On February 22, 2014, Reni Eddo-Lodge published a post on their blog. The post was titled: “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race”
I…am a white woman. I am not going to talk to you about race. For that conversation, please follow the included link to either read or hear the article read by Reni Eddo-Lodge.
Instead, I am going to talk to you about an area where my lived experience and life’s research has made me an expert in ways most of you listening will not be an expert. I’m not saying that in some elitist way. You can work to bridge the gap between us.
But if you’re not trans, you probably don’t understand what I’m about to say.
I want to tell you why I’m no longer going to talk to cis people about gender.
It’s because cis people have never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be a default. Some of us call that cisgender, but once you try to tell people how to know someone is cisgender, that gets just as complicated. What we really mean is that cultural default for who gets power — and who those with power say do not count unless or until they conform to the default.
I can no longer have this conversation, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places.
If you have not faced these medical obstacles, if you do not by default face this bigotry by the nature of how the people around you perceive your embodied existence, then you have a privilege I yearn to one day see as a reality for all people of all medical backgrounds and gender-based identities.
But let’s be clear. That is not the reality.
I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across. I have been trying since I was a helpless little girl being raised in a cult in Mississippi. I have been trying since the son of my father’s best friend molested me, and when I tried to tell anyone, they abused me into silence.
I have been trying since my own identical twin brother inflicted sibling sexual abuse against me since I was a little girl until only a few years ago when I was in my mid thirties.
I have been trying to have this conversation since my parents responded to me talking about the abuse by saying God had ordered them to make me safe by turning me into a boy.
They had good intentions, I guess. But intentions don’t equal impact. To me, what my parents did is the definition of evil, even if the people themselves deserve grace.
Since I was a little girl, every time I try to talk to cis people about gender, it goes the same way. Of course I have my own bias. My identical twin brother abused me in ways I’m only beginning to understand. I begged him to just acknowledge what he’d done and how it had affected me.
Trying to talk to him foreshadowed what it would be like trying to talk to countless future cis people about gender.
Their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo. I’m not talking to cis people about gender unless I absolutely have to.
We tell ourselves that good people can’t be bigots. Good people won’t diminish the lives of other people because they were persuaded by powerful arguments they didn’t realize are bullshit.
But look at how many people throughout the world vote for politicians and political efforts that explicitly use transphobia as a campaigning tool. My gender and my experience of that gender has been politicized against my will, because transphobia and all extensions of the patriarchy have given it meaning.
Because people with one set of characteristics say that makes them better, that makes them more worthy. Because those people point at people with my characteristics and say I will never count. Not unless I somehow find a way to conform to what makes them count.
The reality is that, in material terms, we are nowhere near equal. This state of play is violently unjust. The difference that people of trans experiences are all vaguely aware of from childhood is not benign. It is fraught with bias, prejudice, and bigotry.
I feel increasingly conflicted over how to help anyone be a better ally. Even those in my trans community are caught in a place where it’s hard just to breathe.
But I can tell you how to know you most definitely are NOT an ally.
Since I’m a woman, I’ll be using that term, but please replace it with the term appropriate for YOU.
Five Quick Tips To Tell If You Are NOT An Ally For Women
You are not an ally for women when you are willing to contribute to the harm and death of the women you declare don’t count.
You are not an ally for women when you knowingly take actions that contribute to the harm and death of intersex people.
You are not an ally for women when you knowingly take actions that contribute to the harm and death of cisgender women.
You are not an ally for women when you knowingly take actions that contribute to the harm and death of all cisgender people who need gender-affirming care that is indistinguishable from that which cis, trans, and intersex people often need.
You are not an ally for women when you knowingly take actions that contribute to the harm and death of anyone who is not an extension of your experience and understanding of your own gender.
The research is quite clear
The research over the last 100 years is quite clear that gender is an extremely complex manifestation of a person’s entire central nervous system.
The ENTIRE thing.
A person’s gender is not defined by any one aspect or physical trait.
Not their genitals. Not their chromosomes. Certainly not best-selling authors with a PhD in linguistics who then deny the dangerous and deadly power of the words they choose to describe the people they declare don’t count.
I’m serious. Look at it. Read it. Do a full meta analysis. Or just read As Nature Made Him: the Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl by John Colapinto.
You’ll quickly see how much of the foundational research used by people like Dalcher and Rowling and the men whose violence they empower ignored the evidence and declared whatever conclusions suited their purpose.
Like men denying women the simple right to vote, contemporary allies for that same cause now take power the same way: by taking it from whoever they are doesn’t count.
They said they were doing it to protect the kids
They believed they were doing the right thing forcing kids to live according to a binary gender — and then deciding that gender for any kids who couldn’t yet decide for themselves.
They said that for the good of the kids, they had to raise them as men — even if it was obvious they were girls.
They said that for the good of the kids, they had to raise them as women — even if decades of research showed which ones were actually men.
This isn’t a joke. This isn’t hyperbole. The leading researchers into gender identity literally took case studies like that of the Thiessen identical twins and twisted the evidence to support the treatment they had already decided was most beneficial.
One of the identical twins lost his penis during a botched circumcision. He underwent surgery that made him anatomically female, then later received estrogen injections and was raised as a girl under John Money’s supervision at the Psychohormonal Research Unit at Johns Hopkins.
For decades, Money refused to admit that every time he checked in with Bruce, the kid was one step closer to agony. One day closer to suicide.
Instead, John Money insisted to the family and to the public that everything was fine. It was cool to raise a boy as a girl. They’d never know the difference.
Bull shit. Bruce knew the difference, and the horror of it all is that while I survived conversion therapy, it is equally as traumatizing and deadly for cisgender people as it is for trans people.
After a few years of peace, the experiences were too much for Bruce. He and his twin brother eventually took their own lives.
John Money fucking LIED about the results of the research despite the last 100 years saying over and over and over that the only way for trans (and cis!!) kids to thrive is to believe them.
But that’s the research and standard of care that people like JK Rowling, Christina Dalcher, and Dave Chappelle have to embrace in order to justify their bigoted positions outside of their imaginations.
Here is what I send as a message of hope and strategy to anyone put in danger of harm and outright death by JK Rowling, Christina Dalcher, Dave Chappelle, my identical twin brother, and all other TERFs regardless of gender
When people with bigoted and transphobic convictions like Christina Dalcher start pointing at penis-shaped genitals as a justification for their willingness to permit and empower harm and death toward trans people, don’t listen to them.
Don’t even bother trying to argue with them.
Trying to argue from within the boundaries of their argument will instantly turn you into their victim.
The only way to win is to not play.
There’s no way to talk to them without accepting the ridiculous premises upon which they base their arguments.
I get why this feels right for people like Christina Dalcher and the scores of cisgender men who are evangelists for the same transphobic positions. But that’s why their positions feel so right that they don’t take a step back and examine the ridiculous premises on which they based their arguments.
An argument can be internally coherent and thus have a true conclusion. That’s a valid argument. But when you look at the premises, you find out the premises were ridiculous. Or maybe just not true.
But because Christina Dalcher did not read or understand the last century of research on gender identity, she doesn’t see that no matter how persuasive her argument, she may as well have started by saying, “If we accept that marshmallows are just cloud poop, we can justify our cruel treatment toward trans people with the following arguments…”
Even if you think their argument sounds good and feels persuasive
That’s right. Even if you think their argument sounds good and feels persuasive, it has nothing to do with material reality. They are holding on to a ridiculously narrow concept of gender.
They declare they are harming trans people in order to free themselves from male violence — but their narrow definition imprisons them within the very patriarchal concepts and structures they think they are fighting against.
They are the exact people The Power — both the book and the acclaimed Prime streaming series — describes as the problem. They claim power, only to then do exactly the same thing as men.
They abuse. They silence. And through it all, they deny any accountability.
They meant no harm, so they take responsibility for no harm.
The real loss is that there are legitimate points of debate within queer-allied circles
For example:
feminists who believe biological essentialism was necessary in order to free us from men who said science was proof women were designed to submit
vs radical feminists who believe we must be free from ALL labels in order to escape the patriarchy
vs modern feminists who believe some labels are essential to identification and identity while insisting that our history and future must be interrogated and reshaped
Those are real, complex, nuanced debates happening within queer-allied circles.
It’s why I laugh at people like Christina Dalcher who use ridiculous arguments to make their points. They throw these absurd strawman definitions and premises and arguments out instead of digging into the juicy and actual conflicts among feminists and trans people and intersex people.
For example, there’s a rift between trans and intersex communities over whether there is some vs zero overlap. If a conservative politician used that as ammunition, they could sit back and watch us destroy ourselves from within. But they make their positions so ridiculous that we’re unified.
Stop wasting valuable time — start empowering valuable people
I have been abused by men and women like JK Rowling, Christina Dalcher, and other TERFs since I was a little girl in Mississippi.
I was raised in a cult. I was forced through trans conversion therapy. I became the victim of Sibling Sexual Assault from my brother, a man who uses a variety of fake identities, but most horrifying of all, he uses one posing as a woman (Alison the Celtic Chameleon) so that he can function as a better predator.
People like JK Rowling are going after innocent women, saying that because they have a biological defect, they are just as dangerous as sexually violent men like my brother.
With all due respect, fuck you. We are literally dying, and you are asking for us to avoid hyperbole.
I understand now that people like them are beyond reason. Beyond empathy.
I don’t know what would or ever could make them care about the real people getting hurt and getting killed because of their actions.
The material reality is that none of us can control other people
Influential yet dangerous authors like JK Rowling and Christina Dalcher--as well as common abusive men like my brother born and raised in Mississippi — will continue to wield enormous power with no thought to the cisgender, intersex, trans, non-binary, and all other gender non-conforming caught in the deadly umbrella of their not just transphobic positions but their transphobic convictions.
We waste valuable time trying to change their minds and control their behavior.
With the fury of a vague platitude, let me repeat these words: Stop wasting valuable time — start empowering valuable people.
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Why I’m No Longer Talking To Cis People About Gender