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Ester Perez #transphobia hispanicpandora.substack.com

(continued from https://fstdt.com/X_WSP.74WBDP6 )
Where "Just Be Kind" Has Gotten Us
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The next ceded ground: girlhood (and feminism)

This brings me to one of my least-favorite woman-identified men of all time: Dylan Mulvaney, [...] The underlying ideology that informs Mulvaney’s shtick is taken directly from social media platforms like Reddit and Tumblr, where a frequently repeated mantra of the trans-identified is “Wanting to be a girl is a symptom of being a girl.” In other words, the desire to be female, no matter how intense, is enough of a justification to claim that identity for yourself. For males like Mulvaney, declaring you are a girl is akin to a magical utterance that creates you as such and starts the clock, if you will, on your “girlhood” journey (I’ll save the discussion of why many of these adult men prefer to refer to themself as “girls” for another day).

Colonizing girlhood is not only the next logical step once the colonization of womanhood was complete; it’s also a symptom of the way trans ideology presupposes womanhood and women as “open access” in this way: the barriers to our identities are so low that, if you desire womanhood at all, it is already yours, constantly available to everyone. [...]

This is the extreme end of the “inclusive at all costs” logic: The barrier to womanhood, to our lives, to everything we have, is so low, how could they hold any value at all? Being demonstrated on a society-wide level here is the complete inability to conceive of women as human beings who can possess anything at all that we shouldn’t be willing to gladly give up to someone else at the drop of a hat, or their expression of a desire to have it.

Following this principle of inclusivity to its logical conclusion, then, is how we got to modern-day liberal feminism. Feminism is for everyone narratives have effectively, gently, insidiously, almost invisibly, swept natal females to the side in their own liberation movement. This is what Andrea Dworkin meant when she said that a mainstream feminist movement is an oxymoron that can’t actually exist, because once it becomes mainstream it will cease to serve women’s liberation: the only type of feminism that can ever become mainstream is the toothless kind, that can ultimately only support the status quo.

Ester Perez #transphobia hispanicpandora.substack.com

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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