‘Trans’ is the Wrong Answer to a Real Problem.
What about the girls?
This contains upsetting pictures but pre-teen kids see stuff like this daily so why should we warn you?
by Dr EM
Part I: Porn Culture.
Transgenderism, for teenage girls, is the wrong answer to a woman-and-girl-hating culture. The non-transactivists I know, the normal people who repeat the thought-terminating mantras, when asked to defend the ideology always resort to ‘But what about trans-identified females, what about the girls?’ I respond ‘That’s the point – what about the girls? Girls are being drugged and mutilated because they do not want to fit in the cage designated feminine.
Let’s destroy the cage, not the bodies and mental well-being of girls’. I have previously written about how school dress codes sexually objectify and focus on girls’ breasts: this could be one reason for the rise in breast-binding at school.[1] Male culture, the one we live in as a society, is wrong, not the girls.
In her 2013 book Misogyny Reloaded, Abigail Bray argued that this global doctrine of woman-hating was a new fascism.[2] Bray warned us that porn, pharmaceutical companies, cosmetic surgeons, self-help and the beauty industry were exploiting a new creed of extreme misogyny to profit off of the bodies and minds of women and girls to the tune of billions.
Similarly, in 2015 Kristin J. Anderson argued that it was neoliberalism which neutered feminism through the language of individual choice and turned it from women’s liberation to a facet of consumerism.[3]
A wholesale assault on women’s rights and humanity is being undertaken by men globally and we have a ‘movement’ which says individual women are the problem and can change the world through self-improvement. No. Not any more. Radical feminism is back, it is growing and we are furious.
It is not just big industry: this female-hating doctrine has recruited ground troops from ordinary men. There has been a change in sexism over the years, from the idea that women shouldn’t do something because we are less capable to a visceral hatred of the female because we are female. Sounds far-fetched? 87,000 women were murdered by men in 2017, 2-3 women are murdered by men per week in the UK. (ref) Dawn Wilcox explained “Violence against women is so ubiquitous that it is invisible,” as she collated the deaths of 1,600 women murdered by men in the United States in a single year.[4]
The South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has admitted the country is facing a national crisis of violence against women.[5] ‘India has an alarming trend that sees 20 women die every day as a result of harassment over a dowry – either murdered, or compelled to commit suicide’.[6]
Latin America has the highest rate of femicide but they are not acknowledged as distinct and data is not sex-based. There are not enough pages to record the multitude of violence committed against female people by males. The 1.6 million women who suffer domestic violence in the U.K. per year, the 11 – 13 women who are raped per hour by men in England and Wales, the background level sexual harassment women and girls experience on public transport or daring to walk around without a male companion in the UK[7] This is fuelled by pornography.
Our society tells men and boys that watching and masturbating to videos of women and girls being tortured, humiliated, raped is a legitimate form of male entertainment. If videos and images had no impact on behaviour then why is the advertising industry worth $563.02 billion?[8]
Dworkin convincingly and repeatedly showed that ‘pornography is the propaganda of sexual fascism. Pornography is the propaganda of sexual terrorism’.[9] If women were considered human we wouldn’t need to show studies again and again that if you whip, burn, choke, drown, insert hooks and objects, and torture them in a variety of other ways they do not like it and it causes harm.
Transgenderism/transsexualism is the same: if women were seen as fully human we wouldn’t need to provide repeated evidence of this fact: studies showing the harms and risks of removing women’s rights to single-sex spaces, self-definition, and sex based legislative protections in other words – we wouldn’t have to keep proving the earth was round and orbits the sun.
Both porn and transgenderism/transsexualism are rooted in the sexualised objectification of women, the denial of a woman’s humanity and view of her as a collection of parts for male sexual thrill. The ultimate end is the possessing of this ‘object’ formerly known as woman.
What could be more possessive than wearing another person as a costume? But a woman is born not worn. Nevertheless, women and girls are on the front line to experience the impact of this advertising and propaganda of male fascism.
Gail Dines and her project ‘Culture Reframed’ is looking at the devastating effects of porn culture as a public health crisis similar to smoking and gambling addiction.[10] We live in a porn culture, boundaries have been blurred and pornography has seeped into music, print, film, other artistic industries and even politics.
In music videos, ‘former pornographic directors can now be found directing music videos and former porn stars can be found starring in them’.[11] In print advertisement, ‘women are… more likely to be positioned in weakened psychological states, looking away, disorientated, and even looking dead or passed out – and these depictions have actually increased over the 50 year period’.[12]
Sex assaults of female children by their male peers is soaring.[13] The EVAW coalition has pointed out that ‘as well as disturbingly high levels of rape and sexual violence in schools, girls are subjected to relentless sexual harassment by other children in school’.[14] Because it is girls that suffer, the government has been slow to act and hasn’t treated it as a priority.
When we consider consensual sex the picture isn’t any better for the young women of the porn era. The 23 year old radical feminist writer ‘Rosie Redstockings’ wrote in response to Owen Jones championing of pornography that some of things she had experienced in her relationships were:
- having my head shoved into his crotch, and held down while I sucked him off
- being told that my gag reflex was too strong, couldn’t I work on it?
- bullied into submitting to facials. I didn’t want to. He said (joking?) that he’d ejaculate on my face while I was asleep. He wasn’t joking – I woke up with him wanking over me.
- bullied into trying anal. It hurt so much I begged him to stop. He stopped, then complained that I was being too sensitive and it can’t be *that* bad, he continued to ask for it
- having my hair pulled
- constant requests for threesomes
- constant requests to let him film it
… Every single straight girl I know has had similar experiences. Every. Single. One’.[15] Anna Moore and Coco Khan have discussed the ‘fatal, hateful rise of choking during sex’ in The Guardian.[16] Women are starting to talk about and campaign on this issue, a woman named Anna, 23, told the BBC she had experienced ‘unwanted acts of violence during consensual sex on three separate occasions, with different men’.[17] It took a Parliamentary debate to decide that women did not enjoy violence and torture during sex to the point of their deaths to get the rough sex defence to murder banned.[18]
It is confusing to grow up being fed ‘liberal feminism’ [the men’s sexual rights ideology]. To be told that something which hurts you should give you pleasure, to be told that something which degrades you is actually empowering. If, for example, anal sex for girls was pleasurable (against biological reality) then it wouldn’t need the propaganda instructing teen girls and young women to do it. If being choked during sex was pleasurable then it wouldn’t be a common feature of domestic violence and murder. If pornography was empowering revenge porn and filmed rapes wouldn’t be a thing. Erections aren’t magical, they don’t change reality or facts, despite what ‘liberal feminists’ and many men assert. If radical feminism wasn’t a threat to ending the submission of women to male power and sexual violence, there wouldn’t be such energy spent on stopping girls and younger women from listening to women slightly older than them. Radical feminism wouldn’t have been branded wrong think, ‘TERF’.
The problem is very real for girls and women but the solution offered by transgenderism is backward – girls, rather than rejecting the cultural demands placed on them because of their bodies, are rejecting their bodies. They have been conditioned to do this. Rather than admitting that our culture is deeply damaging for girls and women, that we need to change it and look in terms of a public health crisis, those in power have individualised the issue – those girls were born wrong instead of what we are doing is wrong. No. No child is born wrong.
We OBJECT.
[1] Dr Em, ‘Breast Binding, Sexual Objectification & Grooming’, Transgender Trend (9 June 2019),https://www.transgendertrend.com/breast-binding-sexual-objectification-grooming/
[2] A. Bray, Misogyny Reloaded (Spinifex Press, 2013).
[3] K. J. Anderson, Modern Misogyny: Anti-feminism in a Post-Feminist Era (Oxford University Press, 2015).
[4] U.N. ‘Gender related killing of women & girls’, https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/GSH2018/GSH18_Gender-related_killing_of_women_and_girls.pdf , p.10; Office for National Statistics (2019) Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2018 (average taken over 10 years); D. Anguaiano, ‘The nurse tracking America’s epidemic of murdered women’, Guardian (11 April 2019) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/11/the-nurse-tracking-americas-epidemic-of-murdered-women
[5] R. L. Franke, ‘South Africa in a crisis of violence against women’, The Guardian (6 September 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/06/south-africa-faces-national-crisis-of-violence-against-women-says-president
[6] R. Gupta, ‘20 Women Die A Day: Dowry Deaths Still A Threatening Reality In India?’, She the people (21 April 2020), https://www.shethepeople.tv/top-stories/opinion/dowry-deaths-reality-in-india-but-until-when/
[7] Refuge, ‘The extent of domestic violence’, https://www.refuge.org.uk/our-work/forms-of-violence-and-abuse/domestic-violence/domestic-violence-the-facts/; Rape Crisis England and Wales, ‘About Sexual Violence’, https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/about-sexual-violence/statistics-sexual-violence/; Plan International UK, ‘Street Harassment’, https://plan-uk.org/act-for-girls/street-harassment.
[8] https://www.statista.com/topics/990/global-advertising-market/
[9] A. Dworkin, Letters From A Warzone: Writings 1976 – 1989 (E. P. Dutton, 1988), p. 201.
[10] ‘The Porn Crisis’, Culture Reframed https://www.culturereframed.org/the-porn-crisis/
[11] K. J. Anderson, Modern Misogyny: Anti-feminism in a Post-Feminist Era (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 77.
[12] K. J. Anderson, Modern Misogyny: Anti-feminism in a Post-Feminist Era (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 78.
[13]‘Child-on-child sex offence reports ‘tip of the iceberg’, BBC News (9 October 2017) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41504571
[14] ‘Government too slow to respond to rapes and sexual assaults in schools’, EVAW https://www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/government-too-slow-to-respond-to-rapes-and-sexual-assaults-in-schools/
[15]R. Redstockings, ‘ In Response to Owen Jones -Rosie Redstockings on porn’, Real For Women Campaigns (8 April 2015), https://realforwomen.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/in-response-to-owen-jones-rosie-redstockings-on-porn/
[16] A. Moore & C. Kahn, ‘The fatal, hateful rise of choking during sex’, The Guardian (25 July 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/25/fatal-hateful-rise-of-choking-during-sex
[17] A. Harte, ‘’A man tried to choke me during sex without warning’, BBC Radio 5 (28 November 2019), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50546184
[18] ‘Rough sex’ defence will be banned, says justice minister’, BBC News (17 June 2020), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53064086