A Woman is an Adult Human Female

Exulansic Responds to Trevor Noah's Interview of Veronica Ivy aka Rachel McKinnon aka Cyclepath

This is an unedited clip of the interview followed by an essay response.

Trevor Noah's interview of Veronica Ivy AKA Rachel McKinnon is very useful if it is still not clear why we activists opposing gender ideology need to be confident saying "male people are neither girls nor women." We must understand and be capable of articulating what makes a male a male - to be certain that something concrete, objective, and tangible makes males males. Maleness is neither a feeling nor a vibe, but a biological circumstance independent of superficial appearance. We must demand an objective, universal definition of maleness to which all males can be held. We must insist this be applied regardless of the feminization status of the male, or else males can and will use medical technology to feminize themselves in order to “pass” this test. We must insist that self-conceptualization have no legal relevance to biological sex. We must say doctors are still beholden to material reality and do not possess the power to define male from female on an incoherent and case-by-case basis. Anything short of that is a denial of equal protection. We must be secure in the generalization that there are no male women. The rights of feminized males must be adjudicated via some other pathway than by defining male individuals as legal females. Clearly, such policy does not work.

A woman is an adult human female. If these definitions are not real, who exactly are we fighting for? How do we expect to protect the rights of females if we cannot define female? Defining a woman as anyone who looks like a woman is as circular as defining a woman as anyone who identifies as a woman. It is sexual racialism - an attempt to racialize, render appearance-based, femaleness, a functional circumstance. Femaleness is a capacity, not a silhouette. The purpose of sex-based rights to be apart from maleness is to preserve physical and psychological health due to our capacity opposing the potential or realized capacity inherent to maleness. Maleness represents a specific threat to femaleness, one which no amount of social engineering will ever eliminate. That is why female-male segregation is fundamentally unlike racial segregation. Females will never truly separate from males (sorry, lesbian separatists) due to being reproductively linked, and therefore the risks of community isolation are fundamentally unlike those involved with racial segregation. Being a woman is not a lineage because both men and women come from long lines of men and women - well, mostly women. I support equitably funded single-sex education with my whole heart.

Making exceptions for some male humans to be considered women, despite being male humans, is how we got into this mess of having male humans in female-only prisons, sports, bathrooms, and everywhere in between. Gender ideologues started from the premise that “woman” is a gender that is based on looking like a woman (whatever that is) AND/OR feeling like a woman - whichever feels more relevant to the individual who has been determined to be a male human. Genderists then concluded that sex ought to be legally divorced from the concept of a woman, demanding we reject the definition of woman as a female human who is fully mature as bigoted towards the male “women” with DSDs and later, the male “women” without DSDs.

At no point were we women consulted as to whether we wanted to give up having a word that was specific to us as adult female humans. We are instead handed this alternative, “cis-woman,” which relabels us as not what we are, but how we purportedly like to be treated, how we may have been mislabeled, and whether we want to alter our bodies. We are told, sex is not relevant, by folx who then refuse to answer, “what makes us cis-women?” We have no footing anymore as the ground has been replaced with Looney Tunes air that supports you until you look down.

All this reifies and justifies sexist socialization of the vast majority of women and girls, on the theory that if we did not like it, we would want to be man-gender. It is claimed we would seek to approximate the man-gender if we did not like being the main target of male sexuality to the point where our identity as women is somehow defined by whether we inspire sexual attraction in males. It is like playing hopscotch on a cruise ship, attempting to nail down this world-model, but we must if we are going to persuasively argue that adult and juvenile female humans matter enough to have a word for ourselves and dignity, safety, and privacy from maleness.

Once we accept that some adult male humans are women, we have accepted the sale of female-only spaces, and we are now haggling. Making these exceptions is how we validated, legally, the concept that anyone can be a woman if they look enough like a woman to be socially accepted as a woman, while still retaining the idea that a woman is no less a woman simply because she looks masculine or has male anatomy - regardless of whether the individual has organs designed to reproductively react to femaleness. That’s the radix of this wretched tree of trans ideology. How much collateral damage are we women and girls willing to accept so that these male humans can live as though they do not have a disability and are instead a kind of female? Yes, being correctly categorized may put a male athlete so low on the roster he can no longer make a living competing. Them’s the breaks. That slot is reserved for a woman: an adult human female. A woman deserves to make a living being at the top of her game in a fair league of her own.

Caster Semenya: an adult human male, who is therefore, a man.

If we try to accommodate the disability of male people with intersex disorders by requiring females pretend to see them as female, and treat them as if they were female, and compete at a disadvantage against them as if they were unusually athletically gifted females, the result will be the predictable oppression and marginalization of actual female people - such as myself. I was demonized and marginalized because I said that a woman is an adult human female, and that all adult human males are men. I was mistreated for saying that females have a right to female-only spaces. I was villified for saying that the purpose of such spaces is not to protect males from other males. There is a reason why certain 46XY DSDs are overrepresented in female competitions, and that reason is that they have a biological advantage over females. They were allowed in because of the claim that they had a “female experience,” and ought to be entitled to continue having this experience. It was unfair to burst their bubble. However, nature burst the bubble, and we are just the messengers.

By requiring females to compete against developmental males, the authorities send women and girls the message that we are just not as good at sports as a male. This is the one place where we are supposed to be able to compete fairly, and we’re still not able to do that. This denies opportunities and funding to women and girls who would otherwise go further in their career and perhaps be able to make it into a self-sustaining profession. Instead, they want to give this pathway to male people with conditions that make them not competitive within their sex class. This feels fair, because patriarchy and child psychology says it is fair, just, and good, to take from females. Mother is the source of life and sustenance. In a matriarchy, men are guided out of that way of thinking by women’s social power and patient instruction. In a patriarchy, men are encouraged to see women that way their whole lives, and to seek to colonize women’s emotional, household, reproductive, and sexual labor. We have to share and give and contort to meet the needs of others, no matter the cost, or we are seen as bad women who must be thrown on the pyre and burnt.

Caster Semenya is an example of an androgen-sensitive XY male person with testicles who was nevertheless allowed to compete until recently as a female. We were instructed to see Semenya as a woman with naturally elevated testosterone levels, being unjustly treated like a man. If your testicles are what is elevating the testosterone levels, being considered a man is just - but we are forbidden from saying that, lest we be deplatformed and stalked. We are being systematically denied female-only competition and female-only spaces. The floodgates inevitably open for all the feminine or feminized or feminine-identifying males to compete as women with elevated testosterone. VI/RM suggests that it’s somehow racist call these male women with testicles, men. The suggestion is that if they looked like the white women whose glory they stole, we would all be fine with calling them women. Wrong. He pairs this with the insinuation that they are being targeted due to a racist expectation that they conform to white beauty standards, and not a rational recognition that regardless of race or color, they are men: adult male humans.

Factions of trans ideology exploit these unreasonable accommodations given for disorders of sexual development, with the same policy demands relying on the same legal precedents. They have teamed up - hence, the shared flag. You cannot have a system in which I am an equal participant as a woman, an adult human female, in which you can also require me to recognize some males as women, or else. I am denied a name for my category and the right to form my own mental category system. I am not free if I can be commanded not to speak on certain topics due to my femaleness, on pain of losing my reputation, my safety and my livelihood. We are living through an inquisition in which the blasphemy of challenging the concept of a male woman will simply not be tolerated. The inquiry is, “Do you believe male women are women?” I do not. In today’s society, even in gender critical circles, you are allowed your own personal relationship with the concept of a male woman, but to deny the holy spirit of male womanhood is completely unforgiveable.

I demand female-only sports and female-only facilities for female-only athletes. I demand for these girls, no less, and so much more, than I had growing up. I will not settle for anything less than full equality of funding and opportunity, which will require clear definitions in order to be measurable. A woman is an adult human female. A girl is a juvenile human female. If we agree a person is male, we have agreed they are neither a girl nor a woman. We must resist the big lie. Our ideological opponents fixated on Roe for a reason. The genderists fixate on protecting the legal concept of male women for a reason. We must fixate on these policies and practices for a reason as well, if we want girls to be able to change with privacy, be free from the crimes of flashing and voyeurism, and compete fairly against other girls. We must have a definition of girl that excludes males who resemble girls, or males who resemble girls will continue to take opportunities and funding away from girls. A woman is not anyone who looks like a woman any more than it is anyone who identifies as a woman. A woman is an adult human female.

DSD activism initially separated sex from 'gender identity.' This was to accommodate individuals who resembled or felt like the sex they were verifiably not, due to naturally occurring disorders of sexual development (DSD) and the psychological trauma having such a disorder often causes, and the compassion-drive desire to alleviate avoidable suffering of medical patients.

This idea that the law and social pressure could be used to coerce acknowledgment of 'gender identity' in conflict with verifiable sex, allowing males access to female-only spaces, sports, and facilities, then generalized to more males and females who also wanted to identify as the 'gender identity' (sex-species-age word) they were verifiably not, for a variety of reasons. This then led to people creating new "gender identities" such as 'nonbinary' identities, which were also about identifying with a complex age-species-sex complex other than the one associated with their verifiable sex. This is already leading to people creating additional "gender identities" that challenge the other two aspects of what was once a complex of verifiable traits, and we get wolfgender and toddlergender adult human males and adult human females.

At the same time, it is denied that male and female, and increasingly, human and non human, as well as adult and child are distinct states of being. They argue instead there is a spectrum between extremes them and therefore we must simply respect what individuals feel or look like, since what anyone is alleged to be unverifiable. It's the Heisenberg gender uncertainty principle. This theory has had catastrophic consequences for adult human females.

No to males in female sports, facilities, and transitional spaces. No to adults in juvenile prisons (Hannah Tubbs). No to wolfgender people in zoos.