Naomi Cunningham on “the dolls”:

So in plainer words, “dolls” refers to men who say they are women. And “protect the dolls” means “protect men who say they are women from being faced with the reality that they are men, and the consequences of that reality”.

Ok, that’s clarifying. I’m not going to protect those men. They don’t protect us so why should we protect them?

“Trans women” are a subcategory of men. They are men who for whatever reason (and we are not privy to their individual reasons) either wish actually to be mistaken for women, or would like other people at least to pretend to mistake them for women. They go to a variety of different lengths to be seen as women. Some do everything in their power to “pass” as women, including radical remodelling of their genitals, voice surgery, facial feminisation surgery, laser hair removal, and modifying their gait and social behaviour. I’ve heard tell that the anguished desperation of some of these men to be seen as women has even led some of them to go so far as trying to modify their habit of interrupting and talking over women.

HAhahahaha. Very few of them though. Without interrupting and talking over women life just becomes so drab and pointless.

All of these varieties of men are men. And as I have already noted, we are not privy to their reasons for claiming to be women or performing their conception of womanhood. No doubt some proportion of these men feel a genuine distress that they were not born female, and are managing that distress by pretending as hard as they can that the reality they find unpalatable is not real. I couldn’t think that a healthy or a grown-up way of coping with the disappointments of reality even if it didn’t entail entitled demands to have everyone else join in with the pretence. But the demand is both delusional and oppressive.

YES. That’s what I wish more people would say more often and more loudly. That demand is a god damn outrage, yet so many people pretend it isn’t. Adults don’t play pretend games in public, let alone forcing other adults to play along.

At least, they don’t unless they’re as arrested in their development as the male characters in The Big Bang Theory. Adults who go to comic book conventions probably are fatuous enough to pretend to be the other sex, but that’s not an argument for pretending, it’s a reason for not being an adult obsessed with comic books.

But there are other kinds of men who say they are women. There are men for whom dressing as women is a sexual fetish. There are men who are sexually aroused by invading supposedly women-only spaces. There are cross-dressing men who talk to each other on Reddit chats and other places about their “euphoria boners”. There are men who go into women’s toilets and changing rooms in order to masturbate, film themselves while they do so, and then post that footage online. It’s a porn category.

There are even men who take drugs to induce lactation, and either express the resulting milk or get infants to suck on their nipples. That’s a porn category too.

But it’s bundled into the oppressed minority category, so we’re evil if we say those infants should be rescued before another sun sets.

…there’s exactly one acceptable way for men to behave in relation to women-only spaces, and that is to stay out of them. That’s what decent men do. If a man doesn’t stay out, he’s not a decent man. Even if he’s genuinely distressed by his male body and invading women’s spaces with no more nefarious intent than to comfort himself for that distress by playing pretend, he’s showing a callous indifference to women’s privacy and boundaries by doing so. He’s behaving like a man who doesn’t think women have the right to privacy away from the male gaze. He’s behaving like a man who’s not good with the word “no”.

There are so many of those around. The struggle continues.