To find the origin of transgenderism we only have to go back to the original lie that men use to justify patriarchy. That lie is the claim that males are higher on the hierarchy of species than females. Men are recorded as having said this from the dawn of patriarchy until the father of evolution theory, Darwin himself, less than two hundred years ago. Darwin hypothesized that males had evolved further than females. So, if males are human, then females are sub-human.
The repercussions of that lie on women are obvious. I want to look at the repercussions of that lie on men.
Members of a species recognize each other. They recognize each other by looking into each other’s eyes, where they see a consciousness of the same breadth, depth and width as their own.
Male and female toddlers playing together, looking into each other’s eyes, recognize they are equally of the same species. They do not mistake the family pet for their own kind for the same reason. When a human mother gazes into her infant’s eyes, she recognizes her human offspring, and the infant recognizes her – or his -- own future, as human, in the mother’s eyes.
So, if patriarchy needs to uphold the lie that the female is less than the male, it has to teach boys and men how to view the female as less than human and replace their natural perceptions of the equality of the sexes.
Patriarchy teaches boys and men to view the female as less than human by dehumanizing her. Men –- by which I mean men-in-charge, powerful men, elite men who influence culture on behalf of all men -- do this in the following ways:
1. Creating pornography of her, in which her body is central and her human consciousness is shrouded behind a performance.
2. Creating a prostitute of her, which teaches men and boys again that her body is the most important thing about her and it exists to excite him. Her consciousness may have a role to play in his fetish. He may want her unconscious. He may want her alert and resistant, or alert and frightened, or any other state that he can induce in her once he has paid for the use of her.
3. Creating a reproductive system of her, in which her eggs or her womb can be bought or rented, thus separating her consciousness from her body. This can happen through forced coupling (arranged marriage and rape), egg extraction or embryo implantation (surrogacy).
These three methods of dehumanization are intensified if men can persuade a woman to accept payment for the dehumanization. Once she accepts payment, she demonstrates that she is willing to participate in her own dehumanization. In turning her agency against herself she demonstrates that dehumanization is in her nature.
Once men see this, they are free to violate her at their will: beat her, rape her, kill her. The crime is not that much different from the crime of animal cruelty.
And yet, when an ordinary man looks into the eyes of an ordinary woman in the ordinary course of a day, he recognizes her humanity. Her consciousness mirrors his own. This truth becomes intolerable because it just can’t coexist with the patriarchal understanding that men have a superior consciousness, are better than women at any task, are more intelligent than women, more able to reason, to solve problems, to anticipate consequences. The patriarchal established truth that only men are human.
A man who suspects he is not superior to women has a problem. He may have to constantly prove, to himself if not to anyone else, that he is superior. He can do this by participating in her dehumanization – watching porn, using prostituted women, assaulting women. And if he is unable to avoid the truth of their equality, a man will avoid close contact with adult women and choose the young and undeveloped for intimacy.
When a grown man looks into the eyes of a pubescent or prepubescent girl he doesn’t see a reflection of himself, he sees someone less experienced, less knowledgeable, less beaten down. What he sees is no threat to him.
And so the mature will choose the immature, and the more insecure a man is in his supposed superiority, the younger he will have to go to find a female who doesn’t threaten his masculinity. Masculinity is the name of the lie that men chase. Authentic males need to trade their authenticity for the illusion that is masculinity.
Some men simply can’t. These are men who find relief in relinquishing their masculinity and offering themselves up as female/feminine, just as a beta dog will cower before the alpha to indicate it won’t stand up for its equality with the alpha. Transvestitism is a man cowering while simultaneously taking pride in the heroic act of martyrdom. This is bravado – the performance of courage to hide cowardice.
But fetishes are like addictions. Their power diminishes through time and repetition.
The man who enjoyed private periods of cross-dressing wants now to become public. So transvestitism moves out of the closet dressed in the new disguise of transgenderism – which is the continuous performance of transvestitism. He claims authenticity for what he once recognized as performance.
In order to live the disguise safely he must create of women an admiring audience, requiring that she clap mindlessly at the spectacle he presents to her. If, out of fear or confusion or kindness, she agrees, she has agreed yet again to her own dehumanization. How is it possible that kindness can be the mark of her dehumanization?
But what if the man who cannot perform masculinity is confronted by a wall of non-acceptance? If he is mocked, taunted, rejected in his performance of femininity, what is there left for him? If he can’t live as masculine and if he can’t live as feminine, then how can he live at all? It might well create an existential crisis for him so that he feels the threat of non-acceptance as the threat of death. And, indeed, such men are regularly claiming that refusal to comply is calling for their non-existence.
If a man fears for his own existence, he will threaten women with non-existence. And this too is indeed happening – cross-dressing men who want to be accepted as women are routinely and brutally threatening women with death.
Even without the death threats, transgenderism is the most deadly threat to women’s humanity because unlike porn, prostitution and reproductive exploitation, this is the first form of female dehumanization to be wholly embraced by all the western institutions of power since women were acknowledged as persons in their own right.
Governments have until now either paid lip service to eradicating some of the others, or displayed indifference to them, but they have not actually advocated for them, as they do for transgenderism.
In ten years what began as a plea for people to respect trans identity by referring to trans people by their “preferred” pronouns, is now the law, and everyone is required to state their gender identity through pronoun preference. In several western nations gender identity has usurped sex as the defining category for all humans. Refusing the recategorization can bring the police, arrest, massive fines, loss of jobs and even incarceration.
Men have replaced one lie with another – the lie that they are of a higher evolutionary state than women has been replaced with the lie that sex is irrelevant. Both violate the most basic biological fact that mammals necessarily have a sex binary. All of society is being made to accept the delusion that people are not their bodies, but simply occupy them like ghosts in organic machines.
The dehumanization of women follows through what the Yogyakarta Principles, the wish list that is put forward as a universal legal document, call “sex characteristics.” Some people have vaginas. Some people menstruate. They can be referred to by function and form – birthing parent, gestational carrier, menstruator, people with a cervix. The word “woman” is being outlawed, even in such fields as concern only women, like pregnancy and breastfeeding.
The boundary violation of porn and prostitution and rape is now the legalized and enforced condition of all women. We are collectively permitted no boundaries against men when the men choose to call themselves women, a word we are no longer permitted to call ourselves.
What, then, about all the services set up by women to help women violated by men, whether through violence at home, in public or in the sex trade? If the administrators and board members of rape crisis centres, women’s shelters, exit services agree to accept men in the category of women, they agree to their own dehumanization. And if they agree for the sake of a paycheck, they too have traded their humanity for money just like the prostituted women they claim to help. Men see this and take note.
And if these CEOs with middle-class salaries, mortgages and annual vacations abroad deny that they are being dehumanized, and deny their participation in it, they are simply doing exactly what the prostituted women and battered wives have always done. Men see this and have taken note, again, that women have signed away their right to be seen as humans and persons in their own rights.
Seeing that “powerful” women have signed away women’s rights to boundaries, men have been quick to rape and pillage women’s centres, women’s organizations, women’s shelters, women’s sports. Transvestic pretenders now head rape crisis centres, occupy high level positions in government, run for office and even hold political office. They have taken almost 10,000 women’s sports medals and already in some team sports occupy all the positions on the field, or the court, or the rink. They understand that imprisoned women are theirs for the plucking.
As much as our “professional feminists” err when they think they can still help prostituted and battered women when they have agreed to the wholesale dehumanization of women, the untrained “amateur” women fighting gender ideology as a single issue err in thinking they can ignore the prior forms of dehumanization.
Porn does not exist separately from prostitution.
Prostitution is not separate from rape and assault.
None of these are separate from reproductive exploitation.
The same woman can be, and is, marketed as a prostitute and as a surrogate womb, raped and beaten by her pimp or a john. The younger she is, the more she is valued.
The man who wishes to present himself exclusively as a feminine replica – a lie replicating a lie -- has already learned to see femininity as body devoid of consciousness and dehumanization as erotic.
Some long to be sexually violated, to be porn “stars”, some want to carry a child in their own belly. Trans and gay men are now the biggest consumers of babies created to be given away or sold.
Afterall, what is a baby but a body to be consumed for male desire?
Porn, prostitution, reproductive exploitation, femicide and pedophilia nest inside transgenderism like so many broken dolls. Outlaw any one of them, and the others will still flourish. The end goal will always be total dehumanization in one form or another.
We must remember that violent men practice their cruelty on women, or children, before they move on to men.
There are men who will whisper in a distressed boy’s ear, “wouldn’t you rather be a eunuch, I can see that’s what you are, deep down inside.”
That same man will not hesitate to whisper to the stranger – man or woman -- at the local bar some dark night just before last call, “wouldn’t you just love to download your brain into a machine body, we can do that now you know?”
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Your analysis of the dehumanization of women goes through patriarchy like acid.
Excellent article. Thank you.