By @Peak_up (YouTube)

@Peak_Up is a WLRN guest writer highlighting the impacts of transgenderism on her life and the lives of women and children everywhere. This is her introductory post to start off a series.

I didn’t hear the word “transgender” until 2013, when my fiancé came out of a therapist’s office announcing, “I’m ok, I’m a normal person, I’m just transgender!!” He was elated, and I didn’t see any reason not to be happy for him. He had a very “feminine” side to his personality, which I liked because I had never been a big fan of masculinity. Part of the reason I loved him was that he never felt the need to act “tough” or forceful, and never seemed to think of himself as superior for his maleness. Whatever made him happy, I supposed, was just fine. I wouldn’t love him any less if he dressed in women’s clothing or called himself by any other name.

However, it didn’t stop with clothing or naming. He and his therapist soon decided that he needed to take artificial hormones to change his body, and that was something I couldn’t see myself tolerating. I’ve always been very caring and attentive to physical health. I insist on only eating healthy food, and even choosing the best sources and certifications, taking it to a higher level than most health conscious people do. I’ve learned that most western medicine and pharmaceuticals are meant to mask symptoms and make money rather than heal the causes of disease. Taking artificial hormones would include drastic side effects and a deepening of whatever problem my partner was dealing with. I knew this intuitively, and I researched and confirmed it before putting my foot down and refusing to stay in the relationship if he decided to harm his body that way. He was physically healthy and correct. If he needed to be healed, it was in his mind that the healing needed to take place, not his body. 

We stayed at this stalemate for a short while, and then I found out that he was taking the hormones secretly. It started to show in strange signs on his body, and I reacted angrily. I was appalled. He stopped taking them, for the time being, but I could see that this was something he was not going to let go. A few weeks later, he told me that he needed to take the hormones, and that he would choose that path whether I stayed with him or not. We broke up, and were both completely miserable for the few days we managed to stay apart. 

Knowing it was the wrong choice, for him and myself, I chose to stay. If I could magically go back and change one thing about how I handled the situation, I would stay firm in my ultimatum to leave if he started taking hormones. It might have convinced him to reconsider, or at least saved me the pain of watching the one I fell in love with change into someone I wasn’t as crazy about. I loved him too much to leave him, and I chose to hope that he would see the error in his thinking and change his mind eventually. If I wanted to be with him, I had to let him make his own choice about his own body. My natural instinct is to heal when people I love are hurting, so I felt an overwhelming need to know as much as could be known about the root cause.

The best explanation he could come up with was that he liked being a “girl” (even though he was 32) and that feminine things always interested him while manly things sickened him. He complained about the drab clothing choices available to men, and the large amount of body hair they (and he) had. He was disturbed by most male company, especially those who dressed or spoke sloppily. He had a story about when he was a child, and wished to wear the girls’ school uniform rather than the boys’. He had done drag performances as a teenager, and still enjoyed going to raves in drag. I had attended many events with him in drag, and didn’t have any problem with it. It made for a ton of fun, the amount of time and energy he put into looking extraordinarily colorful, glamorous, and sparkling, and all the attention it attracted. That was all fine before he started insisting that he actually was female. I couldn’t explain why at the time, but his literally being female was impossible for me to accept.    

His therapist allowed me to attend part of one session where I could ask questions and express my concerns, which amounted to an attempt to silence me on all of them. I said that he was clearly a male, and that I could not understand how it could be any other way. The therapist told me, “You don’t get to choose.” Weirdly, that was exactly what I was saying, that you don’t get to choose; you just are what you are. At the time I didn’t know enough about gender to defend my position against the massive campaign that was building up in support of the transgender movement, and my lover was on the train being conducted by the media and his therapist and doctors. I fell into their line of thinking just long enough to lose him to it. 

I was still baffled, and resorted to reading books. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the right ones first. I read tirelessly trying to understand what the condition of “transgender” is, what its complexities are, its variations, and what causes it. I read stories written by transgender people, which all had different explanations and reasons, many of which strongly contradicted others. I read books written by therapists and doctors, which promoted treatment in an advertising way, aided by guilt. I read books written by scientists, explaining the surgeries and medications generally issued and their effects, which were terrifying. Books written by gender studies experts propagated that gender roles were innate and natural, and women actually liked to, and were more fit to do housework and care for babies, and men liked to, and were more fit to wield tools and weapons. I read about many accounts that were emotionally touching, and made compassion and conceding the obvious moral answer. 

Although I was learning from what I read, all of this left me feeling even more confused. Everyone was different, and my partner didn’t exactly fit into any of the many types of gender dysphoric people I was finding in the literature. The only common thread I found through all of that studying was the need gender dysphoric people have for absolute, unquestioning support for their chosen path, regardless of the cause, the treatment, or the outcome, so that is what I did. I had been successfully duped into thinking that loving and supporting him involved condoning his potentially harmful delusions. I knew it was screwy, and I even remember saying things like, “Trying to stop you from harming yourself is how I show that I care. That is my way of being supportive of you.” My sentiments were ignored, and his were prioritized. For several months I continued studying, and being ultimately “supportive,” continually fighting back my true feelings about it. 

I couldn’t honestly see what was wrong with someone wanting to wear clothes made for the opposite sex. What could be the big deal about that all of a sudden? Butch lesbians and gay men had been doing it forever, along with people who simply didn’t conform to stereotypes. On social media, I noticed that feminists comprised a group that often opposed transgender activists, so I asked them to explain to me what they felt was wrong with it. They answered condescendingly, presumably unable to believe my confusion about such an elementary subject, and offered some helpful books. Their condescending attitudes would have resulted in my desertion if I had not been so desperate for understanding. I learned from that to always be patient with people who don’t understand. It took me a while to order the books because I was afraid my partner would see them and feel invalidated or offended, but I was sure relieved when I did.

Discovering radical feminist literature, the godmother of gender analysis, was refreshing and enlightening. Not only was all of it consistent and without contradiction, it also made perfect sense. The main point that transgender theorists and proponents had repeated over and over in their writing was that sex and gender are two different things, and in transgender people they don’t match up. This causes an abhorrence for the natural state of the body; a need to change the body to fit the gender identity. The main point that radical feminists repeated over and over in their writing was that sex and gender are two different things, and they don’t have to match up; they actually never completely do. No one is totally “masculine” or “feminine,” and no one should feel the need to fit into a gender role. How could something so simple be made so confusing by gender theorists?      

As I continued reading feminist theory, it got deeper. It was explained that gender is not just a social construction, it is a tool of subordination. Women are not passive or feminine by nature. We are trained to embody these qualities. Men are not naturally aggressive or masculine. All of this is taught and socially enforced. The answer at the root of this problem was the obvious fact that biological sex is a real, unchangeable condition, and gender is a social construct totally subject to change and variation, and ultimately, imaginary. Anyone can easily understand that sex and gender don’t always align, but many people don’t understand how harmful gender roles are, and how their damaging effects manifest everywhere in the world. Until we understand how harmful they are, and their far-reaching effects, we can’t understand how harmful gender identity ideology is. 

When I started bringing these points to my partner, he became less and less open to talking about it. We had never had a communication block before, but now he was distancing himself from hard questions. Did he really think he was a woman? Did he really think anyone could change their sex? What was his definition of a woman? What was really at the bottom of this perceived need to identify as female? As time went on, and I gradually chipped away at his arguments, he eventually started refusing to talk to me about it at all. He became defensive and asked to be left in peace about my point of view on the subject. 

I continue to love my partner as he is, as he was, and however he decides to be. I refuse to use the words “she” or “her” in reference to him, because those are words I bestow strictly on those of us who live with the joys and limitations of an actual female body. The struggles and glories of living in our bodies are unique to us as biological women. That is not to say that transgender people don’t have their struggles and limitations, but theirs are not ours. Our struggles are ours precisely because of our female bodies. Men who attempt to present as women may be hated by some for the appearance they have chosen, but women are systematically hated for the very bodies we were born in. We cannot choose to identify out of them, transgender or not, and many of us don’t want to. We would rather stay in our beloved bodies and fight to be recognized as whole people deserving of dignity, than turn into one of our haters, just to be on the winning team.

I already loved my partner deeply when he chose to alter the body I once enjoyed immensely. I can’t help the fact that I still love him, but the way I express my love is very different now. When I feel love, I have the impulse to act on it physically. My partner is not this way, and has never been as enthusiastic about physical connection as I am. He also hates the way his body appears and acts out affection. To love him, I have had to reroute my instinct to express it physically and do without my personal need for physical affection. It’s true that some people might not mind that kind of adjustment, but I feel robbed of an aspect of my relationship that I considered essential. Somehow, that hasn’t stopped me from loving him and wanting to stay with him. My romantic attraction has faded gradually away, but my deep, intimate love has remained unchanged. It is a tragic paradox that I would never have thought possible until it happened.

I thought he would gradually come around and realize how wrong it was. Sadly, the opposite happened. He kept going further from reality as his support base grew into a powerful political force. Things have gone so far in the wrong direction since this started; now there is no one who hasn’t heard the word “transgender”. Even my teenage lesbian daughter is dating a girl who calls herself a boy. The damage of the transgender movement has reached into my home and touched my loved ones with its damage. While it may often feel like we can’t do anything about it, we can’t do nothing about it. That is why I signed the Declaration on Women’s Sex-based Rights and started writing about my experience and the knowledge I’ve gained. Education about the harms of the transgender movement would have helped me immensely, so I am glad to offer my support and story to women who know intuitively that it’s wrong but don’t know how to say it. One thing I’ve learned about standing for women is that it’s always unpopular, and that is what makes feminism so important.    

@Peak_up was born and raised in Humboldt County, California, and now resides in southern Oregon where she teaches Yoga, volunteers for a nutrition organization, hosts a feminist consciousness-raising group, and homeschools her teenage daughter. She is forty years old and has been married for five years. She was politicized by radical feminism after her husband tried to become a woman, and speaks out to help others affected by the harms of transgender activism.