Recently, the Gender Critical community was rocked by the sudden removal of a prominent voice from a prominent platform.

“I do plan to keep making this content, because it’s more important now than ever to keep speaking out.” 

The Case Against The Case Against CAIS

Exulansic made her well-considered views known regarding whether individuals born with the anomaly of sexual development known as Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome should be counted as women. There was some passionate disagreement, but she stood her ground and even won over a few people.

Two very interesting creators sat down to have a conversation. Well over an hour long, I was prepared to settle in for a while.

But 20 minutes in, one of them takes a tangent from their discussion of male and female archetypes, “The girl who wrote ‘Sex and the City’ is now like 50, and she’s alone. And she writes that she actually regrets being alone and not having kids.”

Naturally, I had to go find out if this were true. Reading while listening to Jungian theory being too much for me, I had to dip out of the video before it really got going.

“Being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic.”

An anonymous Tumblr post expressed a common shame in simple words. It rippled through Gender Critical social media in the form of screenshots after the original post was quickly deleted.

Her spurt of stifled frustration struck a chord, breathlessly relating a firsthand account of female suppression: “You go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualized, 

“When like a few years ago you could take your shirt off to play in the stream and trade cards with the boys and come home covered in mud and not even think about it.”

“Among the ‘strong-minded women’ who met to attend the convention was Amelia Bloomer – The lady who goes in for breeches and buncomb.”

Dress historian Abby Cox quotes a catty article from 1853, describing feminists as women who subscribe to pants and nonsense – You know, that crazy stuff about women being full people who deserve rights.

“I didn’t actually wanna bring it up, because of some personal biases towards it. It gets brought up a lot when people talk about feminism and clothing in the 19th century, so [it was] kinda me being like, ‘Ugh!’ 

“We define our sexual orientation as one thing and you’re changing it to another, and that’s the issue.” Self-described “old-school lesbian YouTuber” Arielle Scarcella sits stubbornly at the center of our cultural confusion.

“Now we have people telling us things like we have ‘complicated relationships’ with genitals? I don’t think me being a lesbian is a complicated issue. I think it’s just me being attracted to females,

“…Or female-presenting people.”

Posted back in December of 2019, Arielle becomes unusually quiet here. She hangs her head and mutters, “There’s nothing complicated about the fact that I like – that, that I’m attracted to boobs and vaginas. I mean, it’s that fuckin simple sometimes.”

This week, Senator Joe Manchin insisted any extension of the Child Tax Credit payments should include a work requirement.

"Before you start saying, ‘is it going to be permanent?’,  let's see how we're doing this. Let's make sure that we're getting it to the right people.“

And who would that be, Joe?

"There's no work requirements whatsoever. There's no education requirements whatsoever for better skill sets – Don't you think if we want to help the children, the people should make some effort?" 

Strong words from a fellow whose entire industry takes August off work like classical Versailles. But I guess budgeting has never been politicians’ strong suit.

“Magic is a female fantasy and a male nightmare.”

The Witch has endured for millennia as a symbolic challenge to male supremacy. She represents our innate understanding of the power structure we live in, her different forms expressing our shifting feelings about Woman regaining her place on even footing with Man.

Magic was traditionally Woman’s purview – Our friends the Ancient Greeks, founders of Western civilization, worshipped a Goddess of Magic called Hecate. Hecate’s three faces are reminiscent of the traditional phases of a woman’s life – Maiden, Mother and Crone.

We are taught that Ancient Greece is the foundation of modern civilization.

Politics, Philosophy, Law – even Democracy itself was supposedly invented there, and we are still living in the paradigm created by the likes of Aristotle. We still discuss the Great Thinkers, offering reverential deference to the first glimmer of our present culture.

Enter: The Veil

Thing is, this seminal societal flowering was misogynist as all hell! These precious pillars developed during the first methodical clamping-down on the agency of women.

*Women’s History has grown into a series! The first installment, featuring the oldest symbol of our oppression, will be up before next weekend. Meanwhile, we have a cautionary tale of validation mania…

Writer and Queer Theorist Kate Raphael struggled during lockdown.

“I felt flattened by so many weights: COVID-19, Zoom calls, the grind of winter running, depression. I was desperate for a change.” Her ennui is matched only by the drama as she sets the scene –

“I stepped into the bathtub in a sports bra and shorts and held the first ponytail perpendicular to my head. Wielding a pair of scissors, Cole sawed through my thick mane, tugging at my scalp as he hacked through the hair, and the first ponytail fell to the bathtub floor.” 

The Internet can be a dangerous place, but the rabbit hole I fell down this week goes much deeper than I anticipated.

It all started with Abby Cox. She’s one of my favorite YouTubers, and she put the brakes on her whole video concept this week to address a glaring issue she found in her research.

Girlhood As Internalized Misogyny

Abby is an historical costumer with several years in a living history museum under her belt. In comparing recent remakes of classic historical fiction to older productions, she noticed an uncomfortable trend: “I’m frustrated,” she tells us, “by the reliance on ‘Girly-Bad, Boy-Good’ clothing defaults that our feminist characters are shoved into!”

The article’s lumbering title reads like a summary of the past 50 years of feminism – American Motherhood Vs. The American Work Ethic – Working motherhood is getting harder, Let’s fix that!

Meet The New Boss…

Senior Data Reporter Rani Molla sets the scene, "’When you're in a tough position, when you're forced to make a choice that isn't ideal, oftentimes, you'll find a silver lining and you'll find a thing to look to that allows you to feel good about that choice.'”

And Vox is here to help you with that. “The root cause of this crisis long preceded the pandemic … and something's got to give.” Naming the pain gives the illusion of urgency without actually having to fix anything.

The moment I opened my mouth to talk about what’s happening in Afghanistan, someone was kind enough to remind me that, “It’s happening to most women in the world, as a majority of the population is in such countries.”

Giving others the benefit of the doubt saves a lot of time, but even assuming this PSA is earnest still feels less than helpful. More and more of us are speaking up, and this is a good thing. 

Speaking for myself, I usually focus on things at home because that’s my area of expertise. I don’t presume to speak for women in faraway countries.

Denial is a helluva drug. It can turn abuse into love, rage into wisdom, and women into men.

Since I spent my writing time this week making videos, I was probably a little too happy to find Female Socialization is a Transphobic Myth by Devon Price. Devon thinks she’s a man, and she loves sharing how her masculine essence insulated her from growing up female.

I’m going to introduce Devon by way of a random anecdote she probably should have cut: "I remember deciding one day in middle school that I was going to emulate my favorite fictional character, Hannibal Lecter.

Radical feminism has many detractors. Finding Meghan Murphy among them lately has been a surprise.

As her follow-up to defending Benjamin Boyce’s right to talk about ‘whores,’ Meghan has stepped up to tell us How To Feminist. And it’s not a great look.

Even worse, I understand and agree with a lot of what she said! But she paints with a broad brush without so much as a personal anecdote to anchor the conversation. Her bitterness is palpable and she comes across as pretty condescending,

Her title –Radical Feminism Has A Humanity Problem – sets an adversarial tone from the beginning.

A powerful tool in our fight to preserve women’s rights may be staring us right in the face.

It’s easy to take the obvious for granted, and confronting this social norm is a flashpoint for many of us. 

But why is makeup mandatory? It’s obviously a holdover from older, stricter ideas of what women should be. What a corset does for the waist, contouring does for the face. And we all know it’s at least as bad for us.

I’m not going to lecture anyone about harmful chemicals or animal testing. There are plenty of other people more qualified to take on these very important issues. 

Made the mistake this morning of clicking on The Humanist Report. 

I knew it was going to piss me off, the headline was Stephen King Says JK Rowling “Canceled” Him For Supporting Trans Women. I do my best to keep track of narratives on all sides. They usually take a couple of minutes to warm up to the bullshit.

But Mike Figueredo goes right for it. “So, by now, I think it’s abundantly clear, since author JK Rowling has made it known every opportunity she had, that she hates trans women. Okay, we get it!”

NO YOU DON’T. I actually read her essay and as many tweets on the subject as I can find, so I can say with some authority that SHE NEVER SAID THAT.

“All this time, we have been quietly permitting society to convince us that, in discarding the torturously repressive corset, we have definitively thwarted the patriarchal hold over female liberty Once And For All…

“While in actuality, our material freedom has been gradually snatched from right under our noses in the form of expensive jeans with fake pockets requiring additionally expensive handbags!

“Do with that information what you will.”

It sounds too simple, but the erosion of women’s pockets through the 19th and 20th centuries follows our struggle for liberation. The more autonomy women have, the fewer and smaller the pockets.

I knew something was up when I woke up to 19 notifications.

They had me right – A smallish account with only so much energy to defend myself. But they just really hated my Cyberpunk article!

After the original poster proclaimed it was “NOT ok to insult anyone because of their opinion,” a group of them wasted no time dogpiling me to tell me why my opinion meant I needed to die.

Hardly bothering with ‘transphobe,’ they labeled me ‘vile,’ ‘disgusting,’ toxic,’ (of course!) and even abusive. My writing was referred to as “a pile of dog shit.” I was told to take ‘feminist’ out of my bio. And called a bigot and a fascist, for good measure.

Watching Reddit go down in flames this week was way too satisfying.

Supposedly, they got to know ‘Aimee’ through a volunteer relationship. But no one ever bothered to Google the name!

Many people, myself included, had at least a passing familiarity with the Challenor crew before these latest events. David the Elder had gotten himself expelled from two political parties in the UK for generally being a nasty, pedophilic fuck, but especially for doing it in public a little too often.

‘Aimee’ the younger is a well-known validation junkie. So it was no surprise that, upon being given full Moderator powers, this person set about hacking away at anything that hindered this quest.

When your identity is built on a lie, reinforcing it is a constant preoccupation. This obsession bleeds into everything you do.

One Stunning&Brave soul calling himself Bella Blondeau shares his view through a trans lens darkly. The game Cyberpunk 2077 strikes him as pretty transphobic, and he would know!

But while trying to illustrate transphobia in gaming, Bella actually demonstrates his lack of understanding of gender theory or the real world he’s so desperate to avoid. He complains that the game is an “insidious attack on trans personhood” because characters are chosen based on the player’s voice.

The pandemic has demonstrated how little has actually changed for women. 

We spent the past year getting used to being at home. Many lost their jobs, or quit to take care of the kids. Many more soldiered on, playing Mom, Wife and Worker on a single, ramshackle set. Meanwhile, Joe Biden executive-ordered us out of legal existence.

Adding insult to injury, #NotAllMen refuses to go away.

The response #TooManyWomen was pretty satisfying, but it exposed some confusion in the feminist conversation.

How Many Men?

“No one is saying that it’s all men,“ wrote one commenter, “so we don’t need to say ‘not all men.’“

Just a quick note of warning to readers and the wider feminist community.

This afternoon in Montreal, a man who calls himself Billboard Dad was out doing his thing. Interestingly, that thing is protesting the Canadian government’s stance on gender politics.

“I was having peaceful conversations on Saint-Catherine Street, joined by a local man. A bunch of these thugs suddenly swarmed me, I'm told there were about 7.“

He got footage of several people surrounding him, one of them shouting, “Transphobes, fuck off!“ while hitting Billboard Dad with a traffic cone!

What makes a cult?

Dr. Steven Hassan thinks he knows. “After my deprogramming from the Moon cult in 1976, I became interested in mind control… but needed a master’s degree to receive ethical training in hypnosis… I have been attending workshops (and giving them) ever since.“

Feminists on Twitter have latched onto Dr. Hassan’s words from last June, “Young people are not getting good ethical counseling regarding their trauma, their body image issues, their gayness… They are being rushed to taking hormones and in some cases surgery.“

Hey guyns, get this – Abortion is trending again! Zipidee-do-dah!

Ovarit’s comments on my post this week took a discouraging turn. Alongside a lively discussion of Mitt Romney’s Child Allowance Plan, an unexpected consensus emerged that abortion protections at the Federal level are basically gone.

The Sad State of Women’s Rights, US Edition

“It’s just a matter of time. It’ll be off the table soon, and it makes moderate Republicans a lot more appealing to me.“

This sounds reasonable until you remember that all Romney needs to look like a hero is a little integrity.