Feminists must escape from the sexual and political abuse inflicted by the men who dominate the transgender ideology, a feminist author declared Tuesday at a demonstration outside the Supreme Court.
“A man can never be a woman,” Natasha Chart told the crowd and the cameras. “A lesbian can never be male … I will not be forced to lie, I will not submit,” she said.
She spoke from a stage where her broad alliance of feminists, lesbians, and conservatives explained their shared political opposition to the transgender ideology.
Their anti-transgenderism speeches were delivered as several lawyers for the transgender movement told the Supreme Court judges that the government must embrace transgenderism. That ideology demands that the government outlaw any legal or civic recognition of the complementary sexual and biological differences between legally equal men and women.
Chart, a feminist writer at FeministCurrent.org, used her speech to urge other feminists to walk away from the men who dominate the transgender ideology:
I’ve been told that I am not a nice, inclusive person for saying that the law needs to be able to recognize sex. And not just me, but all the women who don’t believe that human beings can change sex. We’ve been, we’ve even been accused of perpetrating genocide. It’s funny because five years ago, I first started seeing lesbians were being publicly shamed, sexually harassed, and demonized by straight men calling themselves lesbians.
These men also tended to call themselves progressives, feminists … They keep telling us now that they are absolutely indispensable to the women’s movement, and we cannot do without them. Everyone can always see this behavior, and they always get away with it.
I didn’t think — and I still don’t — that sexually harassing lesbians is a good way to be inclusive. So I objected.
It turns out it’s a firing offense on today’s left to complain about men sexually harassing lesbians if that man says he feels like he’s a lesbian.
That harassment still goes on, and if anything, it has gotten worse. Women share shocking screenshots with me from lesbian dating apps, which are now just simply packed wall-to-wall with men. These men have even started getting women’s [social media] profiles suspended for saying no to them and refusing to recognize their gender and validate their feelings.
Across social media, women’s accounts and access to public conversation is under permanent, constant surveillance for offenses against men claiming to be women, with catastrophic penalties for refusing to lie for them to spare their feelings.
Is that nice behavior? What about my feelings? What about the feelings of all the women who have lost all access to public conversation on social media?
I saw that President [Barack] Obama made several moves to end single-sex facilities for women and girls through executive branch orders and funding threats. His administration and now the entire Democratic congressional caucus made a point of insisting on an end to women’s rights to bodily privacy from men whenever we are outside our homes. If a woman complains that a man has dropped his trousers in front of her at a job, the left will shout “Me Too!” in solidarity, and he’ll be cancelled. If a woman complains because he dropped his trousers in front of her at a gym locker, but he says he’s a woman, they’ll cancel her. Is that kind?
Was it inclusive when the women who objected to that [trouser dropping] were fired for it? Women are still being fired if they dare to say anything against this.
Anywhere on the left, some of us may be fired for the offense of appearing at this [alliance] gathering today. None of the women at liberal organizations can say no to this [transgender] agenda or their peers will destroy them, and that makes their consent to this [transgender ideology] — their support for it — as meaningful as a hostage statement.
Last night, a woman wrote to me, a progressive reporter who is outspoken and not shy to hold unpopular opinions, to ask for a quote for this [transgender legal] case. And after she got my reply, she said to me, she wrote, “I just met Aimee [Stephens, the plaintiff in the lawsuit], she prepares for tomorrow, she is a woman.” And I asked her, “In what way is Stephens a woman?” And she said, and I quote, “It’s not a matter of what I think.”
And I’m here [to protest] for her [the reporter] today, even though she probably really dislikes me.
It is the right of all women to speak publicly and be able to petition our government for the redress of our grievances and be able to participate openly in the public sphere. I have seen numerous women banned from social media for pointing out that gender transition treatments leave children sterile for life at ages where they can’t possibly consent to such permanent decisions. But a generation of quirky, stereotype-rejecting kids — many of whom would grow up to identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, many of whom are autistic — are being sterilized as minors now.
And the only crime that the left or social media companies seem to recognize in this is the crime of women objecting to the wholesale sterilization of vulnerable children. For that, we get accused of “promoting genocide.” There are doctors in the U.S. who will go to work today and oversee the chemical castration of little boys, who will put 14-year-old girls into menopause, and give troubled young girls cosmetic mastectomies. And I object — and for that, I’m considered dangerous.
I’ve seen public calls for every type of harm against those of us who object to the end of women’s sex-based rights or who object to the sterilization of children.
To the people who say … the only meaningful type of violence [they recognize] is that I refuse to call a man “she.”
Still others insist it is violent of me to associate with conservatives, in spite of the fact that gender activists associate with lots of conservatives, and I’ve never seen anyone have a problem with that. It’s almost like women who say no to these men [who say they are transgender] are just going to be wrong, no matter what we do.
Sisters, when a man puts you under constant surveillance and retaliates whenever you say no, and huffs about being indispensable, and he makes you lie to spare his feelings, and he always puts you in the wrong — no matter what — that is not a partnership. It’s abuse. Plan a way out before it gets worse. It will get worse.
In closing, to echo my sisters in the U.K., a man can never be a woman. A lesbian can never be male.
My name is Natasha Chart from New York state. I will not be forced to lie. I will not submit.
Transgender Facts:
In general, the transgender ideology says a person’s legal and civic recognition as a man or a woman is determined by their “gender identity,” not by their biology.
The ideology also insists that men and women are more or less interchangeable, and it objects to the public’s view of the two sexes as simultaneously different, complementary, and equal.
The transgender advocates want to impose their ideology on Americans by establishing “transgender rights” laws, which would require the Department of Justice to penalize individuals and groups who insist that biology determines male or female status — and also shapes peoples’ likely political, civic, and personal priorities.
Polls show the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents. In 2017, former President Barack Obama told NPR that his promotion of the transgender ideology made it easier for Donald Trump to win the presidency.
Multiple polls show that most Americans reasonably wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that people’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by biology. A U.K. survey shows a similar mix of sympathy for people who say they are transgender alongside lopsided opposition to the ideology.
The transgender movement is diverse, so its different factions have competing goals and priorities. It includes sexual liberationists, progressives, feminists who wish to blur distinctions between the two sexes, and people who glamorize the differences between the two sexes. It includes high-profile children, people who are trying to live as members of the opposite sex, troubled teenage girls trying to flee womanhood, and people trying to “de-transition” back to their sex.
It also includes men who demand sex from lesbians, masculine autogynephiles who say they are entitled to women’s rights, alpha males who insist they are the natural leaders of women, parents eager to support their children’s’ transgender claims, wealthy donors, politicians, political professionals, revenue-seeking drug companies, surgeons, and medical service providers.
Transgender advocates claim that two million Americans say they are transgender to a greater or lesser extent. But very few people who describe themselves as transgender undergo cosmetic surgery of the genitals. Only about 4,118 Americans surgically altered their bodies in hospitals from 2000 to 2014 to appear like members of the opposite sex, according to a pro-transgender medical study. A Pentagon report commissioned by former Defense Secretary James Mattis said that “rates for genital surgery are exceedingly low — 2% of transgender men and 10% of transgender women.”
Yet the gender ideology is rapidly gaining power, aided by huge donations from wealthy individuals and medical companies.
In Ohio, for example, in February, a judge forced the parents of a teenage girl to give up custody so she can begin a lifetime of drug treatments and surgery that will allow her to appear as a male.
The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male and female civic society around the idea of “gender identity” has already attacked and cracked many of the popular social rules that help Americans manage the cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different, and equal men and women.
These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, children’s safety, practices to help teenagers, health outcomes, women’s ideals of beauty, culture and civil society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, military culture, and children’s sexual privacy.