“Why are you so vehement in this hatred and loathing?” she asked, laying on the hyperbole and emotion so thick, she may as well have been using a muck spreader. “It must be very personal to you.”
Ahh, my fried IB, the blind liberal with the ‘if it’s not personal to me or you, why care?’ that usually (in my experience) comes from conservatives. I care about gay people being attacked, but I’m not gay and don’t have any gay people in my family. I care about the education system, but I don’t have kids (and don’t particularly like them either, if I’m honest). And I care that autistic girls are identifying as boys in record numbers. I am an autistic female myself, so maybe that bit is slightly personal.
IB was outraged that I (and my fellow GC friend in Ireland) told her that children are being indoctrinated into trans ideology and she scoffed when I told her that I had witnessed this gender-grooming on Tumblr for many years. I asked her why she is not concerned about the number of autistic girls rocking up to gender clinics wanting to be boys. Her answer was to say “Of course autistic girls have rights! They should have the same rights as anybody else.” I said, “Autistic rights are not the issue here. I am asking whether you think it is normal for so many autistic females to suddenly think they are male, in the last decade. Is that not questionable?”
She deflected and defaulted to talking about men - transwomen - and accused me of “hating men in dresses” [and shouldn’t], “because they don’t infringe upon me”.
I replied that I’m asking her about AUTISTIC GIRLS. I am asking whether she thinks the increase in autistic girls wanting double mastectomies and testosterone is normal. I am not talking about cross-dressing adult men. It goes to show what a men’s rights movement this really is. It always goes back to males and what they want. Aside from that, why is she calling transwomen ‘men in dresses’? Obviously, they are, but that will get her absolutely vilified in pro-trans circles, and also means, deep down, she doesn’t believe a male in a dress is a woman. She also said, “So what if they want to be a woman lookalike?” That’s an absolute sin in the TRA bible. I told her to be careful saying that around tranitrons, because she will be threatened for only seeing them as a lookalike as opposed to a real woman.
Nevertheless, she claimed she does literally believe that transwomen are women because “being a woman is not about parts”, in response to my Irish friend saying “that to be a woman, you need XX chromosomes, a vagina, cervix, uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries, and to experience menstruation and menopause. Everything else is stereotyping which is socially constructed and overlaid upon your sex.”
There was yet more cognitive dissonance: IB agreed that gender is a social construct but that it is simultaneously innate - that gender incongruence is congenital, not social. I, rather patronisingly, I’ll admit, told her to go over her sentence a few times and see what’s wrong with it, before adding that she is woefully out of her depth on this topic. Frankly, she deserved condescension because she kept repeating “transphobia” as I spoke.
I said if gender is a social construct, which it is, people should just ignore the rules and dress how they please - and many people have done precisely this, for many years. I have no problem with androgyny (I’ve even fancied androgynous men and various points in my life). What I object to is this being medicalised and pathologised as a disorder that needs fixing with dangerous surgeries and endocrine system-destroying drugs. Gender Ideology is the very thing that is reinforcing the gender stereotypes feminists fought against. It reinforces toxic masculinity too, with many transmen acting like burping, farting manly stereotypes and even partaking in online abuse towards their fellow females. It is misogynistic. It is sexist. And to insist men can have vaginas and women can have penises and therefore gays and lesbians must fuck them is deeply homophobic.
IB didn’t have a bastard clue what I meant about trans ideology being anti-womens’ rights and homophobic. My friend tried to tell her about female spaces being taken. Another American friend - a male, who is a Democrat campaigner - joined in on our side saying he’d heard about the Lia Thomas swimming controversy and thought it was a disgrace and that Biden was fucking up over this issue. IB said this takeover is not true, yet is simultaneously ‘okay’ with the very male takeover she had just said wasn’t true.
I told her about the Tavistock over here and how many homosexual or bisexual teens are being sent there as a form of conversion therapy. And she couldn’t believe it.
She couldn’t even work out why transwomen might be anti-lesbian. I kept asking her to “Think about why trans-identified males might be angry with lesbians…” and despite being an intelligent woman, she couldn’t work it out. “Because, IB, the lesbians are rejecting them because they have penises and transwomen think they’re entitled to lesbians.”
I told her how there are no exclusively lesbian bars left in San Francisco. I told her how conservative or homophobic or religious parents would rather have trans kids than gay kids and it’s them who are giving their kids a complex about their gender by taking their favourite toys away if they’re marketed for the opposite sex. She suggested that trans kids are more hated than gay kids, so parents preferring trans is impossible, so I showed her the Tavistock whistleblower’s statements, in which the parents were pushing for their gay children to go on hormones.
IB did not let the information in. Then she threatened to start this debate up in London when she next visited to which I told her it’s controversial and she’ll need to keep her loud voice down.
Fast forward 6 months to her visit. She did not start the trans debate as promised while out with a group of us and waited until later, when out with just me. While she retained none of the information I’d given her, she confessed to me she doesn’t agree with men in women’s spaces because she doesn’t want to see penises in toilets but “transwomen don’t do that.” I broke it to her that yes, they do, there are photos of them with erections in toilets and tweets where they brag about intimidating women.
I told her how few transwomen actually have penile inversions; they are essentially just cross-dressing men and because it’s impossible to tell who is a perv and who isn’t, we have safeguarding measures. She asked why they don’t use gender-neutral toilets, as she is happy to. Because, IB, that isn’t what transwomen want - they want women’s spaces; to them, compromise IS transphobia. They don’t want their OWN spaces, they want to colonise OURS and she’s welcome to use gender-neutral bogs, that’s on her, but why should women who don’t want to be forced to, because handmaidens like IB don’t mind? And if she admits to not wanting to see cocks in the ladies’, then why is she saying she is okay with gender-neutral, where she will likely see men’s dongs. She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.
Oh, and for Pride Month, IB baked a rainbow penis cake. Which, like her earlier statement making autistic girls all about men, she associates Pride with male genitals. That says it all really. What about lesbians? Where is the vag cake?