Last year I wrote a post on getting dropped as an author from an animal rights anthology, and I tacked a “beginner’s gender critical reading list” at the end. Both the article and the reading list are very long and arguably might have been better posted separately. In any case, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the reading list so – a year later – I’m reposting it on its own so it remains accessible as a resource.
Two things to note:
- I have not been updating the list, which means that there are no articles or videos that came out after the blog post was published.
- I noticed that some of the links in my list are now dead, usually because the article/video/blog was taken down by the platform that was hosting them. I think it is worthwhile to leave the list as is, because it also serves as a historical record of the erasure and censorship of feminist ideas.
Enjoy.
The transgender movement and society
The New Backlash. This is a long but excellent read that thoroughly describes and analyses the situation we are in. Written some years ago, still on point. I recommend you take the time to read it.
Sex and Gender. A Beginner’s Guide. Also very long but clear and thorough. If you don’t want to read the whole thing I recommend you at least jump to How Did We Get Here?
Gender Identity: What Does It Mean for Society, the Law, and Women – A talk by Meghan Murphy A talk that was given at an event that was heavily protested and for which the speakers needed to hire bodyguards. Transcript here.
To Advance Civil Rights, Oppose Transgender Extremism
Astroturfing: a brilliant article on the corporate funders of the trans trend
Why now? Historical specificity and the perfect storm that has created trans identity politics
The oldest hate crime: How misogyny is being used to strangle women’s debate on sex and gender
Transwomen are women or else “Indigenous women and girls are disproportionately harmed by the laws, policies, and practices that accept gender identity as truth and biological sex as a lie due to our over-representation in transition houses for battered women and their children, rape crisis centres, and prisons in Canada. Indigenous women and girls have long and violent histories of colonization that are ongoing in our contemporary woman-hating, racist, capitalist culture. Research shows that many women and girls in prison in Canada have survived male violence, are poor, and are often imprisoned for non-violent poverty-related offenses. Men who identify as women believe that they should be placed in women’s prisons and leaders and others think so too. One of the reasons I think policy makers are allowing men who feel they are women to serve their sentences in women’s prisons and to be allowed access into women’s transition houses and rape crisis centres is because these places are disproportionately populated by Indigenous and other marginalized women.”
There is no problem with trans people in bathrooms
Gender and gender identity
Gender is not an identity, it is a tool of patriarchy: A feminist view of gender identity politics
If ‘white feminism’ is a thing, gender identity ideology epitomizes it
What’s healthy about gender dysphoria? Short video by Carey Callahan, a detransitioned woman who is now a therapist.
Gender, Patriarchy and All That Jazz
I am überpoor (satire) “There’s a word for people like me: überpoor (don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it; your ignorance just means you’re a privileged bigot). Basically, it describes the state of being poor while enduring the added oppression that comes with having money and a middle-class background. The queer poverty theorist J’amie Olivier came up with it in his brilliant work Whipping Chav. If you’ve not read it, please do. It explains so much about how poor people are not oppressed due to having no money but due to “poorphobia”: a widespread antipathy towards dog racing, Lambrini and the Waitrose Essentials range. Hardest hit by this are the überpoor: people who have been wrongly assigned middle- or upper-class status but are in fact poor. For centuries, such people have simply been invisible. No one has wanted to talk about us and our needs.“
Fay Blaney on gender identity and Indigenous cultures at the Vancouver Public Library
The gay people pushed to change their gender
On law and policy
Scottish Government Faces Judicial Review for Redefining “Women” to Include Men
California SB 132 Would Allow Trans-Identified Male Inmates to be Housed with Females
Should Men Be Allowed in Women’s Prisons? (video) Posted on August 28, 2020. “At the time of this recording, the California legislature is poised to vote on SB 132, a bill that would allow incarcerated individuals to self-identify as transgender or intersex. Those individual must then “Be housed at a correctional facility designated for men or women based on the individual’s preference.” This includes sex-specific residential programs such as the Community Prisoner Mother Program.”
Kara Dansky at WNTT – Washington DC (video) Attorney Kara Dansky speaks of legal developments around gender identity and Title IX in the United States.
Interview with Female Erasure Contributor Cathy Brennan (audio)
How do transgender policies affect International laws on women’s rights? (video)
Can women legally be compelled to handle male genitals? (video) That example I gave of the Muslim esthetician not wanting to wax a scrotum? It wasn’t a hypothetical. Look up Jessica/Jonathan Yaniv.
Anna Zobnina (International women’s rights law expert) Where did gender identity ideology come from? (video)
The abuse of civil rights laws needs to stop
On language
An Open Letter to the Guy on Twitter who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real
Reproductive Rights: Women vs. People with Uteruses ‘“Uterus-haver” obfuscates the fact that the group of people at risk of losing abortion access are the same group of people we talk about being underrepresented in government; the same people sent to prison for “suspicious” miscarriages; the same group of people who were denied the vote for several hundred years in our republic. “Uterus-haver” conveniently fractures a cohesive picture of the female situation.’
The Women’s March and the Erasure of Women
Why has “biological reality-speak” become a thought crime?
#CanWeHaveAWord? Why Talking About Women’s Issues Has Become a Minefield
Another college student group hosts a violent, transphobic cupcake party
Vagina Monologues playright: ‘It never said a woman is someone with a vagina’
On biology
Project Nettie: scientists supporting biological sex
Sex is binary: Scientists speak up for the empirical reality of biological sex
Gender Heretics Is Offering 1 MILLION For A Third Human Gamete
Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise In which the academic career of a biologist was ruined because he publicly insisted that male and female are not social constructs.
The fight for women’s rights
Female Erasure with Maya Dillard Smith and Mary Lou Singleton | On Contact with Chris Hedges (video) Maya Dillard Smith is a legal scholar who was pushed out of her job as the Executive Director of the Georgia ACLU because of her reservations over Obama’s directive to public schools to replace sex with gender identity.
‘How the Gender Identity Movement is Hijacking the Fight for Reproductive Sovereignty’ (video)
A letter to the woman who called me a TERF “In this brave new world that you helped to create, look around for your transactivist friends, your lefty male allies, the ones you stood beside and yelled ‘terf, transphobe, bigot’ with, with you shouting the loudest, because you wanted to show what a good ally you were, how inclusive, how progressive. Where are they now? Why, they are where they always were. Benefitting from the patriarchy. Enjoying the new, improved version of it that you helped them to build by crushing the resistance from the women who spoke up for their rights. This has all cost them nothing; it has made the world a better, easier place for men. It has cost you and your sisters who campaigned with them for virtue cookies, everything.”
Why Can’t Women Be More Nice? “The demand that women be ‘nice’ and ‘kind’ goes further than just being a matter of tone policing, it has an impact on what women are allowed to say, and how much we can expect to be listened to when we say it. Women are not just expected to be nice whilst fighting for our rights, we’re expected to be nice instead of fighting for our rights.”
What happens when women try to meet to discuss their rights in 2019
Sex Based Segregation & Fairness in Sports | The Big Picture RT (video)
Women Interrogated by Police, One Thrown in Jail, for Disbelief in Gender Identity Theory
How does transgenderism undermine our right to organize as women, in Brazil?
WHRC [Women’s Human Rights Campaign] Launches USA chapter
Opposing Women’s Rights: 100 Years of Violence
Counting men as women
Why Disabled Women Requesting Female-Only Care is Not ‘Disgusting’
Man Elected to Female Leadership Seat That was Created to Ensure Female Participation in Politics, also: NY Democrats Quietly Dismantle ‘1 Male, 1 Female’ Rule
‘Self ID will stop women playing on an equal playing field’
These Are Not Our Crimes (video)
‘Gender Fluid’ Credit Suisse director named on FT list of Top 100 Women in Business Sigh…
Have some “intersectionality” with your Honey Bumbles: On Gavin Hubbard’s theft of a Samoan victory
No. You may not take our sport. “We all know the truth here and the truth is that the truth is not what matters to the people making these decisions. What matters is what has always mattered — male feelings. Male desire to conquer and conquest has been the single most deadly force throughout history so why shouldn’t they take from women our fledgling sporting competitions?”
Cancelling feminists and their allies
The Annals of the TERF-Wars Humorous chronology of the trans v. feminist conflict, with a focus on the UK.
Why British Feminists Are Such a Bunch of Evil Witches
Censored by transpolitics: A masterpost A long list of people who have been attacked, unpublished, censored, threatened and more for questioning in some way trans people or ideology.
Women in the United States are Being Fired for Talking About Feminism “A man can not be fired for believing he is a woman, but a woman can be fired for believing he’s not.”
Rose Freedman: Professor’s door ‘covered in urine’ after gender law debate In which a Jewish professor, human rights lawyer and survivor of sexual violence finds her door covered in urine and is called a “Nazi who should be raped”.
Bullying and Harassment Permitted by Bristol University (crowdfund) In which a feminist from the Dominican Republic loses her PhD scholarship to study in the UK following bullying for her gender critical views.
Fired For Feminism This was written by an acquaintance who was fired for writing an article about the misogyny of identifying as “non-binary”. This was the second time she was #cancelled. The first time, she was kicked out of an animal rights group she founded.
How I became the most hated lesbian in Baltimore In which the only woman and lesbian on the Baltimore LGBTQ Commission’s Law and Policy Committee was pushed out of it.
Trans people are real – but so is biology The latest casualty: Sasha White was fired for her job at a literary agency in New York for saying “Gender non-conformity is wonderful, denying biological sex not so.”
Thistle Petterson: How I Became the Most Hated Folk Singer in Madison
Cancel culture cannot erase a strong argument
Transactivism at its Finest – the Blood Root Restaurant Debacle In which the elderly lesbian owners of a vegetarian restaurant that was a decades-long community pillar and catered to all people, including trans, came under attack by transactivists.
Trans-identified male verbally attacks Rose McGowan at Barnes & Noble talk
Dehumanizing women as TERFs
‘TERF’ isn’t just a slur, it’s hate speech
TERF: a term used to stop critical thinking while demonizing homosexuals and transexuals (video) “People who use the term TERF are part of the queer and trans community. Do you know who started the queer and trans community a long time ago? Homosexual people. In LGBT, the first two letters are referring to homosexual people. It’s insane that being a homosexual now is a prosecutable offense in social [justice] circles.”
It’s Time for Progressives to Protect Women Instead of Pronouns
Terf is a Slur (TRA Diss track) – Grace Adetoro (video) Something different–let’s support radfem artists!
The Invisible Women – why are so many women scared to speak out about gender politics?
What’s wrong with gender ideology “TERF graves are gender neutral bathrooms” – truly the language of the new civil rights frontier.
Why I Became An Evil TERF (video)
Social media platforms censoring feminists
The Disturbing Trend of Feminist Censorship on Medium
Reddit is Censoring Women’s Health Support Groups
WordPress shuts down several feminist blogs without warning and WordPress censors GenderTrender; Gallus Mag responds.
Reddit Purges Wrongthink From Women’s Health Support Groups
F-Droid Bans Feminist Social Media Site Spinster, Then Bans Female Dev For Asking Questions
I’m with the Banned: Twitter in the Time of Gender Fascism
YouTube Censors Interview of Mother Who Lost Daughter to Trans Cult “Whilst Keen might have blasphemed in the eyes of the Silicon Valley gods, the video she posted did not break a single British law. Despite the content being legal, the 37.1 million British adult users of YouTube will not have the opportunity to hear this important perspective on what is a live political issue within the UK.”
Female-only spaces
Male-bodied Rapists Are Being Imprisoned With Women. Why Do So Few People Care?
Man Wins Lawsuit Demanding to Change in Locker Room Alongside High School Girls, Assisted by ACLU Girls don’t matter in the United States.
Discontinuation of grant to Vancouver Rape Relief shows trans activism is an attack on women In which a woman’s shelter is defunded for maintaining a female-only space for rape victims.
Why it’s Impossible for Women to Compromise with the Transgender Movement “Just as women and girls share sex-specific facilities while some of us wear skirts and others wear pants, and have managed on a daily basis over decades of sharing facilities to not rape or beat up one another over differences in fashion, men in pants must get comfortable urinating and changing alongside their brothers in skirts. There is no logical reason that a male person in a skirt should trigger violence in a more traditionally masculine-appearing male observer. This issue is men’s problem, and men must resolve it amongst themselves. Women are not human shields that should be placed between two warring factions of males. If the two male groups choose not to get along and share spaces civilly, then the male individuals who identify as women must fight for their own facilities – just as women once fought and won sex-specific facilities.”
Buuuut what about the transvestites? (video) In which a women is banned from a female-only dating app because she opposed the presence of a cross-dressing male, and this youtuber asks who actually counts as transgender.
Expelled from GirlGuiding because of my Gender Critical Beliefs (crowdfund) “I felt that some aspects of Girlguiding policy needed rethinking in the light of their acceptance of self-identity as proof that someone is female, which clashes with my gender critical beliefs. The issues are particularly important around safeguarding, where parents cannot know that their daughter is sharing changing or sleeping facilities with with a person who has the physical attributes of a man or boy but says they identify as a woman or girl. Adult men who say they identify as women will be allowed to share sleeping facilities with and do intimate care for young girls. This meant that the Girlguiding policy required us as adults in charge of children to deliberately withhold information from the children’s parents and guardians.”
Get your story straight on the bathroom debate
Why Women’s Spaces are Critical to Feminist Autonomy
The Left and women
How progressive misogyny works
British Labor Party pledge purge of feminists
The new misogyny targets Cindy Sheehan and Helen Steel
Woman ‘attacked in racist incident at May Day march’
‘Those involved in progressive movements need to commit to ensuring women’s voices are heard’ Well-known Spycops and McLibel campaigner Helen Steel is now a cancelled woman. ‘Perhaps the most shocking incident was at Manchester Anarchist Book Fair in 2018, where Steel explains she was “physically carried out while trying to persuade them that it was incompatible with anarchist principles to exclude women from participating in discussions about what the word woman means and whether males should be allowed into women-only spaces.”’
When did liberal men start thinking it was acceptable to tell feminists how to be feminist?
What is really radical in sex/gender politics?
Women’s rights in the far left – are feminists actually neo-fascists?
If feminist Linda Bellos is seen as a risk, progressive politics has lost its way
The Women’s Alliance: Confronting Sexism on the Left Is anything more tragically representative of the 2010s rise of woke culture than transactivists calling anti-war work irrelevant? The US is still slaughtering people in imperial wars, but anti-war activism has all but disappeared while bourgeois ID politics have largely supplanted solidarity and radical politics. ‘The Women’s Alliance says, “…given that Veterans for Peace made a position statement regarding transphobia and transmisogyny, we also requested copies of past position statements regarding sexism and misogyny. We have yet to receive any confirmation that they even exist.” Note that the VFP concern seems centered on men who have transitioned to become transwomen. There is no provision for the fight against trans-misandry—something that is undoubtedly important to those female members who have transitioned and live as transmen. We find this telling as to the nature of these demands. The Women’s Alliance activists were called transphobic bigots and received the usual threats of rape and violence for disagreeing with the theory of gender being promoted by trans activists and now the VFP. Perhaps the most over-the-top attack was directed at Cindy Sheehan, who became a leader in the peace movement after her 24-year-old son was killed while serving as an Army Specialist in Iraq. When she posted a comment in support of the Women’s Alliance Statement, she was told by the trans solidarity crowd on social media that all the antiwar work that she has done has become “irrelevant,” and all her work on behalf of Private Manning is now “negated.”’
An open letter to the left regarding silence
Women’s rights, trans ideology and Gramsci’s morbid symptoms
Class, Identity Politics and Transgender Rights
Women’s meeting besieged by raging crowd “We are attacked as if being critical of gender is some aberration rather than the core principle of feminism that it is. But where women’s groups have led the way the left is lagging behind.”
On the harassment of lesbians
Stonewall has sold out lesbians and it’s time they be held to account
Meet the Gay Activists Who’ve Had Enough of Britain’s Ultra-Woke Homophobes
Shame Receipts (Content warning: graphic language)
Lezbehonest about Queer Politics Erasing Lesbian Women
Lesbianism is under attack, though not by the usual suspects
What is the Cotton Ceiling. Presentation by Angela Wild of #GetTheLOut. (video)
RE: “your dating preferences are discriminatory” (video)
Riley, You Are Not A Lesbian – Not A Feminist Either (video)
Lesbians are being excluded from the Vancouver Dyke March in the name of ‘inclusivity’
Interview: Angela C. Wild of #GetTheLOut on Pride in London and Lesbian Erasure ‘In the name of “inclusivity” and “progress,” we have reached a stage wherein same sex attraction is called “hate speech”. Reframing females who are attracted to other females as somehow “bigoted” or “hateful” functions as a vicious form of misogyny, because it denies women’s right to have sexual boundaries.’
Media Blackout on Dana Rivers “Mitchfest” Murder Trial Dana Rivers is a well-known trans-identified male who participated in a campaign to shut down a female-only music festival, Mitchfest, and who harassed lesbians who attended the event. A few months after Mitchfest was shut down, he murdered a Black lesbian couple and their son in Oakland. We do not yet know why he committed these murders, so we can not say whether they were hate crimes. With that said, think of the media coverage that would ensue if the victims had been male. Imagine if a person was known to have harassed gay men, or Jewish men, or Black men, or Muslim men, and to have organized against their freedom of assembly. Imagine that the same person then proceeded to murder members of that community. There would likely be some hypothesis on it the murders being hate crimes as well as increased media coverage of the vulnerability of the targeted community. In this case? Total silence. This family deserves to have their story told. To add insult to injury, the headline of The East Bay Times states that a “woman” was charged with the killings. This was not a woman’s crime.
Medicalizing gender non-conforming and autistic children
The Transgender Child: The Creation of an Emblem for a Political Movement (video) Presentation by Stephanie Davies-Arai for the panel Inventing the Transgender Child organized by the Women’s Human Rights Campaign.
Tavistock: Former Clinicians Call It Conversion Therapy. My Response. (video by GNC Centric, a detransitioned woman)
Bill to ban FGM passes in Wyoming despite pushback by radical trans activists
Transing a 5 year old tomboy (video)
The New Conversion Therapy: How Homophobic Quackery is Targeting Children An important read, so to quote the author: “Do not turn off your system. Do not tune out. Sit your ass down, and pay attention, because as it turns out, homophobia is definitely alive and well in the American medical establishment.”
Interview with Female Erasure Contributor Dr. Kathleen Levinstein PhD. LCSW LMSW (audio)
No Longer Silent, UK Gender Clinic Whistleblower Launches Lawsuit
Protect Gender Dysphoric Children from the Affirmation Model This is a currently active crowdfunding campaign by Keira Bell, a detransitioner. She explains: “I’m an ex patient of Gender Identity Clinics where I was prescribed dangerous, experimental drugs and received a double mastectomy procedure. I am fighting to stop this from happening to minors.”
Irreversable Damage: the trans threat to girls
Children’s Rights, Trans Realities | With Scott Newgent (video) Scott Newgent is a transman / trans-identified female who opposes the transing of children and has launched the Trans Educational Speaking Tour
Listening to detransitioners
Does Sex Matter? Gender Identity vs Material Reality: Pt 2 Carey Callahan Detransitioned woman discusses the medical transition of children and the portrayal of detransitioners in the media.
Response to Julia Serano: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation “The truth is that a lot of women don’t feel like they have options. There aren’t a whole lot of places in society for women who look like this; for women who don’t fit, who don’t comply. When you go to a gender therapist and tell them you have these kinds of feelings they don’t tell you that it’s ok to be butch, to be gender non-conforming, to not like men, to not like the way men treat you. They don’t tell you that there are other women who feel like they don’t belong, who don’t feel like they know how to be women. They don’t tell you about any of that. They tell you about testosterone, that’s about it.”
Ariel Pereira on Queer Politics The young founder of Detransition Chile speaks of her experiences with lesbophobia, male privilege and more.
Magdalen Berns
Magdalen Berns was a young Scottish lesbian youtuber who died of brain cancer last year. I have already shared some of her videos above, but she merits her own category. I encourage you to take some time exploring her channel.
Choice quote: “Your fucking minds are so open your brains have fallen out.”
After Magdalen passed away, I shared some of her videos on my facebook page to commemorate her. In response, a vegan activist told me to throw myself in a washing machine. This person was an organizer with an “intersectional vegan” non-profit that was built on pontificating to animal rights activists to end “all oppression!!” instead of working on single issues. The contention that you can not effectively fight any oppression without ending all oppression is nonsensical and unworkable. But, when voiced with an air of intellectualism, these pronouncements allow people in the animal rights movement to gain moral clout and followship. Some years ago this organization penned an article about the “transphobia” of the animal rights movement, for naming the exploitation of “female reproductive systems” as such, for example in dairy production. The article singled out well-known second wave feminist Carol Adams who, presumably to remain in good standing with the animal rights movement, became willing to be mealy-mouthed in naming sex as an axis of oppression.
JK Rowling
The woman deserves her own category too.
JK Rowling and the transactivists: a story in screenshots
Radical Girlsss Statement in Support of JK Rowling: Migrant Perspectives
An Apology to JK Rowling “JK Rowling recently published an eminently reasonable, heartfelt treatise, outlining why it is important to preserve the category of woman. There’s only one thing wrong with it: it assumes a rational interlocutor.”
TRAs, Rape-Logic and the Economy of Entitlement
Sexism is alive and well in the transgender debate
Strategic Ignorance and JK Rowling
The genius of the “I ♥ JK Rowling” stunt
Statement from J.K. Rowling regarding the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award “I believe the time is coming when those organisations and individuals who have uncritically embraced fashionable dogma, and demonised those urging caution, will have to answer for the harm they’ve enabled.”
JK Rowling’s stance against the thought police “For some unfathomable reason, being ‘politically correct’ is often attributed exclusively to people who are ‘left-wing’. Marxism is of course normally considered to be the essential philosophy of the ‘left-wing’. But Marxist philosophy is dialectical and historical materialism, which has as one of its most fundamental tenets that ideas are true only if they are in accord with material reality, regardless of what any number of people, learned or otherwise, might believe. At one time, practically the whole of humanity believed that the world was flat, and/or that the sun revolved round the earth. But their belief did not make it true. And it follows that, however many people are bullied into believing that there is no biological difference between male and female, it will never be true.”