Hitchhiker's Guide (Part II): Hitchhiking on Other People's Struggles

How Civil Rights Movements are Co-opted and Derailed by Gender Identity Ideology

The most important strategy employed by those promoting Gender Identity Ideology is hitchhiking on causes people admire.  This Part of the report discusses the hitchhiking on civil rights struggles that has been happening, and the devastating consequences for each of those struggles.

Attaching the “T” to the “LGB”.

Gender identity and homosexuality are very different concepts.  Gender ideologues reject reality, insisting that a male body is female, and vice versa.  They insist that others must join with them in disconnecting from reality, forfeiting their own rights accordingly.  (Those rights include the right to sex-segregated spaces and sports, for example, and will be explored in depth in this report.)  Gender ideologues actively encourage children to reject and medically alter their bodies.  

Those fighting for gay rights do none of those things.  They simply defend the right to have same sex relationships.  There is no rejection of physical reality involved, nor is there an insistence that others join in denying reality and forfeiting rights.   Gay rights activists accept and celebrate the bodies of people who are attracted to the same sex.  They don’t declare themselves or others as having been born in the wrong body or in need of surgical or chemical alteration.  They don’t encourage children to reject their sexual physiology and harm their bodies.  

The difference between being gay on the one hand and identifying as trans or nonbinary on the other, is made all the more stark by the fact that the central premise of Gender Identity Ideology directly contradicts the central premise of gay rights.  Insisting that sexual anatomy is irrelevant to a person’s sex inexorably leads to the denouncement of those who limit relationships to people who have the same sexual anatomy. 

Tying so-called “trans rights” to gay rights as if they go hand in hand makes no sense whatsoever.  But Gender Identity Ideology and those who promote it are not rational. Nor do they have any qualms about co-opting a progressive movement to advance a regressive agenda.

Despite fundamental differences and contradictions, Gender Identity Ideology is hitchhiking on the struggles of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals.   The “T+” has firmly attached itself to the “LGB.” 

• Most LGB organizations have been transformed into LGBT+ organizations which primarily focus on the “T+” (transgender, plus a slew of other gender identities.)

• Schools no longer teach units on “Sexual Orientation”; they teach units on “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” (SOGI).  Messages about sexual orientation now automatically encompass gender identity, without anyone examining whether that makes sense.  Children watch videos about bullied gay teens and the follow-up discussions focus on the need to use “she” and “her” for any boy who says he’s a girl.  “Gay Straight Alliances” are rebranded as “Gender and Sexuality Alliances” which focus primarily on trans and non-binary identities. Even books for preschoolers dutifully tack the T onto the LGB and present the gender identity flag alongside or sewn onto the Pride flag.  All of this delivers a clear message that rejecting your body and medically altering it are the same as loving your body and being proud of your sexual orientation.

• Legislation to ban “conversion therapy” has been passed in multiple U.S. statesand Canada in recent years, even though, thankfully, gay conversion therapy is now quite rare.  The real point of the legislation is to ban psychologists and others from helping trans and nonbinary-identifying people explore the roots of their discomfort with their bodies, roots that can include sexual trauma, homophobia, and mental illness. 

• The Equality Act in Congress properly adds homosexuality to the list of protected classes of people. But it also tacks “gender identity” onto the list. Gender identity is piggybacking on the legal merits of homosexual rights. 

• Any statement made about LGB, any events established by LGB, anything at all related to LGB is now deemed to be about T+ as well.  A recent Seattle Times article and video on National Coming Out Day was all about kids and staff at Seattle Schools who identify as trans or nonbinary, with barely a mention of homosexuals, even though the term “coming out” was coined to describe an LGB experience.  Banking on antipathy towards parents who opposed homosexuality in their children in the past, the article implies that any parent who questions a child’s desire to chemically or surgically alter their body for Gender Identity purposes creates an “unsafe” home environment.

• Those promoting Gender Identity ideology tell people that failing to support their agenda is equivalent to a refusal to support gay rights. As one gender ideologue put it in a Guardian article: “those who resisted gay rights have been damned. The same fate awaits bigots who dismiss trans rights.” 

By hitchhiking on the LGB, the T+ has gained an aura of civil rights respectability, easy passage of controversial bills, and immediate promotion in the schools and elsewhere without any meaningful discussion as to what Gender Identity Ideology is and the harm it does.

Ironically, that harm includes destroying the gains made by lesbians and gays over the past century.  Gender Identity Ideology and so-called “trans rights” directly contradict and undercut LGB rights.  Among other things:

• Homosexuals are now lambasted if they refuse to have relationships with members of the opposite sex.  Lesbians, in particular, are pressured to have sexwith men who say they’re women.  Under Gender Identity Ideology, these men are women, their penises are female organs, and any lesbian who disagrees has a “genital fetish”.  She is a bigot who deserves to be denounced and canceled.  In short, Gender Identity Ideology is elevating homophobia to new heights. 

This man claims to be a lesbian and wants actual lesbians to consider men like him to be in their dating pool. His statements exemplify the homophobia rampant in Gender Identity Ideology: “Gay men often pride themselves on being disgusted by vaginas. And the same goes for lesbian women with [regard to] penises….some queer people have built their sexual identities around these repulsions. But I don’t think they’re innate at all….Gay conversion therapy has been proven not to work, but you can unlearn your own prejudices. It just takes time and conscious effort.”

• Dating apps for lesbians are now heavily populated by men claiming to be women. Women have been banned for including in their profiles that they are “only seeking biological females.” Reportedly there are no longer any women-only lesbian bars in the U.S. and in other countries that once had them.  Places where women used to go to meet women are now full of men who say they’re women.

• Schools and other institutions teach that homosexuality is “same-gender attraction” rather than same-sex attraction—in other words that lesbian and gays are open to relationships with the opposite sex.

• Gender Identity Ideology is fueling what many in the LGB community call the “new Gay Conversion.”  Historically, when children uncomfortable with their sex went through puberty, the majority came to accept their bodies, and a high percentage turned out to be gay or lesbian.  By insisting that all children who reject their sex must be “affirmed” as trans or non-binary, schools and other institutions lock children into rejecting their bodies.  Social transitions lead to medical transitions. Thus, gender identity ideology is reducing the number of children who grow up to be gay or lesbian. 
  
  Indeed there was a dark joke among staff at Tavistock, one of the world’s most famous gender clinics for children, that “there would be no gay people left” as the result of transing children.  Numerous clinicians resigned from that clinic, citing among other things, concerns that children were identifying as trans and being medicalized as such due to homophobia.  It is instructive to readassessments of the clinic and the details of a judge’s decision in favor of Tavistock’s safeguarding lead Sonia Appleby who sued the clinic for undermining her attempts to protect children.   There was “systemic homophobia, meaning homophobia was not being identified in children and families, and led to gay and lesbian staff being subject to persecution,” said one assessment. 
  
  In a recent study of detransitioners (people who once identified as trans but no longer do) nearly 23% cited internalized homophobia and difficulty accepting themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual, as key to their decision to transition. They did so even though the survey they were responding to had no questions on this topic.  In a question about why they had transitioned, under “Other” they wrote things like: “Transitioning to male would mean my attraction to girls would be ‘normal’”; “being a ‘gay/trans man’ (female dating other females) felt better than being a lesbian, less shameful”; and “I felt being the opposite gender would make my repressed same-sex attraction less scary.”  Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian analyst and social worker who works with detransitioned young women reports that most now see themselves as butch lesbians.  “In our work together, they traced complex histories of coming to terms with their homosexuality,” Marchiano reports.  “Some faced vicious homophobic bullying before they announced their trans identification.”
  
  It should also be noted that medical intervention regularly leads to infertility.  Gender Identity Ideology is facilitating sterilization of gay people.

  In many schools being gay is reportedly now viewed as a cop-out by students—a failure to acknowledge one’s true trans or non-binary identity.  Kids discuss their identity labels, avoiding the dreaded label “cis”, i.e. not trans/nonbinary.  The number of students coming out as gay is dwindling, as trans/non-binary self-declarations steadily rise.  “Students are starting to come out in their gender (such as nonbinary or trans) more often than in their sexuality (such as gay or a lesbian),”  observes Brennon Ham, a trans-identifying health education specialist for Seattle Public Schools.

Other examples of Gender Identity Ideology undercutting LGB people include:

• Gender ideologues appropriating historical LGB heroes, falsely claiming that they were instead trans-identifying, based on flimsy analyses.

• Straight people appropriating the status of gay, when one person in a heterosexual couple declares themselves to be the other sex. 

• Smear campaigns against the LGB Alliance, an organization formed to defendLGB people. Gender ideologues failed in their quest to cancel the Alliance’s charitable status, when government officials determined that accusations against the Alliance were baseless. But the attacks continue. In April of 2022, the Alliance was awarded a grant to make a film celebrating the last 70 years of gay rights achievements, but the award was rescinded due to pressure from gender ideologues.

• Lesbians being harassed at and kicked out of Pride parades for peacefully carrying signs that say “Lesbians don’t have penises” and “Woman: Adult Human Female.”  A gay man being pushed out of a Pride march for wearing an LGB Alliance shirt.

• Few, if any resources, going to the expansion of LGB rights, such as campaigns to repeal laws criminalizing homosexuality in various countries.  Being gay can lead to the death penalty in Iran, for example, yet LGBT groups in places like the U.S. and the U.K. put limited resources into fighting those laws compared to resources given to the Gender Identity agenda.  (Interestingly, in 2015, 8 members of the women’s Iranian soccer team were reportedly men who had “transitioned to being women,” a step which is legal in Iran)

• Those fighting for LGB rights are undercut by the various messages put out by the T+ which are now assumed to reflect the views of all LGB people.  As the LGB Alliance put it recently regarding gender ideologues’ attacks on women’s sports: “As LGB people we agree wholeheartedly with @ChrissieEvert, @Martina, and @Daley_thompson.  The reputation of the gay rights movement is tarnished when activists that claim to represent us deny biological reality and undermine the sporting chances of girls and women.”

Groups like LGB Alliance have formed to defend gay rights from attacks. Gender Identity ideologues have smeared the Alliance, challenged its legal status, and successfully forced the withdrawal of a grant to the Alliance.

In short, if you think you are advancing LGB rights by supporting Gender Identity Ideology, think again.  You are actually dramatically undercutting the most fundamental gains made by lesbians and gays over the last century.  You are helping to reinstate vicious homophobia, which describes homosexuality as a “genital fetish.” You are denying gays and lesbians the right to assemble in same sex venues, to attend Pride Parades, to form organizations that defend same sex rights, and more.  You are endorsing the sterilization of homosexual youth and helping to trans away a generation of gays and lesbians.

These lesbians peacefully chanted factual non-hateful statements like “lesbians rights matter” and “pro woman, not anti-trans” at a 2019 Pride event in Lancaster, UK. The women were surrounded and drowned out by a crowd of trans activists. Confrontational individuals screamed in their faces, spat at them, and tried to grab their banners. Feeling unsafe they left, a fact celebrated at the main stage by an event organizer. The ouster of the lesbians was lauded by LGBT group reps on-line as a victory against hate. Read details here.

Glomming onto the Fight Against Sexism

Gender Identity Ideology presents itself as a feminist venture.  It talks about fighting gender oppression and otherwise coopts the language of the struggle against sexism and sexist stereotypes.  It has infiltrated major feminist and women-serving organizations, like the National Organization for Women (NOW) which considers trans-identifying men to be women and Planned Parenthood, which has become one of the top providers of so-called “gender-affirming” wrong-sex hormone therapy in the U.S.

Hitchhiking on anti-sexism struggles has been very useful in advancing Gender Identity Ideology.  Groups that would otherwise object to its agenda now loan it their social justice imprimatur instead.  Proposed new laws like the Equality Act move forward because progressives assume these will take women’s rights to a new level and they don’t think through the implications of the gender identity provisions.  Existing laws are reinterpreted through a gender identity lens and the general public assumes this is all part of a steady feminist march forward towards justice.

Gender Identity Ideology benefits greatly from hitching a ride on feminism.  But how does the struggle against sexism and sexist stereotypes fare in this arrangement?  Terribly.  As we’ve seen, outrageous redefinitions of the words “woman” and “man” lie at the heart of Gender Ideology.  So does an insistence that trans-identifying people must be exempt from policies that recognize differences between men and women, establish sex-based protections, and address historical discrimination against females. 

As Gender Ideology advances, we are witnessing cataclysmic erasure of most of the gains girls and women have made over the last one hundred years or longer.   We are experiencing reinstatement of the most abhorrent sexist stereotypes imaginable.  All of this hurts girls and women tremendously.  It also hurts boys and men, by imposing harmful sexist stereotypes on them.  Here are some glimpses of the devastation.

Women are being denied the right to women-only spaces, gatherings and groups. Men are now regularly present in women-only rape shelters, prisons, nursing facility wards, assisted living accommodations, homeless shelters, locker rooms, bathrooms,spas, support groups, rape survivor therapy groups, book clubs and social organizations.  Anything meant to be for only girls and women is now forced to include boys and men.  Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, while claiming to be female-only organizations, now include males as scouts and leaders, expel women who object, and place men in top positions. The author knows a woman who was severely criticized by her endometriosis support group for objecting to the inclusion of a man who says he’s a woman, even though endometriosis is a female-only disease. And while the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal did rule against trans-identifying Jessica Yaniv who had sued beauticians for refusing to wax his male genitals in their homes, it did so based on other factors (e.g. Yaniv’s racism), not because women have a right to exclude men from their homes. (The Tribunal considered Yaniv a woman, male sex organs notwithstanding.)

Let’s be clear about something: women don’t need to give a reason for wanting to set boundaries and be alone together as women.  If someone who is not a Native American wants to be part of a private Native American gathering, no one insists that they must be included.  No one points out that the person feels bad to be excluded, shares tribal values, or has experienced oppression. No one admonishes the tribe to be “inclusive” or claims that the person seeking entry is Native American based on self-identification.  Similarly, no one should chastise women for exercising their right to women-only spaces.  No one should be demanding that they make a case for why they get to have those spaces. 

Let’s also be clear that trans-identifying men are not being excluded because they’re “trans.”  They’re being excluded because they are men.  They must comply with sex-based restrictions like all other men and women.  They are not being denied rights.  By keeping trans-identifying men out of women’s spaces and positions, society is merely enforcing sex-based policies that apply to everyone.  It is simply defending women’s rights to women-only spaces. Note also that women objecting to Gender Identity Ideology’s agenda welcome trans-identifying women (who call themselves trans men) in women-only gatherings and venues, unless those women are taking testosterone and that is relevant, such as in women’s sports.

Nor is anyone arguing that all trans-identifying men are rapists or otherwise violent.  Just like they’re not arguing that every other man who’s excluded is a rapist or violent.  It is manipulative and specious of gender ideologues to claim otherwise. 

While women don’t need to give reasons for setting boundaries, there are many excellent ones. 

Female-only shelters, for example, give women who have been abused a safe placewhere they can let down their guard and heal.  Overwhelmingly sexual and other violence against women is perpetrated by men, and trans identification does notreduce rates of male criminality and violence.  Moreover, males can generally overpower females, because males are typically bigger and stronger.   Having naked men in the shower nearby, knowing that the next bed is occupied by a man, and just having men around, creates tremendous stress for many recovering women.  Some experience PTSD when in a confined space with men. 

There are also duplicitous men who will take advantage of policies that allow them access to women’s spaces.  Claims that this would never happen are ridiculous.  Anyone who has delved into domestic abuse and sexual assault issues at all knows the lengths to which sexual predators and other violent men will go to gain access to victims.  

It is outrageous that like other women’s rape shelters, the Vancouver Rape Shelter has lost funding as punishment for maintaining a male-free women’s shelter. The Vancouver Shelter has also endured hateful graffiti and a dead rat nailed to its door.   It is outrageous that President Barack Obama issued guidance that all HUD-funded women-only shelters must admit trans-identifying men and that President Biden set this in stone via Executive Orders within hours of entering office.  It is outrageous that a man who says he’s a woman has been hired as head of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre—a position that was advertised for women only—and that he has said that women uncomfortable with men in their shelter are bigots who will be re-educated during therapy.  “[I]f you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature….expect to be challenged on your prejudices,” Mridul Wadhwa warns. Many rape victims no longer see the Scottish rape shelters as a safe harbor because of this.

VancouverRapeRelief @VanRapeRelief

A follow up to the dead rat that was nailed to our door recently... this morning we found this writing scrawled across the windows of our storefront space that we use for support and training groups #Misogyny

Mridul Wadhwa, a man who says he’s a woman, heads the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Wadhwa warned women who need shelter “[I]f you bring unacceptable beliefs that are discriminatory in nature….expect to be challenged on your prejudices.” By “discriminatory”, he means not agreeing that men who announce themselves to be women are women.

Another place in which women are particularly vulnerable is prison.  An overwhelming majority of incarcerated women have endured violence and sexual abuse inflicted by men prior to their convictions.  Nonetheless, men who say they’re women are increasingly being placed in women’s prisons. 

Rapes and sexual assaults by male prisoners against women prisoners have already been reported in the U.K. Washington State, California, Illinois, New York, Texas, and other locations.  In Canada, twenty women who have been imprisoned, sent an open letter to a prison reform group, objecting to its support for trans-identifying men in women’s prisons.  “[O]ur sisters inside are being sexually assaulted by the male transfers aided by your efforts,” the women wrote. “Each one of us…has witnessed severe and harmful issues with the numerous and increasing male transfers to the women’s prisons. Every one of us knows a woman who has either been harassed, sexually harassed, assaulted, or sexually assaulted by a male transfer to a women’s prison.  For some of us, that woman is us.”  The letter continues, “We have friends, other sisters inside, who have been sexually assaulted by male transfers, some over extended periods of time.” It notes that harassment and assaults continue in half-way houses and that many women are too afraid to speak up because of fear of punishment, including impacts on parole. “Transgender self-identification is automatically believed without question while you continue to deny the violence against women that is taking place,” the letter said.   

In England and Wales, 81 of 163 transgender prisoners have at least one conviction for a sexual offense.  Nationally, in the U.S., 48.47% of male inmates who identify as women are in federal custody for sex offenses.  A 2009 study in California found that 20% of trans-identifying inmates had been convicted of sex offenses, and 50% of crimes against persons.  In Illinois a woman prisoner is suing the Department of Corrections alleging that she was raped by a man placed in her cell.  That man had a record of violent crime and had previously strangled a male cellmate to death.     

The Illinois prison officials do not deny that sex happened.  They say, however, that it was consensual, and that the woman suing them is lying about rape.  They even punished her for filing a complaint, denying her privileges like use of the gym and the ability to make a phone call, for two months.  It is extraordinary that she’s being so cavalierly declared a liar given the violent record of the man she is accusing.  It is even more extraordinary that prison officials don’t seem to realize that the concept of “consensual” sex is problematic in a setting where a woman is locked up with a violent man.  But all of this is par for the course as Gender Identity Ideology spreads through society—women’s rights and safety are completely ignored as the feelings of men seeking access to women’s rights and spaces are treated as sacrosanct.

Two women prisoners in New Jersey’s only female-only prison have been impregnated by male prisoners who claim to be women. Prison officials deem the sex that led to those pregnancies “consensual.” There are 27 trans-identifying men in with the 800 women in the prison, including men found guilty of horrific violence against women and children, such as “Perry Cerf” whose sadistic boastful descriptions of what he did to a woman he killed can be read here.

Men who claim to be women are now regularly placed in women’s prisons. Women prisoners see naked men in their showers. They find themselves locked in cells with men, including men convicted of violent crimes.

The prison system, courts, law enforcement and the news media all make a point of using female pronouns for trans-identifying men accused or convicted of assault.  This leads to bizarre statements like this one describing the sexual assault on a female prisoner by a male prisoner who claims to be a woman: “The complainant…felt something hard press against the small of her back…..She could see the defendant’s penis erect and sticking out of the top of her pants, covered by her tights.”  How in the world did the man’s penis end up sticking out of the top of this woman’s pants?  Oh wait, that’s right.  In the crazy world of Gender Identity, this man is a woman, for whom “she” and “her” is used, and his penis is a female organ.  The assault is recorded as having been done by a woman.

Getting a handle on the numbers of men moving into women’s prisons is difficult.  In the U.S., among other things, we face lawsuits from the Gender-Ideology-promoting ACLU seeking to block public access to that data when we file freedom of information act requests.  In Washington State, gender ideologues have even passed a bill to weaken the state freedom of information law making it more difficult for the public to obtain data on the number of men in women’s prisons.  Nonetheless, it is clear that there are already large numbers of men in women’s prisons, lots more are requesting to go there, and prison officials are increasingly required to place men with women because of Democratic Administration directives, lawsuits filed by the ACLU, and advocacy from so-called social justice groups.   

A new California law declaring gender identity rather than sex as the basis for prison placement went into effect on January 1st, 2021.  By April, 255 men had requestedtransfers from men’s prisons to women’s.  By mid-November, the number was 291 and 41 transfers had been approved.  The state is under pressure to transfer the men at a faster pace. 

Those figures are for California alone. And they don’t include newly convicted trans-identifying men, who want to go right into women’s prisons, bypassing male prisons altogether.  In Washington State, as of March 2021, a half dozen male prisoners had been moved to women’s prisons and another 150 were in line to move. There are 27 trans-identifying men housed with 800 women in New Jersey’s sole women-only prison.

An article from 2019, describes “a flurry of men” demanding access to women’s prisons, some successfully, and provides details on the conviction histories of some of the men involved.  Jordan Kuykendall, who now goes by the name Sora, stabbed his ex-girlfriend to death after she ended their abusive relationship, for example.  One of the men in the article (Andre Patterson who now goes by Janiah Monroe), with a long record of violence including strangling a male cell-mate to death, is the man accused of raping a woman in an Illinois prison, as discussed above.  The ACLU represented Patterson/Monroe, enabling him to be placed in the woman’s cell.

Source: WomenAreHuman.com

An NBC report in early 2020 said there were 4890 trans-identifying prisoners in the U.S.  At that point, they were mostly in men’s prisons, but that situation is changing rapidly as Democratic Party policy declaring men-who-say-they’re-women to be women is implemented.  

Women’s Liberation Front has pointed out that if just 1% of prisoners in the US identify as transgender and are housed accordingly, then 15% of inmates in women’s prisons will be male.

Mainstream coverage of the issue of males in women’s prisons is scant and decidedly one-sided.  Women are not interviewed, and their concerns are mentioned dismissively, if at all.  An NBC report focuses entirely on the stories of men who say they’re women and how badly they want to be in women’s prisons.  Women’s concerns are dealt with via a dismissive quote from a California prison official who says there have been “isolated” cases of “cis” women prisoners victimized by trans-identifying male prisoners but this was “not prevalent.” Similarly, an LA Times article features detailed stories of male prisoners who consider themselves women, making it clear that these individuals are women.  The concerns of actual women prisoners are barely mentioned and are treated as ignorant and whipped up by guards in their prisons. 

“The complaints from the cis [gender] women here are that these are men coming here and they’ve been traumatized by men and so they shouldn’t have to live with them,” says a male prisoner named Concepcion who claims to be a woman.  “I have repeatedly said that they’re women, but their anger gets directed towards me.” Concepcion can’t fathom why women feel their rights to women-only spaces are being violated.  Afterall, he’s explained to them that men are women.   In his view—a view given center stage in the news article—the women prisoners are just confused.  The women he’s referring to are not quoted in the article.

Mention is made of the idea that some male prisoners claiming to be women, might not be true trans people.  Apparently, the prison system is trying to weed those men out.  A trans-identifying male quoted in the article says he knows at least five inmates who applied for transfers under false pretenses and that staffers want him to help identify them. 

The article ends with a trans-identifying male’s statement: “All we’re really hoping for is connection and compassion.”  In other words, women need to be nice, and agree that men are women, thereby forfeiting their sex-based rights.

Regularly, those pushing for men to be placed in women’s prisons fail to notice the irony of their words.  An ACLU attorney bemoans the fact that her male client “is being housed in an all-male prison…forced to shower amongst men openly…forced to sleep amongst men.” Another male prisoner seeking transfer to a women’s prison notes that it is “humiliating” to be a woman “forced to be around a man in prison.”  A judge admonishes the Department of Corrections to transfer men to women’s prisons faster, dismissing the department’s argument that they need to take time to screen out predators, as “nonsense”.  As they focus on the feelings of male convicts, none of the people quoted here cares in the slightest about the fact that women prisoners are forced “to be around a man in prison” and to shower and sleep among men. 

And when a woman prisoner stands up to say she’s been attacked, there’s no hint of the MeToo sensibilities recently championed in progressive circles. The attorney who enabled accused rapist Andre Patterson/Janiah Monroe to be placed in a woman’s prison had this to say about the woman accusing his client of rape: “Transphobia exists everywhere, both out here on the street and in prison, so it’s not surprising that there are some people who feel uncomfortable with her presence in a women’s prison.”  Remember that with the phrase “her presence”,  he is referring to a man with an extensive violent criminal record including murder, attempted murder, and aggravated battery.  He is referring to a man who strangled a male cellmate to death.  He is talking about a situation in which a woman was locked in a cell with this man. And prison officials acknowledge that sex did occur.  While attorneys often say nasty things about their client’s accusers, this accusation of transphobia is standard from all corners for women prisoners who object to the destruction of their sex-based rights—women who are enduring unacceptable situations.

Men are regularly participating in female-only sports, stealing opportunities and honors from women.  Over and over again, they have taken titles, trophies, records, a spot on the team, a spot in the championship race, and more from female athletes.  Here’s a list of just some of the males disrupting women’s sports, and the numbers are growing by leaps and bounds.  Most recently in the news, a man who claims to be a woman (Lia Thomas) has been smashing women’s swimming records. He finished one race 38 seconds ahead of the second-place contender, and recently won an NCAA women’s national championship title.   President Biden’s Executive Order and regulations requiring schools to allow trans-identifying men on women’s teams is accelerating the demise of women’s sports.

Six of countless examples of men (who say they’re women) competing in women’s sports. Clockwise from top left: Laurel Hubbard takes gold in Pacific Games weightlifting; Fallon Fox inflicting severe damage in Mixed Martial Arts, Veronica Ivy winning women’s cycling trophies; Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood take 1st and 2nd place in a Connecticut high school track event; Lia Thomas who just won a women’s NCAA swim championship; June Eastwood (center runner), first place finisher NCAA women’s track Big Sky Conference

It is incontrovertible that top men outcompete top women by a long shot in most sports.  Check out this website to see how many high school boys would defeat the world’s top female athletes in various sports. (Spoiler alert: it’s a lot.) As the result of fighting long and hard for a fair playing field, women get to be Olympians, enjoy careers as athletes, hold records, and experience all the honors and benefits that go with having a fair shot in athletic competitions. Now they are being told that the feelings of men who identify as women matter more than women’s feelings and women’s rights.

Reducing testosterone levels does not substantially reduce male advantage.  That advantage flows from a combination of all sorts of physiological differences between men and women.  Men have denser muscles with more and larger fibers, higher proportions of fast-twitch fibers which aid explosive movement, ligaments and tendons that better store potential energy and produce more explosive power, thicker skin, and greater bone mass. They have larger rib cages, hearts, lungs and hemoglobin pools which provide more oxygen to muscles. Longer legs and narrower pelvises give them a different angle of the knees which improves their running gait as compared to women. This list of male physiological sports advantages is just the tip of the iceberg. And on top of all that, men don’t have to deal with menstrual cycles, post-pregnancy changes, and the like. 

Virginia Tech swimmer Reka Gyorgy has publicly objected to the inclusion of male swimmer Lia Thomas in women’s races at the NCAA championship meet in Georgia in March of 2022. “Every event that transgender athletes participated in was one spot taken away from biological females throughout the meet,” Gyorgy said. She came in 17th in a qualifying race for the 500 meter freestyle event. Thomas took her spot and won the freestyle title.

Other damage done by Gender Identity Ideology to women’s rights and the fight against sexism includes the following:

• Sexist stereotypes are being revived and reinforced.   Statements made by trans-identifying individuals and their families as to how they knew they were trans, regularly reflect egregious sexist stereotyping.   “I was always drawn to girl toys and didn’t want to play with the boys,” say males who believe themselves to be females.  “My child never wanted to wear pretty dresses and play with dolls,” says the father of a girl who identifies as a boy.  “My child was very feminine, flamboyant and dramatic.  No matter how I tried to punish, reshape or discipline her, she continued being very feminine” says a motherabout her son whom she now considers a girl, illustrating how some parents’ sexism leads them to steer their child to transgenderism.  This mother is so embarrassed by gender nonconformity that she prefers a child who denies his sex….and she enforces rules that foster that outcome. 
  
  A young acquaintance told me that her sister is actually her brother because he (meaning the sister) “thinks like a man.”   This acquaintance has no idea that she is channeling obnoxious sexists from days gone by who said that women weren’t logical, couldn’t handle math and science, couldn’t be lawyers or doctors, and worse. She has no idea that she’s embracing the very heart of gender oppression: declaring that certain ways of being (that have nothing to do with reproductive anatomy) are reserved for one sex or the other.  
  
  Sexist stereotypes are incorporated in the criteria used for diagnosing gender dysphoria, the medical name for significant discomfort with one’s sex.  Children can be diagnosed as dysphoric if for six months or longer they strongly desire to be or insist that they are the other sex or some other “gender identity,” and they exhibit at least five characteristics from the following list:

  • In boys, a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire. In girls, a strong preference for wearing only typical masculine clothing and a strong resistance to the wearing of typical feminine clothing,

  • A strong preference for “cross-gender” roles in make-believe or fantasy play

  • A strong preference for the toys, games or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other sex (yes they actually use the word “stereotypically”)

  • A strong preference for playmates of the other sex

  • In boys, a strong rejection of typically masculine toys, games, and activities and a strong avoidance of rough-and-tumble play.  In girls, a strong rejection of typically feminine toys, games, and activities.

  • A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy

  • A strong desire for the physical sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.

  • A diagnosis of gender dysphoria is not necessarily required before a child who believes they’re “born in the wrong body” can be treated medically. But the sexist stereotypes woven into the definition of gender dysphoria reveal much about the roots of gender ideology.

  In a world beyond sexism, a boy who likes dresses and dolls gets to play with them as a boy.  A girl drawn to so-called boy toys and activities gets to enjoy those as a girl.   In the Gender Identity world, these children are apt to declare themselves the other sex or some mythical sex that is neither boy nor girl.  They are even likely to undergo medical treatments to try to erase physical evidence of their actual sex. This is not progress. This is not feminism.  This is a huge slide backwards.
  
  Schools promote this mindset.  See Gender Ideology in Our Schools Part I and Part II to  examine the destructive messages bombarding children in K through 12 education. Teachers are even on the look-out for children “born in the wrong body”, as determined by their likes and dislikes.
  
  Fundamentally “gender identity” is a cover for sexist stereotypes.  After all, how can someone’s likes and dislikes “align” or “not align” with their sexual anatomy in the absence of a stereotype-poisoned mindset?  The idea of one’s “gender” matching or not matching one’s sex only works if you think each sex has some assigned set of feelings, clothing, behaviors, and aptitudes that go with it.  Gender Ideology is profoundly sexist.

• Positions, awards, and other honors reserved for women to make up for historical oppression are now regularly given to men instead.  Here are just a few examples of this Orwellian reality:  Emilia DeCaudin who was elected to “female” leadership in the Democratic Party in New York,  Lily Madigan elected as a Labour Party woman’s officer in the UK, Philip Bunce included on a Financial Times list of the top 100 women in business,  Torrey Peters chosen as a finalist for a coveted Women’s Prize for fiction, and Michaela Jae Rodriguezgiven the Golden Globes award for best TV drama actress.

Emilia Decaudin (a man who says he’s a woman) was elected to the “Female District Leader” position on the New York Democratic Council. Below is a comment Decaudin made about people who defend women’s rights.

• Women are losing the words they need to discuss their bodies, their lives, and their rights.   Attacks on language related to womanhood are as surreal as they are ubiquitous.  The term “woman” is considered exclusionary and has been erased in all sorts of places. The packaging for feminine hygiene products now advertises that they are for “people who menstruate” or “people who bleed”.  A recent cover story in the Lancet, a respected medical journal, was about “people with vaginas” rather than women.  (Oddly the journal doesn’t refer to men as “people with penises.”)  Planned Parenthood and other organizations that used to serve women now almost never mention women by name.  Schools instruct teachers to refer to girls as “people with vulvas” and provide them with diagrams of reproductive anatomy that avoid the labels “male” or “female.”  At one point Human Rights Campaign produced a pamphlet which defined “vagina” as something only trans-identifying men have.  Per their definitions women were to refer to their vaginas as “front holes.”
  
  Many women who consider themselves men retain their female organs and some have given birth.  Therefore they would have us believe that men have vaginas and can give birth.  They consider it “exclusionary” to refer to “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people”.  Meanwhile, men who believe themselves to be women, get bent out of shape if women talk about womanly things that they don’t have—such as female anatomy—in any way that doesn’t validate trans-identified men as women.  We are told to not say that women have vaginas or can give birth because these men are supposedly women too and they don’t want to feel left out.   On top of all this, gender idealogues believe that there are sexes beyond male and female, so they get upset at communications that reference the two actual sexes, such as “Welcome, brothers and sisters!”  In short, Gender Identity ideologues seek to police language.  They are saying that everyone must use confusing, cumbersome, biologically-inaccurate, terminology to validate trans-identifying indviduals’ delusions and spread Gender Identity beliefs. 
  
  This all matters a great deal.  First, women need more visibility, not less; they say “sisters” and “women” in greetings and other communications specifically to announce “We are here!”  Historically women have been excluded, or if present, ignored. 
  
  Second, Gender Ideology’s linguistic rules make it extremely difficult for women to talk about their lives and organize for change as women.  
  
  Third, gender ideologues reduce women to body parts.  They are referred to as “people with vulvas” or “birthing bodies” rather than the whole human beings they are.  This is demeaning.  It is also ironic since gender ideologues often accuse gender critics of reducing women to body parts.
  
  Fourth, using confusing language instead of clear language hurts people.  A majority of women don’t know what a cervix is, or that they have one, for example.  Cancer Society notices telling “people with cervixes” to get pap smears are ineffective.
  
  Finally, and most importantly, going along with the inanity of Gender Identity Speak implies agreement with Gender Identity’s tenets.  It teaches children and others that sex has nothing to do with anatomy, that there are more than two sexes, and other falsehoods.

• We have lost ground in the struggle to help girls, women, boys and men understand and love their bodies.
  
  In the past, we insisted that women should be taught about their sexed bodies, so they could understand and enjoy them.  Now, whether a body part is considered male or female supposedly depends on the feelings of each individual. Girls and boys emerge from high school deeply confused about their bodies and what happens to them over the course of a lifetime.
  
  We fought against societal messages that convinced women to see their bodies as inadequate and wrong.  Now, girls are explicitly told that their bodies can be “wrong”.  They are told that breast-binding, puberty-blockers, wrong-sex hormones, cutting off healthy breasts, and removing healthy uteruses and ovaries, are admirable ways to “be yourself.” And they are acting accordingly, denouncing their femaleness.  They are being applauded for taking these actions.  Boys are also being taught to see their bodies as wrong, and to reject and harm them, and they are doing so.   We’re hurtling backwards on the matter of understanding and loving our bodies. 
  
  Beauty product corporations, universities,  public libraries, and others have begun to proudly distribute binders, amplifying the self-loathing messages girls and women get from celebrities like Ellen/Elliot Page and elsewhere.  As one critic put it, “What can we expect next, a nicely wrapped foot-binding kit?” 

  The same people who denounce “black-face” applaud “woman-face”.  Indeed “drag” is presented as bold and stunning by schools and by public library story times.  A Seattle elementary school has even sent grade school families links to drag queen Desmond Is Amazing as part of gender identity materials.  Desmond is famous for highly sexualized performances which he started doing at age 11.

Above: a poster from a New York City education campaign in 2013 designed to help boost the self esteem of girls ages 7 – 12. Contrast this to the image below of a woman who cut off her breasts and denounced her femaleness, and was put on the cover of Time for doing so.

• Women are losing the ability to track progress,  demand women-focused medical research, and more.   Sex-based data is vital.  Gender Identity Ideology is destroying everyone’s ability to obtain that data:

  • How can we track progress regarding male violence against women, without properly identifying people’s sex?  Police departments, reporters, judges, court recorders and others are all referring to male rapists, male pedophiles, and other male criminals as women.  As a result, someone unaware of the madness of Gender Ideology would look at recent crime stats and assume something strange is going on.  Suddenly woman after woman is being charged with rape, pedophilia and other crimes. One would never know based on news articles and court proceedings that it is men who are being charged and convicted.  To make matters worse, some judges insist that victims of assault refer to their male assailants as “she.”  If they fail to do so, those victims can be denied compensation.

  • Women have different health problems than men.  Diagnoses and treatments for one sex are often not appropriate for the other.  In addition, medical research must be done on both men and women.  As more and more people declare themselves to be a different sex and change their IDs accordingly, it is difficult for doctors, epidemiologists, and others to gather the sex-specific data needed to understand sex-based health differences, and to provide women and men with the health care they need.

  • How can we track women’s progress on things like the pay gap and breaking the glass ceiling when men claim to be women and their data is mixed in with data on women?  Corporations may well have already begun to claim that they’ve met sex diversity goals by employing men who say they’re women.  Note that the first person on this list of the “Top 16 Highest-Paid Women CEOS in the Biopharma Industry” is a man.  Across society, if well-paid males posing as women are now counted as women this will skew statistics, making it look like women are doing better than they are.

  At the same time the honor of being the “first female” in various positions is now regularly bestowed on males.  Dr. Rachel Levine, for example, is a trans-identifying male, who attended an elite all boy high school which prepared its charges for a life-long “brotherhood”.  He fathered two children before self-declaring womanhood at age 53.   In announcing Levine’s appointment as Assistant Secretary for Human Health and Services, Biden Administration officials celebrated the historic appointment of “the first female four-star officer to serve in the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.”   Levine himself said he was “humbled to serve as the first female four-star officer of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps….”  And news story after news story used the same language. (The author was suspended from Twitter for pointing out that Levine is a man.) 

Rachel Levine, a man celebrated as “the first female” four-star officer” to serve in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.

Deja Vu.  It is hard to think of a way to undercut all the gains that have been made in the fight against sexism that is more ingenious and insidious than Gender Identity Ideology.  In the Gender-Ideology-controlled world, hard-won rights and programs remain on the books, seemingly intact, even as they are completely destroyed.

Women fought hard to be able to set boundaries and have their own spaces.  Now they are told that setting-boundaries is unkind and “exclusionary”.  We had made some real progress in ending sexist stereotypes.  Now people talk about female and male minds employing all the age-old sexist stereotypes. 

If you are cheering on Gender Identity because you think you’re helping to tear down the remaining pillars of sexism and sexist stereotypes, think again.  You are actually demolishing important victories women won through lengthy struggle. You are promoting not just sexist stereotypes, but the very worst of these.  You are tearing down women’s ability to set boundaries, participate in fair sports, organize together as women, and to even document and make visible the discrimination they face.  You are responsible for women being raped in places where they should be safe from men.  You are saying women have no boundaries, no rights, no language, no biological identity, no physical reality. You are teaching girls that if a naked man is present in the locker room after school, they’d best not tell anyone lest they be branded a bigot. Thus, you are undermining fundamental safeguarding lessons.   

Gender Ideology pretends to fight sex-based oppression.  But it delivers a huge blow to every gain we’ve made over the last one hundred years, and even longer.

Those who have fought sexism for decades have a sense of déjà vu as stereotypes are reinstated, girls are encouraged to loathe their bodies, boundaries are erased, and women are told that their job is to be nice and make sure no one feels excluded.  As a sign at a recent protest against Gender Ideology succinctly put it: “Same Shit.  Different Century.”

Latching onto Intersex

Gender identity materials, including those used in schools to educate children, regularly refer to intersex conditions. This is part of the third major hitchhiking strategy employed by gender ideologues:  latching onto intersex.  

Here are some important things you need to know (See this video and links below it for details and source documents):

• People with intersex conditions are not “between” the sexes.  Many prefer the term Disorders of Sexual Development (DSDs) because it is less misleading. 

• Approximately 1.7% of live births involve DSDs, a statistic frequently cited by gender ideologues.  (They say there are as many “intersex” people as there are people with red-hair.) There is no ambiguity whatsoever as to whether someone is male or female in over 99% of these DSD cases.

• Every person with a DSD is either male or female, including the roughly .02% of live births that have some sort of ambiguity requiring further examination. A sliver of this sliver—less than .002% of live births—involve genitals with the characteristics of both sexes or some other inconsistency between gonads and genitals. Or they involve the presence of both ovarian and testicular tissues.   These extremely rare conditions do not involve new sexes beyond male and female.

• Sex is not a spectrum.  It is binary.  The term “sex” (as in male or female) is related to “sex” (as in how our species reproduces itself).  There are only two gametes (eggs and sperm), only two gonads (testicles and ovaries), and only one way to create a new person (sperm meets egg.)  It is absurd to claim that DSDs create 3rd sexes.  Yes, we have wonderful variations within each sex—some women have more hair than some men, there are all sorts of sizes and colorings and cosmetic features for our sex organs…and there are various DSDs—but there are two basic body types: female and male.  There are those whose bodies are organized around producing eggs and gestating, delivering and nursing a baby (whether or not they do so) and these people are women.  And there are those whose bodies are organized around the production of sperm (whether or not they impregnate someone, whether or not sperm production is functioning) and these people are male.  Humans are like all other mammals, we have two sexes, and beautiful variation within each of those two sexes.  Even if the tiny number of DSD births involving ambiguity represented new sexes (they don’t) the numbers would be so miniscule that using them to declare sex a “spectrum” would be absurd.

• Trans- or non-binary identifying people almost never have DSDs.  Let that sink in for a second.  Trans- and non-binary identifying people almost never have DSDs.  They were born with healthy typical sex organs.  Trans “women” are men, born with testicles (the primary sex organ), a penis, other secondary sex organs, and a Y chromosome.  Trans “men” are women, born with ovaries (the primary sex organ), a uterus, a vagina, fallopian tubes, and only X chromosomes.) Moreover, very few people with DSDs consider themselves trans or non-binary.

So why in the world, do Gender Identity Ideology proponents regularly talk about intersex conditions?  Because hitchhiking is very useful to them.

• They create the impression that trans and nonbinary-identifying people have DSDs, even though they don’t, prompting others to assume there’s some biological basis for their non-compliance with sex-based policies.

• They spread the false belief that sex is a spectrum.  They then argue that trans- and nonbinary-identifying people exist somewhere on that spectrum in a spot other than the male or female location observed for them at birth.  Though its only rarely spelled out, the argument goes like this: i) Some people have DSDs (true), and ii) are therefore not male or female (not true), and iii) therefore sex is a spectrum (not true), and iv) therefore, people without DSDs might have some special invisible difference from others that makes them somehow between male and female, or something beyond male or female, or neither male or female (patently illogical and absurd.)

• They create the impression that Gender Identity Ideology is based on science rather than quasi-religious belief.

And how do those who actually have DSDs fare as the result of being appropriated and misrepresented to advance the transgender agenda?  Not well.  Many have fought for a long time to be seen as the males and females they are, yet gender ideologues are telling everyone that they’re something else. Some gender ideologues are even pushing for policies that lead to children with DSDs being marked as neither male nor female on their birth certificates.

DSD activists like Claire Graham strenuously object to the co-optation of intersex conditions by trans activists.  Targeted by gender ideologues, Graham has been blocked by Twitter and otherwise deplatformed.

Claire Graham, DSD (intersex) activist: “[W]hat trans activists say about us isn’t true. It’s unkind, unscientific and harmful”.

Flush from appropriating LGB groups as tools for advancing an extremist T+ agenda, key Gender Identity groups are now declaring that they intend to take on intersex issues as well.  They claim that they will now become a voice for those with DSDs.   We can expect the destruction of DSD rights as the result of this, just as the rights of LGB people were stripped away when the T latched onto them.   The take-over by Gender Identity ideologues of organizations that formerly focused on the problems of people with DSDs, is already apparent.

Each year some families cope with the challenge of welcoming a baby with a DSD into the world.  They have to come up to speed quickly on complex medical issues, and often have to make tough decisions.  Individuals with DSDs and their families, not gender identity activists, need to be in the drivers’ seat as the issues that affect their lives are discussed.

Those who have been supporting Gender Identity Ideology because they believe it is based in science as the result of having heard gender ideologues talk about intersex conditions and sex spectrums, need to come to grips with an unpleasant reality.  They have been duped.  They are allowing the shameless co-optation and grotesque misrepresentation of DSD conditions by gender ideologues to fill their heads with unscientific nonsense.   And they are not helping those with DSDs.

Appropriating Black, Brown and Indigenous Struggles.

Gender Identity ideologues strive to create the impression that supporting their agenda strikes a blow for racial justice and against colonialism.  It does the opposite.  Once again, this toxic ideology is hitchhiking on other people’s movements in order to get ahead, dramatically undermining those movements in the process.   

Here are examples of the hitchhiking:

• Gender ideologues emphasize the race of black trans-identifying people.  “Attacking two Black young women who are simply participating in the sport they love just because they are transgender is wrong…” says ACLU attorney Chase Strangio, regarding two trans-identified males who insist on running in women’s rather than men’s high school track. The ACLU, which represents these males, never mentions the race of the women displaced by them. Those women include a black woman who sued to try to keep high school women’s track female-only, another black woman who lost the chance to run in an important championship race, and black women visible in photos like this.  Gender ideologues also ignore women of color who are harmed by white trans-identifying males, such as the women defeated by a much older male, Laurel Hubbard, in women’s weight-lifting. See this photo of Hubbard atop the podium as Feagaiga Stowers and Iuniarra Sipaia—Pacific Islander women demoted to 2nd and 3rd place—can barely conceal their disgust.  Missing from the photo is Naura’s Charisma Amoa Tarrant who would have placed third but for Hubbard.

Charisma Amoa Tarrant was bumped from the Pacific Games weight-lifting podium when male Laurel Hubbard took gold.

Two male athletes (3rd and 4th from left) beating women in a Connecticut high school women’s track event. The ACLU emphasized that these males are black while ignoring the women of color they displaced.

• Gender ideologues use racial justice groups to push Gender Identity Ideology.  They have commandeered Black Lives Matter to organize “trans rights” events, for example, parlaying people’s concerns over racial injustice into their seeming support for the Gender Identity agenda, though most likely have a poor understanding of that agenda.  Thus, an estimated 15,000 people chanted “Black Trans Lives Matter” at a Black Lives Matters in Brooklyn, NY in 2020.  And an elementary school in Seattle distributed Gender Identity materials from a Racial Equity Task Force as part of a Black Lives Matter lesson “centering on the value Trans Affirming”.  The cover letter asserted that, “Attacks on the transgender community are attacks on racial justice.”  The materials promoted Laverne Cox, a black man, who insists that men who say they’re women must be allowed in women’s spaces.  (Cox presents a stereotypical image of womanhood through his clothing and mannerisms.) In these and other cases, the Gender Identity agenda is given the imprimatur of being a noble civil rights cause without any discussion as to what the agenda is.  And without any acknowledgment of the destruction of women’s and other people’s rights that flows from it.

• Gender ideologues equate defending sex-based rights with supporting racism. “This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation,” declared Obama’s Justice SecretaryLoretta Lynch, in opposing a North Carolina law protecting sex segregation in private spaces like bathrooms.  “We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation …..It was not so very long ago that states…had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodation keeping people out based on a distinction without a difference.” 
  
  Lynch’s analogy falls apart when it is examined for even a moment.  Note that Lynch did not argue against sex segregated bathrooms.  Apparently, sex segregation is based on a distinction with a difference.  Instead, she argued against equal enforcement of sex segregation policies, demanding suspension of enforcement for individuals who declare themselves a different sex.
  
  Similarly, the ACLU’s Chase Strangio claims that  “attempts to police women out of the category of womanhood”—by which Strangio means attempts to enforce sex-based policies equally for all people instead of creating special exemptions for trans-identifying people—"are always steeped in centuries-long colonial and racist histories.” One “cannot understand” so-called anti-trans bills “without understanding that history.”  Others join Strangio in this analysis, arguing in supportive tweets, that bills defending women’s rights “are predicated on centuries of racism and anti-blackness in the U.S…..”  This makes no sense!
  
  Sex segregation policies to protect privacy and provide fair conditions in sports acknowledge real differences between the sexes.  They were fought for by people of color as well as whites.  No one, not even Strangio, is arguing against sex segregation itself.  Instead, they are arguing that select individuals should be exempted from sex segregation provisions that apply to everyone else.  It’s outrageous that they treat this intrusion on other’s sex-based rights as noble, and objections to it as racist.

• Gender ideologues admonish black women to support Gender Identity Ideology as a matter of fighting racism.  The black trans-identifying male promoted by Seattle schools—Laverne Cox— has urged black women to “prevent murders” of black trans-identifying males by telling other black men who refuse to date males like Cox to “interrogate their unconscious biases.”  “Even though we are LGBTQ and specifically trans, we still are Black.  We still deal with structural racism,” Cox says.  According to Cox, “if any one of us is taking a stance against another member of a marginalized community, we’re playing into the dominant narrative. If we’re fighting each other, the bigger fish of oppression are already doing their work.”  In other words, when black women fail to support the gutting of sex-based rights it’s tantamount to them promoting racial oppression.

• Gender ideologues misrepresent indigenous cultures and conflate opposing Gender Identity Ideology with colonizing those cultures.  They regularly point to categories of gender non-conforming people in various indigenous societies asserting that those individuals are transgender—which is not true—and that therefore indigenous cultures embrace the tenets of Gender Identity Ideology—which is also not true.  They label people who disagree with those tenets as oppressive colonizers.  

Gender Ideology has moved forward by leaps and bounds via the hitchhiking it does on racial and indigenous justice movements.  But, as usual, that hitchhiking leaves huge damage to those movements in its wake:

• Women of color and indigenous women are harmed by Gender Identity Ideology.  Women athletes of color, including indigenous women, left out of record books, championship races, and the winner’s circle, are just one example.  Women of color and/or indigenous cultures are disproportionately present in prisons, and are now forced to be confined with males there, as another example.

• Equating support for sex-based rights with racism, asking black women to forfeit these rights as a matter of racial solidarity, and other aspects of gender ideologues’ co-optation of racial issues…. is itself racist.  Saba Malik, a woman of color, opened her statement at a gender critical conference in 2020 with an explanation as to why she risked death threats to show up and speak: “I felt that as a woman of color I should be here to refute the idea that believing biology is important and that a woman is an adult human female is the same as being racist.” 
  
  Karen Davis, a black woman, discusses the gender ideologues’ racism ploy in a number of her videos.  In one, Davis responds to someone who was upset that Davis was supposedly “attacking a minority” by failing to agree to the Gender Ideology agenda.  Davis patiently explains that men, like her critic, have passed laws giving them access to women’s spaces, which is unjust, and hence women oppose that.  She points out that “men who impersonate women are mostly white, middle-aged, middle class to affluent, and they’re home-owners.” They are “members of the dominant culture.”  It is they, not black women like her, who discriminate and try to push others out of society now and historically.  “They are racist white men who believe that black women are supposed to validate and affirm them….”  
  
  Responding directly to Strangio and another gender ideologue, Davis agreesthat the debate over gender identity bills “is steeped in racism. But it’s not steeped in racism in the direction that these people are talking about.”  It is steeped in racism in that it eliminates safeguarding for vulnerable women—poor women, black women, women more likely to be using public spaces than affluent women.  Forcing women to let men into their spaces, means that she, a black woman, is forced to “interact with some middle-aged white dude” and “there should not be the force of law behind this white dude that tells me that I must interact with him.”  “That is the hallmark of slavery…..That is a hallmark of black oppression,” Davis says.  “What these people are actually seeking to do is remove my ability as a woman and as a black woman to tell some white dude, get the f*** out….”
  
  Davis points out that pressure on black women to “stand up” for black trans-identifying men “hearkens back to the racist past of black people” and in particular of black women being cast as nurturers for others.  In response to someone telling her that “as a black woman” she should stand with black men who want to gut women’s sex-based rights, Davis says: “You like to school black people on how we are supposed to enact our oppression for you benefit…..And I’m not your negro.”  According to Davis, “One of the things that privileged white men have attempted to do is to glom onto the continuing black civil rights struggle….and liken their highly privileged white maleness to the struggle, the ongoing struggle of black people, the ongoing liberation struggle of black people.” 
  
  Davis also points out that some of the demeaning language now foisted on women by gender ideologues—like the term “black birthing bodies”—is the very same language that was used for black women slaves. 

• Gender identity issues take over, leaving women’s issues unaddressed.  A statement by Native American activist Cherry Smiley was read at the conference on gender identity in Seattle early in 2020, mentioned above.  Smiley described how indigenous women in Canada fought for decades for a national inquiry into murdered and disappeared indigenous women and girls.  When they finally got the inquiry, it was expanded to include “2SLGBTQIA” people, without any notice or discussion. “Disproportionate amounts of time, resources and energy went into discussing everyone else but indigenous women in our own inquiry,” Smiley says. She supports a separate inquiry for 2SLGBTQIA people.   Similarly, black women face similar challenges as black trans-identifying males dominate meetings that are supposed to focus on women’s issues.  Gender Identity matters dominate and steal time and energy away from discussions of the issues that matter to black women. 

• While those opposing gender ideology are maligned as colonial oppressors, it is actually gender ideologues who play that role.  Gender Identity Ideology imposes meanings on indigenous concepts that are not accurate, such as by declaring various categories of indigenous people to be “transgender”.  They imply that indigenous societies had no concept of the sex binary—men and women—until white people arrived, which is wrong and insulting. They also imply that indigenous cultures embrace the sorts of policies gender ideologues are pushing related to gutting sex-based rights, medicalizing children, and more, which is false.
  
  But the damage done by Gender Identity Ideology goes beyond misrepresenting indigenous cultures.  Gender ideologues are intent on imposing their belief system on others, including indigenous communities.  And they have the power of huge non-governmental organizations behind them, as well as the power of the U.S. government and other governments.  President Biden issued Executive Orders shortly after entering office directing all agencies, including international agencies, to require support for gender identity ideology from all, using the power of giving and withholding funding to achieve that end.   The huge international non-governmental organization La Leche League is requiring that people working with pregnant and nursing women around the world use language that indicates that men as well as women have babies and nurse them.  Self-ID laws are being imposed by governments around the world, sex-based rights are being gutted, and gender identity curricula are being used in schools, including schools attended by indigenous people.
  
  The Gender Identity version of what indigenous cultures believe is way off.  That’s why, despite explicit cultural recognition of fa’afafine (a name for men who take on women’s roles in Samoa, which gender ideologues inappropriately publicize as supposed proof that policies gutting sex-based rights should be adopted), the President of Samoa said he was shocked when he heard that Laurel Hubbard, a man, had been allowed to compete against women in the Pacific Games weightlifting events.  “This fa’afafine or man should have never been allowed …to lift with the women,” he said.  Indeed, Samoan fa’afafine play on men’s teams. 
  
  Yes, gender ideologues are very wrong in their interpretations of indigenous cultures’ perspectives on sex and gender.  That’s why Cherry Smiley explains with respect to Native American cultures “there was also an understanding that female and male bodies are entirely different.  Male-bodied people were not allowed into female ceremonies or sacred rites, and vice versa.” 
  
  It’s why Maori women have condemned policies proposed in New Zealand that allow “gender identity” to usurp “sex”, and they have angrily deplored claims that this action would somehow begin to restore Maori culture to pre-colonial times. In a video entitled Maoritanga is being Weaponized by Gender Diversity, Maori activist Michelle Uriarau, says, “we would not be here…if not for the generations of relationships between wahine [women] and tane[men]in our lineage. It doesn’t matter what you think you are…you were born of a wahine. We’ve never ever denied that.  And to use that excuse [that proposed gender identity policies would help restore pre-colonial culture] to justify these sex self-ID laws?  Racist! Hideously racist!”   Uriarau says, “I don’t know of any hapu [tribe or clan] anywhere…that promoted the idea that their tamariki [children] and their mokapuna [grandchildren] were born in the wrong bodies.  Whose body are they born in? And who’s born into theirs? You know it makes no f***ing sense.”  

Maori activist Michelle Uriarau: “The way I see it, indigenous people are being used as a prop for this American-derived and funded movement.”

• Similarly, Maori activist, Dianne Landy, says in a video labeled, “Sterilizing Tamariki [Children] is Not Maori Culture, “I do not believe it’s right to mutilate your children.  I do not think it’s right to sterilize your children…. I can’t find any of this in our history…. I haven’t seen our people flaying off their penises and turning them inside out.” (This is a reference to so-called “gender affirmation” surgeries promoted by gender ideologues.)
  
  In another video “Gender Identity is Not Maori Culture”, Uriarau elaborates that  “….[W]e’ve never had in our culture tane [men] pretending to be the opposite sex, claiming to be wahine [women] and then claiming to be lesbian and demanding that lesbians sleep with them.”  Denouncing gender identity ideology, she says, “The way I see it, indigenous people are being used as a prop for this American-derived and funded movement. It’s got nothing to do with Maori.  It’s got nothing to do with indigenous people.  You look at the men, at the rich wealthy white men who sit at the top of this movement…they’re not indigenous.  They don’t give a crap about indigenous people.”

A new “Messaging Guide” produced by the Transgender Law Center confirms the explicit intent of gender ideologues to hitchhike on people’s concerns about racial injustice.  With massive funding and access to top notch public relations advisers and research, the Guide talks openly about framing gender identity issues as intertwined with racial justice. Gender ideologues plan on doubling down in building a “race class gender narrative.”  They intend to mobilize a progressive base, especially Black, Asian American Pacific Islander, and Gen Z audiences and to marginalize those opposing Gender Ideology, who are referred to as anti-trans racists.  The Guide is worth perusing to see the slick public relations tactics in use and to understand the obfuscation ample funding can buy.   

Gender Identity Ideology undercuts struggles for racial and indigenous justice. It is appropriative and colonial, even as it pretends to be the opposite. Its harmful impacts are disproportionately felt by women of color. And it is imposing abhorrent post-modern ideas, like the belief that men have babies, on people around the world who do not share those beliefs. To stand with those fighting for racial and indigenous justice, oppose Gender Identity Ideology. 

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You have reached the end of Part II of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Transgender Galaxy. Why We Must Opposed Gender Identity Ideology. To move on to Part III, click HERE.

To go to PART I which contains the full Table of Contents at the end, click here.