J.K. Rowling is in my feed again. I didn’t have to guess why, the beats are slightly different but it’s the same song. Last time, she ruffled the feathers of the extremely small but extremely vocal and active internet trans community by affirming that in fact, only biological women have uteruses and can give birth.
The reaction was swift and furious, amounting to a lot of harassment of Rowling and her fans, including children. Besides the usual death threats and sexual invitations to service various configurations of genitalia, seen below:
…there was also a harassment campaign targeted at child fans of Rowling which involved spamming hardcore porn to a section of Rowling’s Twitter set aside for fan-art related to her Harry Potter books, drawn by kids. In a carefully calculated response, Rowling declined to retweet these images in order to avoid boosting their visibility. The TRA reaction to this?
That’s enough spin to twist your head right off your neck, isn’t it? Making Rowling the bad guy because she “ignored porn tweeted to children”. Remind me, who tweeted that porn again? This should furnish you with some idea of who she’s dealing with, and the size of the hornet’s nest she stepped in when she dared to say that only biological women have a uterus and can give birth.
The replies all seem to follow the same theme and use the same language: That Rowling is “denying the existence of transmen and transwomen”. This does not mean what it appears to. She has not actually, anywhere, ever, explicitly said that transmen or transwomen do not exist.
What they mean is that she disputed critical gender theory, which TRAs consider tantamount to denying the existence of transmen and transwomen. So, deeply assuming the correctness of their own ideology, they attempt to impose it on strangers, convicting them of crimes which only exist within a critical theorist framework.
Certainly, transmen exist. But biologically speaking, they are women. Likewise, transwomen exist. But biologically, they are men. To affirm this simple, medically verifiable truth is not to deny their very existence, only to disagree with how they characterize sex and gender.
Equating the two is an attempt to force you to stop doing that. In other words, in the span of just a few short years, we have gone from “silence is violence” to “non-compliance is violence”:
This sort of dishonest code switching has long been a staple of critical theorist strategy. A is not always A. Sometimes, A can be B when it’s rhetorically useful. But when it becomes a liability, it becomes A again. In short, your enemy said whatever you say they did.
The code switching in this case is that things which aren’t actual violence, like verbal or written disagreement, are coded as violence on the grounds that TRAs attribute causation of all anti-trans violence in the world to their critics.
Now, because in their mind you’re guilty of committing violence against them, they’re free to retaliate violently against you. Except your “violence” was figurative, and their retaliatory violence will be literal.
Do you see how that works? Play with words a little bit and you can write yourself a blank check to do whatever nasty thing you please to anybody that dares speak critically of your beliefs. If it sounds like a familiar tactic to you, it should: The church invented it first, back when they were still burning heretics.
TRA harassment campaigns are not a fluke. They are the rule, not the exception, and are a deliberate and calculated strategy aimed at inflicting pain and fear onto whoever points out that the emperor has no clothes until naysayers either shut up, die homeless or both.
It’s the reaction of a movement which knows it’s in the wrong, which never cared what’s true to begin with and simply wants to bulldoze it’s way over anybody standing in the way of their goals. Rowling is far from the first to be subjected to this treatment, she’s just a famous, high visibility target. Otherwise she’d have caved by now and we’d never have heard about it.
For anybody less beloved than Rowling, it’s an immediate professional death sentence to be labeled a transphobe/TERF, with homelessness as a possible consequence. How do you receive that label? Do you get a trial? Ha! No, all it takes is for some teenager on twitter to decide they don’t like you. This can be for any number of reasons. Your crime may simply be not giving consent:
Lest you accuse me of cherry picking. And here’s yet more posts in the “your consent doesn’t matter” genre, this time with lesbians in the crosshairs. Lesbians being a cause of considerable incel-like frustration from “transbians” who have typically not transitioned, seeming to identify as transwomen primarily for sexual access to lesbians, responding with slurs and threats when they’re turned down:
Q.E.D. these are some powerfully unreasonable, emotionally motivated people for whom all non-compliance is violence. A harsh lesson learned most recently by J.K. Rowling, but by a long string of TRA victims before her, including notably the author J. Michael Bailey, author of “The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism”, and the sexologist Ray Blanchard whose work the book principally concerns.
Blanchard proposed the concept of autogynephilia, or AGP, a model of transgenderism which frames it as a fetish, characterized by feelings of arousal when cross-dressing, imagining yourself as the opposite sex, and being mistaken for the opposite sex by others.
This is a sufficiently common self-reported experience in the trans community that rather than deny it, they have renamed it “gender euphoria” and characterized it as a symptom of gender dysphoria. Which absolutely may be the case! It’s hard to tell, this is for obvious reasons an extremely contentious issue.
Likewise, self-reported post-transition regret stories are discouraged or deleted because it’s off-message. These can be hard to find because when mods of trans subs realize they’re being cited elsewhere, the posts in question often disappear shortly thereafter.
This is a tough phenomenon to study, because TRAs don’t want it studied. I used to see self-reported experiences consistent with Blanchard’s AGP typologydaily on subreddits like /r/itsafetish and /r/gendercritical, but of course TRAs had them banned. It is increasingly impossible to discuss this subject from any perspective other than the critical theorist’s perspective without being censored, fired, or worse.
Blanchard found out what “worse” meant when a TRA mob led by Lynn Conway, Andrea James, and Deirdre McCloskey enacted a campaign of in-person harassment against Blanchard and his family following the publication of The Man Who Would Be Queen.
This campaign entailed, among other actions, calculated attempts to turn Bailey’s colleagues against him or at minimum to publicly distance themselves from him. Smear sites were created, devoted to ridiculing Blanchard, his book, and anyone connected to him. J. Michael Bailey didn’t escape this firestorm unscathed: Andrea James was found to have publicly harassed Bailey’s children, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, and his friends.
Witnessing this outpouring of anger and organized abuse had a chilling effect on many researchers in relevant fields. Alice D. Dreger’s colleagues in fact privately warned her against documenting the harassment campaign against Blanchard and Bailey, lest she become their next target:
…the controversy over Bailey’s book got about as ugly as it could. So very intense have been feelings around the Bailey controversy that several people were frightened to speak to me when I sent them inquiries about it a good 3 years after the book’s publication. A few people who heard I was interested in writing a history of the controversy even tried to talk me out of it. Most were concerned that I would suffer personal harassment for researching and publicizing this history, and a few worried that no good would come of it because it would only inflame tensions and further entrench the players. Although I expect that the first concern is legitimate given what I’ve learned, I believe that this history has the potential to calm and even quell some of the tensions that persist. This history is worth tracking, too, in order for scholars, journalists, politicians, funding agencies, university administrators, publishers, and others to appreciate what can happen in an Internet-rich age of identity politics when a university-based researcher takes a controversial public stand, especially if that stand relates to sex, gender, or sexuality.
In spite of all this, TRA anger is to some degree understandable as being born out of fear. Whether true or false, if AGP were to be widely accepted as true, it would deal a devastating blow to trans legitimacy in the eyes of the public. From this perspective, their harassment was either violence against a lying bigot for publishing hateful, misleading propaganda, or a movement of people whose happiness is built on a lie, fighting to conceal that lie lest they be exposed to uncharitable public judgement.
In either scenario, trans people cannot help being how they are. Gender dysphoria is neurological, not a learned behavior and they face a great deal of violence around the world every day from people who won’t accept how they choose to speak, dress, live, and identify. For some, this is a tragedy of sufficient proportions that it doesn’t matter what’s factually true, only what’s morally true.
As an autistic man, that’s not an option for me. I can’t remember your newspeak pronouns and I won’t be forced to affirm irrational beliefs. My hierarchy of value prioritizes truth over human happiness and wellbeing, because you cannot compromise with reality. If you depart from truth for moral reasons, it can work out over the short term, but in the long term, down that road lies innumerable hells far worse than the one you avoided.
We’re in one of those hells now, because we wanted to be nice more than we wanted to be right. J.K. Rowling chose to be right. For this, she now roasts over the fires of trans discontent as they dance about the flames, jabbing her with red hot pokers, struggling to ruin her for daring to cross them, as they did J. Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard.
To be fair, you don’t have to look far for studies condemning AGP as pseudoscience, like this one. You’ll notice however that the bulk of these studies are published in sociology journals, but aren’t announced as such by the TRAs who cite them. Equally numerous are published studies in sexology and biology journals affirming AGP as scientific, backed up by FMRI imaging of MtF and FtM brains.
This does not conflict with the truth that gender dysphoria exists. There’s certainly ample evidence, much of it also substantiated with FMRI imaging, pointing to structural differences in trans brains to account for their feelings. But this does not somehow prove that sex is mutable or socially constructed, as is often claimed by TRA propaganda:
Note their choice of source. Dr. Anne Fausto Sterling, rebuked in this paper by Leonard Sax:
Anne Fausto-Sterling’s suggestion that the prevalence of intersex might be as high as 1.7% has attracted wide attention in both the scholarly press and the popular media. Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia. If the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female. Applying this more precise definition, the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%.
…And of course John Money, the sexologist responsible for the involuntary sex reassignment surgery and subsequent suicide of David Reimer, as well as recording him performing forced “sex rehearsal play” with his sibling Brian, and some seriously dubious, spicy takes on pedophilia. Note how Money and Fausto Sterling’s claims are judiciously presented absent any of this contextual information.
TRAs, despite to their confident claims to the contrary, are standing on a dangerously shaky scientific foundation. But does this mean Blanchard was automatically right? I don’t think that necessarily follows, but I also don’t think it’s either/or. It is easy to see how he might’ve gotten the idea that transgenderism is primarily a form of dubcon sex play though.
Retail workers in women’s clothing departments have long documented cross-dressing men involving them, involuntarily, in what was clearly some sort of public sex play from the customer’s perspective.
Pussy stunting, the practice of enticing a heterosexual male partner into sexual activity under the pretense of being a biological woman, also seems to be highly popular in trans circles, both as a fantasy and real world practice:
Pussy stunting, incidentally, is also the primary cause of the widespread violence against transwomen they often speak of. The fatality figures they quote consist almost entirely transgender sex workers who habitually neglected to disclose prior to clothes coming off.
It’s another one of those contextual details deemed unimportant for us to know about. The thinking among TRAs is that a transwoman is a real woman, because critical theory says so. You should therefore have no problem discovering your date has a penis. If you do, it’s your fault for not buying into critical gender theory.
This attitude is recounted here in an article by Sherry F. Colb:
…I asked whether perhaps some people might feel traumatized by having had sex, unwittingly, with a person of the same gender assigned at birth (or perhaps, if gay or lesbian, with a person of the opposite gender assigned at birth) and whether that trauma ought to count as a “harm.” One of my colleagues, Colleague 5, who had said “no” to the initial question (about whether there is a disclosure duty) and who had followed Colleague 4, who had said “yes” to the initial question, responded to my query by saying “I don’t care about people [who would be traumatized by learning that they had been sexually intimate with someone of the same sex or of the same gender assigned at birth.]”
Violence is a tragic but common reaction to attempted rape, which is what pussy stunting fundamentally is. It doesn’t satisfy the strict, exclusive Republican definition of rape as forced PIV, but it does satisfy the broader feminist definition of rape, which includes obtaining sex by deceit or coercion. Not caring about the psychological effect that attempting to coerce sex under false pretenses has on someone isn’t an excuse, or a license.
The deeper you dig into the Twitter posting histories, dedicated forums, blogs and other online repositories of writings by TRAs, the uglier it gets. Their public face is that of a tearful but righteously indignant victim. Their private face, mask off, looks very different indeed.
These are not nice people. These are not, by and large, tearful cuddly victims of oppression. If their enthusiastic disregard for consent isn’t enough, their vicious public actions taken against J.K. Rowling, Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey and a long list of their other victims should be.
I don’t hope for improvement, because by and large TRAs seem to believe they can do no wrong. When you imagine yourself as the undisputed, morally pure protagonists in a good vs. evil battle against irredeemable, inhuman oppressors, pretty much nothing is off the table.
So far the TRA reaction to TRA wrongdoing has been to defend it, laugh about it, or sweep it under the rug by censoring repositories of screen captures which document their misdeeds. The admins on many popular platforms are complicit, helping them hide damning evidence because it’s “bad for the trans community”. Imagine if the court system dismissed evidence against someone on trial, because it makes them look bad?
Blogging has become an important source of income for me in recent months. As an autistic adult I belong to a demographic known to struggle with self-sufficiency for the simple reason that nobody wants to hire us. Nevertheless I run a high risk of being deplatformed from Hive for this article by supposedly class conscious TRAs. Being remorseless sociopathic liars, they will invariably misrepresent what I’ve written to admins unlikely to read it before making a judgement.
I’m publishing it anyway because part of my lived experience of autism was being relentlessly, mercilessly bullied by people who made use of very similar tactics now being employed against J.K. Rowling. This doesn’t stop unless enough of us push back, which requires a willingness to stick our necks out for one another.