"Evil Womxn": The Silencing Of Biological Reality And The Technology Of Obfuscation - Forbes

Definition of woman sign in Leeds. Photo credit: Emma Dolan.Emma Dolan

Dedicated to Electric Light Orchestra

In the UK, the recent Reform of the Gender Recognition Act consultation ended on Monday which temporarily marked a pause to one of the most heated issues in the country. For the past five years, I have been actively researching and writing about what is at the heart of these “gender wars” where one side of this debate has persistently attempted to interchange biology with socialization while shutting down any debate on this subject. Briefly, the pro-gender side of this discussion has argued that gender (masculine/feminine) is innate or biological, while contending that sex (male/female) is a social construction. This thesis is not only completely false and scientifically unsound, but it is a direct reversal of what we do know: sex is biological and gender is socially constructed. Women are not menstruating because they wear pink, they menstruate because of the sex of their body. Inversely, men do not earn more money than women on average today because currency has an “invisible magnet” to the human penis, but it is because how socialization has historically had men in the seat of economic power, a fact which is slowly leveling off over time and with legislation.

Children born with a penis or a vagina are somatically sexed by the physical fact of their primary sex characteristics, namely: genitalia, sex chromosomes, gonads, and sex chromosomes. Secondary sex characteristics are what develop later in puberty: the enlargement of breasts for females, the physical contouring of the body, the elongation of the body for males, the storage of more body fat for females, body hair, the shape of the face in both sexes, the structure of the pelvis and other bones, increased muscle mass for males, and so forth. These are somatic markings of the body which can vary, but as a rule females and males are entirely distinct sexually because of these characteristics in addition to the basic fact that females are the only sex which can get pregnant. The transgender narrative insists that children are “assigned a gender at birth” which is in fact incorrect. Children’s external genitalia are observed and from this a sex is recorded. Nothing more. Gender is what pushes the sexed body into a social box because “boys should do this” and “girls that.”

Hold on there—wait, wait!! I know, you are going to say, “But what about intersex?” I’m coming to that now. Intersex does not interrupt the fact of sexual dimorphism which is defined as “the differences in appearance between males and females of the same species, such as in color, shape, size, and structure, that are caused by the inheritance of one or the other sexual pattern in the genetic material.” That there are various intersex conditions no more changes the scientific fact that humans are sexually dimorphic any more than a person born with one leg does not change the fact that humans are bipedal, or that another person born with one eye makes us copepods (one-eyed crustacean species). In fact, many intersex organizations and spokespersons have repeatedly asked to stop having their condition politicized and used to further the transgender political ideology.

Still, the reversal of these terms “sex” and “gender” is not a coincidence—it is the result of a conscious conflation of these terms for the past decade where transgender activists have been using these terms interchangeably. And the effect of this is that now, nobody knows what the other means. Take for instance The New York Times article from Monday states that the Trump administration is planning to “define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge.” The fallacy of this statement I will address in a moment. For now, let’s note how the Times uses “gender” here while going on to quote Dr. Joshua D. Safer, an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai who discusses sex and gender interchangeably. While these two terms are not at all the same, an endocrinologist and president of the Professional Association of Transgender Health is clearly conflating them, and it would seem purposefully so: “As far as we...understand it in 2018, [gender identity] is hard-wired, it is biological, it is not entirely hormonal.” Indeed, it is easy to use gender and sex interchangeably while offering no proof of any hard wiring whatsoever while also reverting to vague clichés that have no scientific basis. Gender does not “originate between your ears.”

Like The New York Times piece, there are several articles which have been making the rounds on social media this week which also falsely posit that sex is a spectrum: this one in Nature, a blog post about this first piece from Stanford University, and this piece in Wired. In effect, the Nature piece is not a piece of scientific research and is an op-ed on Disorders of Sexual Determination (DSD) which relies on the anomaly to posit that human sex is not dimorphic even though like my above examples, human sexual dimorphism is not changed by anomalies or disorders. (Here is a great breakdown of the Nature article.) The Wired article jumps the shark by contending that because people have virtual identities online that it is somehow “old school” all the while claiming that gender is scientific because these writers as well demonstrate not knowing the difference between gender and sex. And this op-ed by Anne Fausto-Sterling is a rinse and repeat of the same analysis of the anomalies of sex and posting them as the norm. A parallel to this type of logical fallacy in political economy would be to analyze the wealth of the .018% and declare that poverty is over concluding that this means that everyone is opulently wealthy.

But here is where things get interesting. The New York Times article, from which all these other pieces are spun, misinterprets the Trump administration memo as the word “gender” when in reality it is “sex.”

The term, gender, has been weaponized to such a degree that most people don’t understand the distinction between the two. Michael McConkey situates the current obfuscation of gender and sex where the “social constructionist agenda is premised on exploiting the broader public’s confusion about the meaning of the word “gender’.” While CNN got the story down correctly and referred to the memo’s wording of “sex,” it completely misunderstood what is at stake with the legal definition of sex being proposed, writing, “The argument goes that to deny someone a job because they're not masculine or feminine enough constitutes sex-based discrimination.” Someone’s being “too” or “not enough” masculine or feminine is entirely related to gender, not sex.

Yet, women being denied employment because their possible employer deems them to be a child-bearing “risk” is an example of how sex, not gender, is used to oppress a class of humans. And these distinctions are not minor, they are the very basis upon which women—from butch lesbians to effeminate women—around the planet are raped and forcibly impregnated today. Boko Haram didn’t ask how its hundreds of rape victims identified. Yet, transgender ideology labels this inherent biological vulnerability in females, as “cis privilege.”

Still, we do know is that identity is psychological and not somatic. To date that there is no proof that gender identity for some is anything more than a manifestation of “gender dysphoria, a condition classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5). While for many others, given the recent evidence of ROGD (rapid-onset gender dysphoria) amongst adolescents in recent years, it is widely believed that we are facing a wave of social transitioners who are self-identifying as transgender because of a social contagion. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the UK where the onslaught of pro-trans lobby groups have infiltrated the education system—even advising the NHS despite these groups not being professionally qualified in this field—such that there has been a 4000% increase over the past decade in girls presenting to the country’s only gender clinic for children, the Tavistock in London, self-identifying as transgender. If anything speaks to the fact that gender is social and sex somatic, it is this rising numbers of girls being sterilized by puberty blockers. To clarify—that’s their sex, not gender, being permanently shutdown for any possible reproduction, in addition to the skyrocketing increase of voluntary mastectomies of these girls as young as 13.

So what is the fallout from this attempt to conflate sex with gender? First, you have the recent phenomenon of males wanting to be housed in female prisons, such as the recent case of Karen White. Aside from the tragedy of the women he raped behind bars, the fact that now crime statistics falsely reporting “women as rapists” will sky rocket over time giving inaccurate census information and misdirecting much needed services for women (eg. women are the overwhelming victims of male violence, not the perpetrators thereof).

Relatedly, in areas where there is a recognition of women in certain fields, you now have males who are entering into this framework taking accolades and other forms of recognition from women, such as Pippa/Philip Bruce who received the Financial Times Top 50 Female champions of Women in Business. Bruce is a transvestite who comes to work in a suit or dress depending on his mood. And the recent removal of the word woman from a major Pap smear campaign by Cancer Research UK this past summer, angered women across the UK, replacing “woman” with “anyone with a cervix” as has Planned Parenthood’s removal of “pregnant woman”, now replacing this with “pregnant person” in tandem with media that is capitulating unquestioningly ideology. And this week The Guardian ran a fake news piece saying that “YouGov asked 538 menstruators about their experiences of period pain in the workplace.” Yet when you go to the YouGov website to see this poll, nowhere does the abject word “menstruator” appear. This was the fabulation of Guardian writer Poppy Noor scoring some “woke points.”

Are feminists being alarmist to think that the category of women is not only under erasure but that there is a conscious political ploy to render biological females invisible? Well, when  Brendan O’Neill who is usually quite critical of feminists, come to call out this very erasure of women in the public sphere, we must realize that this is a massive problem and a serious threat to the rights of women. It is time for everyone to pay close attention to what is actually going on.

Proof in point, writer and feminist, Julie Bindel, was invited to speak later this month at “Truth to Power Café” in London’s Roundhouse, an event specifically celebrating free speech. Then earlier this week, Bindel was no-platformed from this event by the event organizer under pressure by two other participants. Bindel is a well-known British feminist and activist who has worked on issues central to the rights of women who has unfairly been branded as “transphobic” since an article she wrote in 2004. After it was made known that Bindel was no-platformed, Index on Censorship pulled out of the event and finally the Roundhouse canceled the “Truth To Power Café” event issuing a statement about the “safety of [their] young people, audiences, staff and volunteers” and that they feel that they “can no longer guarantee it is a safe space, particularly for our young artists.” One would have thought Isis had been invited to this event and not a human rights campaigner.

Similarly, feminist campaigner, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull of Standing for Women in the UK has produced billboards around the country, only to see most of them taken down after various media companies were lobbied by trans campaigners. What did her billboards contain? The dictionary definition of the word “woman”: adult human female. Keen-Minshull’s first billboard in Liverpool last month was removed after the media owner, Primesight, apologized saying that they were “misled by the campaign’s message.” (Yeah, because the definition of woman is so cryptic that Tom Hanks will be soon starring in a forthcoming Da Vinci Code sequel on the cryptic meaning of “woman.”) Keen-Minshull then went on to post more billboards—one in Leeds which was up for a day and a half and another in London which survived a couple of hours before both were removed. Also, ten buses which were supposed to carry this definition on a side were also declined on the basis that it would be “likely to offend the general traveling public.” As Keen-Minshull related these events to me, she paused, stating, “How can we be talking about the dictionary definition of woman as controversial?”

We are at an impasse where the elliptical and conscious misrepresentations of sex are being used to shut up women in Canada, the US, the UK and beyond from live talks which are de-platformed, to social media accounts which are shut down, to billboards being removed, and the very linguistic basis for discussing sexual different being erased. More bizarrely private and public institutions are coming on board thoughtlessly parroting an ideology they have no comprehension of such as the Wellcome Collection in London which two weeks ago was excoriated for using the term “womxn” because they felt it was “important to create a space/venue that includes diverse perspectives.”  But how can spelling the word for adult human female with an x be anything but exclusive of, er, women? Just like the revamping of women’s toilet’s into gender-neutral toilets today, it is no coincidence that it is not men’s toilets which are rendered gender neutral, but women’s. Similarly, those making demands that women “include men” in feminism will then shift to their next demand that women “include” men as women. As absurd as it is to fathom that my writing six 0x after my bank account balance will make me a millionaire, somehow large tranches of society have been duped into believing that words cast a magic spell upon reality.  What is crystal clear here is that being “gender neutral” and “inclusive” has become a political mandate shoved at women as if they are supposed to fix the problems of why the default to an effeminate male is a female. Other questions abound:  why should these gender non-conforming males, because of their non-conformity, be sanctioned to the women’s toilets? Why should gender neutrality in any way implicate women as arbiters between men when it is men who need to sit down and discuss amongst themselves why some of them are intolerant of non-masculine males in their toilettes, showers, and other intimate spaces? Because of the unspoken and underlying presumption that women are easier to bully and manipulate, women have been saddled in sorting out the men’s “sock drawer.”

Women the world over reject the social status attached to having a female body given that the benefits are highly outweighed by its deficits. Yet, as a class of people who are politically and economically disenfranchised still in 2018, we are facing the evisceration of the only power we have to name our reality and speak out against what is an appalling Orwellian stage in our human history: language. We need to understand that the cure to the weight that gender imposes upon all of us—especially upon females— is not to shantay and sashay our way into fabulousness or to rebrand ourselves as a new word as if words function like three clicks of Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Our task as humans is to expand upon the experiences we live and to state in clear and loud tones that there is no “wrong body,” just very regressive politics in relation to material reality.

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