People trying to live as transgender members of the other sex complained that the Women’s March on Washington unfairly excluded them by declaring that a person’s sex is decided by their male or female biology.
“The main reason I decided not to go was because of the pussy hats,” said 28-year-old Jade Lejeck, who is a man trying to live as a transgender woman. “I get that they’re a response to the ‘Grab them by the pussy’ thing, but I think some people fixated on [biology] the wrong way,” Lejeck said in an interview with Mic.com Sunday night
Lejeck said “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” unfairly equate womanhood with having a vagina, and sometimes argue that transgender men are improperly trying to encroach upon female communities.
Sam Forrey, a 20-year-old “nonbinary” student from Ohio, and his transgender girlfriend Lilian McDaniel, were afraid that the march would be dangerous for them. “Non-binary” refers to people who view themselves as embracing a blend of male and female characteristics.
The transgender girlfriend is biologically male, and worried that he would be placed in a men’s jail if arrested at the protest. He planned on going to the march until he saw people using the march to promote “genital-based” womanhood, he complained.
“I think it ended up being a white cis women march,” McDaniel said.
The term “cisgender” is used to describe normal behavior, such as men living as men and women living as women.
Forrey suggested that the vagina-related messages plastered on signs such as “pussy power” and “pussy grabs back” excluded people who lack vaginas but want to be women, and women who say their vaginas should not limit their chance to live as men.
“As a nonbinary person, the emphasis on genitals just bought into the rigid, Western concept of gender,” Forrey said, suggesting that a person’s biological sex should be unrelated to their classification as male or female.
The Women’s March in Los Angeles featured Laverne Cox and the march in Washington featured Janet Mock, both of whom are men living as women.
Cox said North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which states that people should use the bathroom according to the gender most recently listed on their birth certificate, ensures that transgender people are “stigmatized.”
“If you are a girl like me, a woman like me, a transgender person like me, you live in a country that shames you, that stigmatizes you, that discriminates against you and criminalizes you,” Cox said.
The HB2 law merely allowed the state legislature to establish a biological distinction between legal males and legal females. The law also allows people to change their legal sex after they undergo medical procedures.
That HB2 law is fiercely opposed by gay activists, who denounce any effort to mark legal or civic distinctions between male and female. This non-distinctions policy is supported by less than one-fourth of Americans, according to a recent poll.
A survey of the 2010 census showed that only 1-in-2,400 adults have changed their first name from one sex to other sex.
To read more Breitbart coverage of the political claim that chosen gender should be more important than biological sex, click here.