Women Born Transsexual

From The New York Times:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/kavanaugh-fbi-supreme-court-republicans.html

Republicans want to ram Kavanaugh through no matter how many women object.

By Michelle Goldberg
Oct. 4, 2018

From Slate:  https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/10/transgender-men-sexism-gullible-girls.html

Anti-trans advocates claim we’re weak and gullible—like girls.

By Evan Urquhart
Oct 03, 2018

This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here.

Until recently, most attacks on the transgender community attempted to stoke fears of transgender women. By portraying trans women as unnaturally and dangerously masculine—imposters at best and sexual predators at worst—anti–trans rights groups have sought to drum up opposition to trans people in public bathrooms and use anti-trans sentiment as a wedge against Democrats. Trans men have proved more difficult to demonize, since cis men don’t generally fear men with a transition history in their bathrooms or locker rooms. So, for the most part, they have been ignored.

This indifference is starting to change. Anti-trans propagandists have begun to focus more on trans men and boys—perhaps in reaction to the success in court of transgender boys like Gavin Grimm, Ashton Whitaker, and Max Brennan, each of whom won the right to equal treatment at school. But rather than painting trans men as predators, anti-trans activists portray us as victims, led astray by peers and fundamentally incapable of knowing our own minds.

Ironically, the attitude that trans men are really damaged, naïve, easily led women seems to have begun on websites with an ostensibly feminist ethos, such as 4thWaveNow and Transgender Trend. It subsequently crossed into the mainstream with the publication of a paper by Lisa Littman of Brown University in August. Littman studied the attitudes and beliefs of parents who frequented anti-trans websites and had a child between the ages of 11 and 27 who, they believed, had falsely claimed to be transgender. A total of 82.8 percent of these parents reported that their child was assigned female at birth. And although Littman referred to the children as adolescents and young adults, or AYAs, she repeatedly quoted parents who use female pronouns and refer to them as their daughters. Sympathetic media accounts have echoed this language, referring to the kids under discussion as daughters and girls, and echoing the parents’ belief that media and peers who promote trans acceptance are turning these “daughters” into trans men.

“If your teenage daughter suddenly declares herself transgender, should you assume she’s mature enough to make decisions that will permanently affect her health, fertility, and future?” fretted Jillian Kay Melchior in the Wall Street Journal in one typical response on the right. In another, the Economist’s article on Littman’s research concluded with a warning that “squashing research risks injuring the health of an unknown number of troubled adolescent girls.”

We’ve learned that no matter how young trans girls are, they’re never too young or too vulnerable for the anti-trans camp to portray them as dangerous and predatory, too much of a risk to cis girls to be treated with dignity and respect. Now, it seems, no matter how old transgender men are—remember, Littman’s study included an adult of 27 years old!—we’re not old enough to make health decisions for ourselves, or know our own minds. This creepy suggestion of susceptibility to peer influence in trans boys suggests that trans men must not be allowed to access medical treatment for gender dysphoria and that any act of advocacy on behalf of trans youth has the power to poison young minds, turning weak-willed girls into trans boys.

That is incredibly dangerous and also sexist as hell. The stereotype that women are unable to reason or know their own minds isn’t new. It was used to reject women’s suffrage, on the basis that it was useless to give to women the vote, since they’d only vote however their husbands told them to. (By this logic, married men had two votes, an unfair advantage over single men.) Women were kept from the workplace under the theory that their biological and emotional weakness made them unsuited for labor, and arguments about women’s emotional instability were used to prevent them from seeking public office. Now, these same stereotypes about the dimness of women have been repurposed to suggest that transgender men shouldn’t be believed when we speak about the truths of our own lives and that we must be protected at all costs from the freedom to determine our own paths.

Continue reading at:  https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/10/transgender-men-sexism-gullible-girls.html

From The Nation:  https://www.thenation.com/article/a-woman-can-never-be-likable-enough/

From an early age, we’re taught to please men. What if we got angry instead?

By Katha Pollitt
October 2, 2018

I really thought we had come farther. Even Barbie says it: Girls can do anything. After all, we now hold the majority of bachelors’ degrees, occupy half the seats in medical schools and law schools, run businesses and universities, and sit in Congress. There are even three of us on the Supreme Court. But if you ask why men still run the world, the answer you’ll get back isn’t sexual harassment, male violence, or discrimination—the mere mention of which is deeply unfair, to men. The explanation instead is still some variation of the one Lisa Belkin gave in The New York Times Magazine in 2003, when she profiled a bunch of Yale alumnae who had given up their big-time jobs to become stay-at-home wives: because we don’t want to. We’d rather be moms and have work-life balance and do yoga and make cookies. Remember how outraged people pretended to be when Hillary Clinton said she would rather practice her profession, which was law, than bake cookies? Those damn cookies. It’s not the baking that matters, it’s that you feel you have to do it: to be a good woman, to prove that even if you’re a brain surgeon you’re still just a mom at heart.

These are the rules of The Patriarchy that the #MeToo movement has exposed: the education, extracurriculars, service projects, credentials—they were never what being a girl was all about. Being a girl is about pleasing men: What they think of you and want from you and how you negotiate that in a world that does not want to hear about the darker side of what that can mean. You can be a world-class athlete, like those Olympic gymnasts, and still be molested by your doctor—and nothing will be done about it for years. You can be fantastically talented and lose your career if you don’t play along with Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves. You can get a unionized factory job with decent pay and still be groped and insulted by both your boss and your fellow workers. You can get straight As and a great job and still feel you have to give your date a blow job because he expects it, and it just seems simpler that way—and maybe safer, too. You wouldn’t want him to think you were a tease or a bitch. Because from the moment you were born, you were told in a thousand ways that men liking you was the real measure of your value in the world. And without even realizing you were doing it, you learned to make yourself likable. To attract men, to disarm them, to manage them, to comfort them.

This for me is the meaning of the Senate Judiciary Committee testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Whatever else a woman is—a PhD, a mother, a victim of a sex crime—the most important thing is that she be likable: attractive, relatable, unthreatening, nice. And Dr. Ford was so nice! Pretty—but not too pretty—educated, upper middle class, white, with glasses and a husband and kids and a house. She was just emotional enough—not detached, not “hysterical”—to conform to expectations about what a woman should look like when she tells the truth about being assaulted. She tried so hard to put those old reptiles on the committee at ease: joking in a self-deprecating way about her craving for caffeine, explaining the brain science behind her memories, as if they were all in the classroom together trying to figure out why a woman might remember that the two men assaulting her had laughed, but not remember how she got home that day.

Continue reading at:  https://www.thenation.com/article/a-woman-can-never-be-likable-enough/