On Saturday 2 November, a few dozen protesters gathered outside the Pan Pacific hotel in Vancouver chanting, ‘No TERFS, No KKK, No fascists’. One young white woman held a sign saying, ‘White feminism ain’t shit’. The equally as white woman next to her carried a guillotine made out of cardboard, with the words, ‘Step right up, TERFs’, written on it. The brave young soul wore a ski mask to protect her from accountability. Those under threat, of course, do not share the same privilege.
You might assume these rageful Vancouverites were protesting against some kind of Nazi or white supremacist, threatening to exterminate entire groups of people. But no, these folk were out on a Saturday night with megaphones, blaring sirens, chanting, ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Nazi scum has got to go’, because 300 people were inside to hear a panel discussing media bias in the gender-identity debate. To be fair, it was me, one of the speakers that night, who was the primary subject of their ire, as I continue to dare to insist that women are female, and that our rights matter.
The issue is also that we were discussing gender identity in a critical rather than celebratory way — conversation the left has deemed resolved and untouchable. Either you repeat the words ‘Trans women are women’ ad nauseam — and, when asked ‘What is a woman?’ or ‘How does one go from male to female?’, scream ‘Nazi!’ in response — or you are a blasphemous hatemonger who gets the wall.
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That event in Vancouver was the third in a series organised primarily by two women – Amy Hamm and Holly Stamer. They have no particular activist background and simply wanted to have a conversation in Canada about the issue of gender identity and women’s rights. The first event they organised – a panel featuring myself; Lee Lakeman, a long-time feminist activist, and collective member at Vancouver Rape Relief; and Fay Blaney, an indigenous feminist who has been fighting violence against indigenous women and girls in Canada for decades. The panel itself didn’t focus so much on trans identity as it did on the history of the feminist movement and the importance of women’s sex-based rights. Nonetheless, numerous activists pressured our venue, the Vancouver Public Library (VPL), to cancel our booking. They claimed we intended to engage in ‘hate speech’ and wanted to ‘erase the existence of trans people’. I myself am regularly said to ‘harm’ trans people and to ‘incite discrimination and hatred’.
This is, of course, ridiculous, and clearly many of the activists making these accusations know it, as, if you ask for evidence of this, you will experience a form of ghosting or be told to ‘Educate yourself!’.
The crux of my argument, for the uninitiated, is this: biological males cannot become female. Not only is it impossible to change sex, but there is no reason to. It is okay to be male, and it is okay to be female. You are never ‘born in the wrong body’ — you are simply born in a body, whether you like it or not. As much as I may feel (and behave) like a 25-year-old, my body protests, and no insisting on my part can change that. When my ex-boyfriend was a child, he insisted he was going to be an elephant when he grew up, yet, cruelly, his parents opted not to provide him with trunk surgery. Why sex is believed to be the sole material reality that can be imagined away, I do not know, though I suspect it has something to do with Judith Butler.
