Guest post: An explainer to an old friend

An anonymous contributor shares the letter he sent a friend who had accused him of "transphobic" posts. There have probably been a few conversations like this happening in NZ over the past week.

Hiiiiii.

Howzit?!

I'm not sure which post of mine you're referring to, but I think I could safely apply your question to any of my posts of the past few days. 

I will say this: None of my posts is anti-trans.

As to whether my posts are transphobic, though? 

Almost certainly. 

It's very difficult—without radically changing one's basic and reasonable understandings and experiences of the world—to avoid being transphobic.

• I believe that the sexes are more real and hence more socially important than gender identity. That makes me transphobic.

• I believe that the bodies of males and females have different capabilities from each other. That makes me transphobic.

• I think it is mad to have males competing with and against females in female sport events. That makes me transphobic. 

• I think it is wrong and cruel to subject female prisoners to males in their cells. That makes me transphobic.

• I think transing children is abusive, and stopping their natural healthy growth is extreme abuse. That makes me transphobic.

• I fail to celebrate, and actually find it tragic when people wish to surgically remove healthy, functioning parts of their bodies. That makes me transphobic.

Depending on the day, it can be transphobic to recognise somebody's sex, to call a trans person 'trans', to fail to call a trans person 'trans', to say 'transwoman' instead of 'trans woman', to acknowledge—or even think—about somebody's 'dead name'. 

I have long since quit caring about being 'transphobic'. 

But I am NOT anti-trans.

• For me it would be anti-trans to, for example, not give a shit about the safety and welfare of trans-identified males (or transwomen, if you like) if they were at risk of violence or intimidation.

• It would be anti-trans to deny or compromise a person's access to basic services and housing on the basis of their being trans. 

Trans people obviously deserve to be happy and flourish just as anybody else does. 

They deserve to be able to participate in society like everybody else.

None of these things, though, should force others to have to give up any of their rights.

Women and girls should be and are entitled to have single-sex spaces. 

And women and girls needn't prove that males pose some greater or lesser degree of risk to them before they earn a right to dedicated male-free spaces. The simple fact of wishing to be only with other women—not least in intimate spaces like changing rooms, toilets, and rape crisis centres—is enough reason to grant women a right to their own spaces.

Men and boys should be and are entitled to single-sex spaces, too.

Lesbians should not have to face the prospect of lesbian-identifying males on their dating apps or in their lesbian-dedicated spaces. 

If others wish to create mixed-sex 'lesbian' scenes, including willing females and males, then they are free to do so. 

Lesbians who wish to maintain their own dedicated lesbian spaces should not be shamed or intimidated for it. 

Sadly, lesbians *are* shamed, intimidated, and penalised for attempting to maintain female-only lesbian spaces. 

They are kicked out of dating apps and bars that were traditionally lesbian-only. 

Sportswomen who would complain about having to compete against males are threatened with disqualification by their organisation. 

Women prisoners are not only encouraged to keep quiet about males in their prisons, but are threatened with extra time slapped on their sentences if they do complain. 

Women raped by men who identify as women are forced—under threat of legal punishment—to perform the cruel and gaslighting indignity of referring to their rapists as 'she' in courts of law. 

And those rapists’ offences end up being counted as female-committed criminal statistics.

I could go on. 

But there is well more than enough in all this ^ to make me reject what is demanded by the gender identity movement.

. . .

And I used to support all this. 

Why wouldn't I want to support a marginal community? Especially one actively being marginalised. 

Why wouldn't I support the unique health needs of a minority community of people? 

Why wouldn't I want to support the rights of such people? 

So I supported the gender identity movement and respected all of its claims, requests and directives. 

I did have some doubts at the time:

• Aren't these definitions and embodiments of girlhood, boyhood, womanhood, and manhood based on stereotypes, and regressive, limiting ones at that?; and doesn't all this in fact reinforce the conservative male/female social norms that feminists did so well to critique and overcome in the 60s, 70s, and 80s?

• How can it be 'authentic' to reject your very body? To reject your very sex? These things are at the very base of our constitution. Disembodiment and dissociation strike me as profoundly non-authentic.

• Why and how do my friends find it in themselves to celebrate when one of our friend group wants to cut her healthy breasts off?

These doubts and reservations niggled at me for years.  

I wondered how everybody around me could sit so easily with these things.

How could it be?

And whenever I *did* hear about anyone in the world holding similar concerns, it just happened that they were always super-conservative, religious, homophobic, far-right hateful types. 

In 2021, during the parliamentary passage of the BDMRR bill, which included a section proposing the introduction of sex self-ID, the religious, far-right, hate group Speak Up For Women came across my radar again, as it had objections to the bill. 

After having lapped up the correct narrative about SUFW years earlier, I was ready to support whatever they *didn't*. 

Somebody made what turned out to be a very fateful and helpful comment that there was nothing to back up these claims of SUFW being a 'hate' group.

So I became curious enough to seek out more information myself.

For once, I read SUFW material for myself, instead of deferring to the 'hate group' narratives from my friends and other fellow progressive travellers.

It turned out its reservations and criticisms about gender identity policies were rather like my own. It all seemed quite reasonable. 

Most importantly, I saw zero 'hate'. 

And SUFW's positions came from a place of reason and compassion. Not from religion or some conservative, far-right ideology.

In fact, SUFW's core organisation was made up of progressive, left-wing feminists! All of them Green (or former-Green) Party members and supporters! 

How strange! 

Anyway, long story short, I very quickly came to learn that a whole lot of what the gender identity movement had to say about those with different positions was absolutely fabricated out of whole cloth. Often, shockingly, complete lies.

This was the beginning of the end. 

I realised very quickly that all of the slurs and accusations aimed at those questioning ANY tenet of gender identity were horribly dishonest distraction and smear techniques.

It seemed that gender identitarians were willing to do *anything* to avoid having open, honest conversations about how their beliefs and proposals might work in the real world. 

Gender identity advocates would choose instead to denigrate anyone honest or brave enough to raise reasonable questions and concerns by labelling them somehow 'far-right', 'hateful', or even 'Nazi' or 'fascist' (?!).

They would also default, in lieu of any open, good-faith discussion of issues, to solemnly reciting opaque mantras like 'TWAW’¹ and 'TRAHR'²—And anyone understandably curious enough to ask for an explanation as to what exactly these mantras meant and how those meanings were arrived at were not only criticised but socially ostracised (?!) and deemed somehow evil and untrustworthy. 

For a movement so keen to present itself as loving and kind to have such inhuman and bullying norms of behaviour was just mind-boggling. 

It all struck me as being horribly cult-like. And it still does. 

It's so ironic that the side that makes no great show of being on the 'right side of history' or 'kind' is the one that does *not* by default refer to its opponents in debate as 'hateful' or 'bigots' or 'Nazis' or 'fascists' or 'far-Right', etc. 

And this rather more modest side does not bully its adherents for asking honest, reasonable questions. 

What a change. 

Anyway, sorry to ramble on.

But I really felt the need to give you the full explanation and story . 

I have lost friends since being public about my views. 

I have been ostracised by whole friend circles. It's wild. 

I thought their views were as harmful and objectionable as they did mine, and yet I was fully able and willing to continue our dear and precious friendships. 

Somehow, that wasn't reciprocated.

I HATE the thought that something like my having different views on sex and gender might possibly get between me and you. 

It's hard to fathom that it could. 

But my anxiety around that conceivable possibility is why I decided to spill out all this.

XO 

1. Transwomen are women

2. Trans rights are human rights