First of all, thank you. I'm a 17 year old bisexual teenager who only got introduced to this school of thought a couple of years ago. Instinctively, my brain kept on rebelling against it, not the fact that perhaps some people have gender dysphoria and might want to change their gender, but the fact that it was wrong and transphobic to turn them down. It left me in an extremely awkward situation, because I asked myself, would I date a trans man or a trans woman? And the answer was no. I'm attracted to both men and women, but I do not want to date these people.
I don't mind people being trans. You do you. But do not dare to come to us and say we're transphobic for saying we aren't interested. Complaining that someone's reason for saying no (which is strike one here itself, because you should never need a reason to say 'no') is weak is manipulative and pathetic.
And it's not just dating. It's bathrooms. It's the fucking Olympics. Laurel Hubbard took the place of another woman athlete who had probably spent a lifetime training for it. Laurel Hubbard failed, pathetically, and was still awarded sportswoman of the year. And I think that is fucking unforgivable.
Wrestling. No, men and women are not of equal strength. We are equal but we are not the same. A psychopath pats themself on the back for smashing a woman's skull in, and people applaud them? Seriously??
Bathrooms. You want to use bathrooms? Fine. But self-ID is fucking bullshit. 'If someone says they are a woman then they are a woman'. Nonsense. Do those morons really think that someone looking to commit rape will hesitate to lie?
As a gay man, I came to realize that there is something amiss with the (then) emerging gender identity discourse when I saw what it was doing to the lesbian community. Before that I had naively supported it, just like you. It wasn't long until I started to see something similar happen to the gay male community, with articles in the LGBT press informing gay men of the importance of birth control, because "some guys can get pregnant." A young gay man penned a groveling piece about being ashamed of his "exclusionary" homosexuality that doesn't embrace male-identified females. It was published at Pride.com!
Today it seems that every lesbian and gay space in society is by default a space for heterosexuals who "identify" as homosexuals of the opposite sex. How did this happen? How did we let it happen? We have all been the fool.
I'm so fed up of my straight acquaintainces-people who are ACTUALLY MARRIED to members of the opposite sex- telling me how queer they are! (I'm straight by the way, in my late fifties, been around gay and lesbian friends for years), how I hate seeing my gay friends' spaces and identities co-opted by people who are desperate to claim how "oppressed" they are as queer.
I am an old straight seventies’ feminist, loudly applauding this piece. It is time to call a halt to this nonsense. Live and let live, absolutely, including vulnerable transwomen. But enough of this catering.
This is an excellent chronicle of the gradual unraveling of this BS ideology. Thank you for sharing. I hope more of us can find each other and connect somehow -- strength in numbers.
What a nightmare. I remember wondering, once, where all the lesbian bars went. I realized that as straight men masquerading as women showed up, women just quietly left. Now there are none, because these straight men don't want anything for themselves - not toilets, not sports teams, not shelters, not prisons, not bars, not dating apps - because anything for them wouldn't be stolen from us... and taking away what belongs to lesbians is the WHOLE POINT, from our identity to our spaces to our bodies, minds, and self-worth. It's disgusting.
This is an amazing, piece of writing, and an enraging, account. As a straight woman who entered adulthood in the late 90s, I fortunately escaped all this, so it's really enlightening to read an account from a lesbian who witnessed all this from such a firsthand perspective.
What a Kafkaesque nightmare. How privileged I feel to have grown up in the sixties before any of this bullshit hit the mainstream. And too that my own kids were able to grow up in a non Anglophone country. The whole ideology when it comes down to it (as the author discovered in trying to decipher the Judith Butler verbal fog) is nothing other than a peurile post structuralist attempt at manipulation of the language, to turn the truth/falsehood axiom on its head. You can't do that so easily with languages that don't yet have a separate word for 'gender'. Other languages force you to name a person's sex when you try to speak of someone's gender, and therefore confront you with a not so easily deniable reality. In English the word gender (having been expropriated from its original function as a linguistic denominator, because the English language doesn't use genders) is freely available to be misused to build and maintain pie in the sky fairy castles where sex can be construed as irrelevant or at least of little importance, compared to the innate gender thing which the ideology can claim is what truly defines our identity. The vulnerability of the English language lends itself especially to this form of ideological infestation, not seen so sweepingly in non Anglophone countries.
Well, as a straight, cynical and increasingly decrepit old bit of Gammon, I am of the generation who viewed such goings on with an attitude of "If they're happy and don't scare the horses, let them carry on," all be it with a quizzically raised eyebrow.
But this old carthorse began kicking in the traces when men pretending to be women began insisting that they REALLY WERE women and women pretending to be men insist that they REALLY ARE Men, especially if they were pregnant.
Now we have men not only pretending to be women, but also pretending to be Lesbians and insisting that real women of the Sapphic persuasion allow them to have sex with them!
Absolute sheer madness.
Chuck in the insistence of these Pretend Women that they be allowed to use the same toilet and changing facilities as women and I'm kicking the stable door down.
Love this essay. We all need to recognise how how reactionary this gender ideology is, and how it privileges the sexual fantasies of straight men over the lives and comfort of women and girls. The discomfort in the presence of 'Chloe' you discribe is absolutely reasonable, because we all feel discomfort in the presence of those who are committed, and possibly violently so, to things we know to be impossible. If someone cornered you in a bar and demanded that you believe the world was flat, you would start looking for escape routes.
Beautifully written - a clear, accurate, distinct trajectory of how multiple crucial issues have been hi-jacked, traduced & reformulated to fit a nightmare narrative which conceals both its slavish conformity to gendered roles while simultaneously presenting itself as brave, bold & daring. I despair as to when we will awaken those so thoroughly enmeshed in the lies we are all expected to believe. Here in Scotland, we are threatened by Stasi-style re-education when raped; to the weight of 'Hate crime' law if we challenge this insanity, even if we do so in the privacy of our own homes. Voices like this truly matter. I only wish celebrity gays would stick their heads above the parapet instead of being so cautious & mindful of their bankability. I sometimes think it would take so little to tip the scales.
Excellent essay! You make me so grateful that I grew up with a radical, fierce mother, and have never thought that I was required to agree with other people when what they were spouting was nonsense. I wish you well on your journey -- life is not easy.
This is such a good essay. As a 17-year-old kind of butch lesbian, I've been exposed to this stuff for a few years now and it has never sat well with me. Unfortunately I think this mindset is only going to get worse.
A few years ago, I barely knew any LGB students at my school (tiny school in a homophobic area), but now suddenly there are a ton of nonbinary or trans students who have taken the "gay" label and run with it like it is some quirky club to join, making the homophobia around me even worse. Even in the past week two girls have suddenly changed their names and adopted "they/them" pronouns. None of these people are ever actually gay/bi/lesbian of course, but they have dyed hair and rainbow clothes as if sexuality can be put on like a costume.
The thing that sold me on the harm caused by this movement was when good lesbian friends of mine "transitioned" to male and nonbinary respectively. They experienced a lot of homophobia and I think they saw transition as some kind of escape from that.
Now every conversation has to validate them or cater to gender in some way- it is like they know they are female and need constant reminders of their "malehood" or androgyny to cope. Of course, now I'm the next target. Me being kind of butch or relatively masculine conflicts with their understanding of gender, so they've tried to make me transition too. It all makes me kind of sad, really.
Seeing these opinions expressed by other people makes me feel a bit less alone and saddened by all this stuff. So, thank you.
Hands down the best description of what is happening I have read. The AGP description makes these men & their intention Crystal clear. Fantastic. Please watch The Cauldron podcasts on YouTube. Scottish witches fighting this dangerous & damaging ideology. @LGBAlliance is rebuilding Gay Rights as LGBTQ🤮🤮🤮🤮 religion is all about T Rites. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
First of all, thank you. I'm a 17 year old bisexual teenager who only got introduced to this school of thought a couple of years ago. Instinctively, my brain kept on rebelling against it, not the fact that perhaps some people have gender dysphoria and might want to change their gender, but the fact that it was wrong and transphobic to turn them down. It left me in an extremely awkward situation, because I asked myself, would I date a trans man or a trans woman? And the answer was no. I'm attracted to both men and women, but I do not want to date these people.
I don't mind people being trans. You do you. But do not dare to come to us and say we're transphobic for saying we aren't interested. Complaining that someone's reason for saying no (which is strike one here itself, because you should never need a reason to say 'no') is weak is manipulative and pathetic.
And it's not just dating. It's bathrooms. It's the fucking Olympics. Laurel Hubbard took the place of another woman athlete who had probably spent a lifetime training for it. Laurel Hubbard failed, pathetically, and was still awarded sportswoman of the year. And I think that is fucking unforgivable.
Wrestling. No, men and women are not of equal strength. We are equal but we are not the same. A psychopath pats themself on the back for smashing a woman's skull in, and people applaud them? Seriously??
Bathrooms. You want to use bathrooms? Fine. But self-ID is fucking bullshit. 'If someone says they are a woman then they are a woman'. Nonsense. Do those morons really think that someone looking to commit rape will hesitate to lie?
I'm gonna end with: Stan JK Rowling.
As a gay man, I came to realize that there is something amiss with the (then) emerging gender identity discourse when I saw what it was doing to the lesbian community. Before that I had naively supported it, just like you. It wasn't long until I started to see something similar happen to the gay male community, with articles in the LGBT press informing gay men of the importance of birth control, because "some guys can get pregnant." A young gay man penned a groveling piece about being ashamed of his "exclusionary" homosexuality that doesn't embrace male-identified females. It was published at Pride.com!
Today it seems that every lesbian and gay space in society is by default a space for heterosexuals who "identify" as homosexuals of the opposite sex. How did this happen? How did we let it happen? We have all been the fool.
I'm so fed up of my straight acquaintainces-people who are ACTUALLY MARRIED to members of the opposite sex- telling me how queer they are! (I'm straight by the way, in my late fifties, been around gay and lesbian friends for years), how I hate seeing my gay friends' spaces and identities co-opted by people who are desperate to claim how "oppressed" they are as queer.
It's fake, it's bogus and it's a sickening lie.
I am an old straight seventies’ feminist, loudly applauding this piece. It is time to call a halt to this nonsense. Live and let live, absolutely, including vulnerable transwomen. But enough of this catering.
This is an excellent chronicle of the gradual unraveling of this BS ideology. Thank you for sharing. I hope more of us can find each other and connect somehow -- strength in numbers.
What a nightmare. I remember wondering, once, where all the lesbian bars went. I realized that as straight men masquerading as women showed up, women just quietly left. Now there are none, because these straight men don't want anything for themselves - not toilets, not sports teams, not shelters, not prisons, not bars, not dating apps - because anything for them wouldn't be stolen from us... and taking away what belongs to lesbians is the WHOLE POINT, from our identity to our spaces to our bodies, minds, and self-worth. It's disgusting.
This is an amazing, piece of writing, and an enraging, account. As a straight woman who entered adulthood in the late 90s, I fortunately escaped all this, so it's really enlightening to read an account from a lesbian who witnessed all this from such a firsthand perspective.
What a Kafkaesque nightmare. How privileged I feel to have grown up in the sixties before any of this bullshit hit the mainstream. And too that my own kids were able to grow up in a non Anglophone country. The whole ideology when it comes down to it (as the author discovered in trying to decipher the Judith Butler verbal fog) is nothing other than a peurile post structuralist attempt at manipulation of the language, to turn the truth/falsehood axiom on its head. You can't do that so easily with languages that don't yet have a separate word for 'gender'. Other languages force you to name a person's sex when you try to speak of someone's gender, and therefore confront you with a not so easily deniable reality. In English the word gender (having been expropriated from its original function as a linguistic denominator, because the English language doesn't use genders) is freely available to be misused to build and maintain pie in the sky fairy castles where sex can be construed as irrelevant or at least of little importance, compared to the innate gender thing which the ideology can claim is what truly defines our identity. The vulnerability of the English language lends itself especially to this form of ideological infestation, not seen so sweepingly in non Anglophone countries.
Thank you! So excellent. I wish all the women betraying us would read this and stop prioritizing the men who hate us over Lesbians.
Well, as a straight, cynical and increasingly decrepit old bit of Gammon, I am of the generation who viewed such goings on with an attitude of "If they're happy and don't scare the horses, let them carry on," all be it with a quizzically raised eyebrow.
But this old carthorse began kicking in the traces when men pretending to be women began insisting that they REALLY WERE women and women pretending to be men insist that they REALLY ARE Men, especially if they were pregnant.
Now we have men not only pretending to be women, but also pretending to be Lesbians and insisting that real women of the Sapphic persuasion allow them to have sex with them!
Absolute sheer madness.
Chuck in the insistence of these Pretend Women that they be allowed to use the same toilet and changing facilities as women and I'm kicking the stable door down.
Love this essay. We all need to recognise how how reactionary this gender ideology is, and how it privileges the sexual fantasies of straight men over the lives and comfort of women and girls. The discomfort in the presence of 'Chloe' you discribe is absolutely reasonable, because we all feel discomfort in the presence of those who are committed, and possibly violently so, to things we know to be impossible. If someone cornered you in a bar and demanded that you believe the world was flat, you would start looking for escape routes.
Beautifully written - a clear, accurate, distinct trajectory of how multiple crucial issues have been hi-jacked, traduced & reformulated to fit a nightmare narrative which conceals both its slavish conformity to gendered roles while simultaneously presenting itself as brave, bold & daring. I despair as to when we will awaken those so thoroughly enmeshed in the lies we are all expected to believe. Here in Scotland, we are threatened by Stasi-style re-education when raped; to the weight of 'Hate crime' law if we challenge this insanity, even if we do so in the privacy of our own homes. Voices like this truly matter. I only wish celebrity gays would stick their heads above the parapet instead of being so cautious & mindful of their bankability. I sometimes think it would take so little to tip the scales.
Excellent essay! You make me so grateful that I grew up with a radical, fierce mother, and have never thought that I was required to agree with other people when what they were spouting was nonsense. I wish you well on your journey -- life is not easy.
This is such a good essay. As a 17-year-old kind of butch lesbian, I've been exposed to this stuff for a few years now and it has never sat well with me. Unfortunately I think this mindset is only going to get worse.
A few years ago, I barely knew any LGB students at my school (tiny school in a homophobic area), but now suddenly there are a ton of nonbinary or trans students who have taken the "gay" label and run with it like it is some quirky club to join, making the homophobia around me even worse. Even in the past week two girls have suddenly changed their names and adopted "they/them" pronouns. None of these people are ever actually gay/bi/lesbian of course, but they have dyed hair and rainbow clothes as if sexuality can be put on like a costume.
The thing that sold me on the harm caused by this movement was when good lesbian friends of mine "transitioned" to male and nonbinary respectively. They experienced a lot of homophobia and I think they saw transition as some kind of escape from that.
Now every conversation has to validate them or cater to gender in some way- it is like they know they are female and need constant reminders of their "malehood" or androgyny to cope. Of course, now I'm the next target. Me being kind of butch or relatively masculine conflicts with their understanding of gender, so they've tried to make me transition too. It all makes me kind of sad, really.
Seeing these opinions expressed by other people makes me feel a bit less alone and saddened by all this stuff. So, thank you.
Hands down the best description of what is happening I have read. The AGP description makes these men & their intention Crystal clear. Fantastic. Please watch The Cauldron podcasts on YouTube. Scottish witches fighting this dangerous & damaging ideology. @LGBAlliance is rebuilding Gay Rights as LGBTQ🤮🤮🤮🤮 religion is all about T Rites. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Another fantastic essay! Thanks so much for sharing your experiences.