Yes, some activists have behaved like lunatics. Yes, some criticisms are fair. But that still doesn’t explain the sheer fury directed at us. I think there’s another engine running the hostility, something far more personal.
I think I speak for all the TERFs when I say: your audacity does not evoke feelings of jealousy in us.
It makes us enraged.
We see where this audacity comes from — male entitlement.
You think you’re some feminist heroes standing strong against the hateful women, when in fact you’re just weak-minded, deluded and entitled men.
You have no traits that would make a woman jealous. None. Not physical, and certainly not emotional or behavioural. You give us the ick.
But rest assured — we do not wish you dead. We just want you to never again feel emboldened to live your fetish out in public, to demand access to women’s spaces and make all society actors in your sick fantasies.
Fifteen years ago, most people managed to hold two ideas in their heads at once: that transgender people were rare, and that their lives were usually quite difficult. The prevailing instinct was not rage, but indifference tempered with a little sympathy. One did not need to be a moral hero to manage this. One simply needed a functioning sense of proportion.
What has changed is not the existence of a fringe. Every population has a fringe, and only a child or a demagogue pretends otherwise. What has changed is the media environment, which now rewards the most lurid, the most performative, and the most grotesquely amplified examples of anything it touches, and then feeds them back, endlessly, to those most emotionally primed to react.
You appear to be particularly susceptible to this. That is not a moral failing so much as an intellectual one.
A handful of algorithmically promoted caricatures have taken up permanent residence in your mind, entirely rent-free, and now dictate your emotional weather. They enrage you, animate you, and provide you with a sense of purpose you might otherwise struggle to locate. This is not political seriousness. It is psychological capture.
The interesting question is not whether “these people exist”. Of course they do. The interesting question is why you need them so badly, why you seek them out, and why you allow social media to manipulate you into a state of perpetual agitation over a group you claim to despise.
What has changed is that autogynephiles like you are now allowed to live their fetish in public.
I want you and your ilk to go back to your euphoria boners in the confines of your bedrooms.
It’s risible how you write about what I’m susceptible to, what animates me, what gives me purpose.
You don’t know me. You don’t know any of us.
You pretend you’re a woman, yet you don’t even have the theory of mind to understand why women despise you, why we’re enraged at your entitlement, at your putting on womanface, at mocking our outrage. You called me “psychologically captured”, a century ago you would have called me hysterical.
You will never be accepted as a woman because you are not one.
Leave the kids alone, and stop harrassing women, and we'll be happy to leave you alone. Our language, our spaces and our safety is not yours to redefine. Stand up to the extremists if that's what they are. Pretending TERFs hate you is another nail in the coffin of the social tolerance of trans-id males.
Reading his posts is a bit like squishing a bug — you know it’s going to be gross, but you have to look under your shoe.
The most amusing/aggravating parts are when he says he doesn’t have AGP (yet most of his photos are him with his fake moobs exposed),
or that he has women figured out (we’re jealous, we’re psychologically captured, we’re intellectually lazy, we haven’t lived to our full potential, we’re afraid).
No honestly I just think it's really obnoxious for a dude to say he's a woman when women have birthed every human on this planet, many dying in order to do so, and we women literally bleed every month and live life with no choice but to be the weaker, impregnable sex.
I do not say I am a woman. I say I am transgender. Those are not the same claim, and I have never pretended otherwise. I will never be a biological woman, and stating that obvious fact has never troubled me in the slightest.
But let us imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that I did make the claim you are attributing to me. Even then, the charge of “obnoxiousness” collapses on inspection. A delusion, if it were one, would be my problem. Obnoxiousness requires impact. Harm. Intrusion. You have demonstrated none.
What you are actually doing is mistaking your emotional response for a moral injury. Women bleeding, women giving birth, women dying, all of this is real, tragic, and serious. None of it is altered in the smallest degree by the words I use to describe myself. The fact that you experience my existence as an affront is not evidence of oppression. It is evidence of agitation.
You are not defending women here. You are indulging a sense of grievance that requires an object, and you have settled on me. That may feel righteous, but it is not rational.
If you find yourself this exercised by something that does not affect your body, your rights, or your life in any material way, then the question worth asking is not what I am claiming, but why you need to react so theatrically to it.
I'm not aggrieved by you doing what you want with your body or your style. I'm happy for you that you're happy, honestly. And I read your posts on getting in shape, I think they're pretty universally inspiring.
It bothers me that you claim any form of womanhood at all. This does harm to women because it says, 'looking pretty is what women are', 'being feminine is what women are', and yes that bothers me. It's hard to explain, I recognize that. As a woman, as a girl, I've experienced so much harm from men because I have a female body. So when I see you there is this feeling of recoil, this feeling of 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. But I do appreciate that at least you admit you are not a woman. And none of us are perfect. I do think it would be appreciated if you could try to hear women on this. Something like being raped or abused by a man, as a woman, leaves deep scars and to then see any man claiming any type of womanhood, yes it hurts. And my fear is men who claim such a thing then gain access to especially vulnerable women.
But if you are not one of the men doing that, I do greatly appreciate you setting that example.
I do appreciate you saying this, genuinely. And I want to be clear that I am listening, not just waiting for my turn to speak.
I don’t dispute for a second that being female comes with vulnerabilities that shape your entire nervous system, especially if you’ve been abused or harmed by men. That recoil you describe is real, and I’m not going to tell you it’s irrational or shameful. Trauma doesn’t work like that.
Where I draw the line is here: my existence, and the way I live my life, is not an attempt to redefine womanhood as “looking pretty” or “being feminine”. I don’t believe that, and I’ve never argued it. Femininity is an expression, not a definition. Womanhood is rooted in biology, history, and shared experience, much of which I will never have. I’m not trying to take that from anyone.
I also won’t pretend that there aren’t trans people who make me uncomfortable too. There are fetishistic, performative, boundary-blind individuals in this space, and I think pretending otherwise has done real damage. I used to think they were a tiny fringe. I’m no longer convinced it’s that small. And I think women are right to push back against being told their discomfort is immoral.
What I ask, though, is proportion.
Most trans people are not predators. Most are not activists. Most are not trying to access vulnerable women. Most are just trying to live quietly, work, parent, pay bills, and not be stared at or hated. Treating the entire group as a threat because of a subset feels understandable emotionally, but it doesn’t scale well in reality.
I don’t expect all women to feel safe around all trans people. That’s not realistic. What I hope for is that most women don’t feel they need to be afraid of most of us.
If it helps, I recently wrote about this exact point, that we are not all the same, and that collapsing everyone into one frightening caricature helps nobody, least of all women. I’ll link it below, not as a demand, just as context.
A nice summary. Still though.... this shows the difference between the sexes: "I don’t expect all women to feel safe around all trans people. That’s not realistic. What I hope for is that most women don’t feel they need to be afraid of most of us."
We women have an unease around all men, esp. unknonwn ones, but this fundamental unease tinges all cross-sex interactions. And when you add kink and the transgressive behavior of many trans-id males, it does not make us feel any safer, quite the contrary.
Except for PZ Myers: he’s a fool who decided being kind to other dudes was more important than *checks bites* sex as a concept in developmental biology.
I am currently writing a memoir and I'm essentially saying the same things. Not about the jealousy. But our inner turmoil continuing to live a delusional life that had never made sense, and choosing, regardless of the consequence, to be who we actually are.
I cracked at 60 and seriously couldn't be happier, despite the pitfalls.
The narcissism drips off the page. Too special to have a job, too special to get along with people, too special to live amongst the sheep…
Character disorders are so insidious, because the character can’t even see their true reflection. You project your own flaws on to everyone else: you feel profoundly bitter and jealous? Ah, no, it’s THEM who are jealous! You’re abusive? Ah, no, THEY abused you! Nothing you say is real, because you’ve constructed an illusion to cope with the pain of your imaginary world.
This (your) is a familiar manoeuvre, and a very boring one.
When someone cannot engage with an argument, they retreat into amateur psychiatry. “Narcissism”, “character disorders”, “projection”, “imaginary worlds”, a handful of diagnostic-sounding nouns lobbed in the hope that they will substitute for thought. They do not.
Notice that you do not address a single claim I made. Not one. You do not quote it, analyse it, refute it, or even attempt to misunderstand it creatively. You simply announce that I am defective, and declare the matter closed. That is not criticism. It is a confession of intellectual exhaustion.
The irony, of course, is delicious. You accuse me of being “too special” while writing several paragraphs about me. You insist I live in an “imaginary world” while you construct an elaborate fantasy version of my psychology in order to avoid dealing with my words. If anyone is projecting here, the mirror is not hard to locate.
And for the record, I worked it out this morning. It's actually 30 years since I had a proper job working for somebody else. I've seen off every single recession. And kept earning, even after transitioning. Because, my friend, I am fucking good at what I do.
There’s nothing to engage with. You made a bunch of claims without evidence. Why would I be held to a higher standard than your fantasy? Good for you if you make a living. One less useless burden on everybody else.
“There’s nothing to engage with” is a strange thing to say immediately after you engaged, twice, with everything except the argument.
You have now moved through the full sequence:
diagnose the author,
declare the text evidenceless,
congratulate yourself for not answering it,
then claim victory because the author replied at all.
That is not scepticism, it is evasion with a smirk.
On the substance, your burden-of-proof move is backwards. Blanchard’s typology is a contested explanatory theory about why trans women transition. If you treat it as your baseline reality, then you, not I, are the one relying on it, and you are the one who needs to defend its assumptions, sampling, definitions, and causal claims. Multiple peer reviewed critiques do exactly that, in detail, and they do not treat Blanchard’s material as holy writ.
If you think my claims lack evidence, pick one claim, quote it, and show your work. If you cannot, then the “nothing to engage with” line is simply you announcing that you prefer vibes and diagnoses to reading.
And the “PS” is the cherry on top. You call someone a narcissist, they respond, and you say, “Aha, replying proves it.” That is a self sealing insult, not an argument. It cannot be refuted because you have defined refutation as evidence of guilt. There is a word for that kind of reasoning, and it is not “science”.
1) Charles Moser (2010) — “Blanchard’s Autogynephilia Theory: A Critique” (Journal of Homosexuality)
3) Julia Serano (2020) — “Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ‘embodiment fantasies’ model” (The Sociological Review)
5) Talia Mae Bettcher (2014) — “When Selves Have Sex: what the phenomenology of trans sexuality can teach about sexual orientation” (Journal of Homosexuality)
As someone who used to be a TERF before I came to understand reason, I couldn't agree more. Excellent post. I spent many many years in TERF circles eating up their regurgitated propaganda. I know exactly what makes them tick and its a perceived victimhood supremacy they own. I find it so funny and ironic that most of them are so gung-ho about single sex spaces while sharing every aspect of their lives with abusive and misogynistic men. I eventually grew out of that phase and started listening to trans people instead of just talking about them and lo and behold I learned something new. Anyway, just popped in to say great article, thanks for writing. 🫶🏻
Your essay is all projection and overgeneralization. You act like trans people are automatically superior just for transitioning, and assume anyone who disagrees is secretly jealous of your “audacity.” Maybe try asking TERFs why instead of just writing your manifesto to your echo chamber.
For instance, you could ask me—right here, right now—“Are you jealous of my audacity? Are you hostile? If so, why?” But of course, that would completely undermine your thesis.
What a load of self-aggrandising codswallop to try to justify your attempts to deny reality in the most offensive way. You were, are, and always will be a man.
Alright, the algorithm dropped me here because it knew that I love my trans friends 🩷🩵🤍
Many of these comments are genuinely depressing. Trans people save lives, including (but by no means limited to) their own. I’m cis and I do admit to some misplaced jealousy, you’re a lot better at refusing to let anyone tell you how your body should look that I am. People like you give me hope when my body doesn’t feel like it belongs to me (yet) because I can’t afford to let it tell my story the way I want. One day!
(Clarification: I am safe now, I just really want a tattoo after surviving a couple horrors a few years back)
I'd not call it misplaced, for what it's worth. It took me fifty six years to work out the body was mine to make decisions about, and I spent nearly all of that waiting for permission to arrive from somewhere else. It never does. You just start.
Get the tattoo when you can. Glad you're here to be wanting one.
A good read and a good reminder. And I will just remind trans people not to look at being transgender as a curse. Earlier in life I think that's what I saw it as. A burden. A monkey on my back. Now that is not the case. Substack is dangerous TE*RF infested waters, and the comments bear that out. Same old same old. In the same way they hang on to AGP and sexual fetishes as the only way to approach understanding trans people is, they rush to soothe themselves and get there anti-trans fix any way they can. We are like a drug or soothing balm to some people. It's an obsession, where they get to declare their values, the way THEY live their lives, and protect the box that they're in. And as you say their cage is unlocked. They live in chains with the keys 🔐 🗝️ lying around in plain sight. I think the obsession with trans people is a pathology. Keep on truckin' 🚛🚒. Without them.
I’d like to use the ladies bathroom, because there’s more stalls.. I can’t use the urinals since surgery.
If I use the men’s locker room. I’ll cause a scene.
I could care less about being a political football.
You ladies need to realize that a trans woman is your best friend. Not your enemy. We can protect you from the predators.. not be one. I don’t even have the equipment to bother you anymore. I just wanna be left alone.
Left alone is such a small ask, and somehow the hardest one to get taken seriously. You were never the political football. You're just someone who'd like to use a toilet without anyone writing a think piece about it.
We don’t hate you, and we are absolutely NOT jealous of you. We just don’t want men in our private single - sex spaces. Why is that so hard to understand?
It isn't hard to understand. I understood it the first time anybody said it to me. Understanding what somebody wants isn't the same as being handed an argument for it.
Take the biology for nothing. I was born male, I don't produce ova, no surgeon altered that, and I've never claimed otherwise on this page or any other. It's yours, keep it.
Now look at what it doesn't do. "We don't want men in our private single sex spaces" is a statement about what you want. The question is what the actual risk is, how often harm has actually occurred and at what rate, set against what the exclusion actually costs the people excluded. That's a sum with numbers on both sides of it. A preference isn't a sum, and the moment the case rests on not wanting to, safety has stopped being the reason, because safety reasoning is comparative by its nature.
And set the hate and the jealousy aside entirely, since you've raised them and I'll grant you both for nothing. Suppose there's none of either in it anywhere. The argument is exactly where it was. Somebody still has to get me from she is male to therefore she is kept out of the changing room in Marks and Spencer, shown rather than asserted. I've been asking a while now.
Let me rephrase it. We will not, cannot, have men who claim to be women in single sex spaces. We will not and do not allow it, and it harms many more females in far more substantial ways than it may possibly distress a tiny minority of actual transwomen (identity is not biology, even with cosmetic surgery). On balance, the potential harm is far greater. No transwoman is ever going to be in danger of being forcibly impregnated. Ever.
I still am baffled at how this same kind of argument isn’t leveled against “race” which is TRULY ambiguous, since there is no hard biological line. You are human or not human. You are a human male or a human female. Race IS a truly social construct with no basis in biology. BUT - I can’t (that is, not legally allowed, forget about the societal constraints ) identify as black, or Asian, or Australian aborigine. Yet we treat “race” as immutable. I am an American mutt, 5-7 generations in the melting pot of America. I can’t decide to be another ethnicity, even if I learn another language, dress differently, immerse myself in a foreign culture. I will always be an American mutt. And for that matter I will always be a woman (adult human female). I’m assuming therefore you are a transwoman - that is, literally, “trans” (not) / woman (adult human female). Since there are only two sexes that means you are an adult human male.
As for using women’s single sex spaces - sure, if you are sufficiently medically altered to “pass” then I guess you can get away with it. But that extreme level of medical and surgical intervention is probably sufficient to also render you incapable of raping and impregnating females, so I won’t stop you. But you are also living a lie. How can that become equivalent to living (“your”) truth? If all truth is subjective then we have no way to meaningfully relate to one another.
You've attempted the sum, which is more than anybody else on this page has managed. So let's take it seriously.
Look at what it's made of, though. Many more females. Far more substantial. On balance, far greater. Those are all quantities, and not one of them has a number behind it. Potential harm is doing the heaviest lifting, because potential has no ceiling. You can put any magnitude you like on the side of the ledger you already favour and nobody can audit it. A sum with no figures in it isn't a sum, it's the shape of one.
The impregnation point I'll grant you in full. No trans woman is ever going to be forcibly impregnated. True, and I'd not wriggle out of it. It also isn't the thing at issue in a changing room in Marks and Spencer, and a harm I can't suffer tells you nothing whatever about the rate at which I cause one. The men who do what you're describing were never once stopped by a sign on a door.
On race, you've aimed at a claim I'm not making. I don't say I changed sex. I was born male, I don't produce ova, no surgeon altered that, and I've conceded it every single time it has been put to me. If the argument needs me to be claiming otherwise, it has got nobody to argue with.
Then there's your last paragraph, which I'd ask you to read again. Sufficiently altered to pass, and that level of intervention probably renders you incapable of the harm, so you won't stop me.
That's a capacity test. It turns on what a particular person can do rather than on what they are. It is exactly the sort of criterion I asked you for, and you've handed it over yourself. It also means your first paragraph has gone. We will not, cannot, have men in single sex spaces has become we will, where the risk isn't there. Both cannot be your position, and the second is the better of the two by a distance.
Living a lie I'd hand straight back. I've never claimed all truth is subjective, or that woman means whatever I fancy on a given morning. What I want is to buy a lipstick in Boots, use the lavatory while I'm in there and go home. That isn't a metaphysics. It's a shopping trip.
ok you got me on a couple points - one, no I don't have data to back it up, I'm not a researcher and I don't have the resources or the bandwidth necessary to compile that kind of data. Yes, I do refer to potential, and that potential could, potentially, be limitless. I should probably have used a better word. I suspect that your lived experience growing up male is significantly different than my lived experience growing up female, and I have very specific experiences that have underscored how easily a male can physically overpower a female - not to mention the sheer social force (power? gravitas? the best word escapes me) that has historically been available to males vs females.
I had initially posted the first comment ages ago, and I don't remember the entirety of the article, my apologies. A changing room at a clothing store is not the same as a shelter for women, or a women's club, or even a locker room at a health club.
In retrospect, the whole controversy has reached levels of hysteria that makes it hard to hear anyone's reasonable voice.
I brought up the race comparison because I've always found that in particular to be a similar kind of self identification that is routinely rejected by the trans allies I've discussed this with -it's considered "apples to oranges" by them, but I think it's much more similar than it is different.
There is probably a better way to deal with the whole bathroom problem, and remove it from the greater issue of whether or not to treat trans as a civil rights issue - maybe it should be treated more like a religion. We certainly don't have problems with different religious groups using public lavatories.
You've given more ground in one comment than this page has seen in months, and I'd rather say so than pretend I hadn't noticed.
The physical point I grant you completely, and I'm not going to poke at whatever is sitting behind it. Men can overpower women, easily and routinely, and the social weight you're reaching for is real as well. I've stood on both sides of that one and the difference is not subtle. None of it is in dispute between us.
What is in dispute is what it licenses at a particular door, and you have just answered that yourself. A changing room in a clothes shop is not a shelter, not a women's club, not a locker room. That was the whole of my position. Once the doors get looked at one at a time rather than as a single switch, I am not sure we are arguing any more.
On race, the comparison only bites if my claim is that I have changed category by announcing it. It isn't, and it never has been. I say I am male, I say I transitioned, and I would like to buy a lipstick and use the lavatory while I am in there. Take the declaration out of my mouth and the analogy has nothing left to attach itself to.
And then you went and made my argument for me at the end. Religion is entirely self declared. Nobody is asked to prove it, nobody could, it changes nothing whatever about a body, and it carries real legal protection and a great deal of accommodation besides. The lavatories have never once been a problem. If an unverifiable claim about oneself can be protected that thoroughly without the roof coming in, then unverifiability was never the objection.
The hysteria line I will agree with without any qualification at all. It is most of why I write any of this down.
Shush thicc ‘in the head’ one.. no such thing as cis , and the term queer is a disgusting slur which NO you haven’t ’reclaimed’ . It is male and female and l g or b. Thanks
It's a creative twist: "cutting off healthy body parts and having a festering hole where your penis used to be" is just so seductive to the rest of us. We are so jealous of such a freedom from convention! Shaving off a third of your projected lifespan with body modification via drugs and surgeries is so endlessly attractive. I could go on... :-)
There is not a finite amount of womanhood in the world, and if Stevie or any other transwoman gets some you get less.
It's not appropriation. It's not some style choice.
It's not like transwomen are walking along gorging on "male-pie" and decide hey I'm going to have me some of that "woman-pie" too!
We have to give up all of the male-pie, just to get a small slice of woman-pie.
Why? Because we are allergic to the male-pie. It's slowly poisoning us.
We are dying inside. We transition to live.
You say you want basic respect for your lived realities. Why will you not provide that in return? Why is it that the universal message from the "TERF" community is "Be gone. Out! Leper! Unclean!"?
I think I speak for all the TERFs when I say: your audacity does not evoke feelings of jealousy in us.
It makes us enraged.
We see where this audacity comes from — male entitlement.
You think you’re some feminist heroes standing strong against the hateful women, when in fact you’re just weak-minded, deluded and entitled men.
You have no traits that would make a woman jealous. None. Not physical, and certainly not emotional or behavioural. You give us the ick.
But rest assured — we do not wish you dead. We just want you to never again feel emboldened to live your fetish out in public, to demand access to women’s spaces and make all society actors in your sick fantasies.
Thanks for this AI-powered slop.
I won't even bother dignifying you with a full response. If you don't like my Substack don't read it. It's not for you.
No AI was used in the writing of that reply, sir. Only ATP-powered wit.
You put your substack out there in the ether, the TERFs will come for you. Man up and take it on the chin.
Fifteen years ago, most people managed to hold two ideas in their heads at once: that transgender people were rare, and that their lives were usually quite difficult. The prevailing instinct was not rage, but indifference tempered with a little sympathy. One did not need to be a moral hero to manage this. One simply needed a functioning sense of proportion.
What has changed is not the existence of a fringe. Every population has a fringe, and only a child or a demagogue pretends otherwise. What has changed is the media environment, which now rewards the most lurid, the most performative, and the most grotesquely amplified examples of anything it touches, and then feeds them back, endlessly, to those most emotionally primed to react.
You appear to be particularly susceptible to this. That is not a moral failing so much as an intellectual one.
A handful of algorithmically promoted caricatures have taken up permanent residence in your mind, entirely rent-free, and now dictate your emotional weather. They enrage you, animate you, and provide you with a sense of purpose you might otherwise struggle to locate. This is not political seriousness. It is psychological capture.
The interesting question is not whether “these people exist”. Of course they do. The interesting question is why you need them so badly, why you seek them out, and why you allow social media to manipulate you into a state of perpetual agitation over a group you claim to despise.
You also mentioned wit. I’m afraid I missed it.
What has changed is that autogynephiles like you are now allowed to live their fetish in public.
I want you and your ilk to go back to your euphoria boners in the confines of your bedrooms.
It’s risible how you write about what I’m susceptible to, what animates me, what gives me purpose.
You don’t know me. You don’t know any of us.
You pretend you’re a woman, yet you don’t even have the theory of mind to understand why women despise you, why we’re enraged at your entitlement, at your putting on womanface, at mocking our outrage. You called me “psychologically captured”, a century ago you would have called me hysterical.
You will never be accepted as a woman because you are not one.
Leave the kids alone, and stop harrassing women, and we'll be happy to leave you alone. Our language, our spaces and our safety is not yours to redefine. Stand up to the extremists if that's what they are. Pretending TERFs hate you is another nail in the coffin of the social tolerance of trans-id males.
the favorite movie choices lolllllllllllllll
just the whole thing: "you are jealous of me because you simply cannot believe what a dick I am"
is this guy paid by Big TERF to make our case for us or what?
Reading his posts is a bit like squishing a bug — you know it’s going to be gross, but you have to look under your shoe.
The most amusing/aggravating parts are when he says he doesn’t have AGP (yet most of his photos are him with his fake moobs exposed),
or that he has women figured out (we’re jealous, we’re psychologically captured, we’re intellectually lazy, we haven’t lived to our full potential, we’re afraid).
No honestly I just think it's really obnoxious for a dude to say he's a woman when women have birthed every human on this planet, many dying in order to do so, and we women literally bleed every month and live life with no choice but to be the weaker, impregnable sex.
Then you should read more carefully.
I do not say I am a woman. I say I am transgender. Those are not the same claim, and I have never pretended otherwise. I will never be a biological woman, and stating that obvious fact has never troubled me in the slightest.
But let us imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that I did make the claim you are attributing to me. Even then, the charge of “obnoxiousness” collapses on inspection. A delusion, if it were one, would be my problem. Obnoxiousness requires impact. Harm. Intrusion. You have demonstrated none.
What you are actually doing is mistaking your emotional response for a moral injury. Women bleeding, women giving birth, women dying, all of this is real, tragic, and serious. None of it is altered in the smallest degree by the words I use to describe myself. The fact that you experience my existence as an affront is not evidence of oppression. It is evidence of agitation.
You are not defending women here. You are indulging a sense of grievance that requires an object, and you have settled on me. That may feel righteous, but it is not rational.
If you find yourself this exercised by something that does not affect your body, your rights, or your life in any material way, then the question worth asking is not what I am claiming, but why you need to react so theatrically to it.
I'm not aggrieved by you doing what you want with your body or your style. I'm happy for you that you're happy, honestly. And I read your posts on getting in shape, I think they're pretty universally inspiring.
It bothers me that you claim any form of womanhood at all. This does harm to women because it says, 'looking pretty is what women are', 'being feminine is what women are', and yes that bothers me. It's hard to explain, I recognize that. As a woman, as a girl, I've experienced so much harm from men because I have a female body. So when I see you there is this feeling of recoil, this feeling of 'wolf in sheep's clothing'. But I do appreciate that at least you admit you are not a woman. And none of us are perfect. I do think it would be appreciated if you could try to hear women on this. Something like being raped or abused by a man, as a woman, leaves deep scars and to then see any man claiming any type of womanhood, yes it hurts. And my fear is men who claim such a thing then gain access to especially vulnerable women.
But if you are not one of the men doing that, I do greatly appreciate you setting that example.
I do appreciate you saying this, genuinely. And I want to be clear that I am listening, not just waiting for my turn to speak.
I don’t dispute for a second that being female comes with vulnerabilities that shape your entire nervous system, especially if you’ve been abused or harmed by men. That recoil you describe is real, and I’m not going to tell you it’s irrational or shameful. Trauma doesn’t work like that.
Where I draw the line is here: my existence, and the way I live my life, is not an attempt to redefine womanhood as “looking pretty” or “being feminine”. I don’t believe that, and I’ve never argued it. Femininity is an expression, not a definition. Womanhood is rooted in biology, history, and shared experience, much of which I will never have. I’m not trying to take that from anyone.
I also won’t pretend that there aren’t trans people who make me uncomfortable too. There are fetishistic, performative, boundary-blind individuals in this space, and I think pretending otherwise has done real damage. I used to think they were a tiny fringe. I’m no longer convinced it’s that small. And I think women are right to push back against being told their discomfort is immoral.
What I ask, though, is proportion.
Most trans people are not predators. Most are not activists. Most are not trying to access vulnerable women. Most are just trying to live quietly, work, parent, pay bills, and not be stared at or hated. Treating the entire group as a threat because of a subset feels understandable emotionally, but it doesn’t scale well in reality.
I don’t expect all women to feel safe around all trans people. That’s not realistic. What I hope for is that most women don’t feel they need to be afraid of most of us.
If it helps, I recently wrote about this exact point, that we are not all the same, and that collapsing everyone into one frightening caricature helps nobody, least of all women. I’ll link it below, not as a demand, just as context.
https://fasttrackfemme.substack.com/p/we-are-not-all-the-same
(I'll probably have my tranny membership card revoked for this one.)
I’m not asking you to abandon your instincts. I’m asking for the possibility that some of us are not what you fear.
A nice summary. Still though.... this shows the difference between the sexes: "I don’t expect all women to feel safe around all trans people. That’s not realistic. What I hope for is that most women don’t feel they need to be afraid of most of us."
We women have an unease around all men, esp. unknonwn ones, but this fundamental unease tinges all cross-sex interactions. And when you add kink and the transgressive behavior of many trans-id males, it does not make us feel any safer, quite the contrary.
He is one of the men doing that.
Do you not feel embarrassed when you use the phrase gender Woo woo. You literally just stole that straight off Douglas Murray, pathetic.
Nah, it’s woo woo just like every faith.
Credit James Randi, and skeptics.
Except for PZ Myers: he’s a fool who decided being kind to other dudes was more important than *checks bites* sex as a concept in developmental biology.
I am currently writing a memoir and I'm essentially saying the same things. Not about the jealousy. But our inner turmoil continuing to live a delusional life that had never made sense, and choosing, regardless of the consequence, to be who we actually are.
I cracked at 60 and seriously couldn't be happier, despite the pitfalls.
Thanks for the read
The narcissism drips off the page. Too special to have a job, too special to get along with people, too special to live amongst the sheep…
Character disorders are so insidious, because the character can’t even see their true reflection. You project your own flaws on to everyone else: you feel profoundly bitter and jealous? Ah, no, it’s THEM who are jealous! You’re abusive? Ah, no, THEY abused you! Nothing you say is real, because you’ve constructed an illusion to cope with the pain of your imaginary world.
This (your) is a familiar manoeuvre, and a very boring one.
When someone cannot engage with an argument, they retreat into amateur psychiatry. “Narcissism”, “character disorders”, “projection”, “imaginary worlds”, a handful of diagnostic-sounding nouns lobbed in the hope that they will substitute for thought. They do not.
Notice that you do not address a single claim I made. Not one. You do not quote it, analyse it, refute it, or even attempt to misunderstand it creatively. You simply announce that I am defective, and declare the matter closed. That is not criticism. It is a confession of intellectual exhaustion.
The irony, of course, is delicious. You accuse me of being “too special” while writing several paragraphs about me. You insist I live in an “imaginary world” while you construct an elaborate fantasy version of my psychology in order to avoid dealing with my words. If anyone is projecting here, the mirror is not hard to locate.
And for the record, I worked it out this morning. It's actually 30 years since I had a proper job working for somebody else. I've seen off every single recession. And kept earning, even after transitioning. Because, my friend, I am fucking good at what I do.
There’s nothing to engage with. You made a bunch of claims without evidence. Why would I be held to a higher standard than your fantasy? Good for you if you make a living. One less useless burden on everybody else.
Oli,
“There’s nothing to engage with” is a strange thing to say immediately after you engaged, twice, with everything except the argument.
You have now moved through the full sequence:
diagnose the author,
declare the text evidenceless,
congratulate yourself for not answering it,
then claim victory because the author replied at all.
That is not scepticism, it is evasion with a smirk.
On the substance, your burden-of-proof move is backwards. Blanchard’s typology is a contested explanatory theory about why trans women transition. If you treat it as your baseline reality, then you, not I, are the one relying on it, and you are the one who needs to defend its assumptions, sampling, definitions, and causal claims. Multiple peer reviewed critiques do exactly that, in detail, and they do not treat Blanchard’s material as holy writ.
If you think my claims lack evidence, pick one claim, quote it, and show your work. If you cannot, then the “nothing to engage with” line is simply you announcing that you prefer vibes and diagnoses to reading.
And the “PS” is the cherry on top. You call someone a narcissist, they respond, and you say, “Aha, replying proves it.” That is a self sealing insult, not an argument. It cannot be refuted because you have defined refutation as evidence of guilt. There is a word for that kind of reasoning, and it is not “science”.
1) Charles Moser (2010) — “Blanchard’s Autogynephilia Theory: A Critique” (Journal of Homosexuality)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20582803/
2) Julia M. Serano (2010) — “The Case Against Autogynephilia” (International Journal of Transgenderism)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15532739.2010.514223
3) Julia Serano (2020) — “Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ‘embodiment fantasies’ model” (The Sociological Review)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0038026120934690
4) Julia M. Serano & Jaimie F. Veale (2022, e-pub; 2023 issue) — “Autogynephilia Is a Flawed Framework…” (Archives of Sexual Behavior)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36066682/
5) Talia Mae Bettcher (2014) — “When Selves Have Sex: what the phenomenology of trans sexuality can teach about sexual orientation” (Journal of Homosexuality)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24295078/
Julia Serano? Really?
What about Andrea Long Chu?
Seriously, what you consider scholarship is truly pitiable: more over inflated ego trying to justify telling women to move over for you.
They won’t.
Nor will I.
PS, good job refuting the accusation of narcissism 😂 😂
As someone who used to be a TERF before I came to understand reason, I couldn't agree more. Excellent post. I spent many many years in TERF circles eating up their regurgitated propaganda. I know exactly what makes them tick and its a perceived victimhood supremacy they own. I find it so funny and ironic that most of them are so gung-ho about single sex spaces while sharing every aspect of their lives with abusive and misogynistic men. I eventually grew out of that phase and started listening to trans people instead of just talking about them and lo and behold I learned something new. Anyway, just popped in to say great article, thanks for writing. 🫶🏻
You think all TERFs share their lives with abusive and misogynistic men? What on earth have you that idea?
Your essay is all projection and overgeneralization. You act like trans people are automatically superior just for transitioning, and assume anyone who disagrees is secretly jealous of your “audacity.” Maybe try asking TERFs why instead of just writing your manifesto to your echo chamber.
For instance, you could ask me—right here, right now—“Are you jealous of my audacity? Are you hostile? If so, why?” But of course, that would completely undermine your thesis.
What a load of self-aggrandising codswallop to try to justify your attempts to deny reality in the most offensive way. You were, are, and always will be a man.
Alright, the algorithm dropped me here because it knew that I love my trans friends 🩷🩵🤍
Many of these comments are genuinely depressing. Trans people save lives, including (but by no means limited to) their own. I’m cis and I do admit to some misplaced jealousy, you’re a lot better at refusing to let anyone tell you how your body should look that I am. People like you give me hope when my body doesn’t feel like it belongs to me (yet) because I can’t afford to let it tell my story the way I want. One day!
(Clarification: I am safe now, I just really want a tattoo after surviving a couple horrors a few years back)
The algorithm has had one good day, then.
I'd not call it misplaced, for what it's worth. It took me fifty six years to work out the body was mine to make decisions about, and I spent nearly all of that waiting for permission to arrive from somewhere else. It never does. You just start.
Get the tattoo when you can. Glad you're here to be wanting one.
That's a proveable lie.
A good read and a good reminder. And I will just remind trans people not to look at being transgender as a curse. Earlier in life I think that's what I saw it as. A burden. A monkey on my back. Now that is not the case. Substack is dangerous TE*RF infested waters, and the comments bear that out. Same old same old. In the same way they hang on to AGP and sexual fetishes as the only way to approach understanding trans people is, they rush to soothe themselves and get there anti-trans fix any way they can. We are like a drug or soothing balm to some people. It's an obsession, where they get to declare their values, the way THEY live their lives, and protect the box that they're in. And as you say their cage is unlocked. They live in chains with the keys 🔐 🗝️ lying around in plain sight. I think the obsession with trans people is a pathology. Keep on truckin' 🚛🚒. Without them.
I really don’t want to bother anyone.
I just want to live my life in peace.
I’d like to use the ladies bathroom, because there’s more stalls.. I can’t use the urinals since surgery.
If I use the men’s locker room. I’ll cause a scene.
I could care less about being a political football.
You ladies need to realize that a trans woman is your best friend. Not your enemy. We can protect you from the predators.. not be one. I don’t even have the equipment to bother you anymore. I just wanna be left alone.
Left alone is such a small ask, and somehow the hardest one to get taken seriously. You were never the political football. You're just someone who'd like to use a toilet without anyone writing a think piece about it.
We don’t hate you, and we are absolutely NOT jealous of you. We just don’t want men in our private single - sex spaces. Why is that so hard to understand?
It isn't hard to understand. I understood it the first time anybody said it to me. Understanding what somebody wants isn't the same as being handed an argument for it.
Take the biology for nothing. I was born male, I don't produce ova, no surgeon altered that, and I've never claimed otherwise on this page or any other. It's yours, keep it.
Now look at what it doesn't do. "We don't want men in our private single sex spaces" is a statement about what you want. The question is what the actual risk is, how often harm has actually occurred and at what rate, set against what the exclusion actually costs the people excluded. That's a sum with numbers on both sides of it. A preference isn't a sum, and the moment the case rests on not wanting to, safety has stopped being the reason, because safety reasoning is comparative by its nature.
And set the hate and the jealousy aside entirely, since you've raised them and I'll grant you both for nothing. Suppose there's none of either in it anywhere. The argument is exactly where it was. Somebody still has to get me from she is male to therefore she is kept out of the changing room in Marks and Spencer, shown rather than asserted. I've been asking a while now.
Let me rephrase it. We will not, cannot, have men who claim to be women in single sex spaces. We will not and do not allow it, and it harms many more females in far more substantial ways than it may possibly distress a tiny minority of actual transwomen (identity is not biology, even with cosmetic surgery). On balance, the potential harm is far greater. No transwoman is ever going to be in danger of being forcibly impregnated. Ever.
I still am baffled at how this same kind of argument isn’t leveled against “race” which is TRULY ambiguous, since there is no hard biological line. You are human or not human. You are a human male or a human female. Race IS a truly social construct with no basis in biology. BUT - I can’t (that is, not legally allowed, forget about the societal constraints ) identify as black, or Asian, or Australian aborigine. Yet we treat “race” as immutable. I am an American mutt, 5-7 generations in the melting pot of America. I can’t decide to be another ethnicity, even if I learn another language, dress differently, immerse myself in a foreign culture. I will always be an American mutt. And for that matter I will always be a woman (adult human female). I’m assuming therefore you are a transwoman - that is, literally, “trans” (not) / woman (adult human female). Since there are only two sexes that means you are an adult human male.
As for using women’s single sex spaces - sure, if you are sufficiently medically altered to “pass” then I guess you can get away with it. But that extreme level of medical and surgical intervention is probably sufficient to also render you incapable of raping and impregnating females, so I won’t stop you. But you are also living a lie. How can that become equivalent to living (“your”) truth? If all truth is subjective then we have no way to meaningfully relate to one another.
You've attempted the sum, which is more than anybody else on this page has managed. So let's take it seriously.
Look at what it's made of, though. Many more females. Far more substantial. On balance, far greater. Those are all quantities, and not one of them has a number behind it. Potential harm is doing the heaviest lifting, because potential has no ceiling. You can put any magnitude you like on the side of the ledger you already favour and nobody can audit it. A sum with no figures in it isn't a sum, it's the shape of one.
The impregnation point I'll grant you in full. No trans woman is ever going to be forcibly impregnated. True, and I'd not wriggle out of it. It also isn't the thing at issue in a changing room in Marks and Spencer, and a harm I can't suffer tells you nothing whatever about the rate at which I cause one. The men who do what you're describing were never once stopped by a sign on a door.
On race, you've aimed at a claim I'm not making. I don't say I changed sex. I was born male, I don't produce ova, no surgeon altered that, and I've conceded it every single time it has been put to me. If the argument needs me to be claiming otherwise, it has got nobody to argue with.
Then there's your last paragraph, which I'd ask you to read again. Sufficiently altered to pass, and that level of intervention probably renders you incapable of the harm, so you won't stop me.
That's a capacity test. It turns on what a particular person can do rather than on what they are. It is exactly the sort of criterion I asked you for, and you've handed it over yourself. It also means your first paragraph has gone. We will not, cannot, have men in single sex spaces has become we will, where the risk isn't there. Both cannot be your position, and the second is the better of the two by a distance.
Living a lie I'd hand straight back. I've never claimed all truth is subjective, or that woman means whatever I fancy on a given morning. What I want is to buy a lipstick in Boots, use the lavatory while I'm in there and go home. That isn't a metaphysics. It's a shopping trip.
ok you got me on a couple points - one, no I don't have data to back it up, I'm not a researcher and I don't have the resources or the bandwidth necessary to compile that kind of data. Yes, I do refer to potential, and that potential could, potentially, be limitless. I should probably have used a better word. I suspect that your lived experience growing up male is significantly different than my lived experience growing up female, and I have very specific experiences that have underscored how easily a male can physically overpower a female - not to mention the sheer social force (power? gravitas? the best word escapes me) that has historically been available to males vs females.
I had initially posted the first comment ages ago, and I don't remember the entirety of the article, my apologies. A changing room at a clothing store is not the same as a shelter for women, or a women's club, or even a locker room at a health club.
In retrospect, the whole controversy has reached levels of hysteria that makes it hard to hear anyone's reasonable voice.
I brought up the race comparison because I've always found that in particular to be a similar kind of self identification that is routinely rejected by the trans allies I've discussed this with -it's considered "apples to oranges" by them, but I think it's much more similar than it is different.
There is probably a better way to deal with the whole bathroom problem, and remove it from the greater issue of whether or not to treat trans as a civil rights issue - maybe it should be treated more like a religion. We certainly don't have problems with different religious groups using public lavatories.
You've given more ground in one comment than this page has seen in months, and I'd rather say so than pretend I hadn't noticed.
The physical point I grant you completely, and I'm not going to poke at whatever is sitting behind it. Men can overpower women, easily and routinely, and the social weight you're reaching for is real as well. I've stood on both sides of that one and the difference is not subtle. None of it is in dispute between us.
What is in dispute is what it licenses at a particular door, and you have just answered that yourself. A changing room in a clothes shop is not a shelter, not a women's club, not a locker room. That was the whole of my position. Once the doors get looked at one at a time rather than as a single switch, I am not sure we are arguing any more.
On race, the comparison only bites if my claim is that I have changed category by announcing it. It isn't, and it never has been. I say I am male, I say I transitioned, and I would like to buy a lipstick and use the lavatory while I am in there. Take the declaration out of my mouth and the analogy has nothing left to attach itself to.
And then you went and made my argument for me at the end. Religion is entirely self declared. Nobody is asked to prove it, nobody could, it changes nothing whatever about a body, and it carries real legal protection and a great deal of accommodation besides. The lavatories have never once been a problem. If an unverifiable claim about oneself can be protected that thoroughly without the roof coming in, then unverifiability was never the objection.
The hysteria line I will agree with without any qualification at all. It is most of why I write any of this down.
Shush thicc ‘in the head’ one.. no such thing as cis , and the term queer is a disgusting slur which NO you haven’t ’reclaimed’ . It is male and female and l g or b. Thanks
Course it did .
Would be nice to hear back. :-)
It's a creative twist: "cutting off healthy body parts and having a festering hole where your penis used to be" is just so seductive to the rest of us. We are so jealous of such a freedom from convention! Shaving off a third of your projected lifespan with body modification via drugs and surgeries is so endlessly attractive. I could go on... :-)
Nobody is trying to take anything away from you.
There is not a finite amount of womanhood in the world, and if Stevie or any other transwoman gets some you get less.
It's not appropriation. It's not some style choice.
It's not like transwomen are walking along gorging on "male-pie" and decide hey I'm going to have me some of that "woman-pie" too!
We have to give up all of the male-pie, just to get a small slice of woman-pie.
Why? Because we are allergic to the male-pie. It's slowly poisoning us.
We are dying inside. We transition to live.
You say you want basic respect for your lived realities. Why will you not provide that in return? Why is it that the universal message from the "TERF" community is "Be gone. Out! Leper! Unclean!"?
Trans Identifying Males (TIMs) absolutely do steal from women!!!!
Stop pretending this is about how men dress or what they call themselves
If you have to be constantly disingenuous to defend your position, maybe it’s a crap position
your fight to let ‘some’ men take safety and things from women, allows ANY and ALL men to take safety and things from women
-men can now enter, at will, women’s bathrooms, change rooms, rape crisis centers, DV shelters, etc
-men and boys can steal sports and other opportunities from women and girls
-imprisoned women are forced to be locked in with violent male criminals
-lesbians can’t have penis free clubs, dating apps, events, etc
-TIMS are more violent as a group than other men, and their crimes are recorded and reported as being committed by ‘women’
-theres more, but I know you know