The lead clinician pushing for lowering the age of treatment was a woman who had established herself as an expert in gender medicine in the ‘80s and was a professor of psychology. She had been impressed by the appearance of a girl who had medically transitioned to a boy. The other two clinicians were endocrinologists: a woman and a man who was also a psychiatrist. They first proposed their treatment protocol for gender dysphoria in 1996.

Their first patients included a girl who liked soccer, wasn’t dating (because she was homosexual), and was caught binding her breasts with a tight T-shirt, so was brought to the gender clinic by her parents for “treatment”. Make of that what you will. Their paper, published in 2006, was financed by a pharmaceutical company that made the drug used to suppress puberty (and castrate male sexual criminals).

In preparation for my travels, I learned that the Netherlands was in fact extremely conservative, save for Amsterdam, which seemed to serve as a relief valve, an experimental den of vices with its neighborhood sex toy shops, brothels and cannabis shopfronts. (Much like Bangkok minus the sex toy shops. For Thailand, too, was a distinctly conservative culture. The more famous our sex trade, the more a girl from a “good” family would guard her boundaries from foreigners who assumed Thai women were all equally loose.)

The Dutch had values that defied any notion of living authentically. They did not like to stand out. They had a phrase used with children: “be normal, you’re acting crazy”. They didn’t dress outlandishly tending to choose low key colors, and they did not like my plaid pantaloons. The hill tribe pants I’d made specifically for the trip.

As I was walking to the town square of Haarlem on the outskirts of Amsterdam, an old man on a bicycle looked me up and down at an intersection and uttered the word “terrible” at my outfit. This made me laugh, as a similar Caucasian man had said much the same thing at an intersection in Bangkok when I was walking down the street in a turquoise and black pair I had on at the time. Public policing to maintain normalcy was clearly a thing in the Netherlands.

When I swapped out the plaid pantaloons for black slacks to go with my white jacket with the black buttons and piping, the Dutch seemed to smile at me more when I approached, and I felt stylish and accepted.

Policing normalcy may go a long way to explaining the motivation to make gender non-conforming youth look like the opposite sex they were mimicking so they would be “normal”. It is also notable that the Dutch do not have a self-I.D. law (though 12 of their European neighbors do, including Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Norway and Switzerland). Self I.D goes against this public policing, I reckon.

Still, there were heretical notions the Dutch embraced that I could write home about. The Dutch do not vaccinate their children. They believe in supporting the immune system. Me too. I could safely say this with the backing of an entire country that had progressive policies such as universal healthcare, subsidized university fees, and paternity leave.

I learned while visiting with an expat family of Americans that during Covid the schools were only closed for 3 months and the Dutch thought that was extreme. Their curriculum was vigorous and full of serious subjects like economics, while up to six languages could be taken, with four being the norm. This vigorous curriculum impressed me greatly, as did the teenagers who were articulate and interested in conversing with adults.

Their mother told me about a teacher who received a lesson plan to teach a list of pronouns. She thought the whole idea was silly and instead allowed the children to discuss what they thought about these alternative pronouns. The Dutch pride themselves on being able to discuss controversial topics, and were down to earth and practical-minded. This seemed to go along with their preference for boosting the immune system rather than relying on vaccinations. Better to prepare a student for discourse than deliver edicts telling them how to think.

Their museums still displayed paintings depicting slavery ships and transactions with African nations, though when I wandered into such a gallery, at the Rijk museum, I was nearly the only one there. In the gallery of Dutch masters, there was an intriguing painting of a man wearing female clothing in order to invade the female only space of a woman he admired. The gallery notes tells the story that no one would be fooled by such a disguise. This whiff of TERFiness pleased me greatly.

The young women I shared quarters with, in the female dorms and hostels I stayed in, were polite, considerate, and aware of others. It was a pleasure to watch them come and go, cook food and wash up. If I asked them a question, in English, about logistics, they were helpful and at ease with English, and didn’t give me any attitude for asking.

The trash spilling out of garbage cans on the streets and homeless sleeping in doorways near the central train station let me know the city hadn’t managed to solve this problem either. Otherwise I really enjoyed Amsterdam, the care taken with restorations and history, along with its credit card access, ticket-free transit system so fast and frequent that allowed me to easily reach my destinations.

I was also glad to discover a number of drop-in massage parlors run by Thai ladies, especially after a five-hour bike ride to the coast to visit Kinderdijk, a UNESCO site of restored windmills.

Signs on the massage parlor door assured me that the shop was strictly for massage only. These ladies were certified in the ancient techniques taught in Thai temples, and the massage therapist I chatted with said she had lived in the Netherlands for over 30 years. She loved travel she told me as she pummeled my thighs. Amsterdam reminded me even more of Bangkok after this.

The city did have one more surprise for me when I returned from my travels to Prague, Florence and Mont Blanc in the Italian Alps. It was the day of the Pride canal parade. The sense of divided loyalties this parade prompted in me, and the connection with Thailand, was so unexpected it gave me pause. Could I enjoy Pride and still be a TERF? This report pleased my pre-TERF friends, who seemed to want to welcome me back to the fold.

I returned to Amsterdam to catch my flight home. I had one full day, Saturday, which happened to be the day of the Canal Parade for Amsterdam World Pride. I had arranged to meet my new friend Heli St. Luce, a B of the original LGB, for lunch at her favorite Italian restaurant a block from the canal.

As I waited, I was able to people watch the crowds of celebrants, mostly gay men in skin tight shorts, older men, and beautiful young women in sequin-covered mini-skirts and dresses, leather mini-skirts, and costumes including a pair of devils, all heading for the banks of the canal.

Plus loads of locals on bicycles going on their Saturday errands who perfectly fulfilled my vision of a bicycle centered city integrating with transit and traffic.

Heli and I talked for two hours sharing our multi-racial, multi-cultural English perspective while I enjoyed my first pasta dish in Europe of ravioli and she shared her pizza with me.

She had to get to a 4 p.m. appointment, and I forgot to get a selfie of us with her in a pretty purple dress.

Thus left to my own devices, I walked towards the canal to see what all the fuss was about. When I saw the floats, I was smitten by the fact that these floats were boats, moving exactly at the pace that our parade floats tried to emulate at our parades back in San Francisco.

I was so far away from the center of town that I could actually find a place to view these joyous party boats with their drag queen emcees, and see the double row of boats full of spectators lining the banks.

After I tired of squatting at the rail, I climbed up on a sturdy barrier that offered a view over the heads.

“I’m from San Francisco,” I said, turning to the young lass next to me, when I heard English spoken.

“I’m from London,” she said, pleased to be having a cross-Atlantic experience; she introduced me to her friends and they listed their towns, too: Copenhagen, and er a town in Ireland. They happened to be there for a summer studies program.

“This is my first Pride parade,” my new friend gushed. It brought back memories of when I was young and gay, not that I could tell if she was family, so many allies did we have now.

I stayed for a bit until the floats were all so jammed with writhing bodies it felt like the final floats at our parades, and my perch was beginning to feel precarious, so I jumped down and bid my friends a good time.

The weather was perfect temperature wise and the street party atmosphere so LGB friendly, I felt at home.

Later I was astonished to see a post from my Bangkok friend describing the same Canal Parade event as a participant riding on the Asian float with Team Thailand, in which her girlfriend had a leadership role. Team Thailand participants were all dressed in Thai royal court costumes, all in gold; my friends going as a butch/femme pair.

Team Thailand is eager to have Bangkok be the next World Pride destination in 2030 and is bidding against Barcelona for this privilege. Bangkok has canals and a vibrant gay scene. Barcelona is a favorite destination of travelers. So hard call. I have always wanted to go to Barcelona, but Bangkok would offer me participation with Team Thailand. I could not stay to meet my friends, to discuss it, as I had a flight to catch the next day.

What I really wanted to know from my Thai friends, but could not say in my FB report, was how much was Team Thailand pushing for a self I.D. law? And would I be able to warn them not to go that route? But the door was open. I could ask more questions, of my friend, on my next visit home.

I thanked my FB contacts for following and enjoying my adventures along with me, and offered a last photo of our fair city of San Francisco as I arrived home.

As it happened, I had recently been contacted by two sex realists, both based in Amsterdam, but didn’t know each other. Both had been prompted to contact me because I had confronted Judith Butler. One wanted to know how I came to do such a feat. The other told me Butler’s response to me had so enraged her that it accelerated her plans to go public about the impact of trans ideology on women. Butler’s words had stripped her of any remaining reservations.

That two sex-realists were contacting me from the same part of the world about an event that happened nearly two years ago seemed too serendipitous to ignore. So I thought, why not go there and look them up? By the end of April, I had my ticket booked, and my friend agreed to meet me there. Just as we finished planning our entire itinerary and booked all the tickets, my friend discovered that the rules for her student visa had changed and she couldn’t leave Italy until her renewal card was in her hand. I decided to go anyway even though I had never traveled alone to a foreign, non-English speaking country. I never did that gap year backpacking thing that my more intrepid peers did back in the day. So maybe it was time.

I thought I would be taking a vacation from my punishing writing schedule, as an embedded TERF journalist, but instead I discovered my travel writing side as I regaled my friends with my adventures seeking out restorations of preindustrial living spaces from windmills to Rembrandt’s house to a Cold War-era nuclear bunker built by the Communist Party in Prague.

The one sex-realist post I was obliged to write, when I brought my new friends together, gave me the opportunity to put all my grievances about the trans occupation, especially the egregious progressive flag and gender neutral toilet signs.

But this would not be my only take on Amsterdam, in the hosting of World Pride, as I will report in my next post.

My mission for Amsterdam would not be complete without a sex realist report.

Five sex realists traveling, from all over the Amsterdam area, convened for lunch, on a Sunday afternoon, at the Stedelijk museum outdoor cafe to be introduced. Tables there were spaced ten feet apart so we would talk freely without disturbing others with our raucous heretical chatter.

This being the week before World Pride Week, Amsterdam had decked itself out in progressive flags on various buildings and banner style across some streets.

I have retrieved, from my photo archive, a photo of a trick we sex realist have done with that badly designed, ever changing LGBTQ alphabet-mafia flag. (The Rainbow Flag was plenty inclusive enough, but with every regime change there must be a new flag to mark territory having been taken.

The photo was from my trip to Provincetown, with Ellie and her wife, back in 2023. There I found some refrigerator magnets of said flag and by arranging them corner to corner a Swastika appears, thus displaying our opinion of what this flag represents with the No Debate demand and the self I.D laws that gave men the right to invade women’s spaces with impunity, and with gender non-conforming children being taught that they have the option to change sex because they might have been born in the wrong body.

There is also the matter of the confusing nature of the gender neutral bathroom signage. A mom of a seven year old recently related that her child did not go to the bathroom for five hours, on his first day of school, because he could not figure out who the gender neutral sign was for.

My example, of said signage is from the Anne Frank museum, and is common in new buildings in Amsterdam. I imagined talking to Anne about these renegade ideas, how they creep in innocuously enough, with symbols and flags, then are everywhere intruding into so many shared aspects of public life. While we are not to talk about it in liberal circles.

But talk we did for three hours. It was my pleasure to introduce Bev Jackson, the founder of LGB Alliance in the UK, to Heli St. Luce, a UK born poet, who recently gave a presentation, at our WoLF camp, about the Nordic model of legal prostitution.

Their delight at meeting each other was clear in their animated conversational style, speaking bluntly, interrupting each other with questions, and both talking at the same time. Not the usual manner of the English, at all, which is likely why they left England.

Also present were two other writers, prominent in their fields, who will remain anonymous for the time being.

I did not need to say anything at all except to regale the group with my story of having stood up to Judith Butler, which was the reason Bev had contacted me in the first place, to get the story from the source as it were.

Even if nothing more comes of this meeting it was a success in its own right for having brought together women, in enemy territory who felt isolated before.

My use of occupation language and mention of Anne Frank reflected my earlier visit to her Secret Annex hide-out. I include this related post of my visit to the Anne Frank museum as it says something about how I became the writer I am. How she imparted her observational powers and truth seeking perspective to me at so young an age.

My first stop in Amsterdam, and I mean straight from the train station upon my arrival, was to visit the Anne Frank House museum, for which I had a timed entry ticket for 10:30 a.m.. courtesy of my new friend, I hadn’t met yet, so I didn’t have to wake up at 2 a.m. to book because tickets go so quickly.

I was still in my traveling clothes. In fact, I had slept in them, having missed my connecting flight, which would have had me arriving the night before. I was able to rebook a 6:30 a.m. flight and sleep in the airport at Heathrow. Shouldn’t every traveler sleep in an airport at least once? Hah. No.

But that was the spirit in which I took it, and I shared a bench with another traveler who had done the same thing. My arrival at 8:30 a.m. gave me two hours to get my train ticket, find the right platform for the City Centre, find the Left Luggage place, make sure I had Wi-Fi, and ask for help. Which I did at least 5 times because I had never used my phone’s map ap to go anywhere before, being the analog map reader girl that I am.

People were happy to help, having not seen such an anachronistic traveler holding a tiny accordion-fold tourist map and asking for directions in some time, so much do we look to our phones now. I was glad to see the map had Anne Frank’s house illustrated on it, which told me how important my quest was in relation to this city. Just like the Colosseum is on the map for Rome. So it was with a sense of a miraculous act of faith that I had persevered and made it exactly in time to get in line with all the other pilgrims who were mostly Dutch and didn’t speak English.

At which point I remembered why Anne Frank had been such an important literary figure in my life. More even than I had realized. And not just because of her story. Her story was just the fact of her life during a monumentally tragic time in history.

It was much more personal than that. When I found Anne’s book in the school library, I was the same age as she was when she started the diary, so I felt an immediate simpatico and that I had found a friend. I was already keeping a diary, had done so from the time I was eight. At fourteen, I had abandoned the key-lock daily diary for a tiny notebook I called Notes On Life in an attempt to expand my mission as a writer (while simultaneously limiting expectations).

I was pleased that someone my age had also taken this on, but what she had done with it was far more than I had imagined. She introduced to me the idea that one’s feelings could be expressed in writing. This is not an easy concept for a child of the East, and the British weren’t all that much help in this department either. Stiff upper lip and all that.

Even more significant than I could have realized at the time was that she wrote the diary to an imaginary friend to whom she could confide everything. She had an audience in mind who was not going to judge her. It was the literary notion that someone cared and loved you unconditionally that, in turn, was a form of self love. She was also an optimist. One who imbued her sense of the future with hope that had not been erased even with all that was going on. She saw the Nazi regime as an aberration and had compassion for the goodness of the rest of mankind. Those feelings set a template for me of how to proceed in this Western world. I read her diary again when I was 16, which was when the Nazis got her. This second reading allowed me to see how much both Anne and I had matured. That with age would come more wisdom and reflection. More desires and a philosophy of life.

The museum requires that you walk through it with the audio tour. This is a way to insure that everyone moves at the same pace, proceeding through the account of the Nazi persecution with bits of documentary films; how this persecution affected Anne’s family and then onto the logistics of the building and how the Secret Annex was created behind a bookshelf. By the time you actually enter through that very bookshelf, you are living the story. I was fascinated by the space, the tiny-ness of it. The actual walls decorated with photos from newspapers and magazines.

There is no furniture, so the bathroom was more visceral with its decorated toilet and sink. Anne never described the toilet and must have taken for granted that it was decorated in the same blue and white as the Dutch did their crockery. That did give me a laugh. It was behind plexiglass, so I wasn’t able to look at the decorations. The kitchen counter was also original, so we were not allowed to touch it or the rusted drain. But the sink was there with no such prohibition. I approached it and placed both my hands on either side of its square porcelain body, feeling myself touching that which Anne had touched and the life she had lived. There was a mirror above the sink; I looked at myself in it and connected with her in that life.

Not one I, of course, wanted to have any part of, but it did remind me that I too had had to leave my own happy life that I thought was normal, when my parents saw fit to immigrate to the U.S. I realized, after I had toured Anne’s house, how alone I was in that endeavor. Anne helped me with that, helped me see how to make the best of it by keeping your own self intact. By telling the truth about your feelings and what you observed. Plus there was the scene where she relates how she and a friend had touched each other’s breasts. The scene that enlisted every homosexual reader of her diary into her story. The persecution story of her time and ours.

The diaries, too, were there. How tiny and finely drawn her handwriting was with no crossings out. (Even Dickens had crossed out words I remembered from having seen his original manuscript at the British Museum.) It takes presence and care to write like that.

I believe that keeping a diary was likely the key to us both maintaining our mental health. The museum also replicated the school created for Jewish children who were no longer permitted to attend school, and there, too, the point was to maintain cultural normalcy. (To maintain a meaningful culture at all would help as Gandhi implied.)

I exited through the gift shop, looking at everything, and buying a few visual momentos of Anne and the room she shared with her sister, talking to the cashier, a gay man who listened to me tell him how Anne had helped me when I was the same age. “Oh, you’re family,” he said as much to himself as to me. He asked where I was from and told me there was going to be a tour and it was going to be big, appearing in all the major cities, San Francisco included, so I should look out for it. “Really?”, I said in that drawn-out British way of acknowledgment that I used to say as a kid.

There were young butches present with iconic butch haircuts and traditional masculine clothes fighting the good fight in resisting the butch-to-trans-pipeline, actively holding the line for gender non-conforming adult human females; one writing a manifesto to this position on her FB page, and one in a butch/femme pairing so striking in their beauty together I had to introduce myself.

In my first interaction with the new executive director as she served me lunch, she complemented me on my outfit and commented that women should support each other in this way. This was indeed a shift from the old school feminism of flattening gender expression to a boring nothing. I noted that she was wearing make-up, which reminded me of a woman I met last year at camp who had made a point to wear make-up as a criticism of old school feminism. And now this Arabian/Italian beauty was the face of WoLF. Things were definitely shifting.

Plus, my first day outfit was a recognizable costume. I wore my Hogwarts school uniform with my new green Slytherin cape, so at least people could relate to this tribute to JK Rowling. I also learned who all the Harry Potter fans were and what their houses were. All were butch leaning. So was my outfit the next day. The camo pants, flannel shirt, rainbow hoody and a Looney Tunes tie, all items I had picked up at the local thrift store in town, along with a tiny vintage classroom chair, for I had forgotten mine.

Finally, on Friday, when she arrived, I had the opportunity to talk to Amy Sousa about gender expression, of which she, too, was an advocate with her arty fashion sense and wonderful earrings. She had done the best job of explaining that to be a gender abolitionist meant to abolish gender stereotypes and had nothing to do with theatrical dress-up and cosplay.

“Can I be a gender expressionist, then?” I asked her. She wholeheartedly affirmed this identity. Heh. I could own it, quote to myself that life was a stage, and give my full attention to the women I spoke to. For this would be the heart of my experience, collecting their stories so that I could best take them into the world as examples of the violation of women by men who insist on being women.

Every conversation a collaboration, as I shared with some, my own stories of violation and childhood trauma. It felt uncanny to have these stories recognized as such, so quickly did these women understand them. It allowed me to let down my guard some and open my heart to the experience. I don’t live in a world that sees this at all. I scrub the meta feelings from my writing so I don’t give my opponents any ammunition. It took me several days to come back and reassemble myself just to make basic decisions. Holding all these new friends in my heart, I spun their stories into readable form for my report. The prize of their traumas serving as evidence.

Somewhere far to the North at a private campground, some 60 women gathered together to speak freely among themselves. Nine of us from the Bay Area. Over the five days of this annual Rad Fem Summer Camp, we sat outside in temperatures ranging from the low 60s to low 70s, plus a day of rain, so we could hear from speakers on a variety of topics concerning women today internationally and domestically.

Hosted by the Women’s Liberation Front, an organization defending women’s bodily sovereignty and sex-based rights, it was a chance to reunite and hang out with women I only see online, as well as my dear friend and “support lawyer”, Ellie, who was now president of WoLF, having retired from her duties on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. We were also meeting our new executive director, Jasmin Faulk, whose book “The Last Sandstorm” chronicles her escape from Saudi Arabia. The first woman to escape the abusive system of veiling girls and women, basically to market them for breeding purposes. Her mother was Italian, so she had the advantage of being able to compare how the two nations treated women so differently. When I introduced myself, we immediately noted our shared dual cultural heritage as American immigrants. A rare occurrence in my life that lit me up.

For lesbians and bisexual women, it was also a chance to escape a Pride month that no longer offered activities for lesbians without the intrusion of lesbians with penises expecting us to date them. The L of the LBGTQ effectively silenced to center the T and Q. The Q, a catch-all category for anyone wanting to subvert heteronormativity through the veil of gender identity, i.e., a straight couple who have swapped their genders. Subverting such categories is the DNA of Queer Theory. This appropriation of the word queer obliterating the original reclaiming of this slur by the lesbian and gay community during the ’80s AIDs epidemic and the fierceness which birthed Queer Nation with its confrontational activism and die-ins. A controversial strategy at the time.

These spicy straights, as we call them, “queering heterosexuality,” are apparently also spared the need for birth control, as reported by a gay man doing an intake at a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. Such is the power of the mind to escape biological reality these days.

So we were grateful for a space far from this maddening crowd that allowed us to embrace solidarity with all women in this asymmetrical world of male power and domination. As we shared our stories, freely expressing our incredulousness, laughing a lot, eating together, rotating chores, and taking care of each other, we were also soaking up a brightness that would carry us high above the swirling dark energy of these insults to our biological reality and social standing. We would also learn new ways to combat it with words, frame it, fortify our resolve, and strengthen our spirits, knowing we had a sisterhood that had our backs.

No photos were to be taken with people in them, and photos of individuals had to be scrubbed of metadata. All to protect ourselves from opportunistic harassment should our opponents find us. Luckily, my iPhone does not carry a SIM card stateside, so it does not upload locations. (I use a flip phone to buffer my brain from too much connectedness while I’m out in the world.)

We began with a panel of four women who told their stories of cancellation. Women who had been doxxed (phone numbers and addresses made public), fired from their jobs, legally persecuted, or restricted in some way just for saying variations of men cannot be women. The youngest lost all her friends at once and was alone for two years. Ellie was threatened with a Title IX case by the very law students she was educating about Title IX, just because she said the name Dylan Mulvaney in a tone of disbelief when he was offered as an example of a woman suffering discrimination, and she had the audacity to ask for another example. Jasmin, too, had a story. One that sent her our way to serve our cause with us. She was also there serving us at every meal. I appreciated this gesture, which also gave me frequent opportunities to exchange a few words with her.

On Saturday at breakfast, one table over from me, Exulansic held out her phone so we could marvel at a video on X of our political enemy, Scott Weiner, being run out of Dolores Park, where he was walking to join the trans march. A mob led by a heterosexual man was following him, telling him he could no longer call himself Queer because he was terrible on Gaza, having stated his support for Israel as a Jew. The crowd grew louder and more menacing as he was told he did not belong there. He looked stressed, monitoring them, but staying quiet like a cornered animal. We had mixed feelings seeing this man bullied, one who had so championed the queering of society at the expense of women and girls. Now he was being silenced by a mob that thought they owned him. This Queer Trans movement, having commanded social power in the liberal sphere, now felt it could demand submission to every political position they deemed sacred.

I turned away, glad to be far from San Francisco, and continued to collect the stories of women I hadn’t met yet. So many carried stories of trauma typical for women — domestic violence, emotional abuse, rape, gaslighting, religious oppression — all from men. I asked how one recovers from such trauma; one doesn’t, a young woman told me, yet I saw strong women all around me, some angry and some simply determined not to be taken again or let others be taken in. This determination fueled our activism. I had just learned, too, that rape survivors experienced four times more PTSD than someone suffering from war trauma. This brought home to me the impact of this intimate personal violation.

I approached one young couple striking in their beauty and their butch/femme pairing. The butch partner told the story of her skateboarding competition being infiltrated by men under the guise of their woman identity. Men who hardly presented as women, she said. This sport was already so dominated by men; I felt a further outrage at them wanting to beat women in competition where they would so clearly have an advantage. It offended my sense of fairness. Where once the women were respected and thought cool, she told us, they were now regularly dog piled upon by men, trans or not, if they made any objection to this inclusion. This bullying is another arena of male domination, while those men who agreed with them would stay quietly in the background, only voicing their support privately.

I also met an attractive woman close to my age who had been married to a trans identified man much older than she had been at 22. We know these women by the name “trans widow” for the symbolic death of their husbands. Their stories were very similar. The man would come out gradually within the marriage, often after a child was born, when he felt the attention of his wife diverted by the new baby. They were very controlling to begin with, becoming more so as time progressed and their narcissism grew. These women confirmed for me that it was part of such men’s sexual arousal to see themselves as women. They were in love with themselves as women, obsessed with their female persona, dressing up and spending money to fuel the fantasy. Soon, the wives felt invisible as their husbands stopped relating to them as people. One said she was being observed as a template for female behavior and sexual response. My new friend agreed that this happened to her too, while her name was gone, as he would only call her mom once their child was born. He also blamed her for her unhappiness, saying it was her fault because she couldn’t accept these changes in him. When he suggested she go outside the marriage to “have her needs met”, this pushed her over the edge and landed her in hospital with a nervous breakdown. Only then could she begin to think of leaving. She was not the only trans widow at camp.

This emotional abuse by a family member was also shared by the moms who lived with the threat of rejection by their trans identified children, ever hoping their teenagers would emerge from the clutches of the cult, as they called it. To one woman raised in the Mormon “cult,” it clearly was a cult, just not with a charismatic leader. Her son, she told us, was introduced to the concept by characters in a book by a popular author who had been asked by his fans to create trans and non-binary characters like them. Those who knew the author groaned upon hearing this, so carefully did they try to screen what input their children absorbed. She spoke about how all these parents were being held hostage by these children, silenced and kept from joining our activism out of the hope that if they behaved, they wouldn’t lose their children. But they will anyway, she said, once they are grown, and thus she was reclaiming her voice. (The moms in our group, who are the most outspoken, have children who have already desisted.)

This self-absorption and aggressive insistence that women serve their female persona are greatly reflected in the men who confront us when we protest the invasion of women’s spaces by such men. The threat of violence is voiced in their TikTok videos as they preen and claim to be more glamorous than any woman. Their heterosexuality twisted into an identity they would kill to defend. Thus the “kill all TERFs” epithets. Their justifications for such threats were that we were the haters for misgendering them, for refusing to comply with their insistence that we validate their woman selves. This is not a live-and-let-live movement. It may not even be the sentiment of a majority of men who call themselves trans, but it certainly is the driving force. It was part of what Lierre Keith, the founder of WoLF, called male sexual sadism, reflected in the plundering of the planet and women for resources and services.

It was Lierre’s feeling that we would have to hit bottom with the pillaging and run out of surplus resources before we could rebuild. Hopefully, we will prevail. In the meantime, we could live well and heal together. The more miserable the weather, the more remote the location, the greater the sacrifice to carve out this space, the safer we felt. The quality of this freedom to talk freely, so seldom rewarded in the world at large, elevated our mood as the sun came out for our final days together.

When the idea of a gendered soul is boiled down like this, it is easier for adults to see how this is a construct. Showing how there are a ton of books directed at kids to teach this concept also drives home the point that children are being taught this concept to explain away the gender non-conformity that we once accepted in girls and despised in boys. (That part did need fixing.) It also felt good to remind people that kids need to be taught about boundaries.

I was gratified that one of my contacts, a woman in the Unitarian Church community, made the connection between how we once sought to transcend sexist stereotypes, but have reinvented that problem with a shiny new soul theory. I’m so old I forget that I now have to explain the feminism of the ‘70s.

I had also been waiting to get back at my gay, queer theory friend who had immediately jumped to the accusation that I was a gender essentialist way back at the beginning. This part did elicit, from a high school heterosexual male friend of the same vintage, a satisfying exclamation of how ridiculous such a phrase was.

This year all the books in the Pride display in the Children’s Department, at the Redwood City main library, are about teaching trans identities, save for one picture book about gay grandpa. Two novels with trans protagonists, one book about third gender cross-dressing traditions around the world (but not Thailand), and picture books teaching children what is gender identity.

I sat down with one book aimed at 7-10 year olds. It follows the usual argument given to adults. There is your sex “assigned at birth” based on your genitals, but some people do not fit into either male or female categories. (This refers to the 0.005% with a development of sex disorder, a DSD, often known as intersex; a category used politically to insist that biological sex doesn’t fit a binary. Yet these conditions are still either XX or XY with interesting variations of one or the other, not a third sex.)

Then there is gender which is compared to having someone else pick your favorite color. This is explained by sexist tropes about how what you like to play with is associated with your sex. Never mind that these assumptions are so antiquated they are more a throwback to the ‘50s, but let’s teach them to kids anyway so we can introduce them to “gender identity”. Ta Da!! Gender identity in all its linguistic many labeled glory is then presented as the modern portal to freedom.

So rather than tell kids that they can wear whatever they want and play with whatever toys they want so they can grow up to be full human beings, they must now choose and adopt an identity permanently so they can be allowed to escape such sexist stereotypes. There are scores of these books aimed at very young children for “enlightened” parents to give to their children. Otherwise how would children know that they have gendered souls?

When sex realists said that women are adult human females, a category that does not include men, supporters of gender identity called us biological essentialists or genital essentialist, because we refused to give up our sex based category to men. That having two sexes is a condition of humans and other mammals by which we reproduce our young. That, because of this, female bodies are compromised by this function of reproduction that makes us vulnerable to men. That is why we, as a society, have implemented safe guarding measures for women and children. That is why we teach children to have boundaries and not let adults touch them in ways that violate those boundaries. (There are books for children for this same age group teaching this important concept of boundaries, but there is no month, day or week to celebrate boundaries possibly because we post-feminists are loath to admit that this is still a factor of our society.)

The premise of gender identity is that sex stereotypes are real so therefore, when you follow the stereotypes of one sex or the other you have a gender identity whether it conforms to your biological sex or not. If not then the thing to do is to change your life to match the sex that stereotype is based on. This includes demanding that society refer to you as the opposite sex and pay for body modifications so that you can feel your body matches the stereotypes you have chosen.

Remember that in the ‘70s feminists tried to transcend sex stereotypes by giving dolls to boys and trucks to girls. Today we are asked to affirm a gender identity by cutting off the breasts of girls, and giving breasts to boys, so they can better express their gender identity. (This also keeps the medical industrial complex solvent so that it can go on to offer humanity other “improvements” to the body under the umbrella of transhumanism.)

So you get to decide, dear reader, if such stereotyping is sexist or the basis of a civil rights movement? Should we transcend sex stereotypes by saying that boys and girls can play with whatever toys they want and wear whatever they want, or should we affirm their gender identity with amazing feats of gender medicine and social engineering?

Meanwhile the adult Pride display gets all the gay and lesbian books. This is perhaps a telling step into separating the LGB from the genderists, the TQ+++. But we'll still have a parade for gay grandpa, you antiquated relic of genital essentialism with your "same sex" love.

I did have to note later that there was one book, “Alex Wise vs The End of the World” in the kids section that had a gay protagonist, but he was Black so was still part of the identity tribe that conflates LGBTQ with race.

I didn’t lose all my friends as many gender critical activists did, but they don’t speak to me as easily as they once did. They sit on the sidelines and watch me make point after point that the T is breaking the social contract in oh so many ways, and how our movement is being coopted, and this will take us down with them. Two have tried to publicly accuse me of going down a right-wing rabbit hole. I very politely thanked them for their concern for my mental health and carried on. Some now agree with me that I was right about sports and prisons, but they believe that the greater error is in siding with the Right, who are intent on stripping women of their rights. None of them understands how California law has already stripped women of their sex-based rights; there not being a single lawyer among them.

So, when I arrived at my own suburban library to support a presentation critiquing transgenderism, it was with a similar bittersweet irony that I laid eyes on the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. These witty characters had always been the most striking symbols of our resistance to religious indoctrination that we would burn in hell for the sin of homosexuality. They had been the community organizers getting the word out when AIDs was taking out so many gay men. They had organized block parties, raised money, and generally been good to us. Whoever had brought them to Redwood City for this protest had connections and clout.

I came dressed in a new bowtie and natty hat, carrying books to return to the library as though I was just a patron unaware of what was going on. They had handouts and offered me one. I circulated among them, taking pictures. I saw my TERF comrades standing at the edges looking rather serious. I did not realize until later that drama had already unfolded with an altercation with Beth Bourne, resulting in police being called. Beth was also part of the panel presenting.

And though I would not choose the confrontational style she has chosen, I admire her courage, and remind myself that the suffragettes also had different conflicting strategies among themselves. Each of these strategies had a different audience, and who could say what worked or was most effective at any given time. What we do get from her strategy is further information on how nonsensical the opposition is, and that was useful to me. She did not tell me what happened when I greeted her and took her photo.

I moved along to introduce myself to Amy Sousa, who had initiated the idea of having a library event as she was visiting relatives in the area. Erin Friday, who lives here booked the room. Amy very sweetly remembered me from when we met in 2023 at another panel discussion when I wasn’t anybody and was just about to come out with my book The Unexpected Penis, which I had passed out to all the panelists, and that got me an interview with Benjamin Boyce.

Now, after so many years as the embedded reporter of our group, I do have a voice and am not averse to challenging my own comrades on points I feel strongly about. I believe this keeps us healthy as a group while I negotiate this tricky territory and present to my normie contacts a unified front as a movement.

On Sunday, four sex realists presented a panel at Redwood City library titled The Transgender Assault on Women and Girls. This admittedly rather inflammatory title did not go unnoticed, so when a letter was published in the Daily Journal objecting to this event being held at a public library, a protest was organized by FoodNotBombs that brought out the finest of the Queer community, including the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

We studied their online preparations and were amused to see how they characterized us as “TERFs who are known for their verbal harassment, including sexual harassment towards trans women and children”. Hard to imagine what kind of sexual harassment they could possibly mean. They are apt to portray any engagement at all as harassment.

Women Are Real members have a policy of remaining polite and calm while avoiding verbal confrontation when we protest. Sex realist, Beth Bourne, who operates as a solo protester apart from our group, has a different strategy that includes verbal confrontation in the form of innocent questions. She approached the group of trans activists to ask those holding signs that said Trans Women are Women, what makes a trans woman a woman? They refused to answer the question and instead asked her why she didn’t consider a trans woman to be a woman. When she said that every cell in their body was male and that they had a penis, a man in a skirt rushed at her and threw what appeared to be the contents of a compost bucket at her.

She shouted that this was assault and someone please call the police. Then another man asked her if she was going to sue, and then accused her of assaulting them. When she asked how she was assaulting them when all she had was a sign, he said that she was stirring up hate with her hetero ideas. This struck me much like the words of a religious fanatic responding to an atheist. Stating the truth to this community is so heretical that attacking someone with a bucket of garbage can be justified as self-defense.

Meanwhile, they were giving out handouts that warned that speakers on the panel were associated with far-right, anti-abortion, and anti-LGBTQ+ Christian conservative groups. Anyone who dares to push back on the trans demands is characterized as associated with the far right. Only a few bothered to come to hear what we had to say.

The most heretical statement made was by Amy Sousa, a psychologist, who opened her presentation with the statement that men are only women in language. This is how the trans community can claim that we are trying to deny their existence because we refuse to go along with their language. She then talked about child development and how important it was that the child can learn to trust their eyes and ears and make declarative sentences about what they see. When an adult tells them that what they see is not a man in a dress, but a woman, this teaches the child not to trust in what they see or feel. This becomes a safeguarding concern.

Add to that the idea that humans can change sex, and the child is then being given false information, a false belief that leads them into harm’s way with gender affirming medicalization. It is for this reason alone that parents are angry. It also makes me angry that for years, the gay community promised that we would not even talk to children, in an attempt to dispel the notion that gay men were pedophiles. Now here we are insisting that children learn about every possible iteration of queer identities, and then are encouraged to take up a trans identity unbeknownst to their parents. We promised that we were upright members of society who just wanted to be left alone, so we would win gay marriage. Now extremists are usurping our goodwill and breaking that promise. Is it any wonder that support for the gay community is down?

In the prison presentation of our event, our panelist spoke about all the men who had applied to be housed in women’s prisons. If all of the applicants were granted entry, then their numbers would be 20% of the entire population of women in prisons, she pointed out. She also made note of those men who returned to the men’s prisons. One such man said he could not abide the level of male harassment of women that he was witnessing. While an inmate who was a woman who identified as a man noted that the new prison law had granted a huge loophole to sexual predators.

She also reminded us that we had already tried to pass a law preventing sex offenders from entering the women’s prisons, but were bounced out of committee for being anti-trans. Given that the Democrats have decided that this is the hill they will die on, we’d be happy to make that happen. We lifelong Democrats laughed among ourselves at how many Republicans got our vote in the last election.

We thanked the library for allowing us to give this presentation with such grace, as we gained a few more citizens to our side and made it just a little bit safer to speak up about the concerns we raised, especially about children’s safety. That children take things literally and that lying to them about the sexed body has serious consequences. With Sonia Shaw running for Superintendent of Education heading to the November ballot on the strength of parental rights to be informed should their child request a name and pronoun change at school, political momentum is building in this arena.

I began my library campaign last year by filing a complaint about a children’s book that rewrites gay history by depicting drag queens Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as transgender girls who started the Stonewall riots. We have repeatedly debunked this claim with clips of Johnson saying he is a man. For the record, it was Stormé DeLavere, a butch lesbian, a Black woman, who started the Stonewall riot.

As we were leaving, the protestors serenaded us with songs appropriated from the Civil Rights movement, We Shall Overcome and This Little Light of Mine. Because of course they would. It brought back memories of the Moral Majority singing hymns at gay liberation movements, hoping to what? Demoralize us? How things do come around.

Video of Beth’s assault and a conversation about bathrooms with a non-binary man:

Amy Sousa’s video pointing out the DARVO aspect of the assault on Beth.

Report from the opposition: https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/articles/mom-4-liberty-gets-salad-tossed-at-her-face-at-redwood-city-anti-trans-event/

Our presentation can be watched here.

The sheer number running for governor made me laugh. There was something so Wild West about it. That so many thought they had a chance. It seemed to show how much people saw that needed to be fixed. How many were fed up with a state that had run on a progressive high for so long? They could see the results of the failed policies that did not live up to these progressive ideas. Why was homelessness still rampant, and drug use on the street so prevalent? Why were schools so interested in students’ sex lives and identity that they had to be surveyed about it on a regular basis? The fires in LA had also stirred things up. Our watch party gave me a chance to point out that our issue had become a pivotal point in our state politics.

My non-TERF friends and environmental group leaders were adamant that we had to stay blue in order to resist Trump policies and protect the environment, but as I saw it, California was not the nation. It was an authoritarian state in itself. One that no longer heard a diversity of viewpoints on key issues. I did not believe that a Republican governor would necessarily align with Trump policies or facilitate such drastic ICE-style tactics on immigration. With a Republican candidate for governor outpacing a second Democrat for the November election, it was certainly an exciting election season. We could celebrate, at least, that the sex realist candidate for Superintendent of Public Education was well ahead of the pack. And yes, she was a Republican. One that parents’ groups had brought forth. It showed how organized we had become. We could not count on Democrats to come to their senses, but we could raise up a new political movement to fight for the sex-based rights of women and children being unhinged from the reality of their sexed bodies.

The election night watch party at the headquarters of Marie Hurabiell was spirited and lively. Running against Scott Weiner and Connie Chan, she came late to the race for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress, but said she was just getting started and will run again in two years. She ran on a platform of affordable housing, affordable healthcare, AI security, and immigration reform to increase eligibility for naturalization. She was also the only Democrat to speak in favor of women’s sex based rights, and for that the Democratic Party wanted to make sure she was “primaried”, that she would not be advanced to the November election.

The League of Women Voters refused to allow her in their candidate forum debate, claiming that she did not have a campaign headquarters, a requirement that was not met by the two frontrunners. One of our members spent her days sitting in the campaign headquarters so no one could say she didn’t have one. The Democratic Party cannot afford to have a candidate who speaks out for sex-based rights because they are trying hard to make this a right-wing issue.

We celebrate that the issue of boys in girls’ sports has become a significant point; every candidate running for governor was asked their opinion on the matter. None of the Democrats veered from the party line. Tom Steyer flat-out implied that girls needed to make room for boys identifying as girls because otherwise they would commit suicide. This is an irresponsible narrative; one that even the trans lawyer, in a recent Supreme Court ruling, had to admit was not true. Girls are being sacrificed to the trans ideology.

Other Democratic ideologies have also impacted this race. My turning point came in the last election when the public had the opportunity to vote in Prop 36, which made repeated theft a felony where it had been a misdemeanor before. It shocked me to see entire aisles of commodities at the Safeway in San Francisco in locked boxes. Why were we a society that made theft ok?

Democrats might well ask themselves why the race for governor is so close with a Republican vying for first place.

Local papers sent two journalists to cover the event. One was very interested in the message of my hat, and we had to explain what the word TERF meant. The acronym stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, a phrase that feminists created to distinguish between feminists who wanted to preserve the category of woman for women only and those who wanted to open it up to men identifying as women. Our preferred definition is Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools.

This journalist also startled us in her refusal to cover the issue of rape, including women in a California prison having been raped by a dangerous career criminal. We showed her a picture of the man, and she agreed that she would not want to be incarcerated with him. She stated a personal aversion to stories about rape. Personal or not, the refusal of the press to cover the prison story is part of the coverup. Part of the refusal to admit that this is a result of Scott Weiner’s legislation to “protect the dignity” of transgender identified men, whereas before each male applicant was reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Weiner refuses to look at how his policies have impacted women, including the trafficking of girls in the sex trade. We will be glad to see him gone from the state, and wonder how he will fare in D.C.

In that last line, I sorely wanted to describe Scott Weiner’s campaign as a kink centered shit show coming to DC, but I restrained myself hoping to maintain my polite, reasonable style and show I was not resorting to insulting my political enemies. Ah the sacrifices I make.

Part One

In the ‘80s, lesbians in the professions wore blazers. Professions that required that they be deeply, deeply closeted. Doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, anything that made good money. At the time, I had no such ambitions to be a professional because of the closet, including a teacher, which might have been my choice. I so disdained these closeted professionals that I would not be caught dead in such a blazer. Sometimes blazers were in style, and then they weren’t, but they still wore them. Academics were so wedded to the professional blazer that straight women wore them, too.

(There’s a scene in the Daryl Hannah mermaid movie Splash, from 1984, where she is wearing a man’s suit jacket and pants, having emerged naked from the sea, rescued by a man, and has ventured into a dress shop to buy some clothes. The shop clerk takes one look at her and informs her that that outfit was way out of style. One remembers these things as a young lesbian. It both affirmed that a woman could wear a suit at some designated time and that, unlike for a man, it would also be subjected to the whims of style.

Lesbians also cropped their hair as they still do, but I kept mine long (because it made me look more Asian and one has to decide about this identity thing here in the U.S.). 

Having hated the blazer so much for so much of my life, I decided I should give it a go. After all, this was my year of transformation according to my Tarot reading for the year. 

Blazers were in style right now, or maybe on their way out, which may be why I was able to get this one so cheaply ($14.99 down from $69.99). It has a nifty lining of licensed DC characters that includes Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn responding to the Bat Signal. This gives this office wear a decidedly subversive flair, which appealed to those who shop at this costume site. I chose it for its tweedy professional look.

Lesbian blazers were worn with turtlenecks and neutral necklines of silky blouses if deep in the closet. With button-up shirts if not so much. When I got mine, I wore it on my weekly visit to my elder lesbians, over my usual clothes, to ask them what they thought. They approved it. One suggested I wear it with an orange turtleneck. (Orange is not my color per my color chart, which I had done along with my mother back in the day.) The other thought it was nice-looking and professional. Having verified that my memory was indeed accurate, I decided to keep it. But I could not bring myself to wear it as prescribed with a simple black blouse of neutral neckline; it was such a closeted symbol of so much fear. So I put on my button-up shirt and tie to dress it up a bit. This made me feel so much better that I decided to test it out in the suburban world of my environ. 

I was scheduled to take my car in for new tires. The employees at Firestone are mostly working-class Hispanic men, and I usually go there wearing my working-class black Dickies Eisenhower jacket. There happened to be both a man and a woman behind the counter. It was the woman who smiled at me broadly, as if she knew I was a lesbian and a person who needed help as opposed to a peer. She came to wait on me in such a friendly way that I felt I could ask how long it would take and not be seen as too demanding. 

I went to the library. The closest one was closed, so I got on a bus and headed for the Atherton library. As I walked from the bus stop, I could read people’s reactions. The two working-class men on a job (one Hispanic, one white) smiled at me knowingly. They clearly clocked me as a lesbian. When I walked down a quiet Atherton street, a white woman walking her Labrador said “good morning” so pleasantly I wondered what she was virtue signaling her support for? A lesbian or a trans identity? All gender non-conformity seems to need a label these days.

The library was full of Asians and some story hour tots with their moms. Atherton is not necessarily full of Asians. It is the wealthiest town in California and has a tiny library because mansions have their own libraries. The patrons must have come for the newly remodeled comfort and private glassed-in work rooms. No one paid me any attention at all. I looked like a working professional. So I settled into a comfy chair with my laptop. Then scoped out the bathroom, which had no trans signage, just men’s and women’s. Though the design did incorporate the new doors and not stalls. So they could go either way with the gender neutral thing if mandated.

When I left, it was raining, and there was no shelter at the bus stop, because who uses the bus in Atherton? Just the help. So I got wet. The bus was full of the usual brown people; no professionals. Two men from out of town were on board. One asked me where my umbrella was. I must not be from around here, he said. He was not flirting, just teasing. The weather forecast messed me up, I said. The bus stopped, and he watched as another Asian woman got on the bus who did have her umbrella. Mine was stowed in my car. I so wished I had thought to bring it, but I didn’t usually use an umbrella. I liked rain gear; an umbrella wasn’t action-oriented. The polyester of my blazer was wicking away the moisture I noticed, so that was a feature. My new friend then asked me how long it would take to get to Oakland on BART. I told him, enjoying this gateway into public conversation.

I was liking this outfit. It seemed to give people a handle on who I might be in the world. The blazer also had pockets so I could stow my reading glasses and phone, always a plus. I could also wear it with the new vests I had acquired and tailored to fit, for they were men’s vests. It gave the blazer that suit look. I had ordered two vests; one in green for the house of Slytherin and one in blue for the Ravenclaws from the same costume site.

Part Two

The blazer, vest, and tie became my new lesbian protest outfit. It was dressier than my usual working-class lesbian wear, and dressing up made people pay attention and was a better fit for the conferences we were protesting, one for the endocrinologist and one for the psychiatrists, two key players in the medicalization of gender confused children. Making lesbians visible in our group had been our strategy from the beginning.

“I want all the lesbians to look like lesbians,” instructed Erin Friday, our lawyer in chief, that first year, as she organized a press conference at the state capital prior to our filing through the legislature to give our testimony in support of a bill she wrote to stop sex changes for children.

I knew perfectly well what she meant by looking like a lesbian, but I couldn’t resist sassing her back about how to look like a lesbian.

“Do I have to wear my Tomboy rainbow underwear over my pants?” I asked.

“I’d pay to see that,” she sassed right back on our WhatsApp chat.

She gave me a big hug when I showed up wearing my white button-down shirt, tucked into my grey Dickies pants and a black utility vest topped off by my cadet-style cap. She and the other moms of her group “Our Duty” were all wearing professional-looking dresses, some with blazers even, but with pointy-toe stiletto heels. This was going to be a very interesting and unexpected intersection of political sentiments that possibly only women could display, I thought. Erin Friday would go to bat to get boys out of girls’ sports, bring back single sex toilets, and force the law to define male and female. I was all in for the duration.

We wanted to show that not all members of the LGBTQ alphabet mafia were happy with these new legislations of gender identity. That lesbians were most impacted by gender ideology. Or as I like to tell reporters, lesbians were now faced with lesbians with penises. I delivered this line with a smile and would wait as they put it together. That men identifying as women did not get the operation the public assumed made them a woman, and that they were heterosexual, not some newly recognized variation of gay. 

So of course these men, emphasis on the word men, wanted to impose their “girl dick” on lesbians, which was how they liked to call their penis, in this context, as in “suck on my girl dick” in response to any objections we might verbalize that the category of women was meant to exclude dicks. This was why we needed to break apart the force-teaming of the LGBTQ+ that was silencing the L in order to allow these lesbians with penises into our dating app, women-only events, and whatever lesbian spaces we still had left. The premise of the LGBTQ was that we all had to hang together or we would all be persecuted, as in the much-borrowed quoting of the poem First They Came for the communists.

Meanwhile, our own advocacy group was letting men get rapey with the lesbians (and women in prisons). It was the cruelest irony in gay history. Last year we gave our strategy a name, “lesbians to the front”.

The moment I realized lesbians, the female version, were being erased, I made a point of using the word lesbian instead of gay, which made it seem less like I was sexualized into a porn category. Other lesbians, in our group, had also avoided using the word lesbian, but came to see that we had to embrace it to make our point that we were not the G in the LGBT; we were the silent L, and we weren’t going to remain silent. 

As I stepped up my gender bending lesbian attire, I was confronted by second-wave lesbian feminists within new organizations set up to combat gender ideology. They were using their old tools and ideas of gender equality, wearing their androgynous gender neutral clothing that was the lesbian uniform when I came out in the 70s. Once again, they gave lectures about how fashion was a tool of patriarchy used to oppress women. Ties, these lesbian feminists told me, were symbols of power displayed by the patriarchy. They clearly didn’t go to Hogwarts. I now had ties of both Slytherin and Gryffindor houses. I was sorted into Gryffindor in the early years of the Harry Potter books at a midnight bookstore release party, but when the young actors who played the lead roles came out against JK Rowling, and the one Slytherin character stood by her, I got myself resorted as a Slytherin on the Harry Potter website. Lesbian feminists clearly lived in a bubble devoid of popular culture, though they were aware of JK Rowling as she had come out guns blazing in defense of women’s single sex spaces and rights.

It took me a while to realize their strategy. They were the gender abolitionists, I learned, as opposed to the merely gender critical, bent on removing gender, eager to equate any form of performative femininity as a response to patriarchal oppression of women as well as feminine gay boys. They also claimed that only the most patriarchal societies produced trans identified men wanting to be women. Trans activists liked to claim that indigenous tribes had transgender people, which was their proof that they had been around forever. Feminists were thus claiming that transgenderism was a byproduct of patriarchy, and this was not the case for women who cross-dressed in order to access male privileges. What if we just liked tailored menswear, I wanted to know? In our group, we had both lesbians and heterosexual women who favored menswear, baseball caps, and cowboy hats.

It was hard to figure out what was even meant by abolishing gender; how was this a practical strategy? I had no idea that they were even saying this until a man on Twitter doggedly insisted that feminists had brought on the trans movement via butch lesbians. He had picked on me because of a video Women Are Real had posted. I was wearing a bowtie (pink) with my white shirt, and in my testimony at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission public hearing, I had recounted that when the T was added to the LGBTQ in 1995, we thought we knew what we were agreeing to because, after all, we were all on the transvestite side of straight, especially butch lesbians. No defense would spring me of his accusation. He pursued me for five days on this topic.

As proof of his thesis, he showed me a podcast in which two 70’s-era lesbians claimed that the butch lesbian was a precursor to the trans movement, and here I was representing present-day transvestism as a lesbian and talking about it as part of our past. As this was a fairly recent podcast, not some document from the ‘70s, I was furious with these lesbian feminists for setting me up in this way. I wasn’t there to defend feminism, but I felt I had to as a woman. Why should I even bother when these feminists were rejecting an entire population of masculine-presenting women, many of whom were dedicated to the cause?

Our San Francisco group has been regularly recognized for our effectiveness. One of our founders called herself a Big Lesbian, since the term butch carried so much baggage now. She characterized herself as dressing like a dude, which was her preference as a lesbian and how this created the potential of being mistaken for a man in the women’s locker room now that women were having to look out for men coming in.

We were pushing back against the trans capture that gender non-conformity came under the umbrella of transgender. How could we defend gender non-conforming children if we refused to support gender non-conforming adults? These gender abolitionists were clearly not equipped to negotiate the territory.

This man thought he had me. He was implying that by claiming a butch identity, I was personally responsible for launching the trans movement, when my point was no matter how gender non-conforming I was, I still hadn’t changed sex. That was the point that JK Rowling made in her “dress however you please” tweet speech. My creativity was in my sartorial communication style. I wasn’t alone in using this strategy. One of my comrades had dyed part of her hair purple in a very short hairstyle so no one, no journalists, could characterize her as right-wing. This worked for us who were on the street protesting. We often used costume along with the lesbians-to-the-front presentation in our messaging. Fashion is a female tool at our disposal. The rejection of fashion has discouraged many a young woman from joining the feminist cause; one mother of a teen girl told me at our Rad-Fem summer camp. I bought a few more ties to add to my collection. 

These gender abolitionists, who didn’t have a shred of fashion sense, thought they were exemplifying equality by wearing gender neutral clothing. They could share a sartorial closet with Judith Butler and call themselves non-binary for all anyone could tell. I did not believe their strategy to be effective. Humans are born naked. The impetus to clothe ourselves is a necessity. Decorating the self in imitation of the fancy plumage of animals to signal sexual availability is a mammalian pursuit as well. There is no getting out of this game. I have argued with feminists, who thought they were escaping performing femininity, that the moment they put on clothes, they were delivering a gendered message because of their sex, the way clothes fit their body. They could stay in their ideological bubbles for all I cared. I just wanted them to stay out of mine.

I also had the benefit of sociological comparison, from a very young age, immersed as I was in two very different cultures, each teaching their young entirely different belief systems. I understood how much socialization had to be taught and how very little of human behavior was actually innate. This was why I was so motivated to find out what happened when children were suddenly being allowed to develop a sex-denying persona based on nothing but gender stereotypes.

As I saw how eager people were to embrace this new concept of trans children, I realized how little the public understood child developmental psychology. 

I also struggled with some of the framing of psychology. I remember almost to the day when the American Psychiatric Association dropped their diagnosis of homosexuality as a sociopathic condition, because my mother felt she had to tell me, as if she already knew I was gay in 8th grade. 

Why did certain human behavior like homosexuality even have to have a diagnosis? I wondered. In my search for answers, I came to understand that the DSM was as much a political tool as a diagnostic guide, as well as a reflection of cultural mores. How change was made by those within the APA who were most passionate about a diagnostic condition, while the chain of trust among professionals insured that all the others in the industry followed along. 

This was particularly so in today’s climate of U.S. identity politics. The UK doctor who came to talk to us said as much. He described the conference as a very corporate and pharmaceutical-driven enterprise dispensing information that they all were supposed to lap right up and implement without discussion. In the UK, professionals gathered to discuss the latest findings, and encouraged a diversity of opinion, he added.

I appreciated the willingness of these professionals to speak to us as equals, and felt more positive about our event than I had with the endocrinologists. It also gave me the perfect platform to talk about how trans-activist extremists led the organization to meet their agenda with each new version of the DSM. 

I was gratified to see in the response to my report that one of my non-TERF contacts, who had very young children, had thanked me for my narrative of information. I was encouraged that this trans grooming of children was now catching the attention of parents in the suburbs.

Sex realists showed up at Moscone Center at 7:15 a.m. Saturday, in order to greet psychiatrists coming to their conference. They turned out to be more willing to talk to us than the endocrinologists. They do, after all, make their living talking to people, while the endocrinologists are more lowly technicians who don't make much money unless they are dispensing the chemical treatments of gender medicine, one doctor from the UK told me and my sign partner.

Our group passed out 500 fliers in the space of half an hour. This was the American Psychiatric Association conference, so we felt triumphant. Some doctors even came out to talk to us after reading our flier, which spoke of our concerns with pediatric gender medicine. Most seemed to agree especially if older.

The APA brings us the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Trans activists within have worked tirelessly to move the needle of their diagnosis from a mental disorder to a disability, to an incongruence with societal expectations.

What was first described as transsexualism, in the 40s, made a distinction between gender non-conformity and homosexuality. Homosexuality was entered into the DSM as a sociopathic personality disturbance in 1952 and then removed from the DSM II in 1973 under pressure from homosexual psychiatrists. Trans activists do not want to take this path because their hormone treatments rely on a diagnosis. They want to preserve access to the diagnostic code that allows insurance to cover treatments.

In the 80s, the term transsexualism entered the DSM III. By then, transsexualism had been divided into two categories, gay and fetishistic heterosexual. The social stigma was severe, so the DSM IV brought us “gender identity disorder in adults and adolescence”. The activists still weren’t happy with the disorder part, so in 2013 the DSM V gave us “gender dysphoria” plus the additional entry of “gender dysphoria in children”.

It would not be far-fetched to say that trans activists created the trans child in the hopes of claiming that gender non-conformity in children was innate transsexualism and thus an innate human condition. Sex realists would say that fetishistic transsexualism is paired with the emergence of sexuality and is not an innate human condition present in children who are gender non-conforming and are likely gay or just tomboys. Thus, our most prevalent protest sign is “Stop transing gay kids”.

This seemed to speak to not only our target audience, but gay men walking through the neighborhood. One came to tell us it was about time. Another wanted to have a selfie taken with Lauren, our most butch-presenting lesbian, holding this sign. She flew in as a representative of the LGB Courage Coalition that made the pink signs.

We timed our presence to coincide with lectures by Jack Turbin, a San Francisco doctor pushing trans medicine as a political feature of trans activism. However, at noon we were confronted with a large noisy group, who had a panel truck and a float, who had an even bigger bone to pick with psychiatrists. These were the Scientologists. While they would have wholeheartedly embraced our cause, we did not want to be associated with their message that all pharmaceutical tools of mental health practices should be abolished altogether. So we packed up and went to lunch.

On Sunday, one of our members hosted a brunch for our out of state activists and a conference attendee who was our mole, a young woman who had begun her training just as the industry was teaching that all humans are possessed of a gender essence. This blatant pushing of a belief not based in science made me so mad I jumped up to punch someone. One of my mates offered to take the blow, which was so funny I just put my arm around her and squeezed her affectionately.

I sat back down to further query our mole. She described to me what struck her as most unprofessional. At a panel of transgender psychiatrists, both male and female, they were all crying. What about? I asked. They were distressed by what they perceived as the coming trans genocide and felt the need to instruct their trans patients in how to prepare for being picked up off the street and sent to concentration camps, and how pharmacists were helping them make sure to have a three-month supply of hormones. Plus, one female-to-male transsexual was crying because she feared her hormones weren’t working anymore.

This scenario was so outrageous in fear-mongering that I got up and sat down next to the nearest Jewish person to ask her what she thought of this blatant appropriation of a WWII script. She just shrugged; she was used to it as the mom of a son who has adopted a female persona.

The mole who lived in New York City also told us that her seven-year-old son had nine trans identified classmates and a few furries at his school. Furries usual identify themselves as cats. A discussion ensued as to whether one should go all the way and treat them as cats or pull back and treat it as nonsense. After all, going all in might make the point quicker.

All these thoughts were overtaxing my brain and making me hungry just as the frittata was served, thanks to our host. I had already had a bagel with all the trimmings. I was so grateful for such a lively and engaged group of mates to share in this brain exploding existential exercise.

Meanwhile, the other half of the group was busy campaigning for the one Democrat sex realist willing to go head to head with Weiner for Nancy Pelosi’s seat. We endorse Marie Hurabiell for all you San Francisco voters in District 11.

*Report from our mole describing the panel she witnessed.

That I also had tales to tell about facing these medical professionals in person, as well as random strangers in this very pro-trans city, would, I hoped, beckon them to read my report. The photograph of cross-dressing men yelling at us, with me wearing a necktie to boot, would peak interest. What were these men saying to us?

For me, there was always something exhilarating about putting myself out on the street in such a manner that made me smile from ear to ear. The experience fully engaged all my senses, kept me on my feet intellectually and physically, which left little room for any other thoughts. Why worry about the future when you could get killed today? Hah.

Also special to these events was the chance to hang out with similarly motivated women. People I could get real with, and share stories with across social boundaries that had kept us in different spheres of the world most of our lives. Especially heterosexual married moms with their ROGD children. We were coming at the perils of adolescence from different ends of the story, as it were. So standing next to each other on a sidewalk holding signs for hours at a time gave us a shared space to tell our stories.

I was shadowed by my past in the very city I had spent time marching down Market Street by the age of 21, with a mother equally stumped by my choices to be so out. Yet now we were on the same side somehow, facing this quagmire of the threat of medicalization of both gay and heterosexual young people. A threat no one could have foretold, but that I was getting to tell my own community.

The Pediatric Endocrine Society conference was in town at the Marriott this weekend so of course we had to give them a special welcome. Our sister group, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG), made up special signs just for them. The messages directly spoke to these doctors, while passers by could also react to them as they tried to figure out what “side” we were on.

This is the branch of medicine that brought us the off-label use of puberty blockers to pause the onset of puberty in gender confused children so they could decide whether they were a boy or a girl before they ruined their bodies for passing as the opposite sex by going through the “wrong” puberty. It was supposed to be reversible, but it isn’t. It was supposed to give children a chance to decide, but instead, it stopped their brain development, their ability to make such a decision, by experiencing puberty and the emergence of sexuality.

Not to mention the psychological development that allows a child to form a mature, critical-thinking, problem-solving brain and thus an identity of any sort. It didn’t give them “time”. It teed them up for believing they were the opposite sex and that they should go on to cross-sex hormones.

Pediatric endocrinologists do good work in treating diabetes, adrenal gland disorders, thyroid disease, et al, but those who specialize in transgender health are concerned, not with addressing an endocrine problem, but with providing a consumer-driven product, one step beyond plastic surgery. That of forcing the body to produce the secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex.

Their special interest transgender group is concerned chiefly with “educating” their peers and the public as fast as possible about how happy they make their patients before the bans against applying this treatment to children rob them of this opportunity. The sterilization that occurs when puberty blockers are made permanent with cross sex hormones might well classify their practice as a form of eugenics.

Seven of us showed up the first morning to catch them as they registered. We passed out our postcards asking if people would like information and learn what this was all about.

The foot traffic brought us nurses from another conference down the street. One stopped to tell us that she was a surgery nurse, and what she saw she did not want to see again. She did not elaborate on what can happen when the delicate tissues of the genitals are cut up. We had read about the complications and failure rate. Another nurse stopped by and told us these trans surgeries were truly, truly horrible, and how disgusted she was when she found out that a double mastectomy that she helped with was a needless one.

A European man, attending another conference, stopped to tell Jenny how his daughter had been captured by trans ideation and announced that she was a boy, but they did not confirm this identity, and eventually she moved on and is perfectly well adjusted and happy now. But he also knew other parents who had affirmed this trans identity, and all of them were now transed.

We turned to inform those in traffic as well, and a blue-haired youth yelled at us that we were transphobic. The comedic highlight of the day was having two cross-dressing men with boobs walk up to me and Pat and inform us that we were out here because our husbands had left us because we were so ugly!

“Husbands,” said Pat, turning to me. “Did you hear that? I had a husband.”

“We’re lesbians,” I informed the men and got an even more choice response.

“Well, that’s because you want dicks,” said the one returning to address us again. I laughed so hard. I think he was trying to accuse us of penis envy. Pat said it was so 1950’s. This is what it has come to with these chasers of gender stereotypes. I took a picture of them since one was taking a picture of me to show his friends how they had come across transphobes, I’m sure.

The hotel manager came out, told us he was glad we were here, and asked us very politely to stay three feet away from the building. We already knew not to block any entrance, so we were assured our welcome. The sun warmed us, and we worked up an appetite, quitting after the lunchtime crowd to head over to Mel’s diner.

On Saturday, we set up in the early evening to greet them as they left for dinner. We now recognized their conference tags, and I watched their faces for reactions. Many looked disapproving. I asked one if she wanted information, and she said “not information”. Some took our pictures from afar without meeting our eyes. A more enthusiastic passer by, a woman, wanted to take a selfie with us in agreement with our signs.

Those of us standing on the other end reported that one attendee, a woman, looked at them and didn’t say anything, then got into an Uber, rolled down the window, and said: “Thank you so much for what you’re doing.” It was a sign of how the organization vilified those who didn’t affirm the trans affirming care edict.

They had, in fact, doubled down when faced with a panel given at the Pediatric Academic Societies’ meeting called “A Scientific Dialogue on the Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth,” where attendees were in danger of hearing data-based information from European countries that would conflict with what they claimed was their superior science-based evidence. They are clearly rattled, as indicated by two women who loudly called us transphobes and gave us the finger, then stormed off before we could say anything in response.

When they were all gone, we packed up, satisfied that we had freely been able to provide a dissenting opinion that had not gone unnoticed right here in San Francisco.

“No, no, no. Your opening paragraph is in bad faith. So I’m not going to read the rest. You can try a different argument.”

That was generous of her, given that I was using her words against her, provoking her with a half-truth. Her post in this Facebook discussion was inspired by her anger at the Supreme Court’s recent 8-1 decision, which deemed the Colorado conversion ban unconstitutional because it violated free speech. Since the public seemed to understand conversion therapy as a method by which a therapist would attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation using words, it sounded as if the court was saying go right ahead. But what they were trying to protect was viewpoint diversity, something that was increasingly under threat given the current culture. That’s why even the liberal judges had gone along with it, save for Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Ketanji Brown Jackson first came to the attention of conservatives when she claimed that she could not answer the question “What is a woman?” She couldn’t answer it because she was attempting to hold space to accommodate the wishes of trans activists to make laws to accommodate men who wanted access to women’s private spaces by claiming that deep down they were really women.

To my mind, Jackson was a political liberal, now holding space to insert the controversial idea of a gender identity into a concept that was originally about sexual attraction. Homosexual attraction has been deemed untenable by a homophobic society. One that believed that homosexuality was a choice, and therefore a better choice could be made by social pressure via conversion therapy. What we in the gay community call “praying the gay away”. Since Christians would instruct gay youth to do so at conversion therapy summer camp back in the ’80s.

I was now convinced that we had arrived in a liberal era that was attempting to “trans the gay away” by modifying the body to make a gay kid heterosexual, much like what was going on in Iran, where it was against the law to be homosexual, so you had the option of changing your sex via a thriving sex change industry. This very lucrative industry was now finding a giant foothold in the U.S. by exploiting the cultural belief that “trans affirming care,” i.e. medicalized “sex changes”, saved lives.

My opponent had argued that if free speech was allowed within the medical community, then what was to prevent a doctor from prescribing bleach to cure COVID, or a therapist from telling their patient they were going to hell? This was my response that so offended her.

“Hmm. So, nowhere in the medical profession are there rules to prevent doctors from telling patients to drink bleach, or restrain therapists from telling their clients they are going to hell? This slippery slope argument appears to conflict with your original argument that therapists do not have the right to say whatever they think. In fact, it implies that these professions are unable to govern themselves, which in the case of trans affirming care may be true.”

I was using her slippery slope argument back at her, but I also believed that the entire medical system, including therapists, was so captured by social justice cultural pressure that they had lost their critical minds. When it came to this new political category of gender identity that the Democrats so wanted to protect (and on which so much money was to be made with these treatments), no one wanted to be the gatekeepers of medical treatment that trans activists had deemed necessary to keep children, who thought they were the opposite sex, from committing suicide. This supposed suicide threat had recently, in another Supreme Court case, forced the transgender lawyer to admit that this wasn’t true. There were no valid statistics of patients committing suicide for want of sex change medical interventions or even a social sex change that involved affirming the child with a new name and pronouns, while everyone was now to treat them as if they were the opposite sex.

My opponent knew this. She kept as much an eye on my posts as I did on hers, though she no longer interacted with my posts at all, and I did so on hers only sparingly. We knew a lot about each other through our posts. I knew that she distrusted women because her mother had been manipulative and cruel, subjecting her to a dental appointment trauma that had left her unable to face going to the dentist without a great deal of mental preparation. She was from the Detroit area, had a husband, a stepson she had helped raise, and several income streams that still included organizing clients. I had to admire her resilience and determination to better her life and the lives of others. Apart from many health issues, she seemed to be living her best life.

She was my most valued opponent. No one else dared to post anything that might attract my attention since I had spent so much time making the rounds every morning, doing what I called “meme busting”. Debunking publicly held myths about trans ideology, and a few other pet topics, my contacts chose to post with those lurid memes.

We had met at a professional conference some 20 years ago as professional organizers seeking to expand our business. Later, she put herself through school to get a degree in psychology, after which she deemed herself to be superior to the rest of us who were merely clutter coaches and organizers. She did not go into practice as a therapist though, but was now teaching psychology at a community college, thus her interest in explaining the Supreme Court case to her students. An aim I intended to mitigate with better information.

I apologized for my bad faith argument, and gave her another more to her liking, assuring her that I had it on good authority, in a consultation with my support lawyer, that the Supreme Court ruling was a narrow one that would not remove any professional licensing rules. I also went on for several paragraphs about what was wrong with the wording of the Colorado law banning conversion therapy, how it allowed therapists to facilitate a child’s transition, which would, in our gender critical view, be called grooming or coaching. This pressure to affirm chilled a therapist’s ability to ask questions to explore if they might be gay and not trans, or were otherwise rejecting their body and thus their sex. The social pressure to affirm these new trans children did not take into consideration the characteristics of gay kids who were often gender non-conforming.

I had begun the conversation by asking her if she thought therapists should be allowed to ask these exploratory questions. She had agreed that these were the questions that should be asked and conceded that she would have to study the verdict with this in mind.She did not answer or acknowledge my final comments about the ban or the verdict, which was her way of saying fine, you are allowed to hang yourself with your opinion; I know my readers agree with me. We had 53 professional organizer contacts in common, plus the rest of her 1500 contacts potentially reading this thread. One of our mutual contacts was a colleague in Europe who had a trans identified non-binary daughter she had brought to a conference with the rest of her family, so likely our whole organizer tribe was sympathetic. As was I when this mom told me her autistic child believed she was a boy and was about to go on hormones. I sincerely hoped, for her sake, that switching to non-binary had saved her from ongoing hormone treatments. The mom had recently asked my opinion on the new passport order from Trump. I supported it, but assured her that her daughter’s X passport would be honored, as were all foreign passports that were valid for travel by their home country.

My opponent and I had been going at it on this topic since the last Olympics, when the woman boxer went viral after she was punched so hard by a male athlete that she had sat down crying, saying to her coach, “Not fair”. We went a good round or two. Her position was too oblique to be worth repeating. All about how unsporting it was for a female athlete to fall to the floor crying, while totally avoiding the real discussion that had confused everyone over whether these athletes were male or not, because they had a DSD, a disorder of sex development.

Shortly after the Olympics, she announced that she was coming to the Bay Area to give a talk to our local chapter of professional organizers about how to avoid liability issues in our work with clients. I was not interested in availing myself of her advice on liability, but I did want to see her in person again to see what kind of person she had become.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” I told her when I went to greet her after her talk. She smiled, pleased to see me. She pulled back her long curly salt and pepper hair to show me how much gray she had acquired. She said she wished she were totally grey. I took this to mean that she really wanted the status of an elder that gray hair would afford her. As if this would give her more credibility.

I did not find that she had the stature of the wise woman crone she hoped to project. There was still something girlish about her voice and her presence in a girlish dress. She lacked the confidence to really carry it off. She relied on emotion in her writing to convey the depth of her commitment to what she had to say. I didn’t care about appearing to be wise, though I was older than she by a large margin. I relied on being calm and impartial, sometimes teasing as if I could take it or leave it, with this weird American interpretation of sex and gender, attempting to use the law to prioritize a person claiming a gender identity of the opposite sex over the actual sex they were born.

It was my strategy to rattle my opponents as much as possible by trying to make them angry. In this state, they would be more likely to go too far into territory they could not defend and expose that they didn’t really know what they were talking about. By the same token, they could also make me angry when they accused me of falling down a right-wing rabbit hole. I wasn’t so much angry as horrified that they could make such a judgment. In response, I made sure I relied on my uber-polite British persona to shield any expression of anger or indication that they had gotten to me.

When I saw my opponent in person, it helped me to realize that she was not the least bit intimidating. She was really no match for me. She was not even my intellectual equal. She was still eager to please in that girlish way that women have, wanting to get along. It made me want to be more gentle with her. In future online interactions, I spent more time supporting her other, more personal issues she would post about.

After I finished responding to her Supreme Court post, the following day, she posted another that seemed to be perfectly positioned to provoke me, and I was provoked. I simply had to defend my fellow Brit and the heroine of the gender critical tribe. The meme she posted was about JK Rowling. How, even though you loved Harry Potter, you shouldn’t buy or watch any more of her books, TV, and movie spin-offs because all the money she made off them was going towards a fund that would support her anti-trans agenda. This was about the time she announced her women’s fund to help women financially who had been taken to court for some crime of misgendering or had been unfairly fired from a job for opinions they might have held. This news was two years old, so it was not part of the news cycle, though granted, the new Harry Potter TV series had just been released for a whole new generation to fall in love with.

The usual approach to these JK Rowling is anti-trans sentiments was to ask what exactly it was she said that was anti-trans. I was too impatient to go that route, knowing she might deflect it. So I used another strategy. Thanking her for clarifying something she never intended.

“Yes, JK Rowling stands up for women’s sex based rights,” I said. “Which is what her woman’s fund supports”. “Thank you for confirming that to stand up for sex based reality is anti-trans, that the prioritizing of biological reality over gender identity, which erases same sex orientation, is anti-trans, that the separation of males from females in prisons per the Geneva code is anti-trans, and any ruling that prevents male persons from competing in women’s sports per the recent Olympic ruling are now all considered anti-trans. That says a great deal about the demands of the trans population in attempting to change the agreed-upon reality of the sex of human beings.”

Oh, she did not like that one bit and shot back her own assumptions about what I was up to.

Amanda Kovattana, you know darn well I wasn’t confirming that or anything else with this share. Please don’t hijack my posts for your agenda.

That gave me the opportunity to then ask her what made JK Rowling anti-trans? I honestly wanted to know her version of it. Again, she deflected with an assumption.

Amanda Kovattana you know all of these arguments far better than I. You know exactly why she has been labeled as anti-trans. Your question is the equivalent of MAGA’s “What is a woman?” which is designed to start a fight for which the questioner has ample rebuttals and endless energy. I’m not going to engage with that.

There she had done it. She had accused me of being a MAGA agent, so she wouldn’t have to answer any logical or rational questions. It was an easy out, and she had the support of our mother of the non-binary child, who gave this answer a like. A hearty like I’m sure. I had backed them both up against the wall they had created for themselves. What they were not going to say in the face of my “innocent” questions was that the delusion of their trans student, trans friends, and family members mattered to them more than the truth. They were trying to make it taboo to say that a man identifying as a woman was still a man. There was no easy off-ramp to this position.

I answered anyway because it’s never about trying to change the opponent’s mind. It’s about sharpening one’s sword for clarity and delivering information to those following along. I admit it’s an exhausting practice, but time is on my side. The Olympic committee decision had been made, though it took a woman to do it. None of the male chairs could care less about women’s athletics. The public polls on this issue had made it an 80/20 split in favor of my position that trans-ing children was wrong. More lawsuits would show that it was not a good idea to give children sex change surgeries, or bunk rapists with women in prison.

No, I told her. In all my study of what JK Rowling has said, there was nothing that indicated to me that she was anti-trans. I had even googled it, and all it said was that JK Rowling said that a trans woman was a man (which was true, otherwise why were they called trans?)

This was as good as saying to my opponent that I WAS anti-trans because I couldn’t see what was so obviously anti-trans about her. Nor was I going to take the bait of being called MAGA. One is allowed to have a political position without having it attached to an enemy that might share that opinion, has stolen it, in fact. I left her with one final comeback.

“As for the what is a woman question, I’ve come to see that the question should have been “can a woman have a penis?’ I think that would have woken the public up much quicker to what this is really about.”

There, I had gotten in a reality-based sentence that would enter the brain in a visceral way that screamed, “This is true. Women don’t have penises. There are penises here in the women’s space. We are lying to the public about trans women actually being women.” Or as a fellow comrade* put it, we were the ones shouting the Emperor Has No Vagina.

*Stephanie Engel, who wrote this beautiful picture book for girls about “Girlology”.

When I heard that the Southern Poverty Law Center was being investigated for funding white supremacists to help manufacture racist violence, I guffawed aloud. Since 2023 this once reliable source of discrimination has turned their lens and considerable international social equity on labeling a women’s group I belonged to as a hate mongering organization. And for what? Simply that we were fighting to get violent male criminals, murderers of women and rapists from being housed in women’s prisons through the ruse of identifying as women, often as they faced the prison door.

Several lawsuits currently in motion. One such case, in California, keeps being mysteriously delayed because the man in question cannot seem to get to the courthouse. Could it be that his very appearance would make this whole concept of gender identity crumble into dust in the legal landscape?

WoLF is the organization defending these women in prison on very little money going up against the ACLU, that other formerly reliable giant of an organization captured by this category of transgender, describing a supposedly tiny minority in need of protection at any length.

I post here the response of the Women’s Liberation Front to this accusation. My friend Elsbeth Cypher, a retired Supreme Court justice for Massachusetts who is now acting president, went into the archives to retrieve it for me.

Talk about mission creep. Just like our gay lobby groups when we won gay marriage, here the SPLC is another organization that didn’t have enough real world discrimination to fight so they had to expand, shall we say, their territory. Along with WoLF several other of our organizations had been labeled hate groups and even some of our members are on the list too.

So you see, the Southern Poverty Law Center has long tainted my views about so many claims of the liberal Left that this country has become the denizen of hate fueling a culture war against individual freedom.

This news was still being processed by my contacts; one, a lesbian turned trans man, was claiming it was Trump’s weaponized lawfare against a legitimate leftie organization and reported that their donation page was frozen due to the investigation, but she had found another way to donate. I am always curious why these contacts haven’t unfriended me yet, but maybe they keep me on as an informant.

Only one contact of my old friends acknowledged the post with a like; it was significant that she was a Black woman and an old school activist. Then, when a sex realist comrade left a comment agreeing that the SPLC had gone down the same rabbit hole of poor judgment as the ACLU, I noticed that we shared three of the same contacts from my former life, two from college, one of whom I had spoken to recently about him being the father of a daughter who was a trans man. He was not happy with my current activism, but we parted friends. The third was a lesbian who had chewed me out, a couple of years ago, said she was worried about my mental health, and asked what was next? Was I going to vote for Trump? I had noticed that this contact, an ex-lover of one of my closer friends, had left more friendly comments lately and seemed to have softened her angry stance towards me. Maybe this was why. More of her contacts were on the same gender defying trail as I was. I was encouraged that our TERFie web was widening and tightening around these old lefties who needed updating.

I don’t usually post more than once on a news event, preferring to add information in the comments, but when I saw this report from the SPLC on Beth Bourne’s page, I saw that it was even richer in opportunity for some serious reflection on how our enemies had shaped us over the last three years. I had not seen this report, and didn’t know the SPLC had circled so closely to my TERF territory. It gave me the opportunity to make some connections in the sequence of events over the last three years.

In my write-up, I characterized the friends mentioned as mild-mannered suburban moms for literary effect. I hasten to say that some, like Beth and Erin Friday, came out of the gate fiercely and boldly, perfecting their very different styles over time, while most lay low and anonymously worked behind the scenes, coming out more slowly. Each added their specific talents and creativity to their sphere of influence.

We all have become bolder, our swords sharpened with use, our hide tougher from exposure to the social ostracism of being cast as the enemy of justice. It was very satisfying to write the following post, even if none of my old contacts could bring themselves to acknowledge it. So much was I accusing them of casting me in the same vein as the SPLC had.

Reading this hate watch report from the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center that describes people I know personally was very illuminating. It demonstrates how our opponents freely characterized us as anti-trans based on a grossly broadened definition of the California law against “misgendering” an individual.

How our free speech rights to give a public presentation about boys in girls’ sports were completely erased in favor of making a connection between the mild-mannered suburban moms involved and the white supremacist groups of aggressive males. Even the Unite the Right was mentioned in this report. The group we now know the SPLC paid $300,000 to an informant to facilitate, among other things, transportation to the pivotal rally in Charlottesville that resulted in a death and injury of 35 others.

The SPLC was engaged in silencing women by associating our activism with the very people they were helping create racist events. One might ask why they were so eager to silence women and their concerns. Well, women are the first to speak out when the safety of women and children is jeopardized. Think of the mama bear archetype.

The mischaracterization of our free speech rights resulted in a lawsuit (which we won) and directly affected the decisions we made going forward as we set about to prove that the presentation of viewpoint diversity does not incite violence. It is part of the democratic process.

The story begins in Davis, the hotspot of trans identified young people and children, where parents were asking why their children were suddenly wanting to be trans. Why were gender non-conforming children getting the idea that they could be the opposite sex? The investigation led to the library, to school curricula and surveys of students, and the flags being hung in the windows of schools by trans identified teachers who brought their personal beliefs about gendering into the classroom. The sign on the bathroom door of the public library spoke to this gender identity belief with the words “Gender diversity is welcome. Please use the restroom that best fits your identity”.

The presentation about boys in girls’ sports was given in a community room of such a library in Yolo County, Davis. When the presenter used the phrase biological male athletes, some of the young people attending felt uncomfortable because their trans language, the words they had been taught to defend, were not being used. They asked a librarian, a man, to come to their rescue. Which he did, shutting the presentation down because, he said, calling trans girls male was a case of misgendering.

Erin Friday, our crack lawyer, was present and immediately set into motion the free speech lawsuit. She is named in this report. The day after this news of the shutting down of the presentation got out, the library received a bomb threat. Some copycat bomb threats followed in the ensuing days. A bomb threat is a threat, not an actual act of violence. Police were unable to track down who was making them and were unsure if it was a hate crime, but the SPLC made sure to make that connection in their report.

Women Are Real took to heart the assignment of making free speech presentations at libraries just to see what would happen. Would free speech still be allowed in California? Would violence ensue? And to whom? We started with the San Francisco main library. Nothing happened other than people talking.

Meanwhile, Scott Weiner and other California legislators freely called any woman or women’s group who stood up in defense of women’s sex-based rights, whatever nasty label they could apply, in the same vein as the right-wing associations that the SPLC had given in their hate watch report.

It’s taken us three years of showing up in Sacramento to finally make ourselves visible as something other than right-wing, and more importantly, have our issues heard in the channels of our democratic process. While in the streets, we stayed vigilant for the possibility of getting hurt by trans rights activists by not advertising our protests ahead of time. Some of us had already experienced being attacked with tear gas and karate moves, throwing women to the ground from behind, in Seattle, when our presence was announced beforehand for a presentation at the public library.

The SPLC did not bother to report these episodes of violence by trans rights activists against women because it clearly didn’t fit their narrative.

Why is Davis the trans hotspot? This analysis, from 2023, describes how schools used student surveys to teach it after California law enshrined gender identity into K-12 non-discrimination polices.

“One mother in Davis, California became concerned about these rising numbers when she began hearing about “clusters” of trans-identified students within the school district: five students in one 6th-grade elementary classroom, a third of kids in one music program, and multiple young teens in friend groups suddenly identifying as non-binary or trans. Her concern grew when she herself was given a “YouthTruth Family Survey” in October of 2022 asking if she identified as “transgender.” This led her to submit a public record request to the Davis Joint Unified School District (DJUSD) about the survey instrument and results.”

Even though only fellow TERFs acknowledged and commented on my report, I had the sense that this Finnish study had marked a turning point in my contacts’ understanding of this topic (unless they were bored with me). I was showing myself not just to be a defender of women’s spaces, which no one seemed to take seriously as a real issue, but a protector of gay and lesbian youth, a population all of my old LGB friends could relate in a deeply personal way. My readers, straight and gay, had now to ask themselves what they were actually supporting. Was it homophobia all along?

Then, a former opponent on the topic, a gay man from my core group of friends since the ‘80s, commented on the Finnish study link, saying it was a “great study”; he pulled out the quote that described the existing co-morbidities of the candidates being so high, and he voiced his despair that things would not improve soon. This was such a profound acknowledgment that I was not the enemy, after all, that I began to feel my old self had been restored in the eyes of my friends.

This allowed me to carry on in a lighter vein as I wrote this report. I could insert myself into the story with the history I had with this University, on the very topic they couldn’t bring themselves to address. No one wants to claim that “the emperor has no vagina,” as one of our comrades put it, so vividly, at our brunch. The irony of a committee on academic freedom being unable to bring themselves to speak freely due to their own commitment to this truth-denying, unscientific nonsense.

This week, four sex realists covered three different venues solo so as to save the team for another day. I took the assignment to cover a panel on Academic Freedom at San Jose State, now under investigation for violation of Title IX for having a male athlete on the women’s volleyball team. The team captain had been assigned to bunk with him while traveling to a game, not knowing he was a man. She was not happy about this arrangement when she found out the truth from teammates.

I made sure to arrive early at the SJSU campus, where I once attended. I got lost for 20 minutes looking for the engineering building as the campus had been completely rebuilt and modernized. So I didn’t arrive until after the introductions. I slipped into the back row and took out my notebook. Only 11 people were present for a meeting that had been assigned two adjoining rooms, mostly faculty members and perhaps one student browsing on his laptop.

Academic Freedom, as the committee’s web page says, is limited by the 1940 statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure warning teachers to avoid being controversial in a manner unrelated to their subject. Never mind that their entire premise of embedding gender identity into the curriculum was controversial.
https://library.sjsu.edu/SJSUAcademicFreedom
The panel seemed rather subdued as they addressed the Trump administration’s threats to withdraw funds with the issuing of a list of 197 words that would subject a research paper to heightened scrutiny. So not outright censorship, but a dampening of the spirit, and the leverage to investigate on a case by case basis.

The provost, Vincent Del Casino, referenced Michael Foucault about the essential relationship between academic freedom and democracy. He seemed rather pleased with himself just for being able to say this and hold this meeting. He mentioned later that he was doing a study on drugs and bisexual men, and there was no headline he could write that would pass scrutiny. Said with an ironic smirk, which made me wonder if bisexual was on the list.

Jessica Trask, whose research in climate change science was threatened, spoke about how the cuts in NSF grants made the seeking of grants more competitive. She had begun a rescue program with funds for those at “rapid risk of defunding”, basically anyone’s grants that were defunded or ending. Her priority for the university was to keep machines running, student employees paid, and a writing retreat funded. I liked her priorities.

The main goal, she said, was to save what they could of research already completed and sustain continuing research. She expressed that they were an R2 level school, not an R1. (R1 schools receive ten times more money, have more status, issue more doctorates, and are doing cutting-edge research, not the applied science done at the R2 level, regarding local impact.) She also stated that California was in a privileged position in terms of private support and public appreciation. She was the most upbeat of the four, in trying to be reassuring.

Tammie Visintainer, Associate Professor of Science Education, looked very defensive. When she saw me come in the door, she looked at me hard. Probably clocked me as a lesbian heretic in my flannel shirt and cadet-style cap. She herself was a lesbian, she revealed as she spoke, with a Jewish wife. (This last bit she added in during the Q & A, after a faculty member who was representing the Jewish faculty group wanted to know what the school was doing to quell the antisemitic violence that had increased on campus. The Provost said he tried to create spaces for dialogue and recommended continuing to engage and speak, but didn’t offer any disciplinary measures.)

During her turn to speak, Visintainer said her entire field was gone. I gathered that she was in charge of teaching the teachers how to teach science. She spoke about the list of 197 words that were now forbidden. That DOGE had cancelled them for words. Words that protected climate justice, racial justice, anything about eco solutions, and the LGBTQ+, she said.

I could argue that the “justice” part had made her whole mission in conflict with the impartiality needed to address science, and that the LGBTQ+ was part of the problem, too, but I did not come armed with a question with which to address these issues. I had said my piece last month at the committee addressing the Title IX investigation with a counter suit. That’s when faculty had called our speakers bigoted homophobes, and another lesbian associate professor had gone viral, announcing that she had had plenty of girlfriends with penises, in response to my statement that lesbians didn’t have penises, thus revealing to the world that the state’s public University system was intent on teaching that women could have penises.

Visintainer mentioned the Title IX investigation twice, as well as the volleyball player in question. How she still felt she had freedom to teach as before, and was proud of holding space for so many different viewpoints from transgender students to…I didn’t catch what. She said silence had spread out of necessity for survival.

The mediator, who was also a teacher in political science, said it was ironic that the administration wanted to double STEM to meet the demand for local manufacturing while cutting education, the very engine of that knowledge base. I would agree with that.

The Provost said that clawback of funds would take time. He mentioned word policing. Said that self-policing had already been in practice due to Prop 209 (which effectively banned affirmative action programs back in 1996). I had to look that up.

They were clearly self-policing in the meeting. Only the lesbian defender of trans seemed to be speaking her truth. So righteous was she about protecting her students, but even she held back a bit when mentioning the volleyball player without specifics. The research scientist seemed to take the cutbacks much more calmly and not so personally.

Of course, no one was going to mention that if they weren’t trying to pass a male athlete off as a woman, they wouldn’t be in danger of further losing $200 million, basically holding the well-being of the entire student body hostage for one man. I know, I know. One must stand up to fascism by protecting our most vulnerable (as women’s spaces are sacrificed).

The poli-sci moderator recommended having the difficult conversations, but didn’t say what those conversations might be. Being able to say things is important even when you can’t do anything, she said. She ended the meeting on time after the provost said they would have more at their next meeting.

It was such a strange meeting, and I was glad to have the opportunity to join my mates for brunch the next day to debrief with them as we welcomed two more new members to the group. One recent member, a student at San Francisco State, had gotten a job at the Stonestown Y, where she was confronted by Sammy, our local exhibitionist fond of exposing himself to women and children in the women’s locker room on a daily basis. That may be what it takes to get the public on board when every town of significance has a Sammy at the Y.

I also shared a powerful testimony from Tuesday with those who hadn’t seen it yet. Jamie Reed, a whistleblower who exposed the lack of formal protocols in reviewing minor candidates for gender medicine at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, flew in to testify at a hearing for AB 2164, which bundles gender medicine with abortion as procedures to be protected. She called out California for being way behind on the evidence for pediatric gender medicine and scolded the legislators for refusing to work with the opposition towards common ground, as they usually do. She spoke with a boldness of authority that was riveting. I include her testimony in this report.

The final triumph of the week was that our founder represented our organization in another testimony about how a ruling to subject state employees to further instruction forbidding hate speech would harm women wanting to report that a man was exposing himself in the locker room. I include that testimony here, too.

As a TERF first responder, I couldn’t go back to sleep for thinking about how I was going to educate the educators. The retired Stanford professor I knew largely agreed with me so she didn’t respond to my comments, but the other did. We had been long time opponents on the trans topic, and we went at it for two days in front of her 1500 contacts, 53 of them mutual colleagues. She finished with another post about how JK Rowling was anti-trans so I couldn’t let that go unchallenged either. I’ve basically slept less than 6 hours a night since.

To finesse my arguments, I studied the intricacies of, first the Colorado ban which Kara Dansky had already analyzed, and then Scott Weiner’s ban which I knew we would be opposing on the 7th along with three other bad bills. Thanks to updates from our Women Are Real founder I could grasp the problems with the Weiner bill and lift some of her wording. Understanding these details was key to my explanation. Plus the excitement of going viral with the video of Weiner reacting to the testimony of our star witness. My contacts wouldn’t care about that though the Stanford professor was an expert on facial coding. (I’m not cosy enough with here to ask for her professional analysis though.) What I believed would get their attention was the $26 million requested for transing kids, largely because so many refused to believe kids were undergoing these irreversible treatments.

I kept tweaking the post the entire day, after posting it, trying to satisfy myself that I had explained it as best as I could so I could finally sleep.

On Tuesday, over 20 sex realists headed to Sacramento to protest 4 bills intent on enshrining into law, through all sectors of society, the legal fiction that humans can change sex, including a ban on conversion therapy. Some of us were already there on Monday to oppose the request for $26 million for body modifications on children to mimic the secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex.

As a result of the 8-1 ruling of the Supreme Court, striking down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for the LGBTQ population, Senator Scott Weiner scheduled an emergency hearing to add gender identity to our existing conversion therapy ban, from 2012, that only addressed sexual orientation, i.e. gay people, (the LGB not the T). (The Supreme Court did not outlaw all such state laws. It simply subjected them to higher scrutiny to protect against viewpoint discrimination under our free speech laws.)

From the reactions of my FB contacts (straight female allies of the LGBTQ), I see that conversion therapy has entered the public imagination as the equivalent of lobotomizing gay people with words. Once a practice that used shock therapy and chemical castration, back in the ’50s, conversion therapy for gay people had its heyday in the ‘80s with religious instruction to “pray the gay away”, but hasn’t been prevalent since the ‘90s.

Now, a new context has emerged with the aggressive force teaming of the T with the LGB. The T, now known as “transgender” is a term so loosely defined by the LGBTQ lobby groups that it includes any gender non-conforming presentation and has yet to be legally defined or described. This transgender population is one that is offered medical body modifications that, in practice, has resulted in a huge increase in irreversible body modifications on young people and minors, as well as what we once defined as transvestites (heterosexual men aroused by wearing women’s underwear and presenting in public wearing highly feminized women’s clothing) wanting feminization surgeries, hormones and breast implants. More rarely, a penile inversion to create a facsimile of a vagina for those we called transexuals. These treatments having been legally sanctioned to be paid for by health insurance (taxpayer subsidized), and require a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

The assumption that the educated public has made is that such a diagnosis requires a thorough psychological evaluation of the patient before they undergo medical treatment including investigation into past sexual trauma, internalized homophobia, and co-morbidities such as autism leading to black and white thinking in terms of sexual stereotypes, as well as the causes of accompanying depression and anxiety.

This evaluation process has now been replaced with a patient consent form, or, if a minor, parental permission. In practice, the parental consent has often been accompanied by a doctor telling parents that, without this treatment, the child is at risk for suicide. This is the modern-day equivalent of the threat that if you engage in homosexual activity, you will go to hell.

SB 934 is a bill for therapists who have clients wanting to proceed on a gender journey. The liability issues created by these bans on conversion therapy, that include the T, conflict with the thorough evaluation assumed for medical treatment, which is required for all other mental health diagnoses.

The wording of Scott Weiner’s bill prohibits “gender identity” change efforts”, but never defines what gender identity is. It allows a patient to sue their therapist decades later for attempting such a change in the patient. Meanwhile, a therapist who immediately affirms a child’s gender identity and assists them in the transition process to medical transition faces no parallel liability. To help a patient adjust to their sexed body and or explore the possibility that they may be gay rather than trans is also jeopardized. This puts a therapist between a rock and a soft landing, as it were. Affirm or risk a lawsuit. Not to mention pressure imposed by their professional body that to question a trans identity too closely is transphobic. While progressives push to affirm pronouns as the right thing to do.

A therapist who affirms would not be held accountable by this law (or the Colorado law). Both laws forbid a therapist from attempting to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The inclusion of this undefined gender identity, which advocacy groups say includes agender, bigender, genderfluid, pangender, xenogender, would curtail a therapist’s ability to address and evaluate the meaning of a patient’s transness and or counsel a patient to find peace with the reality of their sexed body. We are talking about minors here. Children who hardly know the reality of their sexed body, have likely never had sex, and whose body is in the process of developing some alarming changes. What we used to know as the natural process of puberty, which many hope to escape.

Our star witness Jonni Skinner, who at 13 had never met a man as effeminate as he was, got the idea from internet influencers and a make-up artist he admired who transitioned, that he would be better off living life as a woman. He was fast-tracked by a therapist, his mother found for him, into the chemical transition of puberty blockers and hormones that he would soon regret and continues to suffer from medically, including being unable to have an orgasm. A point he emphasized for the benefit of this gay senator. We assigned a teammate to video Weiner’s reactions, which I include here. It went viral as he telegraphed, in his body language, his feelings.

The public has not yet been widely introduced to this first generation of detransitioners (due to media silence). Our two star witnesses for the day were just barely grown up enough to attempt public speaking as 23 year old Jonni and 21 year old Layla Jane have done so articulately and effectively as we faced a slew of bills California has been rolling out to enshrine gender identity in all our non-discrimination laws, plus two hate speech laws that would prohibit a journalist or medical practitioner from correctly sexing an individual, or a woman from saying the word “man” should she see one exhibiting himself in the women’s locker room. Or anything akin to what we used to call a sexual crime.

Jonni’s testimony prompted the committee to question the wording of Weiner’s bill more thoroughly than we have ever seen; an encouraging sign that we are having an impact. One woman, on his committee, even suggested that he should engage more with the people in opposition who “should be natural allies”, meaning all the lesbians who showed up to oppose the bill. Highly unlikely as it is a common observation that women hardly register as distinguishable individuals, recognizable one from another in Weiner’s brain.

It was an exhausting day chasing these bills, but we were able to debrief on the drive home with Jonni, and our crew of three lesbians and a public school teacher. We decompressed with some cocktails at a cosy neighborhood San Francisco bar, followed by an amazing dinner of Caribbean comfort food.

Cece, who took this picture, is to be credited for the Wiener reaction video. Next to her is Romy, who testified with Layla Jane, then me, Jonni, and Bev, who filed her report of our day for the Courage Coalition, with her beagle Tyrone.

By cosmic coincidence, a large girly man with estrogen-grown man boobs and longish hair offered this corner to us so we could have back support. Then, when he heard Jonni talking about his surgeons and his story, the man stood up, walked half the distance towards us, to call us hateful, and tell us that fascists talked like this, and that the Nazis put away trans people. Two women at another table got up to leave as soon as the confrontation got going.

Jonni said he was a survivor, but the man wasn’t interested in his story.

Romy, our former ACLU lawyer, asked him what exactly we said that was fascist, and he couldn’t say. The couple next to us said that was a good question.

The man said, “These treatments save lives.”

“It didn’t save mine”, Jonni said.

He didn’t want to hear anymore, said he was leaving anyway, but didn’t actually leave for another 20 minutes or so. He made a final statement, along the same lines, as he was leaving.

I also posted this video, which is worth listening to because she details how the female category will be obliterated by AB 2563, along with our sex based rights, into 29 different codes.

There was one more bill AB 1830 which mandates anti-hate speech training for all California employees which would affect women’s speech in the workplace.

The one that Layla and Romy testified at was AB 1930 which would make it harder for for the Feds to investigate fraud and other criminal acts that pertain to "gender affirming care". Her fierce testimony here.

Last time I was at the airport, the international terminal of SFO, I used the women’s room, then decided to check out the gender neutral restroom. I saw a woman enter it and then turn right around and come out again. As I entered, a man was leaving a stall, walking towards me. That was enough to make me feel uncomfortable in this semi-public space with a man, and I turned around and walked out. He was an ordinary, gender conforming man, but he was in there as if he owned the place. Like men do. They own every place. Stairwells, underground parking. All the places women have experienced being raped by random men and have told each other to avoid. There are few spaces a man cannot use. Men own the place everywhere. That’s the annoying thing about them.

Few use the gender neutral restroom at this airport. It is hardly ever entered when I walk by, yet it is supposed to be a solution offered to what I expect would be gender neutral people or gender non-conforming people. What are known as trans women who are men identifying as women. This last category largely makes it a point of honor to use the women’s room. So it is not really a solution. It is a placeholder that hopes that women’s feelings about men in their restrooms will be a consideration. Or as we say in the world of sex realists, good men stay out so that bad men stand out.

In the ’70s, when I was in college, I did have a male friend, a gay man who was very effeminate, who used the women’s restroom when we went out to dinner in the city. I thought of it as a sign of his eccentricity and didn’t think it was creepy or in any way untoward. He really did just want to pee. But now it wasn’t a matter of just slipping in and out. It had become an entitlement to flaunt and use for sexual kicks. Perhaps make a video to upload to a website specifically created for men to share videos of themselves masturbating in women’s public restrooms.

In California, public buildings are required to have gender neutral bathrooms. The most useful thing to do with this strange room offering to defy the binary truth of biological sex is to call it a family room. The movie theater at the Hillsdale Shopping Mall calls it the family room, and so does the Redwood City public library where there are two gender neutral bathrooms in the children’s section of the library.

I was excited to see the designation at the movie theater because it neutered the gender neutral room of its political message. That a small, but insistent segment of the population wants to enter the bathroom that is not aligned with their birth sex. The family room in the children’s section of the library was a bit different. Strange men should not be in the children’s section of the library at all. It’s a rule at some libraries that no adult may enter the children’s section without a child. Possibly, the library was hedging its bets that no such man would need to use a bathroom while at the library. At least it is a single room, not a bathroom with stalls.

If a building just has a single room facility for each sex then it is likely that both will be made into a gender neutral bathroom, as at Trader Joe’s. Fine. No one hangs out at Trader Joe’s for long. It was, however, in a single-room bathroom at a restaurant where I was interrupted mid-pee by a man opening the door that I thought was locked. And he didn’t close it again when he saw me in there, as one would after having made such a mistake. No, he just stared at me for the longest time. I felt paralyzed by this stare as if I was prey caught in the gaze of a predator. He looked like he worked there, the way he was dressed in work clothes for a kitchen. Finally, I flinched, and he woke up out of his staring and retreated. It shook me up this incident. So much so that when my party left the restaurant, my partner asked me if I was ok. I didn’t tell her what happened. I was afraid it would make her mad enough to go back into the restaurant and complain.

This is the same partner (now ex) who, today, would say she was perfectly ok with men claiming to be women using the women’s restroom. She prides herself on being liberal and supportive of these trans identified men. It would be a point of honor for her.

She can say this because she is thinking of a man we both know. A visiting Buddhist dharma teacher who stayed at our house many years ago. A kind and thoughtful man who told us his story. How he couldn’t bear the ambiguity of being neither one sex or the other, so he had gotten the surgery that he felt made him a woman. Most men, however, do not get “the surgery”. I know this now that I’ve been in the trenches so long studying this issue. I’ve also met the men who have insisted that any attempt to allow women a space to themselves is bigotry.

This was the case with a women’s only spa night in San Francisco. There was the regular women’s spa night that these men would use, though they were told to cover their male parts. So it was women’s night in name only. There were plenty of women who didn’t want to be naked in front of men, either for religious reasons or because they just didn’t like it, so the spa created another women’s night once a month that was exclusively female. This was the one that these men protested loudly enough to get the attention of the news media. Our organization wrote a letter to the Human Rights Commission of San Francisco asking them to intervene. Then we went to the meeting of the commission to voice our dissent in person. We stood in line with these men waiting our turn at the mic. There’s something exhilarating about meeting our opponents in real life, making our case as if it were our day in court. The commission didn’t decide anything one way or the other, and the two spas caved. Later, we found out that one of the men interviewed in the TV broadcast about their protest was already a convicted sexual predator.

When I tell this story, trans allies (who are women) tell me that those are just a few bad apples. The law attracts these bad apples, I explain. That’s why there can be no compromise. California has given them the right to enter women’s spaces and make them feel uncomfortable.

“Men who go into women’s spaces do not have the best interest of women in mind,” I tell my ex. She doesn’t argue with this. I’ve told her some stories. That the entitlement has grown into something downright predatory. Men who get off on watching how women react to his presence, his naked penis. Like, Sammy, the frequent flyer at the Stonestown YMCA who spends hours walking around the women’s locker room, sometimes naked. Occasionally, he bends over and blow-dries his balls. The YMCA has a gender neutral room where he can change, but he doesn’t use it. He can go wherever he pleases, the staff tells anyone who complains. He is non-binary. Right, not even claiming to be a woman.

Then a man, identifying as a woman, got the attention of a Black lesbian in Los Angeles, Tish Hyman, a musician with a big following, who confronted a man she found in her locker room and videotaped him. Everyone could see he was a man. She got more attention than any of us, and now she’s running for mayor. People can no longer say this isn’t happening. That these men are harmless; they just want to pee. Another video was posted. This one was by a young woman in another locker room who filmed the shadow of a man masturbating in one of the stalls. It was unmistakable what he was doing. She phoned her boyfriend to tell him this was happening, and he came down to confront the man. That video went viral in a heartbeat.

Recently, I attended a play at Berkeley Rep. The bathrooms were all gender-neutral. A large sign was posted between the bathrooms with arrows pointing one way for urinals and the other way for stalls. It bore the inscription “it doesn’t matter which restroom you choose to use. Just wash your hands.” Bathrooms are now telling us what to do. Just about everyone went to the bathroom appropriate to their sex. Was this really what people wanted? To be confused as to how to choose the restroom they belonged in. I don’t think so.

At the Davis public library, the sign says “Gender diversity is welcome. Please use the restroom that best fits your identity.” This is the most blatant attempt at this social engineering project I’ve come across.

Bathrooms in new construction are being redesigned in the hopes of finding some manner of compromise. The stalls are gone, and now the bathroom has a real door in a door frame so you can’t peek into it. All of them are gender neutral and open out onto a common area that has sinks that you might share with either sex. That’s for patrons of civilized buildings. It will do, but it still feels a bit too intimate.

At the BART station, there is a bathroom monitor posted to direct traffic into these gender neutral restrooms because we all know what happens when both sexes can use a closed space for any length of time.

This year, a California law mandates that there must be an all gender bathroom in every school. I wonder if they will have to post a monitor in front of those bathrooms. Girls don’t like boys in their bathrooms. Full stop. Girls have to have a place to run to. Tim Walz the governor of Minnesota, earned the moniker Tampon Tim because he mandated that even the boys’ restrooms needed to have tampon dispensers. You know, in case a girl who identifies as a boy is using the boys’ restrooms. Because schools have jumped on the affirmation model in this gender saga. So we can’t just be tomboys anymore in our exploratory childhood development phase; we are pressured to choose a sex for life. Schools can keep this information from parents, so you are the last to know when your child is being bunked with the opposite sex when they go on a field trip as one of our parents found out.

This is part of the kids know who they are philosophy of child development. Parents used to be the adults in the room. Then they wanted to be their kids’ friend and not the mean mom or dad. Now they are required to wait for their kids to announce who they are, as if they were waiting for the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. Every child is the new messiah in a parent’s mind. Having a gender wu child is nearly as good. Having a homosexual child not so much. Kids know it. They still feel there is something wrong if they are attracted to the same sex because the culture vibrates with heterosexual messaging. What I used to call heterosexual water torture, because every advertisement, every storyline depicts a happy heterosexual couple. We got representation back in the ‘90s kicked off by Ellen Degeneres in her famous coming out episode in 1997, but then in the last decade, transexual storylines became the new transformation story. My ex and I had watched all 5 episodes of Transparent a well written family saga which features the father of grown children going through his transition to becoming a woman. The West is very enamored of personal transformation stories.

One parent, in my women’s group, with a daughter who thinks she’s a boy told me that when she offered her daughter a movie about girls who fall in love with each other, her daughter called it lesbian smut. So that’s where lesbians landed. In a porn niche. Children as young as kindergarten can learn that humans can change sex thanks to the picture book I Am Jazz (read here by the reality TV star author Jazz Jennings). They don’t hear about lesbians until they are exposed to porn.

Now, a child’s gender “identity” is being mandated into law. California law mandates that in the case of a divorce, the parent who affirms the child’s declared gender identity when the other doesn’t will get custody. Parents who don’t affirm at all run the risk of losing the child altogether because a child of thirteen can seek counseling without parental permission, and get help leaving their family who don’t believe humans can change sex. Foster parents also get more money if they have a child with a gender identity to manage. California has also made itself a sanctuary state for any child to flee from those bad red states that have banned sex changes for minors. This also makes it easier for child sex traffickers to disappear a child by coming to California to register said child with a new name and sex.

The general public doesn’t think of these things. It never did. They hardly know what a trans person is. Didn’t know that trans activists literally wanted people to believe they were the opposite sex. Very few people, even trans people, believe that humans can become the opposite sex. Being a trans ally was largely a way to resist Trump and Republicans. Republicans who wrote all those bills that banned men from women’s bathrooms because they are men. Duh. But liberals thought it was a ban against gay people living their lives. So they leaned the other way hard. Men identifying as women would get a free ticket into women’s spaces. No one was allowed to discuss how extreme a position this was and how far it was all going to go down the proverbial slippery slope, taking our children with them.

And those tampons in the boys’ restroom. The boys made short work of those dispensers, had a field day ripping up all those period products like it was their territorial duty to protect their space from such female intrusion. The janitor at a school my friends teach at no longer fills these dispensers. That’s how we handle this madness in the field.

I paid a visit to my girls’ high school recently, intent on discovering if girls were being exposed to the social engineering that was erasing women only spaces. There it was on the bathroom door of what used to be the girls’ bathroom.

The door had an all gender sign with a picture of a toilet. Then as if as an after thought, there was another sign of laminated cardboard underneath it that said “students only”. Someone must have had that nagging thought of how it wasn’t really ok if a male teacher used the same bathroom as one of the girls. I mean hello, that’s why we separate the sexes in the first place for such intimate spaces. Women fought for it so they could go downtown safely without worrying about the urinary leash of having to hurry back home to use a toilet rather than brave being raped in a public gender neutral bathroom.

Next week I will join my women’s group for a press conference in Sacramento because one of our mom lawyers, traumatized by her kid’s school having persuaded her daughter she was a boy, has written a bill to try to claw back the public restroom and locker rooms for women only. This bill will likely not even make it out of committee. So fond are legislators, male legislators, of calling the writers of such bills bigots and the people promoting them as on the same wavelength as Nazis. We are prepared to fail. This is a long game. Every chance we get to platform our cause is a chance to let the public know what is going on. Until they finally get that this is a radical social engineering to erase the safeguarding of women and girls and their sex based rights, and come to their senses.

We made signs for the occasion, which included the words “swinging dicks” a phrase used by Judge Lawrence VanDyke in a recent case having to do with a Korean spa near Seattle, where a man identifying as a woman had filed a discrimination complaint. The spa had then sued the state on religious grounds to be allowed to continue to serve only women in the women’s section of their spa, eventually landing in the 9th circuit court of Appeals. That this judge had made this provocative statement indicated that he, too, had come to realize that the trans language of non-discrimination was entirely too obfuscating of the fact that women and girls were being abused by these men's insistence that they be able to expose themselves to females when they are clearly intact men. This particular man sporting a beard as well. It was the same strategy I used last week, when I said lesbians don’t have penises. The spa lost their case so men can continue this abuse.

In the afternoon, we proceeded to the public hearing of the Health Committee to voice our dissent on two bills. Since federal funds have been yanked from medical institutions performing trans affirming medical treatments on minors and organizations that promote trans affirming care, California legislators feel it is their duty to make up this shortfall with policies that would encode these practices in law. Thus, there were two laws we came to oppose.

One law involved the once much-loved Trevor Project, a suicide hotline that was originally focused on gay kids, but has, like many gay organizations, been captured by trans promotional messaging and routinely directs kids to trans affirming information. It has also, with online chat rooms, become a place where adults can easily sign up to chat with minors whom they can then lure into meeting them. Last year, we came to oppose a bill, now signed into law, that would put the phone number of the Trevor Project on the back of every student I.D. card.

California now has a mental health hotline accessed by calling 988. This bill proposed that the line direct inquiries from gay callers to the Trevor Project. This time, we brought two detransitioners to testify. A gay man, Joni Skinner, had a story to tell about calling the Trevor Project only to have them hang up on him. He accused society of transing the gay away. His testimony was so vivid a story of trans affirming care gone wrong that it is now making the rounds online and was written up in the New York Post. He was paired with Layla Jane, a young autistic woman whose breasts were removed when she was thirteen because doctors told her parents she would commit suicide if this wasn’t done due to her gender identity. This suicide stat has now been firmly debunked at a recent Supreme Court trial upholding the state’s rights to ban trans medical treatment for minors.

The second bill we came to oppose wants to forbid medical insurance from refusing to cover cross-sex treatments for all ages, and also includes the refusal of any procedure due to a patient’s sex. This detail informs medical personnel that they may not base decisions for treatment on the sex of the patient, so if a man identifying as a woman wants a Pap smear or a pregnancy test to validate his gender identity, then by golly, he shall have it. Besides forcing medical personnel to play along with these patients, other repercussions of enforcing medical workers to ignore the sex of a patient remain to be seen.

Twice, our line of opposing testimonies filed through after the line of supporting testimonies, which were mostly paid NGO reps including a woman from Planned Parenthood, now one of the biggest distributors of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. Legislators ignored our speakers, didn’t ask them any questions, and moved on to vote yes on these bills. This was a crushing blow to Joni, who left in tears while Layla pointed out how strong our dissent had been; we outnumbered the opposition.

We knew they would vote yes, but not all did. Our efforts seem futile, but we know we are having an impact. We are, after all, reporting from the field the real-world consequences of encoding gender identity into law. We count our wins in the tiny increments of the vibe shift in public opinion, and in cognitive dissonance for these legislators who, as one of my mates pointed out, are no longer sure who the opposition is. They didn’t call us right-wing, or bigots or Nazis. We were mostly women, lesbians, and mothers of gay kids. So many of us used the word lesbian in our testimony that this did not go unnoticed to the amusement of the Federalist, a conservative press.

As part of our " Lesbians to the Front " strategy, I created an organization I named Lesbians Advocating for a Resilient Future, for which our graphics talent provided me with a letterhead so that I could send a letter in opposition to these bad bills. I also spoke this name in my testimony. It was the public debut of my newfound organization. The founder of Women Are Real had discovered that when dissent is recorded, only the names of organizations go into the public record. We want the public to know who is dissenting to show this is not a Right/Left issue.

To my satisfaction and pride, this title was duly noted by the Federalist article. It is a name that thoroughly reflects my personal mission of preparing myself and others, especially young people, to become resilient through practical skills of self-sufficiency in the face of a future of diminishing resources that will require a mindset not focused on material growth and luxuries. A counterpoint to a society focused on victimhood, producing diagnoses for a populace groomed to be rescued by medical intervention and social services. We have long been classified as consumers for the profit of corporations. Now we are the feedlot cattle of the medical industrial complex, with this very lucrative model of recruiting gay kids and sexually traumatized girls for expensive lifelong treatments and surgeries.

The acronym of my organization is LARF, an inside joke on my British accent, because we need a sense of humor for this seemingly futile work. I’m now inspired to build on this platform by writing a position statement and providing content for a website. Meanwhile there are more letters to file in opposition to more bad bills.

Given a week where the Left are reeling from the reveal of Cesar Chavez as having been a sexual predator of underage girls as well as the women who helped to build the farm workers movement, it may slowly dawn on the Left that even men in dresses can be predators and shouldn’t be allowed in women’s private spaces.

The meeting began with the chancellor painstakingly explaining why California would not cave on this issue. She never mentions women, sex or women’s sex-based rights, the whole point of Title IX.

We are a welcoming institution. An inclusive institution. Inclusive excellence is our most fundamental and treasured core value. It is in our DNA. As your chancellor, I assure you that will never change….The CSU will never give preference based on gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, shared ancestry, religion, disability or any other protected status…

Her full speech can be seen here.

Alison Foote, who was present at the meeting sporting her XX XY athletics t-shirt summed up the violations of San Jose State in her speech.

I’m Allison Foote, treasurer for the Independent Council on Women’s Sports. San Jose State’s refusal to follow the OCR’s resolution agreement and hold itself accountable to the women whose volleyball season was destroyed and consent was compromised is an embarrassment to the entire CSI system. The school, among other things, gave a man a full women’s volleyball scholarship, concealed his sex from players and parents, put him in women’s locker rooms and hotel rooms on road trips, and prompted five women’s team to forfeit. Yet CSU is actually suing the federal government and offering nothing but its full support to the male athlete. This is CSU-sanctioned sexual abuse of the women you are obligated to protect. Your internally inconsistent Title IX and DHR guidelines that prioritize gender identity over sex have created the hostile environment unfolding before you now, but most importantly for the two hundred and six thousand women enrolled on your campuses. The adults in this room have failed all of them. Apparently, CSU is where safety and respect belong to everyone except women.

Video of her speech posted here.

We knew from witnessing a previous meeting, at San Jose State last week, that protecting their trans identified students’ rights was the hill they wanted to die on. That misgendering was a crime so egregious a slight that a male student would make it his business to correct the offender severely. While having to state that there were only two sexes would deem their biology department a relic of the obsolete past.

I gave my speech to best capitalize on my having been a graduate of San Jose State and a lesbian activist since the ‘90s. (Never did I think I would actually boast about having gone to this state school.) And because we’ve been so long in this fight I could also say I actually witnessed the games that were in violation of Title IX.

Responses from shocked faculty members to our comments gave me the impression that this was the first time they had heard from Californians who were not on board with their righteous mission to offer men safe passage into women’s sports, spaces, and locker rooms. One assistant professor of sociology took offense at my comments that lesbians don’t have penises.

Her speech attempted to school us on how sex was a social construct, so she shouldn’t have to tell us that a trans woman was a woman. Her explanation was summed up with the statement that one in fifteen hundred babies are not born male or female. This explanation, along with some colorful personal revelations about girlfriends with penises, gave us a juicy bit to post to X that was picked up by the Daily Mail a day later. They love a good penis quote.

Other faculty members were also so triggered by our comments that they put aside what they came to talk about in order to voice their disgust at our comments and compare us to racists.

Antonio Gallo, California faculty of Chicano Studies. I wasn’t around during Jim Crow laws, but it feels like Jim Crow laws right now. The fact that you are separating individuals right now from restrooms and you’re using safety as an issue. That was the same used during Jim Crow laws. This is the CSU, this is what you all have created, but that’s not what I came here to talk about. I want to talk about SB98.

My name is Lisa Kawamura, CFA’s AVP for Chapter Presidents North, and I am a temporary lecturer at Cal Poly SLO in my twenty-eighth year. First, I am disgusted and disappointed in the bigotry and homophobia that have been expressed in this room today. This is precisely why we need to continue to fund the classroom and not the boardroom. I am truly disheartened by the hate reflected in some of our graduates and folks here today. Moving on. The January state budget..

It’s interesting that she heard homophobia in our speeches when we had at least three lesbians speaking. Of course, to them, any pushback on a trans identified man counts as bigotry. They just do not see the women they are violating, even when they are women themselves.

We, in turn, were shocked to discover that, while faculty members complained that they were hardly paid enough to make rent, the Chancellor received one million a year in compensation to run our state’s public education system. She is being paid to remove the legal existence of women as a sex class out of society, while fully approving the reconfiguration of basic biology in order to make the claim that trans identified men are women. She is also the first Latina woman to head such a four-year public University system.

That our group of dissenters presented ourselves as articulate, knowledgeable women full of facts about male athletes stealing women’s honors clearly surprised them. It was possibly the first time they had to entertain doubt that they would win their righteous battle against the binary fascism of humans only being born in two sexes. Yes, even those with DSDs (disorders of sex development) are either XY or XX. There is no third sex to counter the binary of the two sexes.

So we shall see how this case turns out. Will women win back their sports, spaces, privacy, and dignity, or will this University system be allowed to continue social engineering away the sex category of women and girls and their sex based rights, while insisting that humans can change sex? In the end, as one of our sex realists stated in her comments:

“California’s government can’t change reality by redefining what words mean. It may force people to comply with lies, but like all totalitarian mind control dictates, this will fail…. Stop risking CSU funding in a hopeless quest to litigate away reality.”

All the speeches can be watched in this thread.

Four intrepid sex-realists, all registered Democrats, stood outside the California Democratic Convention, being held at the Moscone Center, Saturday afternoon. We held signs and passed out flyers listing all the bad bills Scott Weiner has passed, including SB 132, which indiscriminately houses men who claim a female identity in women’s prisons despite their record of sexual assault of women. We await an upcoming trial of such a man in a rape case.

The press has ignored this story, and the courts keep on delaying the trial, so the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday, Woman Are Real hired a billboard truck to park in front of news media offices in two cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, to raise awareness of this trial. To our delight, the story was picked up, though of course by conservative presses, but at least it put others on alert. I include, here, photos of the truck submitted by the participants.

Billboard trucks with messages also circled the Moscone Center, as we noted one about sex trafficking. A Weiner law has resulted in an increase in sex trafficking of underage girls by disallowing police from ticketing for loitering because Weiner said that trans people were unfairly targeted. How would the police know they were trans? Is it possible that they look like prostitutes? Weiner is running for Nancy Pelosi’s Senate seat. Thankfully, we now have another candidate. Attorney Maria Harabiell, who once interned for Pelosi, and is a supporter of Title IX, just announced she will run for Pelosi’s seat as a Democrat.

Other groups protesting the convention were staked out with pro-Palestine signs, likely protesting Weiner. Also present was a group of trans activists who held a march and rally at the beginning of the meeting, intent on reminding the Dems of their cause, should Dems be swayed by the 80% of those polled, saying they were against male bodies in women’s sports.

One of the trans activists, a young woman, stood in front of Julie, blowing a very loud whistle in her face, refusing to move until Julie grabbed the whistle and threw it aside. Noise-making is a strategy the opposition has relied on despite penal code rules forbidding it.

I arrived shortly afterwards, delayed by my sign making efforts. As I did not have a chicken costume (from our Halloween protest of Weiner being too chicken to meet with concerned parents of trans identifying children), I donned my overalls, barn jacket and Barmah hat so I could pose as a chicken farmer with my sign “No foxes in the hen house, please” on the back side of my “No boys in girls sports” sign that I made for the Ro Khanna town hall meeting.

Given Gavin Newsom’s recent comments on the Ezra Klein show, that he “wants to see trans kids,” because he has a trans god son, and declaring that no governor has been a stronger advocate of LGBTQ rights, it looks like this is the hill the Dems want to die on despite gender affirming pediatric treatments coming under scrutiny as shown a lawsuit awarding $2 million to a young woman suing her care team for allowing her to get a double mastectomy at age 13. The first of 20 to 30 lawsuits by detransitioners.

The claim that no doctors will help detransitioners with their health care complications post-transition was what alerted a physician that these largely irreversible treatments were being given to minors, and he pushed his association, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, to deliver a public statement that they would not do such surgeries for those 19 and under. A week later, the American Medical Association delivered a similar statement.

Regarding surgery on minors, the Epstein files gifted us with mention of Dr. Jesse Ting whose emails to Epstein in 2016, when he was director of the newly launched Mt Sinai’s transgender medicine and surgery program, asked for funds for his documentary “Born to Be” plus a few salient paragraphs about how women with penises are the best of both worlds for those who like dick, but want to be seen with a woman. He received an invitation to visit Epstein’s island with his family.

Dr. Ting performed the vaginoplasty on Jazz Jennings for the reality TV show “I Am Jazz” that allowed viewers to watch the progress of an eight-year-old boy being made into a girl, over eight seasons, aggressively coached by his mother. Jazz Jennings is now an inorgasmic adult who seems to feel no sexual attraction, as we know it, and remains an advocate for minors who want to be trans.

Also in January, the Supreme Court treated sex realists to a four-minute word salad performance as a female doctor skirted around the question “can men get pregnant?” Thus, giving the public a sample of what’s in store if we have no clear definition of the sexes. The two court cases being heard are to determine if states can ban males from competing in women’s and girls’ sports. The ACLU attorney said she could provide no definition of the word woman. The ACLU clearly hopes that our hard won sex based rights can be disappeared if women can no longer be defined in legal terms. Outcomes of the trial are expected in June.

A trans identified man stopped to engage us in conversation, agreeing with our position on all fronts, while a Canadian man from the nearby bio-physicist’s conference stopped to ask us many questions about our feelings on trans identified men who are just living their lives. We welcomed these conversations, then called it a day and went to a book party being held at another member’s home for a book about raising a disabled child. Such is the scope of our concerns.

At our next gathering to practice defending our position in the face of trans talking points, we shared observations that the opposition had adopted new strategies. One of these was to engage us in long, pointless conversations by asking irrelevant questions, such as Cynthia experienced when one made comments on the artistic merits of her sign. Such conversations would keep us from talking to others, more inclined to hear what we had to say.

The man, appearing to pass as a woman, did engage Julie and Cynthia in conversation for quite a while. He agreed with all the points we were making, even when Julie asked him to pull down his mask, and assessed that he was a man. He told us his children called him Daddy and he did not trespass into women’s spaces. Yet he still wore a shirt that said “Trans rights are human rights” and a button that said “Support trans rights”. If he is not defending self I.D. and the right to invade women’s sports, spaces, and prisons, that leaves the loss of trans medicine being so freely available and paid for by insurance. The sign the Asian man was carrying did say “Patients before politics”. We would more likely frame it as “healthcare before politics”. The way Weiner was framing it, being offered therapy rather than hormones and surgeries was akin to medical malpractice.

We are beginning to win on the medical front, which is huge. No longer could the opposition claim that the science was settled. Nor could they harp on how few regret their transitions with all these detrans lawsuits. Nor could progressives claim that minors were not getting irreversible treatments. They used to ask me how many detransitioners, as if a small number was insignificant, but now that the science is questionable, any such treatments are called into question, because not only is the potential of regret a part of the picture, but the actual treatment may be just a performance enhancer, so why was the public being asked to pay for it?

We were also winning on the sports front. I wanted to include details in my post about Imane Khelif admitting in a French publication that he had XY chromosomes, and the Olympic committee heading towards banning male-bodied athletes from women’s events. With the upcoming Title IX cases, that opportunity will come, especially since one of the schools being sued (San Jose State) is in our backyard. What will be harder will be undoing what is taught to children that the definition of male and female rests on identity, not biology. People still don’t seem to understand that what is at stake are women’s sex-based rights, and teaching children that people can live a lie will ultimately undermine their mental health.

One of our members offered a quote from Scott Peck, the author of People of the Lie, that we found helpful. The quote is from his book The Road Less Travelled.

“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”

I had been working on this treatise since mid-January weeks before. Inspired by my discovery of the Little Lord Fauntleroy phenomenon, I wanted to make the point that what was imposed on children and what was taught to them about how to be a boy or a girl, what was considered good manners, and how boys should dress, was embedded in cultural expectations. Feminists have done a lot of work on how girls are raised by such expectations, but far less has been said about how masculinity has been shaped in boys, especially in their dress and manners.

I learned a lot about the expectations of my readers once I posted the following report.

THE SECRET GARDEN was my favorite book as a child, newly acclimating to the U.S from Asia. The story of a spoiled, lonely, outspoken girl brought to live in cold, damp England after growing up in India suited me perfectly. What I did not know, until a colleague posted one of those history-of-a-self-made-woman stories, was that Frances Hodgson Burnett was much more famous for her book LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY, which outsold WAR AND PEACE when it was published in 1886.

Everybody, both adults and children, loved this story of a spunky American boy living in a modest house, who cherished his widowed mother, befriends everybody, including the shoe shine boy, and has deep political conversations about class with the grocery store owner. Bearing the ordinary name of Cedric, he is then whisked away to England as the last heir of a very wealthy, curmudgeon of an Earl, where he is given the title Lord Fauntleroy. His good nature, his wish to help those in need, and his desire see the best in everyone work a kind of magic on not just the Earl, but everyone in his Earldom.

Hearing of such a cross-cultural story between two of my own countries, I beat a hasty path to my library to grab one of the few copies left, which, thank goodness, had the original illustrations.

So why did this book of such a decent human being, raised thus by a kind single mother, fall from grace? It was to my sartorial delight, because of an outfit.

The outfit faithfully depicted in these lovely illustrations was exactly as described in the book, as were his lovely locks. The author sent the artist a photo of her younger son wearing this very outfit, which was the fashion of the day for a dress-up occasion, as was the long hair. She had based her depiction of Cedric upon her own son. So this book was a testament to her child-rearing skills and a real life boy. As a single mother herself, she took up the writing of stories in order to make money, much like another famous, bestselling single mum, and much-loved writer (until she fell from grace).

LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY was the Harry Potter of its time. It was so famous that it was made into a play and spawned a pile of swag depicting the boy in his outfit. Mother’s everywhere wanted to dress up their little boys in the Fauntleroy suit hoping to instill similar traits of goodness and gentlemanly leadership onto their boys. Then came the American backlash.

I learned of this sartorial fall from grace from an Asian man posting about fashion, and it intrigued me so much I went in search of the academic paper he mentioned, and found a fascinating treatise on American masculinity pushing back on what was a European model of masculine restraint and stewardship. The outfit was just too Nelly for this newly hatched nation, just settling into civility after a century of frontier life, said civilian life now being taken over by women. The push back was so severe that Mark Twain’s treatise on American boys, published two years earlier, was firmly reinstated.

I was given to read TOM SAWYER and HUCKLEBERRY FINN, two books that informed me of how to talk people into painting a fence, swindle boys out of church awards and other semi-illegal acts, and that it was natural to take off on a free range, barefoot journey, down a river with a runaway slave because your collar was too tight and going to church too much of an ordeal.

Both books were extremely foreign to me and offered me nothing in the way of negotiating the country I found myself in, so I returned to reading only English books and refused American citizenship until I was in my twenties (out of fear of being deported for being an out lesbian).) My adopted country earned back my affection with the humor of Beverley Cleary’s books.

I further learned of this creation of American masculinity, exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt, and why it had to be done, from another American scholar, a Black woman with a YouTube channel, giving a lecture on American masculinity created for an expansionist era.

And another on the depiction of gay men in the movies under the Hays Code. Well worth a listen as she tells of how violence becomes permissible as a trait of American aggression and manliness, while the Nelly traits were relegated to seductive criminals because of the Hays Code.

Indeed, when it came to making a film of the Little Lord Fauntleroy story in 1936, with Freddy Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney as the boot black, two changes were made to what was otherwise a faithful adaptation of the book. In the opening scenes of the movie Cedric is given a brand new bike and as he is riding this effete Penny-farthing bicycle down the street in his too clean clothes, he is attacked by a group of rough neighborhood boys, fights bravely but is upended into a ditch, feet waving from a pile of earth, and has to be rescued by his boot black friend and later cleaned up and his wounds dressed by the housekeeper.

In contrast, in the book, he is friends with all the boys and they watch as he competes in a foot race with another boy which he wins with everyone cheering for him. Cedric, seeing the disappointment of the other boy, then tells him that he had an advantage. He was just a little taller and a few months older. This leaves the boy feeling that he, too, could have won and might do so in the future. This speaks volumes about the character of our hero, who is to be a leader of an entire Earldom.

The second change, of course, is that his clothing is different, and the famous suit is replaced, upon his presentation to the Earl, with a stiff Eton collar and diminutive bow tie, instead of the luxurious lace collar. The film gives the impression that this is not an ordinary boy of his time, but an overprotected mama’s boy who can’t fend for himself in the masculine American world, but must be elevated by an English title and a fortune. It’s still a good story, but not quite as universal a message about how boys should be raised.

How boys are raised is now a pivotal conversation both here and across the Atlantic. Thus, my interest.

I expected the piece to be more popular than it was acknowledged. It was a hit with my TERF comrades who saw the point I was making. As well as one elder male friend who had read the book and other children’s classics of the era, plus an environmentalist, we knew in common, who posted insightful pieces about popular culture and how it ignored the need to prepare for an austere future, given diminishing resources. I was satisfied with the high quality of these acknowledgements.

My entrepreneurial colleagues (nearly all white women), who had posted many long, interesting historical stories about resilient individuals, refused to acknowledge it, likely because my viewpoint didn’t confirm any of their pet sentiments about immigrants, not to mention my critique of Huck Finn’s adventure with his slave friend being irrelevant to my need for cultural information.

An old hippie contact also seemed to be irked by my lack of reverence for the sacred issue of racism in America. He left me a comment about how Teddy Roosevelt was a racist. He had been arguing with me since 1986, and was still birthday-fundraising for Planned Parenthood and the ACLU. He was clearly annoyed by the piece, and his bringing up racism in a piece about gender expression annoyed me. I had to wait 24 hours before I could come around to giving him my uber-polite response that I was not necessarily endorsing Teddy Roosevelt’s brand of masculinity.

He gave me no further trouble, and I felt jubilant at what I had gotten away with in this critique. No one can argue with the first impressions of a child, even such an impertinent one.

The Minnesota story would have to run its course as progressives ran through their narrative of good vs evil, righteous citizenry vs “fascism”, and hero-worshipping while others silently questioned the actions of their dead martyrs and the training they had received to actively interfere with federal agents armed with guns and acoustic weapons to mess up your head. I felt my contacts retreat as people felt less inclined to post and comment. I even resorted to fluffing up my most stalwart opponents just to keep them conversant.

In response to the apocalyptic fever, I posted about repairs I made at my tiny house, to bolster my sense of resilience, and explain why my choices had involved eschewing hot water, and fancy faucets (and flush toilets), in favor of minimal electricity and even less heat. And how this lifestyle allowed me to escape into a pre-industrialized, simpler time. Escapism was my reaction statement, though I could have said more as an immigrant now questioning what it means to be a sanctuary state. I then watched as other comrades were shredded by their mates on this new, too hot to touch topic.

I wrote a post to recall my past when I was celebrated for being an active participant in what my friends could support as righteous social change. The post involved a sewing job I did for a man I met when I was a climate change activist and owned a novel, one-person electric car. He was a cycling advocate. He had once shared one of my sex-realist posts, but his friends gave him so much flak for fraternizing with a TERF that he stopped. I appreciated his attempt in these divisive times.

My cycling advocate gave me permission to use his name, then disappeared from FB entirely while his friends posted notices on his page to rally against ICE. Perhaps he couldn’t afford to be associated with me.

Even TERFs were arguing among themselves in our WhatsApp channels. I was so glad when we could finally meet, at our monthly social, and appreciate the affection we shared for each other despite our differences of opinion.

We had only one action event I could attend and post about for the entire month. Luckily, I had that as I was able to take the opportunity to show we were not unaware of what was going on in Minnesota, thanks to the actions of one of our teachers. As well as take the usual chance to impart more information about what was at stake for girls, especially lesbians, impacted by gender ideology. Surely people still cared about lesbians, one of their precious identities they were supposedly in favor of protecting?

It was so satisfying a post that I was buoyed up with a surge of energy and joy at being able to speak again, just as lawsuits were turning our way, while demonstrating that we were involved in something constructive to relieve the polarization that had increasingly paralyzed my interactions where seemingly every social expression had become a political statement.

A roomful of sex realists spent their Saturday learning best practices for holding difficult conversations. The spirit of this workshop is perhaps best expressed by the sign carried by one of our trainers at a pre-work rally of teachers standing at a busy intersection, in solidarity with Minnesota. “BLUE AND RED TALK TO EACH OTHER. MELT THE ICE”.

In the opening role-playing, we watched as she deftly rattled off a handful of reasons trans activists might throw at us in conversation. She had heard them all, she told us in the many conversations she had attempted with California legislators, with parents and allies of trans kids, and as a union rep for her school district. The handout we were given listed 25 such arguments pitched at us. The list itself spoke like a history of our ongoing struggle. See below.

Freda, our first presenter, taught the best practices—keep conversations focused, model good behavior, only give facts when requested, find common ground, agree on definitions of male and female, ask questions, and know when to walk away. This last feels counterintuitive in fight mode, but it is a sign of mastery in my book, along with staying calm.

The point is to introduce doubt after establishing that the prescribed talking points offered have not taken into consideration emerging evidence in trans medicine, the impact on women and girls of allowing males in female spaces, sports, and prisons, and the teaching in schools that humans could be born in the wrong body. You can see the presentation slides here.

Our aim was not to win the conversation in real time, but to plant seeds. Our wins come later in incremental policy changes and court cases, such as the $2 million awarded to a 22 year old woman suing her trans medicine doctors for malpractice in allowing her to get a double mastectomy at the age of 16.

Arienne, our champion debater, also told us how she has narrowed down her focus in a breakout session with a gay man at her LGBTQ caucus, by talking about her observations ten years ago of young lesbians at her school. How they used to fall in love in her Spanish class, and it was a beautiful thing, but now they were all trans identified, obsessed with their bodies and wanting to be men, anxious to get their cross sex hormones and double mastectomies. He agreed with her that this was a concern. Teachers often report that 20% of their classes were identifying as trans compared to practically none a decade ago.

Our second presenter, who had spent our long waits in line to testify at Sacramento, talking to the opposition, told us what did not work for her in these conversations.

1) That Trump won on this issue (with his ad “she’s for they/them, I’m for you”).
2) The majority of society supports our side.
3) Gender dysphoria is a mental health issue (and by association, those who identify as trans) .
4) Using the phrase “a man pretending to be a woman”. Better to say “a man identifying as a woman” to avoid using trans terms.

Say “I don’t believe in that…” to get the opposition to see that this is a matter of society being swayed by a belief system and not an issue of identity and civil rights. The difference is explained in this paper from The Philosophers' Magazine.

Ask if they believe that there are any areas of society where biological sex matters.

There were so many new faces present that I was able to do my practice sessions with people I didn’t know, one a librarian at a San Francisco library who told us how to get kids' books on trans out of circulation. The pre-school and early reader books being the most problematic in magical thinking.

She chose the topic “trans people have been here for all time” to play the trans activist role. This was my specialty, so I played the role of sex realist. I’ve attended this workshop three times now and learn more each time, benefiting the most from these role-playing sessions. I chose to defend the notion that girls benefit from male privilege by choosing to be men because it sounds so convincing. My argument was felled by mention of vaginal atrophy from testosterone. Hard to justify such a side effect.

Here is the list of topics we grappled with. You can see the responses and the entire handout here.


It’s such a small number, why do you care so much? There is a manufactured “hysteria” around “trans issues” from the Right for political reasons.

People report that they are happier after transitioning.

Why is it so hard to be kind?

This is like Jim Crow laws. You sound like a 1950s segregationist.

It’s dangerous for the trans person to use the men’s bathroom.

They are the most vulnerable oppressed group.

Science shows that gender is a spectrum.

Trans people have always existed.

Transwomen are women

Suicide risks

We must believe and support who people say they are.

Loud chants of “Love Wins”.

Regret is lower than 1% (lower than knee surgery).

Being trans is just like being gay.

Why are you so obsessed with children’s genitals? Groomer!

Jazz Jennings is now 25.

Kids know who they are. We must give them support.

A friend tells me about a kid she knows who was painfully shy and withdrawn, and after transition is much happier, livelier, more confident.

My TERF mates responded favorably to the post with comments that they wanted to hold their own similar workshops with all the resources our presenters had offered. “Each one teach one” is a phrase a lesbian teacher comrade had recalled when we talked about how to keep passing these teachings along. I was pleased that my contacts would witness this glimpse into the workings of our TERF cell, and see that these were women who had every good intention for the young people in their care.

Other friends began to return and interact with me again on the safer posts I had put up especially the photo of the Raging Grannies at a climate change action to promote electric cars.

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