How I hit Peak Trans

In 2015 Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn Jenner. I remember hearing this announcement with confusion but brushing it aside. I did not then and still now don’t understand how a man can call himself a woman, but it had seemed like a cheap thing that a celebrity might do. There was a lot of gossip, talk about transgender issues but I had little interest. Over time I began to hear more discussion of trans issues, including trans celebrities, the discussion of gender-neutral bathrooms and Jazz Jennings. Still I barely listened.

A few years ago I remember hearing that one of my friends old boyfriend’s had come out as transgender. He liked to wear women’s clothes for a lark as far as I knew but I found out no more about whether he actually transitioned or not. Yet people said he was living as a woman with statements like him living as he was always meant to be. In my mind I could not fathom the idea of a man who lives as a woman living as he was meant to be. How was he a woman? What made him now a woman the way someone biologically female was?

Around the same time another friend announced that they wished to be a woman. They grew their hair long and talked about wanting to get surgery so they could have breasts. They wanted to keep their male genitalia. No one in my group took them seriously and eventually they stopped saying it, cut their hair and just went on as normal. I did not forget though. The idea of a man, now two men really who wanted to identity as my sex because of what seemed to me to be a fetish only unsettled me more. I wondered also what made one seem valid to others while the other did not seem so? Was it because he went through with the change and started actually living as a woman, whatever that meant in this context?

At the beginning of last year I stumbled onto a now defunct part of Reddit called Gender Critical Feminism. I looked through a strange thread about real life figures who were supposed to be now transgender. I looked through more links and discovered some very strange and disturbing stories. There were stories about men identifying as trans women after marrying and having kids and leaving their wives in a horrible bind, stories about males in female dorms and changing rooms acting creepy and predatory, ones about biological males calling themselves lesbians and trying to get lesbians to date them.

I read up on a theory called the Cotton Ceiling, about trans women attempting to sleep with biological women who are lesbians. A porn star named Drew Deveaux coined the term some time ago in the early 2010’s. I read up on the difficulty with keeping lesbian only spaces. When I pointed this out to my friends later that night at dinner they dismissed it as too far-fetched to be real. It sounded to them like something a far-right troll would come up with. Yet I knew from what I had read that too many people were talking about it for it to be a joke.

I don’t date very often and live a fairly secluded and private life, perhaps due to low self-esteem but I have always found both sexes to be sexually attractive to some degree. I remember being nervous as a young girl in Catholic school over my feelings for a fellow girl I practiced things like kissing with. My first sexual experience was with a female when very young and it was my sexual awakening. I fantasized about women and girls for years before males came along. I thought of the stories of hell I was told by Christians like my grandmother as the fate of those that were gay. I was called names for not seeming pretty and feminine enough and was referred to derisively as a lesbian. Though I liked boys later those feelings never fully went away and I have always felt sympathy for anyone same-sex attracted in a world that seemed hostile to their rights.

What I was seeing was homophobia towards women and it was coming from a direction I did not expect it from. Those around me could not see it nor could they see my concerns with the numerous strange gender identities coming about or the stories of fetishists I was reading. They could not prepare me for what I would see next.

I heard mentioned on Gender Critical Reddit about a Canadian feminist named Meghan Murphy who had come under fire for supposed anti-trans activism. She had been thrown off Twitter and had her meetings protested. She also had a website called Feminist Current which shared writings from her and other feminist activists in Canada as well as feminist news stories from around the world. As a person of extreme curiosity at all times I decided to look into her.

What I found was not a woman speaking hate but one speaking words of common sense. In Canada self-id laws had been quietly passed to allow anyone who identified as the opposite sex to claim that as their gender identity. Her writings and those of other women on her site spoke of the dangers in such a movement and the abuses of it to women and girls at the hands of men who identified as transgender. Her words were honest and the stories were harrowing. One in particular got to me and helped me reach what gender critical feminists sometimes call a peak trans moment. That moment when you can no longer ignore the contradictions, absurdities and hostility that the modern day trans rights movement has become. That was Vancouver Rape Relief.

Vancouver Rape Relief is Canada’s longest standing rape relief center according to Feminist Current. After years of campaigning by trans rights activists, 30,000 of their money for educational programs was pulled due to their policy of admitting only biological women. To make matters worse the center has been the victim of repeated acts of vandalism including threatening messages being scrawled on the windows and doors and dead rats nailed to the doors. This was done to a rape relief center for abused women. Thinking about it more than a year later still angers and horrifies me as much as it did when I first heard that story.

So what kind of movement lauds itself as progressive while attacking and working to defund a center for raped and traumatized women? How could anyone ignore the misogyny that seems so obvious in a move such as this? How could I support anything I see and hear of in this movement knowing some of the darker things I have discovered about it? As lockdown started in my country I decided to find out further. I went not just on Reddit but started to use an old account I had created several years earlier on Twitter.

The thing that I discovered was how many women, some under their own names and some anonymous as I am on Twitter felt the same way as I did. After disagreement or apathy from people of both sexes offline I discovered that many females around the world were seriously considering the possible threats to their rights that modern day trans activism was causing. I heard stories of heartbreak as women discussed their past being abused and hurt by men and their desire to keep single-sex spaces for themselves and any daughters they might have.

I listened to lesbians talk about feeling left out of a movement that was now telling them that biological men can call themselves women and lesbians and invade their spaces and try to pressure them into unwanted sex. And perhaps most heartbreakingly of all I listened to stories of parents with children who were now identifying as transgender and their worries that their kids who had never seemed unhappy in their bodies before puberty were being considered for drugs and surgery that would alter them forever.

It was a whirlwind of information to take in and process. Also of note was the hostility I saw towards myself and other people who were gender critical. I became used to terms like terf, transphobe, bigot, to being told I was willing to let trans people die, that I was bigoted and hateful. I heard people who had never met me and had very little clear view of my opinions on trans issues tell me that they hoped I die. I had people report my account and post explicit pictures on my threads.

The most horrifying thing of all was the reaction, both offline and online to this movement as though this was not going on. While celebrities and politicians in multiple countries talked about how vulnerable transgender people were and denounce anyone who spoke against them as hateful, I watched people with pronouns in their bio and anime pictures threaten to rape and kill feminists on Twitter for the crime of saying that sex was real and we needed sex-segregated spaces. I watched major human rights organizations refuse to acknowledge biological sex and push for male bodied athletes in female sports even with the evidence of this unfairness staring them in the face.

I posted a thread asking these points and I still don’t know the answer to them: I don't understand what kind of world we live in that talking about biological sex is hateful but threatening to rape and kill women for talking about it isn't. I don't understand how asking for sex-segregated spaces is hateful but the men who made those spaces important for women aren't. I don't understand how tweeting about women meaning adult human female is hateful but calling women names like terf, bitch, cunt and whore aren't. And I don't understand how insulting women who don't want to be labeled is ok but saying trans women aren't women is hurtful?

And I don't understand how people can cheer-lead on abused women not being allowed to have their own domestic violence centers, girls their own sports, the female sex their own words. All while we change language and laws to be inclusive to trans people. And I don't understand how thousands of people here and more offline can see how hard it can still be to be a women, how in danger we are of male violence and say, yes any male-bodied person can now be a women and you are a bigot or terf if you so much as say no to him.

I have been told online and off that it is kind and inclusive to consider trans women as actual women. Some truly seem to believe them to be women while others just don’t want to deny people the right to identify as they wish to. So is that what men and women are? Are we identities to put on and play with at will? I have said that I hate identity politics and I stand by that as I find them degrading and insulting. The idea that a man can literally identify into my sex class even more so.

If trans women are women then they can be in all female spaces: bathrooms, showers, changing rooms, dorms, shelters, prisons. They are women therefore they belong there. It would be dangerous for them not to be as they are unsafe in men’s spaces. This brings up something of importance to me and a little food for thought:

What is a trans women though? I ask this because I wonder what most people would consider someone who is trans and calls themselves a women to be. Is it someone with gender dysphoria? A female identity? Female pronouns and clothes?

There is a real life condition called gender dysphoria that has been studied for years by doctors such as Ray Blanchard. That a person could have persistent, consistent dislike of their body and wish to medically transition to live as the opposite sex. These were usually males who felt a disconnect with their bodies from a very early age, they were gender nonconforming and often same-sex attracted. GD was felt to be helped somewhat by hormones and surgery though there is still controversy as to whether the appropriate thing to do is to treat people with this condition as though they were of the opposite sex and give them surgeries.

Another condition acknowledged by doctors such as Blanchard was a condition called autogynephilia. This was a condition often thought to affect primarily heterosexual males who had a fetish for dressing up as and being seen as women. They wished to be seen as female and that involved not just the clothes but entering the same spaces as women, being called by a female name, appropriating womenhood.

Are these both a type of trans women? Do they make valid sense being treated as such? Should it take surgery and hormones to make them fully count, such as a transsexual would have or should they be called women on identity alone? What about fetishists with AGP who are using this to enter female spaces and expose themselves to women such as Tyler Porter did in a women’s shelter in Canada? Or Jessica Yaniv, a trans woman who claims to be intersex and has spoken at creepy length about menstruation and their fascination with underage girls? Are these trans women too?

When you move the goalposts so far it becomes near impossible to figure out not just how you are defining women but trans women as well. What makes a dysphoric feminine gay man who transitions the same as a heterosexual AGP man who likes little girls? When you think of trans woman, what do you think is in the public's mind? Why are these both not just considered women but why are they even considered both trans? Does a wig make someone transgender now and welcome to female spaces?

Society says yes. The push for self-id, including in the United States has increasingly been successful. Trans inclusion in female spaces, sports and words is more and more common. The grumbles of dissent are there but they are rarely heard compared to somewhere such as the U.K, where gender critical feminism is a fairly well-known movement that has managed some successful strides recently. The United States seems blissfully unaware of the extent to which laws are being changed to suit the activists, with bills to allow inmates to be placed according to their gender identity being passed in states like California and Maine with barely a murmur.

Young women of my generation and the one now coming of age still deal with misogyny but they have not had to fight for their rights in law in most of western society. They think those rights are engraved in stone and fail to realize how brittle they are. I see young women mocking and insulting feminists of the past, telling older women that they don't need them, that they do not need feminism at all. But these women can only say this because of what feminists in the past have done and are continuing to do.

Something that feminists in the past fought for was the ability of women to have sex-segregated spaces. Bathrooms, showers, changing rooms, dormitories, these were things that they worked to get for our sex so that women could participate more freely and safely in public life. Yet young women nowadays seem to think it kind and inclusive to let biological males in, even when it lets in trans women such as Karen White and Jessica Yaniv.

It will never go wrong they say but this is said in a world where women and girls are harassed and raped everyday and often without a single conviction against the rapists. The goldmine that is opened for males by letting them into female spaces alone is too obvious to the wary observer. Yet people do not want to make that connection and often won’t or brush it aside. Why?

The first thought that comes to mind is the fear of being called bigoted. No one wants to seem that they are the one who is being unkind and prejudiced against what is a seemingly marginalized group in need of protection. Statistics abound about transgender people being at great risk of violence, especially trans women of color. The threat of suicide also hangs ominously in the air, the idea that these are fragile individuals in need of protecting and some might say coddling is very strong with some.

So when you look to be the enemy speaking up against a group of vulnerable people at high risk of violence then you stand to lose a lot of the support that might come your way. If a trans women is not just a women but a women who is part of a very vulnerable group of people then it stands to reason that she is doubly vulnerable as a biological women. Any woman who is not transgender, sometimes referred to as a cisgender woman is viewed in this light as the oppressor. But is this so?

Well it sounds like it could be. Until you remember that trans women are biological males that are now in female sports, where trans athletes such as Rachel McKinnon and Laurel Hubbard have used their advantages to score victories over female athletes and in Hubbard’s case will now be competing as a woman in the Tokyo Olympics. That trans women have taken awards and prizes in sports such as cycling, track, boxing and weight-lifting. And then you think, are biological women, on average smaller and slighter with less lung capacity, smaller hearts and less muscle mass really the oppressor here? When groups such as the ACLU are fighting to keep trans athletes in female sports and biological women and girls are struggling and failing to keep them out who really is the oppressor?

Who furthermore is the oppressor when biological males who have committed violent crimes like Karen White in the U.K and Tara Desousa from Canada get put in female prisons?  When people can get fired from their jobs for saying that sex is real, like Maya Forstater in the U.K or Sasha White in the United States. How can there be anything hateful in speaking up for biological sex and how can people who do so be considered hateful and bigoted?

Well how many of these do you here about in the media? How many Karen White’s and Jessica Yaniv’s and Tara Desousa’s does anyone want to hear about? The point after all is to push the narrative that all trans people are automatically weak, vulnerable, in danger and in need of protection. Though this may indeed be true for some, in particular those with severe gender dysphoria, the ability to call out male violence gets horribly skewed.

But everyone wants to be kind. They want to seem inclusive. This is just like LGB needs of course and look how terrible society was to same-sex attracted people? No one wants to be on the wrong side of history and look like the one hurting the marginalized. We want to be kind, inclusive, progressive. Any worries are surely fear-mongering, to be tucked away as something only neurotic religious sorts who don’t support progressive causes like feminism and gay rights would worry about.

But that is an easy response. Beneath a genuine concern for people with gender dysphoria and their needs is an equally genuine worry about the calls for self-id and how some might use those to hurt women and children. There is concern for female spaces and sports, for female representation. These concerns have not been met; rather they have been steamrolled over in the name of kindness and inclusion.

This doesn't benefit biological females at all. They lose their safe spaces and sports to males in the name of inclusion. So I wonder how people can’t see the gaslighting and manipulation. The desire to be kind and the no debate and emotionally abusive tactics involving threats of suicide may partly give me my answer. More sunlight on the darker sides of this movement would likely help immensely but that is not what these people want and it is not what the media is going to report.

A movement filled with biological males like the wealthy Laurel Hubbard taking prize money from women of color or the former athlete and multi-millionaire Caitlyn Jenner being given a woman of the year award is not exactly banking on a little prestige. When a creepy male feminist like ex-military man Charles Clymer can call themselves a woman, put on a dress and become Charlotte Clymer, now member of the most marginalized group of people then we have a problem.

Though of course one can ask: what about trans men? You have not discussed them. True. They are relegated to the backburner of this movement, both in terms of criticism and praise for it. I suppose when male sports are not at stake and females are losing their spaces it is easier to ignore. On the side of opponents there are no Jessica Yaniv’s to deal with, no Rachel McKinnon to resist and on the side of the activists, no sob story of the poor trans women of color dying en masse or former athlete and reality show star turned trans women passed middle age and acquiring the glitz of the limelight. Certainly no trans man is making man of the year, acquiring billions in business or scooping up awards in sports. This is truly a movement that knows the sex of the people involved on both sides, even if one side chooses to continue to play dumb.

It’s a men’s movement. It’s by men for men and women get to deal with any of the problems that come with it. The only area where females; that is biological females, are centered in this movement is one where the females in question have barely hit womenhood at all.

Recently children’s author J.K Rowling of Harry Potter fame has come under the cross-fire for supposedly hateful and transphobic tweets. She spoke about sex being real and meaningful to discuss for which she was criticized. She was also criticized for her opinions on a particularly controversial part of modern day transgender activism: the identity of transgender children and the resulting medicating of these young children.

The best known example of a transgender child in the limelight here in the United States is Jazz Jennings. Jazz Jennings is a biological male who came out as transgender publicly around five years old after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria. A slew of interviews, books, documentaries and other related material came out afterwards with a TV series I am Jazz following in 2015. Jazz Jennings would later receive sex-reassignment surgery in 2019 which had to be followed up by further surgeries due to complications.

Like most children now diagnosed Jazz Jennings has received puberty blockers from a young age to stop the growth of secondary sex characteristics until the child is old enough to begin taking cross-sex hormones. Lupron is a very commonly used drug for these children. This is a drug that was initially created in the 1980’s to treat prostate cancer but has been used for a variety of reasons including to treat Endometriosis and has also been used on convicted pedophiles to chemically castrate them.

The drug has also been used to stop early precocious puberty in young girls. The long-term effects showed that loss of bone density was not uncommon years after the drug had no longer been taken. Yet this is a very common puberty-blocking drug given to kids in the United States. Give them the drugs as soon as possible and then within a few years start on cross-sex hormones. The idea is that they will then resemble the preferred gender they wish to be. To not allow these children this is to literally contribute to their distress and possible suicide.

The problems with cross-sex hormones are another matter. The likely combination after years of puberty blockers followed by these hormones is infertility. The idea that a child that is not old enough to consent to drink, smoke, vote or have sex according to law but is old enough to map out their life and whether or not they plan to one day have biological children is a stunning example of hypocrisy at work. What child when they are barely in their teens is concerned with whether or not they will one day produce offspring? Yet these concerns are brushed aside as bigoted or possibly even catastrophically dangerous in light of the supposed anguish the child feels at being trapped in the wrong body.

I would rather have a living daughter than a dead son is a common claim made by those wishing to guilt those who are thinking of withholding medicine. These children it is said will die. They will kill themselves and their blood will be on the hands of those who opposed their transitioning. Yet none of them can answer a single question. Where were all of these children before?

Why so many children coming out as transgender now? Why did I not know them when I was growing up in the 90’s and early 2000’s? Can anyone tell me where these children were, why I never knew of them, why everyone knew of gender nonconforming people but never a single trans kid? A common criticism that the activists swat away is the idea of a social contagion causing so many kids to identify as transgender. When the numbers keep going up and thousands of kids continue to identify as transgender you have to wonder. Especially concerning is that unlike most grown adults calling themselves transgender who are male the growing majority of kids seem to be biologically female.

Teen girls in particular are prone to social contagions. They are also prone to self-harm and depression. As a severely depressed young girl who thought seriously of self-harm when I was younger I can’t ignore the possibly that the growing number of young girls might be due to a social contagion. Everywhere the world seems enthralled with the idea of people being transgender. The concerns of poor bone growth, possible risk of cancer and other health matters are not brought up too much and very few young kids care very much about their long term fertility.

But they do care about their immediate wants and having those gratified. They care about having any pain they have go away even if the methods for doing so are shoddy and unlikely to work long-term. The fact that we are dealing with children whose prefrontal cortex has not fully developed and who should not be treated as old enough to make these decisions is something that should be worrying the adults around them. Yet activists often brush any concern aside and so the growing number of kids identifying as trans continues unabated.

It’s almost an unspoken understanding that young girls are scared, vulnerable and miserable during their teenage years but the growing number of kids wanting to be away from their biological sex is swatted away as an inconvenient truth. But the most inconvenient truth of all is the very real pain that has always accompanied being a young woman in a world that is harsh to females does not go away because you take some hormones and get surgery. The idea of fleeing womenhood to avoid the pain of being female in a society that seems so hostile to our sex might seem tempting but it is fleeting.

Every women and girl has dealt with her share of pain at being female. The sad thing is we are not equipping young girls to deal with this. I have been on the brink where as not just a bisexual teenage girl but one with Tourettes I have known what it is like to grow up feeling ugly, lost and alone. I did not know and still do not know a single other female with my disorder and the pain of having it separated me from my peers in a way that has left me feeling distrustful of others to this day. I escaped into books, music, games…anything to heal the agony of being a seemingly unlikeable and odd child that the world did not understand or need. I escaped into fantasy because the lived reality was too hurtful to always live. How many similarly odd girls, autistic, gnc, same-sex attracted, are going through what I have?

How many odd little thirteen year olds look in the mirror and hate what they see looking back at them the way I once did? How many escape to the confines of fantasy to get away from themselves? How many wish to hurt themselves to take out some of their pain of not being good enough for a world that still views us for our looks and ability to fit in? How many might think that these drugs are a miracle cure that will fix everything and that the praise they get for being special and different will last forever?

The future is not female or transgender or nonbinary or anything really. The future is incomprehensible and it is forged through a path of great pain. One day society will have to look at itself and realize that more than anything in this debate it has failed a whole generation of young kids, many of them female. That it sold a miracle cure to them when they were too young to realize how little it would fix and how much harm it would ultimately cause while anyone who complained was shouted down as bigoted and hateful. We are starting to see detransitioners. I expect there to be many more in the future and it might take a whole wave of them before this starts to get the attention it needs and stops being permissible. I just wonder how many hurt children, especially girls will try to flee adulthood in the meantime and what will happen to their health?

Where do we go from here?