I had been a volunteer escort for Planned Parenthood clinics in another state for a couple of years. It was just a matter of shielding patients arriving and leaving the clinic from the ghouls whose job it is to serve their god by yelling at women and calling them evil murderers. I donned the vest that marked us as volunteers so that patients wouldn’t think we were going to hassle them, and walked them to the door with an umbrella open to block the line of site from the protesters on the other side.
The volunteers were managed by a woman who arranged the schedules, and ensured that the clinics were covered by at least two pairs of volunteers on the days that abortion services were offered. When I first joined the group, she and I got along great. I volunteered two weekends per month, Saturday at one location and Sunday at another. I occasionally gave talks at our periodic conferences on the role of a man supporting Planned Parenthood and women, etc etc etc.
So, there was no animus between us until…
The lead volunteer started a Facebook group that was private for us to communicate within, and another to be the public face of the local Planned Parenthood volunteers. One day she created an entry in our name about gender critical feminsts being bad people and ended it with “fuck TERFS.” I sent her a private message that I objected to the post, not because of my position on the transgender issue, but because of the violent threats that gender critical women receive as TERFs. For those new to the game, TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.
Here’s one of my asides. A tenet of transactivism is that all transgender identifying males are to be accepted as women, with no objection or question. Radical feminists can’t accept this because it is in direct opposition to their stance that only women are women, and that the nature of oppression that women face is based on sex and not gender. (This may not be precise, but it will have to do as an aside. A full explanation by a feminist scholar would be a better source than me.) Radfem Collective provides a better, yet still concise description:
Radical Feminist theory analyses the structures of power which oppress the female sex. Its central tenet is that women as a biological class are globally oppressed by men as a biological class. We believe that male power is constructed and maintained through institutional and cultural practices that aim to bolster male superiority through the reinforcement of female inferiority. One such manifestation of the patriarchy is gender, which we believe to be a socially constructed hierarchy that functions to repress female autonomy and has no basis in biology. Radical Feminists also critique all religions and their institutions, and other practices that promote violence against women such as prostitution, pornography and FGM. The subjugation of women is a social process that has no basis in biology or any other pretext, and thus can and should be challenged and dismantled.
Radical Feminists see that our oppression as females is closely linked to and bound up in our roles as the bearers of new life and male hatred of our female reproductive power. Radical Feminists take an unequivocal stance on the right to female reproductive justice.
Radical Feminism increasingly recognises that females from different oppressed groups experience a combination of oppressions. Class, race and disability have systematic structural impacts on different women's lives in different toxic combinations.Radical Feminists believe in an autonomous women's movement as the path to women's liberation. We believe in the importance of female-only spaces where theory and action are developed from the lived reality of females who have been socialised into womanhood.
Back to my story. I told her that I objected and did not say anything at all about trans ID males as women. But that was her immediate reply, an accusation of hate for transwomen. I resigned immediately as a volunteer and when I made arrangements to return my vest and umbrella she made it clear to the other volunteers that they were not to talk to me. Volunteer teammates messaged me in Facebook to ask why I was resigning and I told them that I couldn’t be a part of an organization that on the one hand was protecting women as patients from the threats of violence, while on the other accepted the threats of violence towards TERFs.
There were many antecedents to my “peak trans” moment, and one of them was the sanguine acceptance, by people who claimed to be feminists or supporters of feminism, of violence or threats of violence against women. Since men have the physical strength (bimodally) and social power to carry out violence agaist women, such threats are credible.
Hatred towards women is being justified by a sense of protection of trans ID males. For brevity, I’ll refer to them as TiMs from now on. The popular notion is that TiMs are under a constant threat of violence from men, and that the words of gender critical women are responsible for the violence carried out. (I laugh at the idea of violent men taking their cues from women.) This is considered “literal violence,” and so any threats that transactivists make is justified as being a defensive retaliation.
During this time I had been in a long-distance casual relationship with a woman from another state. If you want to think of her as the “girlfriend in Canada” that’s fine with me. She came to visit meafter my PP exit. I approached the reason that I had left Planned Parenthood, and it was difficult because I was still figuring out what all of this means. She also took the rejection of the term TERF as an attack against TiMs, but I went through my thought process with her and I had thought she understood by the time she left. We had an enjoyable time during the remainder of her visit, and she didn’t bring it up again until after we had ended our thing.
Two years later, she sent me a text after I had run into her at a mutual friend’s home. She said she didn’t want to be awkward around me, but then said the only thing that would make it awkward is my hatred of transpeople. I tried again to explain my position and that is is not based on hate, but she wouldn’t accept it and shortly afterward said she can’t be friends with anyone who is “Sexist, Homophobic, Racist, or Transphobic.” I didn’t see the sense in tyring to argue with her that we should maintain a friendship, or pointing out that two of those things are in conflict with the fourth thing. I just told her “okay,” and we haven’t talked since.
Accusing a friend of hatred towards people in order to shame them into accepting something that they cannot accept in good faith is, in my estimation, a nasty thing to do. It just seemed so easy for her, and I had trusted her to listen to me rather than assume I am a hateful person.
This isn’t an essay to gain sympathy, but to illustrate how poisonous the atmosphere around gender has become. There are women whose careers have been put in jeopardy, or even been forced to leave their positions because of the accusation of hate. I haven’t suffered much myself, compared some of the people who’ve faced such accusations. Some of the other substacks on my recommend list are written by those who’ve suffered economically for their positions.
I have one more story to relate for now, and that took place in 2020. I had flown to Seattle for an event at the Seattle Public Library. Speakers Kara Dansky, Lierre Keith, Meghan Murphy, and Saba Malik were presenting their talks on the harmful effects of transgender activism on women.
There had been attempts to have the event canceled by activists who considered the event to be transphobic and hateful and on the order of a fascist rally. Here’s a writeup of the event for more detail. On the day of the event, I had dinner with some people I had only known through Facebook GC groups, as well as some new acquaintances of a like mind. This was at a hotel down the block from the library. On the streets surrounding the library there were loud protests by people who don’t think that women should be able to speak about such things.
There were shouts and chants, including the ironic “No Hate, No Fear, All Genders Welcome Here!” We didn’t engage with them, at the request of the speakers, because we didn’t want to give them an excuse to erupt into violence. As we stood in line at the back entrance, protected by a phalanx of Seattle’s finest, there were people shouting and yelling at us. At the front of the building the crowd was larger, and all of them were angry that women dared speak up.
A trans supportive group was admitted inside the protective perimeter and was handing out broadsides about the speakers and the evil deeds they had committed, and I talked to them and explained my positions on gender and denied that hatred is involved. I defended the right of the speakers to speak.
Once the doors to the auditorium were opened and we were admitted, we milled about and introduced ourselves to the people around us, while at the meantime the protesters outside were banging on the windows and it seemed like they might break through. The event began, and as Lierre Keith rose to speak a group of men two rows behind me stood and shouted about TERFS and Hatred and repeated the ironic chant. The police go their attention and threatened to arrest them if they continued to be disruptive. The lads sat, and Lierre continued. Again the boys stood up and carried on, these Brave Soldiers for the Order of the Gender, and the return chant of “Let Women Speak!” rang through the auditorium as they were arrested. I am quite certain that they equated themselves with the Freedom Riders of Mississippi as they were being handcuffed and carried away.
Following the event, I left with the group I had come in with and we were guarded by the police against a crowd that continued to scream at us.
The evening ended well, but the event left a deep impression on me. I do see hatred in this social upheaval over gender. These three vignettes have illustrated the direction that the hatred flows.
The hatred is not coming from people who are afraid of gender non-conforming people for being different. It’s in the other direction. The hatred is towards women who are fighting against a new form of misogyny, a new breed of MRA’s who have discovered how to get cookies from the liberal feminists who used to mock their demands for “Freeze Peach” following Gamer- and Elevator-gate.
It’s cool to be a misogynist again, as long as an MRA uses transphobia accusations as a shield against feminist criticism.
The TiM says #metoo.
THANK YOU
I peaked when, in my work as a CASA, I saw % of trans identified Foster Youth was some 15x higher than among kids at large. And nobody had any questions about that! Nope, just affirm!
Nothing genetic happens fifteen times more among foster youth.
The list of symptoms or signals that 'you might be trans' borrows very heavily from Developmental Trauma sequelae. It feels like picking off troubled kids for medicalized lives. NO.