by Daphna Whitmore
Update: On 25 February 2019, Internal Affairs Minister Tracey Martin announced that the Government would put on hold a Bill to allow sex self ID pending better consultation and investigation by the Crown Law Office into legal issues that had been raised. This article has had photos and screenshots added on 31 August that show just how misogynistic many trans activists are. The photos also show that most trans activists are not transgender, but are males with a deep hatred of women.
Science is under attack as universities, workplaces and governments are drawing up policies and laws to codify a fiction that makes creationism look sensible. We are supposed to believe that trans women are women, lesbians can have penises, and biological sex is a social construct. The idea that a man can literally be transformed into a woman, and a woman can be a man, has gained ground over the past decade.
Parliament is considering a law that would enable anyone to change their sex on their birth certificate by simply filling out a form. A similar bill, the Gender Recognition Act, is being promoted in the UK by the Conservative government.
This self ID process is supposed to ease the suffering of people with severe body dysphoria. This is a rare condition in which a person is tormented by the belief that he or she was born in the wrong body. However, the majority of trans women activists do not have body dysphoria and do not want any medical or surgical procedures. The majority are hanging on to their penises and are aggressively demanding rights that impact on women. People who have opposed self ID have faced a storm of abuse from trans activists. Nearly all of the abuse is aimed at women, particularly gender critical women who they call TERFS (Trans exclusionary radical feminists). (See here for thousands of examples).
Self ID would mean a male could simply say he is a woman and demand to share women and girls’ changing rooms. Biological males are now competing in women’s sports and the women are expected to applaud their victories. Women are being told they must open women’s groups to include males who identify as women and to do so with graciousness or be called transphobes, bigots or worse. Lesbians are being told they should embrace these new penis-bearing-women. Women in prisons have been harmed and face danger as males claiming transgender status are moved to women’s prisons. In Canada and Australia beauticians who provide women-only services have been taken to court for refusing to wax the hairy scrotums of trans women.
It is important to differentiate between biological sex and gender as a key plank of the trans ideology involves conflating the two. Sex is biological, whereas gender describes social and cultural behaviours. Biological sex is observable at birth while gender is something that is socialised and happens over time. So babies with male genitalia have XY chromosomes, and those with female genitalia have XX chromosomes. Biological sex is determined by birth genitalia and this corresponds 99.6% of the time to chromosome sex. That level of scientific validity is extremely high. Contrast that with the trans ideology that ‘sex is assigned at birth’, as if it is some random act of a blind midwife. Unfortunately the Ministry of Health and other government departments have taken up the ‘sex is assigned at birth’ linguistic hooey.
Here are more images from trans activists at the Melbourne International Women’s Day demonstration 2019:
Vancouver Women’s Shelter was targeted in August 2019 by trans activists for being a female-only space. They nailed a dead rat to the door and the following week painted offensive slogans:
The trans ideologues claim sex is a spectrum because some people are intersex. This, they say, proves that there are all sorts of sexes or genders. Intersex conditions are rare; they are usually still female or male, and most often are infertile. Just as other developmental anomalies occur such as limb deformities involving extra digits, there are deformities in sex, but this does not mean that sex is a spectrum. Furthermore, intersex people have complained about being used by the trans activists as intersex are not transgender. Their objections have been completely ignored.
Sexual reproduction was a path evolution took 1.2 billion years ago and it has remained dimorphic in that it has two distinct gametes. Sexual reproduction – in plant and animal species – entails two sexes, not a spectrum of sexes. Small gametes are male (sperm in humans) and large gametes are female (ova in humans). Sexual reproduction is simply the fusion of the nuclei of male and female gametes. If sex was a spectrum there would be a number of intermediate gametes. There are no intermediates. The development of sex characteristics are complex, but the end of the process is male or female in over 99 percent of people. *
Self ID is a gift to predatory males. Fill out a form and you are a woman. Why should females be forced to share intimate spaces against their will with males? If females want to get changed or shower without males, or sleep in rooms without males, that will no longer be enforceable. Should it become law women-only spaces would be made free access for any male who declares himself a woman. Violent offenders could be transferred to women’s prisons. It would further encourage biological males competing in women’s sports. In healthcare where it is vital to know the biological sex of the patient there will be wrong diagnoses, wrong treatments, and likely deaths. If this sounds far fetched consider blood transfusions where male and female blood is treated separately. Blood donations from females are used for products such as immune globulin, instead of being transfused directly to patients because of potential for antibodies from pregnancies, (including miscarriages – which are sometimes unknown). These antibodies can cause severe reactions, an acute lung injury, and sometimes death. Transgender people who conceal their biological sex in the healthcare setting are endangering themselves and others.
Transgender people have the right to live free from discrimination but the trans activists are undermining this. By demanding women give up women-only spaces and sex-based protections the trans activists’ campaign is far from progressive. The mess we now face, with a law change pending, is not just the fault of trans activists. They have been enabled by a chorus of woke-folk who have been schooled in post-modernist subjectivism.
The UK parliament has had 100,000 submissions on the Gender Recognition bill, many as a result of a mobilisation campaign by progressive women’s organisations. Supporters of women’s rights in New Zealand should sit up and take note.
Speak Up For Women is a campaigning group set up to defend the rights of women and girls, in opposition to the Government’s proposal that a person’s sex should be a question of choice, or self-identification, on birth certificates.
For more on the consequences of self ID read Renee Gerlich’s article published on the Canadian website Feminist Current.
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*The trans ideologues like to bring up XY females who give birth as proof that a spectrum exists. These females may appear to be XY on karyotyping done with blood or saliva samples, however more sensitive tests show they usually have a patchwork of XY and XO cells and tissues. Their Y chromosome doesn’t have a functioning SRY gene (which triggers male sex development), and XO functionally directs the reproductive development, leading to female sex and anatomy. Similarly, some males are born with XX and develop as males due to the translocation of a tiny section of the sex determining region of the Y chromosome.
Further reading
Law change for gender self-identification needs discussion not censorship
In defence of women’s sports
Redline 
This is an excellent series of articles by Daphna. The difference between sex and gender is so important and so fundamental. For decades in the US in political, legislative, and legal arenas, the term “gender equity” has been used for what is really sex equity. This has led to a total disregard for the difference between biologically determined sex and socially determined gender roles.
Thanks Phil. Yes, the terms sex and gender are thoroughly muddled in New Zealand too. Clear terminology is vital, and especially so with legislation. I hope the debate leads to clarity.
An excellent article, science-based and class-based. To build a better world, the working class must have access to facts.
One of the really awful aspects of trans activism which I haven’t discussed in this piece is the forceful stifling of discussion and debate. The level of censorship is astounding. I plan to write something specifically on the shouting down and shutting down of people who question trans ideology.
Yes, excellent article and I look forward to comment on the censorship aspect. The situation in New Zealand at least is that raising any questions at all about trans gender activism gets dammed as “transphobia” and, where possible, the questioner is silenced. Posts are removed, posters are torn down, hall hire to discuss the matter has been derailed.
These are not academic matters.Social experimentation is being inflicted on the innocent.
When you have young primary school children being encouraged to medically mutilate themselves in search of their ” true gender”such matters urgently need discussion.At the moment, free exchange of ideas about that is not possible.
What an intriguing piece.
The distinction Daphna makes between biological sex and gender-identification is an important one. There has certainly been a conflation of the two ideas. But the continuing of a right-wing attack against trans people (self-identification being a ‘gift to predatory males’) is very strange. The vast majority of trans women merely seek respect for a very personal choice, and for them to be lumped in with a relatively miniscule group of predators is not only offensive, but illogical. The idea that trans people in general are ‘hanging on to their penis’ and trying to attain underserved rights from women seems just a tad absurd.
There are obviously some issues to be worked through around the policy of self-identifying, but non-biological, women being allowed access to certain spaces. But rather than taking a thoughtful and considerate position on the many different perspectives on trans rights, the author (and I assume, editorially, this blog) has retreated into a position of binary antagonism that seems closer to that of right-wing conservatism. A shame, because this debate is important.
The question of predators is not specifically trans, although there are men who are predatory trans. One of the many problems with people just making up their sex based on what they are thinking or feeling is that any bloke can claim to be a transwoman and it will be hard to dispute. Why should women be compelled to give up sex-based rights? It is utterly sexist and pig-headed to demand they do, and to demand they do it without any consultation. Why don’t you make mens-spaces safe and friendly?
Great article. The more impressionable elements of the left have just lined up behind whatever seems to be moving and making the most noise, rather than making a clinical scientific analysis. A chunk of people seem determined to go down the postmodern rabbithole where objective/material reality counts for nothing when faced with the pomo ‘logic’ of people being whatever they say they are and having a screech-fest at anyone who suggests a critical discussion of the subject. This must be what it was like during the Cultural Revolution in China; a bunch of young self-obsessed narcissists screeching and waving the little red book in the air. But this time it is the little book of trans rants.
This bollocks also gets in the way of actual rights for trans people – like demanding free sex-change operations as part of a comprehensive public health service, full rights to dress however people like (in gender terms), the right to walk down the street without harassment etc. And why not fight for space in *men’s* facilities – so that biological males who identify as trans women can use men’s spaces without the fear of attack. Now that *really would* challenge sex and gender stereotypes and create ‘fluidity’.
But, instead, we have penises demanding entry into spaces which women themselves (and the anti-sexist left) have carved out for women, often through long and hard struggle. Those biological males who had a big, big sense of entitlement were backfooted by the rise of the women’s liberation movement and the sections of the Marxist left which fought for women’s liberation. Now, biological males, without giving up anything – least of all their meat and two veg – have found a way into women’s spaces. Claim to be women with *more rights* to those spaces than actual women!
It’s extraordinarily arrogant – and cheeky. And, ultimately, they won’t get away with it because society does actually need to know who is a woman and who is a bloke. Plus the vast majority of people will continue to regard transwomen as blokes, especially when they show up at female beauty parlours and demand waxing of the meat and two veg or insist on lesbians being nice to their penises. It will be just another thing that makes working class people think the left is a bunch of ridiculous performance artists and crackpots.
A few years ago I was starting to think that postmodernism had played itself out. Got that wrong! However, perhaps this is denouement of identity politics and privilege politics.
As Gramsci said in relation to bourgeois society’s impasse: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
This is sure one of those morbid symptoms.
Great article, Daphna! It’s just so rediculous to argue against science/reality that trans individuals are literally the same as biological members of one sex or the other. Total bollocks. I respect anyone’s right to live their life how they choose including being true to their own gender identity. They should never be discriminated against or persecuted for this. However, neither should reality be twisted to suit the needs of a tiny percentage of society. Trans women are trans women and I see nothing wrong with that statement. What they are not is biological women however sad that may be for them personally. It’s just factually untrue.
On the silencing of debate, I just saw a twitter post saying that the person posting instantly blocks any other person they consider to be ‘trans exclusionary’ becuase “these people aren’t interested in discussion”. Apparently the total hypocracy of this statement was lost on this particular individual. Not platforming anyone that trans activists and their allies disagree with is an absolute disgrace.
Trans ideology has some glearingly obvious flaws that some transexual individuals are all too aware of but that have escaped many on the left. See for example this transexual youtuber, whose politics seem to be somewhat to the right, but cuts right throuh the trans activist bollocks with absolute clarity in her videos:
Rose of Dawn: https://m.youtube.com/user/AshleeK9
Nice considered piece, introducing some good useful information rather than “reckons”, this is a testing issue for some of us to work through, those with a marxist world view and class analysis, recognise the multiple layers of oppression and exploitation that various individuals and groups are subject to in addition to basic subjugation of the majority by the capitalist class and state forces, and the contradictions that can arise within and between those groups
Post Modernism’s and Neo Liberalism’s underlying psychology have both created a “dog eat dog” society where many know exactly how many Flybys points they have, but seemingly not much about anything else, and a common scenario of equal weighting ascribed between very different phenomena, which can see individual identity assume primacy, beyond being the traditional sharp end of oppression, such as say Māori/Polynesians disproportionately subject to profiling and Police assault
I would not want the cops on a union or solidarity march after experiencing how they behave, and in whose interests they work for! and the inability of the Pride participants to make a clear analysis is what has stymied them, as LGBT etc. become more accepted, a class collaborationist, bourgeois approach to business sponsors and indeed the Police has developed
Hi Alec, I agree it is a testing issue. On the one hand it is not a new issue, on the other hand it has gained a lot of momentum and evolved in ways that need thoughtful debate, not censorship. The way anyone who wants to discuss the issue gets attacked is appalling. Some are claiming this article is about denying the existence of trans people! Back in the 1990s and 2000s I was prescribing hormones to transexuals; and I’ve never had a problem calling trans women she, but back then people were not invoking magical thinking. There was no pretence that transexuals were metamorphosing into biological females. To do so would be to deny reality and to deny their experiences.
Pride parade – having become a corporate-sponsored show that all the prime ministers and establishment figures were clamouring to be seen at – can’t have it both ways and insist that it is anti-establishment.
Transexuals who disagree with the new entitled variety of trans women get denounced as “true scum”. These folks are so entitled, it’s almost beyond belief. Then, of course, I remember they have penises, so the incredible sense of entitlement becomes more understandable.
The idea that women – ie human females – should abandon altogether women-only spaces is the ultimate in male entitlement, yet loads of ‘woke’ males support this anti-women rights demand. Then try to pretend it has something to do with the rights of a marginalised, oppressed group as if everyone who supports women’s liberation is somehow anti-trans rights.
But the test of whether anyone supports trans rights is not whether any of us support the right of biological males to gatecrash women’s sports and women’s gyms and showers and women’s socials, it’s whether we support the right of people to dress as the opposite sex, go to work in those clothes without harassment and discrimination, walk down the street without harassment etc, have access to sex-change operations and so on.
When faced with political and biological-scientific arguments, the standard reaction of the entitled biological males and their supporters is to throw tantrums, call people nasty names and resort to censorship and no-platforming. All this indicates the poverty of their actual arguments. Authoritarian liberals hate open debate.
A great site for a range of articles from different standpoints which question the ieology and demands of the new layer of super-entitled penises is Peak Trans: https://www.peaktrans.org/
Great comment, Phil. Really exposes the misogyny of these people.
I didn’t want to bog this article down with details about biology but I thought it would be necessary as so much of the trans ideology is about mystifying biological sex. They keep trotting out the idea that sex is very complicated and hence there must be many gradations of sex categories.
Sure enough, today a microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles in a newspaper column has come out suggesting that transgenderism is a result of people not having the standard 46XX or 46XY chromosomes. She says: “In other words, the reality is that people don’t fit into two neat categories, and sometimes, they know they don’t fit the sex they were assigned at birth.”
She doesn’t seem aware that there is no known link between chromosomes and transgender; that people with chromosome anomalies are usually infertile, and are usually male or female, and that what may appear as an XY females (ie someone with male chromosomes) is with better testing shown to be patchwork of XY and XO cells and tissues. The non-functioning Y chromosome is replaced with an XO which results in female sex and anatomy. Males who are born XX and develop as males have a segment of Y chromosome that has the SRY gene and directs the development of male sex characteristics. There is nothing to suggest that these people are likely to experience gender dysphoria.
Here’s her article:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/108804183/siouxsie-wiles-sex-chromosomes-more-complicated-than-xy-and-xx
It has nothing to do with right-wing conservatism and everything to do with supporting women’s rights.
You’re obviously not familiar with the debate and the attitudes of a whole layer of trans women – ie biological males – who have been involved in a vicious campaign against gender-critical feminists, involving routine threats of violence, including death threats and rape threats, along with attempts to get people fired from their jobs, a whole campaign of silencing and censorship, actual assaults, and on and on and on. The behaviour of the trans cult ideologues is just like entitled young male brats.
You should familiarise yourself more with what is going on here. I’d recommend you check out the PeakTrans site: https://www.peaktrans.org/
Here, for instance, is an article by British transexual Miranda Yardley, critiquing the new trans cult ideology, its misogyny and homophobia: https://www.afterellen.com/general-news/567823-girl-dick-the-cotton-ceiling-and-the-cultural-war-on-lesbians-girls-and-women
I hope you dont mind me posting a comment here. I am Mia a male born person, I found your website through reddit GenderCritical. I think you raise some really good points with the issues of self IDing, already vile and terrible people have used the TRA movement to do horrific things to women and its sad to see this, see them support the vile people. The issue I have with self IDing is the people who want to change their self ID more than once. The reason it is hard to change your gender marker on your ID because its suppose to be hard suppose to prevent people wanting to do it unless they honestly felt a certain way and willing to work for it. Now we have people just wanting to try being trans, or even worse men who dress, act, and behave like men claiming to be women because it was made easy for them. Thank you for your article and I loved the kitten and puppy image despite it having some scary but… accurate text that went with it.
Appreciate your comment. There are a number of transexuals – ie genuine people – who feel the same way as you and have been speaking out on the issue and getting appalling flak from the new trans layer. It’s possible to support transexual rights without agreeing at all with the new trans layer and their attacks on women’s rights and gay rights (and transexuals). All the best.
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