But.
If I say I’m a woman but I keep my male organ and then I’m among lesbian women and I want to have sex but they don’t want to have sex with a person with a male organ then how am I a woman if my choosing to be a woman is not acceptable to women.
If a person reacts to you in that way then that person would be a TERF.
TERF.
Trans exclusionary radical feminist.
And that’s a bad thing to be.
In the conversation we are having, that is a bad thing to be, yes.
So you take these women with vaginas who won’t have sex with women who have penises and you call them by a bad name and say they are bad people and how does that help me.
It helps you stand by your choice.
Because I am right and they are wrong.
There is a women’s private festival in Michigan and it’s forty years old, a place for women to come together and make music and cook and talk and simply be together, and these are some of the women who made the women’s movement, cis women, older women, mostly, revolutionaries in their own time. But they will not allow trans women with male organs to be a part of the event and so there is a dispute that is on the edge of being a physical fight. Trans activists camp outside the festival with weapons, and they plan protests and disruptions and sometimes carry them out, graffiti, cut water lines, slashed tires, and flyers of their penises. I am proposing that in this dispute the women with vaginas are wrong because they cannot adapt to a different time in which a woman with a vagina is just one kind of woman and other kinds of women are as much women as they are. If you choose to be an American and become a citizen you don’t have to give up everything about who you were before. You yourself became an American but when you are challenged you say that you feel foreign so you have kept your foreign part in some way intact. If you choose to be a woman the same liberty exists. And if somebody tries to exclude you from your gender choice it is your right to protest.
But what if I can’t see that these choices are choices. What if I learned from the male gay community that homosexuality was inborn, that it was a human way to be, it couldn’t be chosen or unchosen, and what if I hated the reactionary idea that you could reeducate a gay person to make a different choice and give up his gayness. What if I can’t see how these choices you are proposing, these multiple-possibility gender nuances, are not part of that same reactionary ideology, because what is chosen can be unchosen, and it’s a lady’s right to change her mind. What if I propose that my identity is just difficult, and painful, and confusing, and I don’t know how to choose or what to choose or even if choosing is what has to happen, what if I just need to stagger blindly toward finding out what I am and not who I choose to be. What if I believe there is an I am and I need to find that. What if this is about discovery not choice, about finding out who I’ve always been, not about picking a flavor from the gender ice-cream display. What if I think that if a woman’s I am means she can’t have sex with a woman with a male organ then that needs to be respected. What if I worry that there could be a civil war on this side of the gender divide and what if I think that’s the wrong war. What if we are all separate kinds of women and not all the same, and if separations, including sexual separations, are okay and not bigoted or bad. What if we’re a federation of different states of being and we need to respect those states’ rights as well as the union. I’m losing my mind trying to work all this out and I don’t even know the words, I’m using the words I know but they feel like the wrong words all the time, what if I’m trying to live in a dangerous country whose language I haven’t learned. What then.
Then I would say, we have work to do to break the cotton ceiling in your head.
Which is.
Underwear is made of cotton. The contents of a trans woman’s underwear act as an axis to oppress and marginalise her. Quote unquote.
Somebody told my girlfriend a joke about becoming a transbillionaire. I identify as a billionaire and so now I’m rich, she said. How would you respond to that?
That isn’t funny.