Daily Archive

“When I see the unquestioning use of the word “cis” I assume I am dealing with someone who adheres to gender ideology. This word is degrading and designed to enforce the idea that sex-role stereotypes are innate. “Cis woman” implies a woman who naturally performs femininity, the set of ritualized submission gestures taught to female-sexed people from birth. You do not seem to understand that there is a difference between sex and gender or that the millenia old system of patriarchy oppresses female sexed people because of our reproductive capacity. When male authority figures like Rick Santorum (who supports transgenderism btw) get on the airways every election cycle and announce that women should be forced by the state to birth rapists’ babies, these men are not participating in gender oppression; they are oppressing women on the basis of sex. Transwomen have never worried about being forced to give birth, going to jail for a suspicious miscarriage, or giving birth at home in a state where that act is illegal. Transwomen’s bodies are not and have never been church and state regulated breeding units. I fight for the class of people oppressed on the basis of biological sex. I call these people female, girls, and women.

If transwomen would like to join this fight in a way that does not eliminate this group of people from having concise words for ourselves and the ability to name what is happening to us (sex-based oppression; males oppressing females), I welcome that help. Instead, many transwomen are upset that female people are not using our resources and energy to fight for the rights of males who declare themselves female. Your questions imply that those of us who fight against global sex-based oppression are doing wrong by the people who say there is no such thing as sex, that female is just a feeling that a person with a penis can have, and the most important women are the women who are actually men.

Are you asking gender activists questions about how it may be harmful to the class of people who are oppressed on the basis of sex to no longer have a word for ourselves? Are you asking transwomen how girls and women (who live under a constant threat of rape by people with penises) might feel about being forced to have people with penises in our locker rooms, changing rooms, DV shelters, jail cells, etc? Are you asking why men like Rick Santorum and the religious authorities of Iran support transgenderism? Why will the government of Iran kill someone for being gay but happily pay for “sex-change” surgery? Could it be because being gay actually challenges the sexist behavioral caste system called gender while being transgender does not? And on the subject of Iran, are you asking how the women of Iran feel now that half of their national women’s soccer team consists of biological males?

As a female person, I am very aware of what would have been my fate had I been born elsewhere in the world. I agonize every day over what my sisters are enduring globally. No transwoman would have been at risk of being aborted in the womb when a vulva showed up on an ultrasound or being smothered to death for not having a penis or being fed less than bepenised siblings. Transwomen would not have been at risk of being sold to an old man as a rape and breeding slave while the world called it “child marriage.” Transwomen would not have been abducted from school by Boko Haram, raped and impregnated then shunned by the whole village upon returning from that hell. Transwomen would not have been denied education provided only to male children. Transwomen would not be the ward of male relatives, unable to leave the house without being covered head to toe and accompanied by a male over the age of 13. If transwomen would like to join the fight against these and other sex-based atrocities, I would welcome that. Instead, trans activists are more interested in forcing women to adhere to the linguistic demands of males who assert they are female and forcing women to pretend to agree that penises can be female organs.

I support all trans people in their right to perform gender and to believe whatever they believe about themselves and the world. I believe trans people should have freedom of expression and be free of discrimination in housing, healthcare, and employment. I condemn physical violence against trans people. I do not believe transwomen have a right to insist that I capitulate to gender ideology or to compel me to use words I do not believe are true.

Radical feminsm is the global movement to end sex-based oppression. We cannot end sex-based oppression without ending gender. Females are not oppressed because of their gender. Gender itself oppresses females.”

-Mary Lou Singleton