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Transgenderism Is Female Appropriation
Men who become women, transgender if you like, are simply appropriating the female appearance. Without the proper body functions, this is only a surface change. It is a change in the appearance, not in the genetic material that makes a woman female. Some of the hormones may be added or subtracted, sure, however, it does not mean having a truly female experience.
Transgender women never have a first period. They never have the worry about being pregnant; either that they are or that they’re not. They never have the joy of wondering just how normal their anatomical bits are: they are scientifically implanted or grown and adjusted according to spec. They never grow up with the fear of men.
Transgender women get all of the surface portrayal. Like drag queens, they appear female, but unlike drag queens, they do not do it for play or show or entertainment. They somehow genuinely believe that their surface performance of femininity should be respected and even accepted by other women. Though they have challenges of their own, they do not have the same ones as women.
How is it that feminists and liberals everywhere have not condemned this? It is using the perceived experiences of women and profiting by them. It is using an outside experience of what it is to be a woman and internalizing it as if there were any ability to know the workings of women.
For all the concern about appropriating another’s experience, I do not know how it is that we women have allowed men to even steal the experience of being woman from us.
Published in General
Thank you.
Transgenderism is, I think, the most preposterous serious topic of our day — or, perhaps, the most serious preposterous topic. Whichever it is, it remains simultaneously seemingly too absurd a thing to warrant criticism, and too consequential a thing to be left unchallenged.
You’re preaching to the choir sister. With rare exception I can’t bring myself to refer to transsexuals by their adopted sex but it just shows how powerful LGBT has become.
Actually, I have more than once read that SOME feminists agree with you, as do some trans-women. One of them even got banned from Twitter for pointing out the obvious. Sorry that I can’t supply links, but the counter-movement does exist within feminism, though of course the politicians, academics, and managers will go with the easiest, most “virtuous” version of “the narrative” as they search for the pot of gold under the unicorn rainbow arc of history.
Interesting take. Nature had for each gender a role to play. Transgenders cannot fully switch to the opposite sex’s role and therefore cannot fully experience the agony and the ecstasy of the opposite gender.
It’s interesting that only men apparently have commented so far. Did you really grow up with a fear of men?
I bring this up because it’s a popular “issue” at my daughter’s school. She knows at least 2 transgender girls (who dress as boys, prefer male pronouns, etc). According to wikipedia, it’s only supposed to be 0.6% of the population that identifies as transgender. That’s a tiny, tiny number of people and those are the ones who specifically identify themselves as being that way, given that it is a fairly popular thing to be right now.
That’s probably even inflated.
It’s one thing to “feel” more masculine or feminine. Everyone has these moments. Guys who like “chick flicks”. Big burly men with beards who cry when they see Mother’s Day commercials. Women who like guns or like shoot ’em up movies. Women who think other women are often too sensitive. We all have moments where we feel more one way or another. Truly, we have both in us. We are masculine and feminine in varying degrees and yes, it is fluid. It can change from moment to moment.
But that’s just being human.
I do not know where we get off trying to adopt another’s experience and claim that really we’re x inside of y. How can people even make that argument? They don’t know what x even really is! That’s like saying that I’m a tiger. How the hell do I know what a tiger feels like? I feel like I assume a tiger must feel like.
How presumptuous.
Damn, that’s a good point! You can’t don a sombrero or a put your hair in cornrows because that’s appropriation, but you can put on breasts and a bra??
Any decent girl did.
Lest you end up dead in a ditch. You don’t walk alone at night, even in a good area. You park under lights. You go out in groups. If you are caught walking down a street and a man looks at you, safest move is to cross the street. If he also crosses the street, start taking notes because you’re about to get 1) mugged, 2) raped, 3) murdered, 4) raped and murdered.
It wasn’t a fear of all men. I’m very outgoing. I talked to anyone as a kid…and mostly as an adult as well. But I have a healthy dose of fear for men because I know very well what can and does happen to women. As most women do.
I can go all progressive, “I do what I want! I walk alone when I want! I’m a liberated woman!” but that denies the reality of the situation.
Martina Navratilova was one. Because the preposterousness of the current gender fluidity craze all becomes most clear when men who identify as women compete in athletic events as women. Then it is quite clear that one of these competitors is not like the other. And just because you take hormones for a year or go under the knife does not change your hip structure or a host of other anatomical differences that give men an advantage, as far as I know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_Cat
This is where people will make the argument that children should be given hormone suppressants until they can properly transition to a different gender later.
The problem is that they will still not have the same experiences that real women and men have. They just do not have the same fundamental genetic makeup and do not have the same developmental experiences.
I agree. And given that genitalia are distinguishable between the sexes at 11 weeks gestation, even childhood treatment with hormones wouldn’t be enough to change the body plan. It is in the giving of children hormones that the preposterousness veers off into tragedy.
I hope your term catches on.
Andrew Sullivan agrees. For more than twenty years he’s argued convincingly that the vast majority of gay men are indeed “born that way” and in the vast majority of cases, stay that way. (BTW, this has been one of the most undying arguments on Ricochet, like radioactivity with an infinite half life. I don’t want to restart it here and threadjack TRN’s post, which I think is well stated and important.) I bring it up because Sullivan is consistent: he’s always argued for (near) immutability, at least as far as men are concerned, so to a great degree he sees the recent reaching of the trans movement as dangerous heresy: if gender is so fluid, then the SoCons are right–just change your homo thermostat and you can be straight. He doesn’t find that idea unwelcome so much as he thinks it’s not only wrong but nuts. I’m inclined to agree.
There’s a term for people who call it out, ‘TERF,’ meaning ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist.’ And this label has actually been applied to certain trans-identifying individuals. Man, I spend too much time in Facebook groups…
That is the funny part. They eat their own.
Thank you. I knew there had to be a group somewhere.
I recently joined a group called “Ah yes, the circular firing squad of the left.”
If we can do it, they, too, should be allowed to do it.
No, but they grow up uncomfortable with their pre-assigned identity, and this trauma, and the quantity of victimization it automatically assigns, overrides any experiences that arise from irrelevant biological manifestations that have nothing to do with gender. I mean jeez.
You could make the point that transgender women have additional difficulties because they labor under societal expectations that they should have a first period, and worry about being pregnant, or obsess over their own development. These experiences are denied to them; these experiences, in a sense, are owed to them. The short-term solution is obviously early transition and scientifically-enabled recreations of these experiences, but long-term we have to disassociate the manifestations of “biological female” events from our definition of gender.
I mean, transmen have periods. That’s their truth.
If any of this seems preposterous, be aware that contrary arguments are literally violence.
It’s the harm to children, who are too young to understand consequences and should be protected, that has me most concerned about the transgender push. Laura Ingraham had a good segment with a pediatric endocrinologist on her show Friday 5/17/19. Starts about 28:54 mark. Need more doctors like this
That’s the joke of the whole transgender thing. It’s a complete repudiation of the feminist ideology.
Feminists said “girls can be anything. Girls can play with trucks, and boys can play with dolls and it’s all ok”.
Now transgenderism comes along and says “a girl who like to play with trucks? Well, she’s obviously really a boy. A boy who likes to play with dolls? Girl.”
And the feminists eat it up.
Right, I think you grew up with a fear of bad men, not just men in general, which is a very normal and an appropriate thing. It just sounded like a blanket statement and I am glad you clarified.
My daughter’s 8 year old step son insists he’s a girl. His mother is encouraging with name change, wardrobe etc
A few years ago, he told my daughter he felt like a girl. My daughter replied : how the heck do you know what it feels like to be a girl?
The battle has been lost by the way. If my daughter and her husband want to play any role in the little one’s life they have to go along with it
Nuts!
When this whole thing started a couple of generations ago it was mostly men trying to be women. Now, it seems to be mostly girls wanting to be boys.
If anyone has stats on this, please post them.
The tragedy, or maybe simply the crime here, is that much of the medical profession is supporting this nonsense, and performing life-altering procedures on children.
Your daughter is very wise.
Yes. But you need to understand that girls are raised to understand that men can be bad at any time.
Sure, there are good men. But for safety, you assume all men are bad until proven otherwise.
She is. When her step child got dressed for the park in heels and a dress, she asked: what girl do you know who dresses like that for the park? Your sisters are in shorts and t shirts ?
It’s a complicated situation – what I don’t understand is the enthusiasm.
I have a theory that now that homosexuality is accepted, one has to find some other way to be special. I was at a brunch recently attended almost exclusively by gay males. After a Bloody Mary (or two) I said to one recent acquaintance: it must be the pits to be gay now that no one cares. He replied: yeah, you’re no one now unless you’re trans.
This is the part that increasingly baffles me in the “transgender” debate – on what criteria is the supposed feeling based? Like @therightnurse said in the OP, I see only external trappings (clothing, hair styles, etc.).
As she pointed out in Comment #5, it is well within the range of normal human experience that there are men who like chick-flicks, cry at Mother’s Day commercials, (I might add like fashion and home decor, or don’t like sports), and women who like shooting guns and other traditionally male interests (our daughter-in-law likes shooting at least as much as our son does, and she is a much bigger fan of professional football than our son is). Such men who have traditionally feminine interests are still men (genetics tells us so), and such women who have traditionally masculine interests are still women (genetics tells us so).
To me this really is a crime. It is child abuse to inflict such life-altering procedures on children based on such flimsy information.
Almost any parent of small children can report on times that the child has insisted (often within a single day) that he (the child) is a dog, a fairy, a superhero, an airplane, or a truck. So if that same child says he is a girl, that is a pretty weak basis on which to start physically altering his body.
I’m one of those cynics who thinks that the very popularity of the topic is causing youth to claim “transgenderism” even when there’s no real evidence. I’m too lazy to look it up, but a few months ago there was a hullabaloo because a researcher found clusters of youth claiming “transgenderism” that correlated with either a popular kid claiming it first, or when one kid’s claim was enthusiastically affirmed by the adults. In other words, if being “transgender” is “cool” more youth will claim “transgenderism.”