Male TERFs: Are You Sure You're Not One of Us?

One of the interesting things about having a Substack and, by the way, we're now getting more than 10,000 article reads a month, which is pretty freaking amazing, so thank you is that you start to notice patterns in the comments.

The same characters keep coming back.

The same arguments. The same insults.

You're a eunuch.

You're a pervert.

You're mutilated.

You're not a woman.

Week after week. Article after article. They return to tell me again.

I had exactly the same thing when I was on X. The same people underneath everything I wrote. Following me around. Waiting for the next opportunity to explain, once again, how revolting or ridiculous transgender people apparently are.

And I've come to a conclusion about some of them.

I think they're fighting with themselves.

I think they're constructing an enormous internal scaffolding of arguments designed to suppress something they absolutely do not want to examine.

I think they're trying to convince themselves that whatever they're feeling, whatever curiosity or recognition keeps dragging them back to this subject, absolutely cannot mean anything about them.

And I think that because I did it.

For years.

I had an enormous history with gender stretching back through my life, and I still spent roughly a decade finding reasons why I couldn't possibly be transgender.

I rationalised. I dismissed. I argued. I built intellectual structures around myself.

Anything rather than open the bloody door.

And here's the clever bit.

If a man simply spent every day obsessively arguing about whether people like me should exist, it would start looking rather peculiar very quickly.

So you need somewhere to hide.

And transgender politics provides some absolutely magnificent hiding places.

Women's rights.

Bathrooms.

Sport.

Children.

Suddenly you're not a man spending hundreds of hours thinking about transgender people.

You're defending women.

You're protecting children.

You're preserving fairness in sport.

You're fighting misogyny.

Perfect.

Now the fixation has a noble purpose.

You can read every article. Watch every video. Study every surgery. Debate every hormone. Examine our bodies. Discuss our genitals. Follow transgender people around the internet and write thousands upon thousands of words about us.

And every time that tiny uncomfortable question appears. Why am I so interested in this? You've already built the answer.

Because you're protecting society.

I don't think that explains everybody who objects to transgender people. Obviously it doesn't.

But the ones who cannot leave it alone?

The ones who return week after week?

The ones who seem to know more about transgender medicine than most transgender people?

The ones who are somehow underneath every article, every photograph, every discussion, endlessly announcing how completely uninterested they are in becoming anything remotely like us?

Those people interest me.

Because I recognise the architecture.

I built it myself.

And eventually mine collapsed.

So, to all my angry male friends who like to spend their time commenting on my Substack:

Come on in, boys. The water's lovely.

Cross the line.

Accept yourself.

You might find you have rather less to be angry about.