The current page on transgender ideology can be viewed here.

LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

Women Speak Out On the Harms of Gender Identity

“Over the years, many gender-critical views have been systematically deleted, de-platformed, banned, or otherwise “cancelled.” The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) views this erasure as fundamental to the culture of silence which has enabled gender ideologists to unleash a virtually unchallenged assault on women’s sex-based rights and protections. WoLF would like to amplify the voices of our members, our supporters, and all women.”

What does ‘transgender’ mean?

Wikipedia and Peak Trans

It occurs to me that, before saying anything about trans ideology, I should be clear about what I understand by the term ‘transgender’. Hopefully, I won’t need to mention Wikipedia too many times on this site. According to Wikipedia “a trans woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth”. This is unsupported and unsupportable. I and others have edited it in an attempt at accuracy only to have our edits swiftly reversed. One message I received from an editor was “we don’t want people to think we’re not women”. This was a peak trans confirming moment for me and, in light of this evidence that Wikipedia editors will pander to ideology at the expense of accuracy, I no longer support the site financially and will not use it as a source for anything on this site.

Edited 01.01.18 to add: I see there is at least one editor fighting for accuracy on this topic. His user page, on which he documents bias in transgender-related articles, makes for interesting reading.

Edited 05.10.18 to add: Today I learned that the editor mentioned in the last edit has been suspended. Spotted on Twitter – “A trans-activist #Wikipedia administrator has indefinitely blocked the main pro-radfem editor who had been working on trans topics for over a year, for alleged transphobia. An appeal process is running.”

More on Wikipedia misinformation (pdf)

Definition

trans ideology meets rape culture

So here is the definition of trans people I use on this site – it is a definition learned from trans-identifying people themselves: A “transwoman” (also written “trans woman”) is a male-born person who “identifies as” a woman; a “transman” (or “trans man”) is a female-born person who “identifies as” a man. According to this article in the Guardian, “Why a person feels male when they are biologically female, or the other way around, for now remains uncertain,” and I have no intention of going there in the foreseeable future. What I will say is that those men who identify as women and those women who identify as men are wrong. To identify as something, it must at least be feasible that you could actually be that something. One can identify as, say, a socialist or a conservative, as gay or straight or bisexual, as atheist or religious believer, as an environmentalist, as a vegetarian or an unrepentant carnivore. You can identify as any of these things because you can conceivably be any of them. But you can no more actually be a woman if you are a man and vice versa than you can be Napoleon or Her Majesty the Queen. If you identify as Napoleon, you will be considered delusional and quite right too. I’ve heard two trans friends of mine both say that they are not women – that they identify with women not as women and, while this may be problematic, it is at least conceivable that one feels more empathy with the other biological sex than with one’s own.

What is more important, from my perspective, is to point out what people who haven’t take much interest in gender issues don’t seem to know. This is that most trans people do not have genital surgery, which leads to the absurd notion that some women have penises and some men have vaginas, get pregnant and give birth. This is trans ideology. I once believed that all trans-identifying people were either pre-op or post-op. I didn’t know that some don’t even want to have surgery and others do but can’t get it.

Another thing that most people don’t seem to know and, in my experience, find very hard to believe, is that (reportedly) most men who transition are not gay. They are heterosexual men and when they transition they call themselves lesbians. And some have been known to  accuse real lesbians – i.e. those born female – of being discriminatory or transphobic because they won’t indulge “women” with penises.

Your dating “preferences” are discriminatory  Riley J. Dennis

“Trans women are women and trans men are men”

That a person’s “gender identity” should take priority over their sex is the core tenet of trans ideology and is the fundamental reason why transgenderism is problematic for women. I believe that if males were content to define themselves as transwomen rather than insisting they are “‘real’ women – as much as any cis woman is” (see below) and accept that, as transwomen, there will inevitably be limitations placed on the degree to which they can be accepted as women, then there would be much less impetus to fight back.

An article that appears on the website laughingly known as Everyday Feminism provides a wonderful illustration of the logical fallacy known as ‘begging the question’ – a form of circular reasoning where the conclusion is assumed in the premise.

This is so bad, it’s almost funny. Why waste so many words when you can just say: “trans women aren’t men because they’re women”? No need for explanations, reasoning or evidence – just suck it up.

To assert that transwomen are real women is nothing more than an opinion phrased as a slogan and one that, logically, makes no more sense than saying “pantomime horses are real horses”. Yet so many people think it’s enough to simply state it without any attempt to offer any reasoning – apart from circular reasoning as in the example above – and, if our reaction is to contradict it, we are deemed to be transphobic and should just shut the hell up.

In their dreams.

One advantage of this slogan is that it gives trans allies an easy way to practise what is known nowadays as ‘virtue signalling’, as well as an excuse to close down debate and shout down those who might embarrass them with rational counter-arguments.

Take, for example, an article by Josh Jackman that appeared in Pink News on 13 March 2017.

Entitled What is a real woman? I clicked on it in the expectation that I would see at least some attempt at a definition to counter Jenni Murray’s contention, published a week earlier, that someone who has lived their life as a male cannot lay claim to womanhood. But Jackman bottles out entirely, declaring that

Readers are then shown a series of pictures of random objects including a tin of paint, a park bench, a baseball hat…you get the idea. Jackman can’t provide sound reasons so tries to be facetious, in the hope we won’t notice, thereby treating his readers like numpties, which no doubt many of them are. This style of journalism may be why Pink News is often referred to as “Prick News” in feminist circles.

Finally, we are shown pictures of Monica Bellucci, Lupita Nyong’o, Caitlyn Jenner and Andreja Pejić and told they are all real women together with

Right beneath the article, we see the risible claim that Jackman is a “proud feminist”.

The **** he is.

YAY! Not all trans…

Elsewhere I’ve addressed why I think the argument that there ‘is a wider spectrum than the two sexes’ is irrelevant to the notion that ‘trans women are women’: it is women’s biological function that has historically and globally led to women’s oppression as a class by men, which in turn shapes how we are raised and socialised, regardless of sexual orientation, socio-economic class or anything else. This doesn’t imply that all women experience discrimination and oppression the same way, nor does it deny other intersecting experiences of oppression such as racism, class oppression and homophobia. It simply states that what matters ­in determining whether we are male or female – men or women – for the purposes of gender equality and women’s liberation is not how we feel, not what we look like, not our ethnicity or sexual orientation nor what brain scans may or may not show but our role in reproduction. Women are adult human females; men are adult human males. It follows that women do not have penises and men cannot get pregnant.

“Misgendering is an act of violence”

“Gender” is a social construct externally imposed on us according to our biological sex. We can claim a different “gender identity” to the one associated with our sex but we cannot actually demand that other people respect that gender identity. But why wouldn’t we respect other people’s “gender identity”?

Personally, I’m fine with people expressing themselves however they so choose and certainly with men expressing themselves as ‘feminine’, which is a gender and the opposite of ‘masculine’. Also, I believe in courtesy and respect as default positions and I will use preferred pronoun as a courtesy as long as they’ve done nothing to lose my respect (Struck out 3.3.21 as this no longer reflects my feelings) But men who mock, bully, verbally and physically abuse those women who challenge them, men who promote and celebrate violence against women and men who try to silence women don’t deserve courtesy and respect so I won’t afford them any and that includes allowing them and their supporters to police my language.

So how is ‘misgendering’ violent?

Having been the victim of unprovoked physical violence by a group of male-born transgender people less than half my age, the idea that denying a man the status of womanhood and calling him the “wrong” pronoun amounts to violence is not one I find naturally easy to understand or empathise with, so I determined to read or listen to some trans people’s explanations with an open mind.

On Freethought blogs, I read an article called What trans people mean when we say “misgendering is violence”

However, I came away none the wiser. The article makes a fallacious slippery slope argument that suggests without explanation that misgendering strips trans people of their humanity and what starts with misgendering ends with “describing or wishing upon or enacting acts of monstrous violence upon us.” This is preposterous and the quote from a lesbian separatist called Bev Jo von Dohre doesn’t make it any less so. (I researched that quote, by the way. It was allegedly posted in 2010, which is probably about the same number of times it has been quoted as evidence of “TERF hatred”).

Unlike, say, slavery or genocide, refusing to use the pronoun associated with someone’s gender identity rather than their biological sex when they expressly want you to, isn’t denying someone’s humanity. It is denying their gender identity and this may be done for one of several reasons. It may be an act of bullying by transphobes; it may also be an act of resistance against trans ideology and how it potentially hurts women and girls, which is why I do it. By the way, deliberate “misgendering” of gender critical individuals by trans cultists themselves isn’t the way to make a point hit home – I have been called ‘he’ and ‘Mister’ more than once because they mistakenly think I give a shit. I don’t.

Riley J. Dennis argues that misgendering is an act of psychological violence. In doing so he contributes to the notion that trans people are mentally fragile – an idea that was seized upon with enthusiasm by supporters of President Trump’s proposed ban of trans people in the US military.

This feels like more emotional blackmail to me (see Silencing Critical Voices for other examples). I certainly feel disrespected and uncomfortable about the whole idea that male-born trans people are the same as women and I know I’m hated because I’m prepared to stick my neck out and say that they aren’t. But this is telling me my feelings don’t matter compared to the feelings of trans people.

Denis goes on to say that misgendering contributes to the “extraordinarily high rates of suicide” of trans people – although the stats he quotes refers to self-reported attempted suicide rather than actual suicide. I have yet to see reliable statistics for the rate of actual suicide committed by trans people. Nor have I seen confirmed reports rather than intuitive speculation of what actually drives them to take their own lives.

This is wholly implausible. Misgendering may anger trans people and hurt their feelings but suggesting that it has anything to do with violence against trans people is silly and Dennis makes no effort to provide evidence for any correlation. I’m not saying he’s being intentionally deceptive. Intuitively, it probably seems correct to him but it doesn’t stand to reason.

“Not up for debate”

I don’t know when some people started to think this is an OK thing to say but, in any event, it’s wrong. All issues and ideas are up for debate and discussion and I believe the reason that trans ideologues are so reluctant to debate is that their arguments are easily demolished.

This is also why a debate on, for example, proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, which could have a profoundly negative effect on other people’s lives, is mendaciously framed as an “attack” on trans people and the campaign to close it down defended with spurious slogans such as “trans lives are not up for debate”, “the validity of our existence is not up for debate”, “trans people’s human rights are not up for debate”, “when the terfs attack we fight back,” etc, etc.

Finally, it is why, when they have the chance to take part in discussions on national TV – ideal opportunities to persuade the viewing public of the rightness of their cause – they resort to pitiable, fabricated excuses to avoid doing so. But it won’t wash any more. Now that the hornets’ nest has been well and truly stirred up, debates will take place with or without the participation of those who’d rather we didn’t have them.

I say more on ‘Not up for debate’ here.