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Róisín Michaux #transphobia 4w.pub

These Men Were Promised Lesbians
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“When those laws will take away other people’s rights,” says Joyce, “it is not only unnecessary to build public awareness. It is imperative to keep the public in the dark.” If only #NoDebate hadn’t been the strategy, these men might have found out earlier that there would be no women waiting for them on the other side of their divorce.

Who egged on the incels?
In a 2019 study, only 3.1% of straight (and non-trans) people were willing to date a trans person. Lesbians were more likely to be game, though it turned out that their willingness only extended to natal women. And in news that would have shocked not a single female – had any of us been consulted – it turns out almost nobody wants to date trans women.

The author of the study, Karen L Blair, was apparently keen to toe the delusional line. She blamed “explicit transprejudice,” and our alleged tendency to view trans people as “unfit, mentally ill, or subhuman.” She said those who denied attraction to trans people simply have “a lack of understanding or knowledge about what it means to be a transgender man or woman, and therefore, what it would mean to date a trans person.”

We're simply not trying hard enough, she says, because “it is one thing to make space for trans people within our workplaces, schools, washrooms, and public spaces, but it is another to see them included within our families and most intimate of spaces, our romantic relationships.”

And the chilling conclusion: “We won’t be able to say, as a society, that we are accepting of trans citizens until they are also included within our prospective dating pools.”

Incels, meaning involuntarily celibate men, have always existed. But nobody threw parades for them, and bigotry wasn't blamed for their unfulfilled desires. Women were. And now, again, it's our fault these men are all alone in their disgusting flats. Gender euphoria is temporary. Woman hatred is eternal.

Róisín Michaux #transphobia 4w.pub

These Men Were Promised Lesbians
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Being cruel to #BeKind
Trans women often end up dating each other, even finding real happiness in the arrangement - though for heterosexual men it rarely seems like their first choice. The relationships they have with actual women are more often than not the wives who decided to stick around, or young “queer” women living their truth that TWAW (trans women are women).

Many try out the chasers (ostensibly straight men, but with a fetish for transgender women) before swearing off them. They might try the dating scene as openly trans, before eventually, inevitably, getting creative with the truth. Sometimes they are successful, in which case they are ecstatic, which only serves to deepen the sadness of the other men in the groups.

But as they burn through their options, the sense of desperation often deepens.

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And then comes the dawning realisation that everyone has been lying to them, which is when the anger begins to build: “Feeling crappy about my looks from trying to date. 3 years of hormones, FFS and still I get brushed off immediately because they can clock me....and don’t want to be with a transgender woman.”

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The political hugboxing of AGPs
A civil rights movement is one in which you win hearts and minds. You convince people to give rights to those who didn’t have them before, as Helen Joyce puts it in her excellent book Trans:when ideology meets reality. The process, which usually takes decades or more, has been sped up in the case of “trans” people. “You might think it a good thing that such a delay is a thing of the past,” says Joyce. “But in fact it’s an indication that transactivism is not a civil rights movement at all.”

Gay rights, female enfranchisement, and desegregation took ages, and had to be built from the ground up via speeches and rallies where the favour of majorities was won. Only then did these movements take their cases to the courts. Trans activists went straight to the politicians, avoiding the painstaking process of convincing women to extend access to their spaces, identities and bodies.

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Róisín Michaux #transphobia 4w.pub

These Men Were Promised Lesbians

Whose idea was it to tell heterosexual men that they could change their wardrobe and the world would see them as women? A non-exhaustive list: your local government, your national government, your federal government, your national broadcaster, the HER app, and your local arts centre.

Any time women made it known that, as one half of a sexually dimorphic species, we can spot the phenotypical traits of men before we clock literally anything else about them, we were shouted down, expelled, fired or attacked. But the threats did nothing to change our innate sexual attraction.

The grimmest places on earth

The end result is a lot of lonely, unhappy “transbians.” Promised by all of our major institutions that only raging bigots would see through their fancy dress, they gather on internet fora and post through the stages of grief. Incredibly, the first of those stages is often surprise.

Peppered among the sexy selfies in divorced-dad apartments, in Facebook groups like “Transgender Lesbians” and “How to girl” and the subreddits r/MtF, r/AskTransgender, and r/MTFSelfieTrain, they run the gauntlet from hope to shock to despair to rage. The following unedited and unlinked quotes are just a sample:

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What gives? They got their official girl-certificate, they have little nubbins of boobs, and everyone in the office is forced to call them “she”. So why does nobody want to date them? Trans "women" rarely pass. And yet society has invested heavily in convincing them that they can.

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Stefanie Bode #transphobia 4w.pub

Four Reasons To Stop Saying “Gender Dysphoria”
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The diagnosis and concept of “gender dysphoria” itself is 100 % intertwined with today’s gender identity ideology. It is inconsistent to condemn the latter and preserve the former as right and valid. The label is so strongly connected to the gender industry, that we put a woman in danger of undergoing harmful chemical and surgical interventions, once we use or repeat the term “gender dysphoria” in reference to her.

4. The label of “Gender Dysphoria” others women
When feminists use the concept of “gender dysphoria” to explain other women’s distress, they define them as having a psychiatric illness; this is not only pathologizing, but also othering, in declaring someone is fundamentally different from us - something is wrong with that woman and must be either fixed or tolerated.

As feminists, we know that it’s perfectly healthy, and indeed useful, to feel uncomfortable with sex roles and sex role stereotypes. We know that it is normal - albeit not desirable - to not feel at ease with one’s female body under male supremacy. Furthermore, in referring to these women as “people with gender dysphoria” we reduce them to these experiences and contribute to them identifying with an apolitical sexist psychiatric narrative.

Instead of othering women, we could point out the commonalities in our experiences. When we de-pathologize women who claim to have “gender dysphoria,” we help them to understand that their experiences make perfect sense in a misogynistic world and that there are always alternatives to self-harm. The advice given by Elie and Nele here goes in this direction again. They recommend women to search for role models with similar bodies and observable nonconformity to sex role stereotypes, in addition to developing a feminist awareness and to questioning internalized sex role stereotypes.

Use clear language to address the practices of transgenderism
If feminists want to attack the ideas and practices of transgenderism, it’s time to refrain from using the misogynist psychiatric concept of “gender dysphoria” and start criticizing it instead.

Instead of relying on diagnostic labels, specifically describe the behavior and experiences of the women and men involved.
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Stefanie Bode #transphobia 4w.pub

Four Reasons To Stop Saying “Gender Dysphoria”
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There may be other ways to deal with the distress that comes from being at odds with sex role stereotypes. Despite personal anecdotes of overcoming this distress through learning about radical feminism, this is not pursued even by gender critical psychotherapists as a potential remedy or a way to channel this distress. None recommend feminist activism, or participation in radical lesbian communities.

Usually, the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic communities do not recognize psychotherapy’s unwanted side effects, as for instance its negative impact on the liberation and feminist awareness of women, as Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins have warned us long ago.

Instead, those who refer to the psychiatric concept of “gender dysphoria” when discussing the problems of transgenderism demonstrate uncritical views of the whole system of psychotherapy and psychiatry itself, which includes the institution of psychiatric diagnoses.

As feminists, we have to criticize these systems and the concepts they use, work that feminists like Phyllis Chesler and Celia Kitzinger already started many years ago. This is especially true on issues related to sex and sex role stereotypes, which Sheila Jeffreys has spent decades documenting.

Upholding the label of “gender dysphoria” confirms the psychiatric notion that the body is the actual problem and used in feminist circles it suggests that mitigating suffering on an individual level should be feminists’ main focus of concern.

In addition, it seems that the diagnosis itself creates the symptoms that it tries to describe. Some women reported that the aversion against their body started only after others assigned the label “gender dysphoria” to them, which is an example of the strong constitutive nature of concepts and ideas. As Emily Köhler testified in her talk at Women’s Declaration International, relating to the concept of “gender dysphoria” taught her to dissociate from her body.

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Stefanie Bode #transphobia 4w.pub

Four Reasons To Stop Saying “Gender Dysphoria”
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There are many other ways to refer to someone’s mental distress in relation to sex or sex role stereotypes. For example, this person experiences sadness, despair, suicidal thoughts, the belief that she must fulfill a specific sex role, the distress over not fulfilling a socially expected sex role, insecurity, fear, body dysphoria, rejection of one’s sexed body or, in the words of Jennifer Bilek, dissociation from one’s body, being glorified and promoted by a huge industry.

There is no need for using a psychiatric term that conveys only sexist notions and reveals no specific information about what one is referring to. When others refer to “gender dysphoria”, we need to ask them: What do you mean by that? Seeking clarification helps the speaker and audience more clearly understand the socially constructive nature of transgenderism and enables a critical view of it, including in conversations with people who use the label for themselves.

The feminist activists Elie and Nele from the campaign Post Trans report that many affected women find relief in naming each feeling “for what it is,” instead of referring to the term “gender dysphoria.”

They explain that women can specify their experiences, for instance by saying they feel “discomfort from being seen as a woman” or “feeling uncomfortable with my breasts.” Breaking down psychiatric terms to specific experiences and perceptions is a great way to de-pathologize women, to stress our common experiences and to connect with each other.
3. It supports the ideas and practices of transgenderism
Use of the term “gender dysphoria” is accompanied by the assumption that the perception or experience at hand needs some form of clinical intervention. It is, after all, a clinical diagnosis.

The so-called “treatment” recommended by the clinical community in 2022 consists of hormone blockers, affirmation of cross-sex fantasies and invasive surgery. But even if psychotherapy is recommended instead of medical interventions, this still operates within a psychiatric misogynistic framework.
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Stefanie Bode #transphobia 4w.pub

Four Reasons To Stop Saying “Gender Dysphoria”
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The definition for “gender dysphoria” in children sounds very similar, but adds “preference for cross-dressing,” toys, games, and activities that are culturally associated with the other sex. For all age categories, the DSM-5 stresses that “in order to meet criteria for the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”

“Gender dysphoria” is no less a social construction than “gender” is. The concept of “gender dysphoria” on the one hand focuses on distress and on the other on a story that is supposed to explain this distress—the mismatch between sex and sex role stereotypes.

Using the term “incongruence” within these criteria suggests that everyone fulfills or should fulfill a sex role. It does not reject sex roles or sex role stereotypes themselves. It affirms them and just problematizes a probable distress with them. It also is based on ideas how congruence between sex and sex roles would look like which affirms the idea of traditional sex roles.

2. The concept of “Gender Dysphoria” is vague
Talking about “someone with gender dysphoria” could mean multiple different things. For example:

* She doesn’t conform to traditional sex role stereotypes and realizes that others accept her more if she pretends to be a boy
* She gets the constant message that homosexuality is a horrible thing and she gets rewarded when presenting as the other sex instead
* She has the urge to mutilate her body or feels a deep disgust towards her physique
* He has developed an autogynephilic fetish from the consumption of pornography
The term “gender dysphoria” is an umbrella term in the same way as the term “transgender.” It is basically useless when we strive to educate others on transgenderism.

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Stefanie Bode #transphobia 4w.pub

Four Reasons To Stop Saying “Gender Dysphoria”

The vague and sexist concept creates the very symptoms it claims to describe

The gender identity debate is inherently a debate of language and concepts. Concepts like “transgender” and “transsexual” are hotly debated among radical feminists.

Many advocate against the use of these concepts as upholding the false premise behind them — that a person can change their sex.

In the search for accurate terms to question the practices and ideas of transgenderism, gender critical and radical feminists may fall back on another term: “gender dysphoria.”

Recently, I saw one woman announce on social media: “I just had a wonderful idea. From now on, I try to use the abbreviation PGD - people with gender dysphoria - instead of ‘trans people.’”

As a trained and practicing clinical psychologist, but above all a radical feminist, I reject the concept of gender dysphoria.

Rather than relying on it, I suggest we start debating the underlying assumptions of the clinical term “gender dysphoria” and stop using it in favor of clearer language describing and criticizing the practices and ideology of transgenderism. Here is why.

1. The concept of “Gender Dysphoria” is sexist
The 5th Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” uses “gender” when it means “sex” or “sex role.” It is unclear whether the authors see a difference between these two.

By using “gender” at times for “sex” and at other times for “sex roles,” they ignore the feminist definition of sex roles as patriarchal tools of control over women. By using “gender,” when they mean “sex,” they reveal that they do not believe in the material reality of sexed bodies, but are members of the cult of “gender identity.”

The DSM-5 defines “gender dysphoria” in adolescents and adults as “incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender lasting at least 6 months.” This state should be manifested by at least two of the following (my own translation is added in brackets):

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