Where "Just Be Kind" Has Gotten Us

It’s hard to express exactly how angry I am as I sit down to write today. [...] I have also accepted that it is not “hatred,” either, at least not in the sense that trans rights activists mean when they say this. Anger is a justifiable response to injustice. This anger in particular feels uncontainable, uncontrollable, as boundless as the sea of derisions and obscenities against my sex class, especially against those of us who insist that it is still a sex class, and that it will never, ever include anybody born male.

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Today, my anger is consuming like a fire.

The first ceded ground: “Trans women are women”

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The value structure enforced by female socialization helps illustrate why women and girls are some of the—if not the most—ardent and zealous warriors for trans activism and gender ideology. This is completely unsurprising in a society that constantly pushes women to cede, cede, cede, and then rewards them for doing that. Some of the demands that feel the smallest, the easiest to yield to, turn out to have the most insidious effect, particularly those that have to do with relinquishing female-specific language to make room for more “inclusion.” Prior to all this, I would not have described having a word to refer to a specific category of oppressed people as a “right.” This is something so fundamental to any political discourse, it’s more like the basis to even begin a discussion about rights: the ability to name the group of people whose rights are either at risk or under attack. The patriarchal mandate is the same in language as it is with our bodies: to divide and isolate us, while males, of course, stay intact.

I capitulated to these language demands—like “trans women are women”—for years, because they seemed like such small concessions to make. I never realized the way I was being asked to contribute to my own self-erasure: Yes, you are me, you are us. Whatever I have is for you also. Whoever I am, you are also. Everything I have is for you too. Taking back female-specific language is one arena, at least, in which I can regain some meager amount of ground, by wholly refusing to uphold the fiction that any males are included in any definition of the categories women and girls.

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