THE FLIMSY, LEAKY TRANS UMBRELLA

National Review

 

The Flimsy, Leaky Trans Umbrella

By MADELEINE KEARNS

February 18, 2024 6:30 AM

 

Not everyone under it deserves equal sympathy.

 

At the 2022 NCAA women’s swim championships in Georgia, I witnessed an altercation between a British women’s-rights activist, Kellie-Jay Keen, and a male transgender activist, Dawn (formerly Don) Ennis. Keen had spotted Ennis in a hallway and confronted him: “I am asking you as a mother, do not use women’s spaces,” Keen said. “It makes women and girls feel very uncomfortable.”

 

Ennis pushed back. Keen doubled down. And the scene, which I captured on video, went viral on social media. Despite being the aggressor, many people who saw the interaction thought that Keen came off heroically. It’s easy to take this public support for granted. It was not always the case.

 

A few years earlier, Keen was involved in a similar altercation. In 2019, Keen and some fellow women’s-rights activists, confronted Sarah (formerly Tim) McBride, then the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, now a Delaware state senator.

 

“Why don’t you care about lesbian girls at 14 getting double mastectomies?” Keen asked, during her Facebook livestream: “Everyone, this is Sarah McBride ignoring women and girls’ concerns as usual — so typically male!”

 

In response, NBC News ran a story headlined, “Prominent transgender advocate harassed by anti-trans feminist, video shows.” Sophie Lewis, writing in the New York Times, characterized the incident as Keen and her friends having “stormed onto Capitol Hill in Washington for the purposes of ambushing Sarah McBride,” “heckling and misgendering” him in what constituted “transphobic harassment.” Even some fellow TERFs castigated Keen and dismissed her as a liability.

 

But Keen saw things differently, telling The Spectator:

 

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I didn’t wear a mask. I didn’t have a baseball in trans remembrance colors. I didn’t say I want to punch anybody. I didn’t call him names. I didn’t swear at him. I didn’t intimidate him physically. I didn’t threaten violence. I didn’t commit violence. I asked a man pertinent questions about his lobbying.

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Now Keen is more popular than ever. What she realized, well before many others, was that winning in the court of public opinion depends on exposing the truth uncompromisingly, not on coming off as kind.

 

Five years ago, transgenderism was marketed as something that could manifest in any person at any age. It was explained as a realization (both sudden and ever present) of being “in the wrong body,” of not being the sex one was “assigned at birth.” It was introduced as an “umbrella term” that could apply to any person who had this realization, regardless of his or her age, sex, or psychiatric history. Indeed, it was wrong to even ask about such things since being trans was established by declaration alone.

 

Meanwhile, gender dysphoria — clinically defined as “a marked incongruence” between one’s “experienced or expressed gender” and one’s sex — was similarly one-size-fits all. Of course, not everyone who has gender dysphoria identifies as transgender and vice versa. And the underlying causes and co-morbidities differ in the case of each person suffering from gender dysphoria. But again, you weren’t supposed to dwell on such distinctions.

 

The strict policing of language helped make this oversimplification possible. According to the activist rulebook, you weren’t allowed to “deadname” anyone, you were required to be totally incurious about the person’s life prior to being trans. You weren’t supposed to “misgender” a person, or even acknowledge his sex. The result was that many groups of people who had very little in common with one another — except their assertion that they were something other than their sex — were lumped together. And so, the most sympathetic cases provided a cover for the least sympathetic. This was the way the activists wanted it.

 

Years later, after the strong winds of scrutiny prevailed — the “trans umbrella” no longer protects everyone under it from fair criticism.

 

The public now knows that the little boy who innocently plays with dolls (whose parents have projected an ideology onto him) is experiencing something wholly different from the depressed adolescent girl who wishes to be happy and popular and thinks that trans is the ticket. The public also knows that this unhappy teenager is distinct from the adult homosexual male who longs desperately for requited love and thinks that a “sex change” can deliver it. And the public also knows that this restless gay man has little to do with the “autogynephile” (AGP) — the heterosexual male sexually aroused by the idea of himself as a woman.

 

Of all the people who are most in danger of losing public sympathy, it is surely those in this last category. Among adults, it may also be the most populous. Ray Blanchard, the Canadian sexologist who has spent decades studying  AGPs and trying to help them, said in a recent interview: “In the Western Hemisphere and English-speaking Commonwealth countries, the overwhelming majority of adult natal males presenting with gender dysphoria are of the autogynephilic type.”

 

Extreme and high-profile examples, such as male sex offenders admitted to women’s prisons, have alerted the public to the existence of autogynephilia. And so have some AGPs themselves. Take Debbie (formerly David) Hayton, a married father and science teacher from the U.K., who regrets having surgery. Hayton has written very frankly about his struggle with AGP and the toll it’s taken on him and his family.

 

Once the “trans umbrella” is collapsed, what you’re sometimes left with is a straight white male selfishly making demands of others. It’s no wonder that such individuals are keen to keep it up.