But that’s just my point, CandyLeBonBon. Ultimately, I don’t think this is a nuanced conversation at all. It has been made to appear so only because the rights and needs of women are still so inconsequential in the world’s eyes.
Having recourse to medical interventions to more closely approximate the opposite sex may provide relief to some of those males with acute psychological issues, but their relief is at the expense of women’s humanity. It causes concrete harm to women and girls. It damages us.
Some male detransitioners now speaking out about how they were failed by the medical establishment are clearly victims themselves of the current trend to reify all things genderist. But it’s striking how, when they identified as trans and took steps to appear female, not one of them ever considered how what they were doing could or would impact on women.
They didn’t need to take that into account. They didn’t need to stop and try and see the world from a female perspective: nobody ever demanded that of them. No one ever does, in a world based on patriarchy.
Again and again women are adjured to be kind, to comprehend and empathise with the suffering of distressed male people; lambasted when we don’t. Yet the same expectations are never levied upon male people with regard to us, despite all the myriad ways female people have been hurt across the centuries, are still vulnerable and still being hurt now.
This is misogyny. It may not be conscious or intentional, as in the case of some of these male detransitioners. They didn’t mean to hurt us. They simply never thought about us as human beings. They simply never stopped to think how they were using us to facilitate their lives, how what they were doing impacted upon our lives. You could perhaps call it misogyny by omission.
Omitting to see us as full human beings with our own unique experience and history, a history in which oppression by the male sex looms large in whichever direction you look. Full human beings with our own material reality, which is underpinned by our biology: our female reproductive system, so vastly different from the male one, and our physiology that is relatively more vulnerable whether our reproductive system functions or not, whether we use it to reproduce or not.
Full human beings with particular experiences and reality which male people simply do not share in.
Distressed male people are exempt from having to think about all this. Their needs are paramount. If approximating femaleness makes them feel better, that's all that matters. Not the impact on female people.
We’ve seen this time and time again: in the Hansard record of the discussions around the GRA, in the policy of housing male prisoners in the female estate, in the NHS Annex B allowing males onto female wards, in the innumerable sports bodies who allowed males into female sports and are only now starting to question their earlier decisions, some of them at least. Etc etc etc.
It’s all born out of a world where male people count for more than female people. Genderism is the product of an unequal world, a world that values male people way, way above female people. A world where misogyny is so built in that we don’t even notice it most of the time, because it’s so much part of the air that we breathe, have always breathed.
My contention is that what male people are doing to female people whenever they appropriate the state of womanhood, in the context of millennia of patriarchal oppression, is a form of abuse. It may not be, for the most part, intentional or consciously pursued, but it is abuse nonetheless.
Even when real psychological distress is present, it’s still abuse. Being distressed doesn’t give us the right to hurt others to make ourselves feel better. Only in a patriarchal world would a male person’s distress make him entitled to use female people to alleviate his distress, regardless of whether he hurts those female people in the process.
And please. Let’s not forget that those with acute gender dysphoria and severe psychological distress are very much the minority these days, anyway. It is no longer necessary to even have gender dysphoria to qualify as “trans”. The dogma of gender identity ordains that a male person can be perfectly comfortable with all the most male aspects of himself, and still claim womanhood.
Hence the prevalence of male “women” telling women who challenge them to “suck their girldick,” committing sex offences with their penis and in line with offending rates of other males, and bearded/bestubbled “lesbians”.
It’s gross misogyny, offensive beyond measure, and I’m tired of it. Tired of it all.