Excellent analysis. I think there is a fear of the fury that would be unleashed if pornography was curtailed. This is where the feminist analysis of patriarchal dominance certainly rings true. The need for unfettered access to women as a sexual and reproductive resource - we are guarded from our own moral corruption, guarded from other men’s attentions, sometimes even literally guarded with chaperones. Men guard what they view as their own.
I do not think that conservatives - I prefer to call them “gender traditionalists” - are or can be allies to radical feminists. Radical feminists believe that biology is real but do not believe that “biology is destiny.” Radical feminists basically wish to abolish patriarchal gender norms.
Gender traditionalists also believe that biology is real but do believe that biology is destiny. Therefore, these gender traditionalists wish to preserve and reinforce patriarchal gender norms.
Yes, gender traditionalists and radical feminists share the belief that biology is real. And, yes, both groups reject trans ideology. But that’s it. Their end goals are polar opposites and can’t be reconciled.
Sure, gender traditionalists don’t want trans women in female spaces* Radical feminists don’t either. So on a surface level one might think these groups could be allies. They can’t be. An alliance between those who want to preserve patriarchal gender norms and those who want to abolish these norms makes no sense. Gender traditionalists want women “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen,” unless I’ve missed something, radical feminists absolutely do not. An alliance between these two groups will hurt women much more than it helps.
If anything, gender traditionalists and trans activists who embrace patriarchal gender norms are more suited to each other.
*Gender traditionalists have a very limited view of what female spaces are: bathrooms and locker rooms. I don’t believe they give a damn about rape crisis centers or women only spaces in hospitals or prisons, etc.
So many labels. Why do you want to put everyone into tribes with neat little labels. There are as many ways of being as there are people. There is only one reason we want Transwomen out of women’s spaces. It is simply because they are Men.
I use “gender critical” and “gender traditionalists” to make an important distinction between two groups that trans activists far too often lump together under the pejorative label “TERF.” They do this to paint those who wish to abolish patriarchal gender norms as far right extremists to signal that those who wish to abolish patriarchal gender norms, roles and stereotypes as too fringe to be listened to. As for the term “trans women” - yes they are men but you can’t solve a problem without naming the problem. Discussion would be clumsy when instead of saying e.g. “tree” we had to always repeat the dictionary definition of the word tree. As long as terms are defined and there is a common understanding of what they mean I see no problem with “inventing” terms, in fact, doing so is necessary. Of course when it comes to this issue there is no common understanding - this is purposeful on the part of gender ideologues. They do it to muddy the waters. If I say men should not be allowed in female only spaces, most people would say “duh, of course not.” But if I say trans women should not be allowed in such spaces most would understand that I’m talking about men who pretend to be women. The words and terms we use matter. So it’s very important to use the most precise and efficient language. And if we need to “invent” terms to make our meaning clear, so be it.
One of the biggest problems of all gender politics in a patriarchal-dominant society and culture is that it assumes bi-polar human sexuality is the norm (standard of reference). This results in discounting human capacity for a gender-integrated sexuality. Patriarchy is a form of hierarchical (as opposed to horizontal) social organization. As such, it is dependent on a bi-polar understanding of social existence. The hierarchical conceptual framework requires a sexual bi-polarity of men and women. Incidentally, this social framework also requires inequality, the division of people into rich and poor. If there is no bi-polarity there can be no hierarchy. That is why integrated sexuality, as well as asexuality, plays virtually no part in current gender politics. It is not surprising that in our culture virtually all gender politics, including radical feminism, is patriarchal.
P.S. For a good introduction to integrated sexuality I would highly recommend the movie “Two Spirits” (www.twospirits.org). From the movie’s blog description: “Two Spirits interweaves the tragic story of a mother’s loss of her son with a revealing look at a time when the world wasn’t simply divided into male and female and many Native American culture held places of honor for people of integrated genders. Sadly, there seems to be no place in mainstream global culture for either integrated or asexual politics.
Integrated gender - what does that mean ? As far as I’m concerned it means allowing for the masculine and feminine sides of your personality while also understanding that no human can change sex. Integration of gender is the opposite of gender identity ideology which pretends humans can choose their sex and that if a male is more feminine he needs to wear a dress and chop his bits off. Indigenous cultures usually had a third gender caste for gay men, they didn’t have the same for women. Two spirit is a made up term that comes from a conference / work shop in the late 1990’s it isn’t a term from pre colonial history.
Any ideology that tells individuals who don’t meet strict feminine or masculine gender norms that they need to take drugs and cuts bits off is harmful and dangerous
Integrated gender is much more than “allowing” the self to have masculine and feminine aspects. The way you frame the question, is indicative of how a patriarchal society “defines’ human sexuality as an either or based on physiology. The concept that a human being may be both is extraordinarily dangerous to the patriarchal world view. The rigid separation of people into two genders is fundamental to male control of women and reproduction. This socialization process of rigidly separating people into either male or female is achieved through extreme sexual repression which quite literally splits the person in two and represses the part of the person that does not conform with their biological gender. People are not “allowed” to be both those who do recognize that they are actually sexually integrated beings are considered “queer” not normal and a clear and present danger to the patriarchy.
The whole concept of gender identity is a social construct, like the concept of race, created to solidify the male/female separation in the human personality. We should not be surprised that this violent, sexual repression results in many and varied pathologies – most especially in those who accept their gender identity without question. The compulsion to change your biological gender is a response to the sexual repression needed to sever human sexuality in two. I would speculate that in a non-patriarchal society, the idea of changing your biological gender would not exist. It is interesting that the idea of medically changing gender began in the same 19th Century white, Western society that also gave us the concept of race.
P.S. We should also not discount the connection between sexual repression and political fascism. In that regard, Wilhelm Reich has written two books that are quite instructive: “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and “The Sexual Revolution.”
The way you frame gender integration shows you have been completely saturated with gender identity ideology. It shows you have left rationality and science by the way side and jumped off into la la land. There is no such thing as queer, that is a theory that has been created to allow specific individuals to choose to breakdown the boundaries of other individuals. Queer merely means “I will not live by the social standards of the day no matter the harms and consequences it may cause others “. Fine if you are a big burly man who can look after himself in any situation, not fine if you are a young child or woman who can be interfered with by said burly man. Social norms help keep a check on harmful behaviour and help to keep the less powerful and strong safe. A society based on queer theory does the opposite. Sexual repression is what stops pedophillia being a lawful exercise. In a fully queer society pedophillia, sexual harassment and sexual abuse are considered sexual orientations and the perpetrator wins, the victim loses. We are on our way towards this abomination right now. Look at the women being harassed, raped and living in fear of their lives because males convicted of sex crimes and murder who claim to be women have been housed in female only prisons. This is an abuse of human rights happening right now across the globe anywhere that gender identity laws and queer theory have been established.
Queer theory and gender identity ideology are dangerous, exploitative concepts that give power to predators and leave victims vulnerable and at their mercy. These people have no mercy they are fetishised sexual predators.
The perception that we who are gender critical are right-wingers or have a "hard right" view of the gender identity issue is a by-product of the multi-layered lack of understanding of the complexities of this topic.
First there is the politics - these are the groups that are fighting about this:
The extreme Left - these are postmodernists, the Queer Theorists, Academics, institutions and organizations that have been infiltrated and captured (Stonewall, Mermaids, Tavistock, Mayo Clinic, AMA, APA, BBC, CNN, DSM-V, and etc.) all of whom are pretending humans can change sex, and they are being driven by the billions of dollars at stake for big pharma, surgical clinics and big med. Typical of postmodernists, they pretend reality actually is what they think it is, that it's all a construct. This is nonsense.
The extreme Right - these are the fundamentalist, religious right-wingers who hate gay people, and who lump the LGB in with the TQ+, and while they are passing laws to stop the TQ+ delusions, propaganda, and conversion efforts aimed at children and young adult, they sweep up the LGB and are reversing decades of forward momentum in human rights. While the hard right is correct that humans cannot change sex, they are dead wrong about everything else, and one of the great mortifications about this whole mess for people like me is that the hard right agrees with me about anything. In reality, the right wing is like a broken clock being correct twice a day. They are correct that humans can't change sex, and that doing this horror to minors is child abuse, but the reasons they are correct are incorrect. They believe it's a sin. We know it's the difference between physical biology and reality versus a psychiatric pathology and an ideology.
Then there is everybody else, the rest of us - we are mostly centrists on the Left, but there are a lot of Republicans in here too who are not right-wing nutcases. Our position is that this is not about being on the wrong or right side of history. What the TRAs are standing against is 225 million years of mammalian evolution, and two billion years in the evolution of sex as a biological reality. I can't be a TERF because I am a straight male, but even I know the difference between male and female biology and the nature of mammalian reproduction.
And that is where all the trouble comes in. Gender ideology is entirely a fiction. But it has been carefully assembled as a manufactured category in the US to make vulnerable people (children, young people, and the psychiatrically fragile) useful targets for financial exploitation. This also is complicated, multi-layered, and so well built it staggers the imagination. But some very smart wealthy people have built this madness to feed their fetishes, and even though it is beginning to fall apart now because of lawsuits and actual medical data (the Cass Review etc.) demonstrating there is zero evidence demonstrating any benefit at all from "affirmative care", it has worked marvelously well thus far. And even people like yourself have fallen victim to the propaganda. You are not alone in being victimized by this deception.
It costs nothing to be LGB, but if I can convince you that you are born in the wrong body and need surgery and hormones then you become an individual, lifetime human profit center worth 1.3 million per person and even more if you later detransition. Remember, in 2015 there was only one gender clinic in the US, and today there are over 300, doing billions of dollars of business. That is a very successful marketing campaign.
But you, in your understanding, have to make the leap to recognize that the LGB and their human rights have nothing at all to do with the market-generated psychiatric pathology of the TQ+. And neither of those have much of anything at all to do with the DSD people. They are not the same. The sooner you understand those differences, the sooner you will see behind the curtain to the men who are driving this for profit.
Deep Throat was right back in the Watergate days. As he said to Woodward and Bernstein - "Follow the Money!"
Same here. "Follow the Money!"
Look up these names: Pritzker, Stryker, Rothblatt, Bunce, Gill, Thiel, Benioff, and Bohnett. Read anything by Jennifer Bilek, who is a journalist tracking the money. It's astonishing and appalling.
The author says he knows of no one who denies the existence of people who "identify as transgender."
Well, if he actually listened to the most coherent TERFs (like me), he'd understand that we deny "transgender" even exists. Look up Jennifer Bilek's work.
There is no special category for those who deny the reality of their sexed body.
A man who doesn't want to be a man is still a man. He's not a special category of human. Men who wear dresses, makeup, get surgery, take hormones--they're still men. Even the men who pass, which is very, very few.
What is a man? An adult human male.
Sex exists; "gender" is a word that has no application to humans.
So, we say that mental illness exists. Autogynephilia (which includes most of these men) exists.
But "transgender" does not exist. They're men. Nothing more.
Because those who defend "transgender" as a category of being will have to provide criteria and a definition of what qualifies for a homo sapien to enter that category.
Excellent analysis. I think there is a fear of the fury that would be unleashed if pornography was curtailed. This is where the feminist analysis of patriarchal dominance certainly rings true. The need for unfettered access to women as a sexual and reproductive resource - we are guarded from our own moral corruption, guarded from other men’s attentions, sometimes even literally guarded with chaperones. Men guard what they view as their own.
It's funny because men themselves are the source of the corruption.
I do not think that conservatives - I prefer to call them “gender traditionalists” - are or can be allies to radical feminists. Radical feminists believe that biology is real but do not believe that “biology is destiny.” Radical feminists basically wish to abolish patriarchal gender norms.
Gender traditionalists also believe that biology is real but do believe that biology is destiny. Therefore, these gender traditionalists wish to preserve and reinforce patriarchal gender norms.
Yes, gender traditionalists and radical feminists share the belief that biology is real. And, yes, both groups reject trans ideology. But that’s it. Their end goals are polar opposites and can’t be reconciled.
Sure, gender traditionalists don’t want trans women in female spaces* Radical feminists don’t either. So on a surface level one might think these groups could be allies. They can’t be. An alliance between those who want to preserve patriarchal gender norms and those who want to abolish these norms makes no sense. Gender traditionalists want women “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen,” unless I’ve missed something, radical feminists absolutely do not. An alliance between these two groups will hurt women much more than it helps.
If anything, gender traditionalists and trans activists who embrace patriarchal gender norms are more suited to each other.
*Gender traditionalists have a very limited view of what female spaces are: bathrooms and locker rooms. I don’t believe they give a damn about rape crisis centers or women only spaces in hospitals or prisons, etc.
So many labels. Why do you want to put everyone into tribes with neat little labels. There are as many ways of being as there are people. There is only one reason we want Transwomen out of women’s spaces. It is simply because they are Men.
Just stop using the word "gender."
That's the original source of all of this confusion.
The word itself means everything and anything--so that it means nothing.
There is no such thing as "trans" women. They're just men. Stop inventing terms to apply to things that are just delusional men.
I use “gender critical” and “gender traditionalists” to make an important distinction between two groups that trans activists far too often lump together under the pejorative label “TERF.” They do this to paint those who wish to abolish patriarchal gender norms as far right extremists to signal that those who wish to abolish patriarchal gender norms, roles and stereotypes as too fringe to be listened to. As for the term “trans women” - yes they are men but you can’t solve a problem without naming the problem. Discussion would be clumsy when instead of saying e.g. “tree” we had to always repeat the dictionary definition of the word tree. As long as terms are defined and there is a common understanding of what they mean I see no problem with “inventing” terms, in fact, doing so is necessary. Of course when it comes to this issue there is no common understanding - this is purposeful on the part of gender ideologues. They do it to muddy the waters. If I say men should not be allowed in female only spaces, most people would say “duh, of course not.” But if I say trans women should not be allowed in such spaces most would understand that I’m talking about men who pretend to be women. The words and terms we use matter. So it’s very important to use the most precise and efficient language. And if we need to “invent” terms to make our meaning clear, so be it.
All of this word salad will lead to nothing.
It’s meaningless and a waste of time.
Male rapists are in women's prisons, and this is what you're doing.
Complete nonsense.
One of the biggest problems of all gender politics in a patriarchal-dominant society and culture is that it assumes bi-polar human sexuality is the norm (standard of reference). This results in discounting human capacity for a gender-integrated sexuality. Patriarchy is a form of hierarchical (as opposed to horizontal) social organization. As such, it is dependent on a bi-polar understanding of social existence. The hierarchical conceptual framework requires a sexual bi-polarity of men and women. Incidentally, this social framework also requires inequality, the division of people into rich and poor. If there is no bi-polarity there can be no hierarchy. That is why integrated sexuality, as well as asexuality, plays virtually no part in current gender politics. It is not surprising that in our culture virtually all gender politics, including radical feminism, is patriarchal.
P.S. For a good introduction to integrated sexuality I would highly recommend the movie “Two Spirits” (www.twospirits.org). From the movie’s blog description: “Two Spirits interweaves the tragic story of a mother’s loss of her son with a revealing look at a time when the world wasn’t simply divided into male and female and many Native American culture held places of honor for people of integrated genders. Sadly, there seems to be no place in mainstream global culture for either integrated or asexual politics.
Integrated gender - what does that mean ? As far as I’m concerned it means allowing for the masculine and feminine sides of your personality while also understanding that no human can change sex. Integration of gender is the opposite of gender identity ideology which pretends humans can choose their sex and that if a male is more feminine he needs to wear a dress and chop his bits off. Indigenous cultures usually had a third gender caste for gay men, they didn’t have the same for women. Two spirit is a made up term that comes from a conference / work shop in the late 1990’s it isn’t a term from pre colonial history.
Any ideology that tells individuals who don’t meet strict feminine or masculine gender norms that they need to take drugs and cuts bits off is harmful and dangerous
Integrated gender is much more than “allowing” the self to have masculine and feminine aspects. The way you frame the question, is indicative of how a patriarchal society “defines’ human sexuality as an either or based on physiology. The concept that a human being may be both is extraordinarily dangerous to the patriarchal world view. The rigid separation of people into two genders is fundamental to male control of women and reproduction. This socialization process of rigidly separating people into either male or female is achieved through extreme sexual repression which quite literally splits the person in two and represses the part of the person that does not conform with their biological gender. People are not “allowed” to be both those who do recognize that they are actually sexually integrated beings are considered “queer” not normal and a clear and present danger to the patriarchy.
The whole concept of gender identity is a social construct, like the concept of race, created to solidify the male/female separation in the human personality. We should not be surprised that this violent, sexual repression results in many and varied pathologies – most especially in those who accept their gender identity without question. The compulsion to change your biological gender is a response to the sexual repression needed to sever human sexuality in two. I would speculate that in a non-patriarchal society, the idea of changing your biological gender would not exist. It is interesting that the idea of medically changing gender began in the same 19th Century white, Western society that also gave us the concept of race.
P.S. We should also not discount the connection between sexual repression and political fascism. In that regard, Wilhelm Reich has written two books that are quite instructive: “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” and “The Sexual Revolution.”
Look at this word salad to try to defend something that is just a load of nonsense.
"Gender" is a linguistics term that applies to words only. It has no application to humans.
Wtf do you mean "biological gender"?
Do you people even listen to yourselves?
Sex exists for humans. "Gender" does not. You prove it.
The way you frame gender integration shows you have been completely saturated with gender identity ideology. It shows you have left rationality and science by the way side and jumped off into la la land. There is no such thing as queer, that is a theory that has been created to allow specific individuals to choose to breakdown the boundaries of other individuals. Queer merely means “I will not live by the social standards of the day no matter the harms and consequences it may cause others “. Fine if you are a big burly man who can look after himself in any situation, not fine if you are a young child or woman who can be interfered with by said burly man. Social norms help keep a check on harmful behaviour and help to keep the less powerful and strong safe. A society based on queer theory does the opposite. Sexual repression is what stops pedophillia being a lawful exercise. In a fully queer society pedophillia, sexual harassment and sexual abuse are considered sexual orientations and the perpetrator wins, the victim loses. We are on our way towards this abomination right now. Look at the women being harassed, raped and living in fear of their lives because males convicted of sex crimes and murder who claim to be women have been housed in female only prisons. This is an abuse of human rights happening right now across the globe anywhere that gender identity laws and queer theory have been established.
Queer theory and gender identity ideology are dangerous, exploitative concepts that give power to predators and leave victims vulnerable and at their mercy. These people have no mercy they are fetishised sexual predators.
Regarding politics:
The perception that we who are gender critical are right-wingers or have a "hard right" view of the gender identity issue is a by-product of the multi-layered lack of understanding of the complexities of this topic.
First there is the politics - these are the groups that are fighting about this:
The extreme Left - these are postmodernists, the Queer Theorists, Academics, institutions and organizations that have been infiltrated and captured (Stonewall, Mermaids, Tavistock, Mayo Clinic, AMA, APA, BBC, CNN, DSM-V, and etc.) all of whom are pretending humans can change sex, and they are being driven by the billions of dollars at stake for big pharma, surgical clinics and big med. Typical of postmodernists, they pretend reality actually is what they think it is, that it's all a construct. This is nonsense.
The extreme Right - these are the fundamentalist, religious right-wingers who hate gay people, and who lump the LGB in with the TQ+, and while they are passing laws to stop the TQ+ delusions, propaganda, and conversion efforts aimed at children and young adult, they sweep up the LGB and are reversing decades of forward momentum in human rights. While the hard right is correct that humans cannot change sex, they are dead wrong about everything else, and one of the great mortifications about this whole mess for people like me is that the hard right agrees with me about anything. In reality, the right wing is like a broken clock being correct twice a day. They are correct that humans can't change sex, and that doing this horror to minors is child abuse, but the reasons they are correct are incorrect. They believe it's a sin. We know it's the difference between physical biology and reality versus a psychiatric pathology and an ideology.
Then there is everybody else, the rest of us - we are mostly centrists on the Left, but there are a lot of Republicans in here too who are not right-wing nutcases. Our position is that this is not about being on the wrong or right side of history. What the TRAs are standing against is 225 million years of mammalian evolution, and two billion years in the evolution of sex as a biological reality. I can't be a TERF because I am a straight male, but even I know the difference between male and female biology and the nature of mammalian reproduction.
And that is where all the trouble comes in. Gender ideology is entirely a fiction. But it has been carefully assembled as a manufactured category in the US to make vulnerable people (children, young people, and the psychiatrically fragile) useful targets for financial exploitation. This also is complicated, multi-layered, and so well built it staggers the imagination. But some very smart wealthy people have built this madness to feed their fetishes, and even though it is beginning to fall apart now because of lawsuits and actual medical data (the Cass Review etc.) demonstrating there is zero evidence demonstrating any benefit at all from "affirmative care", it has worked marvelously well thus far. And even people like yourself have fallen victim to the propaganda. You are not alone in being victimized by this deception.
It costs nothing to be LGB, but if I can convince you that you are born in the wrong body and need surgery and hormones then you become an individual, lifetime human profit center worth 1.3 million per person and even more if you later detransition. Remember, in 2015 there was only one gender clinic in the US, and today there are over 300, doing billions of dollars of business. That is a very successful marketing campaign.
But you, in your understanding, have to make the leap to recognize that the LGB and their human rights have nothing at all to do with the market-generated psychiatric pathology of the TQ+. And neither of those have much of anything at all to do with the DSD people. They are not the same. The sooner you understand those differences, the sooner you will see behind the curtain to the men who are driving this for profit.
Deep Throat was right back in the Watergate days. As he said to Woodward and Bernstein - "Follow the Money!"
Same here. "Follow the Money!"
Look up these names: Pritzker, Stryker, Rothblatt, Bunce, Gill, Thiel, Benioff, and Bohnett. Read anything by Jennifer Bilek, who is a journalist tracking the money. It's astonishing and appalling.
--
So good to hear from a bloke who gets it. We need more like this!
lol attractive
The author says he knows of no one who denies the existence of people who "identify as transgender."
Well, if he actually listened to the most coherent TERFs (like me), he'd understand that we deny "transgender" even exists. Look up Jennifer Bilek's work.
There is no special category for those who deny the reality of their sexed body.
A man who doesn't want to be a man is still a man. He's not a special category of human. Men who wear dresses, makeup, get surgery, take hormones--they're still men. Even the men who pass, which is very, very few.
What is a man? An adult human male.
Sex exists; "gender" is a word that has no application to humans.
So, we say that mental illness exists. Autogynephilia (which includes most of these men) exists.
But "transgender" does not exist. They're men. Nothing more.
Because those who defend "transgender" as a category of being will have to provide criteria and a definition of what qualifies for a homo sapien to enter that category.
Nobody can do it.
Because it doesn't exist.
I hope the author reads this.