Of all the critical components in women’s struggle for liberation, the right and ability of women to say no to unwanted male genitals is foundational. Once you can protect yourself from surprise sexual torture, other human rights become possible.
Feminists have long fought for laws to curb rape, sexual harassment, indecent exposure, marital rape, trafficking, and child sexual abuse, and all have in common a presumption that men should keep their genitals to themselves around presently disinterested parties. Further, children should have the right to be free of sexual advances, and women should always be able to say no, and to be left alone sexually while incapacitated.
If your issues lead to more unwanted male genital exposure, let alone contact, you’re now working for the interests of sexually entitled men, not women. Yet this has become the norm, rather than the exception, in what’s been presented to the mainstream as feminism for the last few years.
Enter Jessica Yaniv, formerly Jonathan. His exploits in harassing women and girls have recently been chronicled in conservative U.S. publications such as The Blaze, The American Conservative, The Daily Signal, the Christian Post, and the National Review, because liberal and mainstream U.S. outlets won’t touch it. He’s currently trying to force female beauticians to wax the hair off his genitals, and he’s succeeded in driving some of them out of business and extorting settlements from them.
Previously, Yaniv talked to girls and women on the internet about his menstruation fetish. Until recently, the truth of his name and male sex was fiercely protected by the Canadian government, as well as technology platforms like WordPress and Twitter, which banned numerous women and some men who’d tried to warn others about his predations.
Every Objection Rests on Yaniv’s Maleness
What’s important about the Yaniv case isn’t just that he’s an obviously predatory and disturbed individual, it’s that he’s a man. If society affirms that he is correct when he insists it’s a violation of men’s human rights to say that they aren’t women, then he’s a victim of discrimination who’s doing exactly what he should be doing.
Yet the basis for concern about Yaniv rests wholly on the fact that he’s a man, and that everyone knows this. For instance, concern about Yaniv’s discussions of menstruation with young girls rests almost entirely on the fact that he’s a man. Any man demanding that women view or touch his genitals against their will, or that men be allowed into women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, rape crisis shelters, and prisons, is just as indecent as Yaniv.
Decent men don’t make demands like this, by definition. Decent men hear a woman say no, and the matter of intimate contact or exposure is settled for them.
Yet there’s no basis under self-identification of sex —such as is being proposed in U.S. federal law under the Equality Act, and provisions added to the current version of Violence Against Women Act passed by the House —to have criteria by which a claim of gender identity can be evaluated or rejected. It must simply be accepted.
This is the inevitable and intended consequence of gender identity laws: His penis is female if he says it is. He’s a woman who has a right to talk about menstruation with women and girls if he says he is. He’s a lesbian who has a right to represent lesbians politically, or be allowed into lesbian dating spaces, as one of them, if he says he is.
If You Agree to Trans Ideology, This Follows
Moreover, this is the inevitable and intended consequence of insisting that “preferred pronouns” based on gender identity claims be used, and demanding that it be treated like an act of violence to use accurate, sex-based pronouns. If you agree Yaniv is a woman because he says he is, and that his body is female because he says it is, and that it’s an unconscionable breach of public order to say that he is a “he,” and male, and has a male body, the argument is all over but the shouting.
You can’t write out a clear statement about why Yaniv is wrong without some recognition, no matter how indirect, of his male sex. That’s the point, and it always was. If you agree that “misgendering“ is violence, you’ve already conceded that female beauticians must be required by law to treat Yaniv’s claims about his male genitals being female as true, or they’re committing an act of violence against him through refusing to act as if he’s correct.
But he’s a man, and always will be. No number of laws asserting that he can identify as a woman can make him one. No number of sloganeering T-shirts proclaiming “I am who I say I am” can change the reality of anyone’s sex.
Postmodernist Epistemological Wanking
Morgane Oger, the vice president of British Columbia’s New Democratic Party and a man who says he’s a woman, has written about Yaniv’s complaints to take the calculated position that a man who says he’s a woman shouldn’t expect every self-employed woman to have gotten on board with the idea that she needs to touch male genitals on demand, “because cultural norms have not fully adjusted.” How generous.
Former BC attorney general and minister of justice Suzanne Anton has said that the nondiscrimination provisions of the BC and Canadian Human Rights Code have exceptions for protecting public decency. Under that reasoning, Anton says no woman should ever have to touch male genitals against her will, nor have to let anyone into her home, let alone enter a home she doesn’t want to enter. (This is Anton’s opinion now. The way these things go, I expect Anton’s groveling apology for “transphobia” soon.)
The BC Human Rights Tribunal will decide these cases within the next three months, but back in the United States, the entire left is effectively demanding that, for the ongoing worth of their donations and partisan allyship, feminists must agree that women both don’t exist, and can have penises. This is an astounding artifact of postmodernist epistemological wanking.
The queer community media outlet PinkNews has taken Yaniv’s side, presenting him as being refused services by female beauticians who visit clients in their homes “because she is transgender,” rather than because he is a man.
Twitter user goinglikeelsie, who was at first the only person to report on Yaniv’s Human Rights Tribunal hearings against the beauticians, provides context to the quotes used by PinkNews, explaining that they were from a “developmentally delayed Sikh woman who does not have English as a first language.”
It’s not just clickbait news outlets and itinerant perverts who think this way about the supposed need to “affirm” every desire of any man to be seen as a woman for any purpose. The National Center for Lesbian Rights is advocating for cosmetic facial surgery for men who claim to be women, although no one has ever made this political demand on behalf of healthy women.
A U.K. gender clinician insists that men who say they’re women should be entitled to womb transplants. The American Civil Liberties Union wants boys and men to be able to enter women’s sports, so they can live as their “authentic selves,” which is apparently more important than women’s authentic rights.
Erasing Women and Women’s Rights
Who are women? Is it the class of person who will definitely get banned from Twitter (unless Twitter can be internationally shamed) for saying women don’t have male genitals?
Women can be identified and defined for the purpose of saying that they’ve discriminated against a male person for refusing to touch his male genitals, because he said he’s a woman, too. When we ask why he’s a woman, women suddenly can’t be defined, except by him. He can specify that he wants a female beautician, but she can’t specify that she wants a female customer.
“Ha ha,” they seem to say, “you only asked the law to protect you from unwanted male genitals belonging to men! Watch us invent the legal fiction of male genitals belonging to women! Pwned!” I’d love for that to be just a joke, but apparently it’s an opinion that it’s cool for CNN anchors like Chris Cuomo to publicly express.
Social justice culture, aptly referred to as Woko Haram by gender-critical Twitter users, is so committed to the idea that women should always welcome any random male genitals, had to invent a sexual orientation category for those who’d prefer to get to know and like someone quite well before making sexual contact, and maybe even remain in a monogamously committed partnership. Is that you?
Claiming that a penis is female for the purposes of demanding that women look at it or touch it is certainly a novel idea. Especially if you’re a man who sees getting an invitation for his male genitals as a problem of overcoming objections, like a pushy used car salesman, rather than as a subset of the problem of making a connection with another person on a mutual basis of affection.
Arguments using logic like this are now considered terribly discriminatory and mean, because won’t you think about the feelings of vulnerable people? People are dying, being killed, even, we are told, because of the insistence of some of us on saying words that recognize reality.
Try Actually Helping the Vulnerable
But if the left is that concerned about vulnerable people, they should be paying more attention to those caught in prostitution, especially prostituted women, because trans-identified people who aren’t in prostitution are generally safer from deadly violence than the general population.
2016 rates, using HRC data, FBI data, etc., murder per 100K pop:
0.8 – females who are trans-
1.6 – all trans- people
2.1 – males who are trans-
2.1 – females
5.0 – black females
5.4 – all US population
7.4 – males
18.3 – black people
32.7 – black males
204.0 – prostitutes*— Adrian Sullivan (@AdrianLSullivan) August 3, 2018
Unfortunately, the people on the left who say they’re supporting “sex workers” usually leave out that they mean they want to legalize pimping. Democratic lawmakers in New York state and DC have pushed towards full legalization of the sex industry that would let sex buyers and traffickers get away with everything.
The sex trade lobby now has software industry influencers like Wired cheerleading for the child-trafficking clearinghouse BackPage, and respected civil society groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demanding the legalization of pimping and buying sex for the last few years. This is a 2015 tweet by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, praising Amnesty International’s endorsement of sex trade legalization.
As Rachel Moran, author, civil society campaigner, and sex trade survivor, says, “When a woman is hungry, the humane thing to do is put food in her mouth, not your d-ck.”
By the simple principle that it leads to women suffering unwanted male genital exposure, both in-person and filmed, just like transgender legal preferences, prostitution also can’t be feminist, and never will be. As Andrea Dworkin said, “The left cannot have its whores and its politics, too,” and they’re still proving her right, all these many years later. If women’s advancement could be achieved through the service of men’s sexual entitlement, we’d have everything sorted by now.
If Sex Can Be Bought, It Can Be Demanded
Further, the logical conclusion of the proposition that “sex work is work” and that prostitution is a “job like any other” is that it can’t be unlawful to make sexual intimacy a condition of employment. A legal regime that tries to recognize both the current understanding of sexual harassment as an inappropriate violation, and sexual exploitation for money as a legitimate job offer, will eventually have to choose between these contradictory ideas, which also fuel the impetus to force women into “sex work” by having to wax men’s genitals or lose their careers.
Why can’t a studio executive casting for a new movie simply insist that all the female roles for a film include providing sexual services to management as a job requirement? Why shouldn’t demonstrating your sexual skills be a mandatory part of the interview for such a job? If “sex work is work,” as the industry marketing slogan goes, this should obviously be legal. If you think that’s repugnant, you already know why prostitution can’t be treated as legitimate employment, and why filmed prostitution should be just as suspect.
This is why feminists committed to the abolition of the sex trade favor the equality model, also called the Nordic model, that treats prostituted individuals as victims of a crime, without letting the traffickers and clients off the hook. This would be an extension of how federal law currently treats minor victims of sex trafficking.
If We Don’t Talk About It, the Abusers Win
These subjects are distasteful, and make people squeamish. But that’s exactly how abusers get away with so much, so often (and have done for a very long time), in institutions both religious and secular. If you can set up a strong enough taboo against discussing a subject, it becomes a greater crime to talk about an abuse, or say that it’s happening, than to commit the abuse in the first place.
So let me finish up by stating for the record that women’s rights are not expanded by legalizing profiteering off women’s bodies via prostitution or pornography. These things don’t benefit women; they’re concessions that women on the left have made to men on the left to be allowed to join their club. Society isn’t advancing when women are bought and sold for the gain of others.
Sex is a fixed trait, and human beings are either male or female, regardless of the distress this may cause some. Reality is often distressing.
Children are not safer in a world where the sex trade, or anti-science beliefs like gender identity, are normalized. Humanity is demeaned by the idea that more male genitals everywhere is progress, much less that unfettered male sexual entitlement constitutes a meaningful liberation of women. On behalf of women everywhere, please stop.
