This morning I was walking along a neighbourhood street, beside a park. Ahead of me on the sidewalk were two youngish women, one of whom was pushing a stroller. As I walked by them, the youngster in the stroller called out "boy", and when there was no response from its mother, repeated "boy", and again, "boy." When there had opened some distance between us, I could hear the women speaking in low volume to each other. I imagined that they hadn't wanted to correct the child within my earshot, presumably not to embarrass me. I wouldn't have been embarrassed, though.
In the vernacular of trangenderism, I was misgendered, and if I were a transgendered person, I would have felt this as a bigoted, even vicious, attack on my identity.
I am not transgendered. I am a woman. I am a woman who has been "misgendered" since I was a child. The first time, I was a kid, my family was camping, I went to use the bathroom, and when I stepped out, a woman was stepping in, and saw me, then angrily chastised me for using the wrong bathroom. I felt ashamed, as though I had done something wrong, although I knew I was a girl and the correct bathroom for me to use was the women's bathroom. When I got back to our campsite, I told my mother what had happened, and her attitude was the problem was not with me but with that woman.
My mother didn't care that I dressed in t-shirts and shorts, didn't care that I played baseball with the neighbourhood boys, didn't care that I wasn't interested in make-up and dolls and pink toys. She let me be me. Maybe I could have used a little coaching in the ways of the world, but my mother encouraged me not to play the girl game, because her experiences were that men were dangerous, and I think she believed the longer I could avoid that knowledge first-hand, the better.
This morning, I was not offended. Instead, I thought of how the young child already had learned to categorize people, but, of note, was not categorizing, say, trees ("fir", "maple") as they went along. Clearly, categorizing people was important, at least to its parents.
An interesting thing about categorizing people, or anything for that matter, is that it is a construct of a thought process represented in language. It is biologically obvious to categorize people by sex; we are born into one of two categories (unless we are intersex). It is completely constructed and arbitrary to categorize us by gender. Gender was originally applied to language; its application to people was a co-optation of the early transgenderists (eg John Money), when they realized they had to do some fancy footwork to obfuscate the theory that one could change sex. One cannot change sex, but if one conflates sex with gender, and then changes gender, voila!, sex change.
Language is meant to be descriptive, but when it is used proscriptively, it is restrictive. As Ruth Barrett discusses in Female Erasure, language forms a frame, and it is either a frame you define for yourself, or a frame someone else defines for, and forces on, you.
The trangenderists have forced a frame on us about gender and sex. Elizabeth Hungerford, in Female Erasure, brilliantly dissects this frame by showing how the transgenderists have taken the language women have developed to describe our experience of discrimination based on our sex and have distorted it to be about gender discrimination by cis against trans. In either system, biologic women are the ones ultimately oppressed, but now not merely by men, but by men who claim to be women, and when men claim to be women, they remove biologic women from the discussion of sex discrimination and erase everything about our experiences as women.
Transgenderism is not a frame that fits women. Transgenderism is a frame that reduces a woman to a concept, a feeling, that can be imagined and felt by anyone who claims it.
Women cannot accept this frame.
Women must hold to the frame we define for ourselves.
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