By @peak_up (YouTube)

This is the third piece in a series that Ms. @Peak_up is publishing as a guest contributor to WLRN. She is writing about transgenderism and the impacts it has on children’s and women’s rights.

The first transsexual person I ever encountered, that I know of, was a nice, older man who frequented a coffee shop in the tiny Northern California town where I lived. Dressed in conservative, age-appropriate women’s clothing, he occupied the same stool every day, discussing politics quietly with the other regulars. He called himself “Michelle,” and so did everyone else. However, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Michelle was born a male, and simply preferred to be treated, and treat others, as though he was female. 

There was no reason to take any issue with Michelle. As far as anyone who knew him was concerned, he was just a little different. He didn’t demand anything, disrupt anything, or try to force his way into anyone’s space. He did not seem to be proud of his condition or expect special treatment; he just wanted to be left alone about it. Since he conducted himself peacefully, most people treated him as they would a lady. That was around the year 2000, at least a decade before anyone in the media started talking about being “transgender”. 

We have now reached a point where men have officially gained access to the protected spaces of women and girls without any credentials. Men who say they identify as women are now in the position to frisk women at the airport, share rooms with them, and be the doctor, or the “woman” in the room, when a woman or girl is having a medical examination. Anyone who expresses discomfort with these arrangements is reprimanded and shamed, and the men who say they’re women are made out to be the victims. Male rights activists have managed to create a reality where they can violate women and then claim to be personally injured by any objection.

Women as a group have suffered a huge loss of our sex-based protections due to the demands of these activists. Women as a sex have become legally obsolete. In many places, any man who says he identifies as a woman, based on stereotypes rather than biological reality, can walk right into a women’s locker room, bathroom, or dressing room and start undressing. If anyone tries to challenge his right to enter, they may be sued, blacklisted, or fired. Even men who say they’re women agree that women’s bathrooms are necessary to ensure a safe and comfortable place to remove some clothing in the absence of males. How is it that men have so easily accumulated the rights to invade women’s private spaces so quickly and easily? 

Women are even losing the right to talk about our bodies. We’re not supposed to say certain words, like “women” or “vagina” because it might make a gender dysphoric man feel excluded. Midwives are not supposed to say “mother” in regard to a pregnant woman, because they might be “fathers” who will get offended about being referred to as mothers. Women are not supposed to breastfeed anymore, moms and dads who call themselves moms can “chestfeed.” Since the gender identity movement is being treated as a “civil rights” movement, people of all professions are being trained to use this “politically correct” language. Women’s Studies, already marginalized and underfunded, has been changed to Gender Studies, and its whole focus has changed. Women’s Studies used to be about the realities of important women who had been omitted from history texts. Gender Studies is a subject that can only be discussed in theory, and in language that is restricted by the PC police. 

To change the definition of the word “women” to include men is to erase women as a sex class who need to be differentiated from men, and that is to feed women and girls to the wolves. All men are not predators, but those who are will be delighted to take advantage of the changing laws allowing them to pass unobstructed into little girls’ dressing rooms. It makes no difference to a pedophile if he has to look ridiculous to gain access to kids. Those who aren’t willing to dress in women’s clothes will enjoy the increased footage shared by those who are. 

In order to make their movement appear valid and progressive, gender ideology activists have stolen and inverted the meanings of words from real civil rights movements. “Transmisogyny” is the word they use at anyone who makes them feel offended for trying to present as women. “The cotton ceiling” is the term they’ve created to describe the limitations on men who say they’re women to get into women’s underwear, particularly lesbians, who are not attracted to them. They’ve co-opted “assigned sex at birth” from the intersex community, and “trans lives matter” from a movement that needs focus on it without this diversion. They’ve adapted the word sexism into “cissexism,” meaning an intolerance for people who try to change sex. This is blatant use of the language of the women’s liberation movement for men’s rights. 

These activists have latched themselves on to the LGB rights movement, with the letter “T” for “transgender”, and now the acronym “LGBT” makes no sense. Not only do the two movements have little to no commonality, the “T” claim that same sex attracted people are “transphobic” for not being attracted to them. This is the use of gay rights language for a homophobic cause. They’ve tried to identify with black oppression by calling women’s spaces “sex-segregated.” While claiming to be advocating political correctness, they are implying the racist notion that black skin can be used as a weapon like a penis can. 

The gay rights movement was necessary and long overdue. Gay people were (and many still are) harshly discriminated against for loving people of the same sex, and laws needed to be put in place to protect them. Gay people never asked anything of the public except to be treated as respectable humans, and be allowed to legally marry who they loved. For lesbian, gay, and bisexual people to make their movement successful, they had to “come out” (another term gender identity activists have stolen) in numbers to show how many of them there actually were. This mass coming out showed the public that gay people were not dangerous, weird, or perverted. They were everywhere, they lived normal lives, and it never made a difference that they were same-sex attracted. 

People who try to change sex demand not only acceptance, but drugs, surgical procedures, changes of definitions, erasure of words, changes of legal documents, and access to vulnerable peoples’ protected spaces, even bodies, all at the expense of others. This has made “LGBT rights” look like an invasive and demanding movement. Gay rights was not invasive or demanding until the gender ideology movement got on its coattails. Organizations like Stonewall, which used to be a wonderful source of support for gay people, have now taken up the fight of gender ideology activists, which erases the very people they were created to protect.

Many gay men don’t feel threatened by gender ideology advancements, and many gay men hate women, too. It’s not easy to get men, even gay men, to understand how these advancements hurt people, because they are often unaffected, or even benefit from them. Lesbians, on the other hand, are all but shunned by the whole enterprise and many wish to be removed from the “LGBT” label. The new “LGBT” organizations are heavily funded by billionaires now that they predominantly represent men’s rights. The Arcus Foundation, for instance, founded by Jon Stryker, heir to the medical equipment fortune of the Stryker Corporation, gives millions every year to “LGBT” programs. The Gill Foundation is another “LGBT” organization funded by millionaires, ILGA is another, ACLU is another, and Transgender Europe is another. 

These organizations and many more are receiving hundreds of thousands, often millions, from wealthy donors with an interest in influencing politics and changing laws to allow men to impersonate women. In the 1940s, a lesbian would have been arrested for wearing a belt buckle, for the crime of impersonating a man. The programs these millionaire “philanthropists” support bring gender identity ideology into school curriculums, police department training, and developing official “trans-affirmative” psychological guidelines for therapists. Jennifer Bilek writes, “Although activists present the LGBT movement as a weak, powerless group suffering oppression and discrimination, in truth it wields enormous power and influence—power it increasingly uses to remake our laws, schools, and society.” Her 2020 article The Billionaires Behind the LGBT Movement cites all of these facts and many more.   

Open Society Foundations, brought to you by billionaire George Soros, gives hundreds of thousands to the Gay Straight Alliance, a major transgender lobbying group, and to the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Center, an organization that goes door-to-door canvassing to reduce “transphobia.” It also gives hundreds of thousands to the Global Action for Trans Equality, and many more. These are just a few of the millionaires and billionaires who are pushing for political changes that will scrap women’s rights while using the “LGBT” flag as a marker of virtue.  

It’s working quite well, and fast. Kathleen Stock was fired from the University of Sussex for saying that biological sex is real. In 2018, the city of San Francisco was sued by a citizen named Tanesh Nutall because a city official denied him use of a women’s restroom on city property. Right now, the word processing program I’m using is alerting me to correct the pronoun “him” in the last sentence. In 2019, an employee of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo sued his employer for not letting him use the women’s restroom, and was awarded 1.32 million Japanese yen. The ruling required all employers allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they please without any notification to anyone of their “gender identities”. Now anyone can go into the women’s room any time, which obviously puts women in direct danger of male violence. These are just a few of the first things that came up researching this issue.    

When I see little toddler girls changing in the locker room at the gym, it scares and enrages me to know that any man can wander in simply by pretending he thinks he’s a woman. Many men will take advantage of this arrangement just to gain access to these spaces to leer at children’s bodies. Even if they don’t act on their perversions, this is a violation and should always be considered a criminal offense. 

Gay men and gender non-conforming men have always used the men’s rooms, even though they have often been targets for male violence. Even men who are small or don’t act tough are much more able to handle a threat from a man than women and girls are. It should not be women’s responsibility to take certain men into their spaces because these men claim to have a special need for protection. 

Cases of violence committed by males who say they’re women are now being reported as committed by females, and they are so many that it alters the pattern of statistics. This alone is a viable cause for women to oppose men being able to legally change their official documents. Violent males being identified as females is already reducing the stark contrast between reports of male and female violence, which in turn reduces the perceived need for women’s protective spaces and ordinances. Men who say they’re women maintain that they are victims of hate in order to make themselves comfortable in the limited and underfunded space of women-only facilities, and then often go on to victimize women in those spaces. 

Women’s crisis centers and shelters are now required to accept men who say they are women. Already over capacity in many cases, women shelters are expected to harbor men in spaces that are specifically meant to be a shield from them. If the shelters refuse to admit men who say they are women, their funding will be cut off, as in the case of the Vancouver Rape Relief & Women’s Shelter. Where are all the billionaire philanthropists rushing to support women’s programs? 

Violent male prisoners who say they’re women have been transported to female prisons to assault the women there. It’s a great way for a child molester or rapist to get out of the men’s prison and into a place where he can be the predator again. There have been numerous reports of violence committed by male prisoners against female prisoners since this has been happening. Yet they are catered to, given hormones at state expense, some are even granted cosmetic surgery. Strangely for them, no female prisoners are asking to be transferred to men’s prisons. 

In 2013, Kristoffer Johannson chopped his girlfriend into pieces and was sent to serve 14 years in a Sweden prison. He took hormones at taxpayer expense, changed his name to Kim, and was moved to a women’s prison in 2019. A journalist, Kajsa Ekman was called “transphobic” for expressing concern about the situation. In the UK, Karen White, a violent male sex offender, was moved to a female prison and attacked females there within days of his transfer. Many documented cases are available from Fair Play for Women, a group advocating for victims of these injustices.

Boys who say they are girls can now receive scholarships reserved for girls because of their underprivileged education status. Female athletes in Connecticut actually initiated a lawsuit against natal boys being allowed to compete as girls because it hurts their chances at scholarships. Males can compete as females in school and professional sports in many places. Having bigger, stronger, longer bones, thicker skin, more height, bigger lungs, more muscle mass, and lots of support, they are cleaning up womens’ and girls’ events. If men keep competing as women, do you think there will be any women left in sports ten years from now? This is one area that people often look at and peak immediately, recognizing the blatant female erasure. It’s one thing, and then another thing, and pretty soon large amounts of people will start to see that this whole movement is completely fucked. I read recently about a boy in one state who was allowed to compete as a girl, and a girl in another state who was not allowed to compete as a girl because she looked too much like a boy.  

What are gender identity activists fighting for? What rights do they want that they don’t already have? They take priority over everyone else, they talk openly and threateningly about their condition, and are accepted and welcomed in professional and public spaces. They even sue people over a word spoken, possibly by mistake, like “him.” Other vulnerable groups have to fight for their rights back that gender identity activists have taken away. This group is not oppressed, but on the contrary, a bit too privileged. 

Gender identity activists repeatedly rely on the assumption that people who try to change sex are often the targets of violence and murder. It’s amazing how they are able to get so many people to talk about that, because thousands of times more women are beaten, raped, and murdered every year by men and no one with any power has ever made that argument in their defense. People who try to change their sex make up less than 1% of the population, and women make up 50%. For every person murdered because they try to look like the other sex, thousands of women are murdered for being women. The problem is not that these people need to be accepted as the opposite sex in order to be safe from murder. The problem is that men need to stop murdering people.

When I encounter gender identity activists, I’m reminded of religious zealots, another group that pushes its ideology on non-believers without any tangible evidence, and will never consider that they might be wrong. They won’t listen to reason or consider any perspective that challenges their trained thinking. Both have histories of violence toward their opposition, both are paternalist in essence and woman-hating at their cores, both refuse to debate fairly and civilly, and both give nonsensical answers to important questions. Both are homophobic, both are full of unexplained contradictions, and both are harmful while claiming to be harmed or persecuted for their beliefs. Both have claimed to occupy the moral high ground while simultaneously violating the dignity, rights, and boundaries of other groups.

The fact that gender identity activists won’t agree to public, peaceful debate or civil discussion with rational, concerned women leads me to conclude that they know their movement is crooked. If their argument depends on force, ridicule, or silencing the opposition, then what they have is not an argument, but deliberate suppression. This is a problem that deserves real answers. It is affecting millions of lives and causing considerable harm. This men’s rights movement in gay rights clothing has colonized popular opinion, and women’s sex-based rights are its plunder. Feminists have been theorizing about the harms of gender for generations, and gender identity activists have made women’s human rights activists out to be a hate group. The only moral thing to do is protect women and girls from anyone who tries to invade their privacy and compromise their dignity. 

It’s unbelievable how a movement that uses harmful stereotypes to define reality is thought to be righteous, but that is where patriarchy has led us. When the world starts listening to women, we will evolve. Until then, men will keep abusing us and taking all they can until nothing is left.   

@peak_up was born and raised in Humboldt County, California, and now resides in southern Oregon where she teaches Yoga, volunteers for a nutrition organization, hosts a feminist consciousness-raising group, and homeschools her teenage daughter. She is forty years old and has been married for five years. She was politicized by radical feminism after her husband tried to become a woman, and speaks out to help others affected by the harms of transgender activism.