In this episode of the Green Flame Lierre Keith Speaks on Biden Executive Order
In this timely episode of the Green Flame Jennifer Murnan interviews Lierre Keith regarding a new development in the war on women. That development is Biden’s executive order on “gender identity” signed the day of his inauguration, and it will eviscerate Women’s Rights.
Lierre Keith is the founder of the Women’s Liberation Front, WoLF founder and board member, a radical feminist for over 40 years and is the author of 6 books.
Here’s an excerpt from today’s episode:
[9:24]
…so what Biden has done, has said, taking this Bostock decision instead of sex, we’re now going to have gender identity so every place in the law that was protecting women as a group, as a class based on our biology, now they’re going to instead look at that through the eyes of “gender identity” and they can’t define gender identity, it’s not in this executive order, there’s literally no definition. The few states that have tried to have definitions, I mean, in New Jersey it’s like “gender identity is a gender related identity” and I’m not making that up, it’s completely circular and this is because it’s complete nonsense. I know we all keep using the emperor’s new clothes as our big metaphor but I don’t have a better one, it’s just complete nonsense, it means nothing. Yeah, “a circle is a thing we call a circle,” great! Does not tell you what a circle is! And the most ridiculous thing is that we all know what a man is and what a woman is, this isn’t actually up for debate. We have been a sexually dimorphic 500 million years on this planet, we’ve had sexual reproduction, there’s just men and there’s women, this is actually not very complicated, they have made it complicated, it is not complicated, we all know who can bear the babies and who doesn’t. For the whole history of patriarchy, they’ve never had a problem figuring out who the women were: was going to be sold as a child bride, was going to have her genitals mutilated, was gonna have her feet pound, wasn’t allowed to vote, I mean, in 1976 when my mother divorced my father she couldn’t get a credit card in her name, she couldn’t get a bank account, didn’t happen to my father! We all know who that happened to and why we have a feminist movement. Anyway, so Bostock has now come to fruition, we saw this in the ruling, anybody can read it all, this information is public and that’s what they said, that gender identity was essentially a discreet group of people and they deserve protection and we’re just going to go with it, again, never defined it because it’s not definable, it’s simply an internal feeling and it has nothing to do with physical reality. So this executive order, the federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination, now have to provide the same, let’s say, they’re going to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity, this involves all the Federal Civil Rights offices across the country which are now going to have to enforce this. This is where you used to go if you felt like there was workplace discrimination or something that was one of the legal remedies that you had, so women aren’t going to have that remedy anymore, men will.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Across the internet, women have been expressing relief at the end of the Trump era.
Even Canadians are posting moving images of Kamala Harris and Jill Biden in outfits representing progress. No true feminist would wear a black suit and red tie, after all. What America needs now is jewel tones.
I’m hard pressed to understand what trauma Canadians have endured watching an egomaniac tweet himself into internet jail… If anything, it provided dedicated progressive posters with four years of conversation starters. Now what will you meme about?
Either way, I’m just glad all this division and polarization will finally come to an end.
Canadians and Americans alike will have to band together to find something new to distract themselves with. Maybe this time it will be mass surveillance and the end of free speech? OR. Or. Wait no I have a good one. An end to women’s sport and sex-based protections?
The first thing U.S. President Joe Biden did, the day after his inauguration, was to sign 15 executive orders, including rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and reversing a policy that blocks U.S. funding for programs overseas linked to abortion. Not bad. He also implemented a mask mandate on federal property, as well as on buses, planes, and trains.
But Biden’s courageous “100 Days Masking Challenge” (ooooh fun! It’s like a game!) wasn’t the only decision allowing us to collectively breathe a hot sigh of relief. He also signed an executive order to implement certain aspects of the Equality Act, which sounds like a great thing, unless you are a woman who, in 2021, hoped for equality under the law. Sorry, Karen. Equality is not for you. Put your mask back on.
The order ensures “that federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity” and bypasses the tedious legislative process normally required to pass legislation.
But hey, we’re talking about equality, you guys.
And who would vote against that! As far as I’m aware, democracy just means other people get to decide what’s good for you. People who vote against ungood things are fascists.
Lest you had been fooled into believing an “Equality Act” was, at least in part, about combatting sex-based discrimination, seeing as women are the half of the population who spent the last 100 years fighting for equal rights under the law, we are reminded that our status as “woman” only matters if you are the kind of woman who is a man.
The original Equality Act introduced in 1974 by Bella Abzug did in fact seek to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex (as well as sexual orientation and marriage status) but as we all now know, thanks to Twitter’s fact checkers, humans have surpassed sex. We are now a mass of amorphous theys whose rights are determined by the kind of porn we prefer. The Equality Act of 1974 did not go on to become legislation, and has been reintroduced in various forms over the years, bringing us to modern times, where equality is still needed, just not for chicks.
Today, the important thing, in terms of ensuring equality, is that mediocre male athletes be permitted to compete against girls and women, lest they have to live with their male-based mediocrity. As such, this “Equality Act” ensures that individuals cannot be discriminated on the basis of their “gender identity,” which sounds nice because no one should be discriminated against, but in this case we’re using the term “discrimination” to defend the rights of men to claim they are female and be treated as such.
You might ask why men would wish to be treated as “female.”
Well, for starters, to ensure they are not denied access to abortion should they become pregnant with delusion. But there are a few other good reasons, too. One of which being that, should these men find themselves charged with sexual assault, they can avoid being stuck in prison with a bunch of violent dudes. Fair enough. No one wants that. Problem is that, as “women,” these men now have the right to be imprisoned in women’s facilities, meaning female inmates are now subject to the male violence no one wants anything to do with. Seems unfair, right? Too bad, Karen! That’s equality!
The really important thing this Equality Act does, though, is to level the playing field for males who aren’t good enough athletes to compete against other male athletes. It is more fair for them to compete against women who are, due to their biology, not as strong or as fast as male athletes. Indeed, women’s bodies are different than male bodies, but we’re no longer allowed to talk about why that is, because material reality is not very polite, and impoliteness kills.
Men can now not only legally access women’s facilities — including washrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms — but as “women,” they can also win sport competitions, races, scholarships, and accolades previously reserved for girls and women, which they fully deserve, because the hardest thing about being a woman is being male.
In October, Biden promised us he would enact the Equality Act during his first 100 days as President.
He is a Good Guy (which is why you voted for him, right?) and Good Guys keep their promises. So, he is following through. None of this was a surprise, and now we can all celebrate this brave new world, free from the burden of independent thought.
Personally, I’m just relieved Americans no longer have a crazy guy as president! Imagine if the leader of your country believed that males could become female through pronouncement, then enacted legislation on that basis! LOL.
This article was originally published on Feminist Current: Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including The Spectator, Unherd, TheCBC, New Stateman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her dog.
Editors note: The sketch by Monty Python really nails it:
The system is fucked-up. If you are reading this, you probably know this already. You’re here because you know how fucked-up the system is. You know that it is based on the oppression of humans, nonhumans and the entire planet. You know that we need to fight this system, that we need to resist it with all we have. You may already be doing that anyway. I’m going to share some of the ways that I have resisted.
Resistance requires courage.
Resistance means standing up for what is right. It requires the willingness to go against an enemy so powerful that defeat seems inevitable. Sometimes, it may even require standing up to your loved ones. The majority of human beings, including our loved ones and even ourselves, are indoctrinated into this human supremacist, male supremacist, white supremacist culture that hates life. Anyone who dares to go against this culture is likely to be attacked on many levels, emotionally, socially, financially, or even physically. I’m sure many of us have faced this. I’ve faced such attacks for refusing to go along with mindless consumerism, for providing a radical view among non-political groups, and for refusing to conform to the dominant narrative. I have been coaxed, harassed, or threatened into submission. Regrettably, a few of these attacks have been successful. They serve to remind us how powerful the dominant system is, and how much of courage it requires to stand up against it.
Resistance means being prepared.
The system does not serve anyone. It is inherently flawed. Usually, these flaws are covered up by conveniences such as 24-hour electricity, hot water flowing out of a faucet, or the ability to instantly connect with anyone. The genocide and slavery that continues to go into making all this possible is well hidden. However, there are times when the injustices of the system become apparent, times when inherent flaws cannot be hidden anymore. The failure of the global supply chain during the initial parts of the lockdown is one example.
Everyday examples include extreme cases of violence against a person of an oppressed group, especially when the violence cannot be deemed to serve anyone. These incidences open up discussion about systemic flaws, and may lead to structural changes, for better or worse. Resistance means being prepared to notice and utilise such situations, to highlight the flaws within the system, and to direct the momentum for positive changes.
Resistance should also be strategic.
It means considering the best and the most effective means to achieve one’s goals. We are up against a system that has far more resources and more power at its disposal. We cannot be prodigal on our use of time and energy. Sometimes, this means backing off from a fight. It is not possible to win every argument, every legal case, every fight against the system. Effective resistance requires us to identify the fights that are worth spending our limited time and energy on.
Resistance comes in different forms.
Regardless of the nuances in our political ideologies, or the differences in our life situations, there are many ways to resist the system. For me, fighting for my right to planned parenthood is a form of resistance. For a woman who has submitted to patriarchy all her life, fighting against her family’s pressures to abort her daughter is resistance. Every form of resistance against this culture should be welcomed.
I believe Derrick Jensen could not be any clearer when he says:
“The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look there is great work to be done.”
Salonika is an organizer at DGR Asia Pacific and is based in Nepal. She believes that the needs of the natural world should trump the needs of the industrial civilization.
Trinity La Fey reflects on the ubiquity of child abuse, the links between childhood trauma and addictive behaviors, the brain chemistry of pornography addiction, and the ways in which patriarchy is reproduced and transmitted from generation to generation through children.
by Trinity La Fey
“The first step in resisting exploitation is seeing it and knowing it and not lying about where it is sitting on you. The second step is caring enough about other women that if today you are fine and yesterday you were fine, but your sister, hanging from the tree is not fine, that you will go the distance to cut her down.”
– Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating Right and Left
* * *
During his 1981 interview regarding Boys for Sale, the documentary exposé on child sexual abuse in Huston, Texas, University History Professor Tom Philpott marveled that around the world, sexual predation of children is observed, but it is not accompanied by the “mayhemic violence” that is seen in America.
Dr. Robert Sapolski, in his Behavioral Biology Class at Stanford University, explains tournament species: who are competitive, non-monogamous maters; and pair bonding species: who mate for life. He describes our hyper-plastic human sexuality as being socially and biologically expressed somewhere between these two.
In When God was A Woman, Merlin Stone documents globally reoccurring Neolithic Goddess worship that included practices of priestesses taking youthful lover/son partners that were later ritually sacrificed. Especially in the chapter, “If The King Did Not Weep”, it becomes clear that widespread sexual predation of the opposite sex, in their youth, is an (or perhaps the most) effective way to ensure sex-based social dominion in a culture. As men attained more cultural power, gaining ritual access, especially in Anatolia, they did so by castrating themselves and wearing the long robes of women.
Jeffrey M. Masson related his discoveries of Sigmund Freud’s letters, in the possession of his daughter, Anna Freud, in Freud and the Seduction Theory, A challenge to the foundations of psychoanalysis, and how she had perpetuated her father’s abuse of women, through psychoanalysis, to discredit them further to themselves and society regarding the large-scale father/daughter incest that was occurring and debilitating his patients well past the years of the physical abuse.
Interviewed for the documentary series The Keepers, former student of Seton Keough High School, Jean Hargadon Wehner, wondered how her abusers knew she wouldn’t expose them; why they trusted her silence as completely as they did.
Dr. Gabor Maté said, in the interview with California Healthline: Addiction Rooted In Childhood Trauma, Says Prominent Specialist, “All addictions — alcohol or drugs, sex addiction or internet addiction, gambling or shopping — are attempts to regulate our internal emotional states because we’re not comfortable, and the discomfort originates in childhood. For me, there’s no distinction except in degree between one addiction and another: same brain circuits, same emotional dynamics, same pain and same behaviors of furtiveness, denial and lying.”
Detailing a near compulsory removal of foreskin during infancy, without anesthetic, the documentary American Circumcision explicitly reveals how the first sexual experience of most American males is a mutilating, traumatic abuse, the memories to which, they have no access.
Porn, Pseudoscience and DeltaFosB, published by yourbrainonporn.com, run by Gary Wilson, “lists 41 neuroscience-based studies (MRI, fMRI, EEG, neuropsychological, hormonal). They provide strong support for the addiction model as their findings mirror the neurological findings reported in substance addiction studies.” A follow up article: Unwiring & Rewiring Your Brain: Sensitization and Hypofrontality, Intro to neuroplasticity, explains the physical results of porn addiction. “Hypofrontailty means the frontal lobes are under performing. Structurally, this manifests as:
Decline in gray matter (the cortex)
Abnormal white matter (the communication pathways)
Decreased metabolism or lowered glucose utilization”
Mohammedraza Esmail, in his article, What Porn Does to Your Brain and How to Quit, displays a common exculpation tactic in his misinterpretation of modern patriarchy as how humanity is (men are) hardwired, even as diagrams from his own article show the pornography addicted brain all but dissolved of frontal cortex: “While a husband and wife commit to being loyal to each other until the end of their days, evolution is laughing in the background. Because evolution doesn’t care about your life-long commitments. Evolution only cares about passing your genetic code to as many females as possible. Therefore, the brain is designed to want no female to be left unfertilized.” he posits, conflating limbic attention to novelty with the mass willingness to be complicit in sex crimes displayed by men.
But, as Sapolski and Maté both point out, only the traumatized, isolated or otherwise epigenetically triggered are disposed to addiction. “Nobody’s saying that every traumatized person becomes addicted. I’m saying that every addicted person was traumatized.” Maté clarifies.
When asked if the sale of children in his city was related to the legacy of trauma in the land on which it stood, Tom Philpot said it best:
“This subject has baffled me, from the time I first became aware of it, until this day. I can’t understand it and I’m trying very hard. As a historian, I know that this society, probably above all in the world and in the history of the world romanticizes childhood, but the historical record, child labor for one thing, indicates this society has not been good to children, has not protected children, and in fact is contemptuous of children, heartless to children, and they’re such helpless victims. Who can they go to? What constituency do they have? Nobody. The heartlessness that goes into it is certainly somehow connected with the heartlessness which ground up the Indians, black people, immigrant laborers, poor people in general, motivating the cuts in social programs today, blindness to the living reality of people’s situation. Yes, it’s connected. It’s about the most hair-raising thing I think I’ve encountered in studying the history of my country: the slaughter of the innocents and it goes on and on and when the public gets a hint of it, nothing happens. There doesn’t seem to be any willingness to make the connections and face them. It’s time we did.”
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
References
Tom Philpott, Boys For Sale Interview, 1981. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6mrC2NabIg.
Rober Sapolski, Behavioral Biology, Human Sexual Behavior I, Stanford University 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOY3QH_jOtE&t=2s.
Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman, 1976, p. 149.
Jeffrey M. Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory, A challenge to the foundations of psychoanalysis The Atlantic, February 1984. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1984/02/freud-and-the-seduction-theory/376313/.
Ryan White, The Keepers, s1:e4, Netflix, 2017.
Dr. Gabor Maté, Addiction Rooted In Childhood Trauma, Says Prominent Specialist, California Healthline, January, 2019. https://californiahealthline.org/news/addiction-rooted-in-childhood-trauma-says-prominent-specialist/.
American Circumcision, Brendon Marotta, 2018.
Gary Wilson, Unwiring & Rewiring Your Brain: Sensitization and Hypofrontality, Your Brain On Porn,
https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/tools-for-change-recovery-from-porn-addiction/rebooting-basics-start-here/unwiring-rewiring-your-brain-sensitization-and-hypofrontality/#hypofrontality, c. 1/5/2020.
Mohammedraza Esmail, What Porn Does to Your Brain and How to Quit, August, 2020, View at Medium.com
In this piece, Max talks about revenge porn and deepfakes as a new form of pornography. Pornography has always been a tool for the subjugation of women by patriarchy. The article further relates subjugation of women to the subjugation of the natural world.
Our culture is a culture of violation, a culture of breaking boundaries: the boundaries of women, of children, of forests, of oceans, of the living planet itself, even of the atom and the gene.
Where does the impulse to violate come from, and how is it encoded and transmitted from generation to generation?
One method of transmission is via pornography, one of a broad set of cultural tools used to inculcate patriarchy and pass it from generation to generation. Susan Griffin, in her book Woman and Nature, writes that “above all, pornography is ritual. It is an enacted drama that is laden with meaning, which imparts a vision of the world. The altar for the ritual is a woman’s body. And the ritual which is carried out on this altar is the desecration of flesh. Here, what is sacred within the body is degraded.”
As Gail Dines and other radical feminists argue, the sadistic brilliance of pornography is that is sexualizes these rituals, hiding them behind a veil of arousal, so that excitement becomes linked to dominance and subordination. Acts that would be anathema to our child selves become normalized, then eroticized.
Revenge Porn and “Deepfakes”
This understanding of pornography as ritualized degradation helps explain two of the newer forms of pornography: revenge porn and “Deepfakes.” As the slow burn of printed pornography exploded with the advent of the internet, now the internet is enabling new forms of ritualized degradation of women and violation of boundaries.
Most people are unfortunately familiar with the phenomenon of “revenge porn“—the practice of men sharing explicit photographs or videos of women online in order to degrade them—which has become all too common over the last decade. “Deepfakes” are newer and make degradation so much easier: computer-generated pornography, often created using AI/Machine Learning technology to swap a woman’s face onto another person’s body.
The technology to create Deepfakes has escalated quickly over the past several years, and now realistic-looking Deepfakes can be created relatively easily, or even automatically. Last month a report exposed that users had uploaded images of more than 680,000 women, without their knowledge or consent, to an automated service on Telegram to create photo-realistic Deepfake pornography. And another expose showed that TikTok stars—often underage teenagers—are ending up on porn websites.
Digital Rape
How can we describe this new form of violation? Sophie Maddocks, a PhD candidate at the New School, writes that feminist activists are increasingly seeking to re-name revenge porn and Deepfakes as ‘Non-consensual pornography’, ‘image-based sexual abuse’, and ‘digital rape.’
Like Susan Griffin, Maddocks points towards an understanding of pornography not as sexual expression, art, or the singular act of bitter men, but as what Andrea Dworkin called “the blueprint of male supremacy.”
“Pornography incarnates male supremacy,” Dworkin wrote. “It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual sadism, is encoded in it. It’s what men want us to be, think we are, make us into; how men use us; not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organized. From the perspective of the political activist, pornography is the blueprint of male supremacy.”
The Ecological Crisis and Patriarchy
As Lierre Keith says, if you could reduce feminism to one word, it would be: “No.” The drawing of boundaries is essential to not just individual bodily and mental health, but to the health of the entire planet. And what is industrial civilization but the cultural urge to violate the entire planet?
Patriarchy is thousands of years old, and it will not be dismantled in a day, or a year, or a decade. But for as long as it has existed, so has resistance. Movements to dismantle porn culture and stop the proliferation of digital sexual abuse are widespread and growing. These problems are deeply entrenched, and confronting the culture of violation will require people in all walks of life to make commitments and take action, over lifetimes.
Deep Green Resistance is primarily an ecological organization, but we are also a feminist organization, because we recognize the links between patriarchy and the destruction of the planet.
Only to name one of the most obvious, the problem of overpopulation is mainly caused by the subjugation of women—legally, economically, culturally, sexually. And the path to solve overpopulation is simple: educate women, and provide culturally appropriate family planning and healthcare. When this is done, population growth disappears. There is no technical mystery here; the problem is changing the culture and restructuring power.
In Margaret Atwood’s prophetic book Oryx and Crake, global warming wreaks havok on a world falling further into dystopia. The most violent forms of child rape pornography are normalized, and young kids watch the “Nitee-Nite” show for live streams of people committing suicide. Soy-based artificial foods and genetically-engineered creatures fill every plate, and as the world descends further into chaos, well-meaning people spend their money airlifting food to starving polar bears in an ice-free Arctic rather than in confronting or dismantling the systems that are destroying the planet.
This is the world we are heading towards, but it is not inevitable. Our only hope lies in what Dworkin calls organized political resistance. Each day, I read these words and remind myself of our task:
[W]hen I talk about a resistance, I am talking about an organized political resistance. I’m not just talking about something that comes and something that goes. I’m not talking about a feeling. I’m not talking about having in your heart the way things should be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart.
I’m talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and you commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live… A political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and people can’t. It is passed from generation to generation. It is taught. It is encouraged. It is celebrated. It is smart. It is savvy. It is committed. And someday it will win. It will win.
In this article, Robert Jensen shares a straight-forward view of Cancel Culture and how critique of a political position is not necessarily directed to mock the people who hold it but rather an invitation to become accountable to one’s obligation to participate in democratic dialogue.
In the current squabble on the liberal/progressive/left side of the fence over so-called “cancel culture,” in which one open letter in favor of freedom of expression led to a rebuttal open letter in favor of a different approach to freedom of expression, I can offer a report on the experience of being canceled.
Several times over the past few years I’ve been asked to speak by university or community groups, only to see those events canceled by organizers after someone complained that I am “transphobic.” At a couple of events that drew complaints but were not canceled, including one in a church, critics tried to disrupt my talk. None of the events was actually a talk on transgender issues. The complaint was that I should not be allowed to speak in progressive settings — about other feminist issues, the ecological crises, or anything else — because what I’ve written about the ideology of the transgender movement is said to be bigoted. A local radical bookstore that denounced me publicly went so far as to no longer carry my books, which I had given them free copies of for years.
If I were, in fact, a bigot, these cancellations would be easy to understand. I have never invited a bigot to speak in a class I taught or at an event I helped organize. I have invited people to speak who held some political views with which I did not agree (after all, if I only invited people who agreed with me on everything, I would be bored and lonely), but I have no interest in giving bigots a public platform.
The curious thing about these canceled/disrupted events is that no one ever pointed to anything I have written or said in public that is, in fact, bigoted. If transphobia is the fear or hatred of people who identify as transgender, nothing I have written or said is transphobic. Most of my critics simply assert that because I support the radical feminist critique of transgender ideology, I am by definition a bigot and transphobe.
For the Sake of Clarity
Let me be clear: I’m not whining or asking for sympathy. I am a white man and a retired university professor with a stable income and a network of friends and comrades who offer support. I continue to do political and intellectual work I find rewarding and can find places to publish my work. While I don’t enjoy being insulted, these verbal attacks don’t have much effect on my life. I’m not concerned about myself but about the progressive community’s capacity for critical thinking and respectful debate.
In that spirit, here is my contribution to that debate on transgenderism and the value of open discussion:
One of the basic points that feminists — along with many other writers — have made is that biological sex categories are real and exist outside of any particular cultural understanding of those categories. The terms “male” and “female” refer to those biological sex categories, while social norms about “masculinity” and “femininity” reflect how any particular society expects males and females to behave. That may seem obvious to many readers, but in some progressive and feminist circles it’s routine for people to say that those sex categories themselves are a “social construction.” I have been told that because I assert that biological sex categories are immutable, I am transphobic.
Is that claim defensible? Are sex categories a social construction?
About Reproduction & Respiration
Let’s think about reproduction. Some creatures reproduce asexually, through such processes as fission and budding, and some animals lay eggs. Most mammals, including all humans, reproduce sexually through the combination of a sperm and an egg (the two types of gamete cells) that leads to live birth.
Now, let’s think about respiration. Most aquatic creatures (whales and dolphins, which are mammals, are an exception) take in oxygen through gills. Mammals, including all humans, get oxygen by taking air into our lungs.
These descriptions of creatures’ reproduction and respiration are the result of a social process we call science, but they are not social constructions. We describe the world with human language, but what we describe doesn’t change just because we might change the language we use.
The term “social construction” implies that a reality can change through social processes. An example is marriage. What is a marriage? That depends on how a particular society constructs the concept. Change the definition — to include same-sex couples, for example — and the reality of who can get married changes.
Cannot Be Changed by Human Action
But again, at the risk of seeming simplistic, these descriptions of reproduction and respiration systems cannot be changed by human action. We cannot socially construct ourselves into reproducing asexually or by laying eggs instead of reproducing sexually through fertilization of egg by sperm, any more than we could socially construct ourselves into breathing through gills instead of lungs.
When it comes to respiration, no one suggests that “lung-based respiration is a social construction.” If someone made such a claim most of us would say, “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense to me.” Yet when it comes to reproduction, some people argue that “biological sex is a social construction,” which makes no more sense than claiming respiration is a social construction.
To be clear: Humans do create cultural meaning about sex differences. Humans who have a genetic makeup to produce sperm (males) and humans who have a genetic makeup to produce eggs (females) are treated differently in a variety of ways that go beyond roles in reproduction. [Note: A small percentage of the human population is born “intersex,” a term to mark those who do not fit clearly into male/female categories in terms of reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, and chromosomal structure. But the existence of intersex people does not change the realities of sexual reproduction, and they are not a third sex.]
The Radical Change
In the struggle for women’s liberation, feminists in the 1970s began to use the term “gender” to describe the social construction of meaning around the differences in biological sex. When men would say, “Women are just not suited for political leadership,” for example, feminists would point out that this was not a biological fact to be accepted but a cultural norm to be resisted.
To state the obvious: Biological sex categories exist outside of human action. Social gender categories are a product of human action.
This observation leads to reasonable questions, which are not bigoted or transphobic: When those in the transgender movement assert that “trans women are women,” what do they mean? If they mean that a male human can somehow transform into a female human, the claim is incoherent because humans cannot change biological sex categories. If they mean that a male human can feel uncomfortable in the social gender category of “man” and prefer to live in a society’s gender category of “woman,” that is easy to understand. But it begs a question: Is the problem that one is assigned to the wrong category? Or is the problem that society has imposed gender categories that are rigid, repressive, and reactionary on everyone? And if the problem is in society’s gender categories, then is not the solution to analyze the system of patriarchy — institutionalized male dominance — that generates those rigid categories? Should we not seek to dismantle that system? Radical feminists argue for such a radical change in society.
These are the kinds of questions I have asked and the kinds of arguments I have made in writing and speaking. If I am wrong, then critics should point out mistakes and inaccuracies in my work. But if this radical feminist analysis is a strong one, then how can an accurate description of biological realities be evidence of bigotry or transphobia?
An Approach, Not An Attack
When I challenge the ideology of the transgender movement from a radical feminist perspective, which is sometimes referred to as “gender-critical” (critical of the way our culture socially constructs gender norms), I am not attacking people who identify as transgender. Instead, I am offering an alternative approach — one rooted in a collective struggle against patriarchal ideologies, institutions, and practices, rather than a medicalized approach rooted in liberal individualism.
That’s why the label “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminism) is inaccurate. Radical feminists don’t exclude people who identify as transgender but rather offer what we believe is a more productive way to deal with the distress that people feel about gender norms that are rigid, repressive, and reactionary. That is not bigotry, but politics. Our arguments are relevant to the ongoing debate about public policies, such as who is granted access to female-only spaces or who can compete in girls’ and women’s sports. They are relevant to concerns about the safety of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions. And radical feminism is grounded in compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria — instead of turning away from reality, we are suggesting ways to cope that we believe to be more productive for everyone.
Now, a final prediction. I expect that some people in the transgender movement will suggest that my reproduction/respiration analogy mocks people who identify as transgender by suggesting that they are ignorant. Let me state clearly: I do not think that. The analogy is offered to point out that an argument relevant to public policy doesn’t hold up. To critique a political position in good faith is not to mock the people who hold it but rather to take seriously one’s obligation to participate in democratic dialogue.
In a cancel culture, people who disagree with me may find it easy to ignore the argument and simply label me a bigot, on the reasoning that because I think the ideology of the transgender movement is open to critique, I obviously am transphobic.
But I want to make one final plea that people not do that, with two questions: If my argument is cogent — and there certainly are good reasons to reach that conclusion — why is it in the interests of anyone — including people who identify as transgender — to ignore such an argument? And how can people determine whether my argument is cogent if it is not part of the public conversation?
