Gender

Dear Trans Ally,

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(This is carried over from comments on a facebook post)

Hi again Ben! Thank you for engaging with the post and even more so with my comments. I really appreciate that.

First, I want to say that it sounds like you know personally and care about trans identifying people. There cannot be enough of that in the world, so that makes me glad to hear that you are willing to carry their concerns in this way. I too have a trans person in my life, who, though we seemed to be estranged at the moment, still matters very much to me and whom I care about more than I care about most people in the world, and it grieves me deeply and has cost me a great deal to be in conflict with them. It is because of this person that I began paying attention to this issue in the first place.

You make several points in your comment, many of which, unfortunately, I must contend with. I thought it easiest to just go through them one by one here on my blog, rather than over tax the comments on facebook. I hope that is ok!

1.) Ben: I, as I noted, live in the SF Bay Area. As a result of living here I have had the chance to know and be friends with many trans-women and trans-men. Not one of them that chose to share their story with me had reasons for transitioning anything like that.

Lee: No doubt every Trans identifying person has a unique story all their own, and I am sorry if anything I have said has led you to believe that I know or question the motives of Trans identifying people as a whole for making what I can only imagine are the most excruciating kinds of decisions a person can possibly make. That is in no way my intention when I criticize self-id specifically and queer theory in general.

But it is necessary to point out what the real-world consequences for women and children are when those who advocate self-id drill down on the misnomer that “Trans women are women,” and then insist that this means no door can be closed to them. There are many trans people who are just as appalled at this development, but unfortunately, ever more men (dysphoric or not) are taking the new, politically correct mantra to its logical conclusion ad absurdum. Sports, prisons, shelters, hospitals, changing rooms, quotas, criminal statistics, to name only some of the areas effected.

2) If you believe science points to a binary system of sexuality you are definitely not reading the same articles I am. From what I have read both biological and personality traits related to sex and gender exist on a spectrum, not within a binary. Yes most of us express within the binary due to biological averages and societal pressures but definitely not all of us.

2.)”Not reading same science”: where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, climate change deniers, creationists, covid-deniers, and flat-earthers.🥴 Of course this kind of statement pulls the plug on any dialogue. To simply claim a “different science” as an authoritative voice to again try to silence legitimate questions and concerns. Science has and still does acknowledge only two sexes. I won’t dive into the actual science of sexed bodies (Brett Weinstein & Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists, do that better than I can in their book “A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century,” as does Helen Joyce in “Trans.” My point is that THIS has been and IS the accepted science, and until there is sufficient, broad-based, independently peer reviewed reasons to over-turn it, which certainly has happened in the past in many areas, I, nor is anyone, obliged, nor likely, to suppress the overwhelming amount of salient reasons to keep the categories male and female as they are, as strictly describing biological bodies (which can be objectively verified) and not inner feelings (which cannot). Again, it is a most useful category, has considerable social, reproductive, statistical, and medical implications, and is one that I believe does more harm than good to erase.

What I believe it is less helpful to do is to attach extremely narrow, role-specific, and confining behavioral definitions to our sexed bodies, and then to blame a person’s body for not aligning with that stereotype. This is, and has been, the main tenant of feminism. I think Queer theory is making a confused jumble out of several different kinds of categories: the physical realities we all face (as healthy/normative & non-normative); the force of sex-roles in evolution; impossible, idealized stereotypes; hyper-sexualization of our culture; personality traits (as listed by either the big 5 or Cloninger’s 4 habit systems for example); Character (again, see Cloninger, Seligman, the Stoics, or just about any religion); the process and states of becoming/being an adult/not yet being an adult; individuation & belonging vs non-conformity & conformity (cynicism / group-think); Extroversion vs. Introversion; self-ideation (narcissism) vs self-transcendence (having values far above and outside of the self/self-forgetfulness (flow)); high vs. low sensitivity; intuitional vs. rational; Trauma and our responses to that trauma; attachment theory; and, and, and. All of these and more play a role in forming our personalities and how we express those personalities. And yet Queer theory wants to force all of these aspects of our identity and make them thread this one tiny needle, the relatively recently developed concept of “Gender,” making that the arbiter of absolutely everything else. I think it is tragic that we have a whole generation of young people pre-occupied with trying to pin down some unique and more eccentric gender than the next person, rather than learning how to come to terms with the reality they were born into (time, location, family, body), internalizing responsibility for positive, transformational growth for themselves and their immediate communities, and learning how to collaborate creatively and seek healthy, intimate friendship with those who may be very different from themselves, physically, cognitively, emotionally, economically, ideologically, and geographically.

So I do not think in terms of gender (except when I am speaking German, and I stumble over every noun!). I think in terms of men and women. And within those two groups, there is an infinite and fabulous assortment of individuals. And I suppose many of the traits, proclivities, and limitations these men and women have, and the contributions they make, overlap in a myriad of ways in all kinds of Venn diagrams that are always shifting and reconfiguring- much like a kaleidoscope. And though some might find it amusing to give every new variance a specific name, it is a fools errand to bully the entire world at gun-point to submit to this new and mercurial nomenclature.

3) Making other oppressed people your enemies is the oldest trick in the book.

3) “Making other oppressed people your enemies…” you lost me here. I’m not sure how you got here? From our conversation so far, you began your first comment on my post by not only aligning yourself with those in the Bay area who revile women who insist on their right to name themselves & protect their own (and their children’s) interests and boundaries, but also by condoning the aggressive and pernicious use of the slurs TERF & SWERF to dismiss, intimidate, and silence us. I believe labeling people in that way is very seductive, but never productive (just as true of using the word “woke” in the same derogatory way).

I have made no-one my enemy. I work very hard to keep my heart open, curious, and soft toward even those who treat me as their enemy. It is a spiritual practice I take very seriously, and I imagine it as a posture of standing with my arms open wide (as if on a cross) in an invitation to embrace, embrace me in my limitations, my interests, my boundaries (“This is not OK for me!”), my unique vantage point, my hopes and dreams, my unique contributions, my vision for what a community of just-harmony (beauty) might look like, and my failures to live up to that vision. And for those who cannot accept this invitation to embrace in vulnerability, to let them go in peace and forgiveness and the hope our journeys will one day lead us closer in the future. And though I often tire of holding those “inner-arms” up, I am deliberate about being held accountable to re-assuming this posture when I have let them fall.

We may be in conflict over this issue, but that need not make us enemies. It only means we have “difference with tension,” the best definition of conflict I have yet come across. Our interests appear to be tugging in different directions causing us to feel a tension on whatever chord there may be that connects us (in our case our shared past at high-school and facebook). The tension is uncomfortable, and the temptation is to relieve the tension by either dropping my own hold on the chord (negating/silencing myself) or severing the other from the chord (negating/silencing the other). I believe conflict, difference with tension, always brings a revelatory possibility with it. If we stay the course, withstand the tension while looking for a way forward, we might just find a greener pasture for all of us which may well surpass the kinds of solutions either one of us can imagine alone. And usually, that means a willingness to go wide, by gathering as much information as possible from all interested parties, and deep, going below the surface and getting to the actual heart or well-spring of the problem by finding out what the real unmet needs driving this movement and counter movement are.

4)Feminism is constantly being attacked by the ideologies and power centers of the status quo that want to discredit it. Those attackers exploit the topics of the day to focus attention on flashy divisive issues and away from issues that affect their power, like abortion rights or equal compensation. Of course a wedge has developed over transitioning. It’s an easily exploitable issue focused on a small group of people who do not fit the status quo and don’t have much power to fight back at a cultural scale.

Here we have some overlap. Though this does sound a bit like “mansplaining” -you, as a man, telling me, a woman who has born the stigma and consequences of being a (sometimes the only vocal) feminist in my conservative family and communities for a couple of decades now, about how unpopular feminism is! I know, I know! Believe me I know!

And, yes, I am very perturbed that instead of pushing forward on the already exhausting list of issues that women and girls are up against because of our sexed bodies and because of male entitlement, male appeasement, and male violence, we find ourselves faced with yet another form of male entitlement, infringement, and violence, which is targeting our economic livelihoods, our reproductive capabilities & selections, and even our personal sovereignty! But let me ask you this: who is diverting whose attention here? It is not Radical Feminists who have the infinite funds that have been bankrolling and secretly lobbying state and industrial institutions over the last decade to bring about such a dramatic cultural shift in record-breaking time. Being a “Trans-Ally” is the new virtue signaling for the Elite-left, the ‘smoke & mirrors’ that keeps those with power and money from having to address any of the issues that would actually cost them some skin (reproductive care and protection, maternity leave, pre+post natal care, domestic violence, equal pay, equal representation, and on and on). “Trans-Rights” is to the Elite Left, what ‘Pro-Life’ is to the Right, and both are harming women and allowing the rich to get richer. And just now SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade!)

5) Insisting that people are defined as who you say they are not who they say they are does not have a good history around here, in San Francisco and Berkeley. We’ve all seen directly how those concepts are regularly used against people, especially those in marginalized groups.

Gender is a concept. Sex is a reality. No one gets to define themselves alone. It sucks, but it is the truth. We don’t live in a vacuum, and whether we like it or not, our identities will always be shaped as much by others as by ourselves. (“Am ‘du’ werde ich mich selbst!”) “Only on the ‘other’ do I become myself!” Only narcissists claim absolute editorial control of their identities. I am observing and naming what I see, the physical and tangible reality that I have access to, and responding in a way that is prudent, safe, and, I believe, empowering for both men and women. I have the personal sovereignty to do that. So do you. Any trans-woman who refuses to acknowledge and take responsibility for the obvious negative implications self-id has for women’s protected status will never be woman enough for me. I have empathy for the tension they feel, but anyone trying to relieve that tension by replacing definitions and removing protections from women rather than the more difficult task of stretching the perimeter of how men can express themselves is avoiding the task of growing-up and shifting the costs for their inner conflict onto women and girls specifically and onto society as a whole, and it will have disastrous consequences if it continues.

6) Is there a discussion to be had about what being trans means and how that relates to feminism? Sure, with trans people included in the dialog.

I am not sure if you have just not been following what has transpired the last 5-10 years, which is completely understandable (I was totally oblivious until two years ago!), or which window you are looking out of, but insinuating that trans people are being kept out of the conversation is flipping reality on its head. Unless you mean the trans people who are speaking out against self-id and de-transitioners, who are just as reviled by those pushing queer ideology as we women are. This whole ‘discussion’ began as a secret lobby campaign by trans activists, and once the reality of the institutional capture of their successful lobbying became visible to regular people who were alarmed over the implications for women and children of this new ‘group think,’ that had come about without any input from women’s rights activists, these women’s activists have been most aggressively and violently bullied, hounded, and smeared in every way possible to try and completely silence any contrary input. On top of that, the most aggressive and most vocal trans-activists have refused to come to the table with people like Julie Bindel, Helen Joyce, and Kathleen Stock, all solid liberals, to have good faith dialogue! I will give you the benefit of the doubt on this one, and assume you just don’t know, because otherwise, this would be just about the most infuriating part of your comments.

If someone is starting from the position of having already decided who can be part of the conversation or adopts TERF as a badge of honor, making it part of their identity to exclude someone we will have a hard time finding common ground even if on many things we have similar goals.

Again, I really don’t know what to do with this. You brought up TERF as a slur, and I wrote that these kinds of labels are cheap and only meant to silence the other. Now you are turning it around and insinuating that I not only consider myself a TERF (which I don’t), but that I wear it as a badge of honor? If I was less gracious, I could believe that you were deliberately trying to turn the tables on me. Women did not come up with the term TERF. Because women who are honestly and prudently looking at the Big Picture and asking good questions about what the ramifications are for self-id and the life-long medicalization of children in all areas of our society, know that finding a way forward that helps dysphoric people live their best lives, while not jeopardizing anyone else’s, is not at all exclusionary of trans people, period! Continuing to insist that I, and others who hold my views, are trying to exclude anyone is a character smear and is simply unacceptable.

They are questioning others validity as people because they don’t fit into their classification system. I don’t understand that.

That is a pretty huge jump to go from “humans that have penises are not women” equals “humans with penises that think they are women are not people”! I know that I am not saying that, thinking that, or in anyway supporting the dehumanization of trans people, so I am wondering how you got there? I wish I could say it went both ways. But women who are against self-id, the medicalization of children, and affirmative only mental health care have faced the most vile forms of verbal abuse, ostracization, threats of violence and actual violence for stating things that are facts believed for thousands and thousands of years, and for daring to question if what seems good to trans activists is actually good for women, children, or even trans-people themselves.

Look, if there is one thing I have learned in my 56 years on this earth, and believe me, I have learned it the hard way, it is this:

It is NOT MY JOB TO VALIDATE anyone’s idea of themselves!!

Not my boss’s, not a pastor’s, not my husband’s, not even my own children’s! To assume it is anyone’s job to validate your idea of your identity (“or else!”), or even your worth, is abusive and manipulative. This need for validation is the foundation of co-dependent and abusive relationships. I believe every person is a precious child of God and I do my fallible best to treat them as such, but as far as our self-worth is concerned, each of us has to figure that shit out on our own. It’s called growing up: 1) Accepting the reality of my situation with all its light & shadows, plusses & minuses, opportunities & limitations; 2) internalizing responsibility to creatively move myself and community to more fully realize our inherent potential; and 3) reaching out for mutually edifying and collaborative relationships. I am happy to welcome anyone who is committed to this journey, and I stand with outstretched arms inviting every man and woman to join it.

Farce

/ It Takes One To Know One / Leave a comment

I looked it up just to be sure and, it turns out, I’ve been using the word wrong all these years. In my online dictionary I find, “farce: mixture of ground raw chicken and mushrooms with pistachios and truffles and onions and parsley and lots of butter and bound with eggs.” The verb? “To fill with a stuffing while cooking.” Imagine my surprise to read those words! But of course that is not all. I’m told that it refers to “a comedy characterized by broad satire and improbable situation,” and was originally (1530) the “comic interlude in a mystery play,” and later, “was extended to the impromptu buffoonery among actors that was a feature of religious stage plays.” Webster says, “Such farces—which included clowning, acrobatics, reversal of social roles, and indecency—soon developed into a distinct dramatic genre and spread rapidly in various forms throughout Europe.” It is Websters list of synonyms and example usages that helps me to recognize the word again, “caricature, cartoon, joke, mockery, parody, sham, travesty.” Something so exaggerated and obviously not true, so as to be ridiculous and something one could laugh about knowing that no one would ever mistake it for a reality. Something so far fetched as saying that the bread, celery, onions, butter, and sage, which you put inside the turkey, is the turkey.

Perhaps this is just the prompt word I’ve been waiting for to get me to open up about something which I haven’t yet felt ready to talk about publicly. Something that, had you suggested to me four years ago that this was happening, or even could happen, I would have assumed you were a Christian conservative on a routine mission to smear feminists by exaggerating the impact of their efforts to distinguish between gender (sex-roles) and sex (anatomy + biology), which they did in the hope of loosening the extremely confining grip that the one has historically had on the other. I would have been baffled at the enormous cognitive-leap that person would have had to make to hold feminism’s claim, which holds that gender is a (mostly) mutable social construct and sex (our body) is an immutable reality with real world consequence, for creating a paradigm that would insist the exact opposite view. I would have assumed that tossing such an outrageous extrapolation into a discussion about the correlation between the doctrine of male headship and the violence and oppression that women face the world over was a last ditch attempt to avoid taking responsibility for an endless and suffocating list of woes that women face because of male dominance, by diverting attention instead to a non-issue.

I know I would have thought this, because four years ago just such a young, conservative, self-identifying-christian, trump supporter tried to divert my feminist arguments in exactly this way right in my very own living room, and that is precisely what I thought. With no little side dish of condescension, I dismissed his objection -that academics and a growing number of people were denying the reality of dimorphic sexed bodies- as an ignorant parroting of a straw-man argument that reeked of paranoia. I told him then that not a single person had ever made such a claim to me, which was not untrue at the time, but that, in contrast, over a lifetime that spanned more than half a century, I had been privy to, had witnessed, and had experienced first hand, a maelstrom of male violence, sexual predation, exclusion, exploitation, silencing, discrimination, stalking, lewd propositioning and voyeurism. Those were the problems that concerned me greatly, for myself, for my daughters, and for women the world over, and the reason I was, and still am, devoted to challenging this pernicious doctrine of male headship within the church.

That was four years ago.

I don’t enjoy eating my own words, especially when they were served with such a spicy sauce, but I have since had to chew and swallow at least my assumption that my young cousin’s last ditch argument was a “non-issue.” Since that day, my little Homemaker-in-Bavaria-Bubble has burst wide open, and I am… I am so many, many strong emotions that I cannot even find enough synonyms to adequately describe the tumult inside of me, and it feels dangerous even to try to express it. Dangerous not because I fear losing the favor of a whole swath of on-and-offline family and acquaintances, which I am sure to, nor, as my daughter warns me, because I will most likely ruin any chance I might have still had at a successful anything-career, though those things and worse are happening to women with more convincing Liberal track-records than myself. I have survived that kind of relational proscription before, and I will survive it again. Nor has it been a matter of incertitude, the fear of getting this one wrong, the fear I could be hoarding privileges and excluding anyone from some good thing, or of causing unnecessary harm. My eyes are wide open, my ears are listening, my heart remains empathetic, curious, and generous toward people who are truly suffering, and yet, in all the ways that we know what we know, I know the Emperor being paraded here is actually naked.

No, the danger I fear, which has kept me social-media-silent these last couple of years about the aggressive Queer Theory that has captured the institutional West, comes from my own inner storm of feelings. They are like wild and angry bulls, which once let out of their pen, will trample and buck off any living thing in their path. Even now, writing this piece feels like riding all of these bulls at once, every word an enormous effort to bridle the fury, incredulity, and bafflement I feel. Sarcasm and searing remarks are chomping at the bit, ready to tear into the inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, the cowardice, and the cognitive dissonance of those aggressively pushing and those so easily buying into this novel and, I believe, harmful Queer cult. I am afraid that this herd of emotions will stampede me headlong off the cliff and into the black abyss of online outrage. I fear I could be lost in endless caves of discourse following the hollow sound of my own echo chambers. And I fear that there is a good chance that I could be swallowed whole by the quicksand of my own self-righteousness. It is not the ire and contempt of others I fear, but my own ire and contempt. So I’ve stayed silent.

But the cauldron of emotions has not dissipated. Worse, my silence has not protected me from any of these outcomes toward which they harry me, and yet all the while, the number of those who think that this is what everyone believes grows and grows. I realize also, the longer I wait to speak out, the more the inner pressure builds to reconcile my online perception with what is actually going on inside of me. Having written long letters pleading with my conservative christian relatives to speak out against the farce of the Trump presidency, and openly chastising Evangelicals for having supported him, I can no longer say nothing about the farce of this current administration pushing the queer agenda and remain in my integrity.

I will simply have to learn to ride the bull, bridle and saddle the stallions, and do my part to steer people away from this harmful ideology: a deep pocketed agenda which is enticing an ever younger, ever greater number, and ever more female population into invasive, permanent, and detrimental medical and pharmaceutical interventions and life time care, is sowing identity confusion even among the very young, is creating an environment of egregious safe-guarding violations, is robbing women of medals, titles, platforms, their sex-based rights, and our very nomenclature, and is promoting a general culture of social-upheaval and division – all based on a premise that is both unscientific and counterintuitive. A textbook case of gaslighting.

And therein lies the fountain of this flood of negative emotions churning inside of me. Here is the source of the loud and frantic, “How Dare You!” that wells up in me when I see the New York Times and the Washington post headlines declaring Rachel Levine, a man, to be the first female four star general; when I see male athletes holding gold medals in women’s competitions; when I read about male sexual predators being housed in women’s prisons; parents being denied their duty of care; lesbians being bullied into dating “women with penises;” Doctors and therapists being bullied into “Affirmative Care” only practices, when I see that children who do not fit the extreme gender stereo types that our culture pushes (and from and into which the trans-movement, ironically enough, feeds like a parasite) are told they are in the wrong body.

IN THE WRONG BODY!!

Just say that out-loud once to shatter the myth of a benevolent ideology.

And to object to these things makes me the unkind one?

Has everyone gone completely mad?

The sheer gall of anyone at all to believe they have the right to tell me, or any of us, to discount, distrust, and outright deny what I see, hear, feel, and discern in order to cushion those with fragile identities from facing their own reality. To assume that I will so cheaply abandon almost sixty years of experience, of learning to trust my own wisdom about the world, of hard-won relational acumen, and a radar for predators that has served me well since I was a very young girl, and simply trade it in for another’s “inner-feeling” as if I were a blind, deaf, and dumb headless turkey, is the height of impudence. And to legislate and mandate that girls and the most vulnerable women (victims of sexual assault, domestic abuse survivors, the institutionalized and incarcerated) should immediately drop their guard and suppress their instinct for danger the moment some man chooses a new pronoun, is not only utterly hypocritical, but also downright misogynistic.

Four years ago, when I was presented a picture of a Liberal Dystopia that denied the reality of our sexed biology, it sounded so outrageous and exaggerated and obviously not true, that I believed only the Extreme Right could come up with something so ridiculous with which to smear the Left. I laughed it off as a farce, thinking that no one could ever mistake gender (the cultural and ever changing sex-roles) for sex (our biological bodies). That would be as far fetched as saying that the bread, celery, onions, butter, and sage, which you put inside the turkey, is the turkey.

Four years later, and I believe that Queer Theory will go down in history as the Great Gaslighting of the Twenty First Century.

(For a calmer, comprehensive, informed, and factual picture of the havoc this ideology is wreaking, please read Helen Joyce’s book, Trans, or listen to the podcast Transparency, hosted by two trans-men, who are having the conversations I wish I could be having with my trans-sibling. I so appreciate their wisdom, self-awareness, vulnerability, and courage to speak truth in such a hostile culture.)