I want to begin by saying that I am honored to even be in the same room as these womyn who have spoken out at such great personal and professional costs.
I am extremely familiar with the type of slanderous censorship campaigns that have been launched at each of these women, and that's because I used to participate in them. In fact, if you told me three years ago that I would be here today publicly criticizing the transgender movement from a feminist perspective, I would have laughed in your face. After all, I loudly, tirelessly campaigned in support of men's access to women's spaces as part of a transgender rights organization. I did this for years, in fact. I met and consulted with leaders of transgender politics including Janet Mock, Jos Truitt of Feministing, Tobi Hill-Meyer (a WA-based pornographer/transactivist), members of The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and many more. I was convinced I was doing the right thing. The truth is that I was terribly wrong.
In reality, I was doing men's dirty work for them…...Though I didn't know it then,
The campaign I helped lead, destroyed a women's space. I live with that every day - that because of my actions women will be denied that space.
But I'm here today because I am a woman born woman who knows that these men who want access to our spaces are not and never will be women. I’m here Because I am a lesbian, the daughter of lesbians, a feminist, a leftist. And because I changed my mind.
So to the women in this room who have doubts about the transgender movement and are afraid to say so -- I want you to know I see you. You are not a bigot, you're not hysterical, you're not on the wrong side of history, and you are far from alone. It's never too late to to ask questions, do your own research, grapple with multiple viewpoints, and decide for yourself. It's never too late to speak out for women's rights and female safety.
I'm going to spend the rest of my time examining a really important aspect of this debate - the voices of women who were once convinced they were transgender men, or female-to-males. I will be reading an abridged statement from Max Robinson. Max Robinson is a 20-year-old lesbian who recently detransitioned after 4 years of hormone replacement therapy. She underwent a double mastectomy at age 17, performed by plastic surgeon Curtis Crane in San Francisco. In her spare time, Max currently helps support other detransitioning women. You can read Max's memoir in full at 4thwavenow.com. Her writing will also be featured later this year in the upcoming Female Erasure anthology, edited by Ruth Barrett. As detailed in Max’s account, the violence and manipulation many females face in queer communities is not widely known or reported in the media, but it is also what the women I know experienced as well. This is her story.
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When I was 16, I talked my older sister into ordering me a binder, and I wore it as often I could.
It hurt like hell. I insisted it didn’t. The pain made it easier to think less, which was nice.
After school, I read [online] articles and dozens of pages into the archive of FTM blogs.
I was glad to see some women who looked kind of like me, saying that they had futures now.
I wanted what they had, and I hated what I had.
At first, I thought I might be genderqueer.
Then, I wanted to go on testosterone for a while,but keep my breasts.
Next I was sure that I wanted them gone.
Some part of me knew I was talking myself into it. I ignored that part.
It was just so comforting to think that I was born wrong.
If my body was the problem, it could be solved.
I thought I was turning away from the hurt that came from being seen as a woman by men, but
After transition, I kept quieter than ever before. Always afraid, always afraid. Brought back into line.
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Transition was supposed to fix things.
That’s what I believed and that’s what doctors told my parents.
I was 16 when I started hormone blockers, then testosterone.
I was 17 when I had a double mastectomy.
After all, this was a medically validated condition.
I had been to appointments with professional after professional,
all of whom agreed this was the way to go.
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But it turned out to be cold comfort, removing hated body parts.
The day of my surgery,
I asked Dr. Crane where the tissue would go. He told me it would be incinerated as medical waste.
My first post-operative memories don’t start until a day or two later.
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I didn’t want to be seen as a woman–as a lesbian–and I didn’t want to ask why. Or maybe I just didn’t know who to ask. I did try. Before I started medical transition, I asked my gender therapist,
a trans man,
about internalized misogyny.
The question was dismissed. I was assured that it probably wasn’t that.
I got a letter for hormone replacement therapy, and later, for the top surgery.
I was grateful. I didn’t know it was okay to be a lesbian with what we call gender dysphoria, that I could survive this way.
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I was almost 20 when I stopped hormones. A while later I stopped understanding myself as a trans man. Things changed. My mind changed.
I [had] thought “woman” was wrong for me, because of how I dressed, how I related to my body, how I resented the expectations society had for me as a woman.
I didn’t realize that my horror at my body
could be caused by the horror of living in a world
that wants to control all women.
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I didn’t know this then. I had subscribed to an incredibly misogynistic set of beliefs for years.
“DFAB privilege” was a common phrase in our community – “designated female at birth privilege.” It was accepted fact that being born female gave you a lifelong advantage over a male who transitioned.
This included men who used transition only to mean using different pronouns [while communicating online].
We believed that, as “dfabs,” we needed to shut up about our petty problems.
We genuinely believed some off-the-wall garbage, like that it’s wrong and evil not to be attracted to penises because of “internalized cissexism.”
At the time, none of this seemed outrageous or strange to me; it felt pretty intuitive.
Growing up under male domination is a grooming process that leaves many girls and women extremely vulnerable to manipulation.
For those of us females (mainly lesbians) who did seek transition,
we were often told that,
as transmen, we were exactly as [dangerous and privileged] as any other men.
Women who never transitioned in these trans circles believed their so-called “cis privilege” rendered them man-like in their power.
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Young lesbians in the “queer community” are known by many names:
if you want to avoid scrutiny for not hooking up with transwomen, you’ve got to get creative. Some of us call ourselves queer, bisexual, or pansexual, because there’s no word for only being attracted to females, and you can’t be a lesbian if you date transmen or avoid dating transwomen. A lot of us, having been told that we can opt out of womanhood by choice, decided that we never want to be called “she” again. Many transwomen seem to view dating a real lesbian, or a “cisbian”, as a uniquely valuable source of gender validation. Often they refer to themselves as “transdykes.”
This includes those who are not transitioning– men who can literally only be differentiated from any other man , when you ask his preferred pronouns and he tells you he wants to be called a woman.
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The first experience that did make me start to feel suspicious of male transition was when I was 18 and a genderqueer-identifying man -- who had never pursued any kind of transition -- raped my best friend.
To avoid accountability within our social circle, her rapist changed his pronouns [to female ones, she/her] and then said that he couldn’t possibly have raped her, because of the power dynamics between a “cis” woman and a transwoman. He moved back to LA a few months later, without ever taking any steps towards transition. When he got there, he told his old friends he wasn’t trans anymore. [Now] I have a list of 20 intercommunity predators, mainly transwomen who prey on females — women or transmen. Eleven of them are one or two degrees of separation from us.
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When our remaining friends from the transgender community
found out that we had changed our minds
almost all of them deserted us immediately.
So many women in our community had themselves
been pressured to share nude photos, coerced into unwanted sex
or outright violently assaulted by males describing themselves as transwomen,
Driving us apart from each other is the easiest way……………...to keep us from learning to recognize …. attempts to redefine our realities.
As soon as a transwoman said, “No, I’M not a man,”
we instantly lost our ability to protect ourselves from him.
The silent victims of transwomen had good reason to keep quiet.
We all saw transwomen using [their] language of “cissexism” and “transmisogyny”
against anyone who named their behavior as harmful.
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Deprogramming took almost a year of exploring the feminist theory
that had been forbidden to us before we
could even call any transwoman a man without having a panic attack….
Both of us were terrified just to read dissenting opinions.
Janice Raymond’s discussion of transexually-constructed lesbian feminists
in The Transsexual Empire was startlingly relevant.
She saw this coming.
All either of us knew about Janice Raymond, until last year,
was that she was [supposedly] evil to the core; a horrible transphobe.
We believed this because we didn’t know any better.
From the outside, now, I can finally see how ridiculous it is.
We had been manipulated into believing that dissenting women are literally equivalent to murderers.
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At the end of the day, I just don’t want anyone male in the bathroom with me.
The experience of being male is fundamentally different from the experience of being female
— even if a man passes, even if a man has surgery to more closely resemble his idea of a woman.
I don’t say this out of a hatred for transwomen. I say this out of love and respect for women.
What we are cannot be conceived nor replicated in a man’s imagination,
and it absolutely cannot be formed out of male tissue on an operating table.
- I am so tired of seeing pictures of women with mastectomies, women who've been on hormones for years, women you can mistake for men, being used to say that of COURSE we should all get to use whatever bathroom we feel like. I had a mastectomy. I don't shave my facial hair. I'm still a woman. I look this way because of socially sanctioned medical abuse designed to elicit compliance from me as an abused butch lesbian with learning disabilities who did not know how to assimilate into the world before me. Every woman who seeks drastic medical treatment to "correct" her femaleness has a lot of very compelling reasons for believing that was her best option at the time. The women with beards and flat chests putting up pictures of themselves saying "you want ME in there with your daughter"? Yes, women with a history of medical transition may need to communicate a little more clearly about our pasts, because not everyone understands that this is something that happens to non conforming women now. But fuck the idea that men on hormones like the ones who sexually abused my girlfriend are more entitled to female spaces than women who are visually identifiable as victims of the male medical industrial complex.
I feel that transition is a treatment with far-reaching harmful side effects
— not only for the individual receiving treatment,
but for those around them.
Lesbians who see their sisters disappearing are more likely to try to erase themselves.
Lesbians who are forced to welcome men into their spaces
will never be able to see or understand the value of female-only space,
having never actually experienced it.
Gendered identity crises are very real to the individuals experiencing them,
myself included, but this energetic drive towards change is not best spent
reforming ourselves into people who can assimilate into the world men have built.
I have so much empathy for other women who believed transition was their best choice. I lived that. But the fact is, loving a woman does not automatically mean agreeing with her. I believe that all of us deserve better.
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I’m grateful that I learned it was okay to exist as I am.
My body has known tragedies, but my body is not a tragedy.
I’m so grateful for all of the incredible women I’ve connected with
who are on the other side of transgender identities now.
Transition doesn’t have to be forever.
More and more of us are waking up, each with her own story.
We question and disagree, with our enemies and with each other.
We learn. Together, we are moving forward.”