Transgenderism and the Scapegoating of Feminism
Whatever did the women do before Matt Walsh opened the pickles?
Some Notes for a Critique of Critics of Feminism
I suppose that I should preface this “old” piece with a note that, as of February 9, 2025, Jennifer Bilek/The 11th Hour Blog has joined in scapegoating feminism—particularly radical feminism—not for transgenderism but for patriarchy itself.
See Tara van Dijk, “FEMINISTS TO THE PATRIARCHY: WE HATE YOU, DON’T STOP!,” February 9, 2025, The 11th Hour Blog, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/feminists-to-the-patriarchy-we-hate-you-don-t-stop.
TITLES IN ALL CAPS ARE VERY CURIOUS, but I digress.
Referencing Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, with no specific references to any second-wave feminist thinkers, this strange lack, Dijk argues “that sex-based differences and inequalities aren’t the result of a single system but a shifting interplay of biology, capitalism, and human desire” (emphasis added). As understood today, the concept of patriarchy, she asserts, “emerged in Second Wave Feminism (1960s-70s) as a retroactive fantasy,” where feminists “projected it backward, rewriting history as if male dominance were a timeless, universal force.” Which second-wave feminist thinker specifically argued that male dominance constitutes “a timeless, universal force,” presumably without a beginning or an ending? She never says. What a strange omission there! Finally, at least, thanks to Dijk, we have something apparently much clearer than patriarchy: “a shifting interplay of biology, capitalism, and human desire”—a “human nature” explanation modified by Marxism. Contrary to Bilek’s insistence on Dijk as “an extremely educated woman,” I cannot find it demonstrated, certainly not in the caricature and neglect of feminist writing that she purports to have researched.
A funny line from Dijk, from the social media screenshots taken in dark mode, is this one: “You’d think that by now, feminist scholars and researchers would have developed a definition that connects male dominance to specific historical, cultural, and structural mechanisms.” As past and present examples, I am thinking of Gerda Lerner’s Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, 1986) and Susan Hawthorne’s Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy (Spinifex Press, 2020)—easily accessible texts. For an overview, there is Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (Basil Blackwell, 1990), which gives a survey of decades of literature covering distinctions among radical feminists, Marxist feminists, and those incorporating Freudian/Lacanian thought. Why does the obvious body of literature by feminist scholars and researchers, over half a century’s worth, suddenly disappear in favor of Lacan and Žižek taking up space? By simple necessity, the scholar must consult the literature.
I am not bothered, as Bilek has put it, with her publishing “an opinion that counters current common radical feminist thought,” given that Dijk counters nothing. The idea that the subjection of women originates in capitalism—or, rather, derives solely from economic conditions or wealth—is at least as old as the late nineteenth century, with Marx’s collaborator Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in 1884. And Dijk’s use of “biology” and “human desire” is not different from the Lacanian development into the 1970s and 1980s modifying Freud with consideration of culture but remaining essentially bound to his conceptual framework. No, I am bothered that Bilek, whose publisher is Spinifex Press, does not recognize what Renate Klein rightly calls “nonsense” in Dijk’s piece—starting with an obvious lack of research. It is not for lack of the writing being written that Dijk has refused to read it.
Donovan Cleckley, March 6, 2025
Donovan Cleckley, “Transgenderism and the Scapegoating of Feminism,” The 11th Hour Blog, August 19, 2023, https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/transgenderism-and-the-scapegoating-of-feminism.
Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.
- Abigail Adams, in a letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776
There has been a rising tendency among critics of transgenderism, not all of whom are even critical of gender, to scapegoat feminism. Women have been prototypical scapegoats à la “wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman” (Ecclesiasticus 25:19). Representing the right-wing point of view, Matt Walsh argues that feminism provided the necessary foundation for transsexualism and transgenderism as its more contemporary incarnation. Walsh asserts:
Feminism set the stage for trans activists by insisting for years that there are no significant or inherent differences between men and women apart from anatomy. They are the ones who came up with the idea that most differences between the sexes were ‘social constructs.’ Now the ‘gender critical’ feminists want to pretend to be the leaders in the fight against trans ideology, all while refusing to admit that it is a direct descendent of their own ideology. These women will absurdly try to flip this around and claim that those of us with more ‘traditional’ views on sex are the ones who somehow set the stage for transgenderism. But our view was dominate [sic] for millennia and transgenderism never existed during that time. Feminism comes along and trans ideology follows almost immediately behind it. Try to piece this together, ladies. It’s not a coincidence.1
Yes, ladies, let us try to piece this all together, as best we can. Most feminists have argued that women and men experience different socialization on the basis of sex from birth to death. By nature, women’s bodies and men’s bodies differ, with clearly differing needs, medically and otherwise, but their behaviors do as well. To what extent socialization versus biology influences these differences has been debated among feminists. In The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, first published in 1979, Janice G. Raymond wrote the first extensive critique of transsexualism, precursor to modern transgenderism, from a feminist point of view. She addressed the question of “the real differences between men and women,” which men have continued pressing upon women to answer. Raymond writes:
Men, of course, have defined the supposed differences that have kept women out of such jobs and professions, and feminists have spent much energy demonstrating how these differences, if indeed they do exist, are primarily the result of socialization. Yet there are differences, and some feminists have come to realize that those differences are important whether they spring from socialization, from biology, or from the total history of existing as a woman in a patriarchal society. The point is, however, that the origin of these differences is probably not the important question, and we shall perhaps never know the total answer to it. Yet we are forced back into trying to answer it again and again.
Raymond continues:
No man can have the history of being born and located in this culture as a woman. He can have the history of wishing to be a woman and of acting like a woman, but this gender experience is that of a transsexual, not of a woman. Surgery may confer the artifacts of outward and inward female organs, but it cannot confer the history of being a woman in this society.2
Whatever did womankind do before What Is a Woman? and Walsh opening that jar of pickles? Women actually understood the difference, so there is that fact to be twisted—pickles on the side. Characteristic of developing feminist criticism of the 1970s, Raymond’s analysis recognized that there are significant differences between women and men, whatever the origin of these differences may be. There was a degree of idealism present in early feminist writing of the era, a notable example being Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution in 1970. Women continued to develop their analyses, which, as seen in Raymond’s work, accounted for precisely the complexity that modern commentary willfully overlooks.
To Walsh’s other point, a big part of why transgenderism did not exist millennia ago is the basic fact of burgeoning technological development in recent centuries. Cavemen were not banging rocks together and making breast augmentations to give each other and get their rocks off. One may as well ask why the Renaissance lacked space travel. As Jennifer Bilek has emphasized, the development of “synthetic sex identities,”3 a part of what Thomas Szasz first termed pharmacracy,4 did not come from nowhere. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, Raymond’s 2021 book, puts forth a timely feminist critique, worth serious consideration, though her work has been seriously neglected when not relentlessly caricatured.5
“Remember the Ladies,” Abigail Adams reminded her husband, a Founding Father and the second U.S. president, who also forgot the ladies. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” she continued. “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” In a memorable line from her letter, she asserts that, if men do not redress such tyranny over women, then “we are determined to foment a Rebelion.” To which John Adams replied, “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.” He wrote that the ongoing American Revolution led to a questioning of traditional hierarchies, “that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.” Yet he also noted that his wife’s letter “was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented”—that is, women. The ladies have long pieced it together. What is woman to do?
Thousands of years before Adams wrote to her husband in 1776, men treated women as vassals for their sex: property. During this time, marriage was the primary method for men to possess women—apart from prostitution, seen as its shadow. Among the early abolitionists, Sarah Grimké and Ernestine Rose commented on how the wife’s identity became subsumed within that of the husband. Over marriage’s function in civilizing women to death, the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments identified how it made women “civilly dead.” Studying how the man’s identity had eclipsed woman-as-wife, spanning much of recent history, modern transgenderism seems like the most logical transition in men possessing women. Where once she became subsumed within man’s identity, possessed, woman herself now becomes an identity for man to possess. Man’s sense of proprietorship over woman not only set the stage but also, still, remains the most jarring pickle.
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Matt Walsh, (@MattWalshBlog), X, July 25, 2023, 7:44 AM, https://x.com/mattwalshblog/status/1683820604883869697: “Feminism set the stage for trans activists by insisting for years that there are no significant or inherent differences between men and women apart from anatomy. They are the ones who came up with the idea that most differences between the sexes were ‘social constructs.’”
Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, 1979 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994), 113-114.
See Jennifer Bilek, “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI),” Tablet, June 14, 2022, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers.
See Thomas Szasz, “The Therapeutic State: The Tyranny of Pharmacracy,” Independent Review 5, no. 4 (Spring 2001): 485-521.
Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2021).