transmisogyny

Transactivism has usurped the struggle of genuinely marginalised vulnerable people and become swollen with the entitlement of spoilt male narcissists.

Those people and their acolytes are now telling women to shut up. They are trying to ban lesbians from Pride march because lesbianism excludes the male. Men in frocks now regularly threaten violence and rape and have turned an oppressed marginal culture inside-out. It’s misogyny unmasked.

San Francisco Public Library last month held an ‘art exhibit’ featuring barbed wire baseball bats painting in trans colours and bloodied t shirts printed I PUNCH TERFS. In a women’s online group yesterday I watched in horror as a man calling himself Natalie laid about him threatening rape and boasting about the size of his penis in order to compel us to ‘respect his pronouns’: ‘she’ and ‘her.’ Womanhood is not a costume to be donned by men who are so entitled they want the one thing they cannot have: to be female.

Native American ‘two spirits’ culture, the Black civil rights struggle, the intersex community, and now lesbians have all complained in turn about the theft of their language and struggle by white males who now claim they are ‘lesbians’ because they sleep with women. The ‘cotton ceiling’, chillingly, is used to convey the crotch of lesbians’ underwear that, like a glass ceiling, must be forced. Small children are encouraged to believe they cannot play with non-conformist toys (dolls, if a boy, trucks if a girl) and still be a boy, or a girl. It’s ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians, and corrective homophobia, in pink.

This homophobic misogynist racist insanity has turned liberal communities upside down and ruined countless friendships between compassionate people as transactivists insist on framing themselves as the ultimate victims. It is happening at a time when more than ever in human history we need to pull together and stand up to the terrifying ecological and social damage wrought by narcissism and power hunger.

Every time I post about this I get emails from women thanking me for having the courage to speak up. I’ve seen black women told to stand down and check their privilege when they object to racism from white, upper class, trans-identified males. Meanwhile men are never called TERF. It is women who are silenced: same as it ever was.

I’ve been called Nazi, a bag of shit, bigoted, and phobic because I point out that women deserve our own spaces and that young women, Muslimas, and survivors of rape and sexual assault are unable to safely share changing rooms with men. Convicted rapists are now demanding they be called women and transferred to women’s prisons. It is seen as more important to respect Ian Huntley’s pronouns than to remember the two young girls he tortured and killed. Trans-identified men like Hope Lye, Jenn Smith, and Miranda Yardley who know they are not female are now routinely banned from Twitter and women are becoming too afraid to speak. Meanwhile women are expected to refer to ourselves as ‘vagina bearers’ who ‘chestfeed.’ If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.