Rebecca Solnit Transplains Things To Us

Dear High-Profile Cisgender Feminist Ladies of the United States,

Thank you for your open letter in the Guardian, which the UK terven read with eyebrows so raised there was nothing but foreheads to be seen for miles and miles.

Let’s not pretend there is much love lost between us. Mutual incomprehension, yes, in spades. We note that one or the other of you drops by on Twitter every few weeks to virtue signal at us for centring women in our feminism, and express your bafflement at our politics. Naomi Wolf, Mona Eltahawy, Kate Manne, Sadie Doyle – all have expressed their grave disappointment with the truculant, trenchant UK feminists who won’t agree that men can become women.

We wonder whether the fee for liberal feminish influencer Rebecca Solnit’s piece came from the Open Society Foundation’s kitty for churning out transhumanist unthink pieces, a glut of paid-for content which advertises male philanthropists’ current pet project to promote body dissociation and erase sex as a salient material characteristic of the human species?

Do you feel at all sullied by hawking your capable intellects to the transhumanist lobby, selling out your knowledge of what a woman is? To the money men? Did your contemptuous poison pen letter feel like a copywriting gig? It certainly read like a garbled telesales script hastily recited by a saleswoman whose heart really wasn’t in it. It’s remarkable how capable minds turn to mush when adapting to the thought-terminating dogma of transgender ideology. It’s embarrassing to behold.

Do you understand what policy capture is? Are you even aware that there is a transhumanist lobby, US-based but with influence reaching across the globe? These men are idealistic fools, but they are technocrats with money and influence. Martine Rothblatt, Jennifer Pritzker, Jeff Stryker – are any of these names familiar to you? Everyone knows George Soros, but are you aware that he has a dog in this race, too? That he, in concert with his billionaire philanthropist confréres, have been working via the Tawani Foundation, Tides Foundation, Argus, and the Open Society Foundation, to replace sex with gender identity throughout all national law and policy frameworks? Just because such disruption justifies their paternalistic meddling?

Do you know about the Yogyakarta Principles, and how this legally non-binding guidance has been strategically used at international level to neutralise women & girls’ sex-based rights? In short, are you at all aware that there is An Agenda, and that it is driven by middle aged men drunk on privilege and the misapprehension that they know not only what’s best for their egos and their bottom line, but also what’s best for women and children (to wit, gender Kool Aid and puberty blockers for kids – the same drugs used to chemically castrate Alan Turing)? If you lack this context, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the trans trend is everywhere right now due to a spontaneous uprising of groovy youngsters, the 20-somethings of whose approval you seem so craven. How shameful to sell them out by mouthing the money men’s mantras. They trust you to speak from a different place. You’re supposed to be public intellectuals.

FYI, it is not a youth-driven human rights movement we are dealing with here. If none of the above is on your radar, would you do us the courtesy of some research? Maybe read the blogs of Kathleen Stock, Stephanie Davies-Arai, Helen Saxby, Jane Clare Jones, Maya Forstater? The women’s organisations Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play for Women? What about Meghan Murphy, Jennifer Bilek and Julian Vigo? Or, if blogs aren’t enough – even when their authors have been covered in the national press, your countrywomen Deborah Soh and Abigail Shrier have just published books which, while not coming from the same intellectual tradition as UK feminists, do attempt to unpack the absurdities and unintended harms of transgender ideology. There is so much to know, so much to think about, and it is somewhat disturbing that you seem to be interested in neither. Where is the hunger for truth? Or did you throw that over long ago in favour of money and the warm, self-regarding glow of Woke zeal?

You may well find, if you engage with the writing linked above, that your perspective on why “gender critical” feminists have been fighting so hard to prevent legal reforms and policy capture for the last few years will deepen, and make more sense. Thinking people hate it when something doesn’t make sense, and they keep researching and talking to people until it resolves. Goddess forbid, you might end up seeing where we are coming from. The fact is that, here in the UK, we stood to lose everything our feminist foremothers campaigned for to give women scope to participate in public life. At the moment, the signs are that the tide is turning against the takeover of public institutions by transgender ideology, but it is a behemoth of mighty proportions, and it is not a simple thing to halt it in its tracks.

When I invoke “we” I mean women as a sex class, every member of which has a common reproductive system. It’s the original form of intersectionality. Class analysis never really ‘took’ on the other side of the pond, which may account for the marked unwillingness of all you High-Profile Cisgender Feminist Ladies of the United States to work out what’s going on. It would be great if you respected your UK counterparts enough to read up, but I suppose cultural imperialism creates blind spots, as does money, and mortgage payments.

Solnit’s youth in San Francisco of the 90s & 00s sounds fun. I could rejoinder with tales of my own age of innocence, but I’m not a celebrity influencer so it might be dull to read. Suffice to say, the rainbow utopia has morphed, over the last decade, into something very different, and a person’s perspective on it depends on whether or not they are in the out-group which has been victimised by it, specifically lesbians who don’t believe lesbians have penises, and desisters, half of whom are lesbians. Big money got involved, big pharma too, and where the major battles had already been won (eg. equal marriage for same-sex oriented people, and legal protections for those who identify as trans, here in the UK), men wanted to create new markets, new social justice ‘problems’ to solve. In so doing, they created new classes of victims. Yay men. Stellar work, lads. And a nice pat on the head for the handmaids.

Solnit’s letter reads as an extended, evidence-free denial that feminist critics of transgender ideology have identified a real problem, which is causing real harm to women, homosexual women and men, and – most unforgivable of all – children. When we repeatedly pointed to violence committed against women & children by men who adopt trans identities specifically to gain access to those vulnerable people, in spaces where they are most vulnerable, you repeatedly dismissed that data as unimportant: in the words of Solnit’s letter, “lurid ‘what ifs.’” I know idealists are slow to respond to factual evidence, but this is quite something to behold. It looks like collusion.

You cis ladies of US faux-feminism discount your own critical faculties, preferring instead to let trans-ID men explain things to you, and misguided younger women lead you up the garden path when your job is to lead them towards truth and understanding. Really, what do they know? What can they allow themselves to know? If a young woman asserts the importance of biological sex, these days, eg. to her lesbian sexuality, she is hounded by trans activists & allies until she capitulates. Only the strongest women, the exceptionally robust, can face that down. That you offer these young women no hope of support, no vista towards a world view which respects their sex, and sexuality, means it is you who is failing them. Not us terrible hags.

Privilege is a buzzword of intersectional feminism. I don’t need to rehearse that, when in a relatively privileged position, a woman can eschew motherhood, access reproductive healthcare, and even avoid having to use public toilets. I shouldn’t need to rehearse that women at the sharp end, at the bottom end of the system, can identify their way out of dependence on public facilities and resources as much as they can identify out of being female: they can’t. They have no choice whether to become mothers, whether to use public loos. While you won’t find yourself incarcerated with a male sex offender, many poor women in the UK, US and Canada already have found themselves in that living nightmare, while the authorities around them claim their mortal fear is just bigotry. I seethe at that avoidable injustice. It is just one of the many living nightmares created by the trans lobby, which ruthlessly asserts men’s entitlement as a sex class to identify as women, and for whom the collateral harm to women is merely a perk of office.

These injustices you blithely handwave away as no more than “lurid “what ifs.” They’re not “what ifs.” They’re facts. Real acts of physical violence committed against real women who will now spend a good deal of their vital energies recovering, surviving. You are saying that the women attacked by TIMs don’t count for anything, in your eyes. How, then, can you credibly self-identify as a feminist? You do you, US “cis” ladies (cis me and it’ll be another matter), but take that label out of your mouth. For the word “feminism” to be meaningful, there must be minimum standards. Not handwaving male violence against women is that standard.

It’s not transphobia which is exploding, Rebecca, and Naomi, and Mona, and the rest of the ethically bankrupt pseudo-feminists. It’s women’s self-respect, anger at avoidable injustice, care for our daughters, our sons, and determination to liberate ourselves from this latest form of misogyny misleadingly called “trans rights,” which is erupting from the grassroots. Trans “rights” is a male sex rights movement, a misogynist and body-hating movement driven by deeply misguided and arrogant men, and we are not about to apologise for pointing that out as many times as it takes to make every last citizen realise that the Transhumanist Emperor is standing in his scanties, clueless and deranged by only ever hearing one side of the story.

Yours sincerely,

UK Feminists

 

UPDATE: I tagged the High-Profile US Cis Ladies of Twitter into this response, and they came back with well-argued defence of their belief that men can be women, and substantive grappling with the points raised…Just kidding. This is how they responded:

@naomirwolf went for the passive-aggressive dismissive approach with an accusation, without evidence, of bigotry: “Please take your transphobia somewhere other than my feed, thank you.”

 

@kate_manne had nothing to say for herself, so like Narcissus’ fangirl she simply added “Echoing” to Wolf’s tweet.

 

@sadydoyle also found herself short on words, so rejoindered with the pithy “Cosigned, please go away.”

 

@monaeltahawy opted for a more direct and aggressive approach. She told me, in no uncertain terms, to “F*ck off.”

 

So much for debate and dialogue. Perhaps Rebecca Solnit will respond either to this letter, or Victoria Smith’s. I won’t be holding my breath, as the Woke don’t engage, on principle, with heretics. Suffice to say, there is little to distinguish U.S. libfems who cheerlead for the end of women’s rights, and the women who campaigned against suffrage. Today’s Phyllis Schlaflys are Democrats and “progressives.”

 

Neither I, nor JK Rowling, nor any UK “gender critical” feminist I know of is “transphobic” in any real sense. We are not giving up on defending women’s rights, and children’s right to develop naturally under the protection of caring adults with their long-term health in mind. We are not going anywhere, because the stakes are too high. When it comes to opposing this nefarious ideology – a US export only bloated ‘charities’ and predatory men actually want – we are just getting started.