"Why did you make this? Are you a TERF?" and other fun questions to get you started
Mostly it's because I'm sick of shouting into the void.
Q: “Why did you make this blog?”
A: Because I’ve seen nothing but affirmation-only approaches and discussions for transitioning (when an individual takes steps to transition “from male to female” or “from female to male”). When I google “LGBT / transgender Singapore”, most of this affirmation-only treatment is being pushed by our largest and most prominent LGBT organizations such as Pink Dot, Oogachaga, and TransgenderSG, to name a few. I think it is only fair that both sides of the argument should be heard in order for anyone to be able to properly make full and informed decisions about the issue, as well as with regards to their own bodies and/or to their children and youth.
There are multiple other blogs, social media accounts, and sites that already cover the Gender Critical viewpoint in the Western sphere, of course (I list some at the bottom of this post). I made this blog with the intention of specifically covering local LGBT issues affecting Singaporeans.
Q: “‘Gender Critical’? That’s TERF nonsense. Get out of here with your transphobia, bigot!”
A: I’ll explain these terms again, for those who are unfamiliar with the lingo that surrounds this debate.
Gender: Previously merely a linguistic synonym exchangeable with “biological sex”. It has now come to be more commonly known as how an individual expresses themselves, often in conjunction with preconceived notions of how humans of a certain biological sex should behave. More about the term “gender”, how it came to be, and gender identity here.
Gender Critical (GC): To be critical of “gender”, as individual expression of self is in no way tied to biological sex. In the same way an atheist does not believe in any gods, so does a gender critical person not subscribe to the idea of gender, which often also follow sexist stereotypes (“girls like pink, boys play with trucks”, etc). Note that being an atheist does not mean that person wants religious people to die, to lose their rights, nor wants their existence erased - a common argument often brought up when someone says that they are GC.
TERF: Acronym for “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”. It has been thrown around so frequently as a slur to silence protesting voices from all sides at this point however (usually and noticeably towards women, the adult human female kind) that the actual meaning of the word no longer matters.
Transphobia: Phobia, an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something, to transgender-identified people. Like the word “TERF”, has also been slung about so much that it’s most often used to signal disagreement with a GC person’s views, regardless of intensity or civility, instead of actual transphobia.
Bigot: One who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance. (Merriam-Webster) See above comments regarding the word “TERF” and “transphobia”.
Across the world, worried concerns and voices of dissent about gender ideology, transitioning, and its effects are being handwaved away and silenced en masse under the label of “bigotry”, “transphobia”, and being a “TERF”. Popular mainstream social media platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, TikTok and Instagram have all silenced and banned any voices of dissent, and those who go against the grain are swiftly downvoted into oblivion before their remarks are deleted by moderators. One needs to look no further than the infamous case of J.K. Rowling speaking out about this issue, her subsequent cancellation(s), and the tsunami of death and rape threats that followed, simply for stating that biology is a fact, and that facts are not hate. (Bonus: the article containing said screenshots has since been purged, perfectly proving my point.)
Q: “Who are you?”
A: Realistically speaking, I’m nobody but an anonymous voice on the internet. Factually speaking, I am a Singaporean homosexual woman, or an adult human female who is only attracted to other adult human females. I am a local and an atheist, and radical feminist-aligned.
Q: “Why should I care about your views on this issue?”
A: No, you don’t have to. I speak simply because I can find no other local voices who share my views, and I hope I can reach those who have their doubts to let them know that they are not alone.
Singapore is a country where sexual activity between two consensual males is still illegal in law at time of writing this post, the appeal of which has been rejected multiple times, with the most recent rejection at time of writing being in Feb 2022, and whose general acceptance of the LGBT populace is rising but still largely conservative.
Religious groups in Singapore are still deeply intolerant of same-sex attracted people - the Wear White campaign for example was formed solely to protest the Pink Dot event, which by itself could only be held at limited times in a limited place due to our country’s strict regulations surrounding free speech issues.
It worries me that our lead LGBT organizations, who are supposed to safeguard our LGBT youth, are being swayed by what is clearly a massive social contagion that has affected children, youth, and adults worldwide, a movement fueled by the vastness of misinformation and the ease of access to pornography on the internet, both of which are constantly amplified by popularity algorithms.
We are downstream of the pipeline that is the unavoidable Western influence. The situation here in Singapore is thankfully not that extreme - yet. We do not yet have biological males competing in female-only sports, biological males in female-only prisons impregnating female inmates, nor judges who cannot define what a woman is. But it has definitely set down roots here. And I am extremely concerned that not a single one of our so-called transgender healthcare resources have explicitly stated that transitioning does not actually change your biological sex.
We are encouraging a terrible lie to people who are confused and/or deeply hurting, that their biological sex can be done away with as long as you "never saw (your)self as female", and that people "can actually become a woman!"
I speak not because I hate transgender people, because of course I don’t - I speak because I do not condone convenient untruths wrapped in the guise of kindness.
Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
J.K. Rowling, 19 Dec 2019
Q: “Whatever, TERF! Insert insult and threat of choice here! Why can’t you just be kind?!”
A: Like so many other women before me, I was once part of that “Be Kind” brigade.
It was the same message that conservative religious groups hurled at us, after all. We were unnatural, we were sinful. Why couldn’t we just live our lives? What we did in our private lives shouldn’t matter to others.
To this day, I still deal with homophobia from my Christian parents. I suspect they still pray for me daily that Jesus will cure my homosexuality, and that I will eventually find a nice man and settle down.
I wrote to Oogachaga once, in the depths of my despair, when I was forced to come out to my parents, only for them to tell me I was consumed by the devil. Oogachaga’s understanding response, still buried in my mail box somewhere, was probably what helped me to hold on for another day.
I attended my first SG Pink Dot back in 2011. I was so happy to finally realize I was not alone, that there were others like me, that nothing was wrong with me. I cried when I experienced my first light up in June 2012, hearing other LGBT people around me cheer as we frantically waved our pink flashlights at the heart display in the ParkRoyal hotel window opposite the venue. I was extremely encouraged to read that the number of Pink Dot attendees kept growing each year. It gave me hope that same-sex attracted people were finally being accepted, that transgender-identified people could look and present however they wanted without discrimination.
All of that held up until I discovered that trans-identifying people - all around the world, not just Singapore - were actually being told, and believed that they could actually, literally change their sex.
“Transwomen are women!” Oh, like, socially? Like society’s expectations of what a “woman” should look like? Yeah, I can do that, I guess.
No, literally. If you say transwomen are male, that’s transphobic, because some women have penises, and you need to educate yourself. If “biological sex and gender identity are two separate things”, then why the backlash? And most people don’t even realize the crux of the issue because of the constant conflation between “sex” and “gender”.
Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals were told they were fine as they were, and they didn’t need to change anything, and that they were who they were meant to be. We were normal people like every other heterosexual couple, only same-sex attracted. Nothing changes when a LGB person comes out, but when a T person comes out, everything does. Medicalization for LGB is considered conversion therapy, but medicalization for T is necessary and gender-affirming. Why is this message of love and self-acceptance so drastically different for our trans-identifying brothers and sisters under the umbrella, who are instead encouraged to change almost every part of themselves possible in order to be their authentic selves, and then some, to the point where other people around them have to also police their own common thoughts and language around them to avoid offence? Worse still that they do it under the misguided belief that all the steps they take to transition are actually so they can “change your biological profile to that of the sex you are transitioning to”, an impossibility for homo sapiens no matter the amount of artificial hormones, surgery, or legal paperwork they undergo. (Further reading material listed below.) Do all those procedures really cure gender dysphoria if the root cause of the discomfort - with their biological sex itself - is not properly and truthfully addressed to begin with?
I can no longer safely say that Pink Dot and its LGBT associates speak for same-sex attracted females like me, if any man can declare himself a woman because he has changed his attire, taken artificial hormones, gotten surgery to modify his body, and especially not even if his paperwork has been updated to reflect a “F”.
We cannot fight for our sex-based rights if the very meaning of sex itself has been distorted.
Resources and Further Reading:
Stats for Gender:
https://www.statsforgender.org/
TransgenderTrend:
https://www.transgendertrend.com/
Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM):
https://segm.org/
Transwidows:
https://www.transwidowsvoices.org/
Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans (PITT):
https://pitt.substack.com/archive
Zach Elliot, Paradox Institute:
A Response to ‘Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia’
Encyclopedia of Bad Gender Arguments:
https://www.womensliberationfront.org/encyclopedia-of-bad-gender-arguments
4th Wave Now:
The 41% trans suicide attempt rate: A tale of flawed data and lazy journalists
Carissa R Violante, Yale School of Medicine:
Every Cell Has a Sex
Gender Heretics:
Offering $1 MILLION For A Third Human Gamete
Claire Graham:
Biological sex is not a spectrum: there are only two sexes in humans
Jo Bartosch:
Why intersex people are fed up with their medical conditions being repurposed as a transgender identity