The diversity of women’s experiences
GLAAD presents an open letter supporting “trans women and girls” – i.e. men and boys who claim to be women and girls.
In observance of Women’s History Month and Transgender Day of Visibility, we write this letter as feminist leaders in advocacy, business, entertainment, media, politics, and social justice who stand as, with, and for transgender and nonbinary people.
What does Women’s History Month have to do with trans anything? Women’s History Month is about women, not trans people. Women are allowed to have things that are for women, and we’re not required to add a shout-out to trans women to all the things that are for women. I for one am deeply fed up with having the subject changed every time a feminist woman mentions a feminist issue. Trans activism is not feminism, and in many ways it is in intense opposition to feminism. All this rushing to interrupt women talking about women to shout “trans women!!” is one of those ways.
We acknowledge with clarity and strength that transgender women are women and that transgender girls are girls.
You can’t “acknowledge” it, because it isn’t true. You might as well say that you acknowledge with clarity and strength that transspecies tigers are house cats. (The strength might come in handy if a transspecies tiger decides to eat you, but it probably wouldn’t.)
And we believe that honoring the diversity of women’s experiences is a strength, not a detriment to the feminist cause. All of us deserve the same access, freedoms, and opportunities. We deserve equal access to education, employment, healthcare, housing, recreation, and public accommodations.
Being a man isn’t part of the diversity of women’s experiences. There’s diversity and then there’s just plain not the same. We do deserve equal access to all those things, but in some cases that requires separation of the sexes and sometimes it requires designating the things as specifically for women, aka affirmative action. Campaigns to improve women’s access to education, employment, healthcare, housing, recreation, and public accommodations are not helped by including some men as women; on the contrary, they are hindered.
And we must respect each person’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.
No we mustn’t, not always. There is no imperative to “respect” young children’s “right” to mutilate themselves. There is no imperative to “respect” anyone’s absolute right to self-determination, because there is a great long list of items people can’t just declare themselves and then act accordingly. My right to self-determination doesn’t stretch to my declaring myself the owner of your house. With that as an example, it’s trivially easy to think of others.
It is time for the long history of assaults (legislative, physical, social, and verbal) against trans women and girls to end. For far too long, lawmakers have worked to strip trans women of their civil liberties—in 2021, once again, we’ve seen a wave of bigoted governmental policies and legislation. Many of these laws target the rights of girls to play school sports or criminalize doctors for treating trans youth and their families.
Now they’re just lying. None of these laws target the rights of girls to play school sports; the issue is boys who want to play on the girls’ teams or to compete against girls, thus gaining an unfair advantage over the girls.
The rest of it is too damn stupid to bother with.
So by this point they’ve dropped women altogether in favour of trans women. They’re not calling on an end to assaults on women and girls, just the trans ones.
Well, to be fair, they are calling for the long history of assaults to end, which doesn’t make any sense but I get the impression that this was written by committee and proof-read by an idiot so my expectations were not high.
And since most of the “assaults” seem to be calling a man “he” even when he wears a dress and make up, and not recognizing the female essence of the big bearded guy dressed like a man and acting like a man, and therefore calling him “he”, this is sort of disingenuous. They talk about history of assault and abuse, discrimination that is orders of magnitude greater than any group anywhere at any time has ever experienced. They don’t give examples. Why? Because most of their examples would be bullshit, and people would see it. Yeah, they are likely to get some genuine crap because of hatred of trans, and hatred of women, and hatred of “sissy” boys. But from some of the tweets in the later post, it appears that at least some of them like that, because it “proves” they are women.
No, what they talk about is the physical restrictions on the use of the women’s restroom, the verbal misgendering, the legislative attempts to retain women’s spaces for women, and the social rejection of the idea that a penis is a female organ if its owner says it is. Also the refusal of lesbians to have sex with a person who wants to penetrate them with a penis.
They constantly harp about their murder rate, which seems to show them as the safest demographic. They constantly harp about their suicide rate, but a lot of that appears to be due to co-morbidities. Their homeless rates appear to be cooptation of gay homeless rates, and are mostly gay young men, not trans. And so on and so on and so on…
An honest listing of all the violence and oppressive forces they have suffered, complete with names, dates, and descriptions of the incidents, put side by side with a honest listing of same for women, for people of color, for gay men, for lesbians, for Asian-Americans, for the disabled, for the elderly, for the overweight…they cannot afford to have that done. Most people will not see refusal of a woman to wax your balls as being in the same category as slavery, domestic violence, having acid thrown in your face, being denied schooling, having your children christened and taken away, having your land snatched by colonialists, etc. They would quickly spot the false equivalence, and would, I hope, turn their back on this dangerously delusional religion.