Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size . . . For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished . . . The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work.
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own1
Woman has often been compared to water, in part because it is the mirror where the male Narcissus contemplates himself: he leans toward her, with good or bad faith. But in any case, what he wants from her is to be, outside of him, all that he cannot grasp in himself, because the interiority of the existent is only nothingness, and to reach himself, he must project himself onto an object. Woman is the supreme reward for him since she is his own apotheosis, a foreign form he can possess in the flesh . . . And for this she is so necessary to man’s joy and his triumph that if she did not exist, men would have had to invent her. They did invent her. But she also exists without their invention. This is why she is the failure of their dream at the same time as its incarnation.
- Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex)2
Women are used in the making and made in the using. The love of or desire for or obsession with a sexual object is, in male culture, seen as a response to the qualities of the object itself . . . Objectification is the accomplished fact: an internalized, nearly invariable response by the male to a form that is, in his estimation and experience, sufficiently whatever he needs to provoke arousal. The proper bounds of objectification as an appropriate response to an appropriate object are set by psychologists, the high priests of secular culture: the form of a woman, a composite of women’s attributes, a part of a woman’s body. Anything or anyone else is seen as some kind of substitute for a woman or the male-defined sexual parts of her body. It is inappropriate to substitute. Male supremacy depends on the ability of men to view women as sexual objects, and deviations from this exercise in male power and female oblivion are discouraged.
- Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women3
Genevieve Gluck and I had a conversation in May 2022, as published to her YouTube channel, dated May 12, 2022. We discussed how prostitution and pornography influence the objectification of women and girls embodied in the disembodiment of transgenderism. The sex industry has established the industrial, institutional, and ideological paradigm for the “gender” industry. Speaking with Susan Faludi, transgender historian Susan Stryker comes very close when he says of transition, “It’s almost like being a convert to a new religion.”4 By now, certainly beneath the pseudoscientific gnostic dogma of “gender medicine,” the simile of “like being a convert to a new religion” has become an understatement. Transgenderism is a new religion competing among the old religions with exceedingly seductive promises of transcendence, especially for its youngest converts: “trans kids.” Its proselytized aesthetics are the religious dress in what Janice G. Raymond has critiqued as “the ultimate homage to sex-role power,” increasingly performed through not only women’s bodies but also children’s bodies.5
“Gender Identity” as Sex-Role Stereotyping
GLUCK: I’m really excited to be talking with you today about some of the things that we’ve kind of talked about on Twitter together a little bit. You’ve written extensively about these sorts of topics, which is why we’re talking now. When I say excited, some of the things that we’re going to be talking about are a little bit dark, but I think both of us tend to look at some of these darker rabbit holes that a lot of people don’t have much interest in looking at—because it can be so bleak sometimes. So, when I say I’m excited to be talking to you, that’s why—it’s because we have that in common. I wanted to start with talking about how gender ideology is related to the objectification of women. That’s kind of the broader topic that we’ll be talking about. If you want to go ahead and explain how you see the origins of “gender identity” as related to this kind of commodification, whether of women or of the body or altogether.
CLECKLEY: In particular, when I think about how “gender identity” has functioned, it begins from the premise that maleness is defined by masculinity, femaleness is defined by femininity. This redefining of the sexes takes sexual stereotyping to be the essence of what sex is, which is the reverse of what feminists throughout the Second Wave worked for. For example, Diana Russell had written, in 1975, in her book The Politics of Rape, that any kind of “sexual liberation without sex-role liberation” would necessarily result in the further oppression of women—which would, of course, impact girls as well.6 What we have seen under the regime of “gender identity” has been precisely that: a failure to question sex-role stereotyping or, more specifically, to repudiate sex-role stereotyping. Instead of rejecting sex-role stereotyping, rather than rebelling against it, we have seen it medicalized as a “condition,” as a “paraphilia”—in all manners of it being reified, rather than questioned as a moral and political issue. The medicalization of sex vis-à-vis “gender identity” seems to have quite a lot to do with the refusal to question the social and political nature of sex-role stereotyping and how it impacts not only women and girls but also men and boys.
John Money and His “Science-Fiction Things”
GLUCK: Right. So, so there’s kind of this history within sexology about the naturalization of these sex-role stereotypes. The role that sexology has played in relegating these stereotypes to “the biological” or to “the innate” is really important, too. Certainly, we could talk about John Money, but he’s not the only one—this idea that women are inherently masochistic and men are inherently sadistic predates him. But maybe we should start with John Money as a jumping-off point since he’s responsible for the term “gender identity.”7
CLECKLEY: With John Money, it is significant, as we have discussed before, to mention his work with the Reimer twins, particularly as seen in John Colapinto’s book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. One of those critical passages, which we’ve both come back to, is where Colapinto discusses Money’s concept of “gender schemas” and Money’s sense of how children become “oriented” toward gender had everything to do with a pornographic concept of man and woman—which necessarily conflated masculinity with maleness, femininity with femaleness. Colapinto writes, “Pornography, he believed”—that is, Money believed—“was ideal for this purpose,” which is to say, to teach children “gender schemas” that would, presumably, allow them to integrate into society.8
I frequently find myself toying with concepts and working out potential hypotheses. It is like playing a game of science fiction.
- John Money, quoted in John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl9
Pornography will not turn a child into a sex degenerate, a sex maniac, or even a picture freak, nor does pornography broaden the appetites of a deviant at any age. Vendors of pornography know very well that their financial success depends on catering to the established tastes of their regular customers. The people who keep the porn shops in business don’t browse around; they come in for their own kind of thing and they don’t want any other kind. The tourist trade is fly-by-night and soon exhausts itself. Honest pornography might, however, help to prevent twists in sexual development.
- John Money, Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman10
You can’t ignore the fact—if you want to say it this way—that a sick society produces transsexualism, or any other sexual problem. But you can’t simply say, ‘To hell with all these poor suffering individuals. I’m going to clean up the society first.’ You do both together, don’t you? The sin is that you would just keep on treating the suffering while at the same time endorse the perpetuation of the society that creates it . . . I don’t think sex-reassignment surgery with hormone treatments will continue to be the method of choice for treating transsexualism. There’s going to be such an explosion of knowledge of how the brain works—about the physiology and transmitter chemistry of pathways that mediate sexual function and identity—that there’s no limit to the science-fiction things we will be able to do.
- John Money, interviewed by John Stoltenberg, Omni, May 198011
Gender transposition means that as compared with the standard stereotypes, which may or may not be biologically, historically, or culturally based, some people are transposed away from what you’d expect if you looked only at their sex organs. Instead of being male, they’re committed to a whole lot that’s female, and vice versa. Since there was a terminological problem, I suggested we use the concept of miming, so you get men who are gynemimetic, impersonating women; and women who are andromimetic, impersonating men. In India, you find the hijra, whose history is lost in the mists of time, but essentially these people replenish their ranks with teenagers who run away from home because they are disgracing their families by being too effeminate. They like to have sex with men and want to be women—they’re obsessed with it. The same as our patients are here. The ultimate stage of the hijra is to get up the courage to go through with the amputation of penis and testicles. They had no anesthetic. No hormone treatment. So in their ancient ways, they looked like men impersonating women. Now some of them are beginning to take hormones. I have a large group of gynemimetic patients—so does anybody who deals with gender problems—who do not want their penises removed, do not want a vagina constructed, and the corresponding is true for the women-to-men. They simply want to take hormones and live their lives as members of the opposite sex. Now if we had a sexual democracy, we’d have a place for both kinds of people. A book called The Transsexual Empire argues that it’s only these cruel, vicious, and heartless members of the medical profession who are forcing these poor darlings to go and get themselves cut up and mutilated, whereas we should leave them alone. Well, I have news for whoever wrote that book [Janice G. Raymond]: You’d have lots of patients willing to get a gun and blow off their own genitals if you don’t do it. I’ve had several who got knives and cut themselves trying to get rid of their sex organs. That’s their obsession!
- John Money, interviewed by Kathleen Stein, Omni, April 198612
In radical feminism, rape was radically redefined by fiat as being not an act of sexual assault or coercion, but an act of male violence and aggression perpetrated against women. Demands for increased legal sanctions against not only stranger rape, but also against the newly decreed offenses of date rape and marital rape, were met by new legislation. Paradoxically, the feminist movement gave its opponents—namely antiliberationist women like Phyllis Schlafly with her Eagle Forum and archconservative men defending patriarchal authority—the first inch of the mile they would need to uphold the tradition that woman, the weaker sex, is dependent on man’s power of protection. Women were surreptitiously being returned to the role of victims and martyrs—helpless, incompetent, and unable to fend for themselves . . . Radical feminism is wrong in asserting that commercial pornography teaches males to denigrate women, to use them as sex objects, and to eroticize their power over women. That is putting the cart before the horse. If males have been conditioned since boyhood to denigrate, objectify, or sexually abuse females (a lesson that females learn to reciprocate), then men will be attracted to pornography that does the same—otherwise, not.
- John Money, “Manhood and Womanhood in Conflict: Fin de Siècle Report,” 1994, in Sin, Science, and the Sex Police: Essays on Sexology and Sexosophy13
When I have seen transgender rights activists write about John Money, they have attempted, in vain, to portray him as “conservative” or as somebody who was not at the vanguard of “sexual liberation.” But what is interesting, of course, is Money definitely was—and he supported transsexualism. He also supported pedophilia as a “sexual orientation” and, with regard to his treatment of children—his sense of children needing to be shown sexually explicit images, as he discusses in his book Sexual Signatures, in his own words, talking about how he believes that children best learn sexuality through seeing pornography, through being shown pornographic images.
Transgender Tapestry (1979-2008) was a publication originally titled The TV-TS Tapestry, first published by the Tiffany Club, a support group for male transvestic fetishists, and then the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE), an early front organization for transvestic fetishists. The publication changed its name beginning with issue 75 during the winter of 1995. Monica Helms, a male transvestic fetishist and the creator of the transgender flag, was a contributing editor for Transgender Tapestry. The “Winter 2002 Nostalgia Issue” portrayed Money among “the heroes,” a key academic proponent for transsexualism, if not the proponent essential to its defense, over decades—and Janice G. Raymond, of course, among “the villains.” Interestingly, there was only a brief mention of the infamous “John/Joan” case of the Reimer twins (just that Money “came under heavy criticism”), publicized as early as 1997 in Rolling Stone, later expanded in Colapinto’s book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl in 2000.14
With the Reimer twins, it was, I think, particularly tragic to consider that he had the twins basically simulate sexual intercourse—which was, of course, child sexual abuse to these boys. One of the passages from Colapinto’s book—this is from Brian—who says, “He would show us pictures of kids, boys and girls with no clothes on.” And then David says, “He’d say to us, ‘I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.’” Money was essentially sexually abusing these children as an “experiment.” Perhaps he saw it as merely a “project,” but, for these children, who were human beings, thinking, breathing, feeling human beings—they did not regard it as such.15
When we think about the way through which men create rationalizations for the sexual abuse of women, from a kind of Sadeian framework, we may think about the way that the scientists can fashion all manner of rationalization through which to abuse the patient, through which to abuse his victim—and it’s often a him—and the victims, if they’re not women, they’re often children, often people who are vulnerable and who depend on the doctors, who trust these doctors. Money worked at Johns Hopkins University, so he was he was not a marginal figure, by any means—although, his status had been questioned, of course.16
GLUCK: I frequently have my Twitter account reported for exposing sex criminals who happen to use a transgender status. Just the other day, I had tweeted, again, about John Money, because it’s always worth a reminder, and the trans activists reported me, again. It’s like you’re telling on yourself—you’re showing who you are when you’re trying to cover up this history, but there is a lot of that covering up of the history of the whole concept, the whole origination of “gender identity”—and the horrific abuses that you’ve just described that are involved in it. Those children, by the way, it should be noted: They did go on to commit suicide as adults—both. For anyone who’s interested, there’s an interview that David Reimer had done with Oprah, back the year 2000, when that book came out.17 It was actually a national bestseller—and here we are, twenty years later, as though people have just totally forgotten about all of it. John Money had defended NAMBLA—or, sorry, his work is featured on NAMBLA. He was actually published in a pro-pedophile academic journal [Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia].
Now, everything in the way of paraphilias can have a phylism attributed to it as part of its foundations. Paedophilia should just be accepted for its etymological meaning, which is simply the love of children. Neither boys nor girls—just the love of children. It’s not the so-called parent-child, pairbonded love. It includes that and then adds the erotic love or lover bonding.
- John Money, interviewed by Joseph Geraci and Donald Mader, Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia, Spring 199118
Prostitution and Pornography as Frameworks
Let’s go back to that concept of the pornography, though, because that is a common thread that’s running through all of this, in many different ways. Interesting that John Money believed that pornography was the tool for helping children to understand their “gender schema” or “gender identity”—since pornography is so heavily based within sadomasochism and within these paradigms of power and control: male power and female subordination. We’ve talked together, too, about Andrea Long Chu in his book Females, where he—in no uncertain terms—defines women according to “receptivity” in sex. It’s literally like the embodiment of pornography is what he’s reducing women to there. What are your thoughts on the role of pornography within all of this?
CLECKLEY: It seems that prostitution and pornography have not been explored for the way in which they connect to modern transgenderism—maybe even more now than they did decades ago. With the use of technology, especially social media, being what it is and the dissemination of images—Chu talks about “sissy porn” and these images being disseminated between and among men, who utilize them as a means through which to achieve some kind of sexual gratification based on eroticizing women’s subordination. They take these images in, put them out, cycle them over and over again among themselves, and it creates a concrete, reified idea of woman as completely dehumanized, as defined exclusively from the point of view of pornography. To go to a feminist critique, there is Janice Raymond’s wonderful book a recent work published by Spinifex Press—Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. She cites some work by you, talking about the way in which
[t]he sex industry has numerous links with the transgender industry. Both have built edifices of exploitation based on misogyny and the downgrading of women’s rights. Both are sold to women as empowerment, liberation, and consumer choice. And both are industries that have managed to expand by protecting men’s rights.19
One of the things that she discusses, when she cites your work—it was part of where you were you had talked about Andrea Long Chu and where he says, “Femaleness is to be fucked because getting fucked is what female is”—something akin to that. He says this—and people will just read it and be like, “Oh, okay, yeah.” It makes one wonder how these men have been able to mainstream this idea the way they have—I ask myself. Women are over half the human population, yet they have the power of a minority group and—across race and class—have been beneath the foot of men. One of the things about prostitution, pornography, transgenderism, and even surrogacy is the systematic dehumanization of women and, more often than not, the hollowing out of women for men’s identities to be basically projected upon them—women disembodied so that men can embody their ideas of women. And it is just terrible, and I think about how crazy it is to be having to even look at and criticize work by many of these men, whether it’s Chu or Grace Lavery, as another example. Society accepts woman hating as a reasonable way of life for men and, apparently, society assumes it to be appropriate for women—and it is not.
I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones. One reason is that, absent the levies of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret . . . I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am . . . I want the tears; I want the pain. Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it. Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.
- Andrea Long Chu, “Surgery, Hormones, But Not Happiness,” The New York Times, November 25, 201820
I doubt any of us transition simply because we want to ‘be’ women, in some abstract, academic way. I certainly didn’t. I transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like Christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. But now you begin to see the problem with desire: we rarely want the things we should.
- Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” n+1, Winter 201821
Cis women hate when trans women envy them, perhaps because they cannot imagine that they are in possession of anything worth envying. We have this, at least, in common: two kinds of women, with two kinds of self-loathing, locked in adjacent rooms, each pressing her ear up against the wall to listen for the other’s presence, fearing a rival but terrified to be alone. For my part, cousin: I don’t want what you have, I want the way in which you don’t have it. I don’t envy your plenitude; I envy your void. Now I’ve got the hole to prove it. I would give anything to hate myself the way you do, assuming it’s different from the way I hate myself — which, who knows. The thing about vaginas is you can never get a good look at them.
- Andrea Long Chu, “The Pink,” n+1, Spring 201922
At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, the gay male critic Leo Bersani famously wrote [in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987)] that public horror of anal sex betrayed a hateful envy of the ‘intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.’ Sissy porn takes this literally. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is . . . Sissy porn did make me trans. At very least, it served as a neat allegory for my desire to be female—and increasingly, I thought, for all desire as such. Too often, feminists have imagined powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force, and they’ve forgotten that more often than not, desire is this external force. Most desire is nonconsensual; most desires aren’t desired. Wanting to be a woman was something that descended upon me, like a tongue of fire, or an infection—or a mental illness, at least if you believe the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where gender dysphoria can be found sandwiched between frigidity and pyromania. The implication is obvious: No one in their right mind would want to be female.
- Andrea Long Chu, Females23
There is something about being treated like shit by shit men that feels like affirmation itself, like a cry of delight from the deepest cavern of my breast. He does not see me as a boy, and everyone here can see what is happening! For those of us whose pre-transition lives also entailed our being excluded from male society because of the inadequacy of our approximations or travesties of maleness (among which I mostly count myself), to be the victim of honest, undisguised sexism possesses an exhilarating vitality, as well as a kind of moral clarity.
- Grace Lavery, “Comme Une Femme: On Returning to France Post-Transition,” Them, June 17, 201924
Salvador Dalí’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus, painted in 1937, presents a set of strange and incompatible mirrorings . . . Dalí’s image reminds us that the metamorphosis of Narcissus is not merely a mutation of plastic matter but a transition, in the full sense, from one form of object into another . . . Unlike Freud’s Schreber, Narcissus transforms out of a surplus of desire, rather than its obliviation. For this reason, and others, it is surely a transsexual Narcissus, and not a homosexual one, that Dalí has in mind as the other of the ‘heterosexual group,’ when he ends his poem with the egg: ‘When that head slits when that head splits when that head bursts, it will be the flower, / the new narcissus.’
- Grace Lavery, “Egg Theory’s Early Style,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 7, no. 3, August 202025
Something stranger, that I suspect is underneath the whole phenomenon of British gender criticals—that is everywhere mysterious and unspoken—the problem that I refer to as leaky boobs and the school run, the revenge of feminine grievance against feminist pleasure, the joy of the chore; sourness as a political aesthetic; the loathing of the trans woman as a figure of pleasure embodied, of—SNIP
- Grace Lavery, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Memoir of Staggering Penis26
GLUCK: Right. You just said something like, “How is it that they that they have been able to get this far?”—or something to that extent, like mainstreaming these concepts. I have a couple of thoughts about that, like the organizing that’s been going on through online cultures—and I don’t even mean now, I don’t even mean social media now. I mean going back to Usenet. We’ve kind of, between us, sort of looked a little bit about Usenet, which was through the 80s to 90s. They were already organizing through Usenet at that time, so there’s been decades of organizing among these certain paraphilia groups, men with these paraphilias—that’s just been behind the scenes. They’ve been connecting with each other, usually just sort of going about their daily life, maybe even subjecting their wife to their fetish, but not really in the public eye, as we would know it now.
At the same time, you suddenly had the uptick of the development of the technology allowing for streaming pornography and then you had everyone having pornography access immediately available in their pocket. So, at the same time that they’re doing the organizing, the society itself is getting groomed into these ideas through the pornography. That’s the way that I would see it and how it’s becoming more and more mainstream and accepted. And it is really shocking, like you said, that people could read something like that and not even think twice about it. The fact that this was published—the whole thing, from start to finish, is a bit sickening for me. We have to we have to look at these things, because society is taking them seriously, but people like you and I have to subject ourselves to this degradation—this celebration of degradation—in order to be able to talk about it and to criticize it.
I think, too, pornography and body modification go together. Transgender surgeries, in addition to being sadistic, are actually a form of kind of body modification. Pornography plays a big role in that it was women, first, whose bodies were being modified for sexual purposes, for the sexual pleasure of men. Pornography really took that to the next level—and then you have people like Nina Arsenault, in Canada, being very blatant about his sadomasochistic fetish of body modification. Is that something you would like to talk about—the role there of the plastic surgery?
I started objectifying my body at a very young age, probably about three or four years old, because I knew that I had the spirit of a young girl inside me, but the body of a boy—I always understood my body as a vessel that contained my spirit.
- Nina Arsenault, “The Body as Art,” 201027
CLECKLEY: Yeah, it is an aspect of what we have been witnessing that jumps. Arsenault really embodies the kind of masochism that we see discussed in—we’ve both talked about this book before—Escaping the Self by Roy F. Baumeister. One of the ways in which Baumeister discusses how masochism can manifest among men is “symbolic feminization.” So, there is this idea that men become castrated and that they then fall into the position of “woman.” We see this in the “sissification” pornography and the genres of “forced feminization” pornography.
One of Baumeister’s observations that I think is most—or, rather, two of them, actually—one, on page 128, where he says, “Being converted into a new person with a new gender, new role, and new name is a thorough alteration of one’s identity: One escapes from the self so thoroughly that one becomes someone else.” And then, on page 129, he says, “The fact that masochists like to imagine themselves as slaves is a naked indication of the desire to shed one’s identity.”28 We see this in the writing that the men do when they talk about their fantasies; they express the desire to be bound, tied up. Julia Serano, for example, expressed the desire to be “sold into sex slavery”—having been a middle-class white heterosexual male basically fetishizing being sold into sex slavery. But, in reality, it disproportionately impacts, of course, most specifically women, not men, and disproportionately Black and brown women, especially women who are poor. It cuts across races because, of course, impoverished women are those who end up in sex slavery; they end up in prostitution. These are the women who end up trafficked.
We saw that a significant minority of suicidal individuals express a desire to become someone new . . . One form of identity change involves altering one’s gender . . . Most common [what Baumeister terms “symbolic feminization”] is dressing in women’s clothes, especially lingerie. A man might wear a woman’s brassiere, panties, and stockings. Some men add makeup and a dress, going out in public wearing feminine clothes, or engaging in sex acts as a woman. They may take female names or perform tasks connoting ‘women’s work,’ such as housework. There is little evidence that female masochists desire to be converted symbolically into males. One possible reason is that our culture associates maleness with higher status; to masculinize a female would not reduce her status. This argument suggests that the feminization of male masochists is one form of embarrassment and humiliation, which seems very likely to be the case. Another explanation is that the female role, as envisioned in our culture, is closer to some notions of masochism (that is, passivity, submissiveness, orientation toward pleasing others) than the male role. Another related factor may be that our culture allows women to wear pants more readily than it allows men to wear dresses. Regardless of why female masochists don’t seem to use gender change, the fact remains that gender change is a significant form of identity change in masochism. Being converted into a new person with a new gender, new role, and new name is a thorough alteration of one’s identity: One escapes from the self so thoroughly that one becomes someone else.
- Roy F. Baumeister, Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood29
When I hit puberty, my newly found attraction to women spilled into my dreams of becoming a girl. For me, sexuality became a strange combination of jealousy, self-loathing, and lust. Because when you isolated an impressionable transgender teen and bombard her with billboard ads baring bikini-clad women and boys’ locker room trash talk about this girl’s tits and that girl’s ass, then she will learn to turn her gender identity into a fetish. So without ever having seen pulp fiction or hardcore porn, my thirteen-year-old brain started concocting scenarios straight out of BDSM handbooks. Most of my fantasies began with my abduction: I’d turn into putty in the hands of some twisted man who would turn me into a woman as part of his evil plan. It’s called forced feminization, and it’s not really about sex. It is about turning the humiliation you feel into pleasure, transforming the loss of male privilege into the best fuck ever. While I never really believed the cliché about women being good for only one thing, I found that that sentiment kept creeping into my fantasies. In my late teens, I would imagine myself being sold into sex slavery and having strange men take advantage of me.
- Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity30
Reading Baumeister (1991) alongside Serano (2007), it seems obvious that Serano’s work represents a man’s flight from selfhood, with his masochism becoming his identity, which he prefers to rationalize as his possession of womanhood. With Chu (2019) and Lavery (2022), we find a similar ideology relocating objectification from the male to an ontological femaleness through the male’s sexual object status. Among the men’s accounts excerpted here, Arsenault (2010) best articulates why the adult male desires to become a “girl”: body-as-vessel for male desire—that is, the object. The supreme irony of the man as “whipping girl” happens to be the masochist himself writing the script to be whipped according to his specifications. It seems obvious why men view dressing in women’s clothes as “the loss of male privilege”: They internalize—and, most importantly, accept—women as being inferior and womanhood itself as the equivalent to a state of bondage. A common thread across these men’s accounts is women as sexual objects to be purchased, and, to quote Dworkin (1981), “Male supremacy depends on the ability of men to view women as sexual objects.” Binding theory and practice, prostitution and pornography have been the paradigm for men buying womanhood in transgenderism.
GLUCK: That Julia Serano quote that you just mentioned ends with “transforming the loss of male privilege into the best fuck ever,” so it’s the humiliation being treated as the source of the eroticism there—just massively insulting.
CLECKLEY: When Baumeister mentions the fact that masochists like to imagine themselves as slaves, he does not use the word “master,” yet, here, we have we have, with Serano, an implicit admission. It is the master who is deciding that he can play at “the slave,” if he wants to—he can play at being “the slave,” if he wants to. It is really up to him, and he can do it as he pleases. There is an extreme amount of power and privilege in that. When we think about all of the women and girls, around the world, who are trafficked—and this man has the gall to write a book called Whipping Girl. All of the women and girls who have been raped and murdered in sex trafficking—and this man has the gall to claim that he is a “whipping girl” is beyond the pale, really, beyond the pale of nonsense. That is the paradigm that I think people need to grasp with regard to the men claiming a kind of proprietorship over women—that the men themselves, at least if not explicitly then implicitly, know they are coming from a kind of position of power. They’re exerting themselves—or imposing themselves—upon people, in this case women, a people, who lack power by comparison.
Fantasy and the Ideology of Pornography
GLUCK: Right. Another thought I was having about this, too, is how the desensitization to pornography—as you’re exposed to more and more extreme content you need more and more extreme content to elicit the same thrill—also is inextricably linked with the plastic surgery aspect. Exaggerating feminine features to an extreme degree, like the really large breast implants and so on—that’s kind of, as I see it, one of the first hypersexualized body modifications on a kind of larger scale. And then to compare that now with things like facial feminization surgery or even the double mastectomy as well, because that’s a rejection of the pornography. So, we’re constructing these false bodies, but, ultimately, the root of it is the influence of the pornography on that industry. Pornography allowed that industry to become prosperous and normalized.
I wanted to talk about this one quote from Nina Arsenault when he was presenting a lecture at York University. He says:
When I watch straight porn, when I see female porn stars, . . . those bodies don’t exist in nature either. Sometimes they have enormous breasts but very tight waists . . . All these things that are really artificial are often the things that are highly eroticized, so I think that really throws our sexualities into question and really destabilizes that.31
So, he’s pointing out here exactly what we’ve just been saying, which is that these bodies are not natural—and that’s kind of the draw, basically the objectification is the sexualization. Did you want to add on to that?
CLECKLEY: Yes, the Arsenault quote had reminded me of an essay from Sheila Jeffreys called “Transgender Pornography: The Bimboification of Women,” from the from the collection The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography: Performing Sexual Liberation, edited by Heather Brunskell-Evans in 2016. Jeffreys had pointed out that part of what makes transgender pornography so “titillating” for the men who consume it—and the consumers are almost exclusively and primarily male—is that kind of mixture of the body parts: the unnatural and this eroticization of taking the flesh, ripping it up, and putting silicone in it. Jeffreys does not say this, but there is a kind of necrophilia embedded in it. I say that not in the sense, necessarily, of the sexual attraction, per se, to things that are dead, but rather, as Eric Fromm puts it, an attraction to that which is mechanical.32 It has taken nature, killed it, and then it is basically feeding upon it for energy—where there is no energy in it, because it has been killed.
This desire to tear apart what is alive finds its clearest expression in a craving to dismember bodies . . . The real aim of necrophilous murderers is not the death of the victim—which is, of course, a necessary condition—but the act of dismemberment. In my own clinical experience I have seen sufficient evidence that the desire for dismemberment is highly characteristic of the necrophilous character. For example, I have seen (directly or through supervision) several persons who expressed the desire for dismemberment in a very attenuated form; they would draw the figure of a nude woman, then cut out the arms, legs, head, etc., and play with these parts of the dismembered drawing . . . The desire to dismember bodies, if it appears frequently in phantasies and dreams, is one of the most reliable factors for the diagnosis of the necrophilous character; no other act is as clear as expression of the desire ‘to tear apart living structures.’
- Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness33
When we think about the images of women presented in transgender pornography, in particular, it is clearly the male-defined absolute stereotype of what a woman is—and I still think about how this has become such a mainstream thing. We have a “progressive” left, as it were, where they can acknowledge the existence of oppression—or say they believe oppression exists. Yet, they can somehow maintain this idea that allowing an oppressor group to wear the oppressed, as if a costume, is, in any way, a kind of a sensible position to hold—and it’s not. It’s something that should be criticized. Jeffreys makes a point in in her essay on transgender pornography. We often hear that men are just engaging in a fantasy, and that it is just a fetish. The problem, of course, is—and Jeffreys points this out—that there are very real impacts on the women and girls around these men, even when the men claim they are being the most chivalrous and respectful men. Jeffreys says, “It simply is not correct to say, as men who have fantasies of degrading and even committing terrible acts of violence against women often do, that fantasies are harmless and have nothing to do with reality.”34 Fantasies have quite a lot to do with reality; they become manifest in the lives of women and girls—and they become what women and girls face. It has always been an annoying and tiresome argument to hear that it is just fantasy—it is not. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have written about how fantasy is not only fantasy but also expresses ideology.35 Fantasy is not something alien to being influenced by ideology—and, in this sense, the ideology is particularly misogynistic.
One form of harm to women associated with men’s cross-dressing behaviour is sexual violence, because these men can have sexual fantasies that endanger women’s lives in the world outside pornography. Feminist bloggers have assembled long lists of male sex offenders who cross-dress or have transgendered. Two examples of male cross-dressers who murdered women in order to express their sexual fantasies show this to be so. One problem is that male cross-dressers may not just want to imitate women in general, but a particular woman, and may be prepared to kill her in order to become her. A man named Edmonds Tennent Brown, who calls himself Katheryn Brown, has sought treatment in prison to transgender. He raped and murdered Mary Lynn Witherspoon in 2003 in South Carolina. After being released from a prison sentence imposed for breaking into her home and stealing her underwear, he bound, raped and strangled her. When arrested he was found to be wearing her trousers and underwear. In 2016 a Russian punk rocker who called himself Pussy was found insane after decapitating his girlfriend and then using her severed head as a masturbation aid whilst wearing her clothes. These men, both cross-dressers and one of whom saw himself as transgender, are likely to have fantasised about their eventual acts with some satisfaction for some time before they carried them out. It simply is not correct to say, as men who have fantasies of degrading and even committing terrible acts of violence against women often do, that fantasies are harmless and have nothing to do with reality.
- Sheila Jeffreys, “Transgender Pornography: The Bimboification of Women,” in The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography: Performing Sexual Liberation36
When it has the misogyny, there are often other levels to it—for example, the racialization, the very white, “pretty” skin. This idea that these men are buying or being able to buy a “womanhood” that is—by the way, they claim that they are critical of “white womanhood”—buying archetypes of women, treating those archetypes that have been oppressive to women for centuries, for millennia, as the substance of what a woman is. Then, they have the gall to claim that they are critical of the social construction of “white womanhood”—and then you have men, white men, like Grace Lavery and Julia Serano, calling themselves women on the basis of their consumption of an archetype. It is the ultimate hypocrisy on the part of these men—and on the part of the left that enables them.
GLUCK: Yeah, absolutely, and then anyone who opposes them, they say, is upholding the patriarchy, which is just—
[shaking our heads and laughing at the absurdity]
CLECKLEY: I love those signs that say—J.K. Rowling shared one the other day—where these men drew a bunch of multicolored knives and said that “TERFs” weaponize the patriarchy against “transfemmes” or “trans women” or something like that.37
GLUCK: Exactly.
CLECKLEY: And it is absurd. I think about how it is so indicative of the fact that the left—sorry, my cat is jumping around—the left, as it is, lacks a class analysis. For people who actually have some kind of class analysis, they would regard it as absurd for an oppressor group to turn around and—when you talk about, say, patriarchy—say, “I know you are, but what am I?”, so that anybody would know that is a ridiculous argument. You do not have to have any kind of analysis for a man to say, “Well, I see that this woman is saying that I oppress her—well, she oppresses me.” [laughs]
GLUCK: Hold on a second there—because that’s interesting. It’s almost like a stunted maturity. There’s something about this fantasy world that they’re all deeply submersed in—the fantasy, the online communities, the avatars, all of that. It’s almost like they are trapped within their own ego, where there’s no deference to any kind of outside opinion, which is really scary as a trend or as a phenomenon.
Going back to the fantasy aspect, I did just want to mention that there is a really obvious parallel between sex trafficking and “gender identity.” They even use nearly the same mantras: “Trans women are women” and “Sex work is work.” They’re both circular arguments that are redundant, and they’re both completely counterintuitive. “Sex work is work,” I mean—you’re talking about exploitation and slavery and you’re calling it “work.” You’re talking about men—and then calling them “women.” It’s completely backwards, but they do organize around this, and this is a multinational trend; it goes on in the U.S. but not only the U.S. There was a man [Antonella Lerca Duda] in Romania, who identifies as a “woman,” running on the platform of “sex work.”38 There is Cecilia Gentili, in New York, who is trying to basically legalize brothels in New York state.39 Every time I see that, I keep thinking of the quote from Julia Serano [Serano, Whipping Girl, 2007: “In my late teens, I would imagine myself being sold into sex slavery and having strange men take advantage of me” (p. 274)]. But not only that—I see a whole bunch of these “sissy” captions, which are these images where they take pornographic photos of actual women. It is almost never men made to look like women; it is almost always women. Except, sometimes, they do this really creepy thing where they use little boys; they take pictures of boys dressed in drag and use those, too—which is really disturbing. They take these images, and they write captions next to them, so that is the caption aspect. Often, there is that theme of slavery, of sex trafficking, of wanting to be sold into sexual slavery. When you have this kind of activism at the front, lobbying for “decriminalizing,” they call it, but, essentially, legalizing the sex industry, in the background you have what the reality is—which is they’re fetishizing it.
CLECKLEY: It goes back to what Raymond had pointed out as well—how the sex industry, as we have noticed it, has intertwined with the “gender” industry. They basically fold into each other, and I think that people don’t consider how they do intertwine and connect with each other. Raymond talks a bit about the “trans” pornography industry. She says:
The pornography industry feeds on women’s hatred of their bodies. Young girls learn to hate their bodies at an early age and many take eating disorders to the point of starvation. Some engage in cutting. Others are pressured into sexting and self-sexual objectification, which has become a free trade in teen pornography. For a number of girls and young women, these disorders are a prelude to cutting off their breasts to identify as men.40
So, there is this dynamic where the pornography lays the basis for which the industrial aspects of transgenderism come in and lay roots. You have the essential dynamic of pornography as propaganda that functions in an ideological way apart from its industrial aspects. It acts as both an ideology, industry, and its own institution. Then, of course, it influences the development of transgenderism and the medicalization of the body. When we think about Heather Brunskell-Evans’s collection on the sexualized body and the medical authority of pornography, it’s that these images, which function as propaganda, then become taken as not only real—and they are real—but they become reified in the everyday lives of women and girls and, of course, men and boys, with increasing numbers of little boys being subjected to medicalization, being castrated, and told it is “mental health care” that they “need.” To give them Lupron, or equivalent “puberty blockers,” that cause serious lifelong health issues, which undoubtedly will also negatively impact their mental health—they are being offered something that will hurt them for the rest of their lives. It will not do anything other than maybe give some kind of cosmetics, but that is essentially what they are being offered: cosmetics—and not and not anything of substance beneath the cosmetics.
GLUCK: Right. Within all of that, you have the sadomasochistic projections of the men onto children now in order to normalize and rationalize their own fantasies, basically, and they’re using the actual material reality to justify their fantasies. Well, in some cases, it’s not even fantasy, right? Because then they act on it as well, so there’s also that overlap, which really needs to be explored more: the overlap between the drugs given to chemically castrate children as “puberty blockers” and the fact that they’re given to sex offenders to chemically castrate them. That’s a huge overlap that I’ve just been looking into recently. For example, Eli Coleman, the former president of WPATH [the World Professional Association for Transgender Health], before he got involved in all of this in WPATH and in the transgender debate, his work was in treating sex offenders with pharmaceuticals.41 Two years before the Dutch protocol, he was in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam, talking about Lupron for sex offenders. So, though I don’t know how to describe it, I’m still looking into it, the overlap is quite obvious—it’s there—and not only Coleman, but also the French president of FPATH, so the French division of WPATH essentially, for those who don’t know the leading bodies on “transgender health,” they call it.
I always said, ‘Sexologists were all about liberating people’s sexuality.’ We were in the area of sex offender [sic], which most sexologists never touched. So that was really kind of unusual. We had to be concerned about containing in that sense. I think that that’s some of the factor of why we didn’t get really very involved. We didn’t get involved until probably around 1988, when we received the first amfAR [American Foundation for AIDS Research] grant to do the work with the transgender population.
- Eli Coleman, interviewed by Eli Vitulli, Academic Health Center Oral History Project, University of Minnesota, July 9, 201242
Woman Hating 2.0
But I also really liked some of your comments and thoughts about postmodernism. You had highlighted some quotes from a woman named Jane Gallop, whom we had both talked about before for her quotes that were featured in Somer Brodribb’s book Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism. But you went a step further, and you actually looked into her book Thinking Through the Body.
There are two kinds of erasure of women which have by now become ‘often noted.’ One is the conception of human history as a history of the acts and organizations of men, and the other is a long and sordid record in western civilization of the murder and mutilation of women. Both of these erasures are extended into the future, the one in fiction and speculation, the other in the technological projects of sperm selection for increasing the proportion of male babies, of extrauterine gestation, of cloning, of male to female transsexual reconstruction. Both sorts of erasure seem entwined in the pitched religious and political battle between males who want centralized male control of female reproductive functions, and males who want individualized male control of female reproductive functions. (I speak of the fights about abortion, forced sterilization, the conditions of birthing, etc.) A reasonable person might think that these efforts to erase women reveal an all-too-vivid recognition that there are women—that the projects of ideological and material elimination of women presuppose belief in the existence of the objects to be eliminated. In a way, I agree. But also, there is a peculiar mode of relating belief and action which I think is characteristic of the construction of phallocratic reality, according to which a project of annihilation can be seen to presuppose the nonexistence of the objects being eliminated.
- Marilyn Frye, “To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality,” The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory43
Postmodernist thinkers are defending against the downfall of patriarchy by trying to be not male. In drag, they are aping the feminine rather than thinking their place as men in an obsolescent patriarchy. The female postmodernist thinker finds herself in the dilemma of trying to be like Daddy who is trying to be a woman. The double-cross is intriguing and even fun, but also troubling if one suspects that it is the father’s last ruse to seduce the daughter and retain her respect, the very respect that legitimized the father’s rule. In Spurs, Jacques Derrida celebrates Nietzsche’s ‘femininity’ while attacking feminists’ ‘masculinity.’ This male champion of the attack on the phallus is still too busy attacking feminists for being phallic. Being antiphallic becomes the new phallus, which women come up lacking again.
- Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body44
Once satisfied to control her body and her movements, once pleased to create images of her and then order her body to conform, the Master of Discourse now aspires to the most divine of tasks: to create her in his image, which is ultimately to annihilate her. This is his narcissistic solution to his problem of the Other. But to do this, to create her in his image, he must be able to take her image, educating her to sameness and deference. Taking her body, taking her mind, and now taking her image. But the task of taking women’s image is ill-advised. In his narcissistic dreaming, he hallucinates, and even if we are called an illusion, he must ask: Where did the illusion of woman come from?
- Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism45
CLECKLEY: Oh, yeah. I had found Gallop to be fascinating in her analysis. She says, “Postmodernist thinkers are defending against the downfall of patriarchy by trying to be not male. In drag, they are aping the feminine rather than thinking their place as men in an obsolescent patriarchy.”
GLUCK: Sorry, can you say that one more time—I love that line.
CLECKLEY: “Postmodernist thinkers are defending against the downfall of patriarchy by trying to be not male. In drag, they are aping the feminine rather than thinking their place as men in an obsolescent patriarchy.” One of the moments that I particularly like—she critiques Jacques Derrida, and she says, “This male champion of the attack on the phallus is still too busy attacking feminists for being phallic. Being antiphallic becomes the new phallus which women come up lacking once again.” What I find most interesting as well is the phenomenon of so many of these so-called “literary theorists”—male “literary theorists”—deciding they’re “women,” including Grace Lavery. We see with works like Grace Lavery’s Please Miss, Andrea Long Chu’s Females, Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, all of these men engaging in a kind of performative rejection of the phallus, yet they still possess the phallus. It’s in the “antiphallic” that they are still exerting power over women vis-à-vis a kind of proprietorship over women that has extended beyond a typical idea of “the stereotypical male.”
The way that I would phrase it—and it is difficult to describe—but I have thought about it as a kind of technological woman hating; it is like “Woman Hating 2.0.” People don’t recognize it as such because it’s become woven into the fabric of everyday life in the way that, with regard to early laws around marriage we saw coverture, where women were seen as appendages, extensions of their husbands’ identities in marriage. Women were basically “covered” by men. Now, we have a kind of legal fiction, similar to coverture, where women are, once again, being covered by men. To me, it is fascinating to think about it in terms of a reassertion of male power, but it’s being done in such a way that it’s catching a lot of women off guard. We know that there are so many women who end up following this like a faith, like a religion, and they hear that the men are so downtrodden—they’re so oppressed. Women feel like they have to care for these men and be there for them—and all of that is “nice” and “good,” but women need to care for themselves. Women actually need to care for their own interests as women as opposed to these men who obviously do not care about women.
There’s a moment from Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, published in 1981, that I’ve always found so important. It’s her discussion of objectification in the chapter titled “Objects.” She talks about the way in which women end up being positioned by men as objects, seen as ways through which men enact and express desire. She says, “Women are used in the making and made in the using.” There’s this dynamic that exists within pornography—the parallel here is to Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”—that emphasizes the social status of women as “the second sex.” Dworkin says, “Male supremacy depends on the ability of men to view women as sexual objects, and deviations from this exercise and male power and female oblivion are discouraged.” The emphasis, of course, is that the male power remains in place. The female oblivion, however, is the underside of the male power. In order to have men on top, you have to have them standing on women’s necks, propped up on women. They stand on women’s necks.
GLUCK: I think, too, a couple of things. First of all, you had mentioned women supporting this, I’m a little bit more cynical, where I think they’re getting something out of it. There’s the conditional acceptance of male authority that’s the prerequisite, so that when a man says he’s a woman, he’s believed. When a man says a woman can have a penis, he’s believed—against all reality. There’s a kind of religious authority to it that’s already in place, where you have millennia of the male authority god figure.
But, also, I wanted to say, about the colonization aspect—you had called it kind of like coverture—I had thought of it in terms of intellectual property, like a metaphysical colonization. This really is taking off in countries where women already have a lot of freedoms and rights. Unfortunately, now that’s changing, and it’s going into countries like India, which is just an absolute nightmare, but it did originate where women had some freedoms. So, what you have is the realm of the physical colonization being put “off limits,” and so, instead, going into the metaphysical and dragging women back into the realm of ideology to set up camp in their minds to get them to obey again. I think of the word “cis” as a signaling that you will obey the male authority—that’s all it really is, kind of meaningless otherwise. But what it does is it shows, “Yes, I will accept your authority or your definition of what a woman is.”
CLECKLEY: The religious element to it has been of interest to me. I think about the critiques, such as those put forth by like Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman, when they talked about women being in the pews, listening to preachers who, really, had no interest in the women’s lives and just wanted them there. They didn’t really care for the women, but the women would submit themselves to an ideology or a religion that is in opposition to women’s interests. I think about how that dynamic reproduces itself with this movement that has the force of a religion, a kind of replacement, in a way. Where once we had more people who followed, in America and or in Britain or so, more people who would have followed Judeo-Christian religion and used it as the hammer through which to smash women, now there is this great new religion that popped up. And men can do whatever they want—and there are men running to it.
Everybody knows that the churches would totter and tumble if it were not for the women. Men have mostly grown out of churches, and attend them because their families wish it, so that the ‘pew rent’ may be paid . . . But as to the difficulty of freedom for woman: There is but one, and that is pecuniary independence.
- Victoria Woodhull, “Tried as by Fire; or, The True and the False, Socially,” 187446
Woman, even more than man, is a fetich worshiper, and though her idols may change, she is ever on her knees, ever holding up her hands, ever blind to the fact that her god has feet of clay. Thus woman has been the greatest supporter of all deities from time immemorial. Thus, too, she has had to pay the price that only gods can exact—her freedom, her heart’s blood, her very life . . . Religion, especially the Christian religion, has condemned woman to the life of an inferior, a slave. It has thwarted her nature and fettered her soul, yet the Christian religion has no greater supporter, none more devout, than woman. Indeed, it is safe to say that religion would have long ceased to be a factor in the lives of the people, if it were not for the support it receives from woman. The most ardent churchworkers, the most tireless missionaries the world over, are women, always sacrificing on the altar of the gods that have chained her spirit and enslaved her body.
- Emma Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” Anarchism and Other Essays47
When you talk about the way in which women are conceptualized as men’s intellectual property, there’s the intellectual property and the sexual property. In the physical and the metaphysical sense, women become regarded as chattel. When you say “intellectual property,” it makes me think of Marilyn Frye’s use of the concept “metaphysical misogyny”—the misogyny that’s not the same as the fist to the face.48 It’s woven into the fabric of things, such that it ends up becoming the basis through which women end up being beaten, women end up being hurt, raped—such as put in prisons with male rapists. The metaphysical misogyny that we see emerging in these more “developed” countries allows for the kind of reassertion of older forms of misogyny, the likes of which echo a Victorian kind of misogyny—old misogyny. This is the misogyny that we’re seeing resurface under “gender identity.” It has been present in the culture, but it’s actually seeping back up—where once the older feminist movements, the First Wave and the Second Wave, combated this misogynistic propaganda. What’s happening is it’s basically reviving itself, so it’s coming back—and it’s worse; it’s becoming worse for women.
GLUCK: Yeah—and definitely the pornography in the background. There’s a strange phenomenon, where pornography is becoming normalized. But, at the same time, it goes on in the private sphere, so the consumption of it is happening privately in people’s homes, and they maintain their “right to privacy” to be able to do it—but also that we shouldn’t be aware of even what kind of pornography they’re consuming, which I find very troubling when you have lawmakers, judges, and teachers. What kind of pornography are they looking at? And I don’t even mean the illegal type; I mean the type that is there, and it is legal. How can we trust a police officer who masturbates to choking women? Do you know what I mean? That’s all the backdrop for all of this kind of revival, as you say. I imagine a zombie or something dead and rotted.
CLECKLEY: That is actually the image I have in my mind of what was thought to be dead. It did not really die; it was beaten back pretty heavily, but now it’s crawling back out of its crypt. Women are being forced to deal with things that are quite unthinkable. When we think about all of the cases of these men, whether they “pass” or not, insisting that they’re women, being put into women’s prisons, sexually harassing women, producing pornography where they claim they’re women and they’re not, where they commit crimes and the crimes are recorded as women’s crimes—we are seeing this happen in a way that it feels like a reassertion of women’s second-class status in society, in our societies which we thought had gained so much in terms of women’s rights. Certainly, there were advances—and there have been advances made—but this backlash is unprecedented, in a way, because it has so much funding behind it, so much institutional power. It is not misogyny that’s just garden-variety; it’s the misogyny that has big money with it that has helped make it a new machine of woman hating.
From Transgender to Transhuman—or, From Modification to Mortification
GLUCK: So, on that note, can you tell me about Martine Rothblatt, whom you’ve written about before in the context of transhumanism?
CLECKLEY: To discuss a little bit about Rothblatt, he had written a book, which came out in 1995, called The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender. He did he did a more recent update of the work titled From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form. In particular, one moment in his book, which I think is of relevance to us, as we’ve discussed pornography and men possessing women, is this section called “Is Consciousness Like Pornography?” I think it is quite a significant moment where he talks about the building of minds, artificial minds. He says:
Build minds that pass the pornography test—minds that seem as authentic as our own. Once that is done, sexual identity will be liberated not only from genitals, but from flesh itself. Consciousness will be as free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh body as gender is free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh genital.49
It is one of those things where, when you read it, the first sense you have is, of course: What the fuck? As I sat down and thought about it, we’ve talked about Baumeister and his conceptualization of masochism and the way in which “gender identity” figures as this kind of escape from the self for people, especially people who have power. Baumeister points out that the vast majority of masochists, of course—he was looking at studies that primarily looked at men—and it was men who were the ones wanting to be whipped. Imagine that. The other interesting thing, in terms of demographics: They, more often than not, tended to be white and middle-class, or middle- to upper-class—relatively privileged, affluent men.
In Rothblatt’s case, of course, he is a multimillionaire, with various connections. He founded United Therapeutics. He has quite an extensive amount of money and one of the interesting things in the piece—which I was very thankful to Jennifer Bilek for sharing on The 11th Hour Blog—one of the things, apart from the money, which Bilek has discussed as well, is also the way in which the image on the front cover of Rothblatt’s book actually speaks to his project.50 People often think that he did a bad, childlike portrait—or tried to draw a portrait—of his wife Bina. However, this is not his wife Bina. The image on the cover of the book is actually his character from Second Life. It’s talked about in his New York Magazine profile from 2014. The name of the character a dark-skinned woman—“sexy brown-skinned woman,” as described—is “Vitology Destiny,” much like how we might think of “Manifest Destiny.” “Vita,” meaning “life,” “Vitology Destiny,” “Manifest Destiny”—which is the basic metaphor for colonization.
Published by Crown Publishers in 1995, Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender was the first book-length articulation that sex should be redefined through “gender identity.” Like the historical negationist minimization of John Money’s role in legitimizing transsexualism, certain activists deny Rothblatt’s significant influence on the legal trajectory of “trans rights.” In fact, Rothblatt was one of the major contributors who drafted the International Bill of Gender Rights (IGBR)—the foundation of today’s “gender identity” legislation.
The Digital Transgender Archive includes the text of the IBGR, adopted July 4, 1996, as part of the Phyllis Frye Collection. According to the text of the International Bill of Gender Rights, “Major contributors to the 1993 committee’s efforts included Dr. Susan Stryker of Berkeley, California, Jan Eaton of Virginia, Martine Rothblatt of Silver Spring, Maryland, and Phyllis Frye of Houston, Texas.”
Rothblatt has been continuously involved with transhumanism, evident with the self-published reissuing of his 1995 book in 2011 as From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form. The basic premise, as Rothblatt explains in detail, is to fully disembody the human body into technology and, essentially, do away with the flesh. In Rothblatt’s view, transsexualism and its medical empire developed into transgenderism and its global industry, an empire of empires, making possible a future in transhumanism.
Sex should really be the sum of behaviors we call gender—an adjective, not a noun. People should explore genders. When they settle on a set of gender behaviors, the name for that set describes their sex. There are billions of sex types: from Rambo to Oprah, from Madonna to Costner, from deep blue to blood red, and a vast rainbow of androgynous possibilities in between. The important point is that gender exploration should come first, through free choice, and that sex is just the label for one’s chosen gender.
- Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender51
Sex is even more malleable than race—as individualized as our fingerprints. If we weren’t told that we had to be male or female, then many people would be ‘other.’ Racial categories are already an affront to mixed-race kids. Sexual categories are an inhibition to gender explorers. The time has come for lobbying to eliminate all government race and sex information collecting. The Constitution orders a census of the people, not of their minds.
- Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender52
In a world free from the apartheid of sex, there would be no sex testing because there would be no sex-segregated athletic competition. Superficially this might seem to disadvantage women, because taller, stronger, more muscular men might win all the prizes. In fact, sex-segregated athletics exists to avoid male humiliation at losing to women. Since the rise of monotheistic patriarchy, women were not allowed to compete in sports at all. The prevailing ideology was that female bodies were good only for carrying men’s food, water, and children. To have women participate with men at sports would be contrary to their passive nature (polytheistic patriarchy), a sacrilegious affront to male dominion (monotheistic patriarchy), or potentially injurious to their childbearing ability (scientific patriarchy). Only recently have women been permitted to compete in sports.
- Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender53
For most of my life I lived as a man. I went to school as a man and became a lawyer. I launched satellite systems as a man and became an entrepreneur. I got married as a man and started a family. Then, a few years ago, I decided to convert and become a kind of transgendered woman. Why? Because there was a lot more to my soul than the masculine persona I had become. There was a woman who needed to be expressed.
- Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender54
Avatar sexuality is a key bridge from transgender to transhuman. It makes cerulean clear that sexual identity is limitless in variety and detachable from reproduction. And by making that point, it simultaneously demonstrates that human identity is limitless in variety and detachable from reproduction. If you can accept that a person without a penis can peaceably live life as she pleases (including as a man), then you should be able to accept that a person without a physical form can peaceably live life as they please (including as a human). Can you can [sic] accept that someone is not automatically passive, or evil, or dumb simply because they have a vagina instead of a penis? Then you should be able to accept that someone is not automatically passive, or evil, or dumb simply because they have a software mind instead of a flesh-based one. Personhood is about equity, not equipment.
- Martine Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form55
Uploaded transhuman minds will certainly avail themselves of the entire rainbow palette of sexual identity. It will be fun, creative and they won’t face the obstacle of a penis screaming ‘but you’re a man!’ However, they will face a more severe barrier: people pointing to the computer system on which they reside and screaming ‘but you’re a machine!’ Loaded into that epithet is the popular and scientific consensus that human consciousness is not possible outside the human brain. The prevailing scientific paradigm is that unique anatomical aspects of the human brain make consciousness possible. A common public view is that God or Nature endowed only humans with a human soul, and consciousness is its earthly manifestation . . . Build minds that pass the pornography test—minds that seem as authentic as our own. Once that is done, sexual identity will be liberated not only from genitals, but from flesh itself. Consciousness will be as free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh body as gender is free to flow beyond the confines of one flesh genital.
- Martine Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form56
Transgenderism is on a successful track. But it is ascendant only because previous victories against slavery, racial apartheid, and the subjugation of women established the fundamental principle that reason trumps biology. We must remember that battles against slavery energized the women’s rights movement, and civil rights for those with different ancestry empowered civil rights for those with different sexual orientations. Hence, we cannot be surprised that transhumanism arises from the groins of transgenderism. As reasoning beings, we must welcome this further transcendence of arbitrary biology, and embrace in solidarity all conscious life.
- Martine Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form57
But the highest-paid female [sic] CEO in America is not nearly as well known. She [sic] is Martine Rothblatt, the 59-year-old founder of United Therapeutics—a publicly traded, Silver Spring, Maryland-based pharmaceutical company—who made a previous fortune as a founder of Sirius radio, a field she [sic] entered as an attorney specializing in the law of space. But what’s really extraordinary about Rothblatt’s ascent is not that she [sic] has leaned in, or out, or had any particular thoughts about having it all. What sets Rothblatt apart from the other women on the list is that she [sic]—who earned $38 million last year—was born male.
- Lisa Miller, “The Highest-Paid Female CEO in America Used to Be a Man,” New York Magazine, September 201458
At times I sort of feel like Queen Elizabeth. You know, she lives in a world of limitations, having the appearance of great authority and being able to transcend any limitations. But in reality she is in a little cage.
- Martine Rothblatt, interviewed by Miller, New York Magazine, September 201459
In the conventional narrative about sex reassignment, a person is so sure from such a young age that he or she inhabits the wrong body that a surgically corrected self is a lifelong dream. Martine says the idea was in her [sic] mind from the time she [sic] was about 15 years old. ‘I idealized myself in my mind as female,’ she [sic] says, even using the word ‘gay,’ ‘in the sense of seeing myself as a woman, sexually attracted to women.’ But this female self-image didn’t drive or define her [sic], and it didn’t exclude other versions of herself [sic]. (‘I loved my penis,’ she [sic] told Howard Stern in a 2007 interview.) Her [sic] female identity was also invisible to those around her [sic], and not just to Bina. ‘There is absolutely nothing that would indicate that this was his tendency or preference, absolutely nothing,’ Rosa Lee [Rothblatt’s mother] told me. ‘She [sic] isn’t a woman, and neither am I,’ added Martine’s friend Kate Bornstein, one of the founders of the transgender movement, who saw a special courage in Martine’s disinclination to fully embrace either gender at a time, during the mid-90s, when ‘gender queer’ had not yet become a familiar term.
- Lisa Miller, New York Magazine, September 201460
Sometimes it’s necessary to be a living example. If the point was just rhetorical, if this was just some philosophical scrabbling, the message wouldn’t have been as strong . . . The libertarian chicken dreams of the day when no one asks them why they crossed the road. It’s your body. It’s your choice what you choose to do with it. It’s not even our place or our business to be judging them or asking them why.
- Gabriel Rothblatt, interviewed by Miller, New York Magazine, September 201461
He [Philippe van Nedervelde] told me that he and his partner in work and life, Helen, had previously built for Martine two virtual islands in the game Second Life—where Martine appears as a sexy brown-skinned woman named Vitology Destiny—and were living here, in Magog, working for her [sic] on another, unnamed project.
- Lisa Miller, New York Magazine, September 201462
And so, it seems like these things are very apparent. They’re jumping out at people. There is a refusal to see it for what it is, which is that it is drenched in misogyny. There is, of course, the homophobia among so many of these heterosexual people who are deciding to just pick up a “lesbian” or “gay” identity just because they want to have some fun one day. As womanhood has been treated like an amusement park for men, so, too, are lesbians and gay men, homosexuality itself, treated as an amusement park for heterosexual people who are who are feeling quite “frisky.” Of course, then they can just throw us away when they’re done. They can just throw us away like we are discardable, like we’re garbage—just throw us away.
Rothblatt presents an interesting figure within the transgender rights movement, because he has been argued to be so marginal as to have no influence. Yet he had quite a lot of influence, in fact, on the very first the form of the “gender identity” bills that have been passed and circulated from country to country. Bilek has also written about this topic.63 Rothblatt has had an extremely significant influence. His work does actually matter with relation to how the trajectory of transgenderism has been going, including the way that biotechnology has been framed as not a big deal regarding, for example, the systematic medicalization of children and young people, which is a very serious issue and requires serious ethical and moral attention—serious ethical and moral analysis. Yet we are being told, “Well, it’s just necessary health care that we’re giving these kids, and it’s all reversible, and it’s fine”—and, no, it is not fine; it is irreversible. It goes back to what we said at the beginning when we talked about the Reimer case. For Money, those children had been seen as an experiment, something to play with and throw away.
GLUCK: But, significantly, something for him to get credit for and to establish his name.
CLECKLEY: Yeah, something to use. Money capitalized upon their pain and then basically didn’t care, really, that there were repercussions upon these two individuals for the rest of their lives. They both died by suicide. I think about how if the lives of people who are being socially and medically transitioned as children—if they reflect, in any way, the outcomes that were experienced by those two individuals . . . The other brother wasn’t subjected to medicalization, although he had been involved in the “social transitioning” of his brother and the treatment of his brother as a “girl,” where the brother was forced to play along in his brother being a “girl.” Even he killed himself as well. I think about how these tragedies are illustrative of what I think we will be seeing. It might well be a taste of things to come.
Further Reading
Donovan Cleckley, “Desire as Dehumanization: A Review of Females,” Women Are Human, June 13, 2020; reprinted as “Writing on Desire and Dehumanization,” June 19, 2024, https://www.donovancleckley.com/writing-on-desire-and-dehumanization.
Genevieve Gluck, “Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About the Influence of Porn on the Trans Trend?” Feminist Current, November 29, 2020, https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/11/29/why-isnt-anyone-talking-about-the-influence-of-porn-on-the-trans-trend.
Genevieve Gluck, “Nina Arsenault: Canada’s Most Famous ‘Trans Woman,’” November 11, 2021, https://genevievegluck.substack.com/nina-arsenault.
Genevieve Gluck, “History of the Trans Flag,” April 5, 2022, https://genevievegluck.substack.com/history-of-the-trans-flag.
Donovan Cleckley, “Techno-Idolatry in Transhumanism,” The 11th Hour Blog, May 2, 2022, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/techno-idolatry-in-transhumanism.
Genevieve Gluck, “Top Trans Medical Association Collaborated with Castration, Child Abuse Fetishists,” May 21, 2022, https://genevievegluck.substack.com/top-trans-medical-association-collaborated.
Genevieve Gluck, “How Pornography Forged the Trans Movement,” spiked, August 16, 2023, https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/16/how-pornography-forged-the-trans-movement.
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Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 45-47.
Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), 1949, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 202-203.
Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, 1981 (New York: Plume, 1989), 113.
Susan Stryker, interviewed by Susan Faludi, in Faludi, In the Darkroom, 2016 (New York: Picador, 2017), 159.
See Janice G. Raymond, “Transsexualism: The Ultimate Homage to Sex-Role Power,” Chrysalis 3 (March 1977): 11-23. See also Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, 1979 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994), 109.
Diana Russell, The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective, 1975 (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 209: “Sexual liberation without sex-role liberation can actually result in greater oppression of women.”
While psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller coined “gender identity” in 1964, Money played a more significant role in advancing the concept and giving it and early transsexualism the academic legitimacy foundational to the medical authority of “gender medicine” today. See Richard Green, “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years On,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 39, no. 6 (2010): 1457-1465, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-010-9665-5; Vern L. Bullough, “The Contributions of John Money: A Personal View,” Journal of Sex Research 40, no. 3 (2003): 230-236, https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490309552186. See also Terry Goldie, The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 135-136.
John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, 2000 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 86. John Money and Patricia Tucker, Sexual Signatures: On Being a Man or a Woman, 1975 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 134: “The same principles apply to the use of explicit sexual pictures. They can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education.”
Colapinto, 34.
Money and Tucker, Sexual Signatures, 141.
John Money, “Future Genders,” by John Stoltenberg, Omni 2, no. 8, May 1980, 116.
John Money, “Interview: John Money,” by Kathleen Stein, Omni 8, no. 7, April 1986, 84.
John Money, “Manhood and Womanhood in Conflict: A Fin de Siècle Report,” 1994, Sin, Science, and the Sex Police: Essays on Sexology and Sexosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 88-90.
See John Colapinto, “The True Story of John/Joan,” Rolling Stone 775, December 11, 1997, 54-58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72-73, 92, 94-97.
See Colapinto, 86-87. To understand Money’s theory of “gender identity” in relation to “sex reassignment,” considering his involvement with the first clinic performing these practices, we may consider the following passages from Colapinto:
While attempting to probe the twins’ sexual psyches, Money also tried his hand at programming Brenda’s and Brian’s respective sense of themselves as girl and boy. One of his theories of how children form their different gender schemas—Money’s term—was that they must understand at a very early age the differences between male and female sex organs. Pornography, he believed, was ideal for this purpose. ‘[E]xplicit sexual pictures,’ he wrote in his book Sexual Signatures [1975], ‘can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education.’ Such pictures, he said, ‘reinforce his or her own gender identity/role.’
‘He would show us pictures of kids—boys and girls—with no clothes on,’ Brian says. David recalls that Dr. Money also showed them pictures of adults engaged in sexual intercourse. ‘He’d say to us, “I want to show you pictures of things that moms and dads do.”’
Money had two sides to his personality, according to the twins: ‘One when Mom and Dad weren’t around,’ Brian says, ‘and another when they were.’ When their parents were present, Money was avuncular, mild-mannered. Alone with the children he could be irritable or worse, especially when they defied him. They were particularly resistant, the twins say, to Money’s requests that they remove their clothes and inspect each other’s genitals. David recalls when he attempted to defy the psychologist. ‘He told me to take my clothes off,’ David says, ‘and I just did not do it. I thought he was going to give me a whupping. So I took my clothes off and stood there, shaking.’ In a separate conversation with me, Brian recalls that same incident. ‘“Take your clothes off—now!”’ Brian shouts.
Though the children could not know this, the genital inspections that Dr. Money demanded they perform were central to his theory of how children develop a sense of themselves as boy or girl—and thus, in Money’s mind, crucial to the successful outcome of Brenda’s sex reassignment. For as Money stressed in his writings of the period, ‘The firmest possible foundations for gender schemas are the differences between male and female genitals and reproductive behavior, a foundation our culture strives mightily to withhold from children. All young primates explore their own and each other’s genitals, masturbate, and play at thrusting movements and copulation—and that includes human children everywhere, as well as subhuman primates. The only thing wrong about these activities is not to enjoy them.’
But the children did not enjoy these enforced activities—particularly those involving ‘play at thrusting movements and copulation,’ which Brian recalls that Dr. Money first introduced when the twins were six years old. Money, he says, would make Brenda assume a position on all fours on his office sofa and make Brian come up behind her on his knees and place his crotch against her buttocks. Variations on the therapy included Brenda lying on her back with her legs spread and Brian lying on top of her. On at least one occasion, Brian says, Dr. Money took a Polaroid photograph of them while they were engaged in this part of the therapy.
See Raymond, The Transsexual Empire.
David Reimer and his family’s story, including accounts from his mother Janet and his brother Brian, appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2000, reposted to the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) YouTube: Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), “The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl,” 2000, The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 21, 2018, https://youtu.be/vz_7EQWZjmM; Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), “Why the Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl Forgave His Mother,” The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 24, 2018, https://youtu.be/eQJHPQpf6mI.
John Money, “Interview: John Money,” by Joseph Geraci and Donald Mader, Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia 2, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 3.
Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2021), 67.
Andrea Long Chu, “Surgery, Hormones, But Not Happiness,” The New York Times, November 25, 2018, SR7. See also Andrea Long Chu, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy,” The New York Times, November 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html.
Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” n+1 30 (Winter 2018): 59-60, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women.
Andrea Long Chu, “The Pink,” n+1 34 (Spring 2019): 17-18, https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-34/politics/the-pink.
Andrea Long Chu, Females (New York: Verso, 2019), 76-77, 79. See also Andrea Long Chu, “We Are All Female Now,” by Callie Hitchcock, The New Republic, November 7, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/155614/female-now.
Grace Lavery, “Comme Une Femme: On Returning to France Post-Transition,” Them, June 17, 2019, https://www.them.us/story/returning-to-france-post-transition.
Grace Lavery, “Egg Theory’s Early Style,” Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) 7, no. 3 (August 2020): 396-397, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-8553034. Lavery’s essay can be read at his website, listed among his other “scholarly” works: https://www.gracelavery.org/scholarly.
Grace Lavery, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis (London: Daunt Books Originals, 2022), 176.
Nina Arsenault, “The Body as Art,” ideacity, July 23, 2010, https://youtu.be/Bf75EVy6FY0.
Roy F. Baumeister, Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 128-129.
Baumeister, 127-128.
Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 2007 (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2016), 274.
Nina Arsenault, “The Eroticization of M2F Transsexuals by Heterosexual Men (Semiotics Lecture),” March 31, 2010, https://youtu.be/0v79_9x7JlQ. See also Genevieve Gluck, “Nina Arsenault: Canada’s Most Famous ‘Trans Woman,’” November 11, 2021, https://genevievegluck.substack.com/nina-arsenault.
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 27, 31-32, 369, 381, 389-393, 406-407.
Fromm, 366-367.
Sheila Jeffreys, “Transgender Pornography: The Bimboification of Women,” in The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography: Performing Sexual Liberation, ed. Heather Brunskell-Evans (Newscastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 169.
See Andrea Dworkin, Pornography, 29, 107: “The fact of the photograph signifies the wealth of men as a class . . . The relationship of the men to the woman in the photograph is not fantasy; it is symbol, meaningful because it is rooted in reality . . . Still calling revenge fantasy, he acts.” See also Catharine MacKinnon, “Francis Biddle’s Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech,” 1984, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 174: “Fantasy expresses ideology, is not exempt from it. Admiration of natural physical beauty becomes objectification. Harmlessness becomes harm . . . In other words, to the extent pornography succeeds in constructing social reality, it becomes invisible as harm. If we live in a world that pornography creates through the power of men in a male-dominated situation, the issue is not what the harm of pornography is, but how that harm is to become visible.”
Jeffreys, 169.
See J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling), X, May 8, 2022, https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1523251575724331011: “You can always tell a real woman by the pretty rainbow way she draws knives.” The attached image includes a “Keep Prisons Single Sex” sticker with a handmade one covering it. The text of the imposing material reads: “TERFs weaponize the patriarchy against transfemmes by telling them what women should be.”
Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen), X, January 14, 2021, https://x.com/womenreadwomen/status/1349616686140325888: “In Romania, trans-identifying male, ‘sex worker’ Antonella Lerca ran for public office on a decrim platform, despite the epidemic of women and girls trafficked into slavery; 86% of women in UK brothels were found to be from Romania; minors were targeted for ‘training.’”
See Genevieve Gluck, “‘Kinky’ Male Trans ‘Lesbian’ Who Ended Suffragette-Era Policy in New York Democrat Policy to Run for State Assembly,” Reduxx, July 14, 2023, https://reduxx.info/kinky-male-trans-lesbian-who-ended-suffragette-era-policy-in-new-york-democrat-policy-to-run-for-state-assembly: “As is the case with many other trans activists, Decaudin supports the ‘decriminalization of sex work.’ In 2021, he shared his support for Decrim NY, an organization headed by a trans-identified male named Cecilia Gentili which calls for the full legalization of the prostitution industry.”
Raymond, Doublethink, 73.
See Genevieve Gluck, “Top Trans Medical Association Collaborated with Castration, Child Abuse Fetishists,” May 21, 2022, https://genevievegluck.substack.com/top-trans-medical-association-collaborated.
Eli Coleman, “Interview with Eli Coleman,” by Eli Vitulli, Academic Health Center Oral History Project, University of Minnesota, July 9, 2012, 16, https://conservancy.umn.edu/items/990dc471-4530-4609-badb-a12240e54676.
Marilyn Frye, “To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality,” The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1983), 163.
Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 100.
Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism (North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 1992), xvi-xvii.
Victoria Woodhull, “Tried as by Fire; or, The True and the False, Socially,” 1874, in Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics, ed. Cari M. Carpenter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 255-256.
Emma Goldman, “Woman Suffrage,” 1910, in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Alix Kates Shulman (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998), 191.
Marilyn Frye, “To Be and Be Seen: Metaphysical Misogyny,” Sinister Wisdom 17, 1981: 63: “The overdetermination, the metaphysical overkill, signals a manipulation, a scurrying to erase, to divert the eye, the attention, the mind. Where there is manipulation, there is motivation, and it does not seem plausible to me that the reason lies with the physical details of certain women’s private lives.” See also Frye, The Politics of Reality, 162.
Martine Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form (Self-Published, Martine Rothblatt, 2011), 78.
Donovan Cleckley, “Techno-Idolatry in Transhumanism,” The 11th Hour Blog, May 2, 2022, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/techno-idolatry-in-transhumanism.
Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), 21.
Rothblatt, 70.
Rothblatt, 73.
Rothblatt, 159.
Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman, 34.
Rothblatt, 76-78.
Rothblatt, 108.
Lisa Miller, “The Highest-Paid Female CEO in America Used to Be a Man,” New York Magazine, September 8-21, 2014, 38, https://nymag.com/news/features/martine-rothblatt-transgender-ceo.
Martine Rothblatt, interviewed by Miller, 40.
Miller, 41.
Gabriel Rothblatt, interviewed by Miller, 41.
Miller, 136.
See Jennifer Bilek, “Martine Rothblatt: A Founding Father of the Transgender Empire,” Uncommon Ground Media, July 6, 2020, https://uncommongroundmedia.com/martine-rothblatt-a-founding-father-of-the-transgender-empire. See also Jennifer Bilek, “Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?” The Federalist, February 20, 2018, https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology. This piece and Bilek’s related analyses discussing Rothblatt can be read among other works featured in Jennifer Bilek, Transsexual Transgender Transhuman: Dispatches from the 11th Hour (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2024), 73-78.