Starve the OBVIOUS ENEMIES

Political discourse today, state of.

There’s a card you can carry? An official card, with your name on it, issued by the head office? Why wasn’t I told?

Oh yes, all about taking money and resources away from our OBVIOUS ENEMIES, feminist women who don’t agree that men can become women by assertion. Much obvious, very enemies.

And in conclusion –

Tell us again how “TERF” is not a slur.

Comments

16 responses to “Starve the OBVIOUS ENEMIES”

  1. Holms Avatar

    “How dare you note the similarities between myself and people I dislike! That would require introspection on my part!”

  2. Josh Slocum Avatar

    “Andrea”, who wrote in the New York Times that his neo-vagina won’t make him happy, but “it doesn’t have to.” A full on apologia for hallucinatory Borderline Personality Disorder in the paper of record. Brave and stunning.

  3. Skeletor Avatar

    If you go babbling about Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.

  4. Ophelia Benson Avatar

    Can I bring myself to read that NY Times piece? I’m not sure…

  5. Skeletor Avatar

    It’s well worth reading:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html

    I disagree on many points but do feel very bad for her. Many will think she’s on the wrong path, but she’s clearly doing this out of a perceived deep need, not as a trend or for attention or to invade women’s spaces. I think this was the more typical, rare transgender experience until recently.

  6. iknklast Avatar

    If you go babbling about Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.

    Okay, Skeletor, any annoying comments you have made in the past three days are forgiven for the next 24 hours.

  7. Lady Mondegreen Avatar
    Lady Mondegreen

    I second Skeletor, the piece is worth reading. Its conclusion is absurd (surgery should be based purely on want, whether or not it actually lessens gender dysphoria or makes a person happier in the long run*,) but its honesty is refreshing.

    Chu admits that transition has not made him happier; in some ways, he says, he feels worse–not because of any discrimination, but because

    absent the levees of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret. Another reason is that I take estrogen — effectively, delayed-release sadness, a little aquamarine pill that more or less guarantees a good weep within six to eight hours.

    Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

    I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am….

    Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman.

    It seems that Chu is complaining because people pointed out that his piece provides evidence for points gender critical feminists and trans-skeptical medical providers have been making all along. “Nuh uh!” says Chu. That can’t be–because they’re TERFs and I’m not!”

    It’s as convincing as the rest of his argument.

    * Chu:

    The medical maxim “First, do no harm” assumes that health care providers possess both the means and the authority to decide what counts as harm. When doctors and patients disagree, the exercise of this prerogative can, itself, be harmful. Nonmaleficence is a principle violated in its very observation. Its true purpose is not to shield patients from injury but to install the medical professional as a little king of someone else’s body.

    Let me be clear: I believe that surgeries of all kinds can and do make an enormous difference in the lives of trans people.

    But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

  8. iknklast Avatar

    Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman.

    This is the problem. Somehow they think we are fortunate for having been born women. They think the abuse they receive is because they are trans, and do not realize that it is because they are now women. They don’t recognize the pain, the suffering, the torture many of us have lived with in our lives, because of ‘the mute simplicity of having always been a woman”.

    I have never desired to change my sex, but I have desired every single day of my life, and probably will continue to desire every single day of my life, to change the performative expectations that come from being born – or perceived – as a woman. And most trans activists are denying that with their constant invocations of cis privilege, which hides the real torment many of us have suffered from being physically, emotionally, mentally, verbally, and sexually abused by men solely because we are women.

    I feel sorry for people who genuinely have body dysphoria. I’ve experienced most of the symptoms myself. But that doesn’t mean that I must give up the right to experience my own pain from my very real crap I’ve taken to center their pain in my being and continually compensate them for their pain. I am angry, very angry, at a world that can’t get it right, and recognize what gender critical feminists have been trying to tell them.

  9. Lady Mondegreen Avatar
    Lady Mondegreen

    But notice, iknklast, what he’s admitting: that he hasn’t always been a woman. He doesn’t use the tortuous pseudoreasoning of “assigned male at birth on the basis of my genitals which were really a girl’s genitals because I was a girl.”

  10. Skeletor Avatar

    Upon re-reading the recent tweets, I feel less sorry for her. How did she go from being sad that she wasn’t born a woman to viciously lashing out at anyone that implies there’s any difference between women and transwomen? Ugh.

  11. Acolyte of Sagan Avatar
    Acolyte of Sagan

    Skeletor, because that’s how gender alchemy works. ‘I’m not lead, I’m gold. Always have been, even though I still look like lead. Only I can say I used to be lead, because you’re a bigot if you say it.’

    I’m sure there’s some logic to it if one looks hard enough. Damned if I can find it, though.

  12. Josh Slocum Avatar

    Skeletor:

    Many will think she’s on the wrong path, but she’s clearly doing this out of a perceived deep need, not as a trend or for attention or to invade women’s spaces.

    There is no “she”. This is a man.

    And it doesn’t matter that it’s a “perceived deep need.” This is typical Borderline Personality Disorder, which is a mental pathology. Narcissistic people perceive “deep needs” all the time that include taking from and exploiting that which belongs to other people.

  13. Josh Slocum Avatar

    He. NOT “she”.

  14. Screechy Monkey Avatar
    Screechy Monkey

    iknklast @8,

    This is the problem. Somehow they think we are fortunate for having been born women. They think the abuse they receive is because they are trans, and do not realize that it is because they are now women. They don’t recognize the pain, the suffering, the torture many of us have lived with in our lives, because of ‘the mute simplicity of having always been a woman”.

    At the risk of mansplaining the difficulties of being a woman, I would venture to add that there is no “right” way to be a woman from birth. That is to say, no way of being a woman that will insulate you from abuse or ridicule. Pretty women are dismissed as dumb and strictly ornamental. Not-pretty women are despised for not fulfilling their role of giving men boners. Etc. The idea that having the “right” length of index finger — whatever the fuck that is — would considerably simplify someone’s life is bizarre.

  15. iknklast Avatar

    Screechy, not mansplaining at all, simply a valuable addition. I realize that, since you are a man, any explanation of what it’s like to live as a woman can be seen as mansplaining, but I think your credit is good here.

  16. iknklast Avatar

    Pretty women are dismissed as dumb and strictly ornamental. Not-pretty women are despised for not fulfilling their role of giving men boners.

    Oh, and something else about this that I have learned in recent years. You can easily move from one to the other. I was once a pretty, young woman being hit on and dodging gropers. I am now 58, and am despised. I am recognized as “smart” now, but that smart is modified to “smart for a woman”. No, they don’t say it, but it’s evident in their vocal inflections, their face, and the way they dismiss or talk over me and see no reason for me to contribute when a man is in the room.