And this is "woke." This is F*CKING WOKE. Taking the most disadvantaged women in the world, victimized by male violence often from childhood, and subjecting them to yet more because penises are more important ... this is what they call feminism now?! This is insanity. These men are incels in dresses who have managed to gerrymander male violence against women into progressivism, and the vast majority of extremely stupid young women are falling for it. I cannot believe my eyes.
for sure. These young women have been cut off from 2nd wave sources like I grew up reading. Their role models are pro porn and pro prostitution. Even Gloria Steinem signed the petition for women's sports. They are going to have to reinvent feminism all over again, but I do believe that they will do so, eventually.
Not just young women. I know women who have literally devoted their lives to women’s rights since the 1970s who have fallen so deeply into this ideological sinkhole that they are unreachable. Lesbians and straight women alike. If the prospect of the most disenfranchised, disadvantaged women in the country being forced to coexist with sociopathic males doesn’t wake them up, nothing will. It will be up to prison wardens and guards to be the whistleblowers. But how much female blood will have to be spilled first?
Don't these woke women have enough brain power to think for themselves. Can't they see the inevitable physical harm and emotional suffering that will result. Are they that brainwashed?
If the last four years have taught me anything, it’s that anyone, even the smartest and kindest and most well-meaning person in the world, can be influenced to abandon critical thinking and powers of observation if a cause is framed as a moral imperative. (Hence the Emperor’s New Clothes metaphor.) If one is a true believer in a particular worldview and is identified with “radical” causes on either side, intellectual curiosity is sacrificed in favor of confirmation bias. Once that happens, any information that doesn’t conform with a well-constructed ideology is deemed tainted, and there’s no need to pay attention to it. Abigail’s book is a great example. It’s been read by hundreds of thousands of people, but not many on the left. By the time it was published, trans ideology had been embedded in progressive politics for many years. Liberal media had long since placed a ring-pass-not around gender critical stories and writings. Readers of the New York Times and Washington Post, for instance, only ever see sympathetic articles about oppressed transwomen athletes being discriminated against by bigots from Red states. The momentous high court decision on the Keira Bell case was not reported, because it would be impossible to spin in a rainbow colored direction. Criticisms of J.K. Rowling, great. A review — even a negative one — of “Irreversible Damage,” no can do.
Where will incurious do-gooder progressives hear the other side of the story? The answer is right under their nose, and frigging nowhere at the same time.
My Memo to Self is to keep my mind open, learn as much as I can about the issues that matter to me so I don’t become ideologically captured myself, tamp down my tendency towards bitterness and impatience, disseminate to my progressive friends gender-critical articles and news even though it pisses them off, and remember that life is not a battle between good people and evil people.
The inevitable physical harm and emotional suffering that gender-based policies will continue to inflict on children and women is already a national emergency. At some point there will have to be a reckoning.
I think at this point, older women who are in thrall to this are sort of "going along" to try to salvage something of their legacy, and are instead flushing it down the toilet. They are trying to "gateway" young women into legitimate feminism and failing to see that the easiest way to make anything called feminism more popular is to simply turn it into patriarchy. It's galling.
Good analysis. When I apply your paradigm to a couple of the women I'm referring to, it fits. They're desperate to remain relevant, which means they have to participate in the Emperor's New Gender. Also, they're honor bound to oppose on principle anything that might align with the Right. One of them is an academic in the biological sciences. How she squares that circle is a mystery. It can't be comfortable.
I've been thinking about this, and I think in both their cases (the older women desperate to be "relevant" and the younger ones looking for some grand cause), they are unwilling to face the fact that most of the world's great struggles have already been identified. What's left to us is to implement them at this point.
But this isn't what they want -- they want to be cool and revolutionary, too. The older ones want to still be young and hip and the young ones want to rebel against something.
However, the 20th century was so successful at identifying the vast majority of social problems (sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation) that what we have to do now is mostly tactical. Like it or not, most of the strategy work has been done. What we need to do now is actually put it into practice -- but that's a lot less glamorous than rebelling against your forebears. It requires instead assuming the mission of your forebears.
Basically, these idiots just want to rebel against something, or keep rebelling because they associate that with their youth.
So they invent some new oppressed persons someplace: from violent sex criminals in dresses to Hamas murderers. Now, they're the grand, noble victims of the 21st century that this generation can spend its time "liberating" and "advocating" for.
I'm stating all of this as a means of opening a conversation, and am prepared to have people point out the ways in which I'm wrong. Actually I'm hoping for it because either way, I'm pretty sure the idea can go someplace interesting.
I agree with you that the desire to continue to be relevant, righteous saviors is central to the motivation of these old feminists. And for this, they need a cause. This is an addition to my understanding that I thank you for. But as an old lesbian, I’ve been dealing with this for at least 45 years, so I know it’s deeper than age or the desire to invent a new cause. Autogynephiles started showing up at our lesbian meetings around 1975 and were granted entry with hardly a peep. Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire in 1979. Crickets. Many lesbians (not all...another story) were sympathetic to transwomen because of how homophobia had affected our lives. Transwomen’s struggle for acceptance took on a poignancy that many lesbians felt they could not ignore. Whatever the explanation for transsexuality, they were willing to entertain the proposition that in some fashion that they didn’t understand, these men were actually women. And if it wasn’t literally true, what was the harm in pretending, out of kindness? How many of them were there anyway? We would open our hearts and spaces out of compassion. Far be it for us to exclude someone whose identity was unconventional. This same thinking informs today’s old feminists, gay and straight, as well as the entire progressive population of this country, by the way.
The Elders have not updated their thinking; if anything, they’re more entrenched than ever. They’d have to be, in order to justify sticking a male rapist in a cell with a woman. They see themselves as the vanguard of enlightened humanism, certain that people like you and I have a moral defect and are motivated by man-hating and intolerance. They embraced political correctness fifty years ago and today live inside the progressive media bubble. On principle, they refuse to read Abigail Shrier’s book. I know. I’ve tried. They never heard of Keira Bell. They’ve never read the testimonies of detransitioners. They think high school girls who complain about boys stealing their track medals are science denying, fundamentalist Christian whiners.
It would be easy to blame Trump for this, but their calcified preference for ideology over critical thinking predates Trump by decades. They subscribe to the Great Untruth that life is a battle between good people and evil people, and in case you were wondering, they’re the good people. They can’t give up their membership in Wokeness. You’re absolutely right that they’re motivated by the desire for continued relevance and an ongoing righteous cause, but you’d have to stick a nuclear weapon in their sense of identity to get them to shift. The mutilation of girls’ bodies hasn’t done it. Men winning Olympic gold in women’s sports won’t do it. It’s possible that the prison issue may one day be the catalyst, a debacle I shudder to contemplate.
This is not a hopeful scenario. I’m sorry I don’t have one.
We're probably about the same age, but I'm straight, never got involved in any feminist activities and was never more than a moderate Democrat. My old college boyfriend from fifty years ago, the MD/PhD with the two daughters who became trans men when they were at Brown, is the person I mentioned in Bari's substack. When I learned he was dying of cancer, I sent him an email and we had a brief correspondence. In his last email to me, he wrote how proud he was of his "wonderful daughters." But the public death notices stated he had two sons.
From that, I figured out he must have been devastated about the transitions. As a doctor, he knew what cross sex hormones and surgeries do to a young woman's body. And thinking about him dying with his two daughters caught up in all the woke transgender hysteria just about broke my heart.
I wanted to understand him and his daughters, so I read Abigail's excellent book. He fit the parent profile to a tee. Excruciatingly liberal. He actually posted one satirical song about boycotting North Carolina right after they passed the anti-transgender bathroom bill. And he posted another song about how his daughters could marry anyone of any sex, race or religion, anyone except a Republican. When he wrote those songs, he had no idea about the transgender storm that was brewing and heading his way.
In Canada most of the racists attacks on visible minorities are done by white liberals in the name of diversity- most common is immigrants who hold the wrong opinions. Numerous stories of people, being fired from universities for holding the weong opinions
Pretty much, with those men self-selected for sexual crimes. Few trans "women" criminals are nonviolent cat burglars, embezzlers, or arrested for drug use. Almost all are sexual criminals in some way.
Yes for the moment but this is a brand new policy it's just a matter of time till it becomes more wide spread (give it 2-3 years) I also made the same argument about men in women's sports. As it becomes more well known more and more men will switch
I had been looking forward this piece in a combination of dread and curiosity about how this experiment would play out in California. It's even more horrifying than I anticipated. Thank you to Abigail Shrier and the WSJ for this reporting--I hope it will lead to more sensible reforms going forward. One of the most moving books I read last year was Alice Johnson's "After Life." It's hard to imagine how anyone could actually reform in prison the way she did if they are living in the kind of terror described here.
Thank you, Ms. Shrier, for being willing to take up this fight. Too many people are in the dark, and far too many women are being harried, silenced, and threatened on the topic.
Thank you for giving a voice to these women. The abused carried out under the banner of gender ideology continue to take my breath away. The debate has, unfortunately, confirmed that a great many people do not see women as human.
The people responsible for these policies are literally violating the human rights of these women according to the Geneva Convention. How are these sick freaks actually in positions of power? Who considered them fit to govern? How is America collapsing so quickly?
So, next somewhere down the line, will young offenders face the same fate? What about all the teens who commit crimes and what is the future for girls/boys schools. I really think people are not thinking this through at the higher levels. It all feels a bit like a Frankenstein movie being played out in slow motion before our eyes.
Shrier's article, published first in the Wall Street Journal and reproduced here, is not in any way speculative. Nor is it based on an article and radio interview from the state of Washington. The WSJ article is based on interviews Abigail conducted with present and former inmates of the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California, and Terry Thornton, the California Corrections Department spokeswoman. Ms. Thornton did not withhold information: she told Shrier that 264 trans-identified males have formally requested transfer to women's facilities, so far 26 have been approved, and none have been refused. As the article notes, these trans-identified males are being integrated into the general women's prison population. They are not being housed separately. You might want to actually read that article before you make any more spurious accusations.
In the radio segment that you refer to, Sheriff Ed Troyer of Pierce County, Washington (not California) discusses his county-level policy at the Purdy Correctional Facility for Women; i.e., he would offer a trans-identified male who has not had sex-reassignment surgery the option to stay in the men's prison or be segregated from the rest of the prison population. He also points out that he doesn't know what will happen once the State rolls out its official policy. Interested readers should refer to the article that accompanies the radio interview. It contains many relevant details about individuals currently housed in Washington State prisons. It bears noting that Washington State is being extremely circumspect about specifics. This is bad public policy and is being challenged in the courts.
This policy is upon us, and not only on the West Coast. I have a friend whose niece is serving time in a Florida prison for vehicular homicide. According to her own report, some trans-identified males are housed with her, also on the basis of self-identification, and they are frightening. As long as self-identification rather than medical transition remains the standard, any male grifter, felon, rapist, murder or all-around sociopath who asks for it, will have the privilege of being housed with women.
Your misplaced outrage would be better spent fighting against this policy and working instead for the right to fair treatment for all prisoners, including women, transwomen, and transmen, in separate venues where everyone's safety is respected.
This: "As long as self-identification rather than medical transition remains the standard, any male grifter, felon, rapist, murder or all-around sociopath who asks for it, will have the privilege of being housed with women."
And this is "woke." This is F*CKING WOKE. Taking the most disadvantaged women in the world, victimized by male violence often from childhood, and subjecting them to yet more because penises are more important ... this is what they call feminism now?! This is insanity. These men are incels in dresses who have managed to gerrymander male violence against women into progressivism, and the vast majority of extremely stupid young women are falling for it. I cannot believe my eyes.
for sure. These young women have been cut off from 2nd wave sources like I grew up reading. Their role models are pro porn and pro prostitution. Even Gloria Steinem signed the petition for women's sports. They are going to have to reinvent feminism all over again, but I do believe that they will do so, eventually.
Not just young women. I know women who have literally devoted their lives to women’s rights since the 1970s who have fallen so deeply into this ideological sinkhole that they are unreachable. Lesbians and straight women alike. If the prospect of the most disenfranchised, disadvantaged women in the country being forced to coexist with sociopathic males doesn’t wake them up, nothing will. It will be up to prison wardens and guards to be the whistleblowers. But how much female blood will have to be spilled first?
Don't these woke women have enough brain power to think for themselves. Can't they see the inevitable physical harm and emotional suffering that will result. Are they that brainwashed?
If the last four years have taught me anything, it’s that anyone, even the smartest and kindest and most well-meaning person in the world, can be influenced to abandon critical thinking and powers of observation if a cause is framed as a moral imperative. (Hence the Emperor’s New Clothes metaphor.) If one is a true believer in a particular worldview and is identified with “radical” causes on either side, intellectual curiosity is sacrificed in favor of confirmation bias. Once that happens, any information that doesn’t conform with a well-constructed ideology is deemed tainted, and there’s no need to pay attention to it. Abigail’s book is a great example. It’s been read by hundreds of thousands of people, but not many on the left. By the time it was published, trans ideology had been embedded in progressive politics for many years. Liberal media had long since placed a ring-pass-not around gender critical stories and writings. Readers of the New York Times and Washington Post, for instance, only ever see sympathetic articles about oppressed transwomen athletes being discriminated against by bigots from Red states. The momentous high court decision on the Keira Bell case was not reported, because it would be impossible to spin in a rainbow colored direction. Criticisms of J.K. Rowling, great. A review — even a negative one — of “Irreversible Damage,” no can do.
Where will incurious do-gooder progressives hear the other side of the story? The answer is right under their nose, and frigging nowhere at the same time.
My Memo to Self is to keep my mind open, learn as much as I can about the issues that matter to me so I don’t become ideologically captured myself, tamp down my tendency towards bitterness and impatience, disseminate to my progressive friends gender-critical articles and news even though it pisses them off, and remember that life is not a battle between good people and evil people.
The inevitable physical harm and emotional suffering that gender-based policies will continue to inflict on children and women is already a national emergency. At some point there will have to be a reckoning.
I think at this point, older women who are in thrall to this are sort of "going along" to try to salvage something of their legacy, and are instead flushing it down the toilet. They are trying to "gateway" young women into legitimate feminism and failing to see that the easiest way to make anything called feminism more popular is to simply turn it into patriarchy. It's galling.
Good analysis. When I apply your paradigm to a couple of the women I'm referring to, it fits. They're desperate to remain relevant, which means they have to participate in the Emperor's New Gender. Also, they're honor bound to oppose on principle anything that might align with the Right. One of them is an academic in the biological sciences. How she squares that circle is a mystery. It can't be comfortable.
"The Emperor's New Gender" is the best summary of this craziness ever. I'm going to quote you.
I've been thinking about this, and I think in both their cases (the older women desperate to be "relevant" and the younger ones looking for some grand cause), they are unwilling to face the fact that most of the world's great struggles have already been identified. What's left to us is to implement them at this point.
But this isn't what they want -- they want to be cool and revolutionary, too. The older ones want to still be young and hip and the young ones want to rebel against something.
However, the 20th century was so successful at identifying the vast majority of social problems (sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation) that what we have to do now is mostly tactical. Like it or not, most of the strategy work has been done. What we need to do now is actually put it into practice -- but that's a lot less glamorous than rebelling against your forebears. It requires instead assuming the mission of your forebears.
Basically, these idiots just want to rebel against something, or keep rebelling because they associate that with their youth.
So they invent some new oppressed persons someplace: from violent sex criminals in dresses to Hamas murderers. Now, they're the grand, noble victims of the 21st century that this generation can spend its time "liberating" and "advocating" for.
I'm stating all of this as a means of opening a conversation, and am prepared to have people point out the ways in which I'm wrong. Actually I'm hoping for it because either way, I'm pretty sure the idea can go someplace interesting.
I agree with you that the desire to continue to be relevant, righteous saviors is central to the motivation of these old feminists. And for this, they need a cause. This is an addition to my understanding that I thank you for. But as an old lesbian, I’ve been dealing with this for at least 45 years, so I know it’s deeper than age or the desire to invent a new cause. Autogynephiles started showing up at our lesbian meetings around 1975 and were granted entry with hardly a peep. Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire in 1979. Crickets. Many lesbians (not all...another story) were sympathetic to transwomen because of how homophobia had affected our lives. Transwomen’s struggle for acceptance took on a poignancy that many lesbians felt they could not ignore. Whatever the explanation for transsexuality, they were willing to entertain the proposition that in some fashion that they didn’t understand, these men were actually women. And if it wasn’t literally true, what was the harm in pretending, out of kindness? How many of them were there anyway? We would open our hearts and spaces out of compassion. Far be it for us to exclude someone whose identity was unconventional. This same thinking informs today’s old feminists, gay and straight, as well as the entire progressive population of this country, by the way.
The Elders have not updated their thinking; if anything, they’re more entrenched than ever. They’d have to be, in order to justify sticking a male rapist in a cell with a woman. They see themselves as the vanguard of enlightened humanism, certain that people like you and I have a moral defect and are motivated by man-hating and intolerance. They embraced political correctness fifty years ago and today live inside the progressive media bubble. On principle, they refuse to read Abigail Shrier’s book. I know. I’ve tried. They never heard of Keira Bell. They’ve never read the testimonies of detransitioners. They think high school girls who complain about boys stealing their track medals are science denying, fundamentalist Christian whiners.
It would be easy to blame Trump for this, but their calcified preference for ideology over critical thinking predates Trump by decades. They subscribe to the Great Untruth that life is a battle between good people and evil people, and in case you were wondering, they’re the good people. They can’t give up their membership in Wokeness. You’re absolutely right that they’re motivated by the desire for continued relevance and an ongoing righteous cause, but you’d have to stick a nuclear weapon in their sense of identity to get them to shift. The mutilation of girls’ bodies hasn’t done it. Men winning Olympic gold in women’s sports won’t do it. It’s possible that the prison issue may one day be the catalyst, a debacle I shudder to contemplate.
This is not a hopeful scenario. I’m sorry I don’t have one.
It's horrible to contemplate, Beeswax.
We're probably about the same age, but I'm straight, never got involved in any feminist activities and was never more than a moderate Democrat. My old college boyfriend from fifty years ago, the MD/PhD with the two daughters who became trans men when they were at Brown, is the person I mentioned in Bari's substack. When I learned he was dying of cancer, I sent him an email and we had a brief correspondence. In his last email to me, he wrote how proud he was of his "wonderful daughters." But the public death notices stated he had two sons.
From that, I figured out he must have been devastated about the transitions. As a doctor, he knew what cross sex hormones and surgeries do to a young woman's body. And thinking about him dying with his two daughters caught up in all the woke transgender hysteria just about broke my heart.
I wanted to understand him and his daughters, so I read Abigail's excellent book. He fit the parent profile to a tee. Excruciatingly liberal. He actually posted one satirical song about boycotting North Carolina right after they passed the anti-transgender bathroom bill. And he posted another song about how his daughters could marry anyone of any sex, race or religion, anyone except a Republican. When he wrote those songs, he had no idea about the transgender storm that was brewing and heading his way.
Trying to set a topic off-limits is a pretty good indicator its adherents don't think it is actually a debate they can win honestly.
In Canada most of the racists attacks on visible minorities are done by white liberals in the name of diversity- most common is immigrants who hold the wrong opinions. Numerous stories of people, being fired from universities for holding the weong opinions
Afterthought since men commit far more crimes than men won't it mean an overwhelming flood of men into limited women's prisons?
Pretty much, with those men self-selected for sexual crimes. Few trans "women" criminals are nonviolent cat burglars, embezzlers, or arrested for drug use. Almost all are sexual criminals in some way.
Yes for the moment but this is a brand new policy it's just a matter of time till it becomes more wide spread (give it 2-3 years) I also made the same argument about men in women's sports. As it becomes more well known more and more men will switch
In sports and prisons, it is a way men can game the system for selfish purposes.
I had been looking forward this piece in a combination of dread and curiosity about how this experiment would play out in California. It's even more horrifying than I anticipated. Thank you to Abigail Shrier and the WSJ for this reporting--I hope it will lead to more sensible reforms going forward. One of the most moving books I read last year was Alice Johnson's "After Life." It's hard to imagine how anyone could actually reform in prison the way she did if they are living in the kind of terror described here.
Thank you, Ms. Shrier, for being willing to take up this fight. Too many people are in the dark, and far too many women are being harried, silenced, and threatened on the topic.
Thank you, thank you, a thousand thanks to you.
Thank you for giving a voice to these women. The abused carried out under the banner of gender ideology continue to take my breath away. The debate has, unfortunately, confirmed that a great many people do not see women as human.
This is horrifyingly wrong - on every level.
The people responsible for these policies are literally violating the human rights of these women according to the Geneva Convention. How are these sick freaks actually in positions of power? Who considered them fit to govern? How is America collapsing so quickly?
So, next somewhere down the line, will young offenders face the same fate? What about all the teens who commit crimes and what is the future for girls/boys schools. I really think people are not thinking this through at the higher levels. It all feels a bit like a Frankenstein movie being played out in slow motion before our eyes.
I would sue for cruel and unusual punishment
This is as harrowing as anything Margaret Atwood wrote about in The Handmaid's Tale, and it isn't fiction.
A fund raiser for a legal suit against this via the War on Women
https://waronwomen.substack.com/p/1st-june-2021
Shrier's article, published first in the Wall Street Journal and reproduced here, is not in any way speculative. Nor is it based on an article and radio interview from the state of Washington. The WSJ article is based on interviews Abigail conducted with present and former inmates of the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California, and Terry Thornton, the California Corrections Department spokeswoman. Ms. Thornton did not withhold information: she told Shrier that 264 trans-identified males have formally requested transfer to women's facilities, so far 26 have been approved, and none have been refused. As the article notes, these trans-identified males are being integrated into the general women's prison population. They are not being housed separately. You might want to actually read that article before you make any more spurious accusations.
In the radio segment that you refer to, Sheriff Ed Troyer of Pierce County, Washington (not California) discusses his county-level policy at the Purdy Correctional Facility for Women; i.e., he would offer a trans-identified male who has not had sex-reassignment surgery the option to stay in the men's prison or be segregated from the rest of the prison population. He also points out that he doesn't know what will happen once the State rolls out its official policy. Interested readers should refer to the article that accompanies the radio interview. It contains many relevant details about individuals currently housed in Washington State prisons. It bears noting that Washington State is being extremely circumspect about specifics. This is bad public policy and is being challenged in the courts.
This policy is upon us, and not only on the West Coast. I have a friend whose niece is serving time in a Florida prison for vehicular homicide. According to her own report, some trans-identified males are housed with her, also on the basis of self-identification, and they are frightening. As long as self-identification rather than medical transition remains the standard, any male grifter, felon, rapist, murder or all-around sociopath who asks for it, will have the privilege of being housed with women.
Your misplaced outrage would be better spent fighting against this policy and working instead for the right to fair treatment for all prisoners, including women, transwomen, and transmen, in separate venues where everyone's safety is respected.
This: "As long as self-identification rather than medical transition remains the standard, any male grifter, felon, rapist, murder or all-around sociopath who asks for it, will have the privilege of being housed with women."