A victory parade
On 11 March, Legal Feminist (a collective of feminist lawyers, of which I am a member: tweeting from @legalfeminist and blogging at legalfeminst.org.uk) tweeted this:
That’s from a pre-prize novella Peters wrote called The Masker.
The Masker isn’t a one-off: there’s a genre. It’s called “sissy porn,” and “forced feminisation” is a popular trope among aficionados[2]. It is a manifestation of a phenomenon known as autogynephilia: a tendency in some heterosexual males to be aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women[3].
With “as women” meaning things like getting aroused by “forced feminisation.” Has it all, doesn’t it – not only stealing what we are, but also treating what we are as all about masochistic joy in violent subordination. Gee, I can’t imagine why we would object to any of this, can you?
In this novella, Peters explicitly eroticises violence against women. The fictional narrator is a masochist for whom dressing as a woman and being treated as female is the ultimate sexually arousing debasement; and for whom “treated as female” means “violently abused.” The single most chilling line in this extract, to my mind, is “meek as an abused woman.” The narrator is luxuriating in his own fearful, humiliated capitulation.
Would Torrey Peters luxuriate in being told to fuck all the way off and not come back? Because I’d be more than happy to oblige.
That being so, it is scarcely necessary to spell out what nerve was hit by our tweet about Peters’ longlisting for a women’s literary prize. Women are being told that transwomen are in every sense women; that we should unquestioningly welcome them into women-only spaces, spaces where we are undressed or in other ways vulnerable or wishing for privacy from males. We are told that if we have any doubts about the safety of extending that welcome, or if it makes us feel uncomfortable, that is because we are bigots.
And here’s this guy writing about how sexy it is to be punched in the face and getting nominated for a women’s prize for writing.
[T]here is – in The Masker and similar material – clear evidence that some proportion of male-bodied people who choose to dress as women are individuals for whom the idea of themselves as women – doing women’s things, in women’s spaces – is not merely convenient and comfortable, or even affirming and validating, but positively erotic. And that some proportion of that category regard femaleness as inherently debased and humiliating, and find the thought of violence against women arousing.
We’re entitled to find that an alarming and enraging prospect: we’re entitled to take strong exception to being co-opted as involuntary bit-part players in someone else’s kink. We’re entitled, too, to fear that some of those for whom the thought of inhabiting the role of an abused woman is erotic may also be aroused by swapping places and abusing an actual woman. The violently abusive language directed against prominent women who speak against gender ideology does nothing to reassure us.
As for me, not only does it do nothing to reassure me, it pisses me off and disgusts me and makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with people.
Torrey Peters has come to prominence by being the first transwoman to be longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In other words, Peters is a biological male who is now in the running to win a prize that was conceived – and presumably endowed – on the basis that it would be ring-fenced for women.
What made the difference was the sickeningly misogynist nature of some at least of Peters’ writing.
A transwoman who has previously published misogynist and abusive pornography which treats femaleness as inherently degrading has been shortlisted for a prestigious prize for women’s fiction, and that fact has been triumphantly reported in the national press.
Exactly so.
This, to my mind, is blatant power play. Women have been abused, bullied, no-platformed, hounded out of their jobs, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted for putting forward civilised measured arguments against self-identification, and for explaining patiently and politely why biological sex sometimes matters, and even for writing accurately on the relevant law. Most of the mainstream feminist organisations and too many prominent individual women have capitulated and are obediently trashing women’s protections and reciting the mantra “trans women are women.”
This outrage – and others like it – feels like part of a victory parade: the more flagrant the outrage that we can be terrorised into ignoring, the more complete – meek as abused women – our capitulation.
And so we persist.
I hate this. :-(
Meanwhile, my novel that shows an abused woman as frightened, angry, and not the least aroused by her abuse, would probably be refused for any such prize because there is a single sentence in it where the woman, when her daughter gets her period and wails that she wishes she were a boy, dismisses the idea, knowing her daughter is going through the same thing she went through at puberty…the difficulty of growing into a woman.
That one sentence is probably more “invalidating” and “violent” than J.K. Rowling having a serial killer in a dress, because it is a direct denial of the idea that the second a child says “I wanta be [x]”, we should go right out and make sure the child can be [x].
Hmm, but if it is violent, doesn’t that mean that you conform to male stereotypes (by being violent), and therefore you are male? A male otter?
Actually, I feel bad joking about that, writing something jokey in this thread, because I feel like this post, and yesterday’s post “We are not a game”, are sacred. They really really hit the nail on the head at exactly what is so rotten in the trans movement, what is so rotten and horrid about the “polite fiction” that TWAW — not the ramifications, not the possible potential dangers, but the rottenness in the very concept itself.
This is where – once again – I suspect framing the subject in terms of “girly” or “sissy” boys, men failing to live up to traditional standards of “masculinity” etc. is probably more misleading than helpful at this stage (and as we all know, if your diagnosis is wrong, you’re almost certainly going to be looking in the wrong place for a cure). There may very well be TIMs like that of course, but they are not the TERF-bashing kind. I don’t see how anyone can look at people like McKinnon, Yaniv, or this asshole, and conclude that too little toxic masculinity, too litte aggression, not enough raging entitlement, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being too nurturing, caring, sensitive, modest etc. is really the problem here.
As I have previously written, the more I think about it, the more I think the “autogynephilia” diagnosis is spot on. This has nothing to do with traditional notions of femininity (as problematic as those notions are) and everything to do with the hyper-sexualized, objectified, fetishized notions of femininity found in pornography. These guys want to be their own jerk-off fantasies.
I’m sorry, my female friends. I’m sorry this is happening to you. I really fear there is little that can be done about it. These social contagions are just that–like diseases. They burn like wildfire through the populace, leaving ashes in their wake.
Bjarte wrote:
I’ve also read that sometimes they want to be what I’ll call their unromantic romantic fantasies — the cool girl they want to date. She likes computer games, girly anime, science fiction, sports, and other “guy” stuff. She can even blend in as “one of the guys.” And she’s a lesbian, of course.
When the Gender Critical argue that transgenderism reinforces stereotypes about sex the Cool Girl is one of the things they trot out in rebuttal. This isn’t a typically feminine woman. And there are lots of them! The GC have no idea what they’re talking about.
Mention autogynephilia, however, and they have melt down fits about the transphobia of it all.
Sastra
Of course the permanent, and I suspect unsolvable, quandry they find themselves in is explaining why we still need boxes and labels like “man” and “woman” at all in their view. They are the ones who insist that something other than observable physical traits makes most people “men” or “women” or “[insert non-binary gender of choice]” to the core of their being, and that falling into one or the other of these boxes is such a vitally important part of who they are as a person that “misgendering” is a hatecrime and comparable to actual violence.
But what is this “something”? We have been repeatedly told that it doesn’t have anything to do with body type, and now they’re telling us it has nothing to do with personality type. Well then what does it have something to do with? If being a “man” or being a “woman” doesn’t say anything about physical or mental traits, what does it say anything about since it’s so vitally important to keep separating people into separate groups requiring separate vocabularies, separate toilets, separate sporting events etc? Even if they attribute this supposedly innate knowledge of their own “gender” to something in the brain (less than ten years ago any talk of boy-brains an girl-brains would get you labelled an “evo-psych kook” by many of these same people), what does that even mean? That they’re the kind of people who have brains telling them that they’re the kind of people who have brains telling them that they’re the kind of people who have brains telling them etc… etc.. ?
Bjarte @8
And, of course, let’s assume for argument’s sake that this gender-brain thing does exist. Even if so, who says that it should be the feature that defines sex, which we use to categorize people? It is indeed true that some people prefer the color green, and, other people prefer the color yellow, but should we divide, say, toilets into toilets-for-people-that-love-yellow and toilets-for-people-that-love-green? What would be the societal advantage of that?
I don’t think there’s been much if any thought put into these issues by those espousing trans ideology. So much of it is confusing and cotradictory. The so-called trans “umbrela” includes such a disparate collection of traits, preferences, and characteristics, it’s a wonder that it hasn’t blown apart already. It’s a shotgun wedding of convenience that really only serves the interests of a few, who use the other parties under the umbrella as cover and camouflage. I’ve come to think this core consists primarily of AGP men, whose goal is public “affirmation,” and “validation” of their paraphilia. Without hyper-sexualized female gender stereotypes, they would have nothing to aspire to, no model to follow. This is why third spaces are a non-starter. No captive audience, no forbidden territory to conquer. This AGP core also attracts the beardy wokebro-MRA/incels who, though they are not themselves trans, and who would never consider dating a TIM, revel in having a righteous cause for which they can openly attack feminists.
What does AGP mean, Not Bruce?
Autogynephilic.