Grody … to the Max
And I do mean Max.
I recently referenced Max Wolf Valerio, who transitioned to a male identity (and somewhat male body) as an adult, and who has always struck me as being a regular guy—and I mean that in a good way. He started off a Substack by reprinting an old essay of his on why he’s not transgender. While he’s fine with being under the umbrella term “queer,” he says “transgender” does not acknowledge the reshaping of his bodily flesh to match his sense of self, to who he is and feels comfortable being in the world.
I’d always thought his comfort in his skin spoke well of him. It was a key element of my perceiving him as moving through the world naturally.
Well, in contrast to this, one of his latest essays starts out with a riff on “the recent and snowballing anti-trans backlash or — atomic bomb,” on which he does not cast an approving eye. Myself, I would think that anyone who distinguishes between transsexuals and transgenders is aware that the latter category is full of wankers who have provoked strong assertions of women’s and children’s boundaries. This “backlash” is against the wankers.
This reassertion of boundaries is routinely portrayed as “anti-LGBTQ.” We are supposedly suffering a barrage of new anti-LGBTQ laws, meaning they affect all non-heterosexual people as well as those not comfortable in the skin in which they were born. This is absolute crap, of course. What lesbian has a problem with laws that keep people with penises out of women’s changing rooms and spas? What lesbian has a problem with laws that would keep women and girls’ sports and athletics for those who’ve not, or who won’t, undergo a male puberty—the purpose of Title IX? What lesbian doesn’t have empathy for the women in prison, most of whom come from a background of abuse, having male convicted sex offenders placed in their cells? The fight for women’s sex-based rights and legitimate boundaries is something that unites lesbians and straight women, even conservative straight women who might otherwise not be keen on lesbians.
But, for some reason, Max can’t understand the “backlash.” He has “engaged online with Gender Critical (GC) and yes, TERF talkers, hoping to find out why they are so upset and what do they expect to accomplish.” And yet, he’s not putting together what I put together in the previous paragraph. I think part of it is an obsession with the early adopters of absolute paranoia over people crossing sex and gender boundaries—not that there’s been a shortage of real enemies stepping up to give them a sense of having been prophets. How does one not get, though, that asserting sex-based rights for women over giving carte blanche to anyone who asserts a female “identity” is a rational response to systematic abuses of women and girls, abuses government entities are promoting?
There are people who have managed to adapt to and assimilate the supposedly evil sex binary. Some have worked for social progress in order to carve out space for themselves in the world without having infringed on the rights of others. This includes the right of females to have the baseline definitions of girlhood and womanhood centered in the realities of their bodies, and by what their bodies do that male bodies don’t and can’t.
You can’t let a loyalty to the people who can’t cope with that reality go to your head. There are limits to the accommodations for outliers, the exceptions that prove the rule, that can be expected. Redefining common sense reality can’t be expected.
I think that’s the mistake Valerio is making. I think he blindly sees the excesses of trans ideology and activism as part and part of social progress. I think that’s not uncommon.
And so, he concludes that those who aren’t getting with the program are motivated by fear. Fear of effective brainwashing trans propaganda everywhere, like fluoride in the water. Fear of a man in a dress under every bed. But no mention of the fear that someone will convince a troubled daughter that her struggles with adolescence are proof she’s actually a boy, and the fear she will have facial hair, a deep voice, and scars where her breasts used to be before anyone realizes ordinary therapy was more appropriate for allaying her angst.
Back in the day, when the very idea of “women’s liberation” was treated by many as a joke, back in the day when Kinky Friedman could mock it in a song saying “Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed” (which is kind of clever), there was a terrible meme that dismissed women’s concerns about sexual assault and harassment. It went like this: “If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.”
That’s the thing: we are living in “fear”—and Valerio’s not the only one to accuse women who resist our colonization to be motivated by fear. We’re the problem, for not lying back and enjoying it.
The Scottish Lesbians have a Substack essay up about a zine on display at Glasgow Women’s Library, which for some reason decided to have an exhibit of trans zines. Titled “Lesbians Are Dying Out,” it mocks lesbians protesting reforms of the Gender Recognition Act to allow unverified self-identification on official records. “If men can just say they are women, and then say they are lesbians, and then those lesbians will have p‑p‑penises! And … and … I don’t want to have sex with someone with a p‑p‑penis!”
Oooh, what a terrible thing! To be a woman who doesn’t want to have sex with someone with a p‑p‑penis, the stuttering spelling of which implies she is an hysterical ninny who deserves to be mocked. The Scottish Lesbian who is commenting notes this is the tired old dismissive trick of framing lesbianism not as a sexual orientation, an attraction to and love of women, but as a fear of penises. She notes that the zine’s author/artist goes on to explain that women already come in all different shapes and sizes and we should be happy to expand that a bit to include women with man-shaped bodies.”
And, of course, any lesbian who won’t do that is simply acting out of fear. This touches on the denial of actual woman-to-woman desire by implying it could only be the result of a bad experience with a man. Or with someone else with a penis. Again, it’s fear. What woman in her right mind would prefer another woman (presumably with a vagina) to someone with a penis?
(I’m tired of seeing all the same hands.)
It’s all like a bad movie … whose title might be “Dr. Strangetrans, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Schlong.”
I do hope Max Wolf Valerio shakes it off and realizes that a lot of these trans people are not his friends.