Julie Bindel

I've come across an old article from 2004 (link), written by this journalist Julie Bindel. And regardless of what work she's done for feminism, I can't help but dislike this woman.

My dislike of her draws almost entirely from her stance on transsexualism and transgenderism. She strikes me as ridiculously out of touch. She seems to have the idea that people change genders to fit their sexuality, as well as the positively archaic idea that physical gender is the only gender people have.

Having a sex change isn't something you do to "normalise" your sexual attractions. It's something you do to make the body that you were born with match your gender identity. Now, another place she goes wrong is thinking that transitioning to match your gender identity is validating societal gender roles (the roles she fought, as a feminist, to show weren't real and were just created by society). When a person transitions, it doesn't mean they're changing from, say a 'butch' male stereotype to a 'girly' female stereotype. Plenty of post-op male to female transgender people won't be that female stereotype, they'll be all over the 'spectrum of femininity', just like with cisgender women.

It isn't about being 'not happy with the constraints of your gender', as she puts it. It's when somebody knows that they aren't the physical gender they've been born with. This strong knowledge that their body is wrong can be deeply disturbing and cause great emotional distress, which will quite often lead to gender identity dysphoria.

Also, if she would like to argue that gender identity is completely learned, I would refer her to the case of David Reimer. When he was a baby, David was born a healthy male. However, he had Phimosis, a condition where the foreskin is too tight to retract. He was refferred for circumcision at the age of eight months. He was unfortunate to get a doctor that did not usually perform them, and performed the surgery with cauterization (yes, that's right, the idiot quack decided to burn it off). David's penis was burnt beyond surgical repair. So, he was, at the age of 22 months, reassigned to female (I'm skipping some stuff here, read the article I linked for the full details) and given the name Brenda. The psychologist, John Money (who was, at the time, a major proponent of gender identity being entirely learned) counseled 'Brenda' through 'her' childhood, and gave no report that it was anything other than successful. However, Reimer, at the age of fourteen, began to live as a male, and underwent all of the necessary procedures to become physically male. He knew, despite being raised as a girl, that he was a boy.

This is an instance where (as we so often argue is the case for us), nature was proven to triumph over nurture. Raising Reimer as a girl did not make him one. The case of transgender people is the same, in that they will identify with their gender identity regardless of their body, or what they are raised as.

You may ask, "Joshua, why is this all so important to you?". Well, other than my strong desire for everyone to have equal rights, it's important because it's an issue close to my heart.

Okay, um, wow, here we go.

This is me, here, coming out, for the second time in my life.

I don't identify as male or female. I would describe myself, rather than as a homosexual male, as an androsexual androgyne (that is, an androgyne that is attracted to males, I believe the prefix andro means two different things in these words(I prefer androsexual to androphilia, the latter sounds too much like a fetish to me lol)). I feel that, rather than having a male or female gender identity, I'm somewhere inbetween. It's something I've thought long and hard about, swinging between the two, before I realised I didn't have to be either. And it's so freeing.

So yeah, give me your opinions on Julie. Honestly, you can comment on what I said about me, but I would rather hear your opinions on the issue I discussed rather than my personal revelation lol. Okay, disregard that lol. If you wanna talk to me about it or something, I'm really more than open for questions.

Laters,
Joshua.