I don’t even know where to start with this. Women who believe they are men can help the #MeToo movement? Please don’t exclude us? NOBODY’S EXCLUDING YOU.
You’re pretending to be a man. Apparently successfully, because women cross the street when they see you at night and lesbians don’t accept you in their community anymore. Men can’t tell you’re a woman. Congratulations, “you’re a man”!
Except, you’re not. You’re playing a role. That’s why you don’t feel comfortable among sexist men. If you really WERE a man, you’d have been raised sexist and you’d join the choir of “locker room banter”. You wouldn’t have the history of learning to fear men you now have.
And the author is obviously aware of this. She doesn’t really believe she’s a man and was “born a man”. She believes, having experienced life as a woman, she’s incapable of mansplaining. If she were really a man, she wouldn’t even use that word.
Men mansplain in practically every article they write, including about women’s issues. They don’t pre-empt being accused of mansplaining. They don’t care. Like the author though, if accused they’ll always deny it.
Crucially, they’ll invoke they’re maleness rather than their “historic” femaleness. They just tell you (the woman) you’re wrong, mansplain mansplaining to you if you’re lucky and move on. Men don’t need arguments like the author. They’re men.
That sentence about female history — I had to read it twice. The cognitive dissonance is strong. 
I thought by betraying her female history she meant denying living her entire life as female before pretending to be a man, denying the experiences shared by all women at the hands of men. But no. She means being outed as a woman.
Being outed as “not being a real man”. This gives away the fact that it is role-play. Lesbians and gay people are ‘outed’ when others become aware of their true sexual orientation. “Trans” people are outed when others become aware of their true sex.
When lesbians and gay people come out, they STOP playing a role — that of an assumed heterosexuality pushed by a patriarchic society. When “trans” people come out, they START playing a role. And if they want to pass as the sex they want to be, it never stops.
So basically coming out as lesbian or gay is getting out of the closet; coming out as “trans” is getting into the closet.
The “trans” umbrella covers many groups —in its broadest definition it actually includes everyone— but lesbian and gay children and adults whose homosexuality is not accepted by them and/or their surroundings are an important group under that umbrella.
And the metaphor of getting in the closet fits. By declaring themselves “transgender” —or in the case of children, being diagnosed as “transgender”— they send a message they no longer want to be viewed as lesbian or gay. They are now straight individuals.
And all is well in the patriarchy again... Lesbians and gay people are erased and become “straight” through this modern form of conversion therapy. It is widely applauded by progressives, whereas homophobic conservative parents use it to “cure” their lesbian or gay children.
Coming back to the article, maybe I should paraphrase a quote by Simone de Beauvoir often misused by followers of gender ideology: “One is not born, but rather becomes a man”. Of course De Beauvoir was not referring to biological sex here.
As a feminist she was questioning the system set up and perfected over the millennia by men that placed women in a subordinate and subhuman role, known as the patriarchy. She argued the system molds us into what it expects us to be. She argued against this form of conditioning.
She compared woman as a biological reality to the distorted form of what “woman” was supposed to be under patriarchy. She explained how the biological reality —our female bodies— is the reason for men to oppress us.
“Woman” the biological reality vs. “woman” the stereotype. The same applies, though with very different consequences, to the oppressor class, namely men. Under patriarchy man means more than a biological reality. There are strict rules to being a “real man”.
Disrespecting women and any person who’s not 100% straight in the most stereotypical sense is an important part of masculinity. Gay is equated to feminine and therefore weak and pityful.
Like woman, “man” has two meanings under patriarchy: the biological r laity of being born male and the masculine stereotype men are expected to comply with. The author, who is trying to live as a man now, is not physically male. She is a physically altered female at best.
This is one reality she’ll have to spend the rest of her life hiding if she wants to continue to play this role. So the only thing she can opt into is the masculine stereotype.
*reality
Which means that she is expected to join in the chorus of hating women and hating lesbians. I’m starting to understand where the cognitive dissonance in this article comes from.
There is a huge difference between the position of men claiming to be women and that of women claiming to be men. And it’s entirely sex-based, ironically.
Men calling themselves women can invade women’s spaces without having to “pass”. They don’t need to undergo surgery (though they can often claim reimbursement if they do), they can keep their penises, low voices and beards.
For their “safety” (from male violence) they successfully push for laws that give them access to female spaces without even having to pretend to be a woman. Simply saying they are one suffices.
And they’re not excluded from anything. They can still go into male bathrooms, be members of men-only clubs and have all the male privileges —like leaving their families. Yet they can, and do, demand inclusion in the #MeToo movement, feminism, lesbian spaces etc.
Gay men who declare themselves women I’m sure suffer under internalised homophobia. Yet they, too, retain most of their male privileges and show their disrespect for women by wearing womanhood as a costume.
Lesbian women who declare themselves men... they have to stay convincing in order to have limited male privilege, like their opinion being listened to and not getting threatened with rape or murder.
Their privileges are contingent on playing their role with conviction. A role that requires them to hate women and lesbians, or in other words, to hate themselves. A double whammy of self-hatred.
I wish there was a way out of misogyny and lesbophobia. Declaring oneself transgender isn’t it. Lesbians are still not accepted for who they are and, sadly, are rejected by the lesbian community if they play their role of men convincingly.
Truth is, the way the patriarchy is built is smart. It sustains itself. There is no way to escape from it within the system. There is only fighting the system.
It is obvious this is what the author wants to do. “I know what it means to live in this world as a woman and want to use my status as a man to help this cause.”
It seems so obvious but pretending to be a member of the oppressive class to help your fellow oppressed will not defeat the system. In order to fix the problem we need to name it. It’s misogyny bits lesbophobia.
There’s a reason why the trans movement imposes language on us and tries to take our words away. Lesbian, woman, vagina, uterus, mother, breastfeeding, pregnant, period... all these words are now “transphobic” unless used by men who say they are women.
Men know we need these words to fight our fight, to fight the patriarchy, to fight them. So let’s set the record straight and reclaim every single one of these words. And let’s translate their words from Newspeak.
Trans activism = male supremacy. Transgender = an undefined concept that may or may not include every group in society but always includes privileged white straight males. Gender identity = a personality. Gender expression = how you look. Transphobia = gaslighting women.
Cis = an imaginary concept to deny the oppression of women by men, similar to Holocaust denial. (There, I’ve said it. Gloria Steinem said: “ There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.”)
I can’t find the quote on my phone but @GloriaSteinem compared this loss of female lives to the Holocaust. So is using the word “cis” which designates women as the oppressor not similar?
And this is how the article ends, at the pinnacle of cognitive dissonance. A “cis-run patriarchy”. Implying that one can run the patriarchy based on an inner feeling. But that’s a privilege that is and will always be reserved for people born with penises. Or as I call them: men.
