Chopping The Onion

One of the difficulties of being on the non-mad side of the gender wars is that the other side’s arguments are so mad, it sounds as though you’re making them up. What trans activism has done — enabled a group of deeply misogynistic men to repackage regressive stereotypes as sacred identities, male access to women’s spaces and resources as feminist, medical experimentation on vulnerable children as life-saving, and endless threats of violence against women as progressive — is totally insane. Yet you can’t just say this to someone who’s thought no further than “well, no one minded men wearing a bit of lippy back in the eighties”. You’d sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. You know it, and trans activists know it too. 

This is why critics need to be very careful in how they frame their criticism. Just as women in abusive relationships know they must take extra care not to sound paranoid, vindictive or delusional when describing “that lovely man”, critics of gender identity ideology must tread carefully to avoid being accused of “just wanting to make trans people look bad’” In both cases, it’s hard to be careful enough. Far easier to dismiss a complaining woman as a crazy harpy than to acknowledge your own complicity in what has been done to her. Sure, he said she was a bitch — or he said she was “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes” — but she’s reading too much into it. Didn’t he tell you she was like that?

This is the framework into which one might fit the Onion’s latest hit piece “JK Rowling Escapes Insane Asylum”. The Onion describes itself as a satirical newspaper — and sure, it used to have its moments, with pieces such as “Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement” — but this is not satire. It’s a misogyny-fuelled revenge fantasy, and a deeply unoriginal one at that. 

At first I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt. The police officer quote — “you will hear her, and her opinions, coming” — felt too on the nose not to be a joke about the way in which the historical institutionalisation of outspoken women aligns with the modern-day policing of feminist speech. Yes, I thought, it is appalling, but also kind of hilarious — quite ripe for satire — that a children’s author who has done so much for children’s and women’s rights has been portrayed as a genocidal maniac in need of locking up. Maybe next they could do a piece on kindly trans allies finally realising that the trans activism they see isn’t a fake version of trans activism cooked up by TERFs in order to vilify trans people, but the “real” trans activism (“you mean Jessica Yaniv and India Willoughby aren’t cruel parodies invented by Julie Bindel? And Sheila Jeffreys didn’t write Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis? No way!”).

Yet the piece is not a joke about the madness of those who declare women mad for speaking the truth. Instead, it does something which will be familiar to anyone who has been in an abusive relationship. Rather than address an actual statement — you are hurting me, you are making me afraid — the abuser responds as if something else has been said  — I didn’t kill you, why are you saying such things? The Onion can’t say trans activism doesn’t push to get men, even convicted rapists, into female-only spaces, or that it doesn’t demand so-called “gender-affirming” care for minors. Perhaps once it might have made a dark joke about the sugar-coating of such truths, but today it won’t dare. So instead it conflates JK Rowling speaking out with Rowling seeing “maleness” everywhere (“she claims we gave her ‘male’ sheets, but I think she just means they’re blue”) and categorising any treatments for children, including dentistry, as evil (“she said, ‘The teeth are the children! You’re mutilating the teeth!’ and then punched me in the face”).  

The writers also throw in a classic example of female speech being presented as more harmful and threatening than male actions, with the line “healthcare workers at the psychiatric facility preferred working with rapists and murderers to the ‘unpredictable’ and ‘erratic’ Rowling”. This is very much of a piece with trans activism’s habit of insisting that women who speak about their rights make the men who threaten to kill them for it feel “unsafe”. It’s also of a piece with the way in which abusive men have, throughout history, sought to portray female accusers as aggressors, and as insane. (To be fair, I think it’s supposed to be a joke about the way feminists such as Rowling stigmatise others as violent. Only doesn’t work when you really do have a movement which demands male rapists and murderers are referred to and treated as women.)

The article includes an AI-created image of a rabid Rowling in a straitjacket. This, in a world where women have been locked up, tranquilised, given electric shock treatment and lobotomised for speaking out of turn. In 1964’s Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson describe how, within abusive family set-ups, the family member who threatens the party line is pathologised:

We hear parents and siblings lie, and become indignant when they are not believed, and call the patient sick for not believing them. We witness intrusion and attempts at control – telling the patient what she thinks, what she feels, what she is like: choosing her role for her, and punishing her if she doesn’t fall in with it. Many of these families have secrets and are chronically ashamed. They live with the fear that the story that protects them might crumble.

These families sound an awful lot like the “trans community” in its treatment of “TERFs’” many of whom are left-wing women and/or lesbians who were once accepted members of the group. Like these families, trans activists fear exposure — some part of them is quite aware of the incoherence of their own position — so are at pains to project all their sins onto those who question “the story that protects them”. 

There is nothing new about women and children having to pander to the craziness of a patriarch — bending and twisting to accommodate his delusions so that his one truth becomes the only truth that matters. This happens in private with families, and in public, in social movements, religious groups and political life. You are expected to cede your perception of reality to that of the dominant man. The more outlandish and flawed his perceptions, the more work has to go into protecting them, and the more you will be punished if you fail. Transgenderism – with its insistence that thinking you are born in the wrong body, or that you can change sex, are not mad things to think – is a very extreme example of this. Women are told that not using the pronouns men demand “leads directly” to violence against them. What kind of lunatic believes that? Yet we must all pretend that we do. 

In 1987’s Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin denounced that “the public censure of women as if we are rabid because we speak without apology about the world”. She described how, fearing punishment, “women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know”. Right now, women who refuse to do this are being told they need curing, not the men whose brains have been rotted by sissy porn. Women who assert their own boundaries are told they have a “phobia”, that the must “reframe their trauma”, that if their previous experiences of male sexual violence have damaged them so badly they fail to recognise that “the feminine penis is different to the masculine penis” they need therapy. Simply saying “no” to men getting their dicks out wherever they like is redefined as insanity because it’s been decided that wanting to get your dick out wherever you like — and call it a ladydick while you’re at it — is totally sane. 

There’s lots of material for satire in there, not that the Onion would go there. Are they afraid that someone would get mad?