Links in bold.
Sometimes you pick a side. Sometimes a side picks you. But eventually, you have to decide. Which Side Are You On?
Until now, I haven’t minded being called a TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist), even though I reject the feminist label1, because I detest political tribalis. Why argue with idiots? And only an idiot would use the epithet “TERF.” Why worry about silly labels that stupid enemies slap on you when bigger things are at stake? Win the battle. That’s more important than political purity struggles. Eyes on the prize.
I now reject that. I no longer want to be associated with feminists in any way. I happily stand shoulder to shoulder with Matt Walsh although I disagree with him on many things. I agree with him on one of the key moral question of our time, whereas I don’t agree with Second Wave Feminists on anything.
Walsh can think whatever he wants of me. If he rejects me as an ally, that’s his choice. But I’ve made mine. I support him on the trans madness.
(Not incidentally, I’ve always found transactional male allies easier to work with than feminists. We cooperate on a goal, achieve it, and that’s that. No purity struggles, just teamwork.)
Walsh gets results, they don’t. What Is A Woman is brilliant. It exposes the idiocy of transgenderism and the malignant fraudulence of its proponents to normal people in a way that all the gender critical radfem in-group megaphoning doesn’t. He managed to insert his memes into the mainstream. This is how you do it.
To date, the only thing that Second Wave Feminists have done about transgenderism is whine about “the patriarchy”—something that doesn’t exist—while Drag Queen Story Hours proliferate like intestinal polyps.
No wonder they’ve gone nowhere. And they will go nowhere. In fact, it is they who have brought us to this crazy place, which I will try to explain in this post.
Let me go back to the early 1990s. The fight over the “Baby AIDS Bill” in New York State raged for several years. Now memory-holed, it was a huge political battle. What I saw in those years made me an enemy of the left in general, and disgusted especially with Second Wave Feminism and its evil twin, the Gay Rights Movement.
A local politician named Nettie Mayersohn was its biggest backer in New York State. Nettie was a quintesstial Old Jewish leftist:
A lifelong union Democrat, Mayersohn came out of the Jewish Workmen’s Circle social-democratic tradition and lived almost her entire adult life in a two-bedroom apartment in a union-subsidized housing development in Flushing.
But she was turned into a right-wing menace because she fought to test newborns for AIDS and to communicate the results to the newborns’ parents.
That bill, which ultimately passed over the vehement opposition of New York’s liberal establishment after a five-year battle, ended a bizarre and deadly policy under which test results revealing that newborn infants had HIV were concealed from their mothers and doctors, delaying for years crucial treatment to avert the suffering and death of these babies.
So-called progressives were against protecting babies from a deadly disease.
In the end, they lost, but in the process, they managed to kill a few thousand black and brown newborns. This has been swept into the memory hole.
This cruel and absurd policy was supported by the medical establishment, the legal establishment, and the administration of Governor Mario Cuomo. Against them stood Mayersohn, a grandmother who’d initially completed her education in high school and then went back to school and earned a degree from Queens College when she was in her fifties. When her bill began gaining traction, the opposition figured that it could intimidate her. They called her into a meeting with the experts, who used jargon and sophistry to explain to her why it made sense to let babies with AIDS die.
The Baby AIDs bill itself was the culmination of a decade of AIDS-insanity. The ones I had grown up thinking were the good guys—no, the ones I had been taught were the good guys, progressive Democrats, the people who were on the right side on Vietnam and civil rights and abortion rights, opposed sensible policies that would have saved lives. Or kept their mouths shut, for fear of being torn to shreds by the gay lobby.
The progs made up flimsy excuses about confidentiality, but in reality this was turf: give in on this, and what next? This fight followed the fight over shutting bathhouses, which the gay lobby fought like honey badgers. They lost that one, and weren’t going to give in on this. In the process a few thousand black and brown babies died. (The closing of bath houses, which were petrie dishes for the spread of AIDs, is still controversial.)
Engel and Lyle presented their recent research as part of an interpretive series accompanying the college production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. The lunchtime session in a Commons meeting room drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd, perhaps drawn in part by the talk’s title, which for the first time in this context at Bates dropped an F-bomb: “F***ing with Dignity: Public Sex, Queer Intimate Kinship, and How the AIDS Epidemic Bathhouse Closures Constituted a Dignity Taking.”
Overwhelmingly, normal people supported the bill. It would have passed in an instant except for a coalition of powerful groups. As Mayersohn tactfully put it:
I was disappointed by the position taken by the gay activist organizations, civil libertarians, and some feminist groups.
Had her bill come to the floor in both the assembly and the Senate, it would have passed. The leadership, however, prevented a vote. This is an election year, and it was considered wise not to offend such lobbyists against the bill as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, the Gay Men's Health Crisis, the National Organization for Women and the ACLU. They were defending, they said, the privacy of the mother. Once a baby is identified as HIV-positive, so is the mother.
More on the history here and here.
Did common sense and decency finally win out? Not really. The passage of the bill was the accidental byproduct of moderate Republican George Pataki’s victory. If NY State voters had elected a Democrat, more black and brown babies would have died.
And that would have been absolutely fine with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the National Organization For Women.
For the record, let’s recall ACT-UP, which referred to Mayersohn as:
“The infamous Nettie Mayersohn, who brought you forced HIV testing of newborns and mandatory name recording of HIV”
ACT-UP was the AIDs era’s version of Drag Queen Story Hour: perverse, perverted media darlings.
By the time Nettie died, she had regained her mantle as a progressive queen. None of the bad things the lefty organizations said came to pass, so they shut their traps and took the credit they didn’t deserve.
Nettie never changed— she always stayed a good old-fashioned Workman’s Circle leftist. How this happens deserves a post of its own. The left gaslights, fights the medicine, sullenly goes along with reality, and then either pretends none of this ever happens, or gets to hog the credit.
I didn’t forget anything. I went off the reservation, completely and irreversibly. There were other things—learning the truth about Communism, looking at the devastation that leftist ideas caused in my own family and my own life—but this was the final nail in the coffin of my red diaper upbringing.
But you’re not really free unless you can truly speak out. So:
Fuck these scum and damn them to everlasting hell. Fuck The National Organization For Women, Fuck Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and most of all fuck ACT-UP. Murderers and monsters, every one of you.
If anyone reading this applies this example to the Covid regime, don’t. Covid for most people is innocuous. AIDs is a devastating wasting disease. And babies can’t give informed consent.
And isn’t it amazing that people had to fight tooth and nail for a few sensible public health measures for the one, and almost immediately, a house of repression was erected for the other? Think of it.
I bring this up to illustrate what the so-called feminist movement has been from the start. I reject it as a flawed pseudo-universalist creed that cannot survive the light of reality. But operationally it has always been a movement of, by, and for the powerful. The feminist and “LGBT” movements have resulted in drama and professional advancement for the few and misery for the many. It’s been this way from the start.
Now that the chickens have come home to shit, they can’t face themselves and take responsibility for the disaster they have caused.
It’s always someone else’s fault.
But pointing out that feminism has failed women both theoretically and in practice doesn’t explain, how, specifically, feminism is to blame for transgenderism.
I must thank pro-feminist male ally Toby Rogers for helping me figure this out, although I reject his premises and conclusions.
Premise:
For a century, progressives had fought to show that biological sex and gender were two different things. The argument was that sex is biological, given (and yes there was acknowledgement of the 0.02% to 1.7% of people who are intersex). Gender was/is seen as a social construct, theater, performative. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique; Susan Faludi, Backlash; Anne Fausto Sterling, Sexing the Body; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble all made the same point, sex is biological, gender is socially constructed. We won that argument in a rout.
At the end of the post, he repeats:
To reiterate, gender and sex are two different things. Gender is socially constructed, performative, theater. "
Conclusion: Big Pharma is to blame:
Starting in 1986 and accelerating in 2015, the pharmaceutical industry launched an all out war against humanity.
Mr. Rogers doesn’t define what, specifically, happened in 1986 that makes the year such a bellwether. Nor does he actually prove a causal relationship between the success of the feminist movement in decoupling sex and gender and the alleged launching of Big Pharma’s assault on gender-confused people. He just states his premise, and his conclusion, and demands that you accept both as valid and true.
It is absolutely true that Second Wave feminism launched a war on traditional gender roles.
The distinction between sex and gender, a building block of feminist theory since the 1970s, seems to be widely accepted today. What is female and male biology and physiology are considered genetic and hormonal outcomes, while the rest of what is feminine and masculine is considered socially and culturally produced.
I reject that they were right to do so, and that they won a fair fight.
Second Wave Feminists (and their gay allies) were privileged people, well positioned in prestigious universities, who marched through an open door and attempted to destroy the institutions that protect the weak. That they didn’t completely succeed has only to do with the fact that we still have some means of resistance and that they weren’t yet in a position to triumph utterly over reality. (See what I mean about the Republican governor of NY State, who finally signed into law what should have been codified years earlier?)
If it were up to radfems, they would have outlawed marriage altogether. Marriage really benefits women, especially poor and minority women. Now it’s a privilege of the rich.
They are now in a position to obliterate every traditional institution, and that’s what they are doing. Destroyers gonna destroy.
“Gender roles” is a bullshit phrase created by John Money, a fraud whose reputation should be, in a sane society, nil. But accepting it just for the purposes of discussion, sex and gender are intimately intertwined, honed by thousands of generations of natural and sexual selection.
Biological sex WILL determine what you do in your life, and all the Amelia Earharts and Sally Rides do not overturn that basic truth. An adventurous temperament, a high intellect, and access to modern technology don’t change a thing. If either Earhart or Ride had had to drag 80 pounds of equipment as part of their jobs they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did.
I remember having numerous dorm room arguments with campus feminists about this. Their way of dealing with objections was simply to wave a hand and dismiss your argument. Or they would mumble something vague about creating technology. When they can’t deal with reality, they simply dismiss it and move on.
For convenience, I’ve put Judith Lorber’s review online. It is interesting that the article, dated July 2011, approvingly refers to John Money and paints a picture of him as a sagacious, honest, trustworthy researcher into sex differences. 2011 was long after Money had been exposed as a monster:
During the twin’s psychiatric visits with Money, and as part of his research, Reimer and his twin brother were directed to inspect one another’s genitals and engage in behavior resembling sexual intercourse. Reimer claimed that much of Money’s treatment involved the forced reenactment of sexual positions and motions with his brother. In some exercises, the brothers rehearsed missionary positions with thrusting motions, which Money justified as the rehearsal of healthy childhood sexual exploration.
John Money conducted an abominable case of cruelty and immorality, worthy of anything in the literature of Communist misuse of psychiatry. That Lorber and The Kinsey Institute do not mention his shattered reputation is also something worthy of Communist misuse of psychiatry.
This is the guy who created the fictional split between biological sex and gender.
Of Kinsey, statistician John Tukey, a true scientist, said:
a random selection of three people would have been better than a group of 300 chosen by Mr. Kinsey.
It is worthless to oppose the trans-madness with allies like Toby Rogers and Helen Joyce.2
They have as much humanity as the people who opposed testing newborns for AIDs. They are wrong from their premises to their conclusions, and no good can come from working with them.
British feminist Helen Joyce has taken to blaming transgenderism in the UK on the influence of American culture and its magical ability to compel a developed society like Britain to follow its fads slavishly as a sort of reverse Beatlemania. A simple internet search indicates that the British have been willing participants in this mania for as long as the US has, if not longer. This is a revealing and sadly overlooked book on the ubiquity of sexual inversion in post WW1 upper-class British society.
You are such a fine writer! Always enjoy your pieces. I've had less "inner struggle" about which side to belong to politically, ever since August 21, 1968. The sight of Soviet tanks on the streets of your native city very quickly cures you of leftie sympathies and notions.