I hesitated writing about peculiar developments among writers critical of transgenderism increasingly trashing feminism and feminists. Jennifer Bilek says to critics, “Don’t leave the kitchen if you can’t handle the heat.” And so I came from the kitchen.
donovancleckley.com/scapegoating-f… TL;DR: There has been a trashing of feminism and feminists targeting women whose work matters. Trashing is typically ignored because many hope that it will all just go away, but it really does not. And I am very sick and tired of bullshit—“psychoanalytically speaking, of course.”

There has been a rapid-onset historical amnesia toward women’s contributions. It has particularly targeted radical feminists, especially lesbian ones. The work against transgenderism actually began with radical feminists recognizing it during the 1970s.
donovancleckley.com/resistance-aga… Janice G. Raymond’s ‘Transsexual Empire,’ in 1979, was the first book-length critique of transsexualism. Where hers came out almost fifty years ago, Matt Walsh’s ‘What Is a Woman?’ came out in 2022. Raymond does not have to “self-identify” being “in this movement for many years.”

Last year, for the Andrea Dworkin Archival Project (@AndreaDworkinAP), @nikkicraft and I shared the following transcript of a May 9, 1990 conversation she had with Dworkin on what Dworkin termed Allen Ginsberg’s “pedophile logic.” I am reposting the transcript here, with a link to the original Facebook post at the ADAP, including a visual Craft made and an introduction I did. As I make our list of posts we have done over the past year about Dworkin’s far lesser-known works, featuring “Why Norman Mailer Refuses to Be the Woman He Is” (1973) and “Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals—Feminism and the ‘Radical’ Left” (1977), I want to make note of this later work, yet another vital part of the portrait.
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Andrea Dworkin Talking with Nikki Craft on Allen Ginsberg, May 9, 1990
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Transcript

DWORKIN: I am assuming that, at some point, you’re going to have some good use for this. Also, I think it’s very possible that you could call him up and ask him about this stuff, and he will tell you.

I don’t think he’s being deceptive about it; I think he is slowly approaching a point where he wants to come out and make it a political issue, eventually defying people to put him, the great poet, in jail. That they should be prepared to put him in jail, but I’m not sure about all of that.

All I can tell you is what happened, and I don’t know whether you want me to tell you about it with any of the emotion that I feel or whether you just want me to give you the facts.

CRAFT: I think, for the tape, just the facts. Don’t you think?

DWORKIN: Yeah, I think that would be better. These conversations began on the day that the Supreme Court decision on the possession of child pornography was announced in the newspapers, which was Saturday April 21, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The event—the reason that both Allen Ginsberg and I were there—was the bar mitzvah of our godson—he’s the godfather and I’m the godmother—Isaac. And that’s why we were there.

I had just read about the Supreme Court decision saying that states could criminalize the possession of child pornography, in the local Boston newspaper, and I was very happy about it. I went down to the hotel lobby to wait to be picked up to go with other people to the cinema, and Ginsberg came down. There were maybe ten other people there, fifteen other people. He was extremely hyper and upset about this decision. I hadn’t seen him in about probably close to twenty-five years. I had only seen him once, in all that time, and we hadn’t spoken. He began talking to me about it; I didn’t bring it up with him. He told me that he was increasingly committed to fighting censorship and that this was a decision of censorship, that he takes such pictures, and that he could be put in jail under the law that the Supreme Court just upheld. That he likes to take them and he likes to share them, and he was very dismissive. Apparently, one part of the law said that you have to have, in order to be prosecuted under this law, more than three prints. In other words, if you only have one print, that’s not actionable, and he was very derisive about that—only three prints. In other words, to him, having three prints would be worthless. He kept saying that they would put him in jail, and I said to him that I would shoot him. He got very, very upset and said, “Why would you say such a thing to me? How could you say such a thing to me? How is it possible?” I said, “What you’re saying is that you molest children.” And he started to say that they weren’t children, basically that teenage boys were not children and that he should have a right to do any sex act he wanted with them and that they wanted with him.

CRAFT: Can you try to say pretty much his exact words?

DWORKIN: I can’t really say his exact words. These are very close to his exact words. He talked very fast, very intellectually deft. Meanwhile, we were moving into the bar mitzvah, into the synagogue, into the service, into the reception.

I wrote a comment in reply to a man saying transgenderism has been the product of the “Marxism” of John Money.
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John Money was neither a Marxist nor did he start “Gender Studies.” Both Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) and I have researched these issues in great detail. “Gender Studies” emerged as increasing numbers of men asserted Women’s Studies made them feel excluded. This claim flew, despite men having the monopoly on every field of study for centuries—then over Women’s Studies, too, which became “Gender Studies.”

Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) is a lesser-known figure in finance to recognize for Women’s History Month.

Woodhull has been most notable as the first woman candidate for the U.S. presidency, running in 1872 for the Equal Rights Party. But she was also the first woman to own a brokerage firm on Wall Street and the first woman to start a weekly newspaper: ‘Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.’

Men using guns in defense of their proprietorship over land they have claimed is not a new phenomenon. One may consider the European “minority” that colonized all of the Americas. Likewise, men now defend their “womanhood,” like a land they have claimed, against women themselves. Adult men calling themselves “trans girls” and brandishing firearms at women is absolutely crazy. Looking across the men’s pages, one finds pornified mockeries of women. No “social justice” movement has made evident male sexual entitlement a sacrament—not until this one now.

There is no #LGBWithTheT where the heterosexual majority will respect lesbians and gay men having boundaries. Trans-identified heterosexual people’s use of “same-gender attraction” redefines us against our will. #LGBWithoutTheT presents resistance to occupation and colonization. Lesbians and gay men who transition do exist. But they are the minority. Their existence does not justify forced teaming us with heterosexual people. Trans-identified homosexual people have been included, by default. Many have desired otherwise in wishing for the straight world.

Gloria Steinem first published ‘Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions’ in 1983, collecting her writings from the 1960s-1970s. In 1995, its second edition did not exclude any of the original pieces from 1983. Both editions included Steinem’s 1977 critique of transsexualism. First published in the February 1977 issue of ‘Ms.’ as “If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Change the Foot,” this essay critiques the misogyny and sex-role stereotyping of “the transsexual empire.” Like Raymond, Steinem emphasizes “the medical establishment.” She notes “societal forces.”

Clitoridectomy, being the surgical reduction or removal of the clitoris, had been regarded as “mental health care,” by knife or scissors, for women diagnosed with “mental health conditions” in Victorian England. According to Sheila Jeffreys (1987): “Isaac Baker Brown used clitoridectomy to ‘cure’ women of complaints as various as epilepsy, not wanting to have anything to do with their husbands, and painful periods” (p. 2).

Between MRA and TRA ideologies, men talk of women as being either “feminazis” and “misandrists” or “TERFs” and “transmisogynists.” Pages like Paul Elam’s ‘A Voice for Men’ and online “trans” forums, all mainly dominated by males, provide many examples along these lines. (1/9) Quoted in an epigraph to the 2013 essay titled “Beware the Rapetard Society,” seen here in a rather typical example, Elam writes: “Telling men they can end rape is like telling minorities they can end stealing. Feminism is a whole new level of hate.” (2/9)
avoiceformen.com/a-voice-for-me…

When I work with students on practicing style formatting, I make paper samplers, where I provide the first page of a few papers and/or general referencing information, and we format our references together. I love picking the samples! Plus, hands-on practice can be most helpful. Freud, A. (1977). Fears, anxieties, and phobic phenomena. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 32(1), 85-90. doi.org/10.1080/007973…

Angela C. Wild (@FrenchFem) of @GetTheLOutUK did the research “Lesbians at Ground Zero,” involving the survey of 80 women, published March 2019. Having seen claims against her work, here is a thread on an older piece of “peer-reviewed” research. (1/25)
gettheloutuk.com/blog/category/… Let us begin with a look back. A work that has been consistently referenced by transsexual rights activists past and transgender rights activists present is “Lesbian/Feminist Orientation Among Male-to-Female Transsexuals” by Deborah Feinbloom et al., published in 1976. (2/25)

“For in reality the language and imagery of androgyny is the language of dominance and servitude combined. One would not put master and slave language or imagery together to define a free person.”
- Janice G. Raymond, “The Illusion of Androgyny” (1975) “Integrity gives us a warrant for laying claim to a wholeness that is rightfully ours to begin with and from which centuries of patriarchal socialization to sexual roles and stereotyping has detracted.”
(cont.)

“Not only are race and sex entirely comparable classes, but there are no others like them. They are large, permanent, unchangeable, natural classes.”
- Crozier (1935), qtd. in Murray and Eastwood, “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” (1965) In Murray and Eastwood (1965), Crozier (1935) seems especially significant, with sex being analogized to race in order for sexism to be seen, at least in one sense here, as being parallel to racism. The original argument, from both Murray and Eastwood, itself matters today.

“Man-Made Femininity and Female Self-Hatred”
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In Gangnam, Seoul, in South Korea, prior to being fined over it, a cosmetic surgeon had decorated his office with jars of jawbones, two glass towers full of fragments, from his countless female patients: solid objects. (1/5) The female patients had undergone peculiar surgeries on the bones in their faces, akin to “facial feminization” surgeries offered in the West to males transitioning to “femaleness,” attempting to attaining an utterly alienating “feminine” ideal against the body as the self. (2/5)

Claiming that Antifa was not there in Los Angeles runs counter to evidence in posts from a group claiming to be with the movement.
And, for most members of the male sex who identify as women to be white, middle-class, and heterosexual, they sure do like co-opting women of color. It really would look way less revolutionary if it was shown on the posts and in the reporting as mainly white males harassing and assaulting women—rather than actual women of color fighting actual oppression, not for mainly white middle-class heterosexual members of the male sex.

Statistically, members of the male sex often murder other members of the male sex at higher rates than they murder members of the female sex. It is not because members of the male sex identify as “men,”rather than “women,” that other members of their sex often murder them. (1/5) The circle that transgenderism, as an ideology, cannot seem to square is how it can be argued that any member of the male sex can experience “misogyny” on the basis of “gender identity”—without also really trivializing the reality of misogyny for those of the female sex. (2/5)

According to @graceelavery, this graphic of a gun and “Shut the Fuck Up TERF,” sent mainly from members of the male sex, most of them being heterosexual, to members of the female sex, can be read among “any number of other feminist evocations of hyperfeminine violence.” (1/10) But this “both sides” reading seems to miss the fact that, if it is so that mainly heterosexual males who see themselves as “women,” most of whom also see themselves as “lesbians,” do send it to actual women, especially actual lesbians, it seems, by default, antifeminist. (2/10)

Here are some related works from @spinifexpress, all from the 1990s, still altogether significant in our time: ‘CyberFeminism: Connectivity, Critique, Creativity’ (1999)
Edited by Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein
spinifexpress.com.au/backlist/p/978…

Here is the author of ‘Histories of the Transgender Child,’ whose argument that “binary gender is a historically Western product and weapon of ongoing settler colonialism and anti-Blackness” ignores how gender as a hierarchy preceded both settler colonialism and chattel slavery. Another problem with this person’s argument is that gender as a hierarchy, that is, male dominance and female subordination, has existed in patriarchal cultures around the globe since at least Ancient Mesopotamia, which, by the way, goes way back—millennia, not just centuries.