You Can Call Me TERF
Just one more way to piss of a small group of people.
This is my followup to cross-posting Holly’s piece regarding trans activism in Burlington, Vermont. If you haven’t read it yet, I strongly recommend it.
Enjoy the followup, or not. It’s up to you.
A few years ago I asked my boss, a woman in her 30s, if she ever felt held back in her career because she was a woman. She responded unequivocally and emphatically, “No!” She is of the millennial generation. I think that those of that generation and younger have very little appreciation of how dramatically society has changed over a relatively short period of time regarding gender. And that lack of appreciation has negatively impacted society today.
Growing up as a small child in the 1960s, I viewed gender roles as pretty obvious and well-defined. Men married women, and then (after getting married, not before) the couple had children. The dads were the bread-winners, and the moms stayed at home and took care of the kids. There was never a question as to who was male and who was female. And there were work roles for men and different work roles for women. There was rarely any crossover. For example, men could be medical doctors and women could be nurses. It was odd for a woman to be a doctor and even more odd for a man to be a nurse. After all, the word “nurse” means to feed an infant from one’s breast. What man could do that? It was normal to ridicule a man for taking on a traditionally female role, and it was normal for women to be discouraged from taking on a traditionally male role. And to emphasize my point, this was the 1960s, not the middle ages.
My dentist was a man, and the receptionist was a woman. Interestingly, the dentist was a black man (at that time he would be called a colored man) in a 99% white town, undoubtedly inclusive of hard core racists. I was taught that it was okay for a dentist to be black, and even more significantly that it was okay for a black man, not a black woman, to be a dentist.
I had the unfortunate experience of being involved in a legal matter at a very young age, and my lawyer was a white man. He was physically handicapped. I remember his hand facing the wrong way on his wrist, but my recollection is foggy. But I learned that a physically handicapped man, not a woman, could be a lawyer.
Shortly thereafter, in my third grade class we kids were all asked to talk about a hobby of ours for “show and tell”. At the time I was into making pot holders with a small loom and stringy loops of fabric of different colors. So I brought in my loom and loops and gave my brief presentation. Afterwards, my teacher, a woman, pulled me aside and told me that I shouldn’t be making pot holders because that was something that girls do, not boys. I listened politely, but inside I was angry and thinking that she had no authority to tell me what I could or couldn’t do.
It may seem strange to a lot of people now, but at the time all of this was perfectly normal. The Civil Rights Act had recently been passed, the Vietnam War was heating up, people were protesting, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Junior were assassinated, and there were race riots. There was a general feeling of revolution, of the breaking of tradition, and strong resistance from traditionalists, the older generation.
Out of this, what seemed like a mess, emerged the women’s movement. Of course, that movement had roots going back to the early 19th century, and women had secured the right to vote in the early 20th century. But now it was about breaking down barriers to career choices. A woman could be a woman, and could also be a doctor, dentist or lawyer. A woman could be anything a man could be! Eventually, even a soldier or an astronaut! Over the course of the 70s and 80s all those limitations, with a lot of struggle, were eliminated. Women had achieved agency over their own lives to an extent not seen before. And that was a good thing.
During that time we also experienced gay liberation. My uncle was gay (killed by AZT poisoning in the 80s), and he would bring his gay partner to family dinners where we experienced plenty of social and political debate with my Marine Corps father. But everyone managed to get along, even though there were plenty of disagreements. Having gay friends (men and women) in college and walking in the gay pride parade in New York City just seemed normal.
One female professor, I can’t remember the class, told us that we were all feminists. Although I resented being told who I was, I couldn’t disagree that I favored equal rights for women and men. In fact, during that time an effort was under way to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It failed, but in hindsight it seems redundant. Women have full equal legal rights with men, and perhaps more importantly, social acceptance for equal participation in various social and occupational roles.
Of course, this dramatic overhaul of societal norms was quite disruptive, and we are still adjusting. But those millennials born in the 90s entered a world quite different from the one in which I was raised, and they cannot possibly appreciate those changes in quite the same way as those from my generation can.
The significance of this history is that women, WOMEN, can be whomever they want to be. And that is how it should be for everyone. Frustrated self-expression is very damaging, and can lead to dire consequences. And sometimes, women can become men, and men can become women. More power to them.
Digression:
In any discussion it’s a good idea to define your terms. This will probably piss off a few people, but so be it. Throughout recent history, definitions of various words have been manipulated and distorted to serve certain interests. A few examples are: liberal, conservative, inflation, money, vaccine, unemployment, and so on. Now we encounter the difficulty of defining such basic words as “man” and “woman”, to the extent that a female United States Supreme Court Justice has no definition for the word “woman”. (Just one more example of how a woman can be whatever she wants to be.)
So here’s the pissing-off part. I’m going to offer my own definition of “man” and “woman”. A man is a human adult whose genetics include one X chromosome and one Y chromosome and no other X and Y chromosomes. A woman is a human adult whose genetics include two X chromosomes and no other X and Y chromosomes.
From the National Institutes of Health (NIH):
The typical number of chromosomes in a human cell is 46: 23 pairs, holding an estimated total of 20,000 to 25,000 genes. One set of 23 chromosomes is inherited from the biological mother (from the egg), and the other set is inherited from the biological father (from the sperm).
Of the 23 pairs of chromosomes, the first 22 pairs are called "autosomes." The final pair is called the "sex chromosomes." Sex chromosomes determine an individual's sex: females have two X chromosomes (XX), and males have an X and a Y chromosome (XY). The mother and father each contribute one set of 22 autosomes and one sex chromosome.
(There are those who experience a genetic abnormality in which they have numbers of X and Y chromosomes differing from those above, and the definition of “man” or “woman” can be extended to those people. But such cases are rare, and this post is not about genetic abnormalities.)
Now I’m going to piss off some more people. “Non-binary” is not a thing. “Gender fluid” is just ordinary individual diversity. Your gender IS what some people call your “sex”. A human adult is either a man or a woman, and that is determined, not at birth, but prior to conception, at fertilization when the winning sperm penetrates the egg and contributes either an X or Y chromosome to the mix.
None of this is to say that you cannot express yourself as the opposite gender, or as an ambiguous gender, or no gender at all. There is nothing at all wrong with that. As a man or as a woman, you can express yourself however you want. But you don’t have to deny or change your gender to be who you want to be!
Some women decide to become men, and some men decide to become women. That’s okay! One can take hormones and other medications, have surgery, or just use makeup and clothing and hair-dos to express how they feel inside. “You go, girl . . . um, guy . . . um, whatever!”
One Halloween I went as half-man/half-woman. It was difficult for people to speak to me or even look at me. It was fun, but I always knew that I wasn’t half-man/half-woman.
One more statement to piss off even more people: nobody is trans-phobic. That is just a slur to justify violence against those who don’t jump on the trans bandwagon. There are those who commit violence against trans folk, but those people are inclined to commit violence against anyone. Their behavior says more about them than it says about their victims. And of course, anyone initiating violence against anyone else is always wrong.
The real point that I’m trying to make here (yeah, it took a while) is the tragedy of decades of women’s liberation struggles culminating in being told that it is no longer OK to be a woman. The whole idea behind the women’s movement was that is WAS OK to be a woman, and to be anything else AS A WOMAN. Now we are seeing men, like Caitlin Jenner, being hailed as Woman Of The Year. This is a guy who won the decathlon in the 1976 Olympics, AS A MAN named Bruce, while real women were fighting for the right to participate fully with men in the workplace and the economy. I’m not a woman, and I can’t pretend to speak for women. But this appears to me to be a huge kick in the teeth to all women out there! Having been branded a feminist back in college, I can’t see how it is now, not just okay, but actually encouraged for men to take over women’s sports and generally invade women’s spaces without limit.
Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned Neanderthal, but if I decided to take medication and have surgery to become a woman, I would still have enough presence of mind and respect not to compete with women physically, and not to compromise their privacy or safety just to make a narcissistic political point.
And I certainly wouldn’t threaten any woman with violence, as the trans community now does routinely, at least in Burlington, Vermont.