…This is a struggle [radical feminists against male-to-female transgenders -ed] —laden with a hilarious level of acrimony—between men who insist they’re women and women who insist that the most crucial part of being a woman involves popping out of your mother’s vagina with a vagina of your own. The latter group is disparagingly referred to as TERFs—Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists—due to the fact that they feel male-to-female trannies are trying to party-crash their struggle against historical oppression. The TERFs argue that for men to pretend they’re women is insulting to real women. To them, it is a genital form of blackface.

The TERF worldview can be loosely summarized as follows: So-called “trans women” are actually privileged males who use such privilege in an attempt to co-opt women’s historical suffering without enduring any of the social stigma attendant to bleeding for five days a month without dying. They are essentially delusional men who wear dresses or, in some cases, mutilate their genitals in a near-suicidal quest to validate their delusions. Trannies should under no circumstances be able to use women’s bathrooms or attend events that are exclusively designed for women. For trannies to invade such female-designated “safe spaces” is at best intrusive, at worst yet another form of rape. Since “gender” is a social construct and “femininity” is a patriarchal imposition, transsexuals are merely reinforcing anti-female memes by aping sexist stereotypes of how women should behave. Therefore it is they, and not the TERFs, who are the true reactionaries.

Robert Anton Wilson famously said, “It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.” Whereas those who would now be defamed as TERFs were on the far bloody cutting edge of leftist politics a generation ago, they now find themselves outdated or, as the kids like to say, “irrelevant.” Without having changed a single idea, they find themselves labeled not as bold freedom warriors fighting the good fight against oppression but as hateful reactionaries who stand in the way of true progress.

One especially amusing bone of contention between the two groups of shaggy yipping poodles regards the vaginal authenticity of male-to-female transsexuals. Old-school feminist Germaine Greer recently asserted that trannies aren’t women because they don’t realize what it’s like “ to have a big, hairy, smelly vagina.”

Although British feminist Sheila Jeffreys—known as the “British Andrea Dworkin” and born with a face that is nearly as objectionable as Dworkin’s—is aligned with Greer in her belief that transsexuals are not legitimate women, she argues that their manmade vaginas are actually smellier than those of natural-born females:

The newly carved-out orifices of male-bodied transgenders do not resemble vaginas [and] create new microbial habitats in which infections develop and cause serious smell issues for their owners.

To my knowledge I have never sniffed a transgender vagina, nor do I intend to, so I cannot speak from personal experience whether or not Jeffreys is correct. I am merely noting—with a tremendous amount of inner joy—that leftist intersectionality has devolved to the point where real women and fake women are arguing over whose vaginas smell worse.

What Guardian columnist Julie Bindel, who is often maligned as a TERF, refers to as the “ trans cabal” routinely depicts TERFs as transphobic reactionaries who unwittingly serve the patriarchy and are therefore complicit in the exclusion, harassment, torture, and murder of transfolk the world over. They allege—without any evidence, as is the case in many such cartoonishly overwrought modern transsexual persecution complexes—that within their dark and sinful hearts, the TERFs want nothing more than for transsexuals to be wiped off the planet. In this sense, they argue, TERFS are no less fascistic or reactionary than all the homophobic right-wing Christian bigots who are always seeking to murder them, at least in their fever dreams. They actually have such a bloated sense of self-importance that they feel non-trannies are as obsessed with trannies as trannies themselves are.

Online, the TERF war consists of little more than both sides accusing the other of being psychotically hateful ideologues who are constantly persecuting, harassing, and threatening to kill them. Based on a cursory review of the trans/TERF battles online, I’d tend to agree, adding only that both sides are guilty of being psychotically hateful ideologues.

If I could sift through all the highly girlish drama—seriously, some of these trans activists can be so whiny that I am sometimes tempted to concede that they actually are women—and whittle it down to one point, I’d say that TERFs are merely alleging that “trans women” are men who are merely pretending to be women, no matter what “gender identity” they claim, how many hormone injections they receive, or surgeries they undergo. Until presented with evidence that convinces me otherwise, I will agree with them on this point.

Otherwise I have no dog in this fight, no skin in this game, no heart to be broken in this emotionally pitched drama. I’m content to sit back and watch the chicks battle the men who pretend to be chicks over whether or not the latter group consists of bona fide chicks. To me, that’s entertainment.

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