One of the main lessons that I have taken out of the gender issue since I “peaked” back a few years ago, is that hatred is mostly borne of misunderstanding. Hating people for what they believe may be a valid position to take if in fact the thing they believe is truly heinous. I think everyone agrees that the Nazis’ beliefs that Jews were vermin is a despicable belief, and one that we should be particularly mindful of, on this day (it is nearly Passover as I write this post.) There are many hatreds out there, and one that infects us in the United States is based on political position.
On Tinder, we are instructed to “swipe left if you are a Biden/Trump voter.” People buy big “Let’s Go Brandon” flags, which are a reference to a NASCAR race at which people were chanting “Fuck Joe Biden.” Now it’s something that you can say at the pastor’s house for dinner and not get in trouble. Democrats are hated for being hateful commies, and Republicans are hated for being hateful bigots. It’s hard to take the high ground for hating someone if the reason that you hate them is that they are hateful, isn’t it?
But, since hate is such a poisonous mindset to maintain towards people, it seems to me to be something that should only be taken on with the greatest of care. Sure, hate Nazis for murdering millions of people. That’s probably a better position to take than apathy. Hating someone for believing something they don’t actually believe, though, that’s a different story.
Here's a tweet that gets it all wrong.
So yeah, if you're a cis woman and you're tall, they'll harass you and demand to check your genitals to make sure you're "real." If you're a cis woman with muscles and athletic chops, they'll insist you must be a man and you don't really earn your achievements.
So does the next one in the thread, same writer:
If you're a butch cis woman, they'll harass you and assume you're a trans woman failing at passing. None of these are hypothetical, they do this every day already, because they're hateful, paranoid bigots seeking targets. They don't care about protecting anyone.
The writer is referring to transphobes, based on an implication that Daniel Radcliffe’s girlfriend is a trans ID male. It’s an unfair implication because it’s based on a poor photo of the couple, but the tweeter generalizes the fault to all of us “transphobes.”
He makes the claim that gender criticals assume that transwomen are not women due to secondary sexual characteristics, or those who do not fall in the -1 to +1 modal distributions for height. He refers to bioessentialism as if this were a TERF ideology and then describes it in a completely unrecognizable way.
Bioessentialism asserts that our gender roles are fixed by our sex, meaning that women are born to be the caretakers, cleaners, and subservient because it is in their nature as women. Bioessentialism is the belief that deviance from the gender norms is wrong because we were not made nor evolved for women to take other roles such as hunting, or earning the household wages, or being the head of the household.
Bioessentialism does not mean that women are gate-keeping to decide who can be women by referring to the reproductive system. This is a subtle difference, but an easy concept to understand once you give it an honest go. Women are women due to their reproductive systems, true. They are not women because of their outward appearance, even those those are strong bimodal indicators of a woman’s sex. They are not women because they express a larger degree of femininity than masculinity, even though though that is a strong bimodal indicator of a woman’s sex. They are women because their reproductive system is organized around the production of the larger, sessile gametes. Their reproductive system is organized around receiving the motile, smaller (and more numerous) gamete and facilitate the pairing of the two types of gametes to form a zygote. And their reproductive system is organized around hosting and nourishing the zygote, then the fetus, and then through a painful and poorly evolved process that has the potential to kill them, delivers the baby to the world.
Women have physical vulnerabilities due to this whole reproductive thing that men do not have, and men can never experience. What can go wrong? Here’s a list of just the occupational hazards that women may face, that men will never face:
Changes in your metabolism increase how quickly you absorb some chemicals (e.g. some metals).
Because of physical changes, the personal protective equipment that you could wear correctly before pregnancy may not fit properly, such as lab coats or respirators.
When pregnant, changes in your immune system, lung capacity, and even ligaments can alter your risk of injury or illness due to some workplace hazards.
A fetus might be more vulnerable to some chemicals because of its rapid growth and development, particularly early in pregnancy when its organs are developing.
I’m not going to go on a tangent on all the reasons that women have some vulnerabilities that men will never face due to their reproductive biological role, but just to explain that the idea of gender roles is not a whim. It has evolved culturally, and as an evolved artifact there are many different ways that gender is structured in varying societies. There are very strictly structured societies in which women are not considered fully human, and are valued only for their domestic, sexual, and reproductive functions. There are also more enlightened societies that have been moving away from those gender structures. But there are very few societies that have evolved to erase the strictures that are placed on women to subordinate them. Men have grown accustomed over the centuries to having power over women, and power is addictive once you’ve experienced it.
This cultural power over women is a function of gender. Masculine and feminine traits are a mix of natural and learned perspectives and behavior modes, but only defined as masculine or female by the social order of gender. There is nothing inherently masculine about being aggressive, there is nothing inherently feminine about being empathetic. Those are labels that are applied to those tendencies, but they can spring up in either males or females. I recently took an online quiz that determined that I am 64% feminine and 36% masculine, and the quiz was scored based on traits that aren’t inherently male nor female. If the same traits were scored in a different society, perhaps one such as the indigenous people of the plains, I might score even higher on the feminine scale.
What the feminists are working towards, and due to the inherent loss of power that males will have to accept this is part of the reason that they are so hated, is the expansion of the limitations of gender on what women and girls are able to do with their lives. The reason that the trans concept is unacceptable has very little to do with individual expressions of feminine or masculine traits, but the idea that if a male expresses a preponderance of feminine traits there must by needs be a female inside the male.1
So, to arrive at my point: The claim is that feminists and transphobes such as myself hate trans ID people because they don’t fit in the gender norms, and are considered nasty people and bullies for stating that men should act as men, and women as women. The truth is quite the opposite. The trans claim is that masculinity reveals the male while the femininity reveals the female and the physical body is independent, or an afterthought in some holy mistake that either must or must not be corrected.2
Hating gender criticals and skeptics for what they are not is the worst sort of error. And calling us bigots for believing what we do not believe is the result of “no debate.” If trans supporters and allies would engage rather than throw up barriers to open conversation, the social crisis could be resolved. We could free ourselves of hating women for what they don’t believe.
The problem is, there are powerful forces that do not want to see it resolved. It’s a way for men to retain power over women, a deliberate function of the backlash against feminism.
While I often mockingly refer to that as a “gendersoul” I have never found or seen a verifiable nor testable explanation for the ways in which female minds can inhabit or be trapped inside a male body; or the reverse. Please enlighten me with something better than genetic variations of the X and Y chromosome, because those are not related to the
There’s no clear answer, either, on why it is that extreme body modification by surgery and drugs is so urgent in teens, but that men who ask for a change to their official gender designation have it granted without body modification. Why do they push it for kids? I have some ideas, but best to listen those who have been through it. Google “detransitioners” and read their stories.
Never underestimate the human capacity for denial - of reality in particular, or the human capacity to claim that ones own beliefs constitute the one and only truth. It would be a fascinating study in the progression of indoctrination and cults if it wasn't so profoundly misogynist and diabolical. Between predatory capitalism, male supremacy and transhumanism, we've hit the trifecta of totalitarian social engineering.
"Why do they push it for kids?" My answer: Way back in the before times it was thought that transitioning early meant the chance to blend in with the rest of population. Increasingly, as "trans" has become its own category that imperative has lost steam, replaced by the newer imperative: avoiding the "inevitable" suicide that will occur if demands for medicalization are thwarted. Underneath it all is the desire to hold high the sword of righteousness, a temptation too great for both sides to spurn. We're all justice-starved at this point.