How “Trans-Women” Should Be Treated

No more lies.

If “trans-women” were really women, they’d just be called women. Calling them “trans-women” is really a backhanded acknowledgment of the truth, which is that they’re men pretending to be women. Noting this shouldn’t even be a political stance per se, it’s just a nod to basic sanity, biology, science, and reality. It’s like looking at your dog and saying, “Yes, I know I put a cute costume on him for Halloween that made him look like Chucky, but he wasn’t actually a crazed, murder-hungry living doll, he was still just a dog.”

We’ve seen a swing back in this direction in the United States, but in Britain, their Supreme Court has in effect ruled and said that yes, men are still men even if they dress like women and surgically mutilate themselves. This is a point of concern at the extremely left-wing Guardian, where a columnist asks, “If Britain is now resetting the clock on trans rights, where will that leave us?”

We are going back to a time before “trans women are women”, full stop, no debate: and if it’s handled well, accepting that sometimes life genuinely is more complicated than that could ultimately be healthy. But if handled badly, we could be heading back to a far darker time, when trans existence was shrouded in fear and shame and bigots had carte blanche.

...That leaves the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is drawing up statutory guidance on how to interpret the act in practice. Yet far from invoking the spirit of 2010, its chair, Kishwer Falkner – who has fought her own personally bruising battles inside the organisation on this issue – is signalling that she intends to take a hard line. The NHS should stop accommodating trans patients according to their preferred gender, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, adding that trans women shouldn’t be using women’s loos and changing rooms, either: when asked where they were supposed to go instead, she retorted that they should be “using their powers of advocacy to ask for those third spaces”. But if that’s her conclusion, then her organisation should be leading the charge to ensure neutral spaces are actually provided, if we are not to simply spiral back to the days of trans people being afraid to go out in public.

What this ruling ultimately means is that no matter how much surgery she has, how well she “passes” or who she feels herself to be, in the eyes of the law a trans woman cannot quite be a woman in the same way as someone born with XX chromosomes. There’s no glossing over the fact that for some, that will seem shockingly cruel, and for others, more like common sense. But though it inevitably puts a degree of separation between trans and biological women, how far that separation goes is not yet set in stone. It will be for parliament to decide in principle and for people to decide in practice how exactly we all live alongside one another, what social norms we set and how far the clock goes back. It’s not too late to try to do that with care and compassion, rather than indulging in score-settling. The supreme court clearly intended to give us another chance, as a society, to get this right. The crime would be to waste it.

As a starting point, it’s worth noting that the people called “transphobic” and “bigoted” here are getting smeared for being 100% correct. You can’t change your sex and along similar lines, what is “misgendering?” It’s correctly identifying someone’s gender. Let’s go a little further. What is “gender-affirming care?” It’s flat out encouraging someone’s mental illness. It’s the equivalent of telling an 85-pound anorexic woman who is weeks away from starving to death that yes, she is actually fat because that’s what she wants to hear.

The problems trans people are going to have in the next few years have nothing to do with people finally telling the truth and everything to do with liberals choosing to lie to those people for so long while trying to strong-arm the rest of society into going along with it.

When you take mentally ill people and encourage them to live as the other sex, mutilate themselves surgically, and take massive doses of hormones more typical of the other sex, as opposed to discouraging them from doing all these things, you are not doing them any favors. There’s a reason 42% of transgender adults have attempted suicide and 56% have self-injured themselves and it’s not because of the truth, it’s because of the lies. The lie that you can CHOOSE to change your sex, that this is going to fix your problems, and that life is going to be better after you do it.

If I told you that if you said the word, “abracadabra,” you would have the same powers as Superman for the rest of your life and you believed me long-term, it wouldn’t make your life better. You’d jump off buildings thinking you could fly. You’d try to punch your way through brick walls. You’d get beaten up as you walked around bad neighborhoods looking to prevent crimes. Meanwhile, everyone would be laughing at the dumb suit you’d be wearing, and you’d be confused and upset that no one else believed you had super-powers. It would create misery in your life for the same basic reason believing you can change sexes creates misery in people’s lives; It would lead to you living a life that is completely out of accord with actual reality.

We’ve created a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation where people who are trans have been encouraged to live in a fantasy world that’s killing them, but now we’re going to insist that they come back to reality, which is not going to be pleasant for them either.

What I mean by “coming back to reality” is that the lies need to stop at every level.

No more pushing this on kids. No more surgery and drugs for people under 18 with this mental delusion. No more encouragement of this by the government, especially in schools. No more government money to cover the insanely expensive surgeries that go along with this madness and no more lying about people’s sex on government IDs.

Additionally, no more pretending that someone is a different sex than they are. No more men in women’s prisons, shelters, bathrooms, and locker rooms. If you’re a man who dresses like a woman and you want to play a team sport, then you need to play on the men’s team, not the women’s team, because you are NOT a woman.

Should we have compassion for people afflicted with this mental illness? Yes, but if that compassion leads us to lie, allows women’s privacy and rights to be violated, or accepts bad behavior, it’s going too far. Mentally ill or not, people have to be held responsible for their actions and they need to be allowed to suffer the consequences of their own poor choices.

Is it awkward to have to use the men’s bathroom when you’re dressed like a woman? I’m sure it is, but if it’s too much to bear, maybe you shouldn’t dress like a woman. “Oh, but I want to swim on the women’s team, not the men’s team!” You can try to make the men’s team, try to start a trans swimming league, or swim without being on a team, but you can’t swim with the women because you’re a man, not a woman.

This isn’t about being mean or vindictive. You genuinely shouldn’t hate anyone for being trans. I would hope people would even have a little sympathy for people afflicted with this problem.

However, after all that being said, the lies just need to stop. No more fudging. No more pretending. No more lies.

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