Kes Sparhawk on WHAT IS A WOMAN?

WHAT IS A WOMAN? A non-essentialist view (response to my gender crit friends)

Imagine, if you will, that on a world far from Earth, there are a series of islands. On each of these lives a different tribe which, owing to various factors, are at peace with each other. They use outriggers for trade, and make alliance when dangerous strangers show too much interest in their land and its possible uses, and once a year there is a great gathering at the central island to feast, exchange the results of their arts, and look for likely mates. Because this is a peaceful area, there are no rules about mating except what the individuals make for themselves. One or two outlying islands have some taboos about certain people marrying each other – they’re focused intensely on building a sparse population – but the result since these taboos have been made is to actually slightly go down in population. Several members have chosen to move to other islands with their mates. The rumor is that this tribe will be modifying their rules soon. None of the others much care; it’s none of their business. Those who wish to leave will be welcomed.

To these islands one day comes a wooden boat; large enough to survive the swelling seas as long as there are no typhoons. This one has achieved it. There are only two crew members on the ship; one a member of the Mahalo tribe, and the other a most peculiar looking person, with pasty skin and hair on their chest. The returning Mahalo explains that this is how people look on the other side of the world, and this person has been a good friend – helping steer the ship safely home. The friend, called Bundi, has not enjoyed life in that other nation, and was glad to leave.

As has been true many places on Earth, Bundi is viewed with some suspicion at first. Strangers have seldom come with goodwill. On the other hand, neither have they come singly, with a friend to vouch for them. Bundi is quite good with making ropes stronger than most; it’s in the knotting. Slowly, Bundi becomes familiar; not like the rest of them in appearance, but striving to learn the language and the customs and to be trustworthy. After a time, the Old Ones of the Mahalo declare Bundi welcome, and a member.

As is customary, Bundi comes with them to the Great Gathering. There is some suspicion there. A few people object. Bundi meekly stays among the accepting Mahalo. Over the years, people come to accept Bundi as one of them; but because some still are hesitant, having been invaded the most recently, the tribes decide that Bundi should not come to the gathering. A few friends stay with Bundi every year to have a party of their own. On their island, Bundi belongs. But it would be wrong to push others to accept what they do not wish to accept. When strangers can be enemies, why destroy the pleasures of the Great Gathering? There are alternatives. Because Bundi is an outsider for most of them, Bundi accepts these rules.

A few grumble that Bundi should not live among them, that the hairy ones will always be enemies. But they’re told off pretty quickly. It’s none of their business. They don’t have to come to the island where Bundi lives with the tribe. Since these complainers are usually the hardest to get along with, the consensus is that they’re welcome to come to the great gatherings and otherwise live with their own, rather unfriendly tribe anyway. No one will force them; they cannot decide for others who is welcome.

The moral of the story, if there is one, can only be that groups have the right to choose their own members, on any criterion they prefer. If Bundi had shown hostility, probably fewer would have been welcoming. Nonetheless, Bundi became a member of the tribe once the Old Ones decided. In other tribes, it might have been by consensus. In others yet, the lack of discussion would have been the decision. Just as no one intervenes with tribal decisions, so no other tribe would have had a say about who was a member of Mahalo.

How Power and Oppression Work

When considering trans people, I think the first consensus radical and socialist feminists need to come to is that different groups have different needs. Each has the right of association. Others have every right to condemn with whom they associate, even distrusting the decisions of the group, but the base must be what the group does; how it makes decisions, how it lives its life.

When groups come together to fight oppression – and as I’ll discuss, women are oppressed and need to come together – they can decide if they wish to include certain groups for any reason. They may not like their politics, they may not trust them to stay nonviolent, they may decide that only people born to the oppressed class should participate for whatever reason. Whatever the reason, the fundamental right to justice is to decide whom to trust, and at whose side you will fight.

People raised in the oppressed group – no matter how badly they felt they did not fit in – have a responsibility to accept this. If, as a group, one side has more power and control, the endangered group has the right to make rules for their safety. No member of an oppressor group can judge this unless they are given permission to judge.

Trans “women” have ignored this rule from the beginning. As a result, the likelihood of permission is far lower than it otherwise would be. When a group declares the oppressed group’s feelings irrelevant, offers no compromise, and uses physical and emotional manipulation to get their way, they are demonstrating ill will. When they use the power of the state to back them, they are underlining their intention of having their way over another, less powerful group. Add to that more economic resources for the group, more propaganda while blocking the voices of the other, and it’s pretty clear that the ones raised as oppressors have, despite verbally rejecting their privilege, cling to it despite the result to the lives and rights of others – rights they try to remove, including the right to a livelihood and the right to speak.

In short, to say trans women are women begs the most elemental of questions: can oppressors by fiat join an oppressed class? Can white people who grew up members of a colonizing population simply declare one day that they are not white? Can the ablebodied buy a wheelchair and claim membership among the disabled? Can those who learn sign language, but who are not deaf, join a community which only speaks by sign language and considers itself a community? Can the wealthy, while not giving up their wealth, declare themselves by goodwill members of the working class? And if they do give it up, do they then have full presumption to speak for the workers, despite the fact they learned a different way of speaking, body language, arts and scientific study?

When women ask such questions, others dismiss them, saying that the cases are not parallel for whatever reason. By tacitly accepting that some marginalized people have the right to make their own definition of who belongs with them, and explicitly making clear that women are not among those marginalized people, one belief becomes very clear: as far as other groups are concerned, women, as a class, are not oppressed, and are not Other. Fifty years of analysis, the development of an understanding of patriarchy, the demonstration that no matter how privileged at other intersections some women are they can’t buy out of the assumption that their body is the entitlement of men, mean nothing. The result is an absolute denial that women have the right to defend themselves if others decide to invade. Women are not given the right of naming their own oppression. When they try to do so, they are attacked. We are again living in the 1950s.

How Women Developed Women’s Liberation and Lost It Again

Now, part of this comes from the rise of identity politics through the civil rights movement. Both the first and second waves arose out of civil rights movements primarily focused on color and ethnicity. What gets hidden in that narrative is that women of color, like their white sisters, began to notice that they were not equal in their own movements. They began, more and more, to define themselves.

Since whites were a majority in Western countries, it was easy for white women to focus primarily on issues which affected them. Since middle class white women – the ones privileged to go to college – had the leisure to go to meetings and spend weekends at protests, they had the additional privilege of standing up without fear of anything more than harassment, threats, and some physical violence. (Please note that they were subject to that, especially lesbians, who were viewed as an embarrassing deviation by the left; gay rights was rejected by every left-leaning group I knew in 1970 or so.) Only radical feminist groups stood up for the right to choose one’s sexual partner, as a logical extension of the right to control one’s own body.

The third wave has largely made this reality invisible, but it made a huge difference, since not all lesbians were white. The second wave was in fact arguably more mixed in their push for women’s rights because of the extreme marginalization of lesbians of color in their own communities. Adding to their invisibility was their determination to continue loyalties with the rest of their people – so their silencing began in struggles within groups of color, where women had little say, but much to say. At the same time, they were attracted to women’s liberation, because it spoke to them in ways their male-dominated culture did not. But white women, who coming out of the civil rights movement had commitment but coming out of white culture had limited knowledge, often needed more educated than women of color had energy for.

The betrayal of this struggle is best illustrated by the “inventor” of the third wave, Rebecca Walker. Rebecca was the daughter of Alice Walker, one of the most notable Black feminists of the second wave, and a white father. She wrote dismissively of the failures of the second wave to care about black women, even though her mother spent most of her life as a black feminist. Alice Walker for the rest of her life wrote painfully about her daughter, trying to understand how they had become estranged. Rebecca became a well-known “third wave” feminist by using her mother’s fame to be published in a second wave publication (Ms) and gaining a writer’s contract. In other words, she used the resources her parents had acquired and the credibility of her mother to attack her. And since, the failure to understand that women of color were involved in the women’s struggle from the beginning, despite error and unconscious racism, has been used to dismiss feminists as feminist, labeling them as “white” and therefore oppressor class only (no intersections for women!) is Rebecca Walker’s legacy to identity politics.

How Postmodern Theory contributed to the Destruction of Women’s Liberation

The history of the feminist movement has not been fully told. When Women Studies shifted to Gender Studies, the material base of feminism was lost. Queer theorists are not feminists, coming mostly out of the embrace of postmodernism, a literary theory without a material base. Postmodernism is influenced the most by textual critics who argue that the texts themselves are what imprison people; that changing the texts will therefore liberate them.

This is the precise opposite of Marxist theory, and goes against most radical feminist theory. These groups can be described as materialist progressives. Those dependent on postmodernism are not; they are liberals, committed to language and ideas as the source of status quo and change as all liberals are, just as their predecessors in feudal times were committed to God as the source of the status quo and change. Materialists/progressives ascribe oppression and liberation to changes in the material conditions of life. One does not “enact” oppression; one attacks it with physical resistance and economic change. And one analyzes it via power: who has control? For whose benefit do most laws exist? What do educational systems perpetuate? What do majority religions value? If there are contradictions to overall power, do they operate to overthrow or to teach acceptance?

To “enact” reality is to assume that material conditions are not the base of power. As such, the theory is embraced by people who have achieved economic and state power, or see it in their grasp, and wish to keep it. Academics, for example, can obtain great status with a theory whose actual fundamentals require careful study to find what’s missing; a theory which celebrates obscurity by its own definition of erasing master narratives as a way to end oppression. Marxian scholars – from Marx through Gramsci to Paolo Freire and the present day – view theory and praxis as dialectical, each informing the other and guiding a culture to resistance and revolution. As such, ideas must be accessible to those who are oppressed; the obscuration (?) of ideas is a deliberate ruling class tactic. Postmodernism – even to some extent its more material sisters in poststructuralism – illustrates how that obscuring works. The status quo cannot be challenged, let alone overthrown, by symbolic means. It can only perpetuate those already in power.

In short, the oppressed have always been defined as Other, and marginalized, by those who benefit from the system. The oppressors have control of the structures which keep people unquestioning, or at least obedient. But within each group, marginalized or central, a particular way of doing things, a method of interpretation, develops. Some of these are higher status – a ruling class will define the nature of art, what are the highest status foods, and so forth. But every group develops its own culture. And that culture is partly passed down with tacit assumptions – of course no one wears bright colors to work; of course one doesn’t raise one’s voice when excited. They are passed on by each cultural group.

This communication is useful for maintaining structures of . It’s inevitable in a hierarchical society that the powerful communicate with the less powerful in a certain way which maintains that power. On the other side, the marginalized, who have more to lose when moving among the powerful, have their own code; ways to avoid triggering entitlement rage, for example. They also have customs and ways of speaking among themselves which builds relationships – highly necessary for survival in a marginalized population.

Culture and Meaning in Women’s Community

These communicative behaviors have been well-established among communication scholars, linguistics, and others who pay attention to difference.

It should go without saying that any definition of woman needs to include both the biological and the material consequences of being female. At the same time, a materialist does not embrace the religious aspects of gender; mystical abilities assigned to one sex or other proceeding from biology, for example. “Woman” is most important for its social implications; that is, the dynamics of power and control. In other words, the “body” of a woman is the site of struggle on which political dynamics play themselves out. It has meaning, and those meanings have consequences.

Without meaning, a body is… just a body. Some have abilities many have not got. In a social world, individual interpretation of one’s body is no one else’s business, unless of course there are medical or other implications in certain specialties. In such a case, a body is only relevant to its owner and the professionals s/he engages in adjusting it for a better physical or mental personal life.

But meaning is universal to humans, except a few extremely brain-damaged individuals. Meaning is culture, and culture is meaning. As Edward Hall says, culture teaches us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. All humans have feet, but only particular cultures assign the feet meaning , so that pointing a foot at an object is a deadly insult. All humans have right and left hands, but some cultures view the use of those hands with awe or disdain. Whether a human is sinister or not may well be which hand they use as dominant.

Cultures may acquire these meanings almost at random, from other power dynamics. But one tendency of bodies is universally noticed historically: the ability to produce children from inside them. And, once noted, culture has assigned meanings to that.

Those meanings are called “gender.” Without going into the early worship of the female for its ability to produce children, I will summarize what gender has meant since the rise of agriculture at least: a division of labor, a particular place in the acquisition of resources, and a constant awareness that culturally men and women are not the same because of reproductive distinctions.

–Kes Sparhawk

The inherent paradox in the trans cult.

All ideologies have paradoxes and contradictions. More rational ideologies may have relatively subtle paradoxes, which take a great deal of understanding of the principles to grasp. More irrational ideologies may have more obvious contradictions, especially if they advocate a fixed idea, which is necessarily and absolutely true. In my entry on fixed ideas, I identified three main properties:

1. The fixed idea is an absolute, said to be true in all cases, and generally must not be questioned (or cannot be questioned because it has epistemic consequences).

2. The fixed idea is an a priori, and any justification offered for it are obviously ad hoc and after the fact. Either way, it cannot be disproved by observation or experiment, making refutation impossible unless one shakes his belief in the idea to begin with.

3. The efficacy of a fixed idea depends on how many corollaries can be pinned to it, and how varied those corollaries can be.

All religious movements, all totalitarian movements, all totalizing belief systems, have a fixed idea or fixed ideas at their core. Usually that fixed idea is something like “the leader is always right” or “the holy book is always right,” but it is not necessarily of this sort.

The fixed idea in the trans cult is something like this:
An individual’s self-identification as regards to gender is always valid and can never be questioned.

This proposition fulfills all three properties. It is absolute, always true, and must not be questioned. It is a priori, and no justification is even attempted. And the entire trans cult relies on this proposition as its foundation. If gender was seen from the same standpoint as race, culture, or height, then there could be no trans ideology. The entire thing is based on a foundation of personal feelings, a subjective foundation.

The paradox is that this subjective foundation is the basis of an ideology which is very much totalitarian and seeks to invalidate other people’s feelings about gender. Anyone whose feelings about gender differs from theirs, even if they identify as transgender, is labeled a “TERF,” which is basically a slur for any enemy of the cult (like heretic, enemy of mankind, etc). Little children are imposed a gender by trans advocates and put on the fast track to transition (with untested medications and surgeries). Lesbians, whose sexual orientation precludes the “gender as feeling” definition, are treated as enemies because of how they feel (who they are attracted to). Any subjectivity that contradicts theirs is anathema and heresy.

Which leads to the question: why is their subjectivity more valid than ours? The answer is simple: because theirs is unquestionable and absolute, and therefore ours must be wrong (both factually and morally). The trans cult wants to dictate how we see and interact with other people on the basis of gender, by stating that their subjectivity dictates a specific, universal definition of what gender can and cannot be. They claim that gender is, specifically and universally, an identity which exists in our brains. This shows that the fixed idea is really about determining whose subjectivity controls how we all perceive the world.

To be clear, the trans cult does not only want to affirm its own subjectivity about gender, but also viciously attack all others. Like any cult, they must attack their perceived enemies, but this means that they are attacking other people’s rights to feel however they feel.

The trans cult shares another thing in common with traditional religious movements: the repudiation of the body. Traditionally, this has been done by positing a body/soul dichotomy, in which the soul is divine and must be purified in order to be with God, and the body is a dirty, “worldly” thing which is mired in sin. The body must be beaten, disciplined, restrained, pleasures must be reined in, in order to ensure the purity of the soul.

In these modern times, intelligent people don’t believe in souls, so instead we have a body/mind dichotomy, which is what the trans cult is based on. Their view is that the components of the body (i.e. biological sex) are irrelevant and constructed by society, while the feeling in our mind (i.e. “innate gender”) is absolute and unquestionable. They are positing that our mind is somehow disconnected from our body, that the organs, hormones or chromosomes that we have are irrelevant to the one “true” gender which is the one in our minds. The mind can therefore “dictate” gender to the body through the medium of self-mutilations, medications, surgeries, and so on. The healthy body must be subverted, butchered, for the sake of the mind, which contains the idealized gender.

This of course brings the important question, which is sometimes asked and prefigures the paradox I discussed above: if the idealized gender is only in the mind, then why change the body at all? Or to put this in more general terms, why not just tend to the soul and leave the body alone?

Traditionally, the Christian answer has been that suffering cleanses your soul. The answer from the trans cult is that those who do not butcher their bodies will kill themselves. This is not shown by the data, but let’s ignore that. The deeper question here is, where does this existential despair come from? If we presuppose that the body/mind dichotomy proposed by the cult is correct, then it makes no logical sense; if the gender in the mind has no connection at all to the body, then why should the state of the body compel the mind to despair?

The answer, in practice, is that (barring people who actually suffer from some kind of body dysmorphia) the suffering is entirely caused by the belief that they are the “wrong gender.” But who taught them this belief? The trans cult! Like all religions, the trans cult sells you on a sin or defect, which you must then saved from. To convince people that they have a terrible defect which can be resolved by belief in one’s religion is the oldest scam trick in the book.

Nowadays, the trans cult is tilting its spear at basic biology and claims that biological sex is a fantasy. They also completely reject transsexualism. Both these things are understandable from the standpoint of the body/mind dichotomy: were they to acknowledge any importance or relevance to the body or biological sex at all, their entire edifice would crumble. In order for this to work, it must place gender solely in the mind, in the person’s subjectivity, because such a subjectivity cannot be scientifically examined. Much like God hiding in the clouds, then out in space, then in another dimension, gender must be hidden in the places where science can’t reach. The only viable religion is an unfalsifiable religion. But unfalsifiable beliefs are ultimately not meaningful: if I can’t see or measure for myself what facts of reality a statement refers to, then I can’t understand its meaning, no matter what I imagine in my head. I do not dispute that people claim to have a gender in their head, but I have no way to observe it, or test that claim. It is therefore no more reliable than the statement that God popped the universe from nothing by saying a word.

Brynn Tannehill and the Huffington Post pushing the transgender cult dogma about gender.

The Huffington Post published a pseudo-scientific, confused, self-contradictory mess about gender from the transgender perspective written by transgender advocate Brynn Tannehill. And make no qualms about it, this is a pro-gender screed, as the introduction itself specifies:

Gender and gender expression are complicated, but not nearly so much as critics would like to claim. They are also not inherently contradictory, nor anti-feminist. Indeed, they can be liberating for everyone.

From an actual feminist perspective, this statement makes no sense. Gender by definition is a hierarchy which classifies men as superiors and women as inferiors. To support gender means that you support the oppression of women. How can that not be anti-feminist? We know FETAs hate and exclude women, but they constantly project that exclusion by accusing feminists of excluding transgender people and being “transmisogynists.”

I am not sure what it means to say that gender is not inherently contradictory. FETAs certainly cannot provide any (non-circular) definition of gender, therefore it’s impossible to say whether their concept of gender is contradictory or not. It may be or it may not be. Either way, it’s invalid.

The first point is a jab at right-wingers who reject the FETA concept of gender because they don’t understand it. While I can’t blame them, because FETAs actually have no coherent concept of gender, I will skip over it because all it reduces itself to is “don’t argue against something just because you don’t understand it,” like physics. While I think it’s laughable that Tannehill would equate her petty prejudices with one of the most successful sciences in the history of science, I will simply go on to the next point.

2. It is not a fad: Gender non-conforming people have been around for millennia

There is extensive archaeological evidence that transgender and gender non-conforming people have existed for millennia. In Eastern Europe, 5,000 year old graves were found with female skeletons buried with male warrior accoutrements. There are records of Norse women going Viking (raiding). Joan of Arc was burned for wearing men’s clothing. The Kama Sutra describes a third sex, and the Bible talks of “self-made eunuchs.” The kathoey of Thailand have a place within Buddhist writings. Other cultures have long traditions of gender non-conforming individuals, such as the hijra of Hinduism and India, the fa’a’fa’fine of the Pacific Islands, and two-spirits in Native American culture.

Here we see again the long-standing FETA trend of co-opting non-Western cultures (which applies in all listed cases except Joan of Arc) for non-binary genders and jamming them into the transgender umbrella. There is zero attempt here to discuss what these individual phenomena were about, what they represented to those people at the time and in their culture. They seek to reduce everything to a shallow imperialist Western transgenderist analysis.

Beyond that general criticism, many of these cases are actually great examples of the exclusionary nature of transgender advocacy. These people seriously believe that a woman wearing men’s clothing (for that culture and time) or participating in typically men’s activities (as labeled in that culture and time) means that these women were actually transgender, that a woman cannot wear different clothing or do different things and still be a woman! Did all these women actually identify as transgender? No, because that concept did not exist. They were women wearing men’s clothes and doing men’s activities. Which they are perfectly justified in doing, because being a woman implies nothing about what one should wear, think, or do.

She has no idea what Joan of Arc’s “innate gender” was. She has no idea what gender Norse women identified as. According to the trans cult’s dogma, she is guilty of the worst sin one can commit, misgendering.

Have gender non-conforming people been around for millennia? Of course. But this goes nowhere in proving that the FETA position makes any sense. Trangender people didn’t exist, because there was no such thing as “being transgender.” Identification is not innate, it is constructed by relating to other people and producing inter-subjective agreements, like any other ideological, religious, or relational group.

3. Gender fluid expression is something a lot of straight cisgender people do (to a degree) already

Women in American society can (and do) express their gender in ways that that can change from day to day, if not hour to hour. They can put on a business suit to feel commanding and strong at work or an interview, both of which are stereotyped as masculine traits. Or mix a jacket with a dress to keep it at a business level, but more feminine. Other times they can dress in ways that make them feel attractive, which often means much more stereotypically feminine attire…

Women in our culture have much greater room to express their gender than men do, but this bolsters the underlying point. Given the option, straight cisgender people will change their gender expression to fit how they want to feel about themselves in that moment, whether it is sexy, strong, or comfortable. While these feelings may be tied to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, they are deeply ingrained into how we see ourselves.

Completely omitted from the discussion here is the reason why women do this. And it is very interesting that Tannehill singles out women here, because women are the category of people who need the most to be “fluid.” Why? Because they have the least power over how they are seen by others. Women must change their gender expression, not because of how they “feel,” but because of the demands imposed on them. There is the constant demand to be attractive, but also the constant pressure on women to outperform men or be forgotten. Women navigate this labyrinth of expectations and demands in order to not be seen as second class citizens, not because they are expressing themselves.

Because FETAs are generally privileged white men, and have never been oppressed because of their gender, they easily think of gender as something you play with, not as something that one struggles with. Brynn Tannehill, a man who graduated college and served in the US military, is a good example of this. It is people like Tannehill, men who treat other people’s lives as a plaything for their ambitions, who see the oppression of others as a game. Because transgender ideology is a genderist ideology, it is also inherently a patriarchal ideology, an ideology which promotes male supremacy. Men appropriate women’s identity and then viciously attack the women, especially lesbians, who complain or argue against that appropriation.

4. Gender has components of both nature and nurture

Demonstrating that gender has components that are social constructs is relatively easy. The colors pink and blue are not intrinsically gendered; they are merely frequencies of light. Dresses and skirts are not either; they are simply bits of fabric any human being can drape over themselves. (The fact that some people are willing to defend the morality of hurting or killing someone for wearing the “wrong” bit of fabric says a lot more about us than it does the fabric.)

At the same time, people seem to have an innate gender identity, whether female, male, or somewhere in between. Anecdotally, we can see this in Dr. John Money’s failed experiment with David Remer, who was raised as a girl but never identified as such. The guevodoces of the Caribbean similarly appear female until puberty and are raised as such as a result of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. However, at puberty their genitals descend, and are treated as male thereafter. While usually infertile, guevodoces almost universally identify as male, despite their upbringing.

Isn’t it… interesting… that all the examples Tannehill brings up concern people who identify as men? I don’t find that particularly surprising that some people may want to identify as men in a society where we are socialized in a gender hierarchy where men are the superiors. But this is speculation, since I do not know the particulars.

That little curiosity aside, the examples themselves refute what they are supposed to demonstrate. The conceptions of gender operating in one village in the Dominican Republic with a prevalence of a very specific sex-related birth defect are rather different from those operating amongst English-Canadians during the seventies. This disproves the notion of an “innate gender identity,” which would be the same in each case. If gender identity was innate, then there could be no comparison to make between these two contexts, and the argument would be simply invalid.

A valid argument for innate gender would start by stating what those innate genders are exactly, and then compare those innate genders with the ones we have today in various cultures. But the fact that various cultures have wildly different conceptions of gender would then collapse the argument. Any concept of an innate gender is an intellectual dead end.

A recent meta-study at Boston University looked at the peer reviewed evidence, and concluded that gender identity has biological origins, though the exact biological mechanisms remain unknown. This conclusion is not uncommon; it is effectively the same conclusion we have reached about sexual orientation and autism; namely that these have biological origins which are not fully understood.

There is a link provided to the abstract of this meta-study (the full text of this study is available here). The conclusion of the study is not that “gender identity has biological origins,” because the study is about the existing literature, not about presenting scientific evidence for the claim. So this statement by Tannehill is a straightforward lie. Beyond that, there are reasons why the individual studies discussed in this meta-study are irrelevant or disreputable, but there is no point in discussing those since Tannehill doesn’t even bother to do so. At any rate, it seems like the meta-study was thrown in as a way to say that actual evidence was presented, but without even bothering to read the abstract.

Tannehill further shows her lack of desire for real scientific evidence by shackling her case to that of sexual orientation. Actually, there is no credible evidence that sexual orientation has a biological basis. Note that I am not saying that sexual orientation definitely does not have a biological basis, simply that our default position should be to reject that notion unless it is well demonstrated. In the case of transgenderism, we should likewise reject the proposition that transgenderism has a biological basis until such a basis is well demonstrated. But at any rate, this cannot prove the existence of “innate gender,” because such a concept is illogical and contradicts our understanding of human societies. Which brings us to the next point…

5. Cultural gender norms change over time naturally

Remember the whole pink and blue thing for boys and girls? That wasn’t always the case. It used to be that pink was the color for baby boys. This can be seen in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, where the baby that Lady protects is clearly sated to be a boy, and yet is dressed in pink, as was traditional at the time…

Thus, the angst over people eschewing modern gendered norms is less about the norms themselves. If it was about a belief that gender norms are immutable and unchanging, then why aren’t conservatives upset about Lady and the Tramp? They aren’t, and thus fact remains that gender norms are changing and conservatives are angry they have little control over it. The change itself is a normal part of cultural evolution.

Radical feminists, who oppose the trans cult and FETAs, have been repeating this for a while now, because this, as I already pointed out, neatly disproves the concept of “innate gender.” If gender was innate, then it would not change substantially in the way that it actually does in real cultures. We have innate biological needs, a fact that does not change between cultures, which all develop some way to deal with hunger, thirst, shelter, and so on. We have innate morality as social animals, a fact that does not change between cultures, which all develop sets of rules regulating social behavior. We have biological sex, a fact that does not change between cultures. Gender, however, can change rather drastically between cultures and eras.

If changes to the conception of gender are part of cultural evolution, then they cannot, by definition, be innate: they are social constructs.

6. How you were raised does not determine the reality of your gender identity

One line of argument that tries to further segregate transgender people is that they are not “real” women or men because they do not have the exact same experiences as most cisgender people. This is dangerous in the sense that it invalidates the lived experiences of a threatened minority group, while othering them and opening the door for “separate but equal” legal marginalization. It’s also wrong on a number of levels.

I literally have no idea what this argument means. The argument is not that “a transwoman/transman is not a ‘real’ woman/man because she/he did not have the exact same experiences as ‘cisgender’ people.” First of all, there is no such thing as cisgender people (i.e. there are no people who conform completely to their gender role at all times), so I have no idea what the comparison is based on. But secondly, that is not the argument being made by opponents of the trans cult. The experiences of a transgender person don’t have anything to do with their biological sex. Biological sex is a fact of biology, a measurable fact, not a question of experience.

I think this may be a failed attempt at referencing the socialization argument, that transwoman specifically (not all transgender people, as she tries to make us believe here) were socialized as boys and therefore maintain the attitude of male entitlement that they were raised with. If that’s what was intended, then the response is highly inadequate. We are not “invalidating the lived experiences” of transwomen. We take them at their word when they talk about their personal experiences and their sense of identity. Where we disagree is on the ideological implications of these experiences, especially as they relate to gender and the rights of women.

Transgender people are held to a double (read impossible) standard for asserting the validity of their gender identities. David Reimer was raised as a girl, but no one questioned whether he was a “real” boy when he asserted gender identity. The same is true for the guevodoces. In this, we can see that when someone asserts a gender other than the one they were raised in, it is only treated as valid if the individual’s eventual identity is cisgender.

Here Tannehill is just straight contradicting herself. Her argument in previous points was that transgender individuals have an innate sense of gender because of some biological component, and she linked to a meta-study which cites many studies which hold that people’s gender identity is linked to their genetics or some sex-based brain part. Here she is saying that that very argument holds transgender people to an impossible standard. So which is it? Is the validity of gender identity linked to sexed biological component, or isn’t it? If the latter, then what is it linked to? If something in humans is innate but cannot be measured in any way within the human body, then in what way can it possibly be said to be innate?

7. Transgender people do not intrinsically reinforce gender stereotypes

Transgender people, by definition, go directly against societal norms for how a person should dress or act based on their assigned gender. Virtually every Circuit Court in the U.S. has agreed with this interpretation of what it is to be transgender. However, the argument made by anti-transgender conservatives attempting to appeal to women and feminists is that when transgender people transition, they do so by adopting cultural norms and stereotypes of their target gender, thus reinforcing them.

This is a dishonest argument, because Tannehill knows very well that this argument is strictly invalid under her own belief system. If a man adopts female cultural norms, FETAs say that this person is actually a woman, therefore they do conform to societal norms of how their actual gender should dress or act!

To express this more clearly:

Right-wing argument:
A person should adopt the societal norms of their assigned gender.
This man is adopting the societal norms of women.
Therefore this person is acting wrongly.

FETA argument:
A person should adopt the societal norms of their innate gender.
This person is adopting the societal norms of women.
Therefore this person is a woman.

Radical feminist argument:
A person should not adopt societal norms of gender, because gender is a social construct which subjugates women.
This person is a man adopting the societal norms of women.
This person is not wrong, and they are also not a woman. There is no norm of dress or action that should be followed by anyone based on gender, because gender is generally irrelevant to determining how one should dress or act. How you dress or act does not make you a man or a woman.

Under the FETA argument, no person can go against the societal norms of their gender. They simply believe that the assigned gender is invalid and that the “innate gender” is valid. Radical feminists do not believe in either assigned gender or “innate gender” as connecting people to an obligation to dress or act in any specific way. People should be free to dress or act in any way they find fit. The FETA argument is merely the flip-side of the right-wing argument.

Both cisgender and transgender people change their gender expression to match how they feel about their gender, and themselves, at any given moment. However, transgender people have traditionally had even less space to express their gender than others.

I’ve already debunked that notion above. Most people do not change the way they dress or act because of “gender expression,” but because they way they dress or act has a direct impact in how seriously other people take them, and how they are able to deal with a hostile capitalist society. Gender roles are prison cells, and we are all prisoners of them to some extent, although women, as I’ve already pointed out, are the primary victims of the gender hierarchy. The only system which would permit us to express ourselves through our mode of dress or the way we act, in short which would permit us to have the same privileges as the white men who think gender is a fun game, would be a system where gender is abolished, capitalism is abolished, and we can all be treated as individuals with our own personal preferences and whose livelihood does not partially depend on what other people think of us.

In the past, transgender people (particularly transgender women) were not allowed to medically transition unless they looked, sounded, and acted in a stereotypically feminine manner. In recent years, people who are visibly gender non-conforming have been at a much higher risk of violence than those who blend in. Religious conservatives have urged violence against transgender people; and the easiest way to avoid this is to adopt an appearance and mannerisms which blend in.

As such, if transgender people have done anything to reinforce stereotypes, it is a result of a patriarchal culture which we have no control over which severely punishes anyone who is seen to violate these stereotypes.

I find it extremely interesting that it is only at the end of this article that Tannehill, after lauding “gender expression” over and over, finally acknowledges that people dress and act in certain ways in order to escape judgment and punishment. Where was this enlightened attitude in the rest of the article? Or does she only sympathize with transgender people (and also giving lip service to gender non-conforming people)? I guess “cis people” (whoever the fuck that is) don’t deserve to be understood.

Also, is it a Freudian slip that she typed “stereotypically feminine manner,” implying that the only transgender people that exist are men wanting to become women? She should have written “stereotypical manner conforming to their innate gender.” I guess the plight of transmen is not that important, right? After all, they are only females, and females are not as important anyway.

Either way, I don’t understand why Tannehill is deploring the fact that transwomen had to “look, sound, and act in a stereotypically feminine manner,” since that’s exactly what FETAs are advocating: that transwomen must “look, sound, and act in a stereotypically feminine manner.” They spend a lot of time telling transwomen how they should move and sit, how they should sound, what attitudes they should have, in order to be “real women.” Why else do transwomen receive estrogen, and go through surgery to get a fake vulva, if not to “look… in a stereotypically feminine manner”? The whole point of transition is to turn a person with their own individuality, their own particularities, into walking stereotypes. All cults seek to brainwash their members so their personalities conform to a certain model, but the trans cult takes that to a whole new level.

The intersection of childism and sexual abuse.

The association between childism and sexual abuse is an old one. Many people have remarked about the absurdity of Freud’s theories about children having sexual drives which push adults to rape them. In that sense, the hatred and objectification of children has always come with acceptance of the sexual abuse of children. The concept that children were objects into which one could pour one’s anger or sexual frustration (as Lloyd de Mause calls it, the “child as poison container” mechanism) was historically a common belief, both in the Western world and in the ancient cultures we revere. In that sense, the idea that children have needs that should be fulfilled by their parents, and are not just objects to be used by the parents to fulfill their own needs, is a very new idea, historically speaking.

As I said, the modern formulation of childism came to us straight from the Freudian belief that young children who are abused are really seducing their parents, that children are the initiators of their own sexual assault, and that therefore the way to resolve issues with the adults who were sexually assaulted by their parents is for them to make their peace with their parents and to forgive them. This is a standard blaming the victim setup that we apply to all exploited people: how did they actually deserve it?

The answer is given to us by the layers of rationalizations. We frame childhood as a form of depravity, which is derived from its wildness (the same general principle applies to nativeness and other “inferior” ethnicities). It is socially necessary to keep children under control because otherwise they would run amok, de-civilize society, and, through their unending needs that constantly need fulfilling, rule over us. Or as a parent once told me, parents are slaves to their children because they are forced to serve them (although there’s no word on how that child somehow managed to force the parents to conceive it despite not existing, let alone being able to cause anything).

The idea of attributing malice to young children, despite a complete lack of evidence of such, is another widespread and bizarre phenomenon. I discussed a couple of examples in this entry. It seems that we automatically associate children with depravity, and that it takes at least some conscious effort not to do so. This is a powerful incentive for people to remain childist.

If we believe that children seduce adults into having sex with them, then the next logical step is pedophilia and its various sub-categories (DD/lg, ephebophilia, lolita, and so on). Children are eroticized because we eroticize infantile traits, such as hairless and blemish-free skin, big eyes, shaved vulva, and most importantly, “innocence” (a false concept that would probably take an entire entry to unpack). Men want to have sex with children because they possess those erotic traits, but they generally cannot do so, which gives rise to fake teen pornography, illegal child pornography, “loli” hentai, and so on.

Nowadays, pedophilia has been integrated within alternative sexualities because it’s “edgy” and “transgressive” (there’s even a push to call trafficked girls “sex workers”). Most heterosexual men are pedophiles, albeit of the mundane kind, and therefore not “edgy.” Mundane in the sense that they are attracted to girls, due to the eroticization of infantile traits, but they are also attracted to women. This is too mainstream, not “edgy,” and therefore unworthy of the attention of the new genderists. What interests them, however, are pedophiles of the extraordinary kind, those who are only attracted to children. That’s where the real transgression is.

The opposite error is to hold that children are “pure.” Children are human beings and have sexual needs, mostly a need to discover what bodies are all about. They are, after all, discovery machines, and preventing children from discovering is an aberration. Their sexual needs, however, do not exist to be exploited by adults.

A child does not become an adult, but is made an adult, by getting the wildness beaten out of them (metaphorically or, in sadder cases, literally). The cutoff age (whether 16, 18, or 21 years old) is just an estimate of when you’ll definitely have been beaten down, when you’ll be “responsible.” And adults are responsible for who they have sex with, children are not. To want to have sex with a child means, amongst other things, to reject their childhood and to demand that they should be seen as adults. But children are not adults, by definition. Children have this undefined, fantasy quality that we call “innocence.” Adults, almost by definition, cannot be “innocent,” as they have been filled by knowledge of, and experience of, the evils of the world.

Traditionally, the child is a container ready to receive the poison coming off of adults who are polluted by this evil. In this way they are themselves filled and are slowly becoming adults. The process of becoming “mature” is literally to be filled with poison, a pollution of the child’s mind and body. The child’s mind is naive, curious, filled with wonder, basically moral and egalitarian. A great deal of poisoning is needed to make it “normal.”¹

Sexual abuse specifically introduces a dynamic that goes beyond childism and goes into misogyny as well, an intersection which which we could call something like pedomisogyny, the hatred and objectification of girls (non-adult females). An unwieldy word for sure, that will probably never catch on, but a word that designates a needed concept nevertheless. We know that the subjection of women starts with the imposition of gender on children. Boys and girls must learn their place in society, and girls in particular must be reconciled with their inferior status.

Pedomisogyny is what I had in mind recently when I saw an episode of America’s Supernanny where one of the first things the nanny did was to talk to the oldest girl and ask her how pretty she thought she was on a scale from 1 to 10. Ostensibly, she was trying to measure her self-esteem. Naturally, she made the immediate equation that a girl’s self-esteem was measured through how pretty she thinks she is. No one thought there was anything strange about that.

Sure, this is a pretty tame example of pedomisogyny. I think that most pedomisogyny takes place in the streets and in the schools, not in the home. But any time we equate the value of a girl with her appearance or attractiveness, that’s pedomisogyny. Every time we assume that a little girl will grow up to be a wife and mother, that’s pedomisogyny. Every time parents berate a girl for liking “boy things,” that’s pedomisogyny.

It is not random happenstance that girls are socialized to both be passive and to be physically attractive. Both are about reducing females to the status of sex objects, willing to spend their time to reproduce the labor force instead of pursuing a career or live alone. But pornography takes these two factors to a whole new level. It is little wonder that we are now talking about girls being groomed for sexual abuse, and that pedophiles are saying that “society does most of the grooming.” There’s no two ways about it, we live in a pedophile culture.

¹ At least we have improved the process by filtering the violence out, but the end result is the same. If it wasn’t, you can be sure that violence against children would still be legal.

Does gender abolition lead to the destruction of cultures?

People who support some dominant institution which faces criticism sometimes make strong, dramatic claims about the dire consequences of abandoning that institution. I think there’s two main reasons for that. One, spectacular claims divert attention away from their own lies and misrepresentations. Two, people who defend destructive social constructs have to make the alternative sound worse.

Some FETAs make the claim that the abolition of gender will lead to cultural genocide. This is a laughable claim, in the same way that all other dramatic claims about abandoning religion, or class distinctions, or race distinctions, are laughable. They are wholly unrealistic disaster scenarios which are predicated on the essential nature of their pet institution.

This essay by a “non-binary” FETA is as good of an example of this tendency as any, and was shown to me by commentator John Doe, so I thought I would use it as a debunking of this sort of nonsense.

When confronted, what they mean when they say gender abolition is the abolition of Gender Roles (and sometimes Gender Behaviors and Gender Expressions). You have to wheedle this out of them, because they will describe these three distinct parts of gender as if they are all one thing.
They are not the same thing, nor are they one thing. They are parts of gender, so what they really want to get rid of are parts of gender.

We have to be specific about what gender is, because the root of the disagreement between FETAs and feminists starts at their conception of gender. FETAs believe that gender is an innate feeling that one is supposed to act in certain ways. Feminists believe that gender is a hierarchy (with men at the top and women at the bottom), which imposes a link between biological attributes (sex) and certain actions and attitudes (gender stereotypes). This link is what we call gender roles.

So while they are technically not the same thing, they are all part of gender and they are all necessary for the existence of gender. Eliminate gender roles and you’ve eliminated gender. To a FETA, this makes no sense, because they believe their gender feeling is innate and that gender roles are only a product of that feeling. But when feminists say they want to get rid of gender or gender roles, they mean the same thing, because getting rid of gender roles does mean getting rid of gender. Without the gender roles to link biology to, there is no way to establish a hierarchy with one role being superior and the other role being inferior.

Now, the argument they will often use in defense of their statements is that they are arguing it from a feminist perspective. In this perspective, it explicitly excludes biological aspects — so referencing any sort of social construction relating to biology (such as saying that then only sex would be left) is in direct contravention to this idea, since the social constructions themselves are part of the social conventions and structures that are part of Gender.

This refers to the common FETA belief that sex is a social construct. I have already debunked this fallacy-riddled, anti-scientific belief. Sex is a biological fact, not a social construct. Likewise, gender is a social construct, not a biological fact.

As for the accusation that feminists do not care about the biological aspects, well, that’s exactly backwards: feminists are very well aware that gender is assigned to people based on their biology at birth. Babies who come out looking more like males are assigned as boys and babies who come out looking more like females are assigned as girls. It is FETAs who deny the biological aspects of gender, since they believe that we have an “innate gender” which has no relation to the composition of our bodies. But this is clearly not true.

The outcome they invariably arrive at is that the world would be a better place, so that the exercise really looks like this:

* Say we will abolish gender.
* ?
* The world is better!

If you don’t believe me, ask them how they plan to achieve that stuff in the middle.

This is the same old argument given to people who advocate the abolition of any institution. I’m sure people who argued against slavery, a feature of world cultures for thousands of years, faced the same objections. Same for people who advocate against prostitution, which has been called “the world’s oldest profession.” And yet neither of these fights were, in the end, futile. Slavery has been made illegal in most countries, even though it still exists. The Nordic model has been adopted in many countries already, and is picking up steam. Did the first opponents of these institutions have a clear vision of how this would happen? I doubt it.

This is also a logical fallacy. Even if every single feminist who advocates for the abolition of gender has no concrete plan on how to do so, how does that prove that gender is desirable? This is a variant of the argument from ignorance: just because we can’t explain right now how gender could, or will, be abolished, does not mean it cannot be abolished.

So let me get to the point here and address the accusation of cultural genocide:

Getting back to that question mark, they seem to think that somehow this one thing will overcome all the other social aspects of differing culturals and varying identities, and magically change the world for the better. Yet if you say to them they are engaging in magical thinking (literally) then they get defensive and deny it, and so you have to take them at face value if you are acting in good faith and that means they are willing to engage in the western notion of manifest destiny and righteous propriety and actively colonize and override and in the end force entire other groups of people who have very different ideas of gender and propriety and destroy those cultures.

The thing is, we (anti-genderists) are against all conceptions of gender, not just non-Western conceptions of gender. It makes no more sense to accuse feminists of being imperialists for objecting to gender as it exists in other cultures, than to accuse them of being terrorists for objecting to gender as it exists in our societies. Feminists aren’t imperialists out to destroy other cultures. Actually, most feminists are against imperialism and are quite opposed to FETAs when they co-opt other cultures’ conceptions of gender (like Native Americans and the “two spirits”) for their own dogma.

If family is the building block of a society, then gender is the building block of family. That is how deep it lies within a given culture — at the root, as they note and claim, and what that means is that in attacking it, the ripples throughout that culture and society will, ultimately, destroy it.

Abolishing gender means not indoctrinating children and not imposing this concept on other people. Eradicating native cultures means imposing colonialist values on people by indoctrination or force. These two concepts are directly opposite. The latter is more like the imposition of gender that people like this FETA preach… a deviation from what is natural in humans. Forming cultures is a natural thing, but gender is not, not any more than racism or childism.

Gender is a bigotry that is deeply encoded in our cultures. As such, it is true that abolishing gender means an upheaval of cultures, in the same way that making slavery illegal has been an upheaval in many cultures. Saying that this makes it a bad thing because it destroys cultures is illogical. Even though slavery was a deeply held bigotry, abolishing it (on paper, at least) in many cultures has not destroyed those cultures. The only way to argue this is to ignore the victims of these practices as not being part of the culture. And that’s real erasure and real hatred.

In the case of gender, we are all victims to a certain extent, which means that abolishing gender cannot, in any way, destroy the culture, because we, its victims, are all part of it. You can imagine a way of life similar to the Ursula LeGuin story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where an entire culture is built around the suffering of a single child, and where the entire population minus one benefits from it in absolute terms: perhaps, in this case, one could argue that saving that one child is not worth it because it means destroying the culture its suffering is built upon (I would disagree strongly, but the concept is not absurd on its face). But the case of gender is the opposite of this. Everyone is a victim and, while men benefit from it compared to women, no one benefits from it in absolute terms. Everyone would be better off without gender.

To conclude their rant, the FETA crows that gender abolitionists will never win (when have we heard this before?):

The biggest issue is that gender is a social construct, and there has, in all of human history, never been an abolishment of a social construct.

While this may be true, many social constructs which used to be very important have lost most of their importance. I already gave slavery as an example. While slavery is still very much extant everywhere, making it illegal has greatly reduced its importance. Monarchies and royalty in general has lost most of its importance in the world. Religious constructs, like gods, sin, and salvation, are still widely believed but have lost much of their importance in society. So why can’t the same thing ever happen with gender? I see no particular reason to believe that gender is somehow immune to the human desire for freedom and fairness which have moved people to overthrow these other oppressive constructs. In the long run, if humanity survives that long, I think the concept of gender will be thrown away into the dustbin of history. Do I know how it will happen? No, I’m not a psychic or a soothsayer. Why should I be expected to be in order to say something should be abolished? My inability to tell the future does not prevent me from having a moral sense.

Entitlement and privilege: hierarchy is the root problem.

It is not fashionable to blame hierarchies for systemic problems. It seems most people believe that hierarchies are necessary, and even beneficial.

The case of gender is no different. Gender is a hierarchy, where men are the superiors and women are the inferiors. Genderism, the ideological support for gender, is as strong as it ever was. One of the main consequences of this denial is the justification of entitlement and privilege. People don’t really oppose entitlement unless it is part of dysfunctional behavior (like young male mass shooters), in which case they single it out as “sick.” And privilege, as far as I can tell, is rarely opposed at all, except by those who are victimized by it (and not even then, if those victims have any hope of getting the privilege themselves in the future).

Hierarchy is a system of systemic and directed control. This system can be an organization (a school), an institution (the family), or a prejudice (genderism). Whatever the hierarchy is, it has superiors, people who wield control, and inferiors, people who are targeted by the control (not necessarily completely separated, as people can be part of both groups in different ways, such as in a workplace with layers of management). Superiors expect certain patterns of behavior from their inferiors (such as a submissive or humble attitude), and inferiors expect certain responses from their superiors if they fail, disappoint, or do the wrong things (getting reprimanded, getting fired, getting punished, losing resources).

Entitlement happens when a person feels owed something because of their social role. We all know the stereotype of the rich shopper who treats store employees like shit. Although it may not seem like it, this is directly related to hierarchy: the rich shopper has control over the employees because they have some influence over the managers.

There is no sense of entitlement that is not mediated by a hierarchy. We all expect to be treated in certain ways because we are aware of our status in the hierarchies we navigate in, and we all adjust our behavior accordingly. In those areas where we are either superiors or have influence over them, we naturally expect to be treated in certain ways and to be allowed to do certain things. This does not mean you can’t be nice about it: magnanimity towards your inferiors is considered to be a good trait, and even people who abuse their power don’t generally do it in the open (and when they do, it’s almost always a form of abuse which is supported and/or codified by the hierarchy or society as a whole).

Male entitlement is a good example of all these points. It is not only the result of the gender hierarchy, but it is also mediated by many other hierarchies, such as the mass media, the family, and capitalism. Men in relationships with women, or dealing with women in the public spheres, expect certain behaviors from women (such as meeting fuckability standards, or openness to being validated by men), and women prepare for certain responses from men (by putting on makeup, by preparing for self-defense, by not doing certain things such as being alone at night, by guarding their drinks, by making first dates in public spaces, and so on). Many men behave completely respectfully and appropriately towards women, but they still benefit from women’s responses, which are generally geared towards appeasing men.

Privileges are actual benefits granted to people on the basis of their social role. If entitlement is the psychological side of domination, privilege is the concrete side. Many people who hold to an entitlement are clearly mistaken, such as men who become shooters because they believe they are entitled to voluntary sex from women (while society does operate under the assumption that men are entitled to sex through prostitution or rape, that sex is not at all voluntary). People may feel entitled to something that is not their actual privilege, and they may not feel entitled to something that is their privilege. Privilege is all the benefits we actually get.

Again, all privileges exist because of hierarchies. White privilege, which is much talked about these days because of racial warfare in the United States, exists because of the racial hierarchy and is mediated by other hierarchies, like the justice system, the military, the government as a whole, and capitalism (and of course the mass media, as the servant of public opinion, which is largely racist). Being white confers a number of privileges, such as being assumed to be reasonably intelligent, trustworthy, and peaceful unless proven otherwise, not being targeted by the justice system and other government organizations, having an easier time finding a job and getting the highest levels of schooling, and being heavily represented at the highest levels of most hierarchies and in most media. While many white people believe they do not possess these privileges, they do, nevertheless.

Many white people interpret this as a personal attack against them, that they are personally oppressing black people. But as I pointed out about male entitlement, you don’t have to be personally coercive in order to reap the rewards of other people being coercive. But white people are not, by and large, aware of the effects of white privilege on black people, so this process is generally invisible to them. So they have no frame of reference by which they could systemically analyze the issue.

Compounding the problem is that superiors in a hierarchy typically have weak egos. When you are routinely not challenged by anyone or anything in an environment, you will not mature emotionally in relation to that environment. It is said that men are less mature than women, and that’s because they tend to encounter fewer challenges. Likewise for white people as regards to race.

I do atypical work for a white person, which is that I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place.

Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism.

This is understandable. If you are white or male, if this is part of your core identity, and you get constant benefits from it, then you would have no interest whatsoever in discussing whether being white or male harms other people. In general, people will not question anything their livelihood or personal identity depends on.

In all cases, entitlement and privilege are not the root problems, hierarchies are the root problem. Entitlement and privilege exist because hierarchies exist. Generally, the most unequal systems entail the highest levels of entitlement and privilege, and the more egalitarian a system is, the less entitlement and privilege can exist within it.

When a child is involved, “no” means force.

On his blog Of Battered Aspect, Dave Hingsburger recounts a story which I think is worth looking at from the perspective of childism.

We were grabbing a bite of lunch at a small cafe, in a mall, right across from a booth that sold jewelry and where ears could be pierced for a fee. A mother approaches with a little girl of six or seven years old. The little girl is clearly stating that she doesn’t want her ears pierced, that’s she’s afraid of how much it will hurt, that she doesn’t like earrings much in the first place. Her protests, her clear ‘no’ is simply not heard. The mother and two other women, who work the booth, begin chatting and trying to engage the little girl in picking out a pair of earrings. She has to wear a particular kind when the piercing is first done but she could pick out a fun pair for later.

“I don’t want my ears pierced.”

“I don’t want any earrings.”

The three adults glance at each other conspiratorially and now the pressure really begins. She will look so nice, all the other girls she knows wear earrings, the pain isn’t bad.

She, the child, sees what’s coming and starts crying. As the adults up the volume so does she, she’s crying and emitting a low wail at the same time. “I DON’T WANT MY EARS PIERCED.”

Her mother leans down and speaks to her, quietly but strongly, the only words we could hear were ‘… embarrassing me.’

We heard, then, two small screams, when the ears were pierced.

Now, I know what the childists will say, this is just a little thing. Getting your ears pierced, all girls have to go through it, it’s not a big deal, and so on and so forth. But if it’s not a big deal, then why even bother coercing the child into doing it? If it’s not a big deal, then why did any of this happen? And I imagine that, as a bystander, I would feel the same way. I would feel like I shouldn’t intervene not only because of parental ownership (“none of your business”), but also because it’s not such a big deal. But that’s indoctrination. The proof that it’s indoctrination is that we wouldn’t feel the same way if an adult was being treated in the same way. But then, an adult would be more able to defend themselves, and would probably not be so dependent on other people’s approval that they would simply give up.

You can say, well, ultimately it did happen so the child must have at least stood still long enough for it to happen. But that’s not consent. The child very, very clearly objected to the procedure. The fact that it was browbeaten into accepting it (if it did accept it) does not mean the act was consensual. It clearly was not. A human being said no to a procedure, was under no obligation or duty to have it done, and it was forced to have it done. This is coercion. This is force. This is an application of power, just like any other application of power in a hierarchy.

Again, I know that there is a tendency to say that children’s values and desires are worthless, and that parents know what’s best. I feel it myself as I write this entry, this feeling that I’m making too big of a deal out of it (and as I do, I keep reminding myself, if it’s not a big deal, why did the mother absolutely need to coerce her own child into it?). But it is a big deal. We repeat over and over that “no means no,” and that this is a basic principle of consent that applies to all of us. But when children are concerned, no does not mean no. No means blackmail, coercion, and control. Like rapists say, “no” means “maybe,” and “maybe” means “yes.” And in any other context, we would call this the credo of a sociopath, a rapist, a monster. But it is the credo of parents, as well.

I am not saying all parents are sociopaths or monsters. I have zero doubt that the mother, in this story, meant well. She wanted her daughter to fit her gender role, as most parents do, because that’s what children must be raised to do (adapt to society’s rules and roles). That is the essence of parenting. Therefore, the mother, from her perspective, did not do anything wrong. Because we are raised to believe that children are not full human beings, we accept, as a normal part of life, that a child’s “no” is meaningless and trivial. We know that when we were children, our “no” was meaningless and trivial, and we know that the same is true for children nowadays. This is nothing anyone ever makes a fuss about.

It is a fundamental principle of all authoritarian systems (of which families are only one extreme example) that consent is always taken, never asked for. War is justified by “future consent.” State oppression is justified by “implicit consent.” Pornography and prostitution are justified by the “consent” of accepting money. Capitalism is justified by the “consent” of contracts. And so on.

What is the blackmail in this situation? We get a hint of it with the “embarassing me” part. The parent’s “reasoning” is something like this: “you are making me look bad, you are embarrassing me in front of other adults (we police each other and evaluate each other’s parenthood based on children’s behavior), therefore you should stop right now before I punish you for doing this. You should act like a ‘good child,’ that is to say, do what I want you to do so you can conform and I can look good for having a ‘good child.'”

I’m not saying she said this at all. For all we know, she may have just said “you’re embarrassing me, stop this tantrum right now,” or something of the sort. But what I’ve said is the reasoning behind it. The punishment and the “good child” role are often kept implicit, because the child has already integrated them in its understanding of its parents’ behavior. If I disobey, I will be punished. “Good children” don’t disobey. “Good children” aren’t sticks in the mud who get in the way of their parents’ fun.

The fundamental premise is that the child must put the parents’ values and desires first, not its own values and desires. This premise is irrational. The only job of a child is to be a child, socialize with other children, and develop in a healthy manner. Parents have nothing to do with any of those things, except insofar as they are ready to support the child in these tasks and otherwise leave it alone. Anything beyond that goes against the child’s rights as a full human being.

While piercing a little girl’s ears is not by far the worse form of the fuckability mandate that is enforced on women, it is still gross and disgusting that a seven year old would be seen by her mother in that way. But this is not the mother’s fault: women do not make the rules. If they did, women wouldn’t have to wear high heels, which deform your feet and spine, makeup, which is impractical and has carcinogen ingredients, or shave their pubic hair, which leads to rashes, infections, and makes STD rates higher.

And piercing one’s ears can cause infections as well, which are wholly unnecessary since a seven year old should not get their ears pierced, and anyone who says otherwise is a fucking lunatic. A seven year old has no social need to look fuckable, unless you’re a pedophile. A seven year old has no social need to look like anything but themselves. What a parent thinks about that is completely irrelevant. If, once fully informed of the risks and the possible reasons why they want to do so, a seven year old wants to get its ears pierced, I wouldn’t object to it. But this is very, very clearly not the case here.

What should the mother have done? She should have apologized to her daughter for going against her desire not to get the procedure done, and both should have left the store politely. That was the only right thing to do. But not many mothers would do that, because it means “losing face”: most parents see parenting as a struggle for control (and they are taught to view it that way, as well), and they hate to lose.

Since most people have no problem coercing their children, what should bystanders do? Well, first of all, there are very few people in our society who would see anything wrong with this situation at all. I read this story in radical circles, which are rather different from the general population. And a radical in this situation would probably doubt themselves like I do. And even if they did speak up, the most that would happen is that mall cops would be called, and then you get into trouble for basically no good reason, because the mother has no reason whatsoever to listen to you. I just don’t see what good intervening would do. What we need is public shaming. And I suppose this story being told is a good beginning, although we don’t know the name of the mother and can’t shame her properly. Even then, the sense of entitlement that parents have is so high that I don’t know if shaming would do that much good.

A new, exciting play: Agency Man Saves Women.

Theater is having a sort of renewal right now, especially with the influx of Hollywood franchises and talent. However, the indie theater is also doing well. Since this is relevant to my interests on this blog, I wanted to transcribe for you a little bit of a new play that is probably going to be a big hit. It’s called Agency Man Saves Women, and is a really wonderful story about agency, being personified into this superhero-type character, saves women who are in precarious situations. Have a read.

***

(A dilapidated room in the basement of a house. There are naked women posters, sexual paraphernalia, and torture equipment all over the walls. Upstage left, a desk with a computer open to a porn site and various recording equipment. Center, Gloria is lying down on a bare mattress and shackled to a post behind the mattress, struggling. She is still wearing her streetwalking clothes. To the left, there is a camera on a tripod aimed at the mattress.)

GLORIA

Help! Someone help! Anybody! HELP!

(Gloria continues to struggle for a few seconds, then AGENCY MAN appears from right and walks to Gloria, who is surprised.)

AGENCY MAN

Ah, do not fret! AGENCY MAN is here! I will “save” you from this predicament!

GLORIA

AGENCY MAN! Get me out of here!

AGENCY MAN

No.

GLORIA

WHAT?

AGENCY MAN

That’s not what I’m here for at all. Getting you out of here? That’s nonsense.

GLORIA

But you gotta get me out! I’ve been kidnapped by this john, and he’s gonna rape me on film!

AGENCY MAN

Whoa there, let me correct you. What you’re talking about is porn. Women voluntarily participate in porn of their own free will, and I feel that you’re insulting their choices by associating porn with rape. Having sex on camera is not rape.

GLORIA

I don’t give a shit! I didn’t choose to be here!

AGENCY MAN
(Laughing.)

So you’re saying that you don’t have agency? That doesn’t make any sense! You chose to be a sex worker, and you’re going to have sex.

GLORIA

He’s going to rape me!

AGENCY MAN
(Very serious.)

Are you denying the choices of sex workers to be in porn shoots?

GLORIA

NO! I just want you to get me out of here!

AGENCY MAN

That’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to stop you from disempowering yourself. You are a human being with the capacity to choose. You should never forget that. You should celebrate your agency, not scream against it. You are a strong woman, and I hear you roar!

GLORIA

I’M ROARING BECAUSE I WANT TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!

AGENCY MAN

I feel like you’re muddling the line between prostitution and sex trafficking. You’re not from another country, so it’s really not a big deal. In this economy, you should thank God you have a job that makes this much money.

GLORIA

I don’t want to be a prostitute, I just need the cash! And I don’t want to be here!

AGENCY MAN

First of all, it’s “sex worker,” not prostitute. Using the correct term is very important. It seems to me that you just don’t care about your fellow sex workers. You’re not one of those SWERFs, are you? Because if you are, forget about me ever reblogging you.

GLORIA

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? WHAT THE FUCK IS A SWERF?

AGENCY MAN

It means Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist. One of those old, hairy, ugly feminists who are against sex workers. You don’t look old, hairy or ugly, so you must not be one. They are all really bitter that they aren’t pretty enough to be successful sex workers, so they turn against them. Typical female jealousy. All they talk about is how sex workers are not safe, saying that “if sex work is a form of work, then why don’t work safety laws apply to it too?”, talking about how women’s choices are influenced by this or that factor, that sort of bullshit. They hate the fact that women can choose to do sex work so they attack their agency… which is silly because we all have agency! And that’s why-

GLORIA

Shut the fuck up and help me! I am a victim of kidnapping! Get me outta here!

AGENCY MAN

HEY! I told you to watch your language.

GLORIA

WHAT?? WHAT DID I SAY?

AGENCY MAN

We don’t say the v-word. That’s a denial of agency. You’re not a v-word, you’re a thriver.

GLORIA

I’M NOT GONNA BE A FUCKING THRIVER IF YOU DON’T HELP ME GET OUT!

AGENCY MAN
(Ignoring what Gloria just said.)

As for the “kidnapping” part, well, obviously kidnapping is not a good thing. But that’s why we need to legalize sex work. Legalization will allow women to make their choices without the threat of getting arrested hanging over them. But you know, from a sex work standpoint, it’s not kidnapping. Your body is a tool of production, so really this is just workplace pilfering, like an office worker stealing a stapler or some pens. It’s not that big of a deal.

(A loud noise comes from off right, both Gloria and Agency Man look in that direction while Agency Man says the next two lines.)

Well, it seems like your performance is about to begin. I’m going to leave now.

GLORIA

WAIT! YOU WERE GOING TO SAVE ME!

AGENCY MAN

That’s right, and I did. I saved you from being disempowered. Now you know that you have the agency needed to do whatever you want to do. If you want to free yourself from this situation, simply negotiate terms with your john. That’s how workplace disputes are resolved. Also, you really need to read more about feminism, real feminism, not the hairy man-hating kind of feminism, which is misandry and just as bad as misogyny. There’s no need to hate anyone in this world. Remember, you have agency, you are empowered. Make the choices YOU want to make. Also, I just want to say, I love women. I’m glad I was able to be a small part of your process. Goodbye!

(Agency Man exits stage left while Gloria struggles vigorously and footsteps can be heard coming from off right.)

***

This reads like a great play. I heard they’re trying to get Lin-Manuel Miranda to play Agency Man. I’m sure it’s gonna be the next Hamilton.