature, philosophy and neuroscience, I was astounded to come across a New Yorker feature on the philosopher which describes his inability to visualise imagery as an anomaly:

“He has few memories of his past, and he almost never thinks about it, although his memory for other things is very good. He attributes this to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.) He has always believed that this is why he never thinks about his childhood. He imagines other people, in quiet moments, playing their memories in their heads like wonderful old movies, whereas his few memories are stored as propositions, as sentences, with none of the vividness of a picture.”

Surely, Parfit’s experience would be representative of the norm, I thought  – i.e. to only be able to see things that are actually there, physically present and immediately visible in the external surroundings? I certainly never had this seeming super-power of creating images myself and had always assumed that my subjective experience corresponded to the average. 

As I was soon to find out, however, the absence of a visual component to Parfit’s imagination is part of a neurological condition which affects an estimated 2-5% of the population, including myself, namely aphantasia. 

Recent studies into aphantasia (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34296179/) connect it to a number of characteristics and personality traits, including introversion and autistic spectrum features, difficulty with recognition, including face-recognition, impoverished autobiographical memory and less event detail in general memory, difficulty with atemporal and future-directed imagination, including difficulties with projecting oneself into mentally constructed scenes and the future, reduced mind-wandering tendency, elevated levels of IQ and mathematical and scientific occupations. 

In addition to these, I think aphantasia is likely connected to a certain philosophical belief or position, namely the non-essentialist view of the self that is found in both the reductionist account of personal identity in Western philosophy and the no-self doctrine in Eastern contemplative traditions. I offer a more extensive argument for this connection here: https://psyche.co/ideas/aphantasia-can-be-a-gift-to-philosophers-and-critics-like-me.

In Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit formulates the view that personal identity is reducible to physical and psychological continuity of mental states, and that there is no ‘further fact’, diachronic entity, or essence that determines identity. The belief that persons are separate entities with continuously existing selves, he argues, is to a great degree an illusion. The New Yorker profile only fleetingly connects Parfit’s philosophy to his aphantasia, but to me it seems an obviously relevant piece of explanation. Our philosophical views are based on our intuitions; our perceptual experience of the world guides our ideas about it. 

As modern neuroscience is giving us deeper insight into the wide neuro- and perceptual diversity of people, it is also giving us new explanations of differences in people’s experience of reality and, accordingly, their philosophical intuitions and beliefs. According to the predictive processing theory of brain function, the reality we experience as objective and independently existing, is to a large degree created by our brain, a projection based on our brain’s best guesses about the external reality and as such a form of controlled hallucination. And as Anil Seth has recently pointed out, since we all have different brains, we will naturally make different guesses about the external reality we encounter and thus have different perceptual experiences of reality. “Just as it serves us well to occasionally question our social and political beliefs, it’s useful to know that others can literally see things differently to us, and that these differences may evolve into different beliefs and behaviours.”

The growing insight into perceptual diversity, then, gives way to an increased possibility of biographically understanding and explaining philosophers’ theories and as such allows for a new form of ‘neuro-biographical’ reading of philosophy. 

It seems plausible that the flipside of a reduced sense of the past and future is an increased connection to and absorption in the present and a weaker identification with a continuous personal narrative and a coherent and substantial self. Parfit’s diminished sense of continuity of identity and substantiality of his own self – which he himself explicitly links to his aphantasia – may well have led him towards or at least strengthened his anti-essential views of personhood. 

Likewise, my own aphantasia could at least in part explain my intellectual preference for and easy identification with non-essential conceptions of self in both Western philosophy and Buddhism. The question is, then, whether the condition of aphantasia gives people like Parfit and me a shortcut to enlightenment and clearer philosophical insight into and intuitive understanding of the human condition and nature of reality. Or, does it obscure the truth by barring us from dimensions that are integral to the most common human experience and installing intuitions that do not correspond to the norm?

As neuroscience and neurotechnology continue to develop and give us better understanding of the variations and differences in the neurological constitution of brains, it will be interesting to see to how far the awareness of perceptual differences and specificity can reach in the explanation of differences in philosophical intuitions and beliefs – and to what extent it can disqualify philosophical positions and theories. The notion of perceptual diversity offers a valuable route for philosophers to exercise self-criticism, scrutinise their theories and intuitions and investigate the underlying perceptions and experiences. At the same time, it troubles some of the fundamental concepts on which the discipline of philosophy relies, paving the way for further relativisation and destabilisation of the already undermined notion of objective truth and rationality and potentially removing us further from consensus.

From Experience to Insight – the Personal Dimension of Philosophy

Written by Muriel Leuenberger

The more philosophers I have come to know, the more I realize how deeply personal philosophy is. Philosophical positions often emerge from personal experience and character – even the seemingly most technical, detached, and abstract ones. As Iris Murdoch wrote: “To do philosophy is to explore one’s own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth.” Philosophy is an expression of how one sees the world, a clarification, development, and defense of “an outlook that defines who someone is” to add the words of Kieran Setiya.

This personal dimension of philosophy becomes evident in the new philosophical positions and topics that emerge when people with different personal experiences and points of view start to do philosophy. The most prominent example is how women in philosophy, particularly in the last 50 years, have contributed new perspectives – a brush of fresh air in old, stuffy rooms. Philosophy’s allegedly objective view from nowhere was rather the view from a particularly male perspective. Care ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of pregnancy are just some areas where the inclusion of women in philosophy with their own outlook and priorities has advanced the discipline.[i]

The relational turn that can be observed in the philosophy of identity can be seen as a recent addition to this list. Relational identity is the idea that who you are is not just defined by your own properties and characteristics but also by how others define you. Others define us through concepts and norms we acquire in a social context that shape how we see ourselves and the world, they define us through our relations with them as friends, siblings, or members of an ethnic group or a book club, and they have the power to constrain our scope of action or provide opportunities. The latter can be a particularly incisive way of being defined by others. For example, by banning women in Afghanistan from universities the Taliban is defining who they can be. They can no longer become a doctor who dedicates their life to and finds meaning in caring for their patients. Insofar as we are defined by our actions, we can be defined by others who exercise control over what we can do in our lives.

Philosophy has typically been pursued by people whose life was in some sense open to them. They had a range of opportunities – doing philosophy was one of them – and did not face strongly limiting constraints and expectations, as in the example of an Afghan woman today. Academia and with it philosophy have become more accessible in many parts of the world. This means that more people are doing philosophy who either experienced more limiting constraints posed by others or who are aware that only very recent changes or the fact that they are born in a certain country spared them from a life of far-reaching constraints. People who have experienced or can readily empathize with how others can define one’s identity have entered the debate on identity. This development makes the emergence and rising popularity of relational identity views comprehensible.

I want to highlight a further, related reason for how the personal dimension of philosophy creates new trends besides the commonly mentioned shift in who is doing philosophy. The growing literature on philosophy concerned with topics and positions relevant to and based on the experience of a more diverse range of people can also be traced back to a diversification in whose testimony is being heard and taken seriously. As Miranda Fricker argued, marginalized groups are often faced with testimonial injustice – their testimonies are considered less credible due to prejudices related to their identity. For most of the history of philosophy, testimonies of experiences and viewpoints of women, non-western, non-binary, and non-white people were not heard, not taken as seriously or relevant, and not readily accessible. Globalization, digitalization, and a cultural shift towards more openness and equality are gradually changing this (although we still have a long way to go). The increased accessibility and ascribed credibility of testimonies of diverse experiences can inspire new topics and positions in philosophers who do not share those experiences but have come to learn about and empathize with them.

Philosophy clearly profits from taking other perspectives into account. We can get a richer picture of reality, a broader understanding of the moral landscape, raise interesting metaphysical questions, and new philosophical positions can come into sight that challenge established old doctrines. The deeply personal character of philosophy makes the inclusion of and attention to different voices all the more pressing.

[i] Vintiadis, Elly (2021, August). The view from her. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-something-special-about-the-way-women-do-philosophy

Transcript: Why are dangerous men still being housed in women’s prisons?

In recent years, prisons across the Western world have been allowing men who identify as women to be housed alongside female inmates, leading to sexual harassment, sexual assaults, pregnancies, and complaints from women both in prison and among the general public. These complaints have been mostly ignored by governments and those with the power to do something. That said, the policy in the UK was changed in February in response to one high profile case in particular, wherein a rapist name Adam Graham renamed himself “Isla Bryson” and claimed to be a woman in order to be reassigned to a women’s prison in Scotland. The new policy prevents men who “retain male genitalia or have been convicted of a violent or sexual offence” from being moved to women’s prisons.

The US and Canada, though, continue to lag on addressing this issue, and dangerous men remain in women’s prisons across North America.

I spoke with two women who are taking action: Amanda Stulman is the USA director of Keep Prisons Single Sex, and Jennifer Thomas is the founder of Free Speech for Women and runs an action group called “Get Men Out.”

You can listen to this interview on the podcast. This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.

~~~

Meghan: I would love if you could tell our listeners a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to be involved in this issue.

Amanda: Thanks for having us. I became involved in this issue in particular because I have a background in administrative law and policy, and because the issue of prisons is so distinct in so many different jurisdictions. On top of the 50 states, there’s the federal system and there are over 2000 separate municipal jails.. County… city… Each one can have its own, unique policy or law which applies to it. So I thought I could be useful in breaking down what those policies look like and how they end up applying in the real world.

So I worked with Kate Coleman, who is the founder of Keep Prisons Single Sex. She’s based in the UK and we opened a branch of Keep  Prisons Single Sex in the US over two years ago. The goal of Keep Prisons Single Sex is obviously to advocate against mixed sex prisons, and we do that by obtaining data, gathering research, lobbying lawmakers and policymakers, and trying to bring public awareness to the issue.

Meghan: Great. I’m so glad that you’re doing this work. This issue of of men being transferred into women’s prisons is so troubling, and I’ve been extremely frustrated, as I’m sure you both have as well, over the past few years that Governments in North America are really not paying attention to this and really not addressing women’s concerns.

Jennifer, can you tell us a little bit about your work and background and the activism that you are doing?

Jennifer: Well, I’m, I’m sort of an action group. So I focus on all the issues with that affect women, girls, and gender. I love working with Amanda because she’s so knowledgeable with the policies. And this last protest, Get Men Out, that was an action group I started. The first thing I wanted to do was aim at the prison situation because that is so abhorrent, you know, and it’s so obvious that it’s wrong. But I also diirect that towards the bathroom issue and other issues too — Get Men Out, Save Our Spaces… It sort of covers everything. What I like to do is read the temperature of what’s going on and try to anticipate where I will get the most exposure.

So that’s what I do. I don’t solely focus on the prison issue, but as with everything in this issue of the harms of gender ideology, you focus on one and the prison issue will lead you to the ACLU because they’re the ones that  sued for that policy to get in there. So I’ll start there and dig deeper just to try to see where I can get more action and more attention focused on that issue. I’ve worked with Amanda a few times, I’ve worked with Beth Steltzer from Save Women Sports, I’ve worked with a Partners for Ethical Care…

When they have an action that I think will really hit the temperature, of where I think America’s at,  then I go full force. So that’s what happened with this Get Men Out action. We worked with Amanda and Amy Ichikawa and we had a sense that the population was starting to be willing to see this. This issue is such a violation — we’re talking about women in prison, we’re talking about really some of the most vulnerable women in the country.

Meghan: Same thing in Canada. I interviewed Heather Mason a while back, who’s a really brave advocate and an ex inmate herself. She’s been one of the only ones speaking out in Canada about this issue. We’re talking about women who already have almost no rights, have no voice because they’re in prison, and they’re being housed with not just men, but the worst men — violent offenders, rapists, child molesters, and so on.

Jennifer, you mentioned that the ACLU was heavily involved  in pushing for this policy allowing men to be transferred into women’s prisons. Amanda, maybe you can speak to that a little bit — how did that happen?

Amanda: Sure. On top of the usual ire one should feel for the ACLU and their complete betrayal of what their mission is supposed to be and what they’re supposed to stand for, I have some extra ire for it. I, as a young adult in the early 90s, I interned at the ACLU in the exact same program that is now their LGBTQ++AI when it was the Lesbian and Gay Rights and HIV project. And to see them stray so far afield, not just from the substance of this issue in particular in terms of protecting women, but even on some of the ancillary issues. For example, they were the main drivers behind preventing a woman from requesting public records in Washington State. She was trying to learn how many men were in women’s prisons, how recently they’d been moved… People were starting to get wind of the policy change in Washington several years ago, and it was the A C L U who worked with several inmates representing them to fight the disclosure by Washington State Department of Corrections for a public records request.

The enormous irony of this is that this woman learned how to make her public records request from the ACLU’s own website. The ACLU’s  mission is transparency, public awareness, obtaining data from the government, you know, the government works for you, etc. And they actively worked to suppress access to data that would allow the public to learn the impact of these policies, and they were so successful.

That they managed to work with the Washington State legislature and actually passed a law modifying their public records  law to exclude disclosure of issues related to gender identity and prisoners. So unless you get information directly from women housed there, which you know, is incredibly dangerous and risky for them, there’s no way to do it on paper, publicly, directly because of the ACLU.

But getting back to the primary issue of pushing for this policy, the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is kinda a local version of the ACLU, I believe it originated with them. I haven’t been able to track it back any further, but they’re the ones who have developed the model transgender inmate policy that was enacted in California, that legislatures tried to enact in Maryland. They’re actively trying to enact a version of it in New York state right now, which is even more extreme than the version in California. So, they’re not only rhetorically pushing this issue, they are actively developing model laws. They’re actively pushing for those laws and actively working to prevent the public from learning about this issue.

Meghan: This is so appalling. I mean, for these kinds of organizations to be fighting against the rights of incredibly marginalized people. It’s really mindblowing that this is happening.

Jennifer: They’re acting as a legal agent of the gender industry. We have to expose and fight the ACLU because they are basically a legal firm that is pushing their policy.

It’s not just as simple as just saying, ok only men and women’s prisons. You have to dig deeper. I’m planning a protest in August against the ACLU in Washington DC because, you know, we can at least go after their donors — all the people that think the ACLU is so great because they protected the Nazis and Skokie and they believe in free speech and all that.

The whole narrative behind them that they’ve managed to hide—the new narrative—is still believed by a lot of Democrats. And I think if the Democrats knew what the ACLU have been doing with our civil liberties, they would stop donating.

Would that stop the ACLU? No, because the gender industry would just make up for that money. But you could see then a shift with the populace, you know, a shift of awareness.

Meghan: I’m glad that you brought that up, in terms of the donors, because one of the major obstacles to fighting gender identity ideology is that it’s infiltrated almost every single institution. Certainly every single civil rights organization, reproductive rights organization, LG now BTQ etc organizations. I mean, the reason that they’re doing this is because they’re getting all this funding to do it. Alternatively, you could look at it as they risk losing funding if they don’t push this.

Let’s talk about that. Where do we go to advocate against these policies when we’re dealing with these massive organizations and institutions? And clearly this ideology has infiltrated the Democratic Party. It feels so big and I know that people are getting really angry about it thanks to activism, like what you two are doing, but it feels like a big hill to climb. Have you had any successes? Or do you have suggestions in terms of who might be a productive target?

Amanda: I have found that to be among the most depressing part of working in this area, which is that there is not a single legacy civil rights organization or women’s rights group that understands this issue, or at least, pretends to. Every single one of them has been absolutely ideologically captured. So it really does seem as though either these organizations have to be built anew from the ground up — some other version of them. Or it’s going to take what Jennifer does an enormous amount of, which is on the street campaigning to bring awareness to force media to pay attention to the issue and to bring it to the public. We don’t have the numbers in North America of people advocating on this issue. We certainly don’t have the dollars. The reason that the ACLU changed the name of the program that addresses this is because they received a $15 million gift from John Stryker. That is what led to the change of the name and to their absolute commitment to the “T” all the time and none of the LGB. So I don’t think there’s a good answer to how we deal with the established organizations. I think people and especially women like Jennifer are the ones sort of creating a public groundswell.

Meghan: Right. I mean I’m, I’m verging towards thinking all these organizations need to be defunded and taken apart and started over again so that they’re not so tied up with this money that’s corrupted them so deeply.

Jennifer: The only real solution is the public against this, right? When we see thousands of people in the streets, fighting against this, that’s when we’ll see some change. People have to get mad enough to get out on the streets and this complacency that they’re under.

But inevitably I do think we will see a ground swell and that’s when we’ll regain our power. We won’t feel so helpless because we’ll look around and instead of seeing 20 or 30 people standing next to us, it’s thousands.

That’s how we know about Martin Luther King — because he went to the street. So it’s going to take that and it’s going to take an awareness level where we just have to keep plugging along and hitting these stories.

Now there’s this new media that is hungry for these stories. Tucker just got fired. James O’Keefe got fired. They’re looking for stories, right? Because they’re going to build their own thing. So we do have this interesting time right now where there’s new media that we can tap into that will tell our story. It’s getting out more and more, but it’s going to take work.

Meghan: So I wanna talk a bit about the law. I know that Joe Biden’s administration pushed through a policy allowing men to be transferred into women’s prisons. But I also am under the impression that things differ from state to state.

I know that New York lawmakers are pushing or trying to push through this bill called the Gender Identity Respect, Dignity and Safety Act, which would automatically place male prisoners in women’s facilities if they identify as women. I’m curious to know, first, if you know what’s happening with this bill, and second, if this is something that we actually need to be fighting on a state to state basis or that we can fight on a federal level.

Amanda: So the New York State Bill, as you say, presumptively houses people according to their self-declared gender identity. And there is such an insanely high burden and such a quick turnaround time required to deny that to someone that the bill was clearly drafted in New York with the intent to never, ever, ever deny someone. There are also mechanisms built in for the state to be sued if someone is denied, and to have attorney’s fees and damages paid. So it is so unidirectional a law, it’s a little frightening that that came about after all we’ve heard coming out of California and New Jersey and Canada, to the extent that people hear about it, um, the, the answer more broadly is yes, for right now, this is having to be fought on a state by state basis.

When this administration — the Biden administration — came in on its first day in office, it issued an executive order directing federal agencies to interpret the laws and regulations that they have some control over and that they manage in the various agencies to interpret sex to include gender identity. So with one pen stroke on his first day in office, he directed every federal agency to work through that process for the Bureau of Prisons, which is the only direct mechanism the federal government has. There are some indirect ones, which I’ll mention, but it’s the only direct prison system that the federal government controls, putting aside military.

During the Obama administration’s last month in office, they created a transgender offender manual and literally chucked it in the air and walked out the door and left that for the Trump administration to deal with. It was a very aggressive policy. Again, not a federal law, not a regulation, didn’t go through any voting process, didn’t go through any public comment process.

It was merely an in-house manual that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was expected to follow. It took the Trump administration two years to grapple with that policy and try to modify it, which they did, in kind of half-hearted way.

And then following Biden’s executive order and a few other similar executive orders, the Federal Bureau of Prisons again reissued the transgender offender manual and again leaning much more heavily towards a pathway for men to be moved into the women’s prisons based on self declaration. So that’s what covers the federal prison.

The way that the federal government impacts the state prison system is they have money and there’s a federal regulation called the PREA regulations, and it derives from the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The PREA regulations provide — and those did go through a public comment period, but that was so long before this issue was in the public’s line of vision.. You know, it was over a decade ago, nobody was paying attention to this… Well, some rare people were paying attention, but very few people were paying attention… And through the regulatory process, the Obama Department of Justice issued regulations that contemplated cross-sex housing. The act itself did not. And that’s the first time in the federal legal system there was anything speaking to even the concept of developing cross-sex housing. So what those regulations provide is that in order to maintain full federal funding — and every state receives some in order to maintain that —  you get massively dinged until you receive no money. Year after year, you get successively more dinged if you do not adhere to those regulations. So every state has to, at least on paper, consider housing people based on their self-declared trans identity. So for a number of years, most states were like, “okay.” And then went about their business. But some of them took it really seriously.

So now a number of states have either laws or policies that not only implement those regulations of contemplating cross-sex housing, but presumptively housed according to self-declared gender identity.

Jennifer: And this is how the federal government influences states throughout, like the federal government has the right — the president can come in and put out an executive order.

That’s what he did. This crazy executive order that virtually anybody would think was insane, you know, prioritizing gender identity above sex-based rights. They can come in and do that, and then they have this mechanism. The schools are funded federally, so they basically blackmail them into adopting these policies by withholding money.

So you think, well, why would the states go along with this? Well, they wouldn’t get their money. They even threatened the school lunch program at one point with, you know, “if you don’t adopt these policies, your school lunch program is going to be threatened.”

It’s a withholding of money if you don’t do this right. So like the universities that are, there are some laws in there, but they’re just not pursuing them. These executive orders have a lot of control even with Title IX. Amanda could probably speak better to this, but that’s why it’s being messed with, because it’s not, it’s not a law per se?

Amanda: Right. Just to clarify, Title IX is itself a law, but it’s the regulations that they’re kind of messing with right now. And what they’re trying to do is trying to apply what both Jennifer and I have been talking about in terms of the executive orders — redefining sex to mean sex or gender identity. The reason we’ve heard a lot about Title IX is they are going through the formal rulemaking process and putting it out for public comment. They received a record number of comments, which is really heartening, about modifying the language of the regulations, which is where you’ll find all the meaty stuff about what you have to do to get money if you’re a state or a state entity.

Meghan: I want to talk about some specific cases. I believe that there are 27 males currently being housed at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for women? Which was a central focus of the Get Men Out protest in New Jersey last month. Is that normal throughout the states?

Amanda: Well, woohoo, now there’s only about 10. A number of them managed to behave so poorly they got themselves moved out.

About two years ago, we worked with Women’s Declaration International to do a statewide FOIA project of every state prison to try to see what the numbers were in each location. Many were extremely uncooperative and we were not able to get a completely exhaustive list. But there are states that are in that range… admittedly not many two years ago. I think there’s probably more now, if we were to circle back and do it again. But even in states where you wouldn’t necessarily think of it, there’s a handful.

Virginia had one for decades, even before this recent push. But a number of states have several dozen. Obviously California does now. Washington State is getting up there. Illinois’ numbers are growing and they have neither a policy nor a law. A federal judge keeps putting men in women’s prison in Illinois. So it’s everywhere, though the numbers change. But we’re, we’re only seeing them go up. We’re not seeing them go down much. New Jersey went down just because they had a kind of freak out placement of men in there when they reached the settlement with the ACLU that Jennifer referenced, and then they had another panic in the other direction when it went so badly.

Meghan: And what are some of the cases — like what are we hearing about what’s actually going on in these prisons? I know that when I talk about this issue online, people will respond in these very blase ways. People will say like, “Well, you know, women get raped in prison either way.” Or they say, “If they’re in male prisons, then these males who identify as women are going to get raped.” Or they say, “Well prison is really bad.” And I don’t know, maybe they’re just not able to picture the situation and what’s actually going down and what the danger is when you’re putting men in women’s prisons. Can you talk to some specific cases that have happened?

Jennifer: So when a woman gets convicted of a crime and the judge reads out her sentence, he doesn’t say, “Okay, your sentence is possible rape, possible forced childbirth or an abortion, and then possible abandonment of your child.”

We don’t agree. We don’t have agreed upon laws to cover this. The public is not in agreement on this. Otherwise, that would be the sentence. This apathy around it just upsets me to no end. I also think people think it can’t happen to them.

The fastest growing category of inmates is women. When women get convicted, it’s harsher sentences for lesser crimes.

I think this sort of bleeds into that industrial complex. Like in New Jersey they were making $61,000 per person off of their prisoners. And women are easier to manage than men. Actually, prison reform is working for men and not women. So men are getting shorter sentences for worse crimes and getting out. They can add more to that prison population by adding men. Right now, if Bundy applied, he would get into a woman’s prisons. If Richard Speck, who killed eight nurses in Chicago, took hormones and dressed like a woman when he was in jail he would be in there with them. There’s no distinction of how bad the crime is.

Amanda: I think those are really good points, and I think a lot of it speaks to, aside from the sort of disregard for prisoners in general, it’s just treated as a kind of a throwaway population. But aside from that, I think it is largely a misconception. This is a subset of, at best, men they’re imagining are a particular kind of man or worse, they think there’s some sort of version of a subset of women. But I think most people imagine that it’s non-violent criminals, that it’s men who have had genital surgery, that it’s men who are on hormones, that it’s men who are tiny and pretty and vulnerable. All of those assumptions are out there and obviously, even if somebody is those things and not a violent criminal who is tiny and has had genital surgery and is on hormones, if they’re a man, they still don’t belong in a woman’s prison.

But I think that is what most of the public imagines when they hear these stories, which is one reason that it’s so important for the stories and the names and the visuals and the crimes and all of that to be made really right in people’s faces so they can see the criminal history of these men. They can see what they look like, which I know seems really superficial, That page on Keep Prisons’s Single-Sex’s website that has a sample of men and their crimes who are in women’s prisons, I mean, I’ve peaked people in 30 seconds by showing them that page. Just the, the visual of is sometimes what people need. Like, oh, still has a penis and is massive? That’s crazy.

Meghan: Yeah. And I guess, probably a lot of people — I’m gonna give them the benefit of the doubt — are imagining these men who are identifying as women or trans women as being men who “pass.” So men who “look like women,” probably men who’ve gone through all the surgeries and so on and so forth. So I imagine that what’s happening there when you’re showing them that actually these are the men who are in these women’s facilities: they just look like regular dudes. Like not even trying to look like women.

Amanda: Or they look exactly like men who have literally put their hair in pigtails, which is somehow even more alarming. You know, the superficiality of it.

Jennifer: The women said in their letters at the protest that these men dropped that act right when get into the facility then it’s a million dollar baby game, you know, let’s make a baby.

They’re not acting vulnerable when that’s going on. It’s a complete facade.

Meghan: In the UK they’ve actually had some success and have started to change their policies in order to bar violent offenders, as I understand it, from being transferred to women’s prisons. Do I have that right?

Amanda: I believe that’s right. There’s a certain category where the answer is just “no.”

Meghan: Have you had any success in that regard? In terms of advocating for change in the US or have you managed to have an impact when you talk to politicians, for example?

Amanda: Aside from public awareness, which is kind of hard to measure, but in terms of objective successes, a number of organizations and women, including Keep Prisons Single Sex and me, fought very hard in Maryland to keep a proposed law there from getting out of committee, and that was successful.

A year or two ago, New York State’s law sat in committee the last legislative session, um, through a letter writing campaign from Keep Prisons Single Sex, and I like to think we had something to do with it not making it out of committee. No successes in terms of turning things around necessarily, but like putting a hand up to the train that just keeps going faster.

But the public awareness is huge. That some mainstream media in the New York Post did a story about Jennifer’s action  last month…  They’re covering it, as Jennifer mentioned, and alternative media is becoming more interested in it. So in terms of public awareness, I think that’s where we’re seeing success.

I can’t say so much elsewhere.

Jennifer: Yeah. And public awareness is a tricky thing because you have to get ’em mad enough to come out. I think there’s a sense of helplessness that can be overcome with just more people on the ground and you know, the more people rally and organize and get together because we have to rebuild almost all our organizations. So we’re going to be needing to mesh with new people, churches that have retained their organization  and can relay messages without the dictatorship of social media and tech… We’re going have to come up with alternatives, and alternative ways of networking, and different people to network with to really get the ball rolling. Because it’s too scary alone. I think a lot of people are aware, and we’re at the stage of how do we get them to join us? How do we get them to come and let us ease some of that helplessness they’re feeling about this by joining together. And then lawyers mix in, and then we’re cooking with gas, you know, and we can make change.

We’re behind England. We have different laws here. It’s a totally different landscape here. But I do feel like it’s changed over the past couple of years in America. And there are more people interested in fighting this. So we are at the stage of just kind of weaving that blanket together.

We’re going to get better at this. I have hope for the future.

Meghan: I’m glad to hear that. I think that unfortunately, we — and I’m speaking like for myself, I’m not speaking for you two because I don’t know how long you guys have all been involved in this work — but we, a lot of the radical feminists who were worried about this early on, really didn’t understand how big this was and how deep the issue goes, so probably naively thought, “If we can just get the word out, then we can stop it,” not realizing that this was coming top down from these very wealthy funders. Just letting people know about it may have not been enough. Although, of course, the more people that know, the more people will push back, especially at a government level, and hopefully we can have an impact on things like legislation that way.

Amanda: You had asked about politicians, and I think there’s something relevant on that issue, particularly to contrast how it’s gone in the US and Canada vs the UK and that is that our politicians, you know, the Democratic party — liberal politicians, or I should say lefty politicians — are absolutely committed to holding onto the belief that the only people who could object to these policies are religious conservatives.

You know, I write as a constituent to my own representatives, and I’m in New York, so they’re all Democrats. And every time I do, I get back a form letter that says, “We’re excited to learn about your interest in religious freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You must be concerned about this for religious reasons.” And I write back and I say, that is not my concern. My concern is this. And I get another form letter that’s their like letter two in this letter tree, saying, you know, “Thank you for demonstrating your interest in religious freedom. We’re concerned about that too.”

So some of what’s happened and some of the challenge in the US and perhaps to some extent in Canada too, probably to a slightly lesser degree, is there is this artificial reinforced divide about who’s for these policies and who’s against them and why.

It becomes additionally challenging when much of the media who will cover this is either conservative or religious or both, and bless them. I am so thankful that they do. But all of us who need to be interested and concerned about this issue are just allergic to the arguments because they come out of the gate thinking this is tribal and we’re not in that tribe, so we’re not joining hands with you.

Meghan: Yeah. I mean that’s been the media and the political view from the get-go, which is why it was so difficult for feminists to get their perspectives out in the first place.

In Canada the media would only cover this issue as one of the religious right — which is strange because the religious right in Canada is really pretty marginal — as though it was only a debate between the religious right and everybody else.

Clearly they’ve done the same thing to a larger extent in the US which is frustrating because as you say people kind of just shut down and think, “Well, I guess you must be a religious right, Christian, gay hating jerk.”

Jennifer: And throw abortion on top of that, which they have done, and it’s just division everywhere. But there is this new media and there are so many people who are politically homeless who just want good schools for their kids and don’t want them brainwashed. So I think people are converging on almost every issue in gender. We’re all starting to kind of sing the same message. We want to work together, we can set aside whatever differences we have. This is too important. So I think there’s hope. There’s always hope, right?

We’re basically fighting the one percent. And if everyone could come in on even the free speech issue where, you know, if we don’t have it, we are literally slaves — then they can tell us to say anything and do anything..

Even with Covid, it galvanized people. But we’re fighting a big machine. Like even with Tucker, you know, he was the top — the top host of the top show in America, and they showed us he can be taken off the throne. They want to model behavior of defeat with us. And we have to fight that with modeling behavior of not using pronouns and demanding our autonomy. Individually and then together. And I think we are getting there and more and more people are getting pissed about this.

I have sisters and a lot of them were against me. But after Tucker, a couple of them came around, so the temperature has changed. My sisters are full on Democrats raised in Chicago, but they’re coming around because they’re seeing it affect them. And you know, that’s how it goes with issues. It has to affect you. Your kid has to be in peril. So I think we are going to see game momentum and then it’ll kind of rub off on Canada because we’re so close.

That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m so sorry. That’s all I have to say about Canada.

Meghan: I mean, it’s really, really bad. It’s a really bad situation in Canada and nothing’s really changing and there’s a little bit of pushback here and there, but not nearly enough and nothing comparable to what’s going on in the US, but you’re right that Canada does follow America’s lead, so, I think you might be right on that end.

And I’m glad that you made the point about we’re fighting the one percent because this trans rights movement has done so much work very successfully to present itself as just another grassroots civil rights movement. Like this is just about these marginalized people who don’t have rights, fighting for their lives, fighting back for their rights, fighting back for them, their safety. And that is not how any of this happened. This was fully a top down thing. And those of us fighting back are the ones who have very, very, very little power.

Jennifer: They always say, You don’t want us to exist.” And then they erase the word women. Bizarre. You know, when this mass propaganda machine captured all the young people online, basically they internalized this dialogue with everything they’re doing to us.

That’s why there’s no dialogue with them. I think what they don’t want people to hear is how ridiculous their answers are.

Meghan: Of course. It’s always a reversal. It’s always about the trans activists presenting themselves as these downtrodden, silencenced, everyone’s after them, they’re being threatened and harassed all the time, etc. And we know as women who are trying to speak out on this that it’s the total opposite. And I mean, I think anyone who’s really paying attention to this debate can see what happens  to women in particular who speak out and who really has the power in all of this institutionally. And in a lot of cases literally the physical power as well as we’re talking about men.

Before I let you go can you please tell me how to find your work, your organizations, and how to support your work, as well as if you have any upcoming actions that people might be able to support or attend?

Amanda: Sure. So the USA website for Keep Prisons Single Sex is kpssinfo.org. Other than that, we’re most active on Twitter, which is @NoXY_USA. We’re also on Facebook.

Meghan: Awesome. And can people support your work in any way?

Amanda: Yes. Thank you for asking about that. We do have a donate button on our website and just so people are aware, everything gets funded through the UK. So if it is in pounds, don’t be surprised. The UK group will honour requests to direct that towards the USA efforts. That’s what funds all of our work. Everyone is a volunteer. Any expenses we have get paid through fundraisers to the UK Keep Prisons Single Sex.

Jennifer: I’m Jennifer Thomas Rev @RevFemStBeatfem. I run the action group, Get Men Out.

My next event is on June 16th in Pittsburgh at the City Council building at 1PM. I’m aiming to get men out of women’s bathrooms. And of course it’s a Free Speech for Women event, so we’ll invite speakers. The following protest I have on the calendar is for the ACLU and that is Friday, August 11th in Washington, DC on the Supreme Court steps. You can email me at [email protected] for more info and I’ll get back to you. I do fundraising, but I peg it to each protest. So the fundraiser won’t come out for the Pittsburgh event until about a month before. So if you just follow me on Twitter, that’s the best way to find me. Or email me.

Meghan: Okay, perfect. Thank you both so much for speaking with me about this.

I’m really excited about the work that you’re doing, and I’m glad that you both feel hopeful about affecting change and I’m really grateful for your willingness to fight and for all the hard work that you’re doing.

Jennifer: Oh, well thank you Meghan. It’s such a pleasure and you are a woman that I admire, and I thank you so much for the interview.

Amanda: Same. Thank you.

The post Transcript: Why are dangerous men still being housed in women’s prisons? appeared first on Feminist Current.

It’s the funding, stupid

A common galvanizing trope among progressives claims the good and open-minded among us are in a constant battle against the evil right, who wishes to stamp out the struggling and marginalized. This holds true in the trans debate.

Just last night at the Met Gala, actress Gabrielle Union told Variety she and her husband, former Miami Heat basketball player Dwyane Wade, had decided to leave Florida on account of the couple’s “trans child.” She explained that “in 2016, there was a move towards a less inclusive world,” going on to imply that their children would have nowhere to attend school were they to stay in Florida, as schools in the state were not “open to teaching facts and accurate history.”

“Where can they say gay, much less trans?” Union asked, referencing a parental rights bill passed in Florida in March, inaccurately dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. She expressed concern that she and Wade “might get arrested for affirming [their] child’s identity.”

Her commentary was odd, considering that it those who challenge gender identity ideology and the practice of transitioning kids who are under threat, not the other way around. Indeed, a Vancouver father was jailed in 2021 for refusing to go along with his child’s transition. Bill C-6 (which later became Bill C-4) passed in Canada last year, claiming to ban “conversion therapy,” but in fact criminalizing therapists and medical practitioners who do not practice the “affirmative model” — which means confirming a child’s “trans identity” unquestioningly, and placing them on a path towards medicalization.

These reversals aren’t new. Indeed they have been the go-to narrative in the media for many years now.

Last month, The New York Times published a piece entitled, “How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives.” In it, Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters argue that the swift rise of trans rights activism began on account of the right having nothing left to fight against once gay marriage rights were won. They write:

“The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.”

It was frankly one of the strangest reversals I’ve yet to read on this issue, blaming conservatives for igniting the fight for trans rights rather than the other way around.

It is true that this movement appeared suddenly, as if out of nowhere, leaving many of us searching for an explanation. What other movement in history has taken hold of every institution, media outlet, and political party so quickly?

The answer, though, is not in Republican strategizing. It is much more simple than that: it was about funding.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that same-sex couples had the right to marry. This decision was, as reported by The New York Times, “the culmination of decades of litigation and activism.” This changed things for individual gay people, of course, but it also changed things for the gay rights organizations who had been fighting for this decision for years. The charities and NGOs and civil rights organizations once heavily invested in advocating for same-sex marriage no longer had a raison d’etre, and as such lost a key justification for future funding.

Gluing the “T” to the LGB allowed for an easy transition into a new civil rights movement, using the same language and mantras of “born this way” and “accepting people as they are,” as well as a need to fight for “equal rights” on this basis.

Indeed, it was the Democrats and Democrat-adjacent organizations that were looking for a new way to galvanize their base and solicit funding, and Republicans were frankly the last to catch on.

Trans intrusion on women’s spaces and the women’s rights movement began long ago, but didn’t really take hold until money was involved. While we often hear men on the right demanding to know “Where are all the feminists?!” the feminists were in fact the only ones to notice the advancement of trans ideology and its impending threat to women’s spaces for many years. Second wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Germaine Greer spoke out against the very sexist lie that a man can transform himself into a woman through stereotypes and cosmetic alterations long before this was on the radar of Republicans.

In 1977, Steinem responded to the situation of James Humphrey Morris, a British army officer who transitioned to become Jan Morris, and the transition of tennis player Richard Raskind to Renée Richards, by writing that, “Feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and the uses of transsexualism.” While it was important, she believed, to “protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision [to transition], and to be identified as he or she wishes,” it was also clearly not a “feminist goal.” A preferred solution would be to “transform society” so that men feel comfortable stepping outside traditional masculine roles and women can step outside the rigid limitations of feminine stereotypes, without need to “mutilat[e] our bodies into conformity.” Steinem added that, “In the meantime, we shouldn’t be surprised at the amount of publicity and commercial exploitation conferred on a handful of transsexuals.”

In 1973, Morgan, a founder of Ms. Magazine, was even more forthright, responding to a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a “male-to-female transsexual” folk singer at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, by saying in her keynote speech:

“I will not call a male ‘she;’ 32 years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman;’ one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.”

Greer, ever outspoken, wrote an article for The Independent magazine in 1989 entitled, “On why sex-change is a lie.” It began:

“On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem.

I should have said ‘You’re a man. The Female Eunuch has done less than nothing for you. Piss off.’”

Greer went on to describe how this man would mysteriously turn up outside her hotel, and that while he “certainly considered that he was psychologically a female… he behaved exactly like a predatory man.”

Her article could have been written today, though it likely wouldn’t have been published. Needless to say, we were warned:

“Knee-jerk etiquette demanded that I humour this gross parody of my sex by accepting him as female, even to the point of allowing him to come to the lavatory with me. Bureaucratic moves were afoot to give him and his kind the right to female identity, a female passport even…”

Predicting exactly the future that came a couple of decades later, Greer wrote, “The general populace, despite the evidence of their eyes and ears, will go along with this bluff.”

Where were all the feminists?!

Radical feminists continued this fight for the years leading up to 2015/16, which is when gender identity ideology began to take hold across institutions, followed by the passage of gender identity legislation.

I was interviewed for a 2014 article by Michelle Goldberg published in The New Yorker entitled “What is a woman?” My interview was omitted, but she spoke with a number of other feminists who had organized a conference in Portland in an attempt to discuss the encroaching ideological and institutional takeover. Goldberg documents numerous attempts by such women to speak against this, all of whom were subsequently shut down, no-platformed, threatened, and harassed endlessly — cancelled, as it’s known today. Lierre Keith, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, and Julie Bindel were among these women, as well as many lesser-knowns.

I interviewed Lee Lakeman, a founding member of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Collective (VRR), in 2012, about her battle to defend women-only space at the shelter and transition house, beginning back in the 90s. VRR has been plagued by attacks and accusations of “transphobia” ever since, resulting in the City of Vancouver pulling their funding in 2019.

Great efforts were made to suppress debate surrounding not just the social and cultural phenomenon of transgenderism, but the related legislative changes. Because most of the pushback was coming from women with no financial or political power, that was not hard to do.

I am aware of course, that the modern, mainstream feminist — the kind of “feminist” who did have a voice within Democratic organizations, well-funded institutions, the mainstream media, and academia — went along with the whole thing. This baffled me for a long time. I didn’t understand the funding mechanisms behind the whole operation, and was livid at seeing organizations that should be among the most invested in understanding how the female body works — reproductive rights organizations, for example — suddenly and in unison erasing women from their work and politics.

~~~

On September 2, 2016, Planned Parenthood tweeted that “Menstruators in New York started to #tweetthereceipt celebrating the repealed tampon tax…” A day later, the Planned Parenthood account reported that “Purvi Patel has been released from prison, but people continue to be criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes.”

These tweets might seem innocuous, but were significant. Where once would have been the word “woman,” we saw “menstruators” and “people.” And Planned Parenthood was not alone. The word we had always used to describe adult human females rather suddenly had cooties.

In 2013, Lauren Rankin, an American reproductive rights activist, wrote that “abortion rights activists have overlooked and dismissed a very important reality: Not everyone who has an abortion is a woman,” adding:

“We must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in assuming that only women have abortions. Trans men have abortions. People who do not identify as women have abortions.”

Rankin explained that an organization called the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF) was “leading the way on becoming more gender inclusive around the issue of abortion,” directing a change in language. NYAAF had changed its language a year earlier, in 2012, replacing sexed language in its mission statement with words like “anyone,” “every person,” and “the people who call our hotline.” In 2013, they explained that “embracing gender inclusivity” meant “not assuming the gender pronouns that our callers use and replacing ‘woman’ with ‘people’” on their website, and had taken it upon themselves to “reach out to the LGBTQ communities and inform them that NYAAF helps fund abortions for all people, not just women.”

In 2015, Fund Texas Women, which pays the travel and hotel costs of women who need to get an abortion but don’t have access to a clinic nearby, became Fund Texas Choice. Co-founder Lenzi Scheible wrote:

“With a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans* people who needed to get an abortion but were not women. We refuse to deny the existence and humanity of trans* people any longer.”

At the time, longtime feminist and political columnist Katha Pollitt noted that while the idea that the word “woman” was “exclusionary” or “cissexist” might “sound arcane to most people,” this directive had been “quietly effective” in reproductive rights activism.

She was right. But most had not yet caught on to this push to erase women from language.

Why, of all places, is this starting in the reproductive rights movement? A movement that, if nothing else, is centered around about female bodies and autonomy?

The truth is in the funding.

Big name funders and billionaire philanthropists like Jennifer Pritzker, the Arcus Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and Jon Stryker not only fund numerous trans rights and LGBT organizations, but Planned Parenthood. At the same time it was decided the “T” would be added to the “LGB,” the associated New Speak was applied across the board, not just to trans lobby groups and LGBT organizations, but to reproductive rights organizations and clinics across the US.

Journalist Jennifer Bilek has done ample work demonstrating the funding sources behind the trans ideology takeover, pointing out that men like Pritzker also fund the now trans-obsessed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who joined Planned Parenthood as a major player in the institutionalization of “female-erasing language.”

Not only that, but Planned Parenthood has since moved into the trans market, selling kids on puberty blockers and hormone treatments. Today, the organization claims to be America’s “second largest provider of hormone therapy.”

Embracing trans ideology was rendered mandatory for any organization wishing to continue getting funding from these corporations and donors. If you’ve ever wondered why UN Women has continued to insist “transwomen are women” despite endless pushback from women or why the Twitter accounts of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRC) appear to be run by woke teenagers, it’s useful to know that Arcus, founded by Stryker, is a key funder. Of course the Democrats are compromised as well. As Bilek also points out, even Obama’s campaign was deeply connected to and funded by Pritzker.

Needless to say, this was no “grassroots movement.” It has never been “the civil rights issue of our time,” as then Vice-President Joe Biden called it in 2012. Certainly it wasn’t “the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics” in response to “gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender,” as Nagourney and Peters claim in The Times.

From the moment men began attempting to identify their way into womanhood, feminists have been there, saying “no.” Some of those women became compromised, as apparently Steinem did, recanting in 2013, claiming that her words were “taken out of time and context” and that what she “wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.” Others always were — careerist in their intentions and profiting too much from their cowardice to veer towards truth.

The reason, I now realize, that radical feminists could speak up against transgenderism was the same reason they weren’t heard: radical feminists aren’t funded by anyone.

Once mainstream feminists made their activism their careers, they became dependent on the same funding sources pushing trans ideology from the top down. While feminists like me who had always worked independently, free to push back against what I saw as the anti-feminist third wave and the big name women who kept their message neat and tidy and confined to Democrat-stamped messaging, struggled to understand why anyone would fall for this clearly anti-woman nonsense, it actually did all make sense.

When you start putting your paycheck ahead of your integrity, you’ll say anything. Even “menstruator.” Even “transwomen are women.”

It’s fair to say that since this debate has finally exploded into the public realm, the fight against transgender ideology has probably become a grift for some men on the right (and beyond). But this is not where it began. It began with the selling of the “T” to people who needed the money, and continued to the point of practically no return because those pushing back didn’t have a bargaining chip.

The post It’s the funding, stupid appeared first on Feminist Current.

“She has her own strength that was so empowering”: Priya Kansara talks "Polite Society" sisterhood

The young star talked about her latest role along with her training in martial arts and favorite Bollywood films

Adam’s Rib: I escaped a fundamentalist religion only to find women’s rights under threat on the outside

It is just over 200 years since the women’s suffrage movement began in Canada. Not even 100 years has passed since we were declared legal persons, and all women, regardless of race, won the right to vote. A mere handful of generations have passed (which, historically speaking, represent only a drop) since women won their sex-based human rights. And once again, our rights are uncertain.

I am of a generation of women whom feminists warned not to become complacent. I reaped the benefits of the sacrifices of first and second wave feminists. I took for granted that women had gained inalienable rights that could not be revoked. I have been in a long slumber of complacency.

As a therapist, I think a lot about the concept of “the shadow”: the power of that which we do not want to face within ourselves — things like complacency and fear. If we do not turn towards our shadow, it can obscure our consciousness and blind us to psychological forces that may become unseen drivers of our actions, such as misogyny.

~~~

I grew up in a radicalized, fundamentalist religious organization run by a hierarchy of men. Women were not permitted leadership roles that might allow them to disrupt the established power structures. The organization’s dominion was cult-like: people were instructed not to befriend anyone outside the organization and to cut off even family members who did not believe. Followers were convinced of an impending apocalypse — a doomsday that would never arrive.

The male fraternity of leaders claimed they possessed the one true interpretation of what God himself demanded from earthly beings. The organization’s views were often science-denying. They forbid followers certain life-saving Western medical interventions, and taught that dinosaur fossils were fakes, evolution was a lie, and humans were only a few thousand years old, created by an aged, male God. They brainwashed followers into believing magical stories of demons hovering nearby, waiting to enter followers’ minds if they were not vigilant against the intrusion of “misinformation” or evil from the outside world.

The organization’s leaders demanded converts believe that myths and lies were real. They interpreted biblical teachings literally in order to legitimize enforcing women’s subservience to men and to gender-stratified roles. We were taught that women were only an extension of men, because we were made from the original man — Adam’s — rib.

Dissent from the dominant narrative was prohibited. Followers who could not reconcile material reality and scientific facts with the magic and superstition the organization fed us were deemed heretics. Anyone found to be introducing ideas that challenged the approved narrative, no matter how rational, was labelled an apostate. Punishment was meted out through forms of humiliation, public shaming, and ostracism. Likewise, those who left on their own accord were shunned — treated as though they were dead.

~~~

I took for granted that, when I left at age 15, I would survive. I sought freedom and autonomy. I wanted to define myself as a young woman distinct from who I had learned I was under extremist, fundamentalist religious dictates — merely the rib of Adam.

So one cold fall evening, with several plastic grocery bags stuffed with clothing, I left. I used the money I had been saving for driver’s education to pay for my first month’s rent in a rooming home. In my room I had a small fridge, a countertop stove, a pillow, and a sleeping bag. Most importantly for a girl on her own, I had a door that locked.

I was courageous (and likely also reckless, given my adolescent brain’s propensity to underestimate risk), yet never reflected on how my courage rested on the backs of the women who came before me. It was only because of the relentless work of women who had fought for my freedom that I was able to leave and get a job, make money, and provide myself shelter.

I was struck by the freedom I could exercise by choice. I knew even at the most difficult times that there was hope because I could make choices that would determine the course of my life, for good or ill. No one would force me. I was free.

Decades passed and it never occurred to me that my rights could be precarious.

~~~

When I saw the attack on women’s sex-based rights begin to gain momentum in the West, in the form of gender identity ideology, alongside the hard left’s science-denying radicalism, I did not join the public outcry. I watched as the very same sort of magical thinking from the extremist religion I grew up in took over many faculties of post-secondary education. The academy — once a bastion for the pursuit of truth through critical thinking, science, and debate — began to look a lot like a religious cult of the left.

I watched as ideology moved from the academy into our cultural institutions and then through society. Some parts of history became acceptable to remember, and others not, creating selective cultural amnesia. It was suddenly a social justice right to spew hate and vitriol, or to deface, burn, or otherwise destroy cultural symbols and institutions. Science — the method of investigative observation, questioning, hypothesizing, and testing that helps create knowledge — was labelled a politically-biased, colonial “idea.” Not even math was immune, with some academics suggesting the “belief” that 2+2=4 was not reflective of “other ways of learning,” and therefore not always true.

Gender studies — an outcrop of postmodernism and constructionism — chipped away at the biological, immutable fact of sex differentiation, insisting the sex binary was not real. It posited that humans could be deconstructed into disparate parts and existed on “spectrums,” that perhaps dozens of “genders” existed, and that male and female were not fixed categories. Those who wanted to erase the sex binary weaponized both invented genders and pronouns, targeting any person who did not agree as “discriminatory.” As this ideology dismantled sex, it also deconstructed age, turning its gaze towards the normalization of adult sexual attraction to children within the academic stream of gender studies.

When these beliefs were challenged using scientific evidence, data, or historical and present realities, in a further Orwellian turn, truth itself was labelled bigoted.

It may have been institutions that introduced these ideologies and newspeak, but it is individuals that ushered in the crisis we face now. It is only because of each person’s willingness to ignore, conform, pretend, and lie that we allowed science-denying ideology to first become common vernacular, then the dominant narrative.

I had lived this before. Humans with rational faculties will abandon reason, sacrifice their own family members, and subscribe to outrageous and harmful ideas in order to maintain their position in the tribe.

I watched from the sidelines as women were deconstructed into non-entities, and children were set on by those determined to dismantle immutable categories dictated by nature. I sat in a terrible mix of fear and lethargy until I could not anymore.

I needed to investigate my shadow.

~~~

I understand now that I was acting from a part of me that still subscribed to the internalized misogyny I had learned in my youth. I knew that taking powerful action —  to not comply and to speak the truth — meant that I had to confront two specific fears.

One I had met before in the rare, but dangerous, predatorial men with whom I had crossed paths as a young, vulnerable girl on her own. And, as any woman who has been intimidated, overpowered, or physically or sexually assaulted by a man knows, men and women are very different indeed. This is a physical reality that vulnerable women face more often. If a man loses his way and combines predatorial behaviour with physical prowess, he becomes a danger that can not only harm, but kill us. For women, sex-based rights, such as the right to women-only spaces, are not optional.

In 2017, trans-identified people were granted special rights and protection under the Canadian Human Rights Act, preventing discrimination on account of gender identity or expression. This was not enough for some. The demands became intrusive, as self-identified transwomen insisted also on access to women’s spaces and sports.

Some women said “no.”  These women have been subjected to an endless barrage of threats and hate from trans activists who demanded subservience.

This scared me for a time. No one wants to meet the mob.

I don’t believe that most men are misogynist or that all transwomen want to destroy women’s rights and safety. But we must ask what it says about a man — trans-identified or not —  who refuses to respect a woman’s “no.”

It is important also to note that there are numerous women supporting this ideology, allowing men to trample over women’s boundaries. The phenomenon of women offering up women’s identities and sex-segregated spaces to men who demand it may be related to internalized misogyny, but is more likely a part of what Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz described as the confusion of offering the teat of compassion when one should be wielding the sword of discernment. These women believe they are helping a marginalized population, but they are hurting half the population and abandoning their own, and others, rights and safety in order to “be nice.”

Fear also visited me because I had previously experienced exile from the group. Although I gained my freedom and autonomy at a young age, it came at a high cost: losing my family and community. Shunning takes an incredible psychological, emotional, and physical toll. Those of us who want to say “no,” and fight to protect our sex-based rights know we will be subjected to a modern version of old-fashioned mobbing and shunning. The deep slumber of unconsciousness can be a compelling alternative to facing our fear.

Yet there is a driver even more powerful than fear, and it is the protective and courageous force of love. A woman who watches another woman be harmed and does nothing psychologically damages herself. Women also cannot collectively watch children become victims of delusional ideologies and still face the mirror. Ignoring our protective instincts demands an incredible separation from ourselves. When we are connected to love for self and other, we know both rationally and instinctively that we have a responsibility to protect each other and children.

~~~

We are at a profound historical moment. In a few short years, efforts to erase biological women have snowballed. The ideologies that seek to deconstruct all categories and boundaries of protection are now dominant narratives in our mainstream media, public school systems, legal and justice systems, workplaces, and even, disturbingly, our medical and related health institutions. It is a surreal experience to witness ideology get into bed with science.

Community organizations across Canada have quickly fallen in line. Women’s centres have opened their doors to “self-identified women,” obliterating long-standing community supports for women. Even women’s rape shelters are open to biological males. The oldest rape crisis centre in Canada, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, was subject to vitriolic attack after refusing to allow access to biological males. The shelter was targeted with hate. Dead vermin were nailed to their door. “F**k TERFs”  and “Kill TERFs, trans power” was graffitied across their windows. Activists petitioned to have this community pillar’s funding pulled, and Vancouver City Council caved. The shelter did not. They were attacked for saying the one word perpetrators of aggression or violence against women do not respect.

In 2017, Canada’s Liberal government paved the way to compromising women’s sex-based rights when they passed legislation ostensibly to protect people from discrimination based on gender identity and expression, but which far exceeded its purported aim. These laws entitled activists to manipulate language, which is what allows us to speak about and understand reality, so women could no longer be spoken about. Progressives applauded such female-obliterating language. Women became “birthing people” and “uterus-bearers.” They produced chest milk. A woman might have a penis, or male gametes. A woman was a thought. A woman was a feeling. A woman was a fiction.

Around the developed world, men who self-identified as women were allowed into women’s prisons, health centres, bathrooms, shelters, changerooms, and gyms. Men were self-identifying as female competitors in women’s sports. These men started smashing records. Women who had worked their whole lives to reach their competitive potential were being beaten by biological men. It was — it is — unbelievable.

In 2023, we are at the precise place feminists warned we would arrive should we fall into complacency. Hard left extremism, fervently religious in nature, has pulled us nearly to the nadir of its radicalized, science-denying demolition of rights and protections. Science denial harms women and children the most. It defines women as non-persons, viewing them instead as subjects of men, and uses children in harmful ways as pawns of radicalized ideologies.

In Canada, we are led by a head of state, Justin Trudeau, who is leading the demolition, declaring “transwomen are women,” and whose government has paved the way for the decimation of women’s sex-based rights and the ability to differentiate ourselves autonomously as persons from men.

We must make conscious what has been alive in the shadows all this time. There are still some men who believe women’s identities belong to them. To them, women are only a rib of Adam, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. This historical moment is evidence of the society we create when we fall into slumber, refuse to see our shadow, accept myths as reality, and deny science and history.

Women have historically been refused legal personhood specifically and only because of our sex. The purpose of the women’s suffrage movement was so we could take equal part in the political system, just like the only other sex: men. This was not only so we could participate fully in public life, but so we could vote in favour of our own interests.

Those of us who have been complacent are waking from a long slumber precisely because the threat of not facing the shadow of cultural misogyny is so high. Each time those who want to erase women threaten or intimidate one of us, they wake up legions more. As our right to exist as biological beings unique from men, to choose women-only spaces, and to represent ourselves are again being colonized, we must not allow ourselves to shirk from fear but face it. Women know we are not a fiction. And we will force leaders who dwell in the shadows, believing we do not exist, back into reality when as embodied females we enact our legal right to vote and remove them from power.

Carla Duda is a therapist and author of the upcoming book, “The Art & Practice of Responsibility: Improve relationships, create meaning, foster well-being.” Learn more about her work and writing on topics like ethical therapy, relationships, and parenting at carladuda.com.

The post Adam’s Rib: I escaped a fundamentalist religion only to find women’s rights under threat on the outside appeared first on Feminist Current.

Kellie-Jay Keen is attacked and mobbed by trans activists in New Zealand

The grotesque irony of accusing @ThePosieParker of being a violent threat. I hope at very least this incident shows the world the truth about this movement. https://t.co/n1DQloKSse

— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) March 25, 2023

Kellie-Jay Keen (also known as Posie Parker), founder of Standing for Women, was to host her Let Women Speak event on Saturday morning in Auckland, but was met with a mob of protesters who pelted her with tomato juice and water, yelling, “fuck you cunt” and “go home Posie, go home.” Trans activists pushed down metal barriers to mob the 5’1” mother of four. Keen was forced to abandon the event, fearing for her life, and was escorted away through a crowd of deranged, screaming protesters by police and her security team.

Keen had been smeared as a Nazi in the country after a small group of men at her Melbourne event gave Nazi salutes. Keen had no association with these men, and said she doubts they were in fact neo-Nazis:

“All of this doesn’t make any sense, it feels really off. I mean, look in the UK. We had police impregnating animal rights campaigners. And we had those police infiltrating those groups. I don’t think it’s beyond the wits of anyone to think that either that was TRAs [trans rights activists] dressed up, or police, or, something was just off.”

When asked about the men giving Nazi salutes, she told The Herald:

“They’re absolutely not associated with me whatsoever. I absolutely abhor anything to do with Nazis. It’s preposterous they even exist in 2023.”

The executive director of Gender Minorities Aotearoa, a New Zealand trans organization, Ahi Wi-Hongi, said they are thrilled at the display of opposition to Keen’s event:

“People have really showed her that we don’t want that here, it’s not welcome. Perhaps she’s gonna pack up and leave — hopefully.

For us the takeaway is that people like her shouldn’t be allowed to come here and spread hateful views and carry out actions that result in people being harmed.”

The Let Women Speak gathering in Wellington planned for tomorrow has been cancelled as Keen’s security team say they cannot keep her safe from violence.

Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau said she “condemns the views and actions” espoused by Keen and that, “In Wellington we proudly celebrate and welcome diversity and inclusion of all members of our community.”

Members of the Rainbow Greens party had called for Keen to be blocked entry to New Zealand, saying she has a “longstanding track record of hateful speech and the incitement of violence towards trans and gender diverse people as well as other marginalized communities.”

“This is because it directly threatens the human rights and bodily integrity of people—in this case, our takatāpui, trans and gender-diverse communities. It is also because these networks of extremists are connected and reinforce one another.”

These kinds of comments offer a particularly glaring irony considering the very real threats women like Keen continue to face every time they attempt to speak publicly about the conflict between gender identity ideology and women’s rights.

Keen told The Daily Mail:

“I do feel like public enemy No 1 out here, genuinely I feel afraid. I am a hate figure. I didn’t realize how much women are hated by some parts of society before I came here. I feel like there are some great powers somewhere who don’t want women talking.

I can take being called a transphobe, but calling someone a Nazi? One of the politicians here called me a c***. They used rhyming slang of ‘dropkick and punt.

The war on women in these countries is absolutely frightening.

I have got to have a team of seven security guards out here with me. I genuinely do feel my life could be in danger sometimes.”

Meanwhile, Eliana Rubashkyn, the protester who threw juice on Keen explained:

“We have to stop the hate against our communities because the world is, right now. It feels like we are in the 1930s again.

New Zealand needs to stand up in front of the world and say this is not welcome here. We protect trans people.”

Rubashkyn told 1News the juice because represented the blood of “our people.”

“I want her to know that her words are blood.”

The post Kellie-Jay Keen is attacked and mobbed by trans activists in New Zealand appeared first on Feminist Current.

Happy International Women’s Day! Women are over

And with a disturbing rise in anti-transgender hate here in Canada and around the world recently, I want to be very clear about one more thing: Trans women are women. We will always stand up to this hate – whenever and wherever it occurs.— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) March 8, 2023

International Women’s Day went mainstream in 1977, the heyday of the women’s rights movement, and has been celebrated on March 8th ever since. In those days, women’s rights were about women. But that is boring and passe, except for the outfits. Today, we still like Gloria Steinem’s glasses, but have no idea if she has a vagina or not, and honestly, who cares! She’s got parts, right?

The future is here and it’s not female. A female is a relic of the olden days, before they had penises and stubble. Don’t be sad — we had a good run! Like, centuries. But now it’s time to wrap it up.

Today, President Biden offered Alba Rueda, a man with long blonde hair, an International Women of Courage award. Rueda is Argentina’s Special Envoy for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and the country’s first male politician with long blonde hair. It is very brave of him to accept an award for brave women on a day for women. Most others would be ashamed. A bold move!

In Canada, a country so progressive they’ve progressed all the way up to a size Z bra, Hershey’s celebrated Fae Johnstone, a man who has made destroying women’s rights into a career, as part of their International Women’s Day campaign, “She For Her.” Johnstone protested my testimony against Bill C-16 back in 2017, on account of his desire to access women’s washrooms, which he did at Parliament that day, thereby proving his dick was a girl one. In response to Fae’s view of the future, where everyone is able live as their authentic selves, adam’s apples and all, a #BoycottHersheys campaign was launched by women who still believe International Women’s Day is for women.

.@Hersheys is putting the face of a trans-“woman” on chocolate bar wrappers with “HerShe” highlighted in honor of international women’s day.
Hershey’s is erasing women. pic.twitter.com/JzRkAtwTdO

— Leftism (@LeftismForU) March 1, 2023

Canadian media was not having it, alas. At ChekNews, Laura Brougham criticized the #BoycottHersheys campaign, writing, “This is the latest high-profile example of trans women facing backlash just for being who they are.”

It’s funny to defend men who want to be women in this way, as clearly the “trans” prefix attached to “women” demonstrates a desire to be someone one is not. If “transwomen” were already women, there would be no need to “trans.” You would just be a woman. And if you were indeed going to “just be who you are,” you would just be a man. You wouldn’t need to change a thing — body or pronoun.

But what are meanings of words to trans activists or Canadian media? Surely nothing more than a suggestion.

Broughton acknowledges that “trans rights” are not in fact under attack in Canada, as they have full government and institutional support, but quotes KJ Reed, a faculty member in Women and Gender Studies at Vancouver Island University (VIU), who offers a long list of ways people who call themselves trans still suffer. Reed tells Broughton:

“People who experience discrimination don’t always have the resources or the time to seek redress under the law. So it means taking time off work, it means talking to lawyers, it means accessing a system that requires both time and monetary resources.”

This is an interesting point, because the only people I know who have had to hire lawyers or “take time off of work” (on account of being fired, to be fair, but who doesn’t need a break sometimes!) within the gender identity debate are women who say men are not women. In any case, if the only discrimination being faced by men claiming to be women in Canada is that sometimes they have to take time off of work, I think they’re doing ok.

Reed is not only a faculty member at VIU, but apparently is also a PhD candidate in the department I graduated from at Simon Fraser University (SFU): Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Things seem to have changed quite a bit!

Back when I began studying at VIU, then at SFU, Women’s Studies was still Women’s Studies. There were courses about women and work, women in the media, women and sexuality, Indigenous women, African women, women in film, and more! In around 2010, everything changed. Pretty much across North America, Women’s Studies departments became Gender Studies departments, and the course material became focused not on women, but on gender theory. I was lucky enough to still be able to get away with focusing my work on actual women back when I was completing my graduate degree, and even produced a radio project featuring radical feminist lesbian, Sheila Jeffreys, who had been critical of transgenderism for many years at that point. My supervisor was not a fan, and said so in her feedback on my grad project, but I managed to graduate with a 4.0 despite my insistence on including cancelled radical feminists who were anti-porn and anti-transgenderism in my work.

No doubt I would have been burned at the stake had I been attempting this even half a  decade later, which I surely would have, had I continued on to do a PhD as planned. Instead, I went into journalism, yet another unfeasible place for me, considering my insistence on sharing inconvenient views and platforming the cancelled. I remember dreaming of working at the CBC. Ha! Carol only-one-side-to-this-discussion-and-it’s-mine Off would not have liked that much. Speaking out loud about women’s rights is the same as being a Holocaust denier at the CBC.

In an effort to continue saying “women” instead of “gender,” and hateful things like “men are male,” I went fully independent, via this very website!

I had no idea how bad things would get.

Ten years after I launched Feminist Current as a place for women to discuss and write about woman things, without compromising to third wave postmodernist NewThink, women are done.

International Women’s Day is for men, which means it is no longer.

The Women’s March tweeted:

David Eby, Premier of British Columbia and leader of the BC NDP took the opportunity to shout out his beautiful bros:

Rather than amplify the hateful voices targeting trans people in the replies to previous posts, let me just say, on #InternationalWomensDay – and every other day of the year, trans women are women. https://t.co/eGrEoTNBbn

— David Eby (@Dave_Eby) March 8, 2023

And of course, Canada’s Top Feminist, Justin Trudeau, announced:

“When women and girls are empowered, entire families, communities, and societies succeed. So today, as we mark #IWD2023 and celebrate the incredible women and girls in our lives, let’s keep working to build a more equal and equitable future.”

He made sure to add:

“And with a disturbing rise in anti-transgender hate here in Canada and around the world recently, I want to be very clear about one more thing: Trans women are women. We will always stand up to this hate — whenever and wherever it occurs.“

And there you have it. Men are women, and International Women’s Day is about them.

We are done. We are over. Time to move on. I mean, we’ve been women this whole time! Let someone else have a shot.

Let’s be the bigger uterus-havers and wish Justin Trudeau all the best in his efforts to make babies out of two penises.

The post Happy International Women’s Day! Women are over appeared first on Feminist Current.

Gender Changes: Genderfluidity and Trans Possibilities

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Bella Ramsey remarked, “I guess my gender has always been very fluid,” explaining that he always enjoyed being mistaken for a boy, and that “being gendered isn’t something that I particularly like.” The rising star of HBO’s The Last of Us wore a chest binder while filming […]

‘Affirmation Generation’ tells truths about ‘trans youth’ the media won’t touch

Proponents of “transgenderism” would have us believe medical transition is the only path for children identifying as “transgender,” but a growing number of detransitioners belies this stance.

On February 18, Panacol Productions released a new documentary about the medical transition of young people on the popular video platform Vimeo. Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine shines a timely spotlight on a medical scandal in the making. Four days later, after it had been viewed 19,000 times, Vimeo removed the film.

Affirmation Generation’s producer, Vera Linder, told me via email last night that when Vimeo removed her documentary she received an email from the company informing her that her content violated Vimeo’s Terms of Service. She also speculated, “It’s possible that getting 19,000 views in three days generated too much traffic.” Linder said she submitted an appeal.

Today Linder contacted me again to say Vimeo had reinstated her documentary. She believes the about-face is due to the outpouring of support the film received on Twitter.

The one-and-a-half-hour film features interviews with half a dozen detransitioners and desisters, as well as doctors, therapists, and journalists. It is organized into three parts: Dysphoria, The Only Path: Affirmation and Transition, and Detransition.

Like another recently released (and promptly censored) documentary, Dead Name, which  shines a light on parents of children who claim to be the opposite sex, Affirmation Generation foregrounds a group neglected by mainstream media: detransitioners.

Affirmation Generation centers on “gender dysphoria,” defined in the film as per a report by Reuters as “a feeling of distress from identifying as a gender different from the one assigned at birth.” According to this document, over 42,000 children aged six to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021 in the United States alone — a 70% increase from 2020.

Captions inform viewers that in 2011, 0.1 to 0.3% of the U.S. population was estimated to be “transgender. In 2021, a study of 5000 public school teens found 9% claimed a transgender identity.

The detransitioners — three young men (Joel, David, and Abel) and three young women (Cat, Laura, and Michelle) — share their heartbreaking stories, discussing what led them to attempt a medical “transition,” the side effects of the cross-sex hormones they were given, the permanent damage to their bodies, as well as their reasons for detransitioning and regrets.

The detransitioners’ stories and experiences are supplemented by interviews with a number of licensed therapists and medical professionals, including: Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist from Ireland and author of Bully-Proof Kids and Fragile; Dr. Lisa Littman, the American physician-scientist who coined the term ROGD (Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria) and serves on the advisory boards of GenSpect and Gender Dysphoria Alliance; American endocrinologist Dr. William Malone; Lisa Marchiano, American LCSW, psychoanalyst and author; Sasha Ayad, an American licensed professional counselor, the co-host of Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast (with Stella O’Malley), and a founding board member of several organizations, including the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine; and Stephanie Winn, American LMF therapist and host of the You Must be Some Kind of Therapist podcast.

Other interviewees include Joey Brite, an American desister and activist; journalist Lisa Selin Davis, the author of Tomboy; and Jennifer Bilek, the investigative journalist behind The 11th Hour Blog.

The film opens with footage of rallies, protests, and media clips addressing the medical transition of children. In a televised address to the American nation, Joe Biden says, “To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know that your President sees you.” In another clip, Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage; The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, asks an important question: “So the puzzle is, why, out of nowhere, in the last decade, have we seen a sudden and sharp spike of teenage girls, who have no childhood history of gender dysphoria, suddenly deciding they’re trans — often with their girlfriends?”

Cat, Laura, and Michelle provide some answers.

Cat, who appears to be in her twenties, recalls dressing up in her father’s clothes as a child. Her problems with “gender dysphoria,” however, only began when she reached puberty. Then, she says, “I just started to feel very uncomfortable in my body — very uncomfortable with the changes that were happening.” She recalls browsing the internet at 13, and coming across a forum for FTM (female to male) people:

“… It had tips on how to pass. It had people telling their stories of transitioning and saying that they’d had chest surgery, that they used to have female genitals and now they had male genitals. And just the way they were talking about it, they made it sound like it was entirely possible to change sex.”

Cat’s parents brought her to see a gender therapist. “He affirmed my trans-identity within two appointments — really the first appointment — and I think it was the third appointment that he suggested I start testosterone,” she said.

Cat started hormone therapy, and initially enjoyed the changes happening to her body. However, after a few months she noticed concerning side-effects: almost daily heart palpitations, frequent nausea, weight gain (she gained 20 lbs.), edema, as well as discomfort speaking and singing. Cat, a singer, was also binding her chest.

Cat reflects on the reasons she began to feel so uncomfortable with her body at puberty, explaining, “I think that being sexually assaulted absolutely contributed to my gender dysphoria getting stronger and wanting to be a woman even less.” She also notes that before “transitioning” she had had an eating disorder and a suicide attempt.

Laura had a history of depression, anxiety, and autism before her medical transition, which included hormone therapy and a double mastectomy. When she was 15, she was introduced to the concept of “gender identities” on Tumblr and at school in the gay-straight alliance club. She adopted labels like “androgynous” and “gender-queer” at first, before becoming convinced “transitioning” into a gay man would mean being loved and accepted. In truth, she says:

“The transition didn’t help. It actually made things worse for me, physically, mentally, and socially. Testosterone really worsened my mental health: depression, mood swings, anger issues, social issues. I lost a lot of friends because I was in a bad mental state.”

Eventually, Laura discovered the work of radical feminists who were challenging gender identity ideology, and began to understand the link between trauma and trans-identification:

“I started talking to detransitioners — this very small group — and I realized that it was all due to trauma and nothing had changed and I wasn’t really any different and I wasn’t any better off. The worst part is that I sort of learned that I could have just dealt with it.”

Laura says her double mastectomy was “one of the worst mistakes that I’ve made.”

Echoing the experiences of other detransitioners interviewed in the film, Laura says she turned to professionals, but was “ushered along very mindlessly,” adding, “I have permanent damage because of it.”

Michelle, now in her thirties, says Tumblr and her peers also played a role in introducing her to the concept of gender identity.

Though she had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD, it was “gender dysphoria” that made sense to her:

“It answered the question: Why am I being bullied when I was in elementary school? Oh, it must have been because I was transgender. Why didn’t I like dresses? Why didn’t I want to wear makeup… Oh, all of this is because I’m transgender. Like, so many of my friends are starting to identify as transgender and are starting to transition. It feels like something that is really catching fire.”

She joined TransFam Support Group, for people considering “transitioning,” run by two trans-identified therapists. One day they told her a clinic nearby was looking for transgender patients. “They want experience with transgender patients,” they told Michelle. We learn that one of the clinic’s therapists wrote her a letter recommending testosterone after seeing her for approximately one hour.

Michelle remembers finding the changes to her body interesting at first. She then got a double mastectomy. A video she made afterwards shows her bare-chested and breastless. Looking stunned, she says, “I don’t know what to say, really.”

Eventually, Michelle came to the realization that the childhood bullying she suffered was due to her autism, not because she was “transgender.” But not before undergoing an elective hysterectomy — “the worst thing” she did as part of her attempt to transition. “Even before I detransitioned there was a part of me thinking, ‘Actually, I do want children now.’”

Michelle’s detransition began with her roommate, who had detransitioned and encouraged her to read online posts by other detransitioners. Initially she refused, believing these kinds of posts were written by bigots simply trying to take away “trans healthcare.” However, Michelle eventually realized she was “chasing something that ultimately I was never going to be able to achieve.” She explains:

“If you live as someone who has transitioned, you’re spending the rest of your life either denying your own material reality or trying to convince other people that they need to deny your material reality in order for you to be comfortable in society.”

David, a gay man, began noticing the stigma surrounding homosexuality when he was a child: “I recognized the guilting [and the] the shaming of same-sex attraction within society and culture.” He decided he would be happier as a woman and began calling himself Paige, taking estrogen, and wearing women’s clothing and make-up. He also got silicone implants.

David says the estrogen he was taking led to severe bone loss — initially osteopenia, which turned into osteoporosis, causing him to become hunched over, needing a walker.

David went to New York City to get castrated, and spoke with two transvestites who had undergone complete sex-reassignment surgery, and who dissuaded him from undergoing the procedures himself. David recalls that one of them told him:

“Don’t do it… All of my life I thought that if I could just become a woman I would find peace and joy and happiness… now that I am legally and medically a woman, I’m more miserable now than I was my entire life. I think about taking my life every day.”

The other man also told him he thought about killing himself “several times a day, every day.”

David recounts experiencing severe unhappiness after his transition — feelings he kept hidden even from his friends:

“Everyone that knew me, they would have argued with anybody that ‘Paige’ was content and secure and happy and just being the person she was meant to be and none of them had a clue that I was depressed, that I was bitter, that I hated myself, that I attempted to take my life quite a few times… I recognize that I didn’t just live a lie, I became the lie. I was the lie.”

Joel is a soft-spoken, thin young man who now sports a beard. He developed anorexia at the age of 11, which led to body dysmorphia and eventually a belief that he was “transgender.”

Joel lives in Indiana and says it is incredibly easy to obtain hormone treatments if you live in an area that has adopted the “informed consent model.” He made an appointment with a doctor in Chicago, and just two weeks later received estrogen. He describes his initial honeymoon phase with hormone therapy, saying, “Everything felt great. My body felt great… I was also becoming an internet influencer pretty quickly.”

Joel had developed a large following on TikTok — in one clip, we see Joel celebrating six months of estrogen injections. He is clean-shaven, heavily made-up, and holding a syringe up to the camera.

Three months later, Joel made another video. He now has a beard and mustache and says his medical transition just made him “more dysphoric.” He explains, “The more that happened to my body, the [more scared] I got, and I came to the realization that I don’t feel like I’m actually transgender.” Joel stayed on hormone therapy for less than a year.

Joel realized that hormone therapy was not having a satisfactory effect on his health, but his desire to stop the treatments was hindered by his social media following. Joel recalls:

“… I had a lot of social media followers, people that looked up to me and made me feel like I was important to them. I felt like I couldn’t go back and that the only option was to just keep pushing forward.”

As a result, Joel became depressed and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Abel is a young bearded man whose medical transition included hormone therapy and breast implants. The sadness and defeat in his voice as he tells his story are palpable. And yet, he says that when he decided to transition he was nearly 100% certain he would never regret it. In the end, Abel had his breast implants removed.

Abel, too, speaks of how easy it is for young people to access wrong-sex hormones. He had just one session with a therapist and was given a letter to transition right away.

Pediatrician Julia Mason reveals that, in many states, young people can walk into a Planned Parenthood and leave with hormones. She explains that Planned Parenthood operates on the “informed consent model” Joel mentioned, and that if youth “sign a piece of paper saying that they acknowledge the risks then they can be given these powerful hormones with irreversible side-effects.”

According to the documentary’s captions, the informed consent model “allows clients to access hormone treatments and surgical interventions without a mental health evaluation or referral from a mental health specialist.”

Stella O’Malley explains:

“I’ve met way too many people — way too many detransitioners — who said: ‘I was constantly trying to fight against the onslaught of nature. I was always fighting against it with the hormones I was taking.’ As somebody said, ‘It’s like putting diesel in the petrol tank.’”

Dr. Malone challenges the claim that puberty blockers are reversible, saying this is “disingenuous on multiple levels.” He says 95% of children who take puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones and that puberty blockers cannot be considered a stand-alone intervention. Moreover, Dr. Malone points out that studies show most children (somewhere between roughly 65% and 98%, depending on which study you look at) who develop gender dysphoria will have resolution of that gender dysphoria by the time they reach adulthood. “This fact seems to be forgotten by medicine currently,” he says.

Dr. Malone enumerates the risks of cross-sex hormone therapy. Males who start estrogen treatments risk blood clots, breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, gallstones, and elevated cholesterol. Females who go on testosterone risk thickening of the blood, severe liver dysfunction, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and breast or uterine cancer.

Close-ups of documents from the Mayo Clinic reveal other complications linked to feminizing and masculinizing hormone therapies, including infertility. “The fact they’re being offered outside of clinical trials, despite the fact there’s so much unknown about long-term risk, is a scandal, in and of itself,” Dr Malone says.

He says there are psychological impacts as well:

“Something that has not gotten a lot of attention but I think will, in the coming years, is the psychological impact of being told by people in positions of authority — physicians in particular — that these interventions would improve that person’s mental health, then coming to discover that not only did the intervention not improve that person’s mental health, but there actually was no evidence to begin with that it ever would.”

Dr. Lisa Littman was the first to produce a study about how social contagion factors into the trans trend, finding that in around 2013-2014, “one after the next teenager was announcing a trans-identification in numbers that greatly exceeded what would be expected.” She says, “It was apparent that these kids were all from the same friendship group.”

Dr. Malone, too, addresses the increasing number of children claiming a transgender identity:

“This has been documented. Not only at clinics in the United States, but also across Europe, a several thousand percent increase in teenage girls in particular. The ratio now is about 80% girls, 20% boys for gender dysphoria.”

Stephanie Winn explains that the idea of transitioning is “highly contagious” because it “appeal[s] to so many of the things that we long for and provide[s] the kind of illusory hope that there’s a way out of normal human struggles like the discomfort of puberty.”

Winn isn’t just critical of the trans trend, but of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM-5) description of the criteria for gender dysphoria:

“It’s really just a list of stereotypes and then someone saying that they don’t fit these stereotypes or that they are uncomfortable in the body that they have. So what’s wrong with that is that you’re recommending some invasive, risky, experimental, and costly medical treatments for something that you’re saying is not a medical condition.”

Sasha Ayad argues that professionals need to “hold space for this being an exploratory thing that teenagers do,” rather than “rubber stamping the identity and encouraging kids to medically transition.” She adds, “This is really the potential of a serious epidemic of medical interventions that are probably going to be inappropriate for many of these kids.”

Oftentimes, discussions of “supporting trans kids” are connected to risk of suicide, should these youths not be encouraged to transition. Winn says “Parents are being intimidated and coerced,” told, “If you don’t affirm right away your kid’s going to commit suicide.” She believes this is incredibly dangerous. “It’s our responsibility to believe in our patient’s capacity for resilience, even and especially when they don’t believe in it themselves.” Winn says:

“We should never tell anyone, under any circumstances, that if you don’t get what you want or if you don’t get what you think is a solution to your problems, you will kill yourself. That’s really damaging. I would call that malpractice.”

Moreover, the data around suicidality in this context is being misrepresented. Ayad explains, “All of the clinicians that are actually tracking current rates of self-harm and suicide will tell you — luckily — the suicide rate is quite, quite, quite low,” adding, “We don’t know medicalizing reduces suicide.”

Interviewees discuss young transitioners’ other (neglected) conditions, including autism, unresolved past trauma, and internalized homophobia and misogyny. Ayad says that “once a kid identifies as trans or describes gender dysphoria, all of the other conditions that they were struggling with before become attributed to the distress of being trans.” O’Malley points to findings in a study done by Tavistock, the largest gender clinic for children in the world (before it was told to shut down last year after an independent review), showing that 48% of the children seeking to medicalize their gender identity were autistic.

There is also concern over the troubling numbers of gay and lesbian youth identifying as “transgender.” Lisa Marchiano says:

“When you realize that most of the young kids who get gender dysphoria will eventually desist — and what the evidence tells us [is] that most of those who desist will then be lesbian or gay — what we may be doing, actually, is sterilizing and destroying the sexual function of kids who may have grown up to be gay or lesbian.”

Lisa Selin Davis notes that some European countries are reevaluting their approach to medical transitions, as systematic reviews did not find evidence to support the idea that these interventions are either medically necessary or qualify as “life-saving treatment.” She says they have issued “very strict guidelines so that children are very carefully evaluated before medically transitioning.” Some of these countries have even begun urging against social transition, as “it appears from preliminary research that social transition generally leads to medical transition.”

Notably, Sweden and Finland both have backtracked on medicalizing so-called “trans kids,” opposing puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors. Mason says Sweden, Finland, and England all followed a commissioned, systematic review of the evidence, finding “either no benefits to youth gender transitions or even that the harms outweighed the benefits.”

Despite these U-turns, Davis says both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health are refusing to do a systematic evidence review.

Dr. Littman discusses her 2021 study, in which she surveyed 100 detransitioners, saying, “The most frequently endorsed reason for detransitioning, in my study, was that their personal definition of male or female changed, so they became comfortable identifying as their natal sex.”

Others expressed concern about medical complications from transitioning, found that their mental health did not improve while transitioning or even worsened with transition, experienced dissatisfaction with the physical results of transition, or discovered that their gender dysphoria was caused by trauma or a mental health condition.

Dr. Littman also comments on the fact that nearly one quarter of survey participants reported internalized homophobia was associated with their gender dysphoria and desire to transition. Accepting themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual was related to their detransitioning.

After listening to the six detransitioners’ stories, we are hardly surprised when Marchiano relates something she has heard repeatedly from detransitioners: “I have ruined my life. I’ve ruined my body. I’ve ruined my health. I had a perfectly good body and now it’s ruined.”

Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine, directed and edited by L. E. Dawes and produced by Vera Linder, is available on Vimeo, free of charge.

Alline Cormier is a Canadian film analyst and retired court interpreter with a B.A. Translation from Université Laval. In her second career she turns the text analysis skills she acquired in university studying translation and literature to film. She makes her home in British Columbia and is currently seeking a publisher for her film guide for women. Alline tweets @ACPicks2.

The post ‘Affirmation Generation’ tells truths about ‘trans youth’ the media won’t touch appeared first on Feminist Current.

The Metaphors Podcast

The last piece of my online identity revamp has been to explore doing a podcast. Yeah, I know, very late to the game. In 2056 I’ll start my TikTok channel. The truth is, I played a bit with them in the first flush of enthusiasm in the 00s, but they never really took for me. I think we all have the social media form that best suits our preferences or talents. Long form blogging is my thing. Audio wasn’t it for me, mainly because I have a fantastically boring voice. I remember doing media training once and after doing a pretend interview in which I felt I had responded like Nicolas Cage on an especially manic day, the trainer smiled sympathetically, saying “could you try being more varied and enthusiastic?”

Also, I am not good at reading a script (as Clint will attest after editing my audiobook readings for 25 Years of Ed Tech). That 25 Years of Ed Tech series that arose from Clint’s audiobook project and Laura Pasquini organising a podcast which was, in many ways, more interesting than the book, rekindled my interest though, as did the always fabulous Terry Greene’s Gettin’ Air podcast. And over the years I have become more accustomed to doing keynotes and just rambling about a subject. I was prompted to take the plunge finally by Maren exploring podcasting for her Virtual Teams book, so I just pinched all her hard won knowledge on getting started.

I have gone for the easy option, using Spotify’s Anchor. I realise this is mildly evil, but have sacrificed morality for ease of use. Sorry. I will say though, that Anchor is very easy to use, if a bit unsophisticated. You can register it in other podcast sites, so you don’t have to listen through Spotify.

What has allowed me to get started is to use the book Metaphors of Ed Tech as the basis. I generally take a metaphor from the book and speak around it for 5-10 minutes, then combine with another one to make an episode. As I blog about metaphors in ed tech quite a bit anyway, I figure there will be some mileage beyond the book also.

I’m not sure if it’ll be a long term thing, and of course, once I get offered the big bucks for adverts you can expect Proctorio endorsements in every episode, but it has been fun. It’s worth having a play with a format you don’t know well every now and then to see if it is a better fit this time around. Anyway, if you fancy a listen, head on over to the Podcast page.

An online presence health check

In my earlier post I was trying to sell the idea that (higher ed related) blogging is experiencing a resurgence. This is partly a justification for myself (and to my line managers), because I’ve been on study leave for 2 weeks. Study leave basically means you have a reason to say no to about 50% of the usual meetings. I’ve been writing a research bid, but I’ve also been using that clearer space in the calendar to update my online presence.

This has included:

• Revamping the edtechie.net landing page – this blog is the main site but people do arrive at the main site and it was old and tatty.
• New blog design and template – look at how swish it looks! And easier to read with less clutter I think.
• Creating a newsletter – the post on blogs prompted some discussion about RSS, which may or may not see a resurgence. As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to explore different ways of dissemination now that Twitter is less reliable. So, I have a newsletter which is just a monthly round-up of posts you can subscribe to if you feel your email inbox is lonely.
• Creating a podcast – more on this in the next post, but I’ve finally (about 15 years too late), taken the podcast plunge, with a Metaphors of Ed Tech podcast.

I’m not sure if any of these make much difference, but I would argue (vigorously even) that it is a good use of anyone’s time in higher ed to regularly do an online presence health check and try out new avenues. Mainly for all the reasons I mentioned in the post on blogs, having an effective online presence is an entirely respectable and valid aspect of an overall academic identity and like any other aspect it requires some tending every now and then.

The Road to Becoming Enough

Cassidy Randall | Longreads | February 16, 2023 | 4,141 words (15 minutes)

Ben carries a Pulaski ax filched from the cabin’s woodshed as we walk the trail along the Canadian border. Half a mile back, we stepped over a mountain lion’s broad track imprinted fresh on the damp banks of the river, her cub’s pocket-sized paw laid just behind it. Claw marks score the aspens at heights above my head, tufts of fur from the enormous bears who left them snagged by the peeling bark. Yesterday we heard a wolf howl far off in the forest. 

The ax is less for protection from these predators — Ben couldn’t bear to kill any of them, even hoping the cabin’s resident pack rat outsmarts the trap he half-heartedly set for it — and more to intimidate any poachers we might come across in this remote corner of Glacier National Park. He’s been coming to the old ranger station here every fall for 20 years in solitary soul-searching rituals, under the pretext of performing this antiquated patrol for illegal hunters. He’s never brought anyone else in for such a long stint. And never someone so important to him, he says. It makes him more fearful of everything that can go wrong in the deep wild out here. Another reason he carries the ax. 

It still boggles my mind that I could be important like that to someone.

To the north of this border trail lies Revelstoke, British Columbia: the mountain mecca that’s now my home. To the east and south rises the jagged expanse of the rest of Glacier, where Ben and I first met so many years ago — back when I called Montana home, when I wrote him off as another failed relationship in a lifelong string of them. Back when I hitched my self-worth and happiness to being loved by a man. 

To the west, my Montana-bought truck with its British Columbia license plates sits in the sagebrush waiting for our return. For me to decide which direction to drive it: Back to Canada, where I’ve chosen me, and the mountains, over men. Or south into Montana with Ben, and everything I’ve already left behind. 

---

The truck didn’t come until later. The little sedan that carried me to Montana came first. 

In 2005, I piloted that gold Ford Focus from Los Angeles up to Missoula one November, looking to spend the winter there during my off-season from teaching outdoor education in my native California. A child of salt water and dusty ponderosa forests, I’d never “spent a winter” anywhere with actual winter. I was looking for a novel three or four months before going back to teaching. 

If I’m honest with myself, I was really looking for something else. 

Inside my head then, I was still the awkward, nerdy girl of my youth. Growing up, I was unaware I was a nerd. I was proud of my intelligence. I rushed to shoot my hand up first in class. I thought it was cool to bury my nose in Lord of the Rings books during free time, and when someone interrupted me, cry out, “Hold on! I’m in the middle of a battle scene!” I was both chubby and the tallest girl in the class, looming in both directions over most of the boys. I had crooked teeth and bad eyes, necessitating glasses and braces, although not, thanks to my parents’ foresight on this, at the same time. 

High school brought no transformative hero(ine)’s arc, the type in the ’90s movies of my youth where the mousy loner girl ends up being gorgeous under those glasses, saved from the hell of social rejection by the coolest, hottest guy on campus. I recall vividly when the neighbor boy called to tell me my friends, with whom I’d been inseparable for years, didn’t want to hang out with me anymore. The following day, I stood horrifically alone on the quad at lunch hour, everyone witness to my fresh status as a total loser. Only one or two boys asked me out over those years. I went to my senior prom stag, trailing a group of, by then, painstakingly won girlfriends and their dates. 

So driving north to Missoula at 24, I couldn’t shake the idea that if I hadn’t had a real boyfriend by then, something was wrong with me. I know there were good times in high school, but we are so hardwired for negativity that underlined in bold in my mind was the conviction that I wasn’t attractive enough, fun enough, athletic enough, thin enough, good enough for a man to love me back. 

But in Montana, virtually no one knew me. It would be a clean slate. When I drove my little sedan on the tail of a fierce wind into Missoula, what I was really looking for was salvation. In the form of a Prince Charming mountain man. 

---

The little ski hill outside town, I heard, was the best place to meet guys. Plus, learning to ski would be something to do in the long, dark cold season. Despite the fact that I grew up at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, home to the gritty ski resorts of Snow Summit and Big Bear, winter was not in my family’s wheelhouse. In junior high, when I heard people start telling stories about learning to ski and snowboard, I cornered my father. 

“Dad, why don’t we ever go skiing?” 

A lifelong product of orange groves and waves himself, he replied, only half joking, “You can stand in a cold shower and rip up $20 bills for the same effect.”

I figured skiing, then, would be a trial, a task that must be accomplished toward an end goal. But, shockingly, I turned out to be good at it. Learning what my body could do in harmony with a certain angle of slope or a particular pattern of snow-robed pine trees made me forget for a while about that uncoordinated little girl. I’d been praying to winter to offer up a romance, was ready to make sacrifices to this new god if it asked for them. And perhaps it did, and I delivered unknowingly and without question, as snow edged out the desert heat from my bones. It fell in my dreams and in drifts behind my eyes. I didn’t find any princes there. But I did find my own power awakening. 

I dreamed of bigger mountains, deeper forests, and people to explore them with, as all my friends got married, had children, and insulated themselves.

Spring came, the outdoor education season started in California, and my little sedan stayed parked in Montana. 

The landscape seeded in my skin. Creeks and rivers rearranged and settled into my blood vessels, trail dust tattooed my ankles. The landscape blurred something, too: the primary geographical feature of my college years. That three-story sorority house in West L.A., packed with 50 young women and full-length mirrors on every landing and at the end of every hallway, mercilessly insisted on what my body was supposed to look like, how the right clothes were supposed to hang on my breasts, which weren’t big enough, and my stomach, which wasn’t flat enough. Surely if I could fit the right mold then I would be worthy of love and the men would flock. I ran the perimeter of campus every other day. I counted calories. The energy it took exhausted me. And I wasn’t the only one in that house. All those bodies that held staggering intelligence and ambition and promise reduced to the pursuit of an unattainable image at the bid of West L.A.

But here. Here my body began to transmute into what it could do, not what it looked like, rinsing away what Los Angeles had taught me about image and self-worth and the dubious merit of a thin pair of thighs. It was in the midst of that transcendence that romance finally materialized. 

At 25 years old, I was saved. For a few years, I was part of something. As in, partner. As in, love, reciprocal. As in, half of a whole. With him, I was whole. I don’t believe I ever told him he was my first boyfriend. I never wanted him to think of me as flawed, to be repulsed by my past incapacity for inspiring attraction. And I did love him, but perhaps it was secondary to finally achieving what so much of Western culture had taught my generation of girls, insidiously and thoroughly, about what “complete” means.

Then he left for me another woman. One “more capable outdoors,” “more spiritually connected to the woods,” more enough of basically everything that I wasn’t. I walked the trails and swam the rivers in an attempt to wash away the pronouncement of my lacking, asked the gilded sun that kaleidoscoped through the cottonwoods and larch to evaporate it from my skin into the wide Montana sky.

I never stopped to think whether he had ever been enough for me. 

---

Some years after, I drove through the long light of a July night to West Glacier. Headed for a date. By then I’d been on many. Some stuck, and I’d be madly in love for a few months until my switch inexplicably flipped and I’d wonder what the hell I’d been thinking. But most hadn’t stuck, and second dates were a rarity. I always figured it was my fault. 

This one was an epic blind date. A mutual friend had introduced me to a man named Ben, who was stationed in Glacier doing trail work. He invited me to summit a peak in the park, if I didn’t mind staying the night on his couch for an early start in the morning. It was a spectacular act of faith for a first date. But I knew about faith. It was one of the things my friends said they liked best about me: how I put my heart on the chopping block again and again.

I recall certain scenes, particular details, of those 24 hours. Him walking down the steps of his little cabin with a beer in each hand before I even turned off the ignition, a couple tattoos snaking up his arms to disappear under rolled-up sleeves. How I couldn’t decide if his eyes were hazel or green. Pulling a scratchy blanket up to my chin on the too-small couch. The dark before dawn when he made us gigantic sandwiches of bacon and runny eggs.

I remember, perhaps because it was embarrassing, that as we passed the long stretch of Lake McDonald on the way up Going-to-the-Sun Road, I said without thinking: “Do you know that one of my favorite things in the whole world is jumping naked into a lake after a long hike?” 

I hadn’t meant it flirtatiously. It was just a fact about myself, like, “I am not a morning person,” or, “Actually, runny eggs really gross me out.” 

He grinned knowingly. “Well then. We’ll have to see if we can find any spots for you later.” 

I also recall that at the trailhead, he took off nearly at a sprint. I kicked into gear to keep up, my attempt to carry on a conversation punctuated by gasping even as he pulled farther ahead. I remember thinking he was just another mountain man like all the others who demonstrated clearly that I possessed neither the speed nor strength required for their adventure pursuits, which were more important than me, who was perhaps just a hindrance out here, on second thought, so why don’t we just meet up for a beer and a shag later?

“Is this a test?” I said to his back. If I wasn’t tough enough or whatever this guy was looking for, I wanted to know it now. If I’d learned anything over the years, it was that I could cut off the hoping and go straight to the rejection and save myself some torture.

“What?” He slowed, turning to look at me over his shoulder. “No! I’m just used to trail work, and the faster you hike, the faster you get things done and get back to camp for dinner. We can slow down, for sure. I’m sorry.” 

I was unused to apologies or the outside-the-self awareness required to issue them. I don’t remember whether the conversation was awkward or easy after that. I know that the summit was windy and we took a single photo, his dimple showing through strands of my hurricane hair. And that he got us miserably lost on the return after claiming he knew the trails in the park like his own bones. I handled it badly, we drove past Lake McDonald in the late afternoon without a word, and I folded myself into my Focus after a curt goodbye. And I remember the thought, as I drove back south: Another one bites the dust.

---

I left Montana shortly after. I dreamed of bigger mountains, deeper forests, and people to explore them with, as all my friends got married, had children, and insulated themselves. But the biggest reason was that I dreamed of falling in love for good. Montana had delivered only drought and dust and failure in that department.

I sold the sedan. I bought the truck — which fit who I had become, and would fit this next leg of the journey so much better. I drove, trying on landscapes where it took me. East, south, west. Eventually I drove north, clear through the border, extending the route I’d began when I left Los Angeles all those years ago. I finally turned off the engine in a tiny mountain town in British Columbia.

Revelstoke’s bladed ridgelines repeated themselves to the Yukon. These mountains were religion with prophets and fanatics and martyrs. The light through thick stands of hemlock and behemoth ancient cedar was harder to obtain, more gratifying to subsume because of it. This landscape was sharp, nearly impenetrable, and it would never even fit inside my body. 

I began, if not to turn away from the mythical notion of a man to “complete” me, to accept that there was no love out there for me. I chose mountains instead.

---

One late October afternoon, I knelt in front of my truck with a screwdriver to loosen my Montana license plates. I’d been here long enough that it was time. The Revelstoke air chilled with the sharp northern tilt of the earth and I thought, fleetingly, of math equation word problems about narrowing angles of light between the southern California desert and a Canadian ski town: “X equals how far she has come, measured in angles and distance.” Up here, I’d discovered the depth of my own capabilities. I’d expanded my limits in adventure sports, blossomed into a writer, surrounded myself with a community that lifted me up in those things. I’d traveled so far from that nerdy, chubby, awkward girl and her erroneous convictions. But internal growth is mostly unquantifiable with simple equations.

I twisted the tool on a corner of the Montana plate. The aluminum was bent from where I’d hit a deer some years before. She ran impossibly away and out of sight, trailing blood from wounds from which I knew she couldn’t recover. The blood was long gone from the plate, but her imprint remained. I pulled off the worn rectangle and affixed the shiny panel of my new British Columbia plate. It hung straight on my bent bumper. I ran my hand over its clean white slate, satisfied.

A few months later, a notification popped up on Facebook. It was Ben’s birthday. On a trip back down to Montana some years back to grab my things from storage, I’d bumped into him in an old watering hole in Missoula where he had relocated for graduate school, and my brain did an about-face. It forgot about the bad parts of that first date and focused clearly, instead, on the topography of his body perfectly fitting mine when he stood to hug me. On a whim, I wrote Happy birthday on his profile. He replied immediately on Messenger. 

I want to apologize, again, for getting us lost on our hike all those years ago. I’ve felt bad about it ever since. 

The chat window held the archived thread of our first communication, timestamped five years ago. Scrolling back I saw the past iteration of myself: a girl less confident, still so careful to present herself so as to be liked. I saw him: striding assuredly into the wild whether or not he knew where he was going. 

The following month, at Ben’s invitation, I stopped in Whitefish, just south of the Canadian border where he lived now, to see him on my way to Missoula. My stomach dropped as I pulled into town, waking up butterflies that tickled my insides. I couldn’t figure out why the butterflies were having a party in there. I already knew Ben. 

He sat on the porch steps of an antique two-story house on the corner, sleeves rolled up to reveal those tattoos, elbows on his knees, scanning the street. He rose when he saw my car and smiled. The dimple. 

“How was the drive?” he asked. So many ways to respond. Instructive, I could say. Delivering. Redeeming. But he, asking only about this short leg of my long road to discovery, would be confused. I replied simply, “Good.” 

His tiny living room smelled of incense and woodsmoke and aging paper from the books overflowing a shelf. I turned to sit on an ugly plaid loveseat by the door, and stopped to examine an enormous map above it, with penned lines drawn all over it.

“Is this Glacier?” I asked him. 

He’d shut the door behind him, and was trying to find an innocuous place to stand in the small room with me in it. He settled for leaning against the wall. “Yeah. Those are all the trails I’ve hiked.” 

I leaned toward it, peering at an inked spider web in the northwest corner, right on the Canadian border. It was nowhere I’d ever heard of.

“That’s Kishenehn,” he said. “An old ranger station. I stay there every fall to patrol for poachers. It’s not on any maps anymore, but park officials still like to have a presence there during hunting season.” He paused. “It’s a pretty special place.”

That afternoon, something between us flicked on like a light. I could close my eyes and point to where he stood in a crowded room. As we hiked up a local mountain to ski down it, he looked at me and smiled with that dimple deepening and a premonition struck me to my core with a singular clarity: This will be big.

---

Some months later, we sat on my tailgate sipping my favorite Montana beer that Ben had brought up to Revelstoke, watching the August sun sink below the mountains across from where my truck sat on the river bank. A lovely moment. 

We argued through it. 

“I don’t want to keep going like this, with two weeks or more between seeing you,” he said. “It’s hard to be away from you so much. I can’t wait until we live in the same town.”

“But what will that even look like?” I downed the rest of my beer. “You’ve said you don’t want to move up here, which I get. It’s hard to get residency, or even a work permit. Trust me, I know, I’ve been through it.”

“It would be easier for you to move back down there. Don’t you want to be back in Montana eventually? With all your best friends? And me?”

I went to work peeling the label off the bottle in my hands to keep them busy while I figured out how to articulate what I needed to say. We’d met in his place, in mine. I fed him my northern landscape, the big newness of it all, the dark rainforest with ancient trees and the snowblind ridges unfurling to the Arctic. He fanned the dying embers of cottonwood light in me. But the drive back north after my visits to Montana always felt more … right.

“I don’t reach my full potential in Montana,” I said. “This is where I reach my full potential. It’s where I expand. And I’ve worked so hard to be here.”

I had finally become enough for myself — in fact, more than I ever thought I could be — and my hyper-independent, jaded heart was perhaps incapable of opening itself to the offer of big, complicated love. Real love, not that movie shit. And so then I said what I couldn’t take back: “I’m not ready to sacrifice everything for this.” 

Hurt pooled in his eyes, reflecting a skyline so foreign to him where the sun had just been.

Later we lay wrapped around each other in my bed, surrendering to sleep in our last night together before we separated ourselves by hundreds of miles, again, when he whispered in my ear, “Will you come with me to Kishenehn this fall?”

His sacred place. He’d told me how that specific corner had mapped itself inside his young and unsure skin and grown into the man lying beside me. I knew about places like that.  

---

At the center of a treed clearing, hidden from the wondrous skylines that defined Glacier, Kishenehn Ranger Station sat shrouded in seclusion. Elk and moose antlers hung over the cabin’s timber-frame porch. Ben toured me around the grounds, the few outbuildings that surrounded the cabin like satellites. At the old fire crew bunkhouse, Ben motioned me around a corner.

“See these depressions along the perimeter?” he said, pointing to the ground at a line of blurry craters the size of my head. “These are century tracks, where bears have walked in the same footsteps for generations. And these,” he gestured to a series of scores in the exterior log wall at chest height and higher, “are claw marks. We’ll probably find some fur around too — yep, here.” He picked a few light brown hairs off the wood and handed them to me. Then he adjusted the bear spray on the chest strap of his pack and led us toward the creek. 

He pointed out every track, explained every sound, inhaled the sky, and breathed it into me. He was so in his element here that he appeared the most solid he’d ever looked. And I understood, as I followed him along these trails that had shaped him the way my long road north had shaped me, that he didn’t need me to complete him, either.

He’d told me how that specific corner had mapped itself inside his young and unsure skin and grown into the man lying beside me. I knew about places like that.  

We woke the next morning to 10 degrees and frost on the grass. A good morning for lingering over coffee by the woodstove. We read by the windows to catch their light. Ben put down his book often to watch the fringe of trees outside, which is why he was the one who saw the doe as she edged into the clearing. He called me over softly. Two fawns emerged from the trees, keeping close to the doe as the little family made its way through the wide meadow and disappeared into the light on the other side. 

Ben smiled and pulled me down into his lap to lay his head against my chest. 

“What are we going to do?” I asked into the quiet.

“About what?” 

“About us. Where are we going to live?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I thought you weren’t ready to have that conversation.”

Before I could think too much about it, I said:

“I think you’re the love of my life.”

His eyes were green, then. “I know you’re the love of mine.” 

---

Days later, with the temperature plunging, we trekked back to my truck in the sagebrush. The journey to a more fully formed iteration of the self looks like lines on a road atlas — or, for some, a wilderness trail map. Sometimes we must continually move forward to arrive. Sometimes, having charted the edges of ourselves, we are drawn to loop back, changed, to places we’ve already passed through, carrying acquired knowledge that lights up the landscape from new angles. 

I had made no decisions about which direction to drive. But I had arrived at this: My full potential did not lie in a particular place. My worth did not reside in another person. And I finally realized, then, that enough had never been the right concept to attach to love. Complement, growth, faith, and yes, even independence, so hard-won for me — these fit better, but were still too simplistic to encompass the reality of what this love could be in all its layered complications. If I were willing to let it. 

I opened my tailgate and shrugged off my heavy pack. Ben set his down next to it and pulled me into the landscape of his body that fit mine so well. “Thank you for coming with me,” he said. 

We got into my truck and drove. 

---

Cassidy Randall is a freelance writer telling stories on adventure, environment, and people expanding human potential. Her work has appeared in TIME, The New York Times, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone, and her first book, The Hard Parts with Oksana Masters, is out February 2023.

‘Dead Name’ shines the spotlight on parents of kids taken in by the gender identity industry

“No debate” is a common response offered to those who challenge gender identity ideology, yet a debate is happening at last. A new documentary has been released — then promptly censored — giving a platform to a group almost wholly ignored by mainstream media: the parents of children identifying as “transgender.”

Dead Name, released in December by BrokenHearted Films, shines a timely spotlight on parents of children who claim to be the opposite sex, encouraged by an entire industry of therapists, doctors, activists, and LGBTQ charities. Given the alarming number of children suddenly identifying as “transgender” in North America, their parents are surely a group worth hearing from. And yet, Dead Name was removed from the popular video platform Vimeo on January 23, after just 34 days.

Dead Name’s director, Taylor Reece, told me via email that when Vimeo removed her 50-minute documentary she received an email from the company, stating, “We have unsuccessfully published your film.” Success is relative, of course, but Reece says viewers from 16 countries bought her documentary. The Federalist’s Tristan Justice contacted Vimeo about the film, and the company told him via email:

“We can confirm that Vimeo removed the video in question for violating our Terms of Service prohibiting discriminatory or hateful content. We strive to enforce these policies objectively and consistently across our platform.”

I reached out to Reece, asking her to respond to the accusation of “discriminatory or hateful” content. She refuted this, saying, “I’d like to emphasize that there is absolutely no hate speech in our film.” She’s right.

Given that Dead Name highlights the plight of and effects on the immediate family of children labelled “transgender,” and addresses the harms of “transgender” ideology, it appears Reece’s documentary has been censored for revealing flaws in and harms of transgender ideology. Reece is now just the latest in a long line of women censored for questioning the medicalization and mutilation of children’s bodies in the name of “trans rights.”

Most of Dead Name’s running time is dedicated to interviews with three American parents, identified by their first names only: Amy, Bill, and Helen. Their stories are heartbreaking, and likely to inspire distress in any parent who fears their child might get caught up in the social contagion of transgenderism.

The film also includes brief interviews with Stephen Levine, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, and Christian Post reporter, Brandon Showalter, as well as brief interviews with other parents of children swept up in an ideology that convinces kids and teens they may have the “wrong body” or that any distress they are experiencing can be resolved through changing “gender.”

Amy, Helen, and Bill come across as thoughtful, caring parents and their stories share many commonalities. They describe their children being influenced by others and becoming withdrawn, learning about transgenderism as a “solution.” They describe feeling alone and powerless to protect their children, and being treated like terrible, unsupportive parents for questioning their child’s new identity. They describe this period of their life as a nightmare. Amy says of her teenage daughter, “She would end up verbally abusing me. It got really ugly… I can’t even begin to say the names that she called me.” They remark on the incongruity of others presuming to know their child better than they do. They discuss being let down by mental health professionals seemingly intent on rushing their child to “transition” to the opposite sex. The sadness and distress is palpable.

Bill says, “This is about protecting my kids. I don’t want another parent to ever have to go through what I’ve been through.” Amy also feels like she can help other parents to navigate these kinds of situations, saying of her parent support group: “I realized that I can be a voice. I can be there for other parents that are going through this, and that’s important to me.”

Bill explains that professionals’ hands are tied by the trans-affirmative model and insufficient attention is given to other paths, such as the watchful waiting approach. He, Amy, and Helen say the trans-affirmative model is portrayed as the only way.

They reflect thoughtfully about wrong-body ideology and ask valid questions our societies are failing to answer. Amy asks her interviewer, “Where does our species go if you can cut off your body parts like this?” She wonders what her grandmother would think of all this and asks: “How are we getting so far from reality?”

Helen describes how, in 2014, she was sidelined when her four-year-old son Jonah was “socially transitioned” at school. Soon after separating from her wife, Helen received a call from Jonah’s daycare’s director, informing her that Jonah claimed to be a girl. This call left Helen shocked and confused. Shortly after, the preschool sent a letter to all the parents, informing them they had a new student named Rosa (Jonah), and that the school wanted the parents to support “her.”

Helen received the same letter as the other parents, as though Jonah were not even her son. The preschool, she felt, seemed to be on a crusade to get everyone using Jonah’s new female pronouns. Says Helen, “It was all about me having to accept this… ‘It’s what Rose wants’.” No one at his school challenged the claim that Jonah was now the opposite sex.

Helen says Jonah’s kindergarten teacher told him about sex-reassignment surgeries. He was six years old. Helen began to look into the impacts of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and how these things lead (often very quickly) into cross-sex surgeries. She realized the social transitioning which had begun at preschool could lead to permanent physical changes to her son.

Jonah adopted two identities to navigate the world: a “boy identity” for his time with Helen and a “girl identity” he adopted at school and expressed when he was with Helen’s ex-wife. Helen agreed to call him Rosa and gave him the choice of “boy clothes” or “girl clothes,” but believed using female pronouns would be harmful to him, saying, “The truth is he’s not a transgender girl.” She tells her interviewer that Jonah’s well-being and mental health have been sacrificed.

American-Canadian clinical psychologist and sexologist James Cantor attended Helen’s child custody battle with her ex-wife, as her witness. Helen won sole legal custody of Jonah, however, she cannot stop her ex from calling him by a girl’s name and using female pronouns for him.

Amy, the mother of a teenage daughter, recounts how in 2015 her daughter suddenly announced she was “trans” and said she needed a new name. She had shown no signs of childhood gender dysphoria, but had begun hanging out with a friend that identified as “transgender.”

Amy’s daughter’s desire to “transition” to the opposite sex led to terrible rows between mother and daughter as Amy questioned her new identity and intention to begin hormone treatments. Her daughter threatened suicide and their disagreements led to fights between Amy and her husband. A meeting with a counsellor who treats gender non-conforming youth resulted in another blow-up, and Amy’s daughter moved out of the family home.

Bill tells us of his son Sean’s difficult life, cut short. At two years old, Sean was diagnosed with cancer, and his leg was amputated. At five it was discovered he had a form of leukemia, which resulted in a bone marrow transplant. When he was eight, Sean’s older brother died of a heroin overdose. Sean’s mother also died. What’s more, Bill says Sean likely knew he was sterile due to the chemotherapy. Clearly, Sean had suffered much trauma during his childhood — trauma Bill believes played a part in Sean embracing gender identity ideology. Bill maintains that Sean gave no signs of early childhood dysphoria.

Following these traumatic events, Sean was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. According to Bill, it was at this point that Sean wanted hormones “to become a girl as quick as possible.” Sean set up an appointment with an endocrinologist at the hospital, which was subsequently cancelled by the endocrinologist (who had been following Sean for some time), as cross-sex hormones would be fatal to Sean on account of the cancer.

Bill believes Sean fell in with the wrong crowd during his freshman year at college. He says Sean was planning to move in with three girls who were “involved heavily in the trans thing.”

We learn that Sean died while at college. A police officer sent to Bill’s home informed him his “daughter” had died, confusing Bill, who initially assumed the officer had the wrong parent. When he viewed his son’s body at the funeral parlor, Bill didn’t recognize him, leading him to believe Sean was taking cross-sex hormones at the time of his death, despite his doctor refusing to prescribe them.

Footage of a Partners for Ethical Care (PEC) protest outside a gender clinic shows parents holding signs reading, “Gender clinics harm children,” “No child is born in the wrong body,” and “Stop transing gay kids.”

Psychiatrist Stephen Levine, who is also a Genspect advisor and who published a paper called Reflections on the Clinician’s Role with Individuals Who Self-identify as Transgender in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in September 2021, explains:

“I’m well aware of the anguish of the parents and it’s not just a one-time anguish that is settled by kind words from the doctor. It’s an ongoing, continued anguish. Many of the parents I’ve seen have gone into therapy as a result, have become depressed and anxious, can’t sleep and so forth. And they don’t know what to do… But I think for every parent who gets involved wisely with other parents there are probably more parents who just deal with this by themselves, in shame and in horror and in sadness.”

Brandon Showalter has been covering the fight against gender identity ideology at The Christian Post for some years now. He tells the interviewer:

“What I would see consistently is that this ideology ruined everything it touches. And that the heartbreak and the devastation of parents and families was just staggering… To be forced to watch the slow-motion dissociation and disintegration — chemical disintegration sometimes — of their own children, was just like living in a horror movie. And that has only increased through the years.”

Mothers of trans-identified children interviewed near the end of the film express how gender identity ideology alienated their children from them, teaching them their parents were the enemy if they were not fully supportive of the child’s wish to attempt a medical “transition” to the opposite sex. They observe that the clusters of children identifying as trans should raise a red flag — but doesn’t — and that being “transgender” is now a social currency for children.

A “dead name,” we learn, is a term used by proponents of trans ideology to refer to one’s name before it was changed to correspond to the new, opposite-sex identity. In most cases the “dead name” is the one given by one’s parents.

Dead Name shines a spotlight on the devastation trans ideology leaves in its wake. It is dedicated to the memory of Sean Mahoney and can be purchased for viewing at deadnamedocumentary.com/

Alline Cormier is a Canadian film analyst and retired court interpreter with a B.A. Translation from Université Laval. In her second career she turns the text analysis skills she acquired in university studying translation and literature to film. She makes her home in British Columbia and is currently seeking a publisher for her film guide for women. Alline tweets @ACPicks2.

The post ‘Dead Name’ shines the spotlight on parents of kids taken in by the gender identity industry appeared first on Feminist Current.

Diversity, "wokeness" and violent oppression: Lessons of the Tyre Nichols case

Diversity is an important value — but militarists, corporatists and oligarchs have turned into a marketing gimmick