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Transgenderism’s Test of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The United States is losing its mind. Dishonesty permeates every facet of life here, from academia’s illicit courtship with postmodernism to corporate buzzspeak to a journalism dominated by clickbait–to say nothing of political discourse. What has been going on since long before “I didn’t inhale” has culminated in “there is no pandemic” and since we accepted it then, we have little excuse to stop accepting it now. “Trans women are literally women” is but a symptom of this disease.

While the entire Western world is fucked in its own ways, I’ve come to understand–through travels abroad, conversations with international friends and now my experiences with presses and agents overseas–that much of the world is not as fucked as we are. Even in nations where the local conservative parties are more liberal than our liberal parties, people do not feel compelled to pretend that “trans women are women.” 

Many have noted the similarities between the language of modern transgender activism and the truth-obfuscating “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s 1984. Conversion therapy has come to mean not turning gay kids into straight ones. Taking on a practiced and purchased persona has come to mean becoming your “true, authentic self.” A surgery to remove body parts is described as a way to make someone feel “whole.” “Trans women are women” is the new two plus two equals five. And whole news stories, WordPress blogs, Reddit forums, and even inconvenient scientific studies have gone straight down the “memory hole,” lest someone get exposed to the wrong thoughts. 

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a linguistic theory that has gone in and out of favor over time, argues that language influences or even dictates thought. Like other feminists, I’ve observed the erasure of the word “woman” and watched that translate to an inability to speak about an entire class of people, leading directly to an inability to pursue activism on behalf of that class. This isn’t hypothetical; it’s playing out in the real world. Male activists are infiltrating and shutting down rape support groups, crisis centers, feminist consciousness-raising spaces, reproductive rights campaigns and even resources for pregnant women in the name of reducing their feelings of “exclusion.”

What I hadn’t thought as much about was how language might foster delusion in mentally-ill trans people themselves.

A recent conversation with a native Japanese speaker showed me that the English language presents the “perfect storm” for the transgender lobby’s insistence upon “preferred pronouns.”  In her language, she said, it isn’t possible to demand that others use particular pronouns because pronouns don’t exist.

The romance languages, like French and Spanish, also muddle the pronoun issue, but for the opposite reason. They have pronouns for everything. People have genders, objects have genders, concepts have genders, and even adjectives reflect the gender of other parts of speech. The word for “it” sometimes means “he” or “they” but not “she”–how would you affirm a non-binary femme in such a language? Choosing a pronoun isn’t straightforward; it’s subject to myriad and complex rules. The person being referred to is but one factor and not always the most important one.

In English, however, pronouns exist and they refer primarily to people. It’s easy to insist that others call you “she,” because “she” is a word and it isn’t being used so indiscriminately that it loses its “affirming” potency. When someone calls you she, they must think you’re a woman!

Though there’s a widespread belief that late-transitioning, primarily-straight men are “faking it,” my ex does believe that he is a woman. Yes, it’s hard to imagine the cognitive dissonance. And yes, the carefully-curated selfies, the cries of “exclusion” and the frequent identity-related meltdowns reveal a deep insecurity around identity. But delusions are a thing, however little sense they sometimes make. He also experienced delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution (more in my book–coming soon!).

And here’s the thing–as he received more and more “affirmation” from others–from friends using “preferred pronouns” to social media accolades–his delusions grew worse, not better. 

Suppose the idea that one is the opposite sex is a straightforward break with reality, not qualitatively different from other types of delusions. Perhaps, then, it doesn’t promote the health of a transgender person to “affirm” his gender, any more than it promotes the health of a schizophrenic to “affirm” the microchip a foreign government implanted in his brain.

Statistically, the numbers of transgender people are climbing exponentially in the U.S. and the U.K., both English-speaking countries. Anecdotally, though we don’t have sufficient studies, that isn’t happening in Japan or much of Western Europe. Are English-speaking people with gender dysphoria sicker than their counterparts who speak other languages? Could we be watching the power of language to influence thought, particularly in the vulnerable?

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When Your Values Are at Odds with Transition

One thing that happens when you write a memoir is that your values become abundantly clear.

A memoir, even when it’s about the author’s encounter with a difficult person, is about the author herself. It won’t resonate with readers if it’s a just list of complaints about someone else.

If you’re doing your job while you’re composing a memoir, you’re asking yourself:

  • Why did that one incident, in particular, bother me?
  • What was it I found odd about the other person’s stance that I couldn’t quite put my finger on?
  • What was I trying to say in that argument we had?
  • What couldn’t I abide, in the end, and why?
  • What final straw broke the camel’s back?

What’s become clear is that my values were at odds with my ex’s. Specifically, my values were at odds with the values he acquired as he became involved in transgender activism.

My ex likes to twist any value difference between us into “transphobia” on my part. For him, it simply isn’t possible to hold legitimate values at odds with his own. There are only illegitimate ones, namely, conservatism and aversion to difference. Thus, if I’m not on board I must be a conservative and a person who was “disgusted” with his presentation.

It’s a bald-faced lie. I vote democrat. I’m 100% pro-choice (unlike my ex, who once said pregnant minors should have to consult their parents before getting an abortion). I recognize and sympathize with the oppression of minorities. I’m in a same-sex relationship. I support the right of everyone to love who they love and wear what they want. I’ve dated “girly” boys and “manly” women (for lack of better terms). I supported my ex’s identity in many ways, before he lost his mind, from buying him clothes and manicures to role-playing in bed.

So no.

I am not a conservative and never have been. My ex’s values changed, not mine. The values I hold, which I’m about to share, were once his, too. Or at least he said they were.

These are the values I hold that interfered with our relationship after he began to pursue transition:

  • Honesty. I couldn’t keep lying to someone and for someone. I couldn’t keep moving my mouth in the service of dishonesty without feeling dirty and compromising my soul. I couldn’t keep biting my tongue and censoring myself to keep from blowing over someone else’s house of cards. I intend to live and speak the truth, however inconvenient for others.
  • Body-positivity. It’s kind of a dumb modern phrase, but the concept is sound. It’s better to love your body than to hate it. It’s better to treat it kindly than to harm it.  It’s better to age gracefully than to pursue youth and beauty. A person’s value comes from his mind and his ethics, not in the conformity of his body to some standard. Physicality is superficial. A failure to come to terms with one’s physicality is a failure of mental health because it’s unsustainable: our bodies deteriorate and forever move toward an undesirable state. There is no a way to “support” a transitioning person without encouraging or condoning his bodily hatred. And because I’m not religious, bodily hatred is self-hatred. There aren’t “good” reasons to hate your body, and I can’t, in good conscience, support someone’s idea that there are and watch him injure himself in the service of that self-hatred.
  • Emotional intimacy. You aren’t being emotionally intimate when you’re lying or being lied to. You can’t become close when you’re evading topics because you don’t want to hurt feelings or you fear increasingly frequent outbursts of temper. When calm and rational discussions must end because of thought-terminating phrases about “triggering” and “feeling safe,” real communication has been lost.
  • Physical intimacy. This is threatened when one partner’s addiction to role-playing supersedes normal sex. It’s threatened when one partner removes and suppresses the sex characteristics that turn the other partner on. It’s threatened when one partner’s self-centeredness precludes his interest in pleasing his partner.  It’s threatened by the decreased sexual response that are a side-effect of hormones. It’s threatened by surgery.
  • A tremendous respect for female people. It is simply not possible to value women in all our uniqueness while defending or accepting the idea that we are nothing but a collection of indistinct traits, indistinguishable from kangaroos, smoke and mirrors, and men who play Grand Theft Auto and jack off to tranny porn. Women are people who are shaped by intense shared experiences from childhood sexualization to the need to subdue rivers of blood to the knowledge that a new human being can emerge from our bodies if we’re not careful. This is not trivial.  One cannot respect women while subordinating women to whichever men utter the right incantations.

I won’t apologize for valuing honesty, body-positivity, intimacy and a respect for female people.

Instead, opponents need to explain why dishonesty, self-hatred, a compromised ability to participate intimately with a partner and a hatred of women must become a necessary consequence of gender dysphoria.

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The Emasculation Fetish versus Womanhood

My ex-husband was aroused by wearing lingerie.

I used to refrain from saying that. First, I refrained in order to be respectful of his privacy. But then he decided to make a three-year post-divorce mission of dragging my name through the mud on social media. He decided to reveal my alleged dirty laundry–like that I called him a “tranny”–without revealing his dirty laundry–like that the entire reason I called him a “tranny” was that he requested it, in the bedroom, for a sexual thrill (I had used the word zero times before that request, despite his tossing in a completely fictional story that suggests otherwise). So I’m less motivated to respect his privacy now.

Then, I refrained from saying it because  he’s a “trans woman” and it’s become strictly verboten–illegal, in some places–to say things about “trans women” that they don’t want said. Even if they’re true. Even if the “trans women” themselves said the same thing last week on transgender forums.

My ex-husband was also aroused by being called insulting names, like “bitch” and “slut” alongside the aforementioned “tranny.” He was also aroused by being tossed around and mistreated in the bedroom.

He was also aroused by “sissification” porn, a genre in which men are forced into wearing women’s clothes as a humiliating punishment for some offense.

Notice the conflation of the feminine with the demeaning.

My ex-husband went on to become a prominent transgender activist in my area who loves to repeat lines like “being transgender isn’t a sexual thing.”

A man once wrote to Dan Savage and said that he wanted his girlfriend to squeeze his testicle really hard until it popped.

Emasculation fetish is a powerful thing.

There’s a paraphilia called “cuckolding” in which men like to watch their wives have sex with other men. Judging by their posts on “cuckolding” forums, they especially enjoy it if the other man is extra masculine and virile and if he manhandles the wife. Cuckold-fetishists like being tied up and otherwise prevented from interfering with the sex they’re watching. There’s a strong element of being “shown up” by this “better,” more alpha male.

That’s reflected in the non-fetish, general dictionary definition of the term:

Cuckold: a man whose wife is sexually unfaithful, often regarded as an object of derision.

In biology, it applies to male animals who “unwittingly invest parental effort in offspring that are not genetically their own.” In other words, a sucker. A fool. Emasculated.

On a cuckolding forum recently, a man expressed his glee at discovering that his pregnant wife’s “bull”–a name given to the man who has sex with the wife–is HIV positive. The cuckold fetishist has been “rock hard” ever since, he enthused, to know that “only a thin strip of latex” protects his wife and child from wasting of an incurable, debilitating disease.

Misogyny is behind the emasculation fetish.

It is misogyny to conflate “female” with “demeaning.” It is misogyny to call your wife’s lover a “bull,” as if she is some animal you’re arranging to have bred. It is misogyny to get a hard-on at the thought of infecting your wife with a virus.

Emasculation might seem, at worst, like a disrespect of men rather than of women. But why is it disrespectful to treat men like women? Because of misogyny.

The power of the emasculation fetish comes from the indignity of being “feminized.” Women are for abusing, not men! Imagine wanting to be as worthless as a woman!

Around one-quarter of men who die of autoerotic asphyxiation–that is, choking yourself while masturbating–are cross-dressed when they are discovered. (1 2 3 4 5 6)

The risk of being caught dead and cross-dressed is a sexual thrill for some men. It’s the titillating fear of emasculation.

Studies have shown that cross-dressing has a high comorbidity with other fetishes and paraphilias. Almost as if it is a sexual thing!

On Reddit, a man once posted that he wanted a surgeon to remove his testicles and replace them with fake testicles. He frequented transgender forums, for what it’s worth.

Are you detecting a trend?

Do I think my ex-husband is a terrible person for acquiring an emasculation fetish? Do I think he’s going to choke himself to death or jack off to exposing another person to injury? Do I think he has ten other paraphilias?

Not necessarily.

Am I a “kink-shamer?” Much as I hate that word, no. No, I am not.

That’s why for a time, I called my ex-husband a “tranny” and a “bitch” and threw him around in the bedroom at his request.

I’ve indulged my share of kinks. I’ve had my share of kinks. As long as people act out their kinks with consenting partners, and without hurting anyone else, it’s not really my bag to call out kink behavior.

But do I think that fetishistic behavior in males equates to womanhood?

No. It does not.

If anything, it illuminates the very maleness of the thing.

Thought experiment: How many women do you know who get wet at the thought of having their ovaries removed?

“Fetishism is seen almost exclusively in men,” says the DSM, the health care field’s authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders, which include fetishes and paraphilias.

Getting off on misogyny is not the same thing as being female.

It’s practically the opposite.

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Shout Out to the Asexuals

There’s an “asexual” in my class and one in the Pride group where I work.

It’s easy to be snarky. There are so many snarky things to say about asexuals:

  • Asexuality isn’t a sexual orientation. There are gay men who don’t want sex, lesbians who don’t want sex, bi people who don’t want sex and straight people who don’t want sex. Asexuals know they have an orientation apart from “asexual;” that’s why they invented the words heteroromantic, homoromantic et al. It isn’t necessary to create a new identity every time someone wants or doesn’t want something.
  • Asexuals aren’t an oppressed minority. No one who might hire you or rent you an apartment can tell whether you like sex or not. It isn’t stamped on your face. Maybe your asexuality manifests in your being perpetually single (though it needn’t), but being single is something everyone, gay, straight or bi, is at some point (and often over and over again).
  • Because of all this, asexuals who join the LGBTQ+ movement look a lot like just another flavor of straight person who inexplicably seems to crave queer cred.
  • Almost every “asexual” I’ve ever met has changed their mind within a few months to a couple of years. It’s almost as if they were going through the perfectly normal experience of not being tortured with constant arousal and/or finding other things in life to prioritize.

But goddess love ’em, in the end I believe asexuals are reacting to a toxic sexual culture.

They are mostly young, mostly female, and mostly heterosexual. The messages they’re receiving from society in the age of social media and “sex-positive” wokeness are absolutely nauseating to anyone with a shred of decency at their core. The males in their age range are completely unsuitable for having sex with. It’s always been a challenge for women to find caring and reciprocal partners, but female pleasure doesn’t even seem to be on the collective radar anymore.

Not having sex under these circumstances is the most rational response a woman can have.

Here’s what a sexual culture that’s toxic to women looks like:

  • This video of a bunch of inexcusably clueless and selfish men tee-heeing about how they can’t be bothered to make their partners orgasm.
  • Porn that’s more violent than ever and more ubiquitous than ever.
  • A cultural stigmatization of “kink-shaming” that has bafflingly come to mean that committing cruel and unusual sex practices is preferable to questioning cruel and unusual sex practices.
  • An atmosphere where a high school teacher friend of mine found a girl crouching under and chained to a boy’s desk, surrounded by a number of other boys, in the middle of class. When questioned, the boys insisted they were all having a consensual BDSM relationship.
  • A world where Teen Vogue advises teenage girls (who have probably never even had decent “regular” sex, see point one) on how to take a dick up the butt. It was bad enough when boys, patriarchy, movies, music and porn were doing that, but now trusted adults posing as sex educators are doing it too.
  • A world where a teen magazine wouldn’t be caught dead teaching boys (much less girls) to perform cunnilingus well. Where’s all that sex-positivity now? Oh, right. It was only ever male-orgasm-positivity after all.

Who can blame a young woman for feeling turned off in a world like this?

The problem is that “asexuality” is a short-term and individualistic solution to a systemic problem. My classmate writes poetry on her “mixed-orientation” relationships, whereby men pressure her for sex and she resists it, and the whole thing is presented as some interesting journey of divergent souls finding a middle ground in a complicated world.

My classmate believes that unenjoyable, coerced sex is normal, and that she’s the unusual one. The “other.” The one whose “identity” requires naming. The one whose quirk requires working around.

It would be better for her soul, and for the soul of society, if she could embrace and thereby spread the absolute normalcy of not wanting to make oneself available for abuse.

But that’s too much to ask of a young woman. It’s easier to take on a quirky identity than to understand that almost every male around you is broken.

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Queer Theory Glossary

In case you’ve had trouble keeping up with the spate of new queer theory terms, here’s a handy glossary for your reference.

Queer – A straight person with an interesting haircut.

Non-binary/genderqueer – A chubby young female, typically 16-28, who has dyed her hair blue. Is probably what was once called a lesbian, but she doesn’t like that word.

Lesbian – A man in his 40’s who works in IT and started wearing his wife’s panties last year.

Transgender – A person whose aversion to society’s made-up gender stereotypes should be taken way more seriously than everyone else’s aversion to society’s made-up gender stereotypes.

Pansexual – Someone who likes men who dress in masculine clothes and men who dress in feminine clothes.

TERF – A mature woman who goes about her business without thinking about men enough. The party that should be held responsible when a redneck man beats up a male prostitute.

Cis – Someone who daydreams wistfully about putting on appropriate clothing and showing their genitals to the doctor.

Sexual orientation – Bigotry in the form of having opinions about whose genitals you like to touch.

Intersectionality – Remembering to include a variety of different types of men in your feminism.

Transmisogyny – When straight white men can’t get other people to say the things they want them to say, and it feels worse than any form of oppression anyone else on the planet has ever experienced.

Ze/Hir – Pronouns you can request to disrupt college classes when you haven’t done the assigned work.

Gay – A passé identity that isn’t cool enough anymore and needs rebranding.

Asexual – A person who feels left out.

Intersex – Probably all of us. I mean, you’ve never had a chromosome test, have you. HAVE YOU?