It’s easy enough, some sixty years after the fact, for us to cluck our tongues at the cowardice and stupidity of those who went along with McCarthyism. It’s especially easy for liberals and academics to say that had they been alive back then, they would certainly have had the courage to stand up for discourse and to stand up for those being blacklisted. That’s partly because universities like to present themselves as bastions of free thought and discourse, where students, faculty, and guests discuss the most important issues of the day. Liberal academics especially like to present themselves as encouraging of these discussions.
Bullshit.
A new McCarthyism—complete with blacklisting—has overtaken universities, and discourse in general, and far from opposing it, liberal academics are its most active and ardent perpetrators, demanding a hegemony of thought and discourse that rivals the original.
For the past decade or so, deplatforming—the disinvitation of a speaker at the insistence of a special interest group—and blacklisting have been, to use the word of an organization that tracks the erosion of academic freedom through the increased use of deplatforming, “exploding.” Between 2002 and 2013, disinvitations from universities went up six times. And no longer are the primary blacklisters the capitalists (as was the case in the 1950s) or the pro-Israel lobby (as it has been for the past few decades). The pro-Israel lobby is still blacklisting like mad, but it’s been overtaken these days in the anti-free-speech sweepstakes by those who often consider themselves the brave heirs of Mario Savio: the liberals and leftists. And the targets of the liberals and leftists are not confined to the right (although they do certainly target right-wingers as well). Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges was recently deplatformed because he speaks out against prostitution as exploitative of women. Only outcry by women forced the college to reinstate him. Writer and activist Gail Dines was recently deplatformed because she speaks out against pornography. Last year an anarchist organization called “Civil Liberties Defense Center” lent its efforts to attempts to deplatform writer and activist Lierre Keith from the University of Oregon because she’s a radical feminist. The irony of an organization with “civil liberties” in its title attempting to deplatform someone because her ideology doesn’t fit its own doesn’t escape me, and probably won’t escape anyone outside of anarchist/liberal/leftist circles. Last year, female genital mutilation survivor, child bride survivor, and feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from receiving an honorary degree at Brandeis because she writes, from unspeakably painful experience, about how millions of women are treated under Islam.
Capitalists used the rhetoric of “communism” to blacklist. The pro-Israel lobby uses the rhetoric of “Anti-Semitism.” And the modern-day McCarthys use the rhetoric of “oppression” and “trauma.”
Things have gotten bad enough that comedians Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Larry the Cable Guy have all said they can’t or won’t play colleges any more. As fellow-comedian Bill Maher commented, “When Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry the Cable Guy say you have a stick up your ass, you don’t have to wait for the X-rays to come back. That’s right, a black, a Jew and a redneck all walk onto a college campus and they all can’t wait to leave.”
Things have gotten bad enough that this spring The Onion put out a satirical piece titled, “College Encourages Lively Exchange of Idea: Students, Faculty, Invited to Freely Express Single Viewpoint.” The article concludes with fictitious college President Kevin Abrams stating, “‘Whether it’s a discussion of a national political issue or a concern here on campus, an open forum in which one argument is uniformly reinforced is crucial for maintaining the exceptional learning environment we have cultivated here.’ Abrams told reporters that counseling resources were available for any student made uncomfortable by the viewpoint.”
Things are much worse than I’ve so far made them seem. Brown University recently held a debate about sexual assault on campus. In response to the very existence of this debate—and this time it’s not The Onion reporting, but rather The New York Times—the college set up a “safe space” where those who might be made uncomfortable, or to use the politically correct parlance, “triggered,” by the debate could remove to relax with “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” A student gave her reason for using the safe room: “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”
Silly me. I thought being challenged was a primary point of college.
Over the past few years I’ve talked to several university instructors (especially adjuncts) who’ve told me they’re afraid of their students. Not physically, as in their students killing them, but rather they fear that uttering any opinion that any of their students—either
conservative or liberal: it swings both ways—find objectionable will lead to that student complaining to the administration, after which the instructor may lose her or his classes, in effect be fired. And I just read an essay by an instructor in which he mentions an adjunct whose contract was not “renewed after students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate.”
The political correctness posse has started coming after me. I’ve been deplatformed twice this year, by liberals at Appalachian State and Oregon State Universities. The logic behind the deplatformings makes an interesting case study in the McCarthyism and circular firing squad mentality of the liberal academic class.
Part of what’s interesting to me about these deplatformings is that given what I write about—my work more or less constantly calls for revolution—I always thought it was inevitable that I’d start getting deplatformed, just as I’m always detained when I cross international borders, but I thought this deplatforming would come from the right. Not so. It’s come from the left, and, well, to use a cliché, it’s come out of left field.
To be clear, I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written scores of lines like, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written about the necessity of using any means necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. I’ve never been deplatformed because I’ve written about taking down capitalism. I’ve never been deplatformed for making the satirical modest proposal that a way to stop environmental destruction is to attach remote controlled cigar cutters to the genitals of CEOs, politicians, and land managers who claim their decisions won’t harm the land (let them put their genitals where their mouths are, I say (which is something they’ve probably already tried to do)) and when their decisions harm the land, well, bzzzt, and I guarantee the next CEO, politician, or land manager won’t be quite so quick to make false promises. I’ve never been deplatformed for calling in all seriousness for Tony Hayward, ex-CEO of BP, to be tried and if found guilty executed for murdering workers in the Gulf of Mexico, and for murdering the Gulf itself. I can say all of those things, and not have the slightest fear of deplatforming.
Why was I deplatformed? In both cases because I hold the evidently politically incorrect position that women, including those who have been sexually assaulted by males, should not be forced—as in, against their will—to share their most intimate spaces with men. I’ve been deplatformed because I believe that women have the right to bathe, sleep, gather, and organize free from the presence of men.
That’s it.
Yes, I think it’s ridiculous, too.
Even though I wasn’t going to talk about this right of women at all, but rather the murder of the planet, a small group of students—in this case those who identify as transgender—at Applachian State was given veto power over whether I would speak at the university. They said that my mere presence on campus would be “an offense” to their community. Bingo: disinvitation. I was likewise deplatformed from Oregon State because, in the words of the professors who deplatformed me, my presence would “hurt the feelings” of the students who identify as transgender. Never mind, once again, that I wasn’t going to talk about them at all.
Do we all see what’s wrong with deplatforming someone because he or she may hurt someone’s feelings? Once again, silly me: I thought I’d been invited to speak at a university, not a day care center.
My recollection of the universities I have attended or taught at is that a primary purpose was to foster critical thinking and the exploration of vital issues of the day, not to protect students from anything that might “hurt their feelings.” A purpose was to help them become functioning adults in a pluralistic society. Clearly, that’s gone by the boards. And I wasn’t even going to talk about transgender issues, which means it would be my mere presence that would hurt their feelings. Do we all see what is very wrong with basing campus and regional discourse on whether someone’s feelings will be hurt, and worse, on “hurt feelings” that won’t even be based on what the blacklisted speaker was actually going to talk about? What does it mean to our society and to discourse that one group of people—anygroup of people—is allowed to hold campus and regional discourse hostage by threatening that their feelings may be hurt? Should Christians be able to deplatform Richard Dawkins because he hurts their feelings? Should atheists be able to deplatform Christians because the Christians hurt their feelings? Capitalists are killing the planet. The murder of the planet certainly hurts my feelings. So let’s deplatform all the capitalists.
The kicker on me getting deplatformed because my presence would be an “offense” to, and “hurt the feelings” of, those students who identify as transgender, is that not only was I not going to talk about them, I barely even write about them. I’ve done the math, and out of the literally millions of words I’ve written for publication, only .14 percent (yes, that’s point 14 percent) of those words have to do with their issues: two short essays, only written after my female comrades began receiving a host of rape and death threats simply for wanting to sleep, bathe, gather, and organize free from the presence of males (and you’d think that rape and death threats by men who object to women wanting space away from men would be the end of the discussion: it is, but not in the way you think: it’s the end of the discussion because the men win and the women and their allies get deplatformed). .14 percent of my work is 1.4 words per every thousand. That’s the equivalent of five words in this entire essay. Even if it were worthwhile to deplatform me over the issue at all, they’re deplatforming me because they disagree with .14 percent of my work. Hell, I disagree with a lot more than that. The cult-like demand of loyalty on the part of the new McCarthyites is so rigid that 99.86 percent agreement does not suffice.
And the essays they object to weren’t even disrespectful (which is more than I can say for my treatment of, say, capitalists), just a political and philosophical disagreement.
Part of the problem is that a terrible (and manipulative) rhetorical coup has taken place in academia, where political and philosophical disagreement have been redefined as “disrespect” and “traumatizing” and “hurting their feelings,” such that the “victims” may have to dash off to a “safe space” to play with Play-Doh and watch videos of puppies. As the (highly problematical) professor and writer Laura Kipnis puts it, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” A fearful college instructor observed, “Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.”
That is a rhetorical coup because it makes discourse impossible. Those who perpetuate or support this coup have made it impossible to talk about the subject (or, clearly, any subject, including the murder of the planet), because any disagreement on any “triggering” subject is immediately labeled as a lack of acceptance and as disrespect.
To be clear, if no one is allowed to disagree with any one particular group of people—whether they be Christians or Muslims or capitalists or those who support (or oppose) Israel or those who identify as transgender, or, for that matter, members of the chess club—for fear their feelings will be hurt, then there can be no reasonable discourse. And if the purpose of a college lecture series is to make sure that no one’s feelings will be hurt, there can be no speakers. Allowing any group to hold discourse hostage to their feelings is the death knell for pluralistic society. It leads to fundamentalism. It is a fundamentalism.
It’s a classic trick used by despots and pocket despots everywhere: to ensure agreement with your position, make certain that all other positions are literally unspeakable. For the religiously minded, the epithet of choice has often been blasphemy. For the patriot, it’s traitor. For the capitalist, it’s commie. And for the liberal/leftist/anarchist, it’s oppressor.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
When I was a sophomore in college, the Colorado School of Mines invited Edward Teller to speak. One of my classes required attendance. The lecture was precisely what one would expect from one of the worst human beings of the twentieth century. But some thirty-five years later, the only thing I remember of that year-long class consisted of the great classroom discussion the next day, with some students hating him and others defending him. The professors—no fans of Teller’s insanity—used this as an opportunity to teach their twenty-year-old charges to build and defend an argument. Why did you find his views so offensive? Defend your position. Convince us.
To my mind, that is the point of college.
I once asked my friend the Okanagan activist Jeannette Armstrong what she thought of an attack by another writer on Jerry Mander’s book In the Absence of the Sacred. Her answer has guided my life and career: if he didn’t like the book, he should have written his own damn book.
And that is the point of writing.
So, if you disagree with me, great! If you think women don’t have the right to gather free from the presence of males, then make your argument. If you feel Israel is not committing atrocities, then make your argument. If you feel capitalism is the most just and desirable social arrangement possible and that communism is the devil’s handiwork, then make your argument. In each case make the best argument you can. Show that your position is correct. Make your argument so sound that no sane person could disagree with you (and lots of people—sane or otherwise—will still disagree with you: that’s the fucking point of living in a pluralistic society). And when somebody doesn’t agree with you, don’t fucking whine that your feelings are hurt or that you’re offended by an opinion different than your own, but instead use that disagreement to hone your own arguments for future disagreement. Or change your perspective based on that disagreement.
That is the point of college.
We’re not all going to get along. But no one is saying you have to invite every speaker into your home. No one is saying you have to accept them into your internet- or face-to-face-discussion groups. No one is saying you have to like them. No one is saying you have to listen to them. Hell, no one is even saying you have to acknowledge their existence. But if you fear a certain discussion or lecture is going to traumatize you such that you need to go blow bubbles and watch videos of puppies, then maybe you should just not attend that discussion or lecture, and later on maybe you should discuss those feelings with a therapist. Don’t project your triggers onto your fellow students. Don’t deprive everyone else of something because you object or because it might trigger you. It is not everyone else’s—or the world’s—responsibility to never make you uncomfortable.
That’s the point of living in a pluralistic society.
I blame society for this mess. Every indicator is that people are becoming significantly more narcissistic and less empathetic: as Scientific American reported back in 2010, “A study of 14,000 college students found that today’s young people are 40 percent less empathetic than college kids from 30 years ago,” and noted that “the sharpest drop in empathy occurred in the last nine years.” The article reports that “today’s students are less likely to agree with statements like, ‘I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective’ and ‘I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me [sic].’” So it should not come as a surprise that these students demand and expect that public discourse be formed so as to not “hurt their feelings.” Pretty much everything in this society—from capitalism to consumerism to incessant advertising and corporate culture to the selfish gene theory to neoliberalism to postmodernism to the superficiality of Internet culture—reinforces this narcissism. How many decades ago was “The Me Decade”? And how much worse has it become since then? Well, about 40 percent.
I also blame liberals/leftists/anarchists, who are in some ways merely replicating the Stanford Prison Experiment, in that having gained some power in the Academy, they’re using that power the same way that capitalists or anybody else who gains power so often does, by denying voice to anyone who disagrees with them.
And I blame the groundlessness of postmodernism, with its assertion that meaning is not inherent in anything, that there are no truths, and that each person’s perception of reality is equally valid. As well as destroying class consciousness—which is one reason modern blacklisting is often based on claims of how some speaker will supposedly hurt or trigger the individual, rather than emphasizing harm or gain to society as a whole—postmodernism has led to much of the insanity we’re discussing. As philosopher Daniel Dennett commented, “Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.” And if all you’ve got is rhetoric, that is, “interpretations” and “assertions,” as opposed to, say, factual evidence, then the only way, or at least the most tempting way, to conclusively win an argument is through rhetorical manipulations. If you can’t say, “Your opinion is wrong, and here are facts showing your opinion is wrong,” you’re pretty much stuck with, “Your opinion is oppressing me, triggering me, hurting my feelings.” And that’s precisely what we see. And of course we can’t argue back, in part because nobody can verify or falsify your feelings, and in part because by then we’ve already been deplatformed.
Among other problems, this is all very bad thinking.
And finally I blame the professors themselves. The word education comes from the root e-ducere, and means “to lead forth” or “draw out.” Originally it was a Greek midwife’s term meaning “to be present at the birth of.” The implication is that the educator is an adult, who is helping to give birth to the student’s capacity for critical thinking, and to the student’s adult form. This is not accomplished by making certain that no one be allowed to speak who might “hurt their feelings.” This is not accomplished by protecting students from “viewpoints that go against . . . dearly and closely held beliefs.” It’s accomplished by challenging students at every moment to be better thinkers, challenging them to question their own assumptions, challenging them to defend their positions with far more intellectual rigor than merely stating, “That hurt my feelings.”
I blame the professors also for not standing up for discourse itself. If you’re going to be a professor, if you’re going to be a midwife present at the birth of the critical minds of your students, then defending free and open discourse should be a calling and a duty. It should be a passion. It takes no courage whatsoever to fail to stand up to attempts to destroy discourse, whether the blacklisters are capitalists, the pro-Israel lobby, leftists, liberals, or students who perceive themselves (and who are evidently perceived by professors) as so fragile their feelings will be hurt by dissenting opinions, their feelings which must be protected no matter the cost to society and to discourse. This failure of courage does great injury to everyone, including the students perceived as needing protection from disagreement. I wish the professors understood that their job is to be educators, not baby-sitters (and codependent baby-sitters, at that). I wish the professors were defenders of discourse.
Editor’s Note: This video was streamed live on May 14, 2015, by TRTV Show Real Talk. Deep Green Resistance volunteers transcribed the dialogue, published here.
Mark: Hello, hello, and good evening and welcome to transition radio live from the land of enchantment: Silver City, New Mexico. My name is Mark Angelo Cummings.
Lynna: And I’m Lynna Arielle Lopez, and I’ll be your hostess.
Mark: Yes, and I am your host, hostess. Gender, what is gender?
Lynna: Male? Female?
Mark: We’re human beings. The way I always like to say, we’re spirits having a human experience.
Lynna: That’s right.
Mark: Some of us have taken this human experience a little too far. It’s all about growing and learning. And talking about learning and growing, you get to know your true friends are all about times of situations when you no longer sing the same tune that you used to sing before, and then people freak out. They attack you, they unfriend you. They go as far as to take away your livelihood.
Lynna: Sabotage maybe.
Mark: Yes, sabotage. I wanted to share a little email that we got from somebody who was giving us a heads up on who actually contacted the sponsors. The email goes:
Just a heads up Mark, this was posted in FTM Wolf Pack. Josh Ortiz—good friend apparently….
Lynna: Fellow FTM
Mark: Yes, which I thought.
“What can we do to stop him”, he quotes. “That’s what I’ve got to know. I work closely with Spunk Lube”—one of our sponsors—“I contacted them yesterday morning and advised them of his agenda. They pulled their sponsorship immediately. Same with the Breast Form Store. I contacted them also and they pulled their sponsorship” He stated: “he will be teaming up with hardcore right-wing conservatives. My fear with that is this: the 1% has 99% of the funds. The funds they will gladly pay to someone like his dumb ass”—he’s referring to me—“and their agenda. What can we do?” Well it seems to me that they’re actually threatening. God knows we’ve already got some threats on Gender Trender “we know where you live.” This is bizarre. Truly Bizarre.
Lynna: All because we want to say the truth.
Mark: Because we want to expose that this whole transgender—gender dysphoria—is all a lie. We’re going to have shows about that, explaining what we mean by “it’s all a lie”, and go into greater details. Really put some light on this subject.
Lynna: Transition Radio TV is more like transitioning from that thought to a new type of thought.
Mark: Like our intro says: a new beginning, a new way of thinking, a new way of being. This whole concept of black and white, people have to realize that there are so many shades of grey.
Lynna: So thanks to Josh we don’t have a sponsor for our show anymore. Thank you Josh. We’re going to be looking for new mainstream sponsors to sponsor our program.
Mark: Individuals that believe in what we’re doing are always telling me they didn’t help us because this has been our focus. We plan to take this to the next level. We plan to educate: do seminars, talk in schools, and try to prevent this black and white you’re either a boy or a girl. We need to stop this mentality and especially stop these drugs that are being given to our kids. The blockers, and hormones and 14 year olds having their breasts cut off. I look back on what I’ve done. I want to have a show especially on this, and really pour my heart out in what’s created these changes in me.
Tonight we have two amazing ladies, Michelle Peixinho and Mary Lou Singleton. Michelle San Buenaventura Peixinho is a Filipino-American originally from Manilla and Honolulu. She has been living in Rio Arriba with her family since 2000.
Lynna: Michelle has over 20 years non-profit experience beginning in 1992 with the environmental, and environmental justice movement. She has worked as a community leader, organizer, program manager, development director and executive director. Since moving to northern New Mexico she was appointed by the governor to serve on the New Mexico Women’s Health Council from 2005-2009. Michelle served as a Midwives of Color section chair for the Midwives Alliance of North America from 2008-2010.
Mark: Michelle holds a Bachelor degree and is a certified professional midwife and a licensed midwife in the state of New Mexico.
Mary Lou Singleton was raised in an Irish Catholic working class family in a dying steel town during the Reagan recession. She has been a lifelong advocate for the rights of females.
Lynna: After graduating from Grinnell College she moved to Albuquerque New Mexico to study midwifery and herbalism, and has lived in New Mexico since. She has served on the Boards of Directors of the Midwives Alliance of North America and the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives, and worked for over 15 years as a busy home-birth attendant.
Mark: Welcome to the show, the lovely Mary Lou and Michelle.
Mary Lou & Michelle: Thank you. Thanks for having us on.
Mark: It’s a pleasure, it’s a pleasure.
We were watching some videos earlier today to get a little glimpse of the lives of midwives and what they actually do, since it’s pretty much gone to the wayside. Or am I wrong, is it something that’s still very much used nowadays? Or is the grim hospital what waits for pregnant women?
Michelle: Only about 1% of the babies in this country are born at home. Compare that to a country like the Philippines—or another developing country—where almost 60% of the babies are born outside of the hospital. So that’s how far we’ve come in our use of the hospital.
Lynna: Is that in a very short amount of time? Within the last 30-40 years?
Mary Lou: Before World War II about 90% of births occurred outside of the hospital, and since the 50’s it’s turned to 99% of births happening in the hospital. It very much paralleled the industrialization in the rest of our culture, turning everything into a mechanized scientific process rather than a natural process.
Mark: My great grandmother in Cuba was a Midwife…
Mary Lou: Great, you’ve got it in your blood!
Mark: It’s pretty sad though that society, and the human race, puts so much trust in the medical system. They don’t even realize that the medical system is not there to help them. That includes the process of birthing.
Michelle: It is a market driven system. Bottom line. When you have a market driven system those are going to be the priorities. Right now our maternal health system is such that we have natural assets right there in the room that we are not even utilizing. In fact we are negating, and making it impossible to utilize them. That is what is embodied in the woman herself, in her body. The hormones and the biological system that is available to us if we wanted to use it, and the natural world; the plant life, and the animal life, the spirit life, whatever it is that we have access to. Those are things that are extremely powerful, and at the heart of midwifery and child birthing that is not presently used at all in maternal health in hospitals.
Lynna: In a hospital setting when the woman is pregnant, the hospital and the doctors all encourage them to just go with whatever is available in the hospital. They install a fear of complications and issues that may arise. That’s one of the first things I hear when people say “Oh you’re going to have a baby at home with a midwife. Don’t you know that you could run into all kinds of complications?” What do you say about that?
Mary Lou: Our species has been very successful at reproducing. We’ve taken over the entire planet. Birth works really well. If it didn’t work so well we wouldn’t have evolved to the point where we have hospitals. I think for a healthy low-risk woman, birth 90% of the time will happen just fine attended by conscious careful loving midwives who can, like Michelle said, channel that power that is inside the body that comes through our biology and life. Everything in the hospital is designed to suppress that power and to turn off maternal instinct—to turn the woman into the patient.
Michelle: Not just only to suppress but to appropriate. So for example: we’re not even allowing a woman to access her own pituitary process to produce the hormones that stimulate the uterus and create labor. Instead what we’re doing is using a synthetic form of it called Pitocin, which was the first synthesized human hormone ever: Oxytocin. So Pitocin is the synthetic form. So not only are we just not using it, we’re actually appropriating it. Medicine is appropriating it, synthesizing it, putting its own name on it, then disallowing us to utilize our own endocrine system—what our own pituitary gland could produce—and then pumping women full of this synthetic hormone instead.
Mary Lou: Close to 100% of women giving birth in a hospital will see that synthetic hormone either during delivery—most of them during delivery—and definitely after delivery if they haven’t received it before.
Mark: That seems to be the wave of the future with everything. Everything is synthetic and then our own bodies stop producing certain things and we become like robots. Back in the day before there were hospitals, and even before there were midwives, women would have the babies on their own. It was just a very natural thing. You pushed—you know they were all working on the field then—until there she is or there he is. We’ve lost our way; we’ve become so dumbed down and so mechanized. It’s like we’re robots. It’s really sad that people can’t think for themselves. They don’t realize that they could tap into their own healing ability. And tap into mother earth. She provides everything we need.
Mary Lou: Absolutely. What I’ve witnessed in hospital birth is that no other mammalian species would put up with being treated that way during birth. A cat would rip your face off if you were treating her that way when she was giving birth.
Mark: Exactly.
Mary Lou: They are very much destroying our instincts, destroying our innate power.
Mark: So what got you interested in midwifery? What was the ah-hah! moment to enter that profession?
Michelle: We all have different very unique stories. I didn’t even know anything about midwifery when I was first pregnant. I was homeless, and was doing my prenatal care at San Francisco General Hospital. I was very intimidated by the authoritarian nature of the hospital. I felt very child-like when I went in there. This was before I had recovered my childhood incest memories, but for some reason I was very repelled by the idea of trying to get this baby out of my body in the midst of these authoritarian figures that really seemed to trigger me. I didn’t understand it all at the time, but I was blessed somehow.
The creator guided me—at 7 months pregnant—to friends who told me “you know you can have your baby at home with the midwife, you don’t have to have your baby that way.” I didn’t know that! I hit the road. We went up to Oregon where midwives are much more accessible than in the Bay area where I was at the time. I shacked up at a friend’s house at a mobile home park, space number 34. That’s where I pushed my baby out. That changed the course of not only my parenting, my relationship with my child, and my own body sovereignty, but also my trust in myself to make health care choices for my children, to trust nature, and the power of nature. So I was able to then use natural remedies for my children. I might not have been able to develop that relationship and that trust otherwise. It was through my own body first. Being a 19 year incest survivor, really it was the first time that my body did me right. I was so grateful. It was the first time that I said “oh,wow, this shit works”. It felt powerful. So that’s why I became a midwife, because I really realized at that moment how important that was: the power that I experienced.
Mark: And what about you Mary Lou?
Mary Lou: Me? I sort of came out of the womb this way. Just really angry about the patriarchy, and justice. Ever since I was little I wanted to help women have babies. I remember being very small, in kindergarten or first grade. I was told that means you want to be an obstetrician. So I was pretty good at school, I went through grade school and high-school thinking I was going to be a doctor. Went to college, and in my sophomore year took a class called Sex and Culture and learned about midwifery in a contemporary context. I didn’t even know it existed before that. It was the classic light bulb, this is what I’ve always wanted to do, I just didn’t know there was name for it.
So I immediately dropped organic chemistry—which I hated—and I started working towards being a midwife. I studied with a birth center. Before I had children I was in college. I studied with a group of nurse midwifes and saw my first births which was amazing. The next summer I lived on a farm with one of the founders of a well-known midwife organization. Then I moved to New Mexico to be a midwife.
Like Michelle, I had my first baby at home. I’m also, like so many women, a sexual abuse survivor. I had been at war with my body since childhood. Very much hated my body, always wore big clothes, bound my breasts, didn’t want any male sexual attention, or wanted too much, acting out hyper-sexually. Like Michelle, when I gave birth, it healed me. I realized my body rocks. I just made a human being and pushed it out. Now I’m feeding it with my breast. I’m a freaking super hero. It made me feel powerful and intact; and not in a way of having power over someone else, but being in my power. My sovereign self. And I also wanted to share that with women. I would love to live in a culture where the majority of mothers feel that way.
Michelle: Or people. Everybody.
Mary Lou: People. Yes.
Mark: We want to go ahead and share a little clip of a video that we found on midwifery. Let me go ahead and share this video here.
(Video clip of Midwives Season 1 Episode 1 S01ED1 Delivering Under Pressure)
Midwife: Little pushes, little pushes.
(baby being born)
Narrator: When we’re at our most vulnerable, we all need someone who isn’t afraid. Midwives are responsible for bring our children safely into the world.
Midwife: It’s a very, very intimate relationship with something you’ve never met before in your life.
Narrator: But now they’re facing the highest birth rates in 40 years. Parents are more demanding, and pregnancies more complicated.
Midwife: When you see a baby come out like he did you just think “oh no.”
Narrator: This is what it’s really like to be a midwife in Britain today.
Mark: In Britain it seems like they’re having a lot of babies so they’re in need of midwifery.
Mary Lou: In Britain midwives attend the majority of women. Most of those are in the hospital setting. They have a very different system of maternity care. They don’t have a capitalist health care system there. They make decisions based on what produces better health outcomes for the population, not what makes the most money for profit health care companies.
Michelle: Yes. Countries like that, like in Ontario also is another example where there’s really strong collaborative care between hospitals and homes so that you might even have a continuity of care where the same provider attends you either way if you have to transport or you can choose which location.
Here, everything is very segregated. So the hospital is its own system. Birth centers are even, a lot of times, their own systems, or completely co-opted by hospitals and run by hospitals in which they’re not free standing autonomous birth centers. They’re bound by hospital policies. And then there are home birth midwives who operate almost completely separately. So what happens in England, Ontario, and other places, is a much more integrated system.
Mary Lou: Right. We know how our medical system works. There’s money in pathology—and the manufacturing of pathology—and birth is in some sense just a microcosm of that. But it’s also the right of passage into a technocratic society that wants to sell you a lot of health care, and other products.
Mark: Yes, and push all the drugs, and create all these diseases and labels so that they continue to push you through the system. I know it all too well. I’m an occupational therapist, worked in the system for over 18 years, and couldn’t stand it anymore.
Michelle: Yes, based on pathology.
Mark: I’m a spiritual person. I believe that the body is capable of healing itself through nutrition, through proper meditation, though visualization, and they offer none of that. Everything is based on a Band-Aid approach and pills that give you more problems.
You were speaking earlier about you bound—Michelle, or Mary Lou actually was the one who said that you bound—and that you hated your body. I wanted to bring this up because that seems to be a lot of the scenario with female to male transgender or transsexuals. They think that it’s such a horrific thing to go through the stage of hating your body. I think it’s a very normal thing for people to go through dysphoria at one point or another.
The abnormality is when you have to do the terrible thing that I did. I ripped my breasts out, and I ripped out all of my female reproductive organs in quest of what to me now seems very delusional. I’m forgiving myself for what I did, but it’s something that is bizarre. Totally bizarre. And that’s why the passion right now to move forward with this quest. Can you give me a little more in-depth, or share your experience and what you think the scenario is with these female to male transgenders.
Mary Lou: One of the reasons I feel passionately opposed to the marketing of gender dysphoria is from my own experience and how I think, if I’d been born 20 years later, I would have been convinced by this relentless marketing on the left—and on the right now too—that hating your body is actually an identity. I didn’t like my body, I had an eating disorder at one point, I tried to starve away my secondary sex characteristics. I was happy when my period went away, I was happy when my breasts went away. A lot of that was because of childhood sexual abuse and unwanted sexual attention.
I think even people who aren’t physically sexually abused— all girls in this culture—have all of this abusive attention coming at them. We live in a rape culture and every female is a victim of that. Every female is a survivor of that.
A lot of times I just didn’t want it. I shaved my head. I would wear the tightest sports bra I could find, I would wear the biggest, baggiest, clothes I could find. At one point, I remember walking around in college and thinking “everything I own I bought in the men’s or boy’s department. I am a female transvestite”.
At the time there wasn’t this huge trans phenomenon. This has happened really quickly in our culture. I’m not an old woman by any means. I think body dysphoria is the norm for females, and also for males now. I think that capitalism thrives on making us hate ourselves and think that we have to buy something outside of ourselves to feel good. To feel great.
Mark: Definitely. When you talk about being sexually molested, I was sexually molested at 8 years old by a so-called friend of the family. It was almost like a grandparent for me. I think a lot of FTMs and probably a lot of MTFs experience this as well, it’s a big psychological issue. And that’s what we’re trying to bring out that GD is just like a cough is to a cold. Gender Dysphoria is not the main psychological problem. There are a lot deeper problems. Narcissism, bi-polar disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia, the list is mile long. The therapists are missing the point. They’re handing these papers out like they’re handing out candy, for people to take hormones, to alter their bodies. Something needs to be done, this should be made against the law. These doctors should be held accountable. These therapists should be held accountable.
Mary Lou: We have no idea of the health outcomes that we’re going to be seeing from this even in the next couple of decades. I am a nurse practitioner. I know, talking to other practitioners, people are seeing lots of elevated lipids in people taking these hormones in adulthood. We’re seeing cardiac anomalies, and other health problems from the hormones. Frankly, I don’t even like giving out birth control pills because of the risk. I don’t like giving artificial hormones to people. I understand that’s everybody’s choice, but I feel like it’s dangerous to do that and people need to know the risks. This is a big untested experiment that’s being pushed on our children.
Mark: Definitely.
Lynna: Can you tell us about the latest accusations that you were assigning gender at birth?
Michelle: Mary Lou introduced me to radical feminism only a few months ago. So a lot of this is new to me, but my thinking, my thoughts as a person, as a midwife, is not new. And for years I’ve been involved in reproductive justice, and this is where I was first confronted by some trans midwives, who were saying that my language was incorrect and that I needed to be referring to this process of assigning gender at birth. This is the first time I heard this. I maintained that women are giving birth, and we have biological reality that exists, before even a baby is pushed out of the womb. I was black listed in those circles as a bigoted closed-minded person.
We absolutely have nothing to do with assigning gender whatsoever. That’s something society does. Gender is a socially constructed thing. It’s not an immutable fact. It’s not something that’s innately part of a human being. So you have a child that’s born, we look at that baby, and you know, in our practice, and our training, we don’t even actually name the sex of that baby. Even though we look, we can see what’s going on there, we don’t tell the mother the sex of her baby. We let her do that herself. At best, if she asks us, we’ll lift a leg. Maybe if she asks us to tell her what the sex is, and she just can’t see the baby at that moment, we might whisper it to her. Very rarely will any of us home-birth midwives really be the person to disclose that information to the family. And the other thing is that we’re looking there at the baby, when the baby emerges, and we’re noticing based on the fact that we are a class of beings that have male and female, that is how we are biologically determined.
Mary Lou: This is science.
Michelle: It’s a fact.
Mary Lou: It’s not social science.
Michelle: So females have ovum, and males have sperm. And we know that there are many variances, just like there are variances in chromosomes with Down syndrome babies. There are many variances in the human body. So, many intersex people are born yes, but this is something completely different. This is not the same as trans. So, when the trans people are always wanting to confront the fact that somehow we have determined, as the birth attendants that receive this baby, what gender roles this person is supposed to adhere to. That’s not possible. It is not our determination whatsoever what gender role a person is going to subscribe to. And it doesn’t matter to me what gender role somebody chooses. If they want one, if they don’t want one. Some people identify heavily with gender roles. That’s fine. And it doesn’t matter to me if it matches your biology or not. Those things are all social. We can do what we want with that as a society. That’s a beautiful thing.
But what we’re talking about is the biological reality of a human being in a dimorphic species of male and female. And all we’re doing is observing: what is presenting on this body? And when that mother is ready to receive that information, most of the time, she process that information herself.
Mary Lou: I’ve been at so many births where the 45 minutes goes by before the family even thinks to look because they’re just so excited that the person is here, the baby is here. And the sex of the baby doesn’t even matter until they sort of come back out of the, like you said, that spiritual awe of the experience. But to say that we’re assigning sex or gender is no different than saying that we’re assigning human to the baby. Or that we’re assigning the baby’s species. These are biological facts and observations. When we do a newborn exam we always test to see if the baby’s palette is intact. We’re not assigning the baby with an intact palette. We’re observing.
Michelle: Either the baby has one, or the baby doesn’t have one. We’re doing an assessment. We do a new born exam and we’re looking at what is the characteristic of the baby. Have the testicles descended. These are all biological realities.
Mary Lou: Are there ten fingers, are there ten toes. We’re not assigning—I’ve assigned you two hands—you know? And even beyond that, midwives have been arguing for a long time against pre-natal sex determination, and that we don’t believe ultra sound should be used gratuitously. We feel like that technology is unnecessary. Midwives have been advocating not finding out the sex particularly because we don’t want families assigning gender.
Michelle: That knowledge. The knowledge of knowing what the biological sex is of the baby you’re carrying can only be used for you to assign gender to that child. The only reason parents want to know so bad, is because they want to know how to decorate the room. They want to know what color clothes to buy. They want to know what name to give the child. They want to assign gender to that baby. That’s the only reason to do an ultra sound, because nothing else changes in what the mother’s going to eat, how the mother’s going to take care of herself, how the mother’s going to push the baby out. And when that baby is born, that baby could care less when they look up at that person who gave birth to them, the gender identity of that person. That person is their mother. That person bore them in their body, and created them of their flesh, and pushed them out into this world and they’re still one being. Gender identity is not a factor in that. That is a purely biological process.
In fact, in birth, if you were to remain in an intellectual space of identity as opposed to your biological reality, you would actually hinder your birth quite a bit. Because you would stay in a thoughtful place of the forebrain as opposed to the place you want to get to in birth where it is not intellectual. Totally primal. The oldest part of your brain that you will use.
Mary Lou: We give birth with our biology, not our identity.
Michelle: Not our gender.
Mark: Can you talk a little more about the realities of biological sex, in your opinion?
Mary Lou: I don’t think it’s opinion. I think these are scientific facts that we are a sexually dimorphic species. Like all species that reproduce sexually with a male and female, we have two sexes. One that produces sperm, and one that produces eggs, because we’re mammals, the females of our species gestate our children inside of our bodies and then feed them with our breasts when they come out. I don’t think that’s a matter of opinion, I think any biology text book would state that as fact, and to anyone who can actually step out of the postmodern insane rhetoric and just look at the world.
Michelle: It’s a beautiful thing actually. When you’re carrying a female fetus, you are carrying all of her ovum. So in that moment you have three generations within your one body. That’s the reality, the biological reality, what a woman carries. And that is a huge biological difference between a man and a woman. Because a man cannot do that. There is something about that experience, or even the potential for that experience. It’s very powerful, that reality. That’s what makes the concept of assigning gender false. When these biological miracles are happening in utero, there’s no barrier between that mother and that baby, or the family and that baby, no difference between when it’s inside the uterus and when it’s outside the uterus. So, it’s the same being, it’s the same biological being.
Mark: And what’s happening with the transgender community, especially with the MTFs is that they are totally just negating all these biological things. And they’re totally just, to me, becoming insane.
Lynna: Claiming womanhood when they have no right do to so.
Michelle: The problem in midwifery that I’ve found actually, is not the trans women, but the trans men who still have their uteruses, and are accessing reproductive health services or midwifery services, but claiming to do so as men. This is where I had, in reproductive justice, put out a beautiful sticker that said “midwifery is a woman’s tradition” and I was confronted about that because it was exclusionary. And I consider midwifery to be a woman’s tradition. Midwife literally in Old English means “with woman”. It’s women helping and serving women. It’s often times the aunt, or the sister, or whoever is around that has been to the most births. Often times it’s very much a woman’s tradition.
But we have been confronted at one time. And now our professional midwifery organizations are actually changing the language of their core competency documents to refer to the pregnant individual, or the pregnant person, as if female biology wasn’t at the core of what was happening in this process.
I personally have in my life many trans friends, exes, and just dear ones that I love. My son has a best friend who’s transitioned. We all have love towards their struggling with this on one level or another, because it has become so common, so prevalent. And yet to sit there and be confronted by some of these peers to say that I am supposed to remove the word mother, or woman, from my rhetoric around pregnancy and child birth, while people who are born in female bodies, who are female bodied people, if you identify as a man, you live as a man, you present as a man, wonderful, but you’re not giving birth with your gender identity. You’re giving birth with your body, your biology. That trans man, is using something that he acquired when he was a female, when he lived as a female, when he was born as a female, however that rhetoric is supposed to be said. He still has it, and he is using it, but he is not naming the source of that act and power. It’s possible for him to give birth because that female body, that’s what’s giving birth. That biological miracle. Right now we’re dealing with midwifery organizations actually changing their language in their documents as if to say that it is possible to change your sex, when it is not possible to change your sex.
Mark: You’re right, it isn’t. It’s really sad that this community has gone to the point of madness. They want to re-write all the rules. They want to tell people what they can and cannot say. And actually that’s what started really pissing me off. I had Cathy Brennan as one of my guests last year, and they all attacked me. Cathy Brennan has a right to voice her opinion. No one is going to stop me from having who I want on my show. To me, there are so many deep mental issues with some of these individuals.
Mary Lou: We were discussing that earlier, have we covered that?
Michelle: It seems like we have talked about that a lot, but… with that question you really are, you talk about the power in the female and the power of nature. You talk about that too in one of these questions. We mentioned it a little bit in the beginning. That is the greatest asset in childbirth. One of the things that I take issue with is that as midwives we’re trained to manage and attend women who are having a normal healthy human pregnancy and birth. We’re trained to see when things fall out of the range of normal, and then how to use natural assets to bring things back into balance. Maybe some herbs, or some lifestyle adjustments, stress management, counselling, nutrition, many many many tools that we use. Because we want the woman to try to stay in this range of healthy and normal. And what is striking me right now, is that instead of talking about how as midwives are we supposed to be providing healthy normal human development—midwifery care—to a person who has now been taking hormones for many years or…
Mary Lou: Cut their breasts off….
Michelle: There’s such a huge range of ways that a person could present to us at this point, but we’re not educated in those things, and I don’t perceive those things to be normal, healthy, development. So it’s really outside of the scope of our practice. I just bring that up because the differences in sexes and the differences in the biology is really… I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I lost my train of thought.
Mary Lou: Can I?
Michelle: Yes please, because I know that you know what I’m trying to say.
Mary Lou: I want to say that patriarchal oppression, absolutely exists, and by patriarchy I am using what Bell Hooks phrased as the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy exists to control female reproduction. If power is passed through men, women’s sexuality and reproduction has to be controlled. And the basis of our oppression is from our biology. Our power is in our biology absolutely, and the patriarchy does everything it can to control and own that power and try to keep women from having sovereignty over that power. One of the most frightening aspects of this erasure of the reality of biological sex, and the complication of gender identity as the legal definition of male and female is that it legally codifies sexual stereotypes as what it means to be male and female, and poof sexism magically disappears. So we have things like the recent supreme court decision, where because a female-to-male trans person gave birth and breast fed, a woman who was discriminated against at work for breast feeding, and she had a sex-based discrimination case, and the supreme court said that’s not sex discrimination because men can breast feed now. So we are losing our protections that are based on our biology.
Michelle: And yet it’s our very biology that is the reason why it has been the tool of control. And even to this day, I mean we’re arguing about abortion, and we’re arguing about reproductive rights, and trans men are demanding their inclusion into abortion. But we’re not talking about prostate cancer issues. All these other issues that go along… we’re only looking at reproduction.
Mary Lou: The way this movement is playing out, it seems to be all the attacking is being done in the places where women actually have some power. I find that really interesting, that they’re going after the midwives, when no one is picketing women’s hospitals. No one’s going after the American College of Gynecology for their transphobic language. They’re going after the lesbians, they’re going after our bathrooms.
Michelle: They’re going after the home-birth midwives. I also notice too, in our midwifery circles, it’s not the trans women that are coming to become midwives. It’s the trans men that are becoming midwives. You know, because they’re women. But I don’t see trans women joining us and becoming midwives.
Lynna: It seems that in arguments I’ve had with other trans women, they seem to want to appropriate things that belong solely to biological women. I would never think to take that from any of you. I just wanted you to talk about maybe some of the nuances, some of the uniqueness of being a female, and when you are with child, and you have a fetus inside your womb, what is happening, so that those that are male to female transsexuals, that they can understand that they will never know. They will never understand, because they don’t have that biology.
Mary Lou: Menstruation is power. There’s so much, there’s so much magic and power. The one thing I specifically…Michelle articulated it so beautifully is when you’re carrying a fetus, a baby, stem cells from the baby enter your system, as the mother, they go into the brain and actually change our brains to make us more like our children. We are partly our children, as much as our children are us. If we’re partnered, we’re more like our partner now, because our child is half their genetic material. And that is an amazing magical biological transformation. That only someone has carried a fetus can experience.
Michelle: You said that about the fetus and being with child, but really it is from time that you start bleeding. I was sitting on the couch and my husband and I were both on the couch, and I just was moaning and groaning because I had cramps coming all the way down to both of my ankles on both legs. I’m a little premenopausal right now, it’s getting that way, and I looked over at him and there I was moaning. I just looked at him and said you have no idea what I’m experiencing. He said no I don’t, I have no clue. I have been bleeding for 34 years. Not even just for like a week or a month, but every single month for 34 years. It’s really something, menstruation, and this filling. Your uterus is filling up with life. This is not a joke, it’s not even a metaphor when people say women are the first environment. Because literally that lining in your uterus is the very soil in which your seed will implant and germinate. It’s literally the soil, and the sun, and the water, and everything for that seed. We have that all the time, every month, that we reproduce and we mature ovum. We prepare for that. Our body is ready.
So many times, if you are in a heterosexual relationship, if you are allowing yourself to potentially become pregnant, or even unintentionally, many times we even have implantation and don’t even know it. A lot of times we have implantation and miscarry, many times. It presents as a heavy menstruation. A lot of us are aware of it, many of us aren’t even aware of it. Conception happens quite more often than we realize.
I don’t want to limit it just to being with child because that’s one of the things that gets used against us. “Oh, this person doesn’t have a uterus anymore, does that make her not a woman?” or “this person has never had a baby, does that make her not a woman?” Woman is not just limited to utilizing your potential. Just innately having that potential is all. Like I said, my daughter had within her, all her immature ovum, all the ovum that she will mature in her entire life, she had inside of her body, inside of my womb during the time that I carried her.
Mary Lou: We carry the seeds of our grandchildren in our own bodies. It’s so miraculous. I’m a very egalitarian person, like I said I’m a gender abolitionist, let’s just all be human and live our potential. But as home-birth midwives, if we had to pick a superior sex, it wouldn’t be male.
Michelle: We’re midwives. We get to be with women in the most spectacular time so I don’t want to limit how we talk about women just in the sense of menstruating and having babies of course. Because I think part of how we got where we are with this disembodiment, we’re dissociating from our bodies, and dissociating from womanhood somehow. There’s so many people unwilling to call themselves women. They identify as trans but they’re not transitioning, they’re not even changing their gender. They’re just a gender variant female. That’s how I see it, they’re women to me. But they identify as trans because they’re identifying with a culture, and a movement, for them very exciting. A sense of belonging.
And at the same time, I’m identifying very strongly with my body. This is my identity. It’s very difficult when we prioritize gender identity over biological identity. So I don’t want to limit it to just reproduction because I don’t want that be ever used against us. A lot of the trauma around reproduction, the trauma around loss, pregnancy loss, infertility—which is rampant because of environmental issues, environmental health situation that we’re in—has caused a lot of women to feel confused about their bodies, about reproduction, and not wanting to be defined by reproduction because of what Mary Lou was talking about—the patriarchy—basically the reproductive control being the most important thing in controlling women. And as a result we have distanced ourselves, and disembodied ourselves so much from our ability to give birth and bring life. We don’t want to be defined by it. But I don’t want us to be not defined by it either. There’s not really a way to disregard those things.
They’re right here, they’re part of our bodies. It’s called biology. Bio. it’s life. It’s all one. So that’s what I wanted to say. As midwives we do love to talk about birth, we love to talk about these babies, the way that we create them and grow them and sustain them from our breast. There could be a whole two years’ time when that baby does nothing except sustain its life off of your very body. And nothing else. That’s so miraculous. And when you do it, it’s so amazing. Maybe it’s painful for women who can’t do that. That would like to do that. I can see how it could be painful for men who can’t do that, because it’s so powerful, so beautiful. I can understand these things. I have compassion for these things. But it is what it is. It’s immutable. It is what it is.
Lynna: Well, humanity has become synthetic, and filling their lives with technology and forgetting the gifts our planet provides. What are your thoughts on this?
Mary Lou: Well we agree with that. I think that it’s really painful times to be an ecologically conscious person. The systems of life are unravelling all over the planet. I think we’re at end stage capitalism and by end stage, I mean terminal. It will either kill us all, or we will stop it from doing so. I think that a lot of people are wanting to disengage from the natural world because it’s very painful to be present with it right now. Our bodies are all poisoned. Human breast milk is the most toxic food on the planet. There’s not a single mother on the planet that doesn’t have dioxin in her breast milk, and that’s just one of the many, many chemicals. It’s not just our species. The whales have very toxic breast milk. All the mammals have toxic breast milk. The air is poisoned, the water is poisoned. Chemicals have permeated everything. Unfortunately, our culture—because it is a capitalist culture—is pushing more of that. Instead of, as a society, we’re not organizing to stop it. It seems like we’re driving over the cliff.
Michelle: I think this is where attachment theory comes in. I really do. I’ve done a lot of studying about environmental health, and attachment theory in that context. One thing that’s beautiful about midwifery is the way that we allow nature to unfold. There’s more oxytocin receptors in your body in the moment after you give birth than any other time in your entire life. It’s the same for the new-born baby. And the reason is because in that moment that bond needs to take place. This is nature, what we’re talking about, a natural process. So those oxytocin receptors are going wild, there’s more than there’s ever been, and what you have is a maternal blueprint that clicks on. I think that when we don’t develop healthy attachment somehow, not only do we have attachment disorder with our parent, our person that was supposed to take care of us, we have attachment disorder with nature. With god. So now we no longer have the same natural attachment to nature that we’re supposed to have. I think part of it is that the attachment disorder is out of the trauma and the grief around what is being done to our planet, like Mary Lou was talking about. The endocrine system is such a crucial part of the connection to this natural world, this nature and how it can be distorted.
Mark: That’s the key right there, the endocrine system. That’s why all these children, and individuals, are coming up with the so-called gender dysphoria. When I wrote my book The Mirror Makes No Sense, I mentioned that this was going to be an epidemic, I saw it coming, because we do live in such a toxic environment. Our endocrine system has been totally messed up, everything is chemical. What we’re trying to do is to alert the community to look, this is not normal. This is something that’s happening due to disruption in our endocrine system. Because this is happening doesn’t give us the right to chop off our breats, or remove our uterus, or to create a neo-vagina, and go around saying “I’m a woman”, or “I’m a man”, and all that stuff. It’s crazy. We are destroying humanity by doing this. We are destroying the normal rhythm of life.
Mary Lou: It’s definitely not something to celebrate. Endocrine disruption is not something to celebrate. It’s something serious. So grieve, and then get full of righteous rage, and stop it. We need to stop the poisoning of our world, and ourselves.
Michelle: There’s a great book called The Molecules of Emotion by Candace Pert. She was an NIH scientist. She’s actually the scientist that discovered the opiate receptor in the 70’s I believe. And she’s since passed away, but she really does a great job of outlining the endocrine system, the Endo-Neuro-Immuno system that’s all connected. She describes the science and how it is the science behind mind-body medicine. Basically it is how she looks at the endocrine system. And these chemicals, these proteins that travel through our blood. And the way that receptors work, it’s such a miracle. I have no idea, I am so uneducated around this hormone replacement, and opposite sex hormones, and things that go into puberty blockers. These things with which we’re not practicing a precautionary principle at all in understanding the impacts before we condone them society wide with young people. It’s a huge concern around the endocrine system, and what might be coming down the line as a result.
Mark: That’s what started us on this whole mission. We became totally alarmed. Oh my god, there’s no way this can be happening, they’re just pushing it like candy. There’s a lot of gender variant children being born, it’s part of what’s happening. Call it evolution, call it chemicals, whatever it is. It doesn’t mean that you have to block these children’s puberty, and make them something that they think they are, when in reality they are who they are. There’s no need for them to go from one gender box into another gender box.
Lynna: It’s controlling the endocrine system. It’s dumbing it down to where function, the way it was intended to function biologically, it would only make common sense. I didn’t go to medical school, but the fact that these puberty blockers are inhibiting the children, the youth, from developing in an adolescent-normal puberty period, that has got to do something terrible to the body.
Mark: You’re looking at growth spurts, their bones, their development, the neurological system in the brain. There are so many systems that have been hindered by doing this. Their answer is, “oh, but it’s reversible”. The body doesn’t understand the opposite puberty. It understands the puberty it’s meant to have, the biological one. When you’re blocking things like that, you’re creating major problems. The body is going “alert, alert, something’s happening here”. These kids are going to have mental problems; they’re going to have a slew of problems. You know what? Everybody’s “hush hush” and the medical system is going “more money making here”. They’re sacrificing our kids, and that’s wrong.
Michelle: And ultimately, if you want to call it the wrong body—which it’s not really possible to be born in the wrong body—we get what we get.
I have a lot of compassion and I’m a lot more soft about this than others. Mary Lou’s a lot better. I really do have a lot of compassion and I do understand that people are suffering. People are tormented inside. People are trying to make sense of this crazy, crazy, world. I absolutely understand it. I’m right here in the world too, trying to make sense of it too. So I just think that there are answers that are going to be far more empowering to us, because ultimately whatever you do to your body it’s still the same body. So if you thought it was the wrong body to begin with, nothing’s changed. I don’t want it to be like that. I sure want people to find answers. I sure want people to find a way to be happy. I just am not convinced that this is a healthy response to the kind of pain we’re all suffering on this earth right now.
Mark: It’s a crazy thing, you know. And again, people call me a hypocrite because I did it. As you mature and grow you look at life totally different. I would have never thought in the day that I was going to wake up one morning and tell myself, wow, what have I done. I think a lot has to do with meeting Lynna and our story and everything that’s happened. It’s made me realize too many things. I have matured so quickly, and having to take care of Lynna in the past four or five months. It brought that maternal instinct in me that I never had, because I never had a child. So to me, she was my child, that maternal instinct. Maritza, which was, is who I am. That came back to life when I had put her to sleep, and all of a sudden it was like “I am woman, hear me roar”. What have I done? What have I done to myself? People are going, “oh your nuts, your transition was not right, you’re not happy”. It’s not that I wasn’t happy, I am happy. But I’m a happy person that realized the mistake I made, and I realized that there’s more to life than a gender marker male or female. We can’t change who we are. It is who we are, it is our essence. I just want my—I don’t even want to call my trans brothers and sisters because they’ve disowned me—but these individuals who’ve taken that step and thinking they’re doing the right thing, to think again, and realize what they’re doing. They’re hurting themselves, they’re hurting their family members, and they’re hurting the planet by doing what they’re doing.
Mary Lou: And there are other people who get it within the trans community. There’s the New Narratives who made a beautiful statement about how biology is immutable, there’s a difference between sex and gender, female space needs to be respected, the rights of females need to be respected.
One thing we haven’t covered that I really want to talk about is the aspect of this that to me, from my observations, is clearly backlash against gay rights. It’s amazing to me how so many people don’t understand that all of these gender non-conforming children, who 30 years ago would have grown up to be happy gay and lesbian people, are now being told they’re born in the wrong body, and are being transitioned into a heteronormative reality. To me it’s so profoundly homophobic. I don’t understand why there’s not more critique of that.
Mark: That’s one of the things we want to really rally our LGB brothers and sisters. They added that ’T’ to the LBGT and they realized that the ’T’ is just voiding all the LGB. Can somebody wake up and realize what’s going on here?
Mary Lou: Pat Robertson is supportive of transgender, but profoundly homophobic and misogynist. In Iran they will kill you for being gay, or put you in jail for life, but they’ll pay for your sex change operation, and change all your gender identity on all your paperwork. Rick Santorum is pro-transgender, but again, one of the worst misogynists. He’s one of the male authority figures who routinely gets on the airwaves to tell the women of America that if he has his way, we will be forced to give birth to rapists babies. The guy hates women, and he’s a patriarch. He’s totally behind the trans thing. This whole thing is being marketed by government of Iran, Pat Robertson, Disney, People Magazine, and Entertainment Tonight. It’s not a liberation movement for anybody.
Mark: It’s actually bringing us back.
Lynna: They’re indoctrinating mothers, and families, husbands. To make them feel like, just because little Jimmy wants to play with dolls, all of a sudden that he’s a girl.
Mark: It’s crazy.
Mary Lou: Whatever happened to “free to be you and me” you know that song? Billy wants a doll, and some day Billy might grow up and be a dad and he needs to know how to be a good one. We grew up in the 70’s. All those revolutionary movements of the 60’s influenced our childhood. It was amazing. The slinky commercials, a toy for a girl or a boy.
Michelle: We were talking actually about the toys and how when we were growing up how the toys, like all the Legos were the same colors. And now when you go to the Lego isle there’s these Legos that are pink and purple, and that are all domestic toy figures of house things, and they’re for the girls. If you look at pictures comparing toys from the 70’s to toys now, how absolutely divided and clear the gender stereotypes are. The more it seems that we’ve pushed ourselves into that extreme gender stereotyping, the more of this “gender dysphoria” that we’re having because it’s absolutely being shoved down our throats that we’re supposed to be one or the other. And then we’re completely supporting this whole binary concept, and these gender stereotypes by saying ok, well the kids who have long hair… and this is all you see in the articles. They like to play with these certain kinds of toys, they like long hair, they like this certain kind of game or whatever that’s stereotypically for girls, therefore they must be a girl. We’re just perpetuating this binary, even more so than we did 30 years ago even.
Mark: It’s the trans agenda. A total trans agenda, which is what we’ve been saying. It’s eugenics. We had a show Tuesday regarding that. Back all the way to 1810, it’s just been program, program, created, almost like a Nazi protocol type of thing. It’s crazy, like you say, what happened to be whoever you want to be, and feel however you want to feel without having to fit into these gender boxes and doing horrific things to our body.
Lynna: It just stems from homosexuality, bisexuality. All that is wrong. So we have to divide you, take the weaker ones and sterilize them.
Mary Lou: There’s no money in people being happy gay people, but there’s a whole lot of money in getting people to hate their bodies, and think they need hundreds of thousands of dollars of body modifications and hormones for life.
Mark: And therapy, and pills, and what is it, $1200 per month for these blockers.
Lynna: $1500 for the implant that lasts a year.
Mark: It’s crazy. They’re going to push it, they’re going to breed these gender confused children so they can make them one thing or the other. It’s scary. People aren’t seeing that. They’re villainizing us and they’re not seeing that we’re saying, “Hello, the sun doesn’t revolved around the earth” or whatever, and they’re saying “Oh Galileo, let’s put you in jail”. They’re not seeing what we have seen for quite a while. It’s sad. So give us your views on counter-revolution.
Mary Lou: Counter revolution. So whenever liberation movements—revolutionary movements— start to really become powerful in a lot of population, the oppressive power structures do everything in their power to crack down on it. In a capitalist system, usually that means coopting the revolution and twisting it in a way that it will help capitalist forces, and selling it as something liberal, not revolutionary.
I think about how I was ten years old when Ronald Reagan was elected. I feel like most of my live has been living in a counter revolution. The busting of the unions was counter revolutionary to the labor movement. The way we’ve undone all the environmental protections is counter revolutionary to what was happening in the 60’s and 70’s. We definitely live in counter revolutionary times.
Mark: Definitely.
Lynna: How did this happen that we’ve gone from “start a revolution, stop hating your body” to hating the body being framed as revolutionary?
Mary Lou: That’s called counter revolution. Isn’t that sad, we really have gone from that. “Start a revolution, stop hating your body”, we grew up with that phrase from the feminist movement. To know what’s being sold to children, that it’s revolutionary to hate your body and to feel that you’re in the wrong body. That is capitalist commodification: selling an oppression identity to people as a product.
Mark: That’s one of the reasons I believe that this whole Pandora’s Box needs to be open and people need to be exposed. Having been in this so-called trans community for the past 12 years, and hearing all the stories, and all the interviews that I’ve done, it’s like the violin of life. Let’s pull up the script, it’s the same repeated line: “I knew when I was 3 years old, I was in the wrong body, and I’m going to kill myself”. You say that, you’re going to get: “ there’s your hormones, and there’s your surgery”. And people don’t want to understand. They’re so caught up in their lie that they are believing it. It’s brainwashing. I was brainwashed too, like from 0-60 it’s like a zombie, “brain, brain”, you see nothing else but this transition, you know nothing else but this transition. And then everything is fine for whatever, 10,12 years, and all of a sudden you wake up and you go, “what’s happened? What did I just do? Where did my breasts go?” Your life has been taken from you.
Lynna: The narrative is that this is normal. That they’re selling, like Bruce Jenner is normal. People that are being interviewed these days are normal. It’s not. There’s nothing normal about it. We’re the ones that do something different. We’re the ones that went against the tide. We’re the ones that made a different choice.
Mary Lou: You’re not having a million dollar interview with Diane Sawyer. People need to look at the money behind this and who’s selling it. It’s being marketed heavily.
Mark: Big time. It’s really sad because a lot of lives are going to be ruined. Not just your own life. Your own life, you’ve taken years from your life, from taking toxic hormones, from doing what you did, you just destroyed yourself completely. People around you are being disrupted. The environment is being disrupted. Have people even thought about all these hormones that we’re taking, when we’re going to the bathroom, that those hormones are filtering into the environment. We’re destroying everything.
Lynna: The fact is that children as they develop up and grow into puberty, you can’t really distinguish sex. If you get the boys hair, if you get the girls hair, it’s pretty much, it’s all the same. Why do they have to make it so gender specific when realizing that that kind of gender specificity really damages children developing as people that they are? A gay future child can get suppressed and then thinks the only way out is to be transgender. It’s crazy.
Mary Lou: Growing up Irish Catholic what I saw was that the gender nonconforming boys were encouraged from a very young age to go into the priesthood. Were told over and over again, oh you’d be such a good priest, we can just tell. Now I think those same boys are being encouraged and groomed to be women, to think that they’re actually woman, and to take on that role. It’s very disturbing to me that the cage of gender is locking down. I don’t believe this is really about gender stereotypes, that this is actually going to free us from gender stereotypes.
Michelle: It’s reinforcing gender stereotypes.
Mary Lou: I don’t see any men who identify as men, wearing makeup and dresses. It’s not freeing people from gender stereotypes. Women fought really hard to wear pants. They went to jail for wearing pants. They lost their freedom for wearing pants. They got beaten up for wearing pants, probably a lot of them got raped for wearing pants. They fought hard for the right to not be constrained by gender stereotypes in their dress.
Men are doing now, if you want to wear dresses and you really like all that stuff that means you’re really a woman. It’s locking down gender more, not freeing anybody.
Mark: I believe that it’s being done to eliminate what they call the weaker individuals. Let’s sterilize, let’s mark their puberty, you’re doing that and you’re taking hormones, you’re going to be sterilizing yourself. It’s almost a master plan. People say, “Oh, you’re a conspiracy nut”. No, there’s something behind all this. People aren’t opening their eyes to the reality of things. It’s really sad.
Michelle: Well Big Pharma is behind this. The medical institution has a lot to gain, apecifically pharmaceuticals, and plastic surgery surgeons. I can’t even begin to grasp all of the complexities of it really, but there are profiteers in this.
Mary Lou: I was just watching a film by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, the son of Robert Kennedy. He said that Big Pharma gives more contributions in the form of lobbying our government, than oil and gas and the military industrial complex combined. This is who is running our government. Big Pharma is very powerful. It’s not a benevolent force.
Mark: Big Pharma, Monsanto…
Lynna; The highest paid “female” is a CEO, is a trans woman, and runs a pharmaceutical.
Mary Lou: The women’s average salary is going up now that more men are “women”.
Mark: It’s almost like men couldn’t have enough of just being in power, they had to also take the power away from women some more in becoming women. What a better way than to do what they’re doing. It’s crazy. I don’t understand why the community is not accepting what we’re saying. We’ve gotten death threats. It’s like, ok, really?
Lynna: Sponsors get pulled, death threats. People are just vehement about expressing their opinion on Facebook, on social media. They will tell you everything to justify their position when their position doesn’t have grounds to stand on.
Mary Lou: That’s why, that their position doesn’t have grounds to stand on, that’s why they’re so adamant about locking down discourse, forbidding discourse on it. Women—radical feminists—all over the world are losing their tenured positions in Universities for speaking out about this, they’re losing book deals, they’re losing speaking gigs. Men who speak out against it are being de-platformed. We’re seeing really horrific authoritarian, anti-intellectualism; the kind of stuff that you see in totalitarian states around this. We’re not allowed to critique it. We’re not allowed to discuss it. That anti-intellectualism, and that aspect of forbidden discourse should make everyone nervous. People should be cautious about any ideology that forbids discussion.
Mark: That’s why we have to do what we have to do. Educate, do seminars, go out there and, probably have to get some bullet proof vest and some sort of body guards, because—you said there’s a big force trying to stop the actual—the pendulum is going this way, we need to bring it back to the beginning.
Lynna: We need to be able to tell kids they can express how they want to. They don’t have to be tied to their gender stereotype. A feminine boy can express to be a feminine boy. A masculine girl can be a masculine girl. There are different.
Mark: Or be two-spirited. I posted pictures of myself when I was younger, there were times when I looked like a boy. I cut my hair. There were times when I felt the female energy flow, and I would let my hair grow, and I would wear dresses. People would always ask me are you butch or are you femme, and I would say it depends on the stars and the moon.
When this whole programming kicked in, I just all of a sudden… “Oh ya! I’ve got to be a man”. It’s brainwashing. I can’t even put the right words to explain what happened. I was talking to my sister today. She said there was not any talking to you. I was on this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. That’s the mentality of the majority, I would say 99% of trans individuals 0-60.
Michelle: I perceive it that people are so determined towards it because it’s couched as the answer to their problems. That’s how I perceive it. Everybody’s problems are being summed up in this gender dysphoria and it’s going to be solved by doing these things. Like you said, that’s actually not the diagnosis itself. There’s so much going on in the bigger picture of that human being that is actually interrelated and connected to everybody else’s trauma, pain and grief—which is absolutely interrelated and connected to the entire total of the planet, the earth—that we are all just part of this organism together.
This concept of individualism, and I get to do what I want because it’s what I want, I have the right to live my life the way I want, that is such an American value. It is such a western value that is so damaging in reality. It’s so damaging, because we’re not just individuals. We’re interrelated creatures coexisting. Breathing in and out the same air, living off of one water that we all share on this planet, and so on, and so on. Those are things that are important. To compartmentalize yourself, and imagine that your problems are individual and separate from the rest of the world, and now you’ve been told this thing is going to solve your problems.
Mark: It’s the psychosis, and narcissistic behavior that the planet is facing right now. Unfortunately a lot of the trans individuals have major narcissistic behavior. It’s screaming “me, me, me, I, I, I!” They don’t care about anything else. Like we mentioned in our intro is returning to oneness. Before we return to oneness there’s all this chaos that’s taking place. Anything else you ladies would add?
Michelle: Thank you.
Mary Lou: Thank you.
Michelle: Really. We both have been very moved by both of your courage and honesty and…
Mary Lou: Sanity.
Michelle: Telling your stories, owning your stories. I can’t even imagine how challenging it is on so many levels. We do know the back-lash and what that feels like.
Mark: It’s been an amazing interview. We hopefully will be able to meet up with them soon, because I know they’re here in New Mexico.
Lynna: You can get that coffee that you want. Because you said you want to sit down with coffee.
Mark: Green tea or something. Anyway guys thank you so much for tuning in and joining us for another show. Tuesday we have another show, we don’t know exactly what we’re going to be covering but bet your bottom dollar it’s going to be interesting. Something controversial and something that the trans community doesn’t want to hear about. But we’re here and determined to help the evolution of our species and to stop this madness of being born in the wrong body and doing all these things that align ourselves. The alignment is already in you. You are perfect the way you are. There is no need to do anything else but breathe, love, and be.
Lynna: If you can’t live your truth, than it’s just not worth living
Mark: Not at all folks. Have a great evening, and good night.
For the past year, the media have been full of discussions of the endemic sexual violence in the contemporary United States, while at the same time pop culture has been celebrating the new visibility of the transgender movement. Both of these cases — which many take to be feminist successes — actually highlight patriarchy’s ability to adapt to challenges and undermine a radical critique of the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of institutionalized male dominance.
In 25 years of being part of a radical feminist movement, I am less optimistic than ever about the capacity of our society to face the truth about the pathology of patriarchy. This culture of denial is not limited to sex/gender, but has become the norm in regard to the unjust and unsustainable hierarchies at the core of all of this society’s social, political and economic systems — with profound human and ecological implications.
Before defending this assertion, there’s a reasonable question to consider: Who cares what I think? I am, after all, a middle-aged white man, a tenured full professor at a large state university, with a U.S. passport, married to a woman. In privilege roulette, I am a winner on all the big identity markers: race, sex/gender, economic class, nationality, sexuality (the last one is complicated; more on that later). According to the rules of progressive politics, I’m supposed to preface every assertion I make with self-abnegation. Who am I to make claims about the proper analysis of these systems of illegitimate authority, given that I live on the domination side of all these dynamics?
Humility is a virtue, and people with my unearned advantages should double-down on humility. But false humility can become a rationalization for silence. Accepting the leadership of people from oppressed groups is an important principle, and privileged voices are not always needed in some debates. But on matters of public policy we all should be part of a collective conversation, and there also are times when people with privilege can say out loud what others say quietly in private. This essay offers my own analysis, but in solidarity with many others who share these views but feel constrained in speaking, out of concern for institutional standing and/or personal relationships.
Patriarchy
This past year I have written about rape culture and trans ideology, in both cases anchoring an analysis in the problem of patriarchy. I’m often told that the term “patriarchy” is either too radical and alienating, or outdated and irrelevant. Yet it’s difficult to imagine addressing problems if we can’t name and critique the system out of which the problems emerge.
The late feminist historian Gerda Lerner defined patriarchy as “the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in the society in general.” Patriarchy implies, she continued, “that men hold power in all the important institutions of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence and resources.”
Like any resistance movement, feminism does not speak with one voice from a single unified analysis, but it’s hard to imagine a feminism that doesn’t start with the problem of patriarchy, one of the central systems of oppression that tries to naturalize a domination/subordination dynamic. In the case of feminism, this means challenging the way that patriarchy uses the biological differences between male and female (material sex differences) to justify rigid, repressive and reactionary claims about men and women (oppressive gender norms).
How should we understand the connection between sex and gender? Given that reproduction is not a trivial matter, the biological differences between male and female humans are not trivial, and it is plausible that these non-trivial physical differences could conceivably give rise to significant intellectual, emotional and moral differences between males and females. Yet for all the recent advances in biology and neuroscience, we still know relatively little about how the biological differences influence those capacities, though in contemporary culture many people routinely assume that the effects are greater than have been established. Male and female humans are much more similar than different, and in patriarchal societies based on gendered power, this focus on the differences is used to rationalize disparities in power.
In short: In patriarchy, “gender” is a category that functions to establish and reinforce inequality. While sex categories are part of any human society — and hence some sex-role differentiation is inevitable, given reproductive realities — the pernicious effects of patriarchal gender politics can, and should, be challenged.
Rape
In patriarchy, rape happens if a man forces a woman to have sex when the woman clearly has not consented or cannot consent. Only men who force women into sex in those situations are deemed to be rapists, only a small percentage of those rapes are reported to police, and an even smaller percentage of the rapists are arrested and convicted. The strategy of narrowing the definition of rape and limiting the number of men identified as rapists deflects attention from other questions about patriarchy’s eroticizing of domination and the resulting rape culture; from larger questions of how men are socialized to understand sexual activity, power and violence; and from the complex ways women are socialized to accommodate men’s demands.
Here’s one clear expression of this limiting strategy: “Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime.” Surprisingly, that statement is from a letter issued by one of the country’s leading anti-violence groups, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN. Even those working to end rape sometimes feel the need to ignore or avoid feminist insights, a phenomenon I explored in an essay last year.
Rape is a crime committed by individuals, of course, but it is committed within patriarchy, and if we were serious about reducing the number of rapes, we would be talking about the roots of that violence in patriarchy. But such an analysis doesn’t stop at what is legally defined as rape, and leads us to a painful inquiry into the patriarchal nature of what the culture accepts as “normal” sex based on men’s dominance. Those same patriarchal values define the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, stripping, prostitution) and the routine sexual objectification of women in pop culture more generally.
So, the comfortable notion that we can condemn the bad rapists, and then all other sexual activity is beyond critique, evaporates in a feminist analysis. That doesn’t let rapists off the hook, but instead asks all of us to be honest about our own socialization. Taking rape seriously requires a feminist analysis of patriarchy, and that analysis takes us beyond rape to questions about how patriarchy’s domination/subordination dynamic structures our intimate lives, an inquiry that can be uncomfortable not only for those who endorse the dynamic but also for those who have accepted an accommodation with it.
This past year, with the media full of stories about the way in which women are particularly at risk in and around predominantly male institutions (fraternities, big-time athletics, the military), there is surprisingly little talk about patriarchy, about the socialization of men into toxic notions about masculinity-as-domination, especially in these hyper-masculine settings. The focus is diverted into questions about rules and regulations, about whether a particular university official, police officer, or commanding officer failed to hold a rapist accountable. All are relevant questions, but none is adequate to face the challenge.
What are we afraid of? The possibility that we can’t transcend patriarchy, that significant numbers of men won’t engage in the individual and collective critical self-reflection necessary? Are we worried that, without such self-reflection, we will not significantly reduce the myriad ways men not only rape but exploit women sexually?
I am not preaching from on high about this; I am a product of the same patriarchal culture and my work in feminism hasn’t magically freed me from the effects of that socialization. If anything, it’s made me more acutely aware of how easy it is to slip back into domination/subordination patterns, even when I’m trying to identify those behaviors and resist. I am worried, too, but that makes me more determined to hang onto the feminist framework.
Trans
The debate within feminism over trans, transgenderism and transsexualism (terms vary depending on speaker and context) goes back to the 1970s (the publication of Jan Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire” in 1979 is a flash point) and continues today (the publication of Sheila Jeffreys’ “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism” in 2014 is a new flash point). For a fair-minded account of the contemporary debate, see Michelle Goldberg’s recent New Yorker piece, “What is a woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism.”
In two previous essays, I articulated concerns about the transgender/transsexual ideology, rooted first in a feminist critique of the patriarchal gender norms at the heart of the trans movement, and second in the troubling ecological implications of embracing surgery and chemicals as a response to social and psychological struggles.
If one understands gender categories (man and woman) as being primarily socially constructed, then trans ideology actually strengthens patriarchy’s gender norms by suggesting that to express fully the traits traditionally assigned to the other gender, a person must switch to inhabit that gender category. For years, radical feminists have argued that to resist patriarchy’s rigid, repressive and reactionary gender norms, we should fight not for the right to change gender categories within patriarchy but to dismantle the system of gendered inequality.
If one understands socially defined gender categories as being primarily rooted in biological sex differences (male and female), then trans claims are not clear. If someone says, “I was born male but am actually female,” I do not understand what that means in the context of modern understandings of biology. (Note that people born “intersex,” with reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not clearly fit the definitions of female or male, typically distinguish their condition from transgenderism.) Although not all transsexual people describe their experience as “being shipwrecked in the wrong body,” as one trans writer put it, I struggle to understand, no matter what the metaphor.
If there is an essence of maleness and femaleness that is non-material, in the spiritual realm, then it’s not clear how surgical or chemical changes in the body transform a person. If that essence of maleness and femaleness is material, in the biological realm, then it’s not clear how those changes in selected parts of the body transform a person.
I have been asking these questions not to attack the trans community, but because I cannot make sense of the trans movement’s claims and would like to understand. I am not suggesting that individuals who identify as trans/transgender/transsexual are somehow illegitimate or don’t have the right to their own understanding of themselves. But if that community asks for support on policy questions, such as public funding or mandatory insurance coverage for sex-reassignment surgery, the basis for that policy has to be intelligible to others.
So, I am not discounting the experience of people “whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth,” the American Psychological Association’s definition of transgender. Instead, I am exploring alternatives to the trans accounts of that experience. For me, this is not an abstract question. As a child, I struggled with gender norms and sexuality. I was small and effeminate, one of those boys who clearly was not going to be able to “be a man,” as defined in patriarchy. My sexual orientation was unclear, as I struggled to understand my attraction to male and female, something that could not be openly discussed in the 1970s where I was growing up. And my early life included traumatic experiences that further complicated my self-understanding.
The story of my struggle has its ups and downs, with many moments of self-doubt and despair. Eventually, I came to terms with gender and sexuality through feminism — specifically the radical feminism that emerged from the anti-rape movement and critiques of the sexual-exploitation industries — and that politics gave me a sensible framework for understanding my history in social and political context. I often wonder what would have happened if, when I was an adolescent in the midst of those struggles, the culture had normalized trans ideology. I can’t see how a trans path, which does not demand that one wrestle with the pathology of patriarchy, would have left me better equipped to deal with gender and sexuality.
My experience doesn’t fit in the category of “gender dysphoria,” as I understand it, and I’m not projecting my experience on everyone who struggles with the brutality of patriarchy’s sex/gender system. I’m simply suggesting that the liberal ideology of the trans movement (liberal, in the sense that it focuses on an individual psychological response to structures of power and authority) is inadequate, and that demonizing those who raise relevant questions benefits no one.
Honest conversations
Supporters of patriarchy have had to yield to some of the demands of feminism, such as giving women access to previously closed-off opportunities in education, business and government. Most men committed to patriarchy have been willing to condemn the most abusive behaviors that come from institutionalized male dominance, so long as the core ideology is protected. These relatively small concessions, which do constitute a kind of progress, are often accepted as adequate, perhaps because a more direct confrontation with patriarchy is dangerous.
I think that’s why the current mainstream conversation about sexual violence so rarely confronts the patriarchal gender norms at the heart of the violence. Rather than going to the root of the problem, most commentary focuses on how changes in policy can minimize the risks to women and increase the effectiveness of criminal prosecutions of men who rape, as it is narrowly defined in the law. And given the very real suffering that results from men’s violence, anything that reduces that violence is important.
That’s also why the current mainstream conversation about trans so rarely directly challenges the rigid, repressive and reactionary gender norms of patriarchy. Rather than going to the root of the problem, most commentary focuses on how changes in individuals can alleviate their distress because of gender norms. And given the very real suffering that results from oppressive gender norms, anything that provides individual relief is important.
No one has a magic strategy to end men’s violence or eliminate oppressive gender roles. It’s possible that, given how entrenched patriarchy is worldwide, there is no way to overcome male dominance, at least not in the time available to us as the ecosphere’s capacity to support large-scale human societies erodes. But it’s difficult to imagine any progress without a deeper critique of patriarchy’s definitions of masculinity (dominance, competition, aggression) and femininity (demure, passive, objectified).
I’m not telling anyone how they must understand these issues or themselves, but I can’t see the value in suppressing critical questions out of a fear of being seen as too radical or insufficiently inclusive. Political movements are based on a shared analysis of the world, and that analysis can’t be fully developed unless relevant questions are open for discussion and debate.
My concern is that when a feminist analysis of rape in patriarchy is offered, mainstream voices dismiss it as “too radical.” Some of my friends in the movement against sexual violence have told me they feel pressure not to talk about patriarchy and feminism in their institutional work. That’s ironic, since rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters typically were started by second-wave feminists with a radical critique. Many of those who staff those organizations today bring a radical analysis and spirit to that difficult work, but the fundraising and public-relations efforts for those centers tend to avoid the subject.
My concern is that when a feminist analysis of trans ideology is offered, mainstream voices dismiss it as not adequately inclusive. Friends have told me that they suppress their questions out of fear of being labeled transphobic and marginalized in work and personal networks. There are trans activists who incorporate a critique of patriarchy into their work, and more open conversation about these strategic questions would be beneficial to all, especially given the heightened vulnerability of people who identify as trans to sexual violence.
My concern is that we are losing the ability to face the pathology of patriarchy honestly, and we can’t fight what we can’t name. There is no guarantee of success in the struggle against patriarchy, but as James Baldwin put it more than 50 years ago, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Deep Green Resistance condemns in the strongest possible terms the decision of Monkeywrench Books in Austin, Texas to cut ties with activist Robert Jensen. Robert has received a massive amount of criticism recently for his article “Some Basic Propositions About Sex, Gender and Patriarchy”, in which he makes public his support for women. That so many have been quick to turn on a seasoned activist for the crime of saying that females exist is not surprising; the women of DGR, like thousands of radical women throughout history, know all too well the threats, insults, denunciations, and other abuse that comes to those who question the genderist ideology and stand with women in the fight for liberation from male violence.
Deep Green Resistance would like to publicly thank Robert Jensen for his activism and offer our support in this trying time. In a world where so-called “radical” communities are blacklisting actually radical women at a breakneck pace – while pedophile rapists like Hakim Bey and misogynists like Bob Black are welcomed with open arms – Robert has been a uniquely positive exception to the Left’s legacy of woman-hating. His contributions to the discussion around radical opposition to pornography, prostitution, and other forms of violence are especially valuable. DGR would like to acknowledge Robert’s efforts as a model for male solidarity work and offer our full support. The men of DGR specifically would like to extend a thanks to Robert for his huge influence in many of their lives.
The following is a response to an open letter written by Bonnie Mann to Lierre Keith.
Hello Professor Mann,
You wrote an open letter recently to my friend and fellow activist Lierre Keith. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but as your letter discusses issues which are very important to me, and as I feel that you’ve gravely misconstrued those issues, it feels incumbent upon me to respond. You may choose to write me off as “uncritical,” since I share the views that you have dismissed as such in your letter, but I hope that you will instead choose to listen and reflect on my reasons for finding your letter uncritical at best, and in all truth, irresponsibly misleading at worst. At the risk of casting too wide a net, there are two things I’d like to address: the things you say in your letter, and the things you don’t say in your letter.
You write that you don’t support those who tried (and failed) to get Lierre’s invitation to speak rescinded, because “you don’t get ‘safe space’ in the public sense from not being subjected to attacks, or to the presence of those by whom you consider yourself to have been attacked.” You don’t specify whether by attacks you are referring to political disagreement, or the kind of rape and death threats, stalking, sexual harassment, and occasional physical assault to which I and other radical feminists are regularly subject. This ambiguity, which pervades your letter’s arguments, works to stymie direct discussion of the issues. If by “attacks” you mean “political disagreement,” then I agree. Contrary to the beliefs of many who try to blacklist radical feminist thought from the public sphere, I do not believe that mere disagreement is equivalent to physical violence.
You go on to say: “I think you get safe space, or as safe as space gets, from having your community stand by you in the face of attacks.” If that’s true, then “as safe as safe space gets” feels pretty damn unsafe when you dare to question the inevitability or the justice of gender. I and the radical feminists I know have formed a community that supports each other in the face of attacks. Unfortunately, supporting each other has not stopped the bullying, the rape and death threats, the intimidation and the stalking and the harassment. This is as safe as space gets for radical feminists who stick to their convictions instead of abandoning them. It’s disturbing to me that nowhere in your letter do you even acknowledge the reality of what we deal with every time we open our mouths to disagree with the currently popular ideology around gender.
You mention having watched a presentation of mine on gender that I wrote about a year ago, entitled “The End of Gender” (or alternatively “I Was a Teenage Liberal”), so I won’t waste time on details of my past that you, presumably, are already familiar with. Suffice it to say that my views on gender have taken the opposite trajectory from yours. One of the most easily challengeable and, frankly, one of the cheapest ways that you dismiss Lierre’s politics in your letter is by suggesting that they are less valuable because they are so old as to be archaic or outmoded. You imply this by describing how reading her arguments brings you “back in time,” and by mentioning several times that you also heard those same arguments from her thirty two years ago. That argument might seem slightly more viable if Lierre, or others in her and your generation, were the only ones who hold similar convictions today.
My very existence (much less my work as an activist) renders that line of criticism less-than-viable. You wrote that you last spoke to Lierre in 1989, but I was born in 1989, and women closer to my age are some of the most vocal and active gender-critical feminists I know. Some of us, the lucky ones, benefit from the support and guidance of women who have been feminists since before we were born. Others came to radicalism because they could see that the ideology we’ve been fed by academia and the dominant culture – individualist, neoliberal “feminism” – is actively working against the advancement of women’s human rights. Young women organize radical feminist conferences, write gender-critical analysis, fight to maintain the right of females to organize as a class, and support each other through the intimidation, threats, and ostracization that such work earns us. We do not appreciate being ignored by those who would take the easy way out in dismissing our politics.
You write that the ideology of gender that gave rise to today’s trans ideology and practice was “brand new” to you at the time you first encountered it, and that it “freaked you out” because it “didn’t match the analysis” that you held at the time, which you equate to the analysis that Lierre and I and so many others hold today. Your implication, and the dismissal it contains, is clear – radical feminist disagreement with liberal gender ideology stems from cognitive dissonance and unease toward unfamiliar ideas, not from reasoned analysis. You imply that radical feminism is an artifact from an earlier time, and that the only women who still cling to it do so because they are afraid of new ideas. Again, you write as if women of your and Lierre’s generation who share your early experience of feminism are the only radical feminists who still walk the Earth.
This argument falls completely flat for me and so many radical feminists of my generation. Liberal gender ideology has never been “brand new” for us. It is not unfamiliar to us; we grew up swimming in it. We’re not clinging to relics, we’re reaching for a politics that actually addresses the scope of the problems. It was gender-apologism that began to give us cognitive dissonance, after our experiences brought us to some uncomfortable and challenging conclusions: Female people are a distinct social class, and its members experience specific modes of oppression based on the fact that we’re female. All oppressed classes have the right to organize autonomously and define the boundaries of their own space. Gender is socially constructed; there are no modes of behavior necessarily associated with biological sex. The norms of gender function to facilitate the extraction of resources from female bodies. The extraction of resources from female bodies forms the foundation of male supremacy, and thusly, male supremacy fundamentally depends on the maintenance of gender.
Like many of radical feminism’s detractors, you have chosen to focus your response to our politics on one statement, perceived belief, or piece of writing, which is taken as a representation of us as a group in order to make it easier to misconstrue and dismiss our views. This is called scapegoating, and Lierre’s email is an oft-selected target for it. I understand that your letter was addressed to Lierre, and so it makes sense that you would focus on her stated views. However, there are multiple other more recent and detailed pieces of writing from her on the subject that you chose to ignore. Maybe the choice to exclude these was “a symptom of not listening.” Maybe it “marks a distaste for complexity, ambiguity, nuance.” I don’t pretend to know, but it was clearly a choice that allowed you to sidestep direct engagement with the basic principles and broader conclusions of radical feminist politics.
In describing your views before you adopted your current ideology around gender, you write that “we weren’t afraid of the people so much as we were afraid of the phenomenon. Why? Because if gender is a sex-class system, and that’s all it is, there is no way to explain the existence of trans women at all. That’s like white people trying to get into the slavery of the 1840s. If gender is a sex-class system, and that’s all it is, then the only “trans” should be female to male, because everybody should be trying to get out and nobody should be trying to get in – yet it’s the transition from male to female that is cited as troubling.”
First of all, if you had bothered to take a broader and more accurate view of Lierre’s gender politics and her writing on the subject, you’d have found that she does not only cite the transition from male to female as troubling. She cites the entire system of enforced stereotypes called gender as troubling, including the trans ideology that justifies enforcing the categorization of qualities and behavior, and presents cutting up people’s bodies to fit those enforced stereotypes as a solution. I do appreciate that you actually engage with some of her arguments, since most who choose to scapegoat her usually skip directly to threats and insults. However, your analysis of the two analogies you chose to address leave some things to be desired. You begin with:
“I am a rich person stuck in a poor person’s body. I’ve always enjoyed champagne rather than beer, and always knew I belonged in first class not economy, and it just feels right when people wait on me.”
This is only a reverse analogy, as you call it, if you believe that she is only intending to address the phenomenon of male people identifying themselves as female. You’re correct that this example, when applied to gender, is analogous to a female person identifying themselves as male. I do not believe that this fact lessens its illustrative power. If this “rich person stuck in a poor person’s body” tried to “transition” to higher economic status based on their inner identification with wealth, how do you think they’d be treated by actual rich people? Might the treatment of this person mirror, say, the treatment of a trans man trying to join a group of men’s rights activists (MRAs)? Here’s a better question: Even if this person was able to “pass” as wealthy by appearing and acting to be so, would their passing have any affect at all on the capitalist structures of power that keeps them in poverty in the first place? Would passing as wealthy in appearance help them acquire actual financial power? Would it retroactively grant them a silver spoon at birth and a BMW on their sixteenth birthday?
You reverse the analogy (“I’m rich, but I’ve always identified as poor, so I divest myself of my wealth and go join the working class”) and say that it’s less powerful that way. I disagree. I think that the reversed version is extremely illustrative of the flaws in your argument, and in liberal thinking more generally. You write:
“Who wouldn’t welcome you, if you really divested yourself of your wealth and joined marches in the street to increase the minimum wage?”
Do you really think that someone can divest themselves not only of their material wealth, but of their history as a wealthy person? I don’t know about you, but if a rich person voluntarily gave up their wealth and said to me “Hey fellow member of the working class! I’m just like you, and there is no difference between our experiences of the world,” I’d tell them to fuck off. Becoming penniless now is not equivalent to going hungry as a kid, struggling to afford education throughout your life, watching your parents pour their lives into multiple underpaid jobs, or having to decide between rent and medical bills. It’s insulting to suggest that someone can shrug off years of privilege and entitlement and safety at will. In large part, growing up with privilege is the privilege. The punishment meted out to males who disobey the dictums of masculinity (a punishment that is yet another negative effect of the sex caste system) can be severe, and of course it’s indefensible. However, it is distinct from the systematic exploitation that females experience because we are female.
You go on to the second analogy: “I am really native American. How do I know? I’ve always felt a special connection to animals, and started building tee pees in the backyard as soon as I was old enough. I insisted on wearing moccassins to school even though the other kids made fun of me and my parents punished me for it. I read everything I could on native people, started going to sweat lodges and pow wows as soon as I was old enough, and I knew that was the real me. And if you bio-Indians don’t accept us trans-Indians, then you are just as genocidal and oppressive as the Europeans.”
You respond: “Maybe we thought gender was a ‘a class condition created by a brutal arrangement of power,’ and only that, but we would never have made the same claim about being native American. Why? It’s blatently reductive. It’s reducing a rich set of histories, cultures, languages, religions, and practices to the effect of a brutal arrangement of power – which is of course a very important part of it. But “being native American” is not merely an effect of power, in the way we thought gender was.”
Your objections to these analogies consistently prove the points that you’re trying to challenge. Of course gender cannot be parallel to “being native American” in this or any other analogy. Gender is parallel to colonial ideology in this analogy. More specifically, male supremacy is parallel to the colonialial power relation in this analogy, and gender is parallel with the stereotypes that colonialism imposes onto the colonized. The “drunk Indian” stereotype, or the image of the “savage,” only have anything to do with “being native American” because the ideology and practice of white supremacy was and continues to be imposed by Europeans on an entire continent’s peoples in order to exploit them. The female stereotypes we call “femininity” (domestic laborer, mother, infantalized sex object) only have anything to do with being female because the ideology (gender) and practice (patriarchy) of male supremacy was and is imposed by males onto females in order to exploit them. Of course it’s reductive to condense an entire distinct, specific set of experiences, the good and bad and everything in between, into a brutal arrangement of power – and this is exactly what gender does.
Gender takes the lived experiences of being female or being male and reduces those experience to sets of stereotypes. Transgender ideology retains those same oppressive stereotypes, but liberalizes their application by asserting that anyone can embody either set of stereotypes, regardless of their biological sex. This does not take away the destructiveness and reductiveness of the stereotypes, and in fact it reinforces them. The existence of outlaws requires the law, and maintaining an identity as a “gender outlaw” requires that the law – the sex castes – be in full effect for the rest of us. If “twisting free” of gender and the power relations of male supremacy is possible for a few of us, doesn’t that mean that those of us who fail to twist free are choosing the oppression we experience under gender? Perhaps we’re not trying hard enough to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. How about other oppressive power arrangements – do the colonized, the racially subjugated, or those in poverty ever get to “twist free” of the power relations they live within? Do racial stereotypes, for instance, “take on a life of their own in the imaginary domain”? To defend gender as even occasionally being estranged from the machinations of power is to defend male supremacy, and to argue that any aspect of society can be apolitical is to completely ignore the ways that hegemony actually functions.
The only other groups of people who have argued to me that gender stereotypes are natural, biological, or apolitical, aside from gender-apologists, are fundamentalist christians and MRA’s. Forgive me if I don’t see how this is remotely progressive. This represents an adjustment in the rhetoric of patriarchy – not resistance to it. These stereotypes are not arbitrary; just like the stereotype of the Indian “savage,” or of the lazy (brown) immigrant, or of the freeloading (brown) “welfare queen,” the stereotypes called gender function to facilitate the extraction of resources. In the case of the “savage” Indian stereotype, the resource in question was and still is land. In the case of women, the resources are labor, reproduction, and sex, and the stereotypes (housewife, mother, infantalized sex object) come to match. It’s not an accident that these stereotypes correspond with the resources that women are exploited for. This is the purpose of gender. What does it mean that those in the academy almost universally embrace the idea that these regressive stereotypes must be reformed, justified, normalized, fetishized, idealized, and extended – but never challenged at their root?
I think you’re right that misogyny is not the conscious reasoning of every male person who begins identifying themselves as female. When I was a high school teacher, I had male students who were told by counselors that they were sick with “gender dysphoria” and put on hormones by doctors because they failed to live up to masculine stereotypes. These boys aren’t consciously out to invade female space – but they, and the abuse that they receive at the hands of the medical and psychiatric establishments, certainly aren’t poster children for why gender castes deserve to be rationalized or maintained. The fact that some males have a negative experience of gender does not erase the fact that structurally, on the macro level, gender exists to facilitate the extraction of resources from female bodies. Gender is the chain, and male supremacy is the ball. Just because males sometimes trip over that chain does not erase the fact that the ankle it’s cuffed to is always female.
I think you’re right that when you say that we “negotiate and take up and resist and contest or affirm these structures in profoundly complex ways and sometimes deeply individual, creative, and unique ways,” but it sounds like you’re using the fact that individuals have varied experiences to dismiss or minimize the reality of the larger structures that those experiences occur within. Individual experiences may not always match up with the larger structures of exploitation, but this does not mean that those larger structures become irrelevant. I also think you’re right that each of us “seeks a way of living, a way of having the world that is bearable.” But this does not erase the fact that gender, the stereotypes that it is composed of, and the exploitation it facilitates, compose one of the oppressive systems preventing us from finding a bearable, much less a safe or just, way of having the world.
You end your letter by, yet again, expressing a patronizing disapproval that Lierre has held the same convictions for thirty two years. I agree that we should constantly be seeking new information, new perspectives, and actively incorporating them into our politics. However, holding consistent core convictions isn’t always an indication of stagnation or dogmatism – sometimes it’s called “having principles.” Would you use this argument against others who stick to their political guns in the face of backlash and opposition? Indigenous communities that have fought for sovereignty for centuries? The women who struggled through the generations for suffrage?
Putting radical feminist principles (like the right of females to organize autonomously) into practice comes with a cost. I and others have come to accept that cost after challenging, painful analysis of radical feminism’s merits. You dismiss Lierre’s radical feminism as an “uncritical” relic from a simpler time, but for me and others in my position, radical feminism has been a lifeline of critical thought. We grew up within a “feminism” that uncritically accepted the inevitability and the naturalness of gender, the neoliberal primacy of individualism, and ultimately, the unchallengeability of male supremacy. You characterize those who hold firm to feminist political convictions as fetishizing clean lines, simplicity, and the safety of familiarity. I’m here to tell you that my worldview was a lot simpler and more familiar back when I believed that gender stereotypes were voluntary, natural, defensible, inevitable, even holy. My life was a lot simpler and safer when I was content to keep quiet and continue parroting liberal nonsense. You’re right that individual experiences of gender differ, and you’re right that the situation is complicated, but complexity does not have to derail the fight against male supremacy on behalf of women as a class – at least, it doesn’t have to for all of us.
