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Trans activists avoid debate and instead rely on intimidation and insults to silence women.
In 2016, Ruth Barrett published Female Erasure, a collection of essays by women speaking out against gender identity politics with the aim of exposing the harmful effects of this novel belief system on the lives of women and children. In a prologue to the book, Barret assumes a male voice to illustrate how male appropriation of womanhood works first to silence and ultimately to erase women:
Because I am a woman, therefore you must treat me as if I actually am, otherwise you are transphobic. As I insist on participating as a woman in your groups, gatherings, or spaces you also must forgo discussing anything about your female socialization, female anatomy, or female functions because it hurts my feelings. It hurts my feelings because I was neither socialized as a girl nor am I capable of experiencing what the female body experiences from cradle to grave. But if you speak about this I am then reminded that I am not female and therefore not really a woman. My experience of feeling like a woman must not be invalidated by your experiences of being a woman, therefore I will shame you for being female, teach you in university to estrange your body from your mind, make your distinct physicality and oppression that is specific to your sex irrelevant in the laws of the land or anything that names our differences until there is only the mind. Now only how I think about your body is real … My word is now more real than your mitochondrial DNA. Accept that by my word, you really don’t exist.
Published: 14 March 2022