I Can't Hate Something That Is So Vague And Fake
In the olden days, the dynamic between the sexes was simple. Men were from Mars, women were from Venus, and we shared an uneasy peace on Earth.
Then trans people came along and complicated everything.
All of a sudden, people began moving between planets or claiming to be from some other planet altogether. Some (gasp) even claimed that they were citizens of both planets at the same time!
In my article, What If Womanhood Were A Country?, I compared transition to immigration in what, if I do say so myself, has turned out to be a pretty versatile analogy.
Celine thought so too. But she had a problem.
Celine:
I am a transgender woman and I agree with you.
Yes, womanhood is a country and it should have a say in admitting immigrants according to their stated legal policies. It is exactly like when you apply for Japanese residency, you have to follow exactly the clearly stated Japanese laws. Maybe you have hired a Japanese immigration lawyer to help you through the maze of immigration laws.
Now, where are those womanhood laws? How can I apply? Can I hire a lawyer to help me through this process? Is there a court to appeal if I have been rejected?
If you could show me there are Womanhood immigration laws to follow, I will be the first to apply. You know why? Because I want to have a way to be recognized as a woman through a known, legal and universally accepted process. Just like you want to be legally recognized as a Japanese by the world.
But since there are no Womanhood country and there are no womanhood immigration laws, then what are the potential immigrants to do? The answers were known to the early immigrants to North America, before the establishment of the 13 Colonies. They showed up. They plough the land. They raised cattle. They built families. They started to live in this new Land of Opportunity. And this is exactly what the transgender women are doing.
No there is no hate in your article. I can't hate something that is so vague and fake.
Steve QJ:
“Now, where are those womanhood laws? How can I apply? Can I hire a lawyer to help me through this process? Is there a court to appeal if I have been rejected?”
This is exactly my point. This doesn't exist. And the fact that it doesn't is detrimental to trans people who are sincere in their desire to live as the opposite gender and to women. I'm arguing for a sensible standard of womanhood that everybody can get on board with.
At the extremes of TERFism you have people arguing that no male, regardless of anything they do or how obviously sincere they are should ever be granted "citizenship." I think this is wrong.
But trans activists, for want of a better term, are arguing that any male who says they're a woman should instantly be legally and socially affirmed as such. I think this is wrong too.
Right now, for example, self ID laws in both the U.K. and U.S. allow male prisoners to declare themselves female, and be transferred to female prisons, with "no hormones, surgery or time spent living as the opposite sex required" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/male-inmates-in-womens-prisons-11622474215).
If there is no sensible conversation about what should be required in order to be recognised as a woman. If those activists continue to erase the boundaries until there is literally no way to distinguish between men and women, more and more women will, I think completely understandably, push back.
It never ceases to amuse me when I'm accused of being fake because I'm trying to frame this debate in a way that's less toxic. I've never come across a community so desperate to be despised. Who so instinctively sees disagreement as justification to attack. What possible motivation could I have to be fake?
I don't hate you. I support you. Sorry if this comes as a disappointment. I just also support women. And some of the things being done in the name of trans people are obviously harmful. The longer it goes on, the more people will join the call to close the borders.
p.s. Your early immigrants analogy sounds great (if also a little vague) until you remember what happened to the native Americans.
Celine:
“you remember what happened to the native Americans.”
I remember and aware of them. They have been brutally displaced. All immigration will cause displacement. Even gentrification will cause displacement. Nothing could have changed that. When transgender women are legalized (whatever that means) as women, they will displace some women too. Just like you would displace some Japanese too. You might not know who but you will.
Steve QJ:
“All immigration will cause displacement.”
No, immigration wasn’t the issue. The Native Americans didn’t reject the settlers, they welcomed them. They were happy to share the land. I think the same is true of most women.
The issue was the nature of the settlers' immigration. It was the immigration without respect for the people who were born in those lands or for the lands themselves. It was the mentality that said, "this is ours now."
I’m not anti immigration. Or anti transition. I’m anti colonisation. And some very vocal, and apparently quite influential people within the trans community are trying to colonise womanhood. It’s those people I take issue with. Not ordinary trans women just trying to live their lives.
Again, given that these people are clearly harming perceptions of the trans community for those who aren't fans of nuance, or who are just sickened by the misogyny that pervades trans activism, I'm genuinely surprised more trans women aren't speaking up.
Celine:
Yes, I agree that more trans women should have spoken up against some other hard to agree with trans women. It is, however, a very tough position to take. It is the same dilemma that some blacks folks have faced. Should there be more blacks folks speak up against the broken black families, the black killing black rate? Yes, but that is a pond of muddy water filled with snakes and crocs.
The challenge is where is the line of OK and not OK?
I have my opinion of what is OK for trans. Others may have their opinions. We all have our background reasons and accessibility to resources differences. Who wants to jump into this pond?
Steve QJ:
“Who wants to jump into this pond?”
Ugh, yeah, this is the problem with so many issues. The overwhelming majority of reasonable people being too afraid to speak up against the lunatic minority.
I'm not knocking you, I know very well how unpleasant it can be for people who speak up even a little bit. But if nobody does, or if it's only "cis" people like me, I think there will be a lot of unnecessary pain down the line. I know there are lots of reasonable trans people out there. But I'm not sure the general public does.
Celine:
You might want to take a glance at this article I have written https://celinekoon.medium.com/when-will-transgender-people-be-perceived-as-normal-and-an-integral-part-of-our-society-4c0cb1c3de15
Steve QJ:
I think, as with so much transgender writing I read, you've misdiagnosed the problem. Yes, some people hate and fear transgender people. No argument from me. But this is by no means a majority position.
Don't you ever ask yourself why the major pushback against transgender people has only come in the past five/ten years or so? Just as, coincidentally enough, surgeries and hormone treatments for children have become common? As males who have no intention of having surgeries or taking hormones or who walk around with full beards have begun demanding access to female spaces? As rapists started being referred to with she/her pronouns and put in female prisons?
As I said, I've never come across a community so desperate to be despised. I can count on one hand the number of trans writers who seem able to go one full paragraph without talking about how much they're "hated" or how society wants their "extinction." They're so intoxicated by this view of themselves as part of a valiant struggle against bigoted oppressors who just don't understand them. But they never talk about the above problems. They never consider how these issues are making ordinary, accepting, good-hearted people think, "hey, wait a minute, this isn't right."
It's extraordinarily rarely trans people speaking against or trying to do anything about these problems. But very often trans people bending over backwards to defend them. That, by far, is the biggest barrier to acceptance.
Celine:
Oh no! Are you saying a whole category of people, a community of people, should be penalized, hated, persecuted; because there are bad apples in them?
Of course the transgender community knows there are bad apples among us. Which community or category of people does not have bad apples? Name one and I will go along with your point of view that transgender women should condemn their bad apples.
Name any religious organizations, sport organizations, education institutions, military services, the Gay Community, the Lesbian Community, the Heterosexual community, Boy Scouts, the Black Community , the Hispanic Community, the Asian community, and I can go on and on…….
That is an old tired point used by people against any community. It is an invalid point. It is a categorical discrimination supporting point. If you support that point, you are the problem.
“Oh no! Are you saying a whole category of people, a community of people, should be penalized, hated, persecuted; because there are bad apples in them?”
I had a conversation recently about whether it’s fair to demonise all men when talking about sexual assault. Yes, men (or I guess I should say males) commit the overwhelming majority of sexual assault. But I argued that the percentage of men who commit sexual assault is likely very low.
Let’s “back of the envelope” this.
In 2021, there were 144,300 reported sexual assaults in the United States. Let’s assume that 100% of these attacks were committed by men (the true figure is ~92%, I think, so close enough). According to RAINN, 2/3 of sexual assaults go unreported, so we’ll triple our 144,300 figure and round up to 450,000.
Even if we assume that each of those assaults was carried out by a different one of the 164 million males in the United States, we find that around 0.27% of males commit all sexual assaults. If we triple that to eliminate toddlers and octogenarians, we arrive at around 1%.
And yet, and this is important, all men are barred from women’s spaces.
This isn’t discrimination, it isn’t hate, it isn’t persecution, it’s a reasonable accommodation that keeps women safe from dangerous men. Because it should go without saying that this number would be much higher if we didn’t keep men out of women’s spaces. Trans women want to be safe from men too. That’s understandable. But then, shouldn’t they be doubly invested in establishing the differences between men and trans women?
Steve QJ:
“Oh no! Are you saying a whole category of people, a community of people, should be penalized, hated, persecuted; because there are bad apples in them?”
No. Of course not. As you say, there are bad apples in every community. I'm saying that without a standard of womanhood that everybody can get on board with (I think it's reasonable to exclude rapists and males who have no intention of transitioning from that standard, don't you?), more and more people will simply reject the whole idea.
This is what I mean when I say I think it's in everybody's interests to think seriously and honestly about this point.
The trans community has been deafeningly silent on the question of where the line between men and trans women lies. Or actually, it's worse than that. The voices that are speaking up insist that there is no line. That any male, regardless of gender dysphoria or transition status or history of committing sexual assault, becomes a woman simply by saying so.
Where are the trans women arguing that if you're a rapist, you forfeit any right to access female spaces? Where are the trans women arguing that if you have no intention of physically transitioning, you don't belong in female spaces? Again, these distinctions safeguard women and trans women. Yet I never hear trans women making the case.
We've finally come full circle. These are the kinds of questions we'd all agree that any nation should ask of immigrants. The trans community isn't just any community. It's a community of people who, in the case of trans women, are asking for access to the private spaces of another vulnerable group.
I think the vast majority of people are more than compassionate enough to understand and accommodate this. But when trans women don't seem to care at all about the safeguarding implications for women, it erodes that compassion.
I’ve said this before, but the suspicion levelled at trans women in female spaces isn’t about their trans-ness, it’s about their male-ness. In fact, their trans-ness is the only reason we’re even having a conversation!
It’s so normal to treat men with suspicion, especially when it comes to women’s privacy, that most people don’t even notice it anymore. And while I don’t enjoy being treated with suspicion any more than the next person, it doesn’t take a genius to understand why this rule has to be universally applied.
Old men, weak men, gay men, this is one of the rare occasions where I think it’s wise to ignore nuance.
Trans women want to be the exceptions to this rule. Yet, at least in public, demonstrate no understanding of why it exists. Frustratingly, if more trans women were “showing up” and “plowing the land” on this issue, as Celine put it, I think that immigration into this brave new world would be going a lot more smoothly.
I had this argument a week or two ago with some TW who objected to a comment I tweeted noting how much the movement had been influenced by sexual fetishism, and likely driven by porn, since 'transgender porn' is one of the highest-rated search terms on porn sites. This guy, of course, complained that I was making them all look like sexual predators.So I pointed out that they had a clear growing sexual predator problem, not because transwomen are sexual predators, but because a too-tolerant left, in the holy name of 'inclusivity', refuses to acknowledge that transwomen are men under the clothes, and sexual predators who were never trans before are taking advantage of it. And if they keep trying to sweep it under the rug like the Catholic Church has done for decades, they run the risk of developing the same well-deserved reputation the Church has.
Celine is right that most groups don't want to push back against their own miscreants, and yeah, it's hard. But *I* do. I push back at feminists who are misandrist, who unconsciously collaborate with and enable sexual predators by not reporting, and who perpetuate female victimhood by refusing to challenge themselves and each other (I have especially been critical of feminists for not taking a harder stance against domestic violence and who refuse to acknowledge that bad, abusive marriages happen because women make decisions every step along the way to allow the abuse.
We *have* to hold our own to account, and I'd love to see black people hold BLM to account - if black lives are so important, why do they only focus on the tiny percentage who are killed by white cops and not all the black lives destroyed every year by other black lives? Why can't they fight against *both*? They've brought a much-needed discussion about police power and the need to rein in their very worst excesses, but BLM is living a lie as long as they make it clear most black lives *don't* matter.
You never see them on the news in Toronto consoling a mother whose son was just gunned down - because it's almost never by police.
The trans community also needs to call out its sexual predators and stop acting like a bunch of entitled dicks. Women need protection from male bodies and what they call 'transphobia' is actually, as you note, fear of rape. The movement has less to do now with people living with GD (still a very tiny percentage) but is now infused with a suspicious amount of men trying to validate their sexual fetishes, and get women to go along with it (I just had this experience recently with a recent ex-friend, a loss of a long-term friendship directly linked to pornography and his particular fetish).
“𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘦 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘢 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘨, 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘢 𝘧𝘦𝘸 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘴, 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘯 𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭 𝘤𝘢𝘯. 𝘈 𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘢 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘶𝘮𝘱𝘩 𝘰𝘧 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.” - 𝘗𝘦𝘵𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘦𝘨𝘦𝘳, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤
Thinking of this, I just checked Spotify and there is a long "FTM transgender songs, because why not." playlist. I need some good sleep and will be listening to rain in a few minutes instead. Maybe tomorrow I'll see if musicians do a better job than the activists. That should be easy.