TERF Wars

There is no time for a schism in the gender-critical movement when the NHS wants men to breastfeed babies with chest discharge.

A civil war has broken out which for the last several months has poisoned discussion in the gender critical movement.

The term ‘gender critical’ is inadequate to describe this rather disparate group, who were the first to recognise the malevolent insanity of celebrating and encouraging body mutilation in the form of sex change operations. The movement includes radical feminists and militant lesbians, suburban moms and dads, liberal therapists, gays and lesbians who have not drunk the LGBTQ+ Kool-Aid, and a few academics. Quite a few of them have built large platforms for themselves. Working away behind the scenes are countless women petitioning local politicians, sharing information, reading and challenging policies, and doing other grassroots work across the world.

Most if not all of these people have, to one degree or another, been punished for their gender critical views, especially when protecting children and young people from the toxic trans ideology. They were and very much still are in the minority as our institutional overlords keep pushing the lie that humans can change sex.

Given how much skin everyone has in the game, it’s been very unpleasant to watch this movement tear at itself. It’s a bit like watching mommy and daddy’s marriage fall apart, as each week brings a new bust-up. 

The fight revolves around two main issues: disagreement over whether men with autogynephilia who acknowledge biological reality can and should be included in the gender-critical movement; and whether it’s ever ok to call those men by female pronouns, as a courtesy, when they are allies to the movement. 

It all kicked off in November when Genspect—an organisation created as an alternative to the affirmation-only model for gender dysphoric youth — held a conference in Colorado. One of the men in attendance was a self-described autogynephile by the name of Phil Illy, who attended in a blue dress. The Genspect Twitter account posted a photo of Phil, his big manly shoulders framed by a dress that on a woman would be considered a sexy little number. I must note it was not something any woman I know would wear to a work conference, unless the work in question was 1960’s Vegas showgirl. 

This was met with howls of protest, with many activists demanding to know why a gender critical organisation would give positive attention to a man who openly admits to getting off on wearing women’s clothes. A more sexually liberal faction developed to rebut the criticism, saying that Phil was not trying to force his way into women’s intimate spaces, nor demanding that he be called ‘she’, or any other behaviours that trans activists have become infamous for. They said he had — as a grown man in a free country — the right to wear a dress. They said that understanding autogynephilic men is helpful and important to understanding the entire trans phenomenon. They said that the criticism — mostly from radical feminists — echoed woke demands to de-platform and censor.

Even after the Genspect conference drama quieted, those core disagreements erupted again and againin nasty exchanges on Twitter, from people who had up until this point shared a common cause. All the while, I was watching from the margins. I could see how confounding it must have been for people who had been consistently outspoken about the harms of gender ideology, to be absolutely slated by people who seemed to think they hadn’t done enough. I understood the arguments they made in favour of including the gender-critical AGP men. 

But I also felt a distinct unease at the friendly stance toward the men in frocks, and I understood the wrath of the Ultras — as they came to be known — who take a hard line against working with men who claim any part of a female identity, because those men are in the grips of a sexual disorder that ultimately harms women. AGP is a paraphilia like flashing or voyeurism, and as such we — the people around them — are unwitting and/or unwilling participants in their kink. 

Then, this week, something happened that put under an extremely harsh spotlight any arguments that somehow trans identifying men can be included and listened to in the campaign to rid the world of gender ideology. The UK Times published a letter written by the medical director of an NHS trust that ‘defended the practice’ of pumping men full of female hormones, and feeding babies the discharge from the resultant man-boobs. The aim, they said, is to “enable trans women to feed babies.” 

As Spiked reported: “Men are able, the letter states, to take a combination of drugs to produce milk that is ‘comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby.’” 

This shocking, upsetting, horrifyingly dystopian story lead back to the TERF wars because a trans-identified man who goes by the name Julia Malott came out with a video in which he called for more research into the possibility of trans-identified men breastfeeding, and then compared the quality of man-boob discharge “breastmilk,” with breastmilk from lactating women who have ingested caffeine or alcohol.  

Mallot, like Illy, had garnered the sympathy of the liberal gender critical faction, because he had spoken out against children being transitioned. So he found a friendly audience with many liberals who were trying to strike a balance between protecting children and young people, and allowing adults the freedom to chose their own lifestyles and sexual tastes. Giving him their approval was a pragmatic approach — and again, I understood their motivation.

Unfortunately for those liberals, Julia took a big steaming dump on their centrists position with his immensely creepy and manipulative video.

“It’s an uphill battle for trans women to breastfeed,” the very reasonable and cuddly Julia states. “Not unlike females who end up having to work with lactation consultants to get breastfeeding to happen.”

He goes on: “So what about me? I have never breastfed. Why? Because my child is 17. She is also my adopted child and came under my care as a young teenager.”  

Allow me to translate, from Julia’s language of delusion into plain English: I have never breastfed because a) I am a man, therefore I have never been pregnant and never will be pregnant and b) I say I have a “child” but actually I somehow acquired a young human over whom I have parental rights even though I am not her father or mother — plus I am, in fact, a man so even if she really was my child I still would not have breastfed her.

These are off-the-charts levels of delusion, narcissism and boundary violations thinly masked in fake empathy and care — and to me, they destroyed balancing act the liberal side was attempting. They thought that accommodations could be made with grown men who think they can magically transform into women and perform our biological functions. They were wrong.

Mallot’s comments are the perfect illustration of how a paraphilia is at its core a compulsion, and therefore a man in the grips of an unchecked and validated paraphilia will put his sexual tastes above everything else — including the well-being of an infant. To me, — and to many, many, others — a man openly stating that he *might* breastfeed is a man openly admitting that his sexual fetish *might* include a helpless, hungry, baby suckling from his nipple. I’m not a violent person, but this is wood chipper territory for me. 

Endless content has been generated pontificating about the “polarised extremism” coming from “both sides” during the schism. But to argue that this is a “both sides” problem implies that that there is a rational and reasonable argument for men to castrate themselves, or stick their nipples in babies’ mouths, or for women to be forced to allow men to parade naked around their locker rooms. 

There is no more a reasoned argument to be made in favour of validating these identities than there is in giving a raging alcoholic a bottle of Jack Daniels and keys to a car. 

This issue was always going to be highly emotive, because while the more polished public figures whose professional lives have been built on their activism — people like Stella O’Malley who founded Genspect —  there is also a group of anonymous (mostly women) whose lives have been negatively impacted in the extreme by trans ideology. They have been subject to police investigations. They have lost jobs. They have lost children to the trans cult. They are stalked and threatened and harassed and sued by psychopathic men who hide behind a female identity. Though the movement’s leaders have also been targets of blowback, the vast majority of people in this fight do not have fame or prestige to protect and validate them, and they are very, very, angry.

To these people, the dispassionate analysis of people on YouTube channels can come across as both condescending and naive, and I see their point. The most emotionally fraught group of all are the women whose marriages ended due to the cross-dressing sexual compulsions of their husbands.  The bitter hurt of these trans widows often seems perplexing or annoying to the big names in the space who champion select AGP men, but these women have suffered immensely. This is the definition of an intimate transgression and traumatic experience. Even with the best will in the world, when public intellectuals with large-ish audiences embrace AGP’s and speak dispassionately about the issue, they should not be that surprised to met with hostility from women who have lived these intensely painful experiences.  

The entire trans phenomenon is built upon emotional turmoil, discord and hatred of the self. It seems to me like it was built for that purpose: to turn us against our very bodies. Our focus is best placed on the puppet masters, not the men in dresses dangling from the strings in front of us.

I have always valued the contributions that the more liberal public figures have made to this vexing issue. However, in their defensiveness over being attacked from their own side, it seems to have been forgotten the trans problem is not a matter of just living your own life. It is an orchestrated, concerted, sophisticated and extremely well-funded attack on our most basic human traits. Fifteen years ago the idea of the ‘trans child’ was beyond the realm of possibility. How is it possible, then, that we now have a television show celebrating mothers organising, over cocktails, the genital mutilation of their young boys? 

I do not want ‘thought leaders’ in this movement to waste time carving out caveats for certain paraphiliac men because they seem interesting and reasonable. I want to focus all the attention on the “non-profit industrial complex” that is encouraging body disassociation and mutilation in youth across the world. I want these otherwise effective advocates for truth and sanity to stop engaging in Twitter wars and instead ask why so many countries are adopting similar laws, seemingly out of nowhere, and who is behind it?

The sexual liberals in the gender critical movement will continue to have a difficult time coming to grips with the severity of this as long as they continue to waste time defending AGP men, whose narcissistic fetish is indulged with every fight we have over them. There are bigger fish to fry. Just ask Jennifer Bilek and K. Yang.

And while on the issue of AGP’s I come down on the side of the Ultras, many of them are radical feminists, and feminism is a deeply unwise ideology that has largely softened the ground in which the gender insanity took root. Feminism created the notion that sex was socially constructed. Feminism inculcated three generations of women with the idea that to be a woman was to be oppressed, and the locus of that oppression was the female body, and family life is akin to prison. 

And we are surprised that young girls suddenly want to chop their tits off and have hysterectomies? All mainstream feminist organisations have sided with the trans ideology, and it ain’t because of internalised misogyny. Renowned feminists like Judith Butler and Donna Hathaway insisted that being a woman was nothing more than an oppressive idea.  “There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. ” wrote Hathaway. Surely this is one of the biggest and most damaging lies of our time?

Much like I’ve never heard liberals offer a humble apology to the conservatives and religious folks who they demeaned and made fun of for years, I have yet to hear the anti-trans feminists address how feminism has harmed women, or that boys and men are also terribly harmed by trans ideology. I’ve never heard them say that what’s bad for men is bad for women, because men and women are two sides of the same coin. 

This whole episode has shown me that the circle cannot be squared. The sexual liberals still hew to idea of near-total sexual freedom. The Ultras have the correct instinct that too much sexual freedom is a threat, but they too are weakened by their continued allegiance to feminism. So where does that leave us? 

I have always lived a liberal lifestyle — but it’s now clear to me that society is best served by a combination of fair, consistent laws and a conservative sexual morality that does not give space to public displays of sexual preference, of any kind. 

The most obvious solution to me is something that many TERFs will not be able to tolerate: we must reappraise the social and sexual conservatism that was abandoned post 1960’s sexual revolution. Can anyone really say that seismic change in our morality really improved our culture, five decades later? 

I’m old enough to remember what life was like in a very heteronormative, traditional family-based society, and what’s more my parents did not adhere to that convention at all. (For more information on that, you can see this talk I did last year.) So I can say with confidence that liberals and lefties, and those who want freaky lifestyles, can live better in a majority conservative, law-based society, than the other way around. 

Once you allow a chose-your-own-adventure sexual morality, there is no way of knowing where the line will finally stop. We are at the Rubicon. On one side are all commonly accepted and rather ancient norms surrounding decency and a shared understanding of appropriate public behaviour. On the other side, confusion and discord among the liberals struggling to deny the obvious. And behind them, peeping and touching themselves, are a bunch of perverts on a spectrum ranging from pathetic to malevolent, consistently stretching the definition of what is acceptable, while the liberals tear their hair out wondering why everyone is so mad at them.