Aren’t Trans-Women “Culturally Appropriating” Womanhood?
by Phyllis Chesler
On March 14th, some very brave women, mainly mothers, demonstrated ourside Gender Dysphoria clinics in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and New York City. I have not seen their actions covered in the media. Have you? Their focus was on the harm done to children by giving them diagnoses that lead to drugs, puberty blockers and surgical mutilation.
On March 17th, the United States Senate began considering the Equality Act. Radical feminists believe that privileging gender identity over and above sex will be very harmful to girls and women.
Here’s what’s puzzling. We’ve all been warned against culturally appropriating someone else’s social, sexual, ethnic, and racial, identity. If someone is a human being of color, (African, Latinx, Asian, or Indigenous), no white person has the right to tell their stories, not even in a novel. Harriet Beecher Stowe had no right to write about Uncle Tom nor did Mark Twain have the right to depict Jim and Huck on that raft.
If someone is gay, only they can play gay roles onscreen or in the theater and only a gay critic can review a play with gay characters in it. No straight writer can do justice to the works of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, or Marcel Proust. Well, wait a minute.
Does this mean that gay critics cannot review the works of straight authors? And that men cannot depict female characters? And that female authors can only write about other women—and that’s only if they’re writing about someone much like themselves, who looks like them, thinks like them, shares the same sexual preference, etc.
And yet, at this very moment in history, we are also being told that there is one exception. Men can dress like women, take hormones and undergo surgery to become women, and that this is uber politically correct. Even trans-women with male genitalia intact but who identify as women can share a military barrack, a jail cell, a shelter for battered women, and enter a sports competition against biological women who were born and raised as women.
I have no doubt that trans-women are persecuted by heterosexual men who also use them for sexual gratification. I think that such trans-women need to launch their own liberation movements rather than climb aboard feminism’s shaky little boat which is currently under such siege. And, at the risk of being harassed, shamed, and defamed, I must dare to note that biology is actually real as is DNA and anatomy.
I do not understand why cross-dressing and drag are so scorned, why deeply unhappy people, even children, need to surgically mutilate themselves and take cancer-producing hormones in order to, arguably, be transformed into another sex.
This is in the interest of Big Pharma, mental health clinics that specialize in gender dysphoria, and surgeons. Always follow the money.
Just wait for all the stories—they have begun to emerge—from trans-man who have come to regret their earlier choices.
As to the increasing number of young girls who want to become men—that will require another article, perhaps only a novel—or a class-action lawsuit will do.
This article first appeared only in German at Achgut Media.