It’s easy to attack and dismiss what an author wrote when you misquote or distort what was said. It’s called creating a strawman. The falsified version of what was allegedly said is then easily attacked and dismissed. It’s much harder to discuss a topic when the author’s statements are accurately quoted.
In February, I wrote a feminist essay entitled “Fantasy Worlds on the Political Right and Left: QAnon and Trans-Sex Beliefs” that was published on 4W.pub, a feminist website. I wrote that someone cannot change their sex; nor is a person born in the wrong body.
There have been a number of responses to my essay, including a few that have been published in The Cigar. There have been too many distortions, mischaracterizations, and just plain inaccurate statements to go through each one. So, I’ll respond to them in general.
The responses were ideologically driven instead of factual. They lifted phrases and slogans from webpages. They rely on assertions, rather than anything that would qualify as arguments. They used simplistic politicized and often inaccurate information, based on cultural analyses, not science or medicine. And worse, they are written as if accuracy and evidence didn’t matter as long as they have a pro-trans opinion and they denounce me.
They use signaling words, which are words that bias the reader even before they read the sentence. For example, in Holdler & Kusz’s letter the word “conservative” appears a number of times. This politically signals the reader to devalue the comment or view it with prejudice. Yet, if one takes notice, I’m a feminist in a women’s studies department and the essay is published on a 4th wave feminist website.
First of all, let me give you more information on the question of whether one can change their sex. I refer you to the January 2021 statement in the Irish Journal of Medical Science, “The Reality of Sex.” The authors write: “We write as medical and biological professionals …. Human sex is an observable, immutable, and important biological classification.” Also, there is a compilation of information about biological sex differences for bones, muscles, chromosomes and gender on a website that summarizes the anatomical and physiological differences between males and females, and compares men and women’s athletic performances and explains how they differ. The website also outlines the determination of sex. It emphasizes that there are only two sex chromosomes, X and Y. Although there are occasionally chromosome number mistakes, that doesn’t mean there are more than two sexes: male and female.
For people who think that they have the brain of one sex and the body of the other, I recommend this March 2021 “massive study” that found few differences between men’s and women’s brains.
Dr. Reumann wrote that my information on surgeries performed on trans people looked like it was from 1960’s studies. Here is a March 2021, PubMed article about surgical outcomes following gender affirming penile reconstruction. Out of 129 patients, there were 281 complications requiring 142 revisions. The profiteers of the trans movement don’t want us to talk about these permanently sterilizing and disfiguring procedures. They want the truth about this medical malpractice suppressed and have told activists it is rude to discuss the surgeries.
Briefly, I want to address the claim that intersex people prove there is a continuum of biological sex between men and women. Intersex is a term for a group of medical conditions, resulting from different types of developmental abnormalities. People with intersex conditions face a number of life challenges. It is wrong to appropriate their lives for political arguments. Many intersex people are deeply offended by how the transgender movement is using them.
Although there have been many distortions and much misinformation about articles that I have written, the most egregious is a statement released by the GWS faculty in my department to the GWS students. They wrote that I “dismiss race and intersectionality.” That’s a vicious lie about my work. I have been writing and talking about racist and misogynistic stereotypes and exploitation of women, particularly Asian women, used in pornography and prostitution since the mid-1990s. I have written peer reviewed papers on the sexual exploitation of Cambodian women on the Internet, the involvement of U.S. military personnel in the trafficking of Korean women to the U.S, and the trafficking of North Korean women in China, just to name a few. I was heavily involved in lobbying to pass an anti-sex trafficking law in Rhode Island that has enabled the state to shut down Asian massage parlors where many Asian women are sexually exploited and trafficked. I wrote several short research reports about this in 2009. The author(s) of the GWS statement are “colleagues,” so they know my work, yet Rosaria Pisa, Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies Department, distributed a statement that includes this blatant lie about me.
I believe history will show that the hormonal and surgical treatment of people who experience gender or other dysphorias is the medical scandal of the century. There is very big funding behind the transgender movement from billionaires and pharmaceutical and biomedical companies. Once a young person enters the hormone and surgery pipeline, they are patients for life. It is enormously profitable to convince people that they can change their sex.
For 30 years I have exposed the lies and opposed the profiteers in the pornography and prostitution rackets. No matter what anyone says about me or tries to do to me, I will continue to expose those who seek to profit by lying to vulnerable people. They need therapy and love. They do not deserve to be lied to about what will bring them peace so that powerful economic interests can profit from exploiting them.