Where "Just Be Kind" Has Gotten Us
It’s hard to express exactly how angry I am as I sit down to write today. It took a long time for me to decide that my anger was not a disqualifying factor in allowing me to speak my mind, as women’s anger is often portrayed to be. 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.
I spent years being silent about this, letting my anger-turned-inward become more depression, marinating in the shame I felt for being angry in the first place. Writing, thinking, and talking about this issue are perhaps so difficult because they make me experience my powerlessness viscerally: it’s been demonstrated to me, time and time again, whose opinion actually matters here, whose sense of reality gets to be prioritized. I never relate more to other radical feminist or gender critical women than when they express their own inner turmoil, when they reach the boiling point of their anger, or terror, or powerlessness, or the admixture of all three, plus incredulity, that this other-side-of-the-looking-glass world inspires in me more often than any singular, identifiable emotion.
Today, my anger is consuming like a fire.
The first ceded ground: “Trans women are women”
Why am I so angry? Because I have been taught, my whole life, above anything else, to value being kind: in other words, that ceding ground, submitting, was the best thing I could do; that selfless was the best thing I could be. I’ve spent a lifetime experiencing the pressure placed on women to give, give, give; of seeing that pressure grow and demand more and more from us in response to the demands of mens’ rights activists disguising themselves as a civil rights movement; seeing the way we are pressured to ever-increasing self-objectification, to take ourselves apart, piece by piece, and to evaluate each piece separately, like slabs of meat; the way society incentivizes us to submit to further and further encroachment, replicating again and again the logic of patriarchy in regards to our sex class: Divide. Separate. Isolate. Break down. Make smaller.
Women—particularly mothers—face heavy social pressure to be utterly selfless, to care about and advocate for everyone around them but them; they are encouraged and incentivized to place absolutely everyone else before themselves. In this regard, the demands female socialization makes of women overlap with and reify the demands transactivism makes of them: give in, give in, give in. Everyone else, always, before you. In part because of this incentive towards selflessness, as Nicky Clark elucidates,
“‘[a] woman highlighting the perspective of women in any fight for rights…is never the most popular person in the room,” and “her motives [are] reframed as hate by default.”
Hatred is deemed the only possible operating logic behind women daring to center themselves in any capacity.
Giving in to that pressure to think of our selves last, to become smaller and smaller, leads to a kind of self-excavation that I think can be incredibly, hideously attractive to women, producing a sanctified feeling of selflessness that can be itself a kind of high. It’s the same sort of temporarily pleasant, ultimately empty feeling I recognize from performing a submissive role in relationships with abusive men, or sublimating my desires to those of whoever is around me. A lifetime of giving in to female socialization’s mandate to give in has left me uncertain of how far the push and pull should extend in a healthy relationship–how much of myself I should be willing to compromise on to make room for somebody else. I typically respond to this pressure in the way I think most other women do: I continue to give in, to cede ground, letting the anger build, until one day it’s too much, and I can’t help but explode.
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.
The next ceded ground: girlhood (and feminism)
This brings me to one of my least-favorite woman-identified men of all time: Dylan Mulvaney, who rocketed to viral fame, multimillion dollar sponsorships with companies like Ulta, and even an interview with President Biden with Dylan’s “__ Days of Being a Girl” TikTok video series. 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. The reaction to J.K. Rowling’s creation of a female-only rape crisis center in Scotland is a good demonstration of this logic resurfacing elsewhere in patriarchy, as Victoria Smith points out: the social obligation women face to be boundary-less, related to their assumed status as “public property,” means that any attempt by women to set out boundaries—just like their attempts to center themselves—will always be met with villification (“why can’t you just be kind?”). Or, as Dylan coos smarmily to the women who dare to object to his appropriation of girlhood: Babe, caring for others? It’s the bare minimum. (Hilarious stuff, if you can see past the rage to really think about it.)
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.
A slight detour: the colonization of “female”
If you’re in any gender-critical spaces online, you’ve unfortunately probably encountered the work of Andrea Long Chu, notorious woman-identified male academic. He is most well-known for his book Females, in which he makes the most shocking and offensive claims about femaleness I’ve ever had the misfortune of coming across. Capturing the breadth and scope of his pornified, academic-jargon-filled “analysis” is probably a task left best to Females itself, so we’ll just go with the highlights, in no particular order:
"At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed... Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is."
"Pornography... is a quintessential expression of femaleness.”
“The gestures most often looped in GIF format almost always register the evacuation of will: wilting faces, trembling legs, eyes rolled back into heads. Even the GIF format itself communicates this, a kind of centrifuge for distilling the femaleness to its barest essentials- an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”
To sum up, for Long Chu, “female” is someone who erases themself to become what someone else desires. This is a man who admits candidly that “Sissy porn did make me trans,” one who has eagerly absorbed and further fetishized the most degrading and dehumanizing characteristics applied to women’s social role, and here he is rushing to attach ever-more-demeaning qualities to his version of “womanhood” to satisfy his paraphilia. As Eliza Mondegreen (whose insightful writing on this issue I highly recommend) points out, this is likely a factor driving more actual women to identify out of womanhood: “Like, if I genuinely believed Andrea fucking Long Chu was the authority on what women are (expectant asshole/blank blank eyes),” she writes on Twitter, “I wouldn't identify as a woman either. You can't take nutjobs like Chu half-seriously and continue to identify as a woman. … It turns out women are not as masochistic as [Chu thinks], after all. [Women will] take Chu and Lavery at their word about what women are, but ultimately they can't accept the insult. They'll nope out.”
I think she’s right about that. But before they’re pushed to that point of either “noping out,” or ceding ground until they realize there is nothing left to cede, bear with me for a thought experiment for just a moment: If we take seriously Long Chu's logic of what being "female" is (hollowing yourself out to make room for another’s desire), an actual woman parroting "trans women are women" is the most "female" declaration possible. For her to say “trans women are women,” which is her saying, trans women are ME, is for her to perform a complete self-excavation, erasing herself entirely, to make room for a male’s desire. What more “female” act could you imagine?
The final frontier: “biologically female”
Over the years, as the linguistic demands from trans-identified males have become more and more extreme, a new and particularly galling development—at least to me—has been the advancement of woman-identified males from claiming just womanhood, to girlhood, to actual claims of being biologically female, possessing a female body.
The woman-identified male depicted in those tweets, “Erin” Reed1, is a semi-influential trans activist, and also an excellent example of having literally “consumed” a girl from his past, in an identity-sense, in order to become her, right down to taking her name:
Many men who are driven to consume and put on women in such a way do so as part of the fetish of autogynephilia, a paraphilia explained by a gender-critical gay man I used to follow on Tumblr as “the logical conclusion of [heterosexual] male dominance/conquest attraction dynamics”:
“so many men who are attracted to women seem to experience this attraction through the lens of themselves and their objectification/gaze. they’re so self-focused on projecting their fantasies onto women that they’re effectively already attracted to a fictional woman that they’ve created in their mind. the only thing that separates these men from full-blown autogynephiles is the next step, which is to take everything from the imaginary woman they’ve created by literally absorbing themselves and becoming ‘her’ (the ultimate fantasy of dominance and taking)…it truly is the logical conclusion.”
Trans ideology, then, is the grand finale to the male consumption of women, the ultimate meat-grinder, consuming us until there will soon be nothing left to give. In the meantime, we are pushed into ever-shrinking spaces, broken into smaller and smaller component parts, all the better to be devoured.
Here’s the thing, though: I think we’re fast approaching a point of diminishing returns on this strategy of pressing women, female people, down even further into the tiny box they’ve been allotted for their personhood.
There is a limit to how much you can cede when you possess so little to begin with.
It doesn’t really have any place in my argument, but I also just have to mention this tweet of “Erin’s,” in which his shockingly glib glide past “Once you realize male bodied doesn’t apply to me…” never ceases to amaze me. Have you realized yet? I’m still waiting. Maybe it’ll hit me soon.
"If we take seriously Long Chu's logic of what being "female" is (hollowing yourself out to make room for another’s desire), an actual woman parroting "trans women are women" is the most "female" declaration possible. For her to say “trans women are women,” which is her saying, trans women are ME, is for her to perform a complete self-excavation, erasing herself entirely, to make room for a male’s desire. What more “female” act could you imagine?"
Perfectly put.
The dissonance between your footnote with her tweet and the “female bodied” photo is something. How does one reconcile a very passing “female bodied” aesthetic with the idea that any body is a female body, regardless of passing?