FSTDT

Kathleen Stock #transphobia #enbyphobia kathleenstock.substack.com

Entering the parallel universe of transactivism

When people say things like “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”, what do they mean? In my book Material Girls I suggested that many of them are immersed in a fiction.

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As a trans person, there are different possible motives for immersing yourself in fictions of changing or escaping your sex. A well-known one is strong feelings of dysphoria. If you’re highly uncomfortable about the sexed aspects of your body - say, because they fail to fit prevalent bodily norms, or you think they do - you might experience relief to act as if you are of the opposite sex, or of no-sex. Worryingly high numbers of girls and young women are in this position at the moment. It’s reasonable to analyse this rise in the context of factors like the invention of the smartphone, the related spread of social media and pornography, and the over-sexualisation and objectification of young women in our culture generally.

A less well-known motive for immersion, specific to some but not all within the male trans demographic and also likely to be influenced by pornography, is the presence of a fetish known as autogynephilia (or “AGP”). In plain language: it’s a sexual turn-on for some males to enter into the fiction of being a woman. There’s a huge effort made by transactivists to deny this. [...] But numerous sources attest to it, and it’s important we recognise it clearly when it comes to discussing incursions into women’s rights. See, for instance, this Vice article from 2016, published before progressive media started to pretend autogynephilia could never happen, and frankly describing a club night where men go to cross-dress as women for sexual pleasure, sometimes also role-playing that they are being “forced” into “feminization” by a dominatrix. Residual doubters should also read Deirdre McCloskey’s transition memoir Crossing, where the sexual element is cheerfully admitted - or just look closely at this picture of a transwoman addressing the New York State Democratic Party.

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Kathleen Stock #transphobia kathleenstock.substack.com

Entering the parallel universe of transactivism

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And then, of course, we also get the fiction of the “trans” child - the most audacious retcon of them all. Transwomen who are “women” must once have been “girls”, and transmen who are “men” must once have been “boys” - which, by extrapolation, means that there must be “girls” in the population of male children, and “boys” in the population of female children, right now. “Trans” children (so often female, but never mind about that) “know who they are”, and should have the “freedom to be themselves”, we are told; yet this “freedom” may well involve a child’s taking drugs that will make her infertile; or give her premature osteoporosis; or bring about the surgical removal of her breasts, ovaries, and womb before she’s had any chance to reflect on the implications. Thousands of children and teens worldwide have been encouraged by adults to thoroughly immerse themselves in this fiction - indeed, to start believing in it, full stop - instead of treating it as one make-believe game among many, as part of a healthy development. Children’s bodies are being used as props in adult dramas they have no way of properly understanding until it’s too late for them.
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A fear of breaking the fourth wall is also, I think, what makes transactivists panic so much about J.K. Rowling’s forthright interventions on the harms of modern transactivism to women and girls. Rowling has the courage to describe the reality of male behaviours that harm women and girls, regardless of the identities of either. Perhaps precisely because she understands so well the difference between fiction and reality, the famous creator of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” is both willing and able to name things that others dare not name at all. She also has the communicative power and cultural clout to get her message out to millions. To those emotionally or indeed financially invested in trans fictions, and who desire others to remain immersed too, this must be terrifying.
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The answer is that the existence of detransitioners reminds people that psychological identifications can be temporary, especially in adolescence, and that there’s no inevitability about transitioning on the basis of feelings of dysphoria. [...]

Kathleen Stock #transphobia kathleenstock.substack.com

Entering the parallel universe of transactivism

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So too does transactivism, with the help of the media and the academy, work to fill in the consequences of the original fictions that transwomen are "women”, transmen are “men”, and nonbinary people "are neither men nor women”. Partly this is a matter of working out what would follow logically, given the way the concepts “woman” and “man” usually work. For instance, if transwomen are “women”, then transwomen are a sub-set of women generally, so we also need a special word for the sub-set of women that aren’t trans: “cis women”. If transwomen are “women”, then, since women before the age of sexual maturity are “girls”, transwomen before the age of sexual maturity are “girls” too. Since women who have children are “mothers”, transwomen with children are also “mothers”. Since women exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians”, transwomen exclusively sexually attracted to other women are “lesbians” as well (and so on and so on). There is also a frequent fiction that transwomen are “female” (because transwomen are women, and women are female).

And then there’s the practice of extending the entitlements and resources of women to transwomen, because transwomen are “women”, so they are imagined to share precisely those entitlements and need exactly those resources too. As we now know to women’s cost, being immersed in the fiction that transwomen are “women” leads people to think that transwomen should be in women’s changing rooms, schools, dormitories, halls of residence, prisons, social groups, sports teams, rape crisis services, swimming ponds, domestic violence shelters, shortlists, political meetings … the list goes on and on. Dedicated single-sex services and resources built painstakingly over years are now effectively dismantled, largely in the pursuit of aesthetic verisimilitude for males.

Meanwhile, if transwomen are “women”, and certain events and experiences characteristically happen to women, then the logic of the fiction dictates that transwomen must undergo these too. So for instance, transwomen are supposed to suffer from “misogyny”, because women suffer from misogyny (a fiction given further oomph by the fact that experiencing misogyny or even sexual violence is a common sexual fantasy of autogynephilic males.)

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