Damn Janice! This short paragraph almost brought me to tears!
"What we need now is a frank acknowledgement of the perils of female leadership and of feminist precepts. Most women don’t want this conversation, and most men are afraid to raise it, but it’s long past due."
We’ve heard a lot lately about the courage of children’s book author J.K. Rowling, who has taken on the hate speech law of her homeland, Scotland.
Before being thrown out of the intersectionality cult, she bowed down to the woke communists by making Dumbledore gay, making another character a lesbian, promoting trans ideology, and bashing men.
It's only because she realizes a threat to women that she's now trying to defend women.
Thank you for covering this topic. I would stand up and cheer, but people would look at me funny.
About this part: "She objects to trans ideology, it turns out, not primarily because it is false to biological reality but because it involves men accessing women’s spaces and identities."
This is true, but we can go even further, and see that virtually all feminist resistance to transgender ideology comes from a belief that men are transitioning SPECIFICALLY to infiltrate women's areas. In this view, men who claim to be women are spies sent by *the patriarchy* to mess with women, especially feminism. See, for instance, "The Transsexual Empire" by Janice Raymond. It's a special kind of paranoia.
What baffles me is how often I see critics/opponents of trans who still profess feminist beliefs that women are marginalized and not valued in our society. The spaces that MtFs invade aren't the products of natural forces, they were created by MEN. White western men created a civilization where women can roam freely without bodyguards or male relatives. Western men created the separate accommodations that trans are demanding to use, including women's restrooms (often better appointed than the men's - even if the numbers of stalls tend to be insufficient in many cases), women's sports & locker rooms, beauty pageants, all girls schools (which still exist, though any boys' schools I knew of went co-ed long ago) and more.
A society that hated a group of people wouldn't create all these spaces and opportunities for the hated group.
I would take her more seriously if she had the same supercilious disdain for people like Ellen "Elliot" Page pretending to be a man. But she obviously doesn't, nor has the thought even crossed her mind. Because she only cares about the invasion of female spaces, not men's.
You're correct. Women like JK Rowling will not free us. But it's not up to just men of courage, although they too are needed. We need women of courage, too. And there are already some other women working on it. It's not either/or, it's both/and. Not every woman is a feminist. And yes, we CAN roll back Affirmative Action. Already happening.
You lay out an excellent proposal for the defense of men’s rights, men’s spaces, and men’s distinctive contributions to the maintenance of a decent society, and state. Feminists, by advancing the contention that sex is a social construct, are effectively declaring that feminism has no purpose. Should I declare that I am really a woman the mainstream of the feminist movement turns the meaning of masculinity, and femininity, into complete nullities.
Times and again, it is demonstrated that there are inherent biologically-founded differences between men and women beyond the obvious physical differences between the two sexes. Men and women think in different ways, create in different ways, and act in different ways regardless of the societies in which they live. For example, one of the negative qualities of men is a tendency to resolve conflicts or assert dominance via physical violence. Women, on the other hand, prefer to ostracize, act with cruelty, and use gossip as a means of promoting hostility.
That’s true whether we’re talking about North American society or West African society, to pick two very different sets of social, and institutional, structures. There are obvious qualities inherent to masculinity, and femininity that have developed over millions of years in the evolution of the great apes, and the hominins. They have promoted the survival of our species, and brought us to dominance over the planet.
Declarations that inherent qualities of the human sexes are meaningless, or even non-existent, are purely nonsensical. They are particularly so because we do not see claims that men are social constructs in the same way. I would argue that this is because women are the ones primarily responsible for socializing children, and feminists are not eager to see this pointed out as it is clearly contradictory to their claim that the socialization of men, and boys, is what has produced the toxic masculinity they decry.
At the same time, feminists are quite willing to claim that gender dysphoria, and sexual orientation, are inherent biological differences. That this contradicts the belief that identity is a purely social construct has yet to occur to most feminists. When feminists like, say, Erin Pizzey stumble across this, and challenge the mainstream of feminism, exclusion, and outright falsehood, is the response. When it’s pointed out that feminists are talking out of both sides of their mouths, we hear crickets.
BTW, I find Rowling’a telling us that Hermione is Black as absurd, and as dishonest, as her saying that Dumbledore is gay. That’s particularly so because the declarations came years after the books, and films, were completed. Since nothing was said about either sexual orientation or racial identity in the books, and films, and Rowling had no problem with the portrayal of Hermione by a White actress, we may conclude with that Rowling is somewhat less honest than the average grifter.
The Cass Review here, really putting the lid on "puberty blockers" for under 18s in the UK NHS, also reminds us that most of the massive rise in demand for "transition" amongst the under 18s is from girls! Interestingly I have never seen anything in any media expressing any concern about "sex based rights" for boys or men being compromised by this "invasion" by "trans men". Which I take as proof that males do not have any sex based rights.
Janice, thanks for another outstanding piece. I'd like to add on the issue of paternity fraud - a far more common phenomenon than most people realise - that the solution is obvious, simple and inexpensive, compulsory paternity testing of babies at birth. We've been campaigning for that since our launch (as a British political party) in 2013. The people who oppose compulsory testing would be aghast if a similar proportion of new mothers were (unknown to them) given other women's babies shortly after birth. The usual double standard.
In the UK two TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) have very high profiles in the mainstream media. One is JK Rowling, the other the radfem lesbian 'journalist' Julie Bindel. For years Ms Bindel complained about being 'cancelled', we know that because mainstream media titles carried articles by her on the matter (while never publishing anything by anti-feminists).
For a while now I've been posting some text in the comment streams on new articles on Ms Bindel's Substack, as well as outlets such as Unherd. It's usually some slight variation of the following:
"Here we go again. Why does [insert publication name] never publish articles by anti-feminists? Julie Bindel has made a long and lucrative career out of holding men accountable for everything bad and nothing good, and women unaccountable. Some uncomfortable (for feminists) truths bear repeating:
1. Trans ideology is the inevitable offshoot of feminists' "gender is a social construct". Professor Janice Fiamengo has written a number of excellent articles on feminism and trans ideology, including:
Meet the New Feminist Hate, Same as the Old Feminist Hate
Why does Bindel never write about women abused by women? Does she not care about these women, or does their existence undermine her career as a feminist propagandist?
3. The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
“Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male.”
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
Finally, a short video recommendation:
Adolf Hitler reacts to radical feminist Julie Bindel
Thank you, Janice, for identifying the massive size of the anti-male cultural iceberg. Hidden from view are the millions of men bashed for being a white male oppressor that they no longer speak up for themselves in normal conversations with women. Men shrink away, silent, frightened and resentful. Smart women realize they got very little transparency from the man, leaving both of them resentful. The unseen consequences of anti-male culture compromise all relationships.
The problem is, men acquiesced to decades of feminism to keep women happy.
Trans is the first issue that demands tha men decide which set of women (pro-trans or GC) to side with. As Matt Walsh has shown, men will be attacked for airing their opinions (and not just genuflecting before the billionaire children's author). Neither the trans or GC side will help a man who gets cancelled over this.
The habit of acquiescence, however, also means that men are less likely to take a stand.
Your list of the legislative changes we'll need before men's roles in marriage and family life can be restored (affirmative action programs, tilted entitlements, etc.) makes sense. But it's also improbable - a nice way of saying "impossible".
Perhaps a practical fallback alternative would be to build and strengthen social sub-communities with healthier cultural environments. The odds for success would probably be higher for religious frameworks, but anyone's free to try.
JK Rowling seems to be a person of about average intelligence who went along with all the standard left / progressive ideas until this trans issue. Don't expect any great revolutions from her.
She's also a member, along with Taylor Swift, of the 'hugely privileged and successful-beyond-their-talent but still wanna complain about oppression' club.
To add to the list of proposed legal changes I would add mandatory DNA testing of all children at birth and the named father. This would at a stroke eliminate paternity fraud and provide men with the certainty women already enjoy. The only negative would be for women whose deceit is exposed but that would be a good thing.
Damn Janice! This short paragraph almost brought me to tears!
"What we need now is a frank acknowledgement of the perils of female leadership and of feminist precepts. Most women don’t want this conversation, and most men are afraid to raise it, but it’s long past due."
So true and so long overdue.
This whole piece was remarkable. Thank you.
We’ve heard a lot lately about the courage of children’s book author J.K. Rowling, who has taken on the hate speech law of her homeland, Scotland.
Before being thrown out of the intersectionality cult, she bowed down to the woke communists by making Dumbledore gay, making another character a lesbian, promoting trans ideology, and bashing men.
It's only because she realizes a threat to women that she's now trying to defend women.
Thank you for covering this topic. I would stand up and cheer, but people would look at me funny.
About this part: "She objects to trans ideology, it turns out, not primarily because it is false to biological reality but because it involves men accessing women’s spaces and identities."
This is true, but we can go even further, and see that virtually all feminist resistance to transgender ideology comes from a belief that men are transitioning SPECIFICALLY to infiltrate women's areas. In this view, men who claim to be women are spies sent by *the patriarchy* to mess with women, especially feminism. See, for instance, "The Transsexual Empire" by Janice Raymond. It's a special kind of paranoia.
What baffles me is how often I see critics/opponents of trans who still profess feminist beliefs that women are marginalized and not valued in our society. The spaces that MtFs invade aren't the products of natural forces, they were created by MEN. White western men created a civilization where women can roam freely without bodyguards or male relatives. Western men created the separate accommodations that trans are demanding to use, including women's restrooms (often better appointed than the men's - even if the numbers of stalls tend to be insufficient in many cases), women's sports & locker rooms, beauty pageants, all girls schools (which still exist, though any boys' schools I knew of went co-ed long ago) and more.
A society that hated a group of people wouldn't create all these spaces and opportunities for the hated group.
Excellent social critique, as always: incisive logic, backed up with evidence.
Although... the strength of this essay itself does mildly undercut your lede, that only men can generate the necessary pushback to radical feminism.
I would take her more seriously if she had the same supercilious disdain for people like Ellen "Elliot" Page pretending to be a man. But she obviously doesn't, nor has the thought even crossed her mind. Because she only cares about the invasion of female spaces, not men's.
You're correct. Women like JK Rowling will not free us. But it's not up to just men of courage, although they too are needed. We need women of courage, too. And there are already some other women working on it. It's not either/or, it's both/and. Not every woman is a feminist. And yes, we CAN roll back Affirmative Action. Already happening.
Wow, Janice. I don't want to diminish your words with praise, but, holy living fuck.
You lay out an excellent proposal for the defense of men’s rights, men’s spaces, and men’s distinctive contributions to the maintenance of a decent society, and state. Feminists, by advancing the contention that sex is a social construct, are effectively declaring that feminism has no purpose. Should I declare that I am really a woman the mainstream of the feminist movement turns the meaning of masculinity, and femininity, into complete nullities.
Times and again, it is demonstrated that there are inherent biologically-founded differences between men and women beyond the obvious physical differences between the two sexes. Men and women think in different ways, create in different ways, and act in different ways regardless of the societies in which they live. For example, one of the negative qualities of men is a tendency to resolve conflicts or assert dominance via physical violence. Women, on the other hand, prefer to ostracize, act with cruelty, and use gossip as a means of promoting hostility.
That’s true whether we’re talking about North American society or West African society, to pick two very different sets of social, and institutional, structures. There are obvious qualities inherent to masculinity, and femininity that have developed over millions of years in the evolution of the great apes, and the hominins. They have promoted the survival of our species, and brought us to dominance over the planet.
Declarations that inherent qualities of the human sexes are meaningless, or even non-existent, are purely nonsensical. They are particularly so because we do not see claims that men are social constructs in the same way. I would argue that this is because women are the ones primarily responsible for socializing children, and feminists are not eager to see this pointed out as it is clearly contradictory to their claim that the socialization of men, and boys, is what has produced the toxic masculinity they decry.
At the same time, feminists are quite willing to claim that gender dysphoria, and sexual orientation, are inherent biological differences. That this contradicts the belief that identity is a purely social construct has yet to occur to most feminists. When feminists like, say, Erin Pizzey stumble across this, and challenge the mainstream of feminism, exclusion, and outright falsehood, is the response. When it’s pointed out that feminists are talking out of both sides of their mouths, we hear crickets.
BTW, I find Rowling’a telling us that Hermione is Black as absurd, and as dishonest, as her saying that Dumbledore is gay. That’s particularly so because the declarations came years after the books, and films, were completed. Since nothing was said about either sexual orientation or racial identity in the books, and films, and Rowling had no problem with the portrayal of Hermione by a White actress, we may conclude with that Rowling is somewhat less honest than the average grifter.
The Cass Review here, really putting the lid on "puberty blockers" for under 18s in the UK NHS, also reminds us that most of the massive rise in demand for "transition" amongst the under 18s is from girls! Interestingly I have never seen anything in any media expressing any concern about "sex based rights" for boys or men being compromised by this "invasion" by "trans men". Which I take as proof that males do not have any sex based rights.
Janice, thanks for another outstanding piece. I'd like to add on the issue of paternity fraud - a far more common phenomenon than most people realise - that the solution is obvious, simple and inexpensive, compulsory paternity testing of babies at birth. We've been campaigning for that since our launch (as a British political party) in 2013. The people who oppose compulsory testing would be aghast if a similar proportion of new mothers were (unknown to them) given other women's babies shortly after birth. The usual double standard.
In the UK two TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) have very high profiles in the mainstream media. One is JK Rowling, the other the radfem lesbian 'journalist' Julie Bindel. For years Ms Bindel complained about being 'cancelled', we know that because mainstream media titles carried articles by her on the matter (while never publishing anything by anti-feminists).
For a while now I've been posting some text in the comment streams on new articles on Ms Bindel's Substack, as well as outlets such as Unherd. It's usually some slight variation of the following:
"Here we go again. Why does [insert publication name] never publish articles by anti-feminists? Julie Bindel has made a long and lucrative career out of holding men accountable for everything bad and nothing good, and women unaccountable. Some uncomfortable (for feminists) truths bear repeating:
1. Trans ideology is the inevitable offshoot of feminists' "gender is a social construct". Professor Janice Fiamengo has written a number of excellent articles on feminism and trans ideology, including:
Meet the New Feminist Hate, Same as the Old Feminist Hate
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/meet-the-new-feminist-hate-same-as?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Single-Sex Spaces for Me, But Not for Thee
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/single-sex-spaces-for-me-but-not?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Anti-trans Feminists Are Now Reaping the Whirlwind
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/anti-trans-feminists-are-now-reaping?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Lia Thomas is the Child of Feminism
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/lia-thomas-is-the-child-of-feminism?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
2. Women are more likely to be abused by female partners than by male partners, the most violent couples are lesbian couples:
https://j4mb.org.uk/2022/12/09/are-women-more-likely-to-be-abused-in-lesbian-or-heterosexual-relationships/
Why does Bindel never write about women abused by women? Does she not care about these women, or does their existence undermine her career as a feminist propagandist?
3. The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
"Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons."
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
“Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male.”
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.
Finally, a short video recommendation:
Adolf Hitler reacts to radical feminist Julie Bindel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZjcPaBrGqI
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com
Thank you, Janice, for identifying the massive size of the anti-male cultural iceberg. Hidden from view are the millions of men bashed for being a white male oppressor that they no longer speak up for themselves in normal conversations with women. Men shrink away, silent, frightened and resentful. Smart women realize they got very little transparency from the man, leaving both of them resentful. The unseen consequences of anti-male culture compromise all relationships.
The problem is, men acquiesced to decades of feminism to keep women happy.
Trans is the first issue that demands tha men decide which set of women (pro-trans or GC) to side with. As Matt Walsh has shown, men will be attacked for airing their opinions (and not just genuflecting before the billionaire children's author). Neither the trans or GC side will help a man who gets cancelled over this.
The habit of acquiescence, however, also means that men are less likely to take a stand.
Your list of the legislative changes we'll need before men's roles in marriage and family life can be restored (affirmative action programs, tilted entitlements, etc.) makes sense. But it's also improbable - a nice way of saying "impossible".
Perhaps a practical fallback alternative would be to build and strengthen social sub-communities with healthier cultural environments. The odds for success would probably be higher for religious frameworks, but anyone's free to try.
I've seen it work.
JK Rowling seems to be a person of about average intelligence who went along with all the standard left / progressive ideas until this trans issue. Don't expect any great revolutions from her.
She's also a member, along with Taylor Swift, of the 'hugely privileged and successful-beyond-their-talent but still wanna complain about oppression' club.
To add to the list of proposed legal changes I would add mandatory DNA testing of all children at birth and the named father. This would at a stroke eliminate paternity fraud and provide men with the certainty women already enjoy. The only negative would be for women whose deceit is exposed but that would be a good thing.