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Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’
Fausto-Sterling later said she was writing ‘with tongue firmly in cheek’. And yet anyone who has taken gender studies in the past two decades will almost certainly have been assigned her essay, and it is taken inexplicably seriously. So entrenched is the ‘five sexes’ claim that Googling ‘how many sexes are there’ turned up ‘five’ as the top answer until the search algorithm was tweaked in response to complaints.
Bell now wishes she had come across radical-feminist ideas earlier – ‘that stereotypes don’t mean anything, that it doesn’t matter if you’re masculine, that it’s your biology that makes you a woman, and there are other women like you’. The
These books never make the connection between homophobic bullying and identifying out of one’s sex. A generation ago, progressives campaigned for schools to crack down on taunts about gay boys being girls; now, the bullies are presented as right.
The importance of gendered performance in fiction about transkids raises a question: if adults stopped fussing about the ‘right’ clothes and activities for boys and girls, then how, in practical terms, could a child express a trans identity? If no behaviours or norms were off-limits to one sex or the other, how could a child feel, or indicate to the world, that they were not actually members of their sex?
transactivism can be exploited by those who would harm children – not that trans people, or transactivists, want to harm children, or do not care if others do.
The worry is not, I repeat, that trans people are unusually likely to be child-abusers. Gay people aren’t, either, and yet their movement was infiltrated by those who were – with two baleful consequences. Children were harmed who could have been kept safe and, even today, homophobes conflate homosexuality and paedophilia. Anyone who cares for the welfare of either children or trans people should want to avoid history repeating itself.
Males are easier to include in a movement centred on personal choice than in a movement centred on an analysis of male oppression and exploitation of females.
The embrace of gender-identity ideology was part of mainstream feminism’s shift away from seeking to improve the lives of ordinary women and towards a self-congratulatory, performative, postmodernist style with its origins on campus.
regarding transwomen’s safety in men’s spaces, they have none for female people who can no longer keep men out of theirs. Such a man is the most profound type of misogynist: the type that, perhaps unconsciously, sees women as supporting actresses in men’s lives.
Navratilova draws a distinction between everyday life and sport: ‘However you see yourself, this is how I will speak to you, and about you to other people. But when it comes to sport, that’s about biology, not feelings.’
The girls are often misrepresented as seeking to get transgender athletes banned, whereas in fact all they want is that everyone competes in their own sex class. ‘In sports it’s your body that’s competing, not your mind,’ says Soule.
What campaigners mean by ‘trans rights’ is gender self-identification: that trans people be treated in every circumstance as members of the sex they identify with, rather than the sex they actually are.
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want new laws, you can focus on lobbying, rather than the painstaking business of building broad-based coalitions. And when those laws will take away other people’s rights, it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness – it is imperative to keep the public in the dark.
Law
The idea that what makes someone a man or woman is performance of, or identification with, gender is incompatible with the foundational feminist belief that women, like men, are fully human and should not be restricted by stereotypes.
All the harms I have described – the destruction of women’s rights, the sterilisation of gender non-conforming children, the spread of postmodernist homophobia, and the corruption of medical and scientific research – would crumble before a renewed societal commitment to the Enlightenment values of open inquiry and robust debate. This book is my contribution.
