Western feminists, for over half a century, have argued that gender itself has been the fundamental agent of women’s oppression. But very few have considered the consequences of matriarchy. I suggest that matriarchy in the Philippines offers an alternative. In ‘Why Men Made God’ we pointed out that powerful, high-status women in the patriarchy were … Continue reading Matriarchy in the Philippines
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Few clinical definitions, established by obscure researchers in obscure institutions, referring to an obscure subject, can have caused more brouhaha than Ray Blanchard’s definition of autogynephilia as ‘a man’s paraphilic propensity to be sexually aroused at the thought or image of himself as a woman.’ But what does it actually mean? ‘Paraphilia is any intense … Continue reading The thought or image of oneself
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Male to Female transsexualism was classified by Ray Blanchard into 2 different types: HomoSexual Transsexual and Autogynephilic.* In the West generally, these two types have presented with different characteristics, most notable being their primary sexual orientation: HSTS are uniquely attracted to men, whereas AGPs have a complex array of sexualities. These are all based on … Continue reading Which type of transsexual?
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Brain Sex? What is that? Some sort of cyber-intercourse? No. ‘Brain sex’ is how many transsexual activists explain how their condition came about. They specifically say that, ‘Transsexualism occurs when an individual of one sex has certain sex-related structures in the brain that are typical of the opposite sex.’ In other words, according to this … Continue reading Brain Sex?
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Sexual transformation from boy to girl has always been hot. Enter the girly-boy: the transsexual or TS. The oldest records we have prove the early existence of TS individuals, often priestesses or shamans. Their direct descendants are in the hijra of India, the kathoey of Thailand, the bakla of the Philippines, the travestis of the … Continue reading Girly-boy beauty
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Transsexualism is high profile these days. But what actually causes it? Who are transsexuals? Since there is clearly a deal of ignorance over this, I’m going to go over the explanations again, in a short series of articles. Women trapped in men’s bodies? Many people are familiar with the idea that male -to-female (MtF) transsexuals, … Continue reading Explaining transsexualism
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In 2009 Dr Charles Moser entered the discussion about Blanchard’s Typology of transsexualism. It is worth revisiting Moser because his mischievous intervention not only hindered the progress of the science of transsexualism, but damaged some people, while favouring others. As you may know, Blanchard separates male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals into those attracted to their own sex … Continue reading Moser’s mischievous intervention.
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Does this man have the right to use a women-only space just because he claims he ‘identifies as a woman’?
Restroom rights again
The issue of ‘transgender’ access to female-specific spaces continues to boil up. So let’s look again at what is being said and why it is a problem.
While women-only toilets and other similar spaces may have originally been invented out of misogyny and male entitlement (more intended to keep women out of male spaces as men out of women’s), the fact is that they have come to be seen as a place of refuge, safe havens for women who spend all their lives enduring the proprietorial gazes and more, of the men around them.
The United Sates of America, as we have noted here before, has an appalling track record of misogynistic as well as transphobic and homophobic violence. A woman’s rape, according to recent data, is reported once every six minutes there and the level of under-reporting may be as high as 80% or more. Women in patriarchal cultures are under constant threat of rape, and that is why the safe spaces issue has become important.
The regressive left, with typical stupidity, has seized on this as an issue of ‘transgender rights’ and nothing else. This is a lie. There are two issues here. One is whether women have a right to safe spaces where they can perform private functions without interacting with men, and the other is whether a person born male who ‘self-identifies’ as a woman, can simply overthrow any such right. In other words, does just saying he is a woman allow a person who is externally identifiable as a man to enter a space reserved for women who were born female?
The matter is whether men’s ‘right’, to call themselves anything they like and demand to be treated as such, over-rides women’s right to feel safe. In other words, it is a simple matter of power and hierarchy. Giving people born male who simply ‘self-identify’ as women permission to enter women-only spaces, just says that men’s rights matter and women’s don’t. That simple.
Part of the problem is the idiocy of ‘identity politics’ which contends that we are whatever we say we are and there is an end to it. That’s absurd. If identity counts, it is what we can be identified as by others, not by ourselves. Science progresses on the accurate observation, identification and classification of phenomena from an independent observer’s point of view. Unfortunately, philosophy and politics conspire to muddy issues which are scientifically clear.
Sex and gender are not the same thing. Sex is predetermined and innate, for almost all of us, excepting those few with specific intersex conditions. But we are not talking about them here. The rest of us are either born male or female.
Similarly, there are only two genders, feminine and masculine. One is either a woman or a man, or in some cases, sometimes a woman and sometimes a man. Gender, unlike sex, is not innate. It is a set of learned behaviours. It follows therefore that it is entirely possible for a person born male to learn to be a woman, and for a person born female to learn to be a man. These individuals are transsexual.
Most of the research that exists — and I am talking about proper research, not academic philosophical twaddle — has been done on male to female transsexualism rather than female to male. The principal researcher whose work informs the current scientific consensus on this is Dr Ray Blanchard, an unsung hero of sexology.
Blanchard was responsible for determining whether patients arriving at his clinic, the Clarke Institute in Toronto, were eligible for surgery to change their physical sex organs from male to female. He called these people ‘transsexual’, which remains the correct scientific term, because they wanted to transform their physical sex.
Blanchard therefore used the term ‘transsexual’ to mean ‘a person who desires to change their physical sex’. The term ‘transgender’ is meaningless in this context; Blanchard was looking at physical reality, not metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. He is a scientist and was applying proper scientific taxonomy and rigour. (It is telling that resistance to his findings, invariably on spurious grounds, comes from a deeply anti-scientific culture, the United States.)
This group was the only one Blanchard studied, and his results have to be taken in that context.
From long before Blanchard, however, researchers had been aware that not all people, who were born male but presented as women, desired Genital Reconstruction Surgery. Dr Harry Benjamin, in the 1960’s, posited a 7-point scale (these are frequently used by biologists) in which only the two most extreme required GRS. Since these scales are typically weighted towards the centre, this means that many individuals had to some degree a gender that differed from their birth sex, but who did not desire or require GRS. In other words, many transwomen have penises.
Benjamin did not look deeply into the causes of this dichotomy between gender and birth sex. He was a medical doctor and his aim was to relieve the suffering of his patients.
Blanchard, however, was interested in the causes and very quickly confirmed that, as previous researchers like Freund had noted, there were two distinct profiles of persons presenting, seeking to have their physical sex changed. He was able, over years of methodical research, to categorise these into ‘homosexual’ and ‘non-homosexual’ transsexuals. The first, which he termed ‘HSTS’ were uniquely attracted to men from an early age, typically long before puberty. They may have thought themselves to be gay boys at some stage, but this was an unsatisfactory and uncomfortable role to play and they would transition into women, often in their teens and nearly always before the age of 30. They were so naturally feminine in their looks and comportment that they would routinely be taken for women. It was easy for Blanchard to identify and plot the correlation between these individuals’ sex drive and their gender identity. In other words, HSTS transsexualism is based in male sexuality. However, because HSTS are uniquely attracted to men, they pose no sexual threat to women at all.
This is an HSTS or True transsexual, the delightful Kevin Balot. Nobody would be surprised to see her using a women-only space, because that is what she obviously is.
Blanchard then asked if male sex drive might be the stimulus behind the other, non-homosexual group. These had no sexual or romantic interest in men prior to transition, were typically much older, often married, and were not feminine in any way. They usually had great difficulty ‘passing’ as women, if they could at all.
Blanchard was able to show that this second group were otherwise normative heterosexual men who had a condition called an Erotic Target Location Error. Most of us are attracted to other people, no matter what our specific preferences are. These individuals, on the other hand, were attracted to themselves, but in the form of women. They typically had a history of dressing up as women to masturbate, and thus had been sexually confirming their condition by sexual reward, often for two or three or more decades of their lives. Although they often claimed to have wanted to ‘dress up’ as girls before puberty, this was never out of desire for male partners, but out of desire for themselves, as girls. Thus autogynephilia is also a product of male sex drive.
To recap: all male to female expressions of transsexualism are rooted in male sex drive, but there are two completely distinct forms, HSTS and AGP. The former have no sexual interest in woman while the latter do, though their primary erotic or romantic desire is for themselves, in the form of women.
This taxonomy remains the scientific consensus, although nomenclature differs a little. Numerous attempts have been made to scientifically disprove Blanchard’s core conclusions, and all have simply confirmed them.
Unfortunately, autogynephiles often resent the scientific description. To try to get round it, they have developed thing called the ‘brain sex’ theory. This is complete bunk and has no scientific basis, but it has become popular because many autogynephiles are good at manipulating a largely ignorant media.
To understand the resentment it is necessary to understand the development of autogynephilia. The subject has to invent a female character within himself to become attracted to. Through the years of sexual reward, this character becomes stronger and stronger until, one day, it takes over. Now as far as this pseudo-feminine personality is concerned, it always was a woman — and so it was, since the male brain it exists within created it as such. This is the real reason why autogynephiles, who are frequently not in the slightest bit feminine but indeed ultra masculine, claim they were ‘always women inside’.
The most extreme forms of autogynephilia can be treated with GRS. As is said, one gives the subject the body he wants so that it cosmetically conforms to the mental image that the pseudo-feminine constructed personality within the subject expects. The feelings of anxiety dissipate, and the subject can lead a more comfortable, if hardly normal, life. Blanchard’s great contribution to the lives of autogynephiles was in giving a supported scientific justification for performing GRS on them. Little enough gratitude did he get.
Clearly, an autogynephile who has had GRS is not a rape threat to women, because his penis has been removed. It would seem churlish and unkind to make a person who had gone to these lengths use a man’s facility.
However, as Benjamin noted, there is a developmental scale. Not all autogynephiles want GRS, and even if they do, they must pass years living in the appearance of women, before they can. At the same time, these individuals are gynephilic (clue: the hint is in the name). In other words, while they are attracted to themselves as women, they are also attracted to other women. Proof of this is in how many get and remain married. So a pre-operative autogynephile, that is to say, one who retains his penis, remains a potential rape threat.
Now, this was not really too much of an issue. Most autogynephiles are far more excited by their erotic fantasy of being women than by the idea of forcing themselves on other women. Indeed, many have great difficulty in having sex at all, at least with others. So once again, there is little danger to women incumbent on allowing them to use women’s facilities.
The problem has come about because autogynephile activists resent the actual science that describes them in favour of the completely bogus and unsupported ‘brain sex’ theory, that posits, against all the evidence, that gender exists in the brain and is innate. Because of this they have promoted the notion of ‘self-identification’. They basically say ‘only I know whether I am a woman or not, so only I am qualified to say.’
And that is all fine and dandy except that the ridiculous ‘Identity Politics’ fly-by-nighters have transformed this into ‘a man is a woman if he says he is’. It doesn’t matter how he lives or how he presents, as long as he says he’s a woman, we have to go along with that. And thus a woman’s right to a safe private space is trumped by a man’s ‘right’ to say he is a woman. That is simple misogyny, but this is the cornerstone of the restroom/toilet/bathroom debate: is a man a woman just because he says so?
It’s a ridiculous assertion.
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A deliberately provocative video by a YouTube publicity whore calling himself ‘Hunter Avallone’ has a new storm in the latte cup of ‘transgender’ raging. While it can hardly be called ‘viral’, it certainly has stirred up the shit. It’s always sad to see the anti-science views of Catholic fundamentalists like Paul McHugh, formed in the 1960s when homosexuality was still considered a ‘disorder’, trotted out as if they were somehow still relevant, despite having been conclusively refuted by over fifty years of actual science; but that is the standard of this video. (The video above is of Bianca Friere, who is transsexual, not transgender. If you want Hunter’s tripe you’ll have to search.)
‘Transgenders’, in a Western context, are a small group of fetishistic, cross-dressing men whose ‘Gender Identity’ is fuelled by their addiction to masturbation while dressed in women’s clothing. These are our old friends, the autogynephiles, whose profile was conclusively determined by Dr Ray Blanchard. His work, despite the shrill protest of autogynephiles, remains the accepted, and increasingly confirmed, science.
However, in world terms, most people born male who become women are quite different from these men. They are socially, sexually, behaviourally and psychologically women. As women, they blend effortlessly into society. Blanchard called them ‘homosexual transsexuals’ or HSTS; I call them male to female (mtf) transsexuals.
However, they have a major problem: autogynephiles pretend to be the same, except they ‘came out’ later. This is a lie and the science — which has never been challenged — demonstrates that.
This artificial conflation is the root of many misconceptions that appear in ‘Avallone’s’ video. Instead of recognising that there are two distinct typologies and that this has been backed up by actual science — yes, the real stuff, published in proper journals — the author, doubtless in pursuit of attention by provoking a row, behaves as if mtf transsexualism and autogynephilic transgenderism were the same thing.
They absolutely are not, but the mistake made here is understandable: autogynephiles have made so much noise that the media is behaving as if they really were representative. You can’t blame a schoolboy with a nasty attitude and a severe lack of analytical ability for falling into the same trap as many senior journalists have.
Let us be clear: mtf transsexuals are uniquely attracted to men, realise they are different at a very early age and develop not into boys but girls. The primary source of their gender is their sexuality. It is really simple: they are attracted to straight men. How does a person such as they succeed in satisfying this? Become a woman.
Janet Mock is transsexual, not transgender. Read her book, Redefining Realness; her development is clearly, and openly detailed. including the period in her life when she thought she might be a gay man.
The relationship between feminine gay men and transsexuals is so close that there is interchange in the middle of the range, as can clearly be observed in Asia. Social pressure, therefore, contributes greatly to whether a person like this becomes mtf transgender or a gay man and almost all transsexuals will have lived as gay boys or men for some of their lives.
Autogynephilic transgenders are socially, sexually, behaviourally and in all other respects men, except they wear women’s clothing, because this gives them a sexual thrill. Once again, Blanchard defined this. Autogynephilia, he said, is a ‘man’s propensity to be attracted to himself in the form of a woman.’
Many children do indeed explore alternative expressions of gender; one of mine did. Most realise that their natural sexual attraction is to the opposite sex and as they grow, develop their gender in accordance with this. They grow out of it. However, in the case of transsexuals their identification as girls persists after puberty and the key, as ever, is sexuality: if they are attracted to men, they will become transsexual.
Depending on the level of social oppression, they may transition fully and live as women. In the West they usually vanish, living in deep stealth as women; in Asia they are far more open, because the cultures are more socially accepting. Where misogyny and transphobia is high, more will live as gay men and suppress their transsexualism. That this is so is supported by the number of quacks providing reparative therapy to turn young post-pubertal mtf transsexuals into gay men. This is a result which the proponents regard as ‘the best outcome’ but which is responsible for the bitterness and self-loathing that many such gay men exhibit.
All competent authorities, for example the British Institute of Psychology, now regard homosexuality and transsexualism as residing on a natural scale of sexual variation. All living things exhibit variation in all parameters, this is just one. (Actually, there are probably several such scales in operation here, but that is for another day.) So transsexualism, along with homosexuality, is a perfectly natural phenomenon. We know that they are because they appear at roughly the same rate in all human populations everywhere, and have done so since history began. The Hindu Vedas, generally agreed to be at least 3,500 years old and probably 5000, mention several different categories of transsexualism, which are still found in India today. The Sumerian ‘Hymns to Inanna’ also mention them. This is a natural part of the human condition: some boys like boys and some like girls, and of those who like boys, some are more successful as girls. If you doubt this, take a walk round downtown Bangkok or Malate in Manila any night of the week.
Autogynephilia, however, has no such pedigree. There are no references to it at all prior to the 19th century, or anywhere outside Northern Europe and North America. It does not appear to exist in Asia or South America, where transsexualism, by contrast, is obvious. This leads me to conclude that it is not a part of natural human variation at all, but instead a form of psychosis resulting from social pressures dysfunctional societies like that of the USA. Blanchard, while never suggesting an underlying cause, classified autogynephilia as a paraphilia or sexual fetish, alongside sado-masochism, necrophilia, bestiality, paedophilia and others. These also appear to have social rather than biological causes and, as has often been noted, tend to cluster. So autogynephilic transgenderists are often also sado-masochists, for example.
The video does make one important point: there are indeed, only two genders. However, what it misses is that these are not related to birth sex, which is fixed. Instead, they are linked to sexuality, which is variable. People who desire to be penetrated are women and people who desire to penetrate are men. Since gender is entirely constructed and not genetic in any way, in a culture where there was no pressure to conform to predetermined gender stereotypes, we would expect to see gender corresponding directly to sexual desire: those who seek to attract male sexual partners would appear in their culture’s expression of ‘woman’ and vice versa. And this is exactly what we do see, in such cultures.
A good example, one of a great many, would be the Bugis people of Indonesia, who have five genders: males who are men, males who are women, females who are women and females who are men, along with a fifth gender that is ‘all at once’. These last are shamans or priests. Yet underlying these five are only two: man and woman; the fifth is just ‘both at once’. One’s sexual attraction determines which one is. If you are attracted to men, you become a woman, irrespective of your birth sex. If you desire women, you become a man. There is no stigma in this, and as a result, not only is transsexualism so commonplace as to be completely unremarked, but the ridiculous proliferation of ‘gender identities’ so beloved of bunk ‘queer theory’ in the West, is totally absent. There are, in practical terms, only men and women, with two developmental pathways into each.
There is no ‘normal’. There are just scales of variation. ‘Normal’, when used in the context it is in the video, just means ‘not like me’. This is a result of the conformism that infects the society of the United States. It has nothing to do with nature and much to do with a history of slavery, genocide, fratricide and violence. It certainly has nothing to do with transsexuals.
That there are these two types — which AGPs habitually deny — was finally, conclusively confirmed in 2011. Blanchard had stated 20 years before that he believed that when the methods to carry out such testing were developed, transsexuals (his HSTS) would be found to have brains more like women and AGPs not. Two teams, one led by Rametti in Italy and the other by Savic and Arver in Sweden, carried out exactly such testing. These were well-constructed studies that used all proper safeguards, were carried out prior to hormone therapy beginning and with proper controls. Rametti screened out autogynephiles and only tested transsexuals, and Savic and Arver did the opposite.
Their conclusions were clear: transsexuals have brains similar to women’s in every tested area and AGPs brains are indistinguishable from men’s. Blanchard was vindicated and his typology confirmed: there is no correlation or underlying similarity between mtf transsexualism and autogynephilic transgenderism. They are totally different phenomena.
Unfortunately, the conflation of the two types is one reason for the underlying problems that transsexuals face, and this video is just one. Far more serious is the toll of killings and violence. At least 20 transwomen were murdered in the USA alone last year, and not one was autogynephilic. They were all transsexuals.
Transsexual women like Janet Mock, Paris Lees and Laverne Cox, who have the benefit of media attention today, must distance themselves from autogynephilic men like Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner. There is no hope for better treatment of mtf transsexuals or a reduction of violence against them, as long as they are conflated with masturbating men in dresses.
‘Hunter Avallone’s’ video, while self-serving, and the worst form of manipulation of evidence to suit a predetermined conclusion, is, a the same time, symptomatic of a broader problem: transsexuals are being erased by cross-dressing men in frocks. While it raises some good points, it is superficial and reflects the author’s lack of knowledge of the subject area. It is always a good idea to establish a proper understanding of the science before opening one’s mouth; perhaps in ten years or so, ‘Avallone’ will have gained sufficient maturity to appreciate this.
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A transgirl performing a traditional Sinulog dance in the Philippines. Pic: Rod Fleming
Almost all credible authorities, according to GIRES in the UK, now agree that the baseline minimum for gender non-conformity as ‘at least 1%’ and this has been borne out, again according to GIRES, by recent studies in New Zealand, The Netherlands and Belgium.
Now ‘gender non-conformity’ is a broad church and by no means all of these would identify as transgender. However, research carried out by Professor Lynn Conway and also by the Williams Institute for Law, part of the UCLA, suggests about half of these are, for a prevalence of around 1:200. This is supported by census results from Malaysia, which put the incidence there — a country that is officially very hostile towards transgender — at 1:170 of male-born individuals.
This should tell us two things: transgender is innate and appears in all populations at roughly the same rate; and that as such it is a part of normal human variation.
Of these transgender populations, the vast majority are what is called by science ‘Blanchard HSTS’, ‘Early Onset Androphile’ or ‘transkids.’ These are almost always, uniquely, attracted to men. They appear as transgender very young and frequently begin dressing as girls, wearing their hair long and, in recent decades, taking feminising hormones in their early teens. They should not be confused with another, much less frequent type of MtF transgender, known as ‘autogynephiles’. These latter are fetishistic transvestite men, for whom dressing and pretending to be a woman is a sexual thrill: think Bruce ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner. (We will deal with these elsewhere; they are almost entirely restricted to white, middle-class Western men and globally are a tiny population.)
But why are MtF transgenders so obvious, and so open, outside the West?
While we were researching ‘Why Men Made God’ I spent much time in the Philippines and was lucky enough to be invited into the company of Filipino families. I was fascinated to observe the ‘two-group’ social model, which we described in the book, in full operation, and indeed I incorporated some of my observationst. This model was particularly obvious at large family gatherings. Here, the men would congregate around one or more tables — often drinking heavily — while the women and children socialised completely separately. There were never any women or children at the men’s tables. Because I am obviously a man, I was directed to the men’s group and observed from there, as the rising tide of alcohol — in the form of ‘Empi’ or Emperador brandy — rose to my gills.
This separation of two groups, however, was not to do with alcohol. As a foreigner and a guest — a person of important status in a Filipina household — I was also invited to join women’s drinking parties on several occasions and I can attest that Filipina women party just as hard as the men do.
One of the things that I did notice, in the large, mixed parties as well as in the women-only ones, was that while the men’s group was made up exclusively of adult men presenting as straight, the other group was of women, children and gays. When women socialised independently of men, there were always a number of gays or transgenders there too; they never, ever appeared in the ‘men’ group activities.
(The term ‘gay’ in Filipino culture does not mean quite what it purports to mean in the West. There, it signifies a person born male who identifies internally as a woman and who desires men romantically and sexually. The notion of the ‘egalitarian gay’ where manly manly men lust after other manly manly men, is regarded as risible throughout Asia and while there are some implantations of this Western model, they are reviled by the vast majority of gays there.)
So this leads us back to ‘what makes a woman?’ The simple answer ‘chromosomes’ will not work, since a small minority of women, who have a condition called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or CAIS, are actually XY karotype. Similarly, he argument ‘possession of a female reproductive system’ would cause a problem with CAIS women, who have vaginas, but none of the other female reproductive system. In any case, this explanation does not satisfactorily answer why it is that women and men are so markedly different in so many non-physical ways, such as how they socialise.
At the same time, a purely essentialist approach — it’s down to chromosomes or genitalia at birth — does not allow for what we now know to be between half to one percent of the born-male population, who are to all intents and purposes, women. These are the HSTS transgenders I referred to earlier, the transkids.
Gender itself is a construct of behaviours and expectations, almost none of which are fixed. Other than motherhood and the necessity to nurse and care for children, there is nothing that we associate with the gender construct ‘woman’ that is innately so. Other cultures, where there are more than two genders, demonstrate this too. Gender is fluid because, unlike being air skinned or blue eyed, it is a social, not a biological construct. It is a function of culture.
So ‘what makes a woman’ must be more than the possession of a vagina or XX chromosomes. Since gender is constructed and not innate, then it follows that it must be learned. And where and when is it learned? In childhood, through socialisation.
This is where the observation of social interaction in Asia becomes so important. Remember, one group contains only adult men; the other, everyone else. So there is a group of ‘men’ and a group of ‘not-men’. Gays fall into the latter group. They are never part of the ‘men’ group, because they are ‘not-men’. This is not just a function of orientation as a somewhat skewed Western perspective has it. Rather, a gay’s orientation is a function of her gender — which is, no matter what she looks like, always ‘not man’.
Blanchard demonstrated that HSTS transgenders are on a scale of variation with gay men (as they are called in the West; in Asia that would be an oxymoron). This close association, within the Asian model, means that all gays, whether transgender or not, are related and are, in social terms, part of the ‘not-men’ group: in other words, in terms of socialisation, they are women. These individuals grow up socialising with girls and woman and adopt the gender expressions that are naturally found within this group as their own.
That is why HSTS are so feminine: their childhood socialisation was within the ‘not-men’ group, within which the authority figures are all women. When the women, children and gays congregate together, separately from the ‘men’ group, at the centre of the group is the matriarch, usually a grandmother or great-grandmother, but perhaps the eldest sister or some other woman identified by a mysterious ranking system that exists within the matriarchy. Gays and transgenders grow up within this group and learn, and maintain throughout their lives, the gender construct that is their badge of membership.
‘Lola’ surveys her domain.
What Westerners may not realise, because of the vicious misogyny of the Western patriarchy, is that to remain part of the ‘not-men’ group is an honour. Boyish boys are excluded from it when they become adult, because men are inferior to women. Why are they inferior? Because they are brutish and violent and they cannot make babies. They lack the most important power of all. They can kill, but they cannot create.
While they may be sexually desired by those in the ‘not-men’ group, they are not part of it. The ‘men’ group is made up of outsiders looking in. The real action takes place in the ‘not-men’ group, presided over by the matriarch, who disposes her beneficence in the form of loving smiles and words and, frequently, gifts. She is ‘Mother Christmas’ and indeed, is an incarnation of the Goddess herself.
Gays, which group includes transgenders, have an honorary right to remain in the privileged ‘not-men’ group, because they have learned how to be women. They behave like women and this gives them the gender ‘woman'; they are tolerated within the group even though they lack the power to make life, because they do not offend those who do.
Following on from this they may adopt other behaviours consistent with being a woman: growing their hair long, wearing make-up, adopting ‘feminine’ body-language and so on. This gives them the right to remain a part of the ‘not-men’ group as they get older, and not to have to become part of the ‘men’ group. These actions symbolise a desire: to remain a ‘not-man’. This reinforces their adoption of gender roles and behaviours that they associate positively, in their culture, with women. This is why they are often so feminine and strive to be as beautiful as they can be — it is only in part to attract male partners: it is also a badge of affirmation, a sign of their membership of the honoured group, of being ‘not-men’ themselves.
When Western feminists point to socialisation as how it is that a ‘woman’ can be, they are right. What they fail to recognise is that, especially outwith the white, Anglo-Saxon, Western patriarchy, gays and transgenders share exactly the same socialisation patterns as women. Furthermore, once outside the protection of the ‘not-men’ group, gays and transgenders become targets for aggressive men. The patriarchy is very strong in Asian culture, but its compass is limited in one crucial regard; its authority does not obtain within the home or the family. So, while within that home, and the ‘not-men’ group that dominates it, gays and transgenders are generally safe, as soon as they step outside they are at risk from men who resent their very existence.
This resentment is because, by choosing not to be part of the ‘men’ group, gays and transgenders question its foundation. They are saying ‘what’s great about being a part of the ‘men’ group? I’d rather be a girl with my sisters in the ‘not-men’ group.’ That, of course, is an existential menace and the male patriarchy responds, as it always does to such challenges, with a narcissistic rage response.
This male resentment is very similar to the resentment that natal women feel everywhere. Asian gays are told in no uncertain manner that unless they join the ‘men’ group — which would mean undoing all their socialisation and changing their sexual orientation — then men will make their lives as miserable as they can — as men do to women. They are denied jobs, discriminated against and, if they can get work, obliged to accept worse terms and conditions than men would be expected to. They are insulted in the street. However it is not possible to unlearn one’s social conditioning, even if one might want to.
In the end, women, transgenders and gays are hated by the patriarchy for the very simple reason that women refuse to let men socialise with them, because they regard them as inferior.
This is the crux and it is outwith men’s power to control, something which men of course, utterly hate. That hatred is the foundation of the patriarchy, which is like a spiteful little boy’s response to being told he can’t play with the girls because he’s too rough. It is an entire social system founded on petulance, on men’s hurt feelings at being told that, no matter how much their mothers and sisters love them, they’re just not part of the club.
The ‘not-men’ group self-selects for inclusion. One is not part of the ‘men’ group by choice, but because one is put there by the ‘not-men’ group, essentially the women. This is a real power that women in these cultures — and it is seen all over the world — have over men. Gays and transgenders, in this model, are actually privileged. They have no desire to be part of the ‘men’ group. They want to remain outside it and within the group of women, children and gays. They reject manhood, masculinity and being part of the ‘men’ group. This is what men find offensive; and this offence may, when the power of women to suppress it is diminished, result in violence, even deadly violence.
Thus, in many senses, albeit not including motherhood, Asian HSTS MtF transgender have a very strong claim to be called a ‘second type of woman’ which is what they usually do refer to themselves as. They often look extremely feminine, they act like women and sound like them; but perhaps most of all, they are hated by the patriarchy in a very similar way to the way that women are hated. Gays and transgenders — they are essentially the same, with only detail differences of dress and hairstyle being different — are indeed women in terms of their gender, a social construct which they have learned from birth and through childhood.
Unfortunately, in the Western patriarchy, HSTS transgender women, who were until recently called ‘True’ transsexuals, have found their identity parasitised, colonised and erased by another group who claim to be transgender but who are in fact simply cross-dressing, sexually fetishistic men with a severe paraphilia: autogynephiles.
We shall discuss those in a future piece.
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Mother and Child. Pic: Rod Fleming
There is a difference between sex and gender; I am going to begin with sex (you’ll see why.) Sex refers to our physical, biological bodies. Usually, it’s how we are identified as babies, by the sex of our genitalia.
So are the sexes unequal? Yes, absolutely. Women are many many times more important than men. This is because the success, indeed the survival, of any population is dependent on the number, not of men, but of fertile mothers.
In China right now, a disaster is unfolding because of decades of legal restriction of family size to one, and a cultural misogyny which has seen female foetuses routinely aborted. This means that China simply doesn’t have enough women and it is facing financial — and possibly existential — collapse as its population ages. Doubtless the Chinese will soon be seeking net immigration on a huge scale; whether they’ll be able to persuade anyone is less sure.
One man can father hundreds or thousands of babies, but a woman can only carry perhaps 20 or so children in her lifetime and very few do that. Most women have far fewer children, which makes each individual mother more important. We explain how human society developed around core groups of women and children in Why Men Made God. Without children, humans cannot survive and the key to this is not men but women. This is why we developed a ‘two-group’ social structure, based around the mothers and children, with the men in a peripheral role.
Further and, as we discovered while researching, in most traditional (i.e. ‘hunter-gatherer’ or ‘forager’ cultures, it is the women who feed the tribe, not the men. For example, the amongst the !Kung San bush people, the women spend around three hours a day foraging and collecting food. They plant small gardens also. This is enough to feed the tribe.
The men hunt, but hunts are only successful 5% – 10% of the time, so actually, it’s a pastime and the people survive by the efforts of the women. Yes, the sexes are unequal: women are worth more than men.
Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct of behaviours, appearance and gendered roles. It is independent of sex, as transgender people prove. It is entirely possible to be born male, for example, and still have a feminine gender; indeed, this happens in about 1% of mail births, everywhere, according to GIRES.
We discovered that in traditional societies there are some gender markers. These include divisions of tasks by gender. The habit of women dressing their hair and wearing some sort of make-up appears universal, even in such traditional peoples as the Zoé, who wear no clothes.
As above, the efforts of the women in traditional societies actually tend to be more important. (This is not always the case, although it is so generally; in extreme regions, for example the Arctic, where foraging is more difficult, the hunt becomes more important. However, even there it is never all-important; that it is presented so is a function of patriarchal academia.) Gender in traditional cultures, which are frequently matriarchal, does not suggest that men are ‘worth more’ than women; if anything the opposite, as these cultures, we discovered, are frequently matriarchal.*
Gender within the patriarchy is different: it is a social construct designed specifically to disempower women and to reinforce the cultural understanding that women are the property of men, and their bodies may be bought and sold though a system called ‘marriage’. This is a contract in which a man gains proprietary rights over a woman’s body and fertility. In the older versions of the patriarchy a woman always ‘belongs’ to a man, either her father, her male relatives or her husband. (A few hours reading the Bible — Patriarchy 101 — will soon demonstrate this.)
In the modern versions this right of property is partially transferred to an external body called an ’employer’, and those exceptional women who learn to play the role of men well enough may be afforded some illusory patriarchal privilege — which ends at the ‘glass ceiling’. The patriarchy’s structures are designed to give the illusion of fairness while actually being the opposite. That is why so few women sit in legislatures: after all, they should be a majority, if ‘democracy’ actually had any meaning.
One way or the other, the woman’s freedom is removed altogether. That is the point of the gender construct. This being the case, the only way to make the genders equal (which I hope by now you understand that I would like to see, although I doubt if I shall live long enough) would be to completely destroy the patriarchy root and branch. That will require the destruction of its economic system, capitalism, at the same time.
The problem, of course, is that men use violence, particularly sexualised violence like rape but also homophobic attacks, and, as we see al over the world, concerted military attacks and other acts of the most obscene cruelty to maintain control. Just today I read of a 19-year old girl being stoned to death in Afghanistan for running away from the much older man she had been forcibly married to. (Western men need not point the finger: their patriarchy is quite as evil and wrong as the Islamic one, it’s just more media-savvy. It does its dirty work in the dark, not in front of cameras.)
At low level you can see it all over the stinking swamp that is YouTube comments; at a more serious level in the fact that a woman is raped in the US every six minutes. The patriarchy will fight tooth and nail to preserve its privilege and men, being the idiots we are, will largely go along with it.
Ending the patriarchy and replacing it with a modern matriarchy will be very difficult. But it must be done.
*We use Peggy Reeves Sanday’s definition of the matriarchy. This is not the patriarchy in reverse, as is sometimes claimed. That’s because women socially organise differently from men. It is rather a culture where women, especially mothers, are central. We discuss this at length in Why Men Made God.
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Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner. Not the face of trans women
If you’ve been anywhere near a media outlet over the last few months you won’t ave been able to avoid noticing that transgender women are getting a lot of attention. If you have seen images of Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner, and then Paris Lees, Janet Mock, Laverne Cox or Jai Dara Latto, who was crowned Miss Transgender UK 2015, you might be forgiven for being a bit confused. You might be struggling to figure out what the connection is between an ageing sports jock who looks like a man in a dress, and a glamorous woman who looks like — a glamorous woman. If you’re at all liberal or PC, you might have just accepted that these are the same, but, you know, because time and stuff.
But you’d be dead wrong. There are two completely distinct types of transgender woman and there is no connection between them at all. The conflation that is going on is wrong and potentially lethal.
Keisha Jenkins, 22, an HSTS recently murdered. All of the trans women killed in the US (that we know of) in the recent spate were HSTS like her.
This is important because one type — which comprises the overwhelming majority of trans women in the world today — is the subject of deadly and repeated violence, while the other colludes in it. Now I will show my cards here: my girlfriend is transgender. But she’s not like Jenner. And because she is — being of the other type — a potential victim of violence, I have to stand to the wire. Political Correctness is all very well until people start dying because of it; and that is what is happening. So let me explain.
The two types of MtF transgender are called, using the terminology of the man who first described them, ending nearly a hundred years of unsuccessful attempts, ‘homosexual transsexual, or ‘HSTS’ and ‘autogynephile’ or ‘AGP’. The scientist who established this is called Dr Ray Blanchard. Prior to his work, these types were called, respectively, ‘True transsexual’ or ‘Type One’ and ‘Pseudo transsexual’ or ‘Type Two.’
For examples, Janet Mock, Kevin Balot, Laverne Cox and Paris Lees are all HSTS and Caitlyn Jenner is AGP. It is important to understand that HSTS are not homosexual men; as women they are straight, attracted to men. But they were born as male and are sexually and romantically attracted to men, which makes Blanchard’s term intelligible at least.
HSTS feel and act irrepressibly girly as children and are often remarked and bullied for being ‘sissy’ (read Laverne Cox’s comments on this for an illustration.) Most will wear girl’s clothes as children if they can, play with feminine-gendered toys and socialise better with girls than boys. (By no means all boy children who do this are trans; gender exploration is a normal part of growing up and most will switch back after a while. Some, however, will not. These are HSTS.)
In clinical terms they tend to present younger than AGPs although there is a crossover in the late teens and twenties. Janet Mock’s book ‘Redefining Realness’ is a good recent personal history of an HSTS growing up.
HSTS see their femininity in terms of their sexuality, romantic objectives and socialisation. They act like girls, they sound like girls and they look like girls. Put bluntly, they are girls. Sexually and romantically they desire a straight relationship with a straight man. Although they almost always have many gay male friends and indeed, many will have self-identified as gay at some stage, they are not interested in gay relationships at all. They are girls and completely hetero-normative girls at that.
Wherever there is a social space that these individuals can be themselves in, they will exploit it and transition. Life is just easier for an HSTS as a woman. Nobody takes them seriously as men anyway and they are useless at it. They have no hope of succeeding in the patriarchal status rat-race as men, but as women, their beauty is their ally. A good-looking HSTS like transpinay Kevin Balot (a Philippine celebrity) will have no difficulty attracting male partners and for a young woman like her, the dream may indeed come true — to find a straight man who really loves her.
Transpinay model Kevin Balot
For Kevin, being a woman is just who she is. She doesn’t have to learn it; she just is. When she was little she was a little girl and when she grew up she became a woman. That’s it. Kevin suffered a great deal as a child, like many HSTS, but she could not change herself. She is what she is. It’s not really a matter of feeling, just of being. She was always Kevin and there is only one Kevin Balot; she describes her name as the most precious thing her parents gave to her and she wears it with obvious and great pride. Being a woman is not an act for her, nor is she conflicted in her personality.
HSTS has been described for millennia and has always been more associated with matriarchal or matrifocal cultures. ( I have seen one fascinating reference to an 11th century Islamic scholar describing what might be AGP, but Islam is a patriarchy every bit as repressive as the modern Western one, so hey, no surprise; but I will pursue that.)
AGPs could not be more different. They show no femininity as children, though they may be detached and sensitive boys. They almost always succeed in masculine areas — sport (Caitlyn Jenner) academia (Julia Serrano and Lynn Conway); many join the armed forces. They usually marry and have children. Their awareness of themselves as women always appears later and never in childhood. (Their personal ‘recalled histories’ may assert childhood feelings of transgender but these are never independently verifiable and are in fact a product of their condition.)
Autogynephilia is a far more complicated profile than HSTS, in which the subject becomes consumed with the idea of self as a woman, and consequentially a desire to be a woman, along with the adoption of female characteristics and the removal of male ones. AGP, like all biological conditions, is a scale of variation, so some individuals feel the dysphoria it causes much more intensely than others. For some, dressing as women is enough; for others, surgical removal of the offending parts is the only relief. However, a majority of AGPs retain their assigned birth gender sexual normativity: they remain attracted to women.
The reason I mentioned Kevin Balot earlier is that names are a useful guide in distinguishing the types. For an HSTS, she is who she’s always been and most will just feminise their given names. Chris will become Crissy, Alan becomes Alana, Peter Petra and so on. Some, like Kevin, refuse to change at all, seeing no need. They are who they are and always have been. There is only one personality inside an HSTS’ head and that is feminine, from early childhood. (There is an exception, where HSTS working in the sex business adopt fancy names appropriate to that; but they do not usually use those names in private life, and in any case, cis men and women do this too.)
However, within the AGP profile, a second, pseudo-feminine personality develops around the fixation with self as a woman. This appears at puberty or soon after. It is quite distinct from the masculine personality that originally conceives it. As this second personality develops, it acquires a name. This is usually very different from the given name of the masculine personality — ‘Bruce’ becomes ‘Caitlyn’ for example.( For inexplicable reasons, there appears to be a tendency towards using exotic or foreign names — often misspelled.)
This second personality may become so dominant and aggressive that it overwhelms the masculine host personality and at this point — usually after years of cross-dressing, first in private, then with forays in public, to ‘cross-dressing clubs’ etc — the subject is fully consumed by the feminine personality. Then all the masculine physical characteristics of the subject’s body have to be re-aligned in concordance with it.
At the same time, the new personality has to have a history, which will be an adaptation of the truth in which feelings of ‘femininity’ were suppressed in childhood and so on. AGPs are not lying when they relate these, but they are still invented: they are a part of the second ‘feminine’ personality, which is destroying all remnant of the original masculine one. The subject is unable to know which memories are true (part of their masculine personality) and which are not.
It is at this point that a masculine (paradoxically) aggression response kicks in to counter any suggestion that the AGP’s ‘recalled history’ or feminine identity might not be real. This is frequently expressed as a narcissistic rage attack, such as has been directed at scientists and academics like J Michael Bailey, Anne Lawrence, Ray Blanchard himself, Alice Dreger (famed for her fairness and academic integrity) and anyone else who dares to challenge the assertions of AGPs.
These attacks should be seen as a defence response by the ‘feminine’ personality that has overtaken the host. In addition to personal insult and character assassination, these attacks also include the routine falsification and distortion of statistics and other evidence, and the insistence that AGPs are the only ‘true women’. This leads directly to the blatant attempt to erase HSTS trans women, who, just by existing, prove the illusory nature of the AGP personality.
AGPs, through this attempt to erase or devalue HSTS identities, in order to colonise them, are one component of the social problem that sees HSTS abused, harmed and killed. They deliberately present HSTS as a minority (which they are not) and as incapable of speaking for themselves, which is about as offensive as it gets. For an AGP, only his own personality matters; everything about him is only about him and he is focussed exclusively on the parasitic ‘feminine’ personality that is consuming him. It is narcissism gone made, with the subject totally obsessed with himself to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.
Gender dysphoria — universally accepted as the specific provocation of transgender — for an AGP is, therefore about detestation of actual physical body parts, since these symbolise the remnants of the masculine personality that has been destroyed. (Although sometimes not entirely, and this is why re-transition occurs.) Its social aspect is the relentless aggression of AGPs against anyone who questions their ‘narratives’, demands to be allowed to use women’s safe spaces and access to their bodies as well as, of course, the incessant attempt to harm HSTS.
(Incredibly, I recently saw, on an AGP’s site, the exhortation that women should just ‘stay out of spaces that [AGP MtFs] frequent.’ It is rare that I am rendered speechless, but I was that day.)
On the other hand, dysphoria for an HSTS — who does not have this internal conflict and is really a girl — is simply about social roles: a horror of having to socialise as a man and being more comfortable socialising as a woman since, in fact, that is what she is. Genital surgery for AGP is like the removal of a malignant tumour, the second personality’s final moment of triumph; for HSTS it’s more like having a boob job — it makes a more convincing woman, who can then socialise more easily as one. This is why so many AGPs do not use their neo-vaginas for sex, whereas HSTS always do: I mean what would be the point otherwise?
AGPs have no notion of what being a woman is, of course; theirs is a fantasy, possibly provoked by the repression they experienced as children. Unlike HSTS, who are in no doubt whatsoever about their feminine identity from their early lives and indeed are quite unable to prevent themselves from being girls, AGPs have to learn and, frequently, fail.
The AGP awareness of self as feminine is rather like a ‘negative shape': once you remove all the masculine parts, what is left is taken to be feminine. That this assumption could not be further from the truth is just ignored by AGPs, though it is the source of much of the conflict between them and natal women feminists.
AGP is a cultural by-product of the Western patriarchy; this is supported by the fact that in other parts of the world, it is extremely rare, to the point of ‘zero percent’ (of trans women) according to one study. Worse however, it acts for the patriarchy in erasing and silencing HSTS trans women, who are far more numerous. In this, AGPs are not alone: we shall deal with their allies in another post.
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There is a legitimate reason why one might not wish to date any person: lack of attraction or interest. We all respond to our inbuilt attractions and we don’t generally want to pursue, romantically, people who fall outside those. This is maybe a form of objectification, but everyone does it. It’s hardwired into us.
But that was not the point of the question, which was how one could avoid dating a trans woman if one were attracted to her. That’s a whole other can of worms. It’s about a man who finds a particular woman attractive and interesting enough to want to ask out on a date, but is afraid to do so in case she has — or used to have — non-standard genitalia.
That there is pure transphobia, open and shut. The questioner doesn’t even want to buy someone a drink on the very slim statistical possibility that that person might be transgender.
This mindset believes that men have a right to expect sex as a return for buying dinner, effectively, and would consider the discovery of a hitherto concealed penis (past or present) to be a default of this ‘bargain’. But that reduces women to sex objects that can be bought with a couple of meals (or maybe a cinema ticket or two, depending on how cheap we are talking) so it is intrinsically misogynistic AS WELL as transphobic.
Then it gets worse; having paid a woman sufficient attention for her to consent to have sex with him, the man presumes a right to expect her genitalia to be of a certain order. This is what leads to the increasing numbers of purely cosmetic labial removal surgeries, amongst other absurdities, and, in some benighted cultures, far worse.
But like it or not, men do not have this right. Women are not measured by their genitalia. Furthermore, being nice to a woman does not imply a sexual bargain of any kind whatsoever. No amount of movies or dinners can guarantee access to her genitalia, whatever they look like. This is coercive, and reduces women to walking genitalia to be bought by men. It is a primary underlying cause of rape: men are conditioned to think that women, in whom they have invested time and money, who then refuse sex are welching on the deal. Once again, transphobic and misogynistic.
Furthermore, this mindset can be lethal to trans women. I have just spent a week trying to support a friend who was agonising about whether she should tell a man who had been expressing serious hots for her, that she was trans. Of course I advised her to, but I hated myself for doing it, or rather having to. I had no choice because the transphobia inherent in the question can be deadly to trans women.
My friend was under no moral or ethical obligation to tell the man details about her genitalia; she’s a woman. IT SHOULD BE ENOUGH.
But in order to prevent her getting into a situation in which she might get killed, I had to say that she should inform this man about something that he had no right to know, at least at this stage. Because of transphobia, her genitalia suddenly became the only thing that mattered. So what if she’s gorgeous, smart, funny, talented, great company, affectionate, loyal and charming? Doesn’t conform to a rigid patriarchal expectation of women, so none of that matters and she had to cry herself to sleep over yet another guy who suddenly lost interest. Telling her that he’s a fool who doesn’t know what he lost out on seems small comfort.
The trouble is, in reducing this lovely woman to the contents of her pants, transphobia does the SAME THING to every other woman. They are also reduced to genitalia, and not just the genitalia they have now, the organs they were born with. Birth genitalia, in this viciously patriarchal world view, is all that counts. Therefore that’s all a woman is — genitals on legs. How staggeringly presumptuous and demeaning can it get?
If you don’t believe how dangerous the misogynistic, transphobic suggestion that men have a right to expect women’s genitalia to be a certain shape is, please Google ‘Jennifer Laude‘ or ‘Gwen Araujo’. Why would any young woman suffer like that? Because of transphobia, that’s why.
These, and countless thousands of other women like them, were murdered by their lovers because of their patriarchally-conditioned expectations. And that is about as sick as it gets. Seduce a woman, achieve your desired end and then kill her because her genitalia don’t look like what your buddies say they should.
Not only is all this transphobic and misogynistic, it is profoundly cowardly because it is all about one thing: fear of penises — and even in the past tense. Big tough manly men indeed, so afraid of a few ounces of human flesh that they will bludgeon a woman to death after having sex with her. It is utterly despicable.
Of course, we would be remiss not to point out that suggesting that ‘transgender women are not women’ is directly transphobic too. We could go long into the subtleties of GRS and all the rest, but it would be irrelevant here: transphobia is transphobia, non, pre or post op.
So, the only legitimate reason for not dating any woman is that you’re not attracted to her. That’s fair enough. We all have triggers. We should try to be open and fair, and to look beneath the surface, but attraction is instinctive.
As regards deeper relationships, the only legitimate reason not to enter a marriage or set up home with a trans person might be a powerful desire to have and raise children; trans women are not able to conceive, though trans men often are. (And in return, trans women can often fertilise, and trans men can’t.)
So, perhaps the couple would have to settle on adoption or not go ahead. To do the latter would not necessarily be transphobic, although it would, I suggest, reveal a very shallow outlook on life. But then we are talking about the patriarchy, with its glib religious pseudo-certainties, here.
However, to be afraid of liking and falling in love with a woman, on the grounds that her genitalia might not live up to your expectations, is as deeply transphobic, misogynistic and cowardly as I can think of.
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