Thrusting women who identify as men and then have babies into the spotlight has been a strange priority during the first few months of Biden’s America. Just three days before Mother’s Day, Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, sent Twitter ablaze while testifying before the Democratic Oversight Committee on some conspiracy theory called the ‘Black [sic] maternal health crisis’. The crisis, it turns out, isn’t that community’s abortion epidemic but the country’s legion of racist OB/GYNs, apparently.
‘Every day, Black [sic] birthing people and our babies die because our doctors don’t believe our pain. My children almost became a statistic. I almost became a statistic,’ Bush wrote on Twitter ahead of her video testimony.
That same month, The Practising Midwife, a British magazine, stirred the social media pot for publishing a fat, bearded person with hairy armpits sitting spread-eagle in a birthing pool holding a newborn, umbilical cord still attached, beaming with a black power fist raised in the air on its illustrated cover.
‘Gorgeous’ declared gay blog Pink News, an objectively false appraisal of a truly disgusting image. That’s not a comment on transgenderism — rather, no one wants to see a nude, obese, ursine communist slathered in afterbirth, hairy gut flopped over her vagina.
A month later, the term ‘birthing people’ replaced ‘mothers’ in an official budget proposal from the White House. Yet, it’s difficult to argue ‘birthing people’ are actually even transgender, at least according to the medical narrative.
Transgenderism has been sold to the American people as one way individuals cope with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. According to the American Psychiatric Association, gender dysphoria is characterized by ‘psychological distress that results from an incongruence between your sex assigned at birth and your gender identity.’ To hear truly gender-dysphoric people talk about their condition is heartbreaking. Albeit extremely rare, these are people whose primary and secondary sex characteristics are so out of whack with how they see themselves as to cause feelings of actual trauma each time they are reminded they have breasts, or a frank and two beans dangling between their legs.
‘In order to meet criteria for the diagnosis, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning,’ the APA states. There is no ‘cure,’ so to speak, but transgenderism — presenting yourself and living in a manner commonly associated with the opposite sex — is seen in the medical community as one way to alleviate mental suffering.
The US’s first ‘successful’ sex change operation happened way back in 1952. Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans are either deeply compassionate toward these kinds of struggles, or they just don’t care, with the usual caveats: don’t hurt anyone, don’t infringe on others’ rights, don’t tell people how to think, leave kids out of it.
That’s considered hateful to Big Trans, which is no longer concerned with the once quiet and dignified struggle of transsexuals but now seeks to impose the tyranny of a super minority over the nation’s 63.1 million mothers.
Most trans men would be horrified at the thought of pregnancy. After all, what’s more ‘woman’ than giving birth? If you were actually a biological female suffering from gender dysphoria, giving birth must be the most traumatizing thing imaginable. You would avoid it, and everything that came with it, at all costs.
Meanwhile, you’ve probably already met every trans man in America who’s given birth, either in the pages of VICE or on a TLC special: whenever it happens, tabloid reporters flock to them because it’s so shocking and odd. ‘Birthing people’ isn’t about compassion for gender dysphorics. It’s fashion dictating reality.
‘It is important to note that gender identity is different from gender expression,’ says the APA. ‘Whereas gender identity refers to one’s psychological sense of their gender, gender expression refers to the way in which one presents to the world in a gendered way.’
So a bearded woman giving birth doesn’t have a male gender identity: according to science, she has a male gender expression. And this is happening at a time when tomboys and lesbians are no longer fashionable but trans is. If the White House wanted to curb-stomp mothers out of a misguided sense of compassion for individuals suffering from gender dysphoria, that would still be stupid but at least understandable. It doesn’t take Alan Turing to figure out that’s not what’s going on here, no matter how cynically the left packages it.
The same goes for trans women. Last month a video went viral of a woman confronting the desk staff at a spa in California over a biological male flopping his junk around in front of women and little girls in the locker room.
‘Are you talking about a transgender person?’ a condescending, white hipster says in the video, attempting to gay-splain to the outraged woman.
‘There’s no such thing as transgender, he has a dick,’ the woman snaps.
‘You’re being a dick,’ the know-it-all millennial white-knighter meekly quips back.
Days later trans activists assembled outside the spa for a protest that turned violent. But the woman was right. That doesn’t sound like the behavior of a dignified trans person simply trying to live a life in peace, but a sexual predator. If you can’t even stand to look at your own penis because you suffer so dearly from gender dysphoria, you sure as hell wouldn’t want other people staring at it. If you absolutely must go to a women’s-only spa, you can bet that towel would never slip until you scraped together enough money to have your doodle sliced off, unless, of course, having shocked women see your dick is a sexual thrill for you.
‘They’re the inconvenient truth of the trans movement,’ a trans rights activist once said to me, speaking of autogynephiles, straight men who are sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as women or of being in women’s spaces. They were once called cross-dressers or transvestites, not to be confused with drag queens — who are gay male nightlife entertainers — or transsexuals, who are people suffering from gender dysphoria.
Another inconvenient truth: no one, not even conservatives, really has a problem with trans men using men’s restrooms or attempting to compete in men’s professional sports (one would never get that far). Many Americans are increasingly seeing trans women in sports as simply a retirement plan for failed male athletes. So maybe the right isn’t transphobic, as the left likes to shriek — just pro-woman and pro-reality.
Except where harming women is concerned, what all this seems to come down to is, what’s so wrong with being different? We used to say, let your freak flag fly. Now the freak flag flies from a nuclear submarine powered by the Democratic party and CNN. All this equality and inclusion talk isn’t about rights, but a small minority of deeply unhappy people lashing out at a world they feel has somehow betrayed them. But authoritarians don’t tend to be very happy people, that comes from the inside. In their bumbling crusade to restructure reality, they’re doing more harm than good for their own cause. Maybe try to find peace in the fact that you’re just not normal. And that’s OK.
