I have laryngitis this week so please enjoy this essay about this video in lieu of a video.
Gender ideology begins its machinations by destabilizing your sense of what you know about sex differences. One such difference is the strength and size differential. The destabilization is aimed at undermining your knowledge that these differences are DUE TO “sex,” and getting you to imagine a fanciful world where men eat more because they are socialized to be big and strong, and this leads to them becoming bigger and stronger. Since women are socialized to be thin and small, we eat less, thus becoming smaller adults. Yes, this is silly, but it is an indoctrination process, and there is a doctrinaire docent affirming you when you are leaving the rational, scientific part of your mind, your experiential knowledge and what you know to be true, and entering the dark fantasyland where anything is possible and probably it will help somehow to self-harm.
About 18 months into my use of hormone therapy to suppress my natural estrogen, stop my natural cycling, and have a mild androgenic/anabolic effect - resulting in getting as jacked as I have ever been in my life and objectively stronger and more muscular than I am physically capable of becoming while having normal estrogen cycles (I’ve tried! It just does not work the same) - I had a similar belief that I had in some sense, caught up to male biology and become man-like in my strength and stamina.
I was quite open about this belief, and few challenged me, both because it would be disaffirming of my gender, and because I was, shall we say, less open to patient attempts to reason with me. I knew what I knew, if you disagreed, you must be wrong, and that was that.
So one day, a man decided to show me rather than tell me, and challenged me to wrestle, and in about 4 minutes, I had what my ex-Scientologist parent used to term a “severe reality adjustment.” I came out of that interaction questioning what I had been taught in gender class. This man was my exact height and weight and we seemed to have a similar amount of muscle mass, yet he easily defeated me, as though his opponent had been a pool noodle or a raggedy Ann doll. The veil of my temple of gender had been torn apart in that moment.
This woman may be confronting a similar crisis of faith. Her belief is that if she takes drugs to look like a man, and identifies as a man, then she is a man. As a trans man, she’s arguably more passable than man (certainly more than myself). She likely had similar beliefs about her own strength compared to actual men. So she went up to this strange man on the street with a swagger of a thousand Chads and said, “What did you say to me?!” in an apparently aggressive manner, and somehow, this lead her to be struck, according to her.
I am skeptical that even that happened, as it seems to me that a punch that knocks out your teeth should injure your lip in some way, but assuming it did, her immediate conclusion was not that she had passed as a man and been struck for starting an argument with another man she did not know. Instead, she retreated into her actual sex category, with its coat of gender, and concluded that she was beaten up for being a female dressed as a male, not for being an aggressive, confrontational man. She did not expect violence, because compared to men, women are actually far less likely to experience male violence. The only kind of violence we are more likely to experience than men, is sexualized violence. But our overall risk of male violence is low, as men tend to fight each other.
She assumes no one wanted to call 911 because they did not want to “get in the way” of systemic violence against trans people, but it is more likely to me that they did not want to call 911 because they could see the situation had resolved and she did not need emergency medical attention. She also expresses frustration that no one wanted to film the altercation. Perhaps this is because the altercation was incredibly short-lived, and perhaps it speaks to her intent in starting the aggressive confrontation “at the beginning of pride month.” It sounds to me like there is a possibility that she was hoping to be victimized and have it go viral at the beginning of pride month for a political reason, and was disappointed that other people could see her intentions and motives clearly, and chose not to involve themselves. But perhaps she was just introduced to the world men actually live in, where they are 2-3 times more likely to be punched on the street by another man than a woman is.
