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The Evolution of “Biological Women” (Part Three: 2008 – 2026)

Sep21

THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL WORK!

I’ve made a copy here to be easy to reference. The work in question goes to American Samizdat, on Facebook. All credit and copyrights belong to that author. I’m making a copy here so I can always find it.

The Evolution of “Biological Women” (Part Three: 2008 – 2026)

There are three factors to comprehend about the state of affairs with respect to scientific, political, and public understandings of transgender Americans.

Trigger warning: many of you are NOT going to be happy with this article. I hope you read on, anyway.

ONE: There’s clear scientific/scholarly consensus that what defines a “woman” or “man” is not solely biological, that human sex/gender exists on a spectrum. Overwhelmingly, researchers see cultural conditioning about gender expectations as a critical part of the mix. Even biological influences are more complex than any insistence on genetics and genitalia as the sole determining factors.

This consensus, however has been effectively neutralized:

TWO: What it means to be “transsexual” (1949 – c.1990s) or “transgender” (post — 1990s) is disputed because those terms are both recent and seemingly malleable. In a sociopolitical milieu where certainty is rare, the simplicity of “biological women/men” has an edge over the nuanced complexity of “transgender” even in feminist, LGBTQIA+, and transgender communities.

THREE: The “biological woman/man” momentum has been sustained by masterful rhetorical strategy, changes in the social media milieu, and billions invested that no organization, political party, or wealthy contributors have yet matched.

Let’s be mercilessly clear: I agree 100% with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security “that the United States is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally.” [March 2026] (1)

I’m not writing from despair but stark realism, and the need to mobilize a better financed and organized strategic response. The stakes are too high to surrender.

Let’s document the scientific/scholarly consensus quickly:

From “Emerging Themes in Epidemiology,” an article by Hélène Colineaux, Lola Neufcourt, Cyrille Delpierre, Michelle Kelly‑Irving, and Benoit Lepage, “Explaining biological differences between men and women by gendered mechanisms,” (2023):

“Biological differences between men and women seem to not be purely explained by biological mechanisms.” (2)

From L. Camille Herbert, “Defining ‘Woman’: Biological Sex and Gender,” Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law (2023):

“Social conservatives do not have science on their side, because current understandings of biology do not support a strict male and female binary.” (3)

From “The Lancet” article by Katrina Karkazis, “The misuses of ‘biological sex,’” (2019):

“Research since (1950s) has expanded the range of variables that produce sex. As one example, the Y chromosome was once said to trigger testes development in fetuses. Later research showed a gene called SRY, located on the Y chromosome, “pushed” primordial germ cells in the embryo to become testes. We now know there are active genes involved in both ovary and testis determination across the genome, and not restricted to the X and Y chromosomes.

“As biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has observed, ‘[T]hose looking to biology for an easy-to-administer definition of sex and gender can derive little comfort from the most important of these [research] findings.’”

Yet that doesn’t matter, because academic journals aren’t where public debate occurs.

Why? Consider the terms “lesbian,” “gay,” “transsexual,” and “transgender.”

The term “lesbian” (referring to sapphic women from the isle Lesbos) is two millennia old, and “gay” dates back at least 400 years in the English-speaking world.

“Transsexual” was invented in 1949 to replace the 19th Century term “sexual invert,” and “transgender” did not replace it until the 1990s in a peacemaking attempt inside what we today call the LGBTQIA+ community.

As Jillian Todd Weiss wrote (2004) for the “Journal of Bisexuality” in “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community”:

“The term was used as an umbrella term referring to transvestites, crossdressers, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people, who seemed to have similar and interlocking interests with gay men and lesbian women. …

“‘Transgender’ was intended by its coiner to refer only to certain non-operative transsexuals, but later mutated to refer to anyone whose gender performance varied from the norm.

“This more open meaning … conflicted with the goals of the coalition builders, which was to capture public sympathy by appealing to an image of homosexuals as people ‘just like’ the majority of U.S. voters, … who wanted the same lives that the majority of U.S. voters wanted. As a result, some gays find themselves agreeing with straights who see in transgenders an assault on normative reality. …” (5)

In 2011, Talia Mae Bettcher (trans woman social scientist) tackled this fissure with “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman,” in “The American Philosophical Association on Philosophy and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues”:

“There … is a familiar view of transsexuality that speaks of women trapped male bodies and men trapped inside female bodies. On this view — let’s call it the ‘Wrong Body Model’ — transsexuality is a misalignment between gender identity and sexed body. At its most extreme, the idea is that one’s real sex, given by internal identity, is innate.

“It is on the basis of this identity that one affirms that one … has a claim to the surgical procedures that bring one’s body into alignment with one’s identity. …

”Another view, explicitly political, … says that trans people challenge the traditional binary between man and woman. Because, on this view, trans people do not fit neatly into the two categories ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ mainstream society attempts to force trans people into this system in order to make it appear that there is a sharp dichotomy between men and women. …” (6)

Bettcher rejected both approaches, working toward a resolution preserving the best of both. Her thought-provoking article didn’t resolve this dichotomy, however, so I leave it to you to read it if you want details.

Her article IS critical for the understanding that by 2011 — as fourth-wave feminism was spawning TERFs (Trans-excluding Radical Feminists) — the LGBTQIA+ community had already fractured in its own understanding of the term.

That’s the point Weiss had made in 2004:

“Some transgenders pass as heterosexuals and reject homosexual identity by calling their sexual relations heterosexual. The reaction of the gay and lesbian community, predictably, has been an attempt to limit the inclusion of transgenders … a result of the previously identified tensions between accomodationism and gender ambiguity, and between homosexual identity and ‘passing.’” (5)

Fourth wave feminism emerged between the 1990s — 2010; its advocates leaving trans individuals out in the cold, as Hyun Jae-Lee documented in “A Critical Study of Identity Politics Based on the Category ‘Biological Woman’ in the Digital Era: How Young Korean Women Became Transgender Exclusive Radical Feminists” (2020) in “The Journal of Asian Sociology”:

“At the end of the 20th century, feminists of the third wave had clearly recognized that the substance of identities like human, woman, and subject is a kind of fantasy. They have suggested that no essence exists behind gender identity and that the gender that we know is the stylization of the body created through performative repetition. …

”[But] around 2011, when social networking services began to connect with large-scale mobile environments, the so-called fourth wave of feminism appeared … fueled by online environments. … The fourth wave emphasizes the identity of the female body in the sexual dichotomy and, worrisomely, there is a tendency toward the exclusion of transgender people. …” (7)

Hello, JK Rowling.

Sociologist Judith Butler (via “Mother Jones’” 2026 “How the Right Uses “Gender Ideology” to Blame Trans People for Everything”) noted that “gender ideology” — which the right converted around 2015 into “transgender ideology” — traced back to …

“… the 1990s, when conservative Catholics began warning that the very concept of ‘gender’ had subverted God’s will and “inspired ideologies” that were imperiling the nuclear family. In a 2004 letter to bishops, the Vatican decried homosexuality, railed against feminists for making women ‘adversaries’ of men, and reaffirmed binary masculinity and femininity as the purest expression of God’s love.

“Any subversion of traditional gender roles wasn’t merely sinful. It wrought a culture, the Vatican said, that corrupted society at large.” (😎

Evangelical Christians and Christian Nationalists started riding this trend around 2011.

Meanwhile, TERFS appropriated the originally neutral term “transgenderism” for equally hostile reasons, as Jill Serrano noted in her 2023 “Medium” article “History of the Word ‘Transgenderism’ and why ‘eradicating transgenderism’ = eradicating transgender people”:

“TERFs … purposefully misappropriated it in a way that confuses the state of being transgender with a potentially dangerous political ideology” invoking “oppressive ideologies (e.g., sexism, racism, fascism, and others) that also just so happen to end with the suffix ‘-ism.’” (9)

Thus it became easier in rhetorical discourse to sell that sharp sexual dividing line of genes and genitalia.

Around 2022, X, Meta, and TikTok changed moderation practices, permitting more of what had been “hate speech.” Monica Armas-Neira in her 2026 article “Weaponizing Transphobia on Social Media” for “The Journal of Psychiatry Residents” calculated that on major platforms …

“… homophobic, racist, and transphobic posts [were] surging by 50% in volume and 70% engagement.” (10)

Maria Bonafonte Recio, Rubén García-Sánchez, Kátia Bones Rocha, and Konstantinos Argyriou examined responses generated by people without strong opinions on trans issues in “From Identification to Justification: How People Interpret Everyday Episodes of Sexism, Homophobia, and Transphobia” (Springer, 2026), finding that …

“… recognition of discrimination was shaped not only by judgments of disrespect but also by whether the victim’s social identity was deemed relevant. …

“Some participants framed the episodes as manifestations of structural inequality and objectification, whereas others denied or minimized them by invoking the absence of hostile intent, individualizing the behavior, or appealing to essentialist views [“biological woman/man”] of gender and sexuality.” (11)

As Schuyler Mitchell put it at “Mother Jones”:

“The right’s gripe isn’t just that trans people exist, but that their existence is tearing down the old world—of good men, obedient women, traditional family structures—and unleashing a new, godless age of chaos and precarity on you. …

“This is why Trump’s executive order promises specifically to ‘protect’ women. And why the right echoes the rhetoric of … TERFs, who have been some of the loudest voices calling for the eradication of ‘gender ideology.’” (😎

Funded by billionaire donors, Mr Trump understands that simplistic anti-trans messages win votes, as noted in Agence France Presse (AFP) in “Republicans find transgender issues a powerful political weapon in midterm campaigning”:

“Only a tiny fraction of Americans are transgender. But controversy over the minority’s rights, especially the presence of a handful of transgender athletes in women’s sports, has proved political dynamite in Trump’s hands before — and, he says, will again.

“Denouncing transgender athletes is ‘one of our great soundbites of all time,’ he recently told a rally. ‘I like to wait about a week before the election’ before raising it, he said, claiming that he was ‘petrified’ that Democrats would suddenly drop their support for transgender people.” (12)

Many Democrats agree with him, as Steve Peebles and Geoff Mulvhill opined for AP in “Some Democrats are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues as they seek a path to power”:

“Soul searching over transgender issues is one facet of a sprawling identity crisis that Democrats are confronting. … There is … a sense in some corners that the party must evolve on an issue where the overwhelming majority of voters — even many Democrats — agree with Trump.” (13)

Why do “the overwhelming majority of voters” agree with Trump on transgender issues?

Because the simplistic “Biological women/man” approach and its less savory accompaniments about mental illness, “homos,” delusions, presence, and threat … worked.

It worked because confusing terminology and definitions, combined with uneven support among LGBTQIA+, feminist, and Christian communities (as well as the Democratic Party) was driven by social media changes and heavy GOP donor investment …

… against which the trans community’s disjointed, underfunded response has been (bluntly) almost totally ineffective …

… putting all trans individuals at risk ..

When they say “eradicating transgenderism” they don’t so much mean the idea of transgender as they mean … erasing and eradicating transgender Americans.

I know you don’t want to believe that.

Neither did the Jews, transgender Germans, the Romany, or the mentally challenged in the 1930s.

A win in the 2026 midterms is only a delay. This edifice has been built so carefully, and the rationalizations for “good people” to be passive bystanders have advanced so far that without a better funded, more coordinated strategy … the trans community is in deeper trouble than most individuals within it understand.

I’ll talk strategy next time … if you are still listening to me.

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SOURCES

(1) “Red Flag Alert – Anti-Trans Genocide in the USA – #3,” https://www.lemkininstitute.com/…/red-flag-alert—anti…

(2) “Explaining biological differences between men and women by gendered mechanisms,” https://link.springer.com/…/10.1186/s12982-023-00121-6.pdf

(3) “Defining ‘Woman’: Biological Sex and Gender,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4555608

(4) “The misuses of ‘biological sex,’” https://www.thelancet.com/…/PIIS0140-6736…/fulltext…

(5) “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community,” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J159v03n03_02 (If you go through Google Scholar by searching article name you can bypass the gated version for a pdf copy.)

(6) “Trans Women and the Meaning of ‘Woman,” https://philarchive.org/archive/BETQWA

(7) “A Critical Study of Identity Politics Based on the Category ‘Biological Woman’ in the Digital Era …,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/26979894?seq=3 (You will need to register for a free JSTOR account to get past the gate for this.)

(😎 “How the Right Uses “Gender Ideology” to Blame Trans People for Everything,” https://www.motherjones.com/…/gender-ideology-mother…/ (DO NOT seek out Butler’s groundbreaking 2024 book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” at Aunt Anna’s. It’ll set you back $10-12 at Amazon.

(9) “History of the Word ‘Transgenderism’ …” https://juliaserano.medium.com/the-history-of-the-word… (Be sure to follow the links back to her earlier work.)

(10) “Weaponizing Transphobia on Social Media,” https://psychiatryonline.org/…/appi.ajp-rj.2026.210307

(11) “From Identification to Justification: How People Interpret Everyday Episodes of Sexism, Homophobia, and Transphobia,” https://link.springer.com/…/10.1007/s12119-026-10608-4.pdf

(12) “Republicans find transgender issues a powerful political weapon …,” https://www.afp.com/…/republicans-find-transgender…

(13) “Some Democrats are recalibrating their approach to transgender issues …” https://www.nbc4i.com/…/ap-some-democrats-are…/

The Invention of “Biological Women” (Part Two: 1950 – 2007)

Sep20

THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL WORK!

I’ve made a copy here to be easy to reference. The work in question goes to American Samizdat, on Facebook. All credit and copyrights belong to that author. I’m making a copy here so I can always find it.

The Invention of “Biological Women” (Part Two: 1950 – 2007)

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Author’s note: I didn’t intend to write three parts, but this is too complex for two segments, and even then this installment is almost hopelessly cartooned against the realities of the period. I apologize — but you can’t write a book on social media.

I welcome corrections/additions, but please be careful about “correcting” my terminology. I agonized over this, but in the end had to go with the terms used during the period as defined then, and I ask humbly that you read them the same way.

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We live today — for many reasons, including the prevalence of digital media — in an “eternal present.” What is politically, economically, or culturally expedient to be considered “true” today is validated against not history, but a perceived (often invented) “traditional past” constructed not from evidence so much as fervor.

An example: the intense social media harassment of trans individuals (especially trans women) that stems from the “biological woman” construct all too often seems to have been with us forever.

The “biological woman” construct is the assertion that sex is innately biological, dependent primarily if not exclusively on genetics and genitalia, and that being “transgender” is a “woke” concept stemming from mental illness, delusion, and/or a desire for “biological men” to pretend to be women in order to threaten the safety and existence of “biological women.”

It results in massive, persistent online attacks, often involving “brigading” to launch multiply sourced attacks against individuals.

But neither mass social media harassment of trans people nor the right’s allegiance to the concept of “biological women” is longstanding. The phenomenon appears to be at most eight years old, and more probably six.

Online trans harassment has been extensive from 2024 – 2026. From 2020 – 2023 there’s also such content, but at about 60% less frequency and a far lower intensity.

Before 2020 published content trails off dramatically back to 2016, and that was generally far milder. (1)

Polling outfits and political scientists agree that “trans acceptance” peaked around 2014, and has been declining under coordinated attack ever since. (2)

For those the catch-phrase “biological women” was created, placing a false “spin” on a complex discussion that had been going on since the 1950s.

Trans people have a history in America, and without overlooking the trans protesters at Stonewall, their turning point came more quietly, at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore.

There would have been no JHMS without assertive women, as Mary Roth Walsh observes:

“The financially beleaguered Baltimore [medical] school had long been in the planning stage, but it had been unable to open because of lack of funds. Convinced that Johns Hopkins offered the best hope, a number of women collected $500,000 by 1892. They demanded that Johns Hopkins admit women on the same terms as men … The administration had no choice but to accept the women’s terms and, in 1893, three out of the twenty-one entering students in the first class were women.” (3)

So it’s fitting that when four researchers — “pediatric endocrinologist Lawson Wilkins, psychologist John Money, and psychiatrist couple Joan and John Hampson” — attacked the issue of the distinction between biology and gender, it happened at Johns Hopkins while they worked with intersex individuals. (4)

What follows is chiefly from Sandra Eder’s “How the Clinic Made Gender,” an amazing book that you absolutely need to read, as what follows is a pale, flawed abstraction, and cannot do it justice. (5) When you see a different footnote number, that information come from a different source; otherwise pretty much the next paragraphs depend on Eder.

The story began in 1948-1954 at the Johns Hopkins’s Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children when Wilkins and Money began treating girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) which led them to the following quandary:

“How should girls with CAH live? They were chromosomally female and had internal reproductive organs such as ovaries and uteruses, but they had been born with male-appearing genitals and looked increasingly male as they grew up.”

That question overturned centuries of how the medical field considered the very nature of women.

The traditional viewpoint was that all presumed “female” traits were inherently biological, and relied on male scientists to construct both the questions and the answers, as noted far back as 1982:

“For a long time, biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and physicians have allocated a great deal of attention to the question, ‘Why are males masculine and females feminine?’ They have searched busily for the answer: just the right ratio of nature to nurture required to produce our present schizophrenic state of affairs.

“Nature, it appears, works in ways mysterious and widely varying, depending upon which man of science we accept. Darwin thought that nature enabled us to distinguish boys from girls by endowing the latter with inferior traits at birth — a difference established through sexual

selection. John Money contends that nature controls behavior through our hormones and the differing spatial orientation of our genitals (also a favorite with psychologist Erik Erikson).

“Others have located nature’s imprint in a differential development of the left and right sides of our brains. And the sociobiologists locate it in our genes, which supposedly endow women with an updated version of the ‘mothering instinct’ — the evolutionary adaptation that equips women to guard parental investment in our offspring …”

In other words, scientists “do not accept all possible answers: only those congruent with the implicit assumptions that form the basis of their understanding of the world (an understanding shared with most of their “educated” contemporaries).”(6) [Another book you MUST read.]

Money and his colleagues in 1955 encountered “Charles,” a two-year-old with an exceptionally large penis who was already growing pubic hair. It turned out, however, that Charles had XX chromosomes and — upon surgical examination — ovaries and a uterus. HE was in fact, genetically and in most genital aspects, a SHE.

But Charles had been raised as a boy for the first two years of his life, and Money (who had introduced the term “gender role” the previous year) and his colleagues believed that “that gender role was determined by the sex in which the child had been raised rather than by sex chromosomes or other biological sex characteristics.”

So they provided what today we’d call “gender-affirming” surgery, and removed Charles’ ovaries and uterus, then placed the child on hormone therapy.

Think what this means about the origination of the terms “biological woman/man” and “gender roles.” Money and company developed the thesis that biology was in fact secondary to society’s imposition of gender roles and expectations in determining the sexual identity of a person.

In other words, “biological woman/man” was originated as a concept that biology is NOT determinative over all other factors in locating sexual identity.

Money went on in the 1960s to foster the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic, whose 1966 statement of purpose included: ““If the mind cannot be changed to fit the body, then perhaps we should consider changing the body to fit the mind.”

By then the English term “transexual” was 17 years old, having been established in 1949, but the history of “transphobia” — both the concept and the term — is much more complicated … and represents a sad chapter in LGBTQIA+ history.

The chief proponents of transphobia from the 1950s up to the early 1980s were … lesbians.

As Jillian Todd Weiss argues, “There was a vigorous debate in the U.S. homophile movement of the 1950s as to whether homosexuals should embrace [transsexual Christine] Jorgensen. Some gay men and lesbians denounced those who felt themselves to be of the opposite sex, criticizing them for acting like ‘freaks,’ bringing disrepute to those gays and lesbians trying to live quietly within heterosexual society.”

Weiss also notes that during this period “some gays and lesbians associated gender transgression with undignified and low-class behavior, while ‘fairies’ and ‘butches’ were more readily accepted in working class communities,” and “a survey from the 1960s … found that more than two-thirds of a sample of almost 300 gays and lesbians in the homophile movement considered those who asked for sex-change surgery to be ‘severely neurotic.’”

More importantly, Weiss explains the impact of lesbian scholar Janice Raymond’s 1979 book “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male,” which argued “that the phenomenon of transsexuality was created by fetishistic males who sought to escape into a faux stereotypical femininity, with the connivance of male doctors who thought that femaleness could be medically created and homosexuality medically vitiated.” (7)

The book may have contributed to the closing of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in the same year, though even Raymond herself suggests that Dr Money’s reputed extension of his theories into incest and child pornography was a more likely cause.

The work remains critical today because — while gleefully republished in 1994 as a kind of proto-TERF bible — its mischaracterizations of data and often bizarre sociological analysis have become fundamental (if unattributed) elements of today’s anti-trans hate campaigns. (😎

Raymond’s book was only one of multiple influential works within the LGBTQIA+ community between the 1970s – 1990s that trashed trans people. For a more complete list, go back to the Weiss article.

Weiss points out that the shift in the 1990s from the term “transsexual” to “transgender” within the LGBTQIA+ community was actually an attempt to sort of get around the animus toward medically transitioned individuals, because “transgender” …

“… was used as an umbrella term referring to transvestites, crossdressers, transsexuals, and other gender-variant people, who seemed to have similar and interlocking interests with gay men and lesbian women, and that had caught the imagination of the public through sympathetic portrayals of transsexuals such as Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards and Wendy Williams. Originally, the term ‘transgender’ was intended by its coiner to refer only to certain non-operative transsexuals, but later mutated to refer to anyone whose gender performance varied from the norm.” (7)

In other words, the “trans” in “transgender” was originally more oriented toward “gender transgression” than “gender transition.”

“TERF” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) was not coined until 2008, but its origin clearly derives from Raymond’s work (especially its 1994 edition), and plays an interesting part in a quite strange transformation.

Here’s my current provisional conclusion about “biological women” and all the associated elements of sexual identity by 2008:

FIRST: The term “biological female/male” or “biological sex” was created in the 1950s as part of an argument that gender roles are more important to individual sexual identity than biology. This was applauded by a feminist scholarly pushback against a male-dominated scientific community looking for reasons to attribute all “negative” or “inferior” female characteristics to biology, thereby making them immutable and unchangeable.

SECOND: The 1960s became the first era of open medical transition, but that was cut short around 1979 due in no small part to segments of what we today consider the LGBTQIA+ community rejecting “transsexuals” as freaks or the mentally ill. (A tough pill to swallow.)

THIRD: The rapprochement between transsexuals (newly re-characterized as “transgender”) and the larger LGBTQIA+ community occurred in the1990s, with anti-trans LGBTQIA+ elements and the newly forming TERFs keeping up the fight against transgender legitimacy.

FOURTH: (this will be the meat of Part Three) — Since about 2008 — and definitely since 2014 — the arguments of anti-trans elements of LGBTQIA from 1979 – 19905 and by TERFs soon thereafter were picked up by the far right (without attribution) and morphed into a political crusade against “Transgender ideology.”

How that happened is critically important to understand if we expect to defeat it.

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SOURCES

(1) A sample of earlier works on this topic includes Shagun Jhaver, Sucheta Ghoshal, Amy Bruckman, and Eric Gilbert. 2018. “Online Harassment and Content Moderation: The Case of Blocklists,” (ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction) 2018) https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3185593 and Alan Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online” (Data & Society) (2017) https://www.posiel.com/…/Media-Manipulation-and…

(2) Penelope Higgins, “Fascism and the Trans Villain: Historically Recurring Transphobia in Far-Right Politics,” (Graduate History Review) (2023) https://journals.uvic.ca/…/ghr/article/view/ghr12202321578 (note: if you search this through Google Scholar you will find that you can download an un-gated pdf pre-print of the article.

(3) Mary Roth Walsh, “The Quirls of a Woman’s Brain,” in Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifen, and Barbara Fried, eds., “Biological Woman — The Convenient Myth” (Schenkman) (1982). If you look hard enough you can find a copy online. It used to be at the Internet Archive but has been removed. I would never tell you to visit your Aunt Anna.

(4) Alexander Rony and Hagit Caspi, “Author Interview with Sandra Eder: How the Clinic Made Gender,” (UC Berkeley Letters & Science) (2023) https://ls.berkeley.edu/…/author-interview-sandra-eder…

(5) Sandra Eder, “How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea” (University of Chicago) (2022) If you cannot find it at the source I didn’t mention above, Amazon will sell you a used copy for about $10. https://www.amazon.com/How…/dp/0226819930/ref=sr_1_1…

(6) Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifen, and Barbara Fried in “Introduction” to “Biological Woman — The Convenient Myth” (see note 3 above).

(7) Jillian Todd Weiss, “GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community,” (Journal of Bisexuality) (2004) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J159v03n03_02 (If you go through Google Scholar by searching article name you can bypass the gated version for a pdf copy.)

(8 ) Janice G. Raymond, “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male” (Athene Series) (1994 reprint of 1979 edition with a new introduction by the author). Hard copies of this book today go for hundreds of dollars; most certainly DO NOT visit Aunt Anna.

The Invention of “Biological Women” (Part One: 1608 – 1950)

Sep19

THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL WORK!

I’ve made a copy here to be easy to reference. The work in question goes to American Samizdat, on Facebook. All credit and copyrights belong to that author. I’m making a copy here so I can always find it. I will be making a copy of Part Two when it becomes available but the history of the word “woman” is fraught with sociological connotations and has had nothing to do with biological sex most of the time.

The Invention of “Biological Women” (Part One: 1608 – 1950)

There’s distinct irony in trans haters — especially women — becoming offended when the term “cis-women” is used, then claiming that usage is intended to eliminate “biological women.”

The concept of “biological women” and “gender roles” as distinct from legally and culturally accepted definitions of “woman” did not exist before the 1950s, caught on slowly thereafter, and is at odds with modern science.

In this introductory segment we’ll consider the many adjectives and nouns applied to women throughout American history to discover that “I am not a cis-woman, I am a woman without adjectives or qualifications” reflects an ahistorical modern myth rather than objective reality

In the colonial, Revolutionary, and Federalist periods, the noun “women” without the adjective “negro,” or synonyms “negress,” “wench,” or “fancy girl” always meant “white women.” This was also true for Native American women. (1) (2)

The term “woman” was never intended to be a universal designation for all “adult females.”

Another critical term for white women in early America was the legal reference “femme covert.”

This codified the reality that all white women were legally defined not as individuals, but in relation to the “responsible” male in their lives: “daughter of,” “sister of,” “wife of,” etc.

“Femme covert” literally means “hidden woman/female,” a status in which all of her property and legal rights were controlled by that male. (3)

While that status began to disappear during the 19th Century, the basic reality remained: in a political and legal sense: “women” could accurately be defined as “individuals with fewer rights than men.” This remains true today, despite all social advances.

The formal designation of simply being “women” also excluded lower-class white women: indentured servants, prostitutes, whores, and … witches.

None of these distinctions involved as-yet-undiscovered chromosomes or genitalia/breeding.

That was why the US Ambassador to Mexico in 1845, Joel Poinsett, found himself in a quandary when an individual seeking a visa to enter the United States diplomatically, and said individual presented with both male and female genitalia. “A true hermaphrodite,” Poinsett wrote, and refused to stamp either “male” or “female” on the papers. (4)

Medical science prior to the American Civil War was largely ignorant of even basic female anatomy. Midwives usually attended births because male doctors had so little idea what they were doing.

You can find serious contemporary references to the clitoris as “the little penis” or “the woman’s penis,” complete with speculations about precisely what the organ did. (5)

Instead the terminology for “women” involved racial, social, and economic distinctions — created by men for the benefit of men.

Had someone in 1781 written, “Indentured women are women” or “Negro women are women,” they’d have been in trouble.

During much of the 19th Century the dialogue about “women” centered around what’s known as “the Cult of True Womanhood.”

The “True Woman” was white, of course, and belonged to the elite, professional, or tiny emerging middle classes.

Four primary virtues defined her: Piety, Purity, Submissiveness, and Domesticity. I don’t have to go deep into the definitions for you to have the idea what this all meant — it was the foundation of today’s Christian nationalist “tradwife.” (6)

Meanwhile, let’s take a swipe at the categories of adult females who were NOT considered “true women”: Black women (slave or free), Native American women (“squaws”), Asian women (“chinks”), servant women (“Bridgets,” “biddys” or “wenches”), employed women (“working women” or “mill girls”), prostitutes (“fallen women,” “soiled doves”), women who chose to remain single (“spinsters”), politically active women (“viragos”), or lesbians (“Uranians,” “Jacks,” “Sapphists,” or “Tribads”).

Speaking of prostitutes, there were trans women (“fairies”) documented among the bawdy houses of American and European cities as far back as 1830, as in the case of “Mary Jones” in New York City. Her “dead name,” to use modern parlance, was “Peter Sewally.” (7)

Remember Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” speech?

Well, she wasn’t — at least not to the white men who made the rules and the Stockholm-Syndrome-infected white women who served as their obedient handmaidens.

The definition of “women” in America has always been entangled not in science, but in race and class.

The Page Act of 1875 excluded all female Chinese immigrants from the same category of “women” (thereby barring their entrance into the country) by characterizing them as all prostitutes (carriers of STDs and “moral corruption”). (😎

Women’s rights activists (suffragettes and early feminists) were consistently removed from the category of “true womanhood” as “unsexed” or “unwomanly” (mid-19th Century); “man-haters” (early 20th Century); “Battle Axes” or “Castrating bitches” (mid-20th Century), or “Feminazis” (late 20th Century).

Meanwhile, those white women who opposed feminism and the expansion of women’s rights were heralded as “traditional women,” “conservative women,” or even “real women.” Since much of this occurred during the late Jim Crow/Civil Rights era, Black women were (again!) generally excluded from these terms with a very few exceptions.

Shall we discuss the biological elements here?

Remember that during the 1930s Nazi Germany modeled its eugenics laws (including the sterilization of the “mentally deficient — male or female) on those existing in the United States. (9)

Remember that any white person (especially women) could lose their status forever due to the transfusion of a unit of “negro” blood. The same people today telling you that an individual cannot change their gender don’t want you to study the history wherein a drop of blood could change your race. (10)

Remember that Black women from the 18th through the middle of the 20th Century were considered appropriate subjects for medical experimentation without their consent because they lacked the cultural and legal protections of “real” women. (11)

Remember that the US government continued an active (though covert) program of involuntary sterilization of Native American women into the 1970s because their consent, unlike that of white “women,” was considered unnecessary. (12)

What’s also notable here is that between the colonial period and the mid-1950s, despite all the other aspects we’ve noted, there was never a separation in the definition of “woman” between “biology” and “gender.”

“Woman” was considered to be defined by a host of traits, some social and some physiological. The idea of splitting the definition into “sex” or “biology” versus “gender.” had yet to occur.There was widespread recognition in the medical community in the late 19th century that many women possessed physiological and psychological traits that significantly diverged from what was considered “normal.”

The term “sexual invert” was coined to describe women who physiology, sexual attractions, and gender presentation significantly differed from that norm. The term “passing woman” describe what were effectively trans men — women who lived their entire lives as men, even marrying and having families. (13)

Possibly the most famous (at least in retrospect once historians reconstructed their biography) sexual invert/trans man, was Albert Cashier, a Civil War veteran soldier whose close family and friends, as well as attending medical practitioners, were aware possessed female genitalia … but no one “outed” Cashier publicly, even after death. (14)

Though the role of XX and XY chromosomes was generally understood by 1902-1905, significant karyotype variations weren’t discovered until 1956 – 1959, decades after Dr Magnus Hirschfeld performed the first known complete bottom surgery for a trans woman named Dora Richter in 1922, leading directly to many more at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science until Germany’s transgender population — like homosexuals, the mentally challenged, and the Romany — joined Jews as targets for genocide. (15) (16)

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University during the 1950s piloted the idea that “woman” as a definition needed to be divided into two major categories: biology and “gender.”

Biology dealt with anatomy and “sex.” Gender covered all those aspects of how society viewed and enforced cultural roles on women. The researchers — as scientists — predictably concluded that the biological definition was determinative.

How that happened, and why it was a disaster, is the topic for next time.

=========

SOURCES

(1) Allsup, Carl, “Women and racism” (EBSCO) (2022) https://www.ebsco.com/research…/history/women-and-racism/

(2) Caren Holmes, “The Colonial Roots of the Racial Fetishization of Black Women” (Black & Gold) (2016) https://openworks.wooster.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi…

(3) Catherine Allgor, “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should” (Nation Women’s History Museum) (2012) https://www.womenshistory.org/…/coverture-word-you…

(4) Reel M-97, “Despatches From U.S. Ministers To Mexico, 1823-1906,” (Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State) (National Archives, Washington DC)

(5) Virginia Vigliar, “A brief history of the clitoris.” (Antidotes) (2022) https://virginiavigliar.substack.com/…/a-brief-history…

(6) Jennifer Kurtz, “Introduction-Women and the Cult of Domesticity,” (Lumen Learning) (2023) https://viva.pressbooks.pub/…/introduction-women-and…/

(7) Jonathan Ned Katz, “The ‘Man-Monster’” (Out History) (2011) https://outhistory.org/exh…/show/sewally-jones/man-monster

(😎 “Page Law (1875)” (Immigration History) (2019) https://immigrationhistory.org/item/page-act/

(9) Beth Daley, “Historians are learning more about how the Nazis targeted trans people,” (The Conversation) (2023) https://theconversation.com/historians-are-learning-more…

(10) “The Color of Blood,” (Smithsonian) (ND) https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/color-blood

(11) Benjamin Anderson, “Author Harriet Washington Lectures on Medical Apartheid,” (Hamilton University) (2014) https://www.hamilton.edu/…/celebrated-author-harriet…

(12) Erin Blackmore, “The Little-Known History of the Forced Sterilization of Native American Women,” (JSTOR Daily) (2016) https://daily.jstor.org/the-little-known-history-of-the…/

(13) Rodolfo John Alaniz, “Darwinian Sensualities: Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, and Late Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Theory,” (University of Texas) (2017) https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/…/gender-symp-hps…

(14) Amy Benck, “Albert D. J. Cashier: Woman Warrior, Insane Civil War Veteran, or Transman?” (OUT History) (ND) https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/albert-cashier

(15) Samantha Reidel, “Remembering Dora Richter, One of the First Women to Receive Gender-Affirming Surgery,” (THEM) (2022) https://www.them.us/…/dora-richter-first-trans-woman-to…

(16) Jaycek Z. Kubiak, Małgorzata Kloc, and Rafał P. Piprek, “History of The Research on Sex Determination,” (Biodmedical) (2020) https://biomedres.us/fulltexts/BJSTR.MS.ID.004194.php

(17( Alexander Rony and Hagit Caspi, “Author Interview with Sandra Eder: How the Clinic Made Gender,” (UC Berkeley Letters & Science) (2023) https://ls.berkeley.edu/…/author-interview-sandra-eder…

America Was Never Great

Nov13

I’m copying this post from Facebook, so I have it available. The original post is by historian Jermaine Fowler. This is his work, reproduced here simply for easy reference. (Facebook is not a reliable reference.)

November 01, 2025 (Saturday)

On June 5, 1934, about a year and a half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany met to plan what became the Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece of Nazi racial legislation. A stenographer recorded every word—ink on paper, archived where most Americans will never look.

The transcript reveals something we’d rather not remember: the meeting opened with a detailed memorandum on the race laws of the United States.

For hours, these Nazi lawyers debated American legal precedents. They discussed whether to bring Jim Crow segregation to Germany. They analyzed anti-miscegenation statutes from thirty American states. They examined how the U.S. classified and constrained the citizenship and political status of colonized peoples (including Native Americans and Filipinos) across different eras.

They were particularly impressed by the “one-drop rule”—some states defined anyone with even one Black ancestor, however distant, as Black.

And here’s the part that should haunt us: as Yale law professor James Q. Whitman documents in Hitler’s American Model, some Nazi jurists considered parts of U.S. racial law too extreme to implement in 1934.

Let that settle in. The architects of the Holocaust looked at Jim Crow and thought, “That might be going too far.”

This meeting reveals what Black intellectuals had been warning about for years: Jim Crow was more than a failure of American democracy. It was American fascism, fully operational. Impressive enough that the Nazis used it as their blueprint.

We prefer to think of fascism as something foreign, something that happened over there. But as Whitman documented, America in the early 20th century was “the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” and Nazi lawyers knew it.

Here’s the problem: fascism has an American accent, but we’ve trained ourselves not to hear it. We know the Berlin book burnings but not the Tulsa massacre (1921), where a prosperous Black neighborhood was bombed from the air and burned to ash. We remember Kristallnacht but forget Rosewood (1923), where an entire Black town was erased.

We teach the Nuremberg trials but not Buck v. Bell (1927), where the Supreme Court legalized forced sterilization with the words “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” We built concentration camps for Japanese Americans (1942–1945) while fighting fascism abroad.

The U.S. ran medical experiments on Black men in Tuskegee (1932–1972) for forty years. We turned convict leasing into slavery by another name, we drew redlining maps (1930s onward) that still determine who builds wealth and who doesn’t, and we did all of it with legal precision and bureaucratic efficiency.

That’s not a catalog of failures. That’s fascism with American characteristics. And our refusal to name it has let it survive, adapt, and return.

While most Americans remained blind to the fascist system in their own country, Black intellectuals saw it clearly. They lived inside it.

W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the 1930s and ‘40s, explicitly connected Jim Crow to European fascism. He argued that American racial oppression had anticipated Nazi Germany. When McCarthyism emerged, Du Bois warned that anti-communist repression was “American fascism” that “would use the negroes much as Hitler used the Jews.” Hyperbole? Not at all. He was being precise.

Claudia Jones, a Black Communist organizer, spent the 1940s and ‘50s warning that Jim Crow, union-busting, and political repression constituted a fascist system. When she was put on trial in 1948, she told the court she was fighting “the fascist drive on free speech and thought in our country.” For this, she was imprisoned, then deported.

Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940 and explicitly compared the psychology that created Bigger Thomas to the psychology that produced Nazi Germany. He was sounding an alarm. It went unheard.

Fringe voices? No. They were intellectuals with intimate knowledge of American fascism, describing exactly what they saw. We refused to call it by its name.

Jim Crow was a complete political system.

One-party rule? The Democratic Party controlled the South absolutely, just as fascist parties controlled their states.

Political violence? Thousands of lynchings, with state protection for perpetrators and zero convictions.

Racial hierarchy as explicit state policy? Enshrined in law from the Black Codes of 1865 through Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to the dismantling that finally began with Brown v. Board (1954) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

Economic exclusion? Sharecropping, wage theft, segregation that destroyed wealth accumulation.

Extrajudicial killing? Spectacle lynchings where towns gathered, took photographs, sold postcards.

This was a fascist system, running in America for a century. We just called it something else.

The Voting Rights Act didn’t end the system. It regulated it. And for sixty years, we’ve been systematically removing those regulations.

The Supreme Court gutted preclearance requirements in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). Voter ID laws proliferate. Polling places close in Black neighborhoods. Voter rolls are purged using the same logic as literacy tests—technical requirements that seem neutral but function to exclude.

Then 2025 arrived. The components rebooted in public.

Remember the components of the Jim Crow fascist system? They’re roaring back, operating in plain sight.

One-party rule? Republican-controlled state legislatures have gerrymandered themselves into permanent power. In several states, precision-drawn maps have produced durable majorities from minority vote shares, letting parties pre-decide outcomes before ballots are cast.

Manipulation of citizenship? Orders and drafts targeting birthright citizenship revive a legal architecture the Nazis studied—and it echoes here, the same state-by-state strategy that made Jim Crow untouchable for a century. Create the legal theory in friendly courts. Spread it through executive action. Let states enforce it locally.

Political violence with state protection? January 6th defendants are being pardoned and celebrated. Reporting shows federal voting-rights enforcement has receded—staff exodus, case withdrawals, and shifting priorities. Armed “observers” and intimidation resurface in Black and Latino precincts. No convictions. No consequences. The state protects the perpetrators—just like it did during Jim Crow.

Economic exclusion? DEI programs were ended by executive order, with knock-on effects in grants and contracting; parts of the contractor regime and equity rules are in flux or under court review. Wealth routes are narrowed by policy choices that systematically reduce opportunity and capital access.

Extrajudicial control? Police violence continues with qualified immunity intact. Mass deportation plans target mixed-status families, separating citizens from non-citizens using the same logic that once separated “Negro” from “white.” The cruelty is the system working as designed.

The question echoes across a century: Can states create second-class citizens? Under Trump 2.0, the answer is becoming clear. Not through mob violence this time but through executive orders, through captured courts, through laws that sound neutral but target with precision.

This is old Jim Crow putting its boots back on.

Stop asking if fascism is coming to America.

American fascism never left. We defeated its European students in 1945 but never dismantled the system they’d studied. We renamed it. We regulated it. We pretended the regulations were transformation.

The lawyers who met in 1934 would recognize what’s happening now. They’d see the same legal architecture, the same manipulation of citizenship, the same use of federalism to protect local oppression. They’d just be surprised we kept it running this long.

W.E.B. Du Bois saw it. Claudia Jones saw it. Richard Wright saw it. They told us exactly what it was. We ignored them because the truth was too uncomfortable.

This is the return of American Democracy to its original form, the one impressive enough that fascists crossed an ocean to study it.

Picture the ledger books from 1934, still filed in Berlin archives. Picture the voter rolls being purged in Georgia right now. Picture the same elegant legal language, a century apart, doing the same ugly work.

How much longer will we pretend it ever left?

You Did This

Feb4

This is to every single person who told me I was “hysterical” for predicting the rise of theocratic based fascism in the United States as long as 11 years ago (before Trump even announced his candidacy)

This is for every single person who told me “that can’t happen here”.

This is for every single person who said our institutions would save us.

The entire time, conservatives have said in advance, publicly, precisely how they would undermine everything, destroy every safeguard, seize control of every institution.

Even if a given court rules Trump in contempt of violating a court order, who’s going to arrest him now? Who’s going to enforce anything?

And now we have the first concentration camp since WWII. We have citizens being threatened with deportation. Kids being denied medical care. An entire group of human beings being actively erased from existence and history (that’s called “genocide” for you who are too f*cking stupid to get it).

Some of you are just NOW finally asking how do we mobilize against this to “save” our country? You should have mobilized a decade ago. In waiting til now to realize this, you’ve already lost. The United States of America is already dead. And you can’t face that, can you? You killed it by your inaction, your refusal to listen to what they openly said.

For those that can get out, do it as soon as you can. For those that can’t, your lives and the lives of your descendants for generations will become a living hell.

You were warned and ignored every warning. You deserve what’s coming. Those of us who told you don’t deserve this but we’re the direct targets. Our blood will be on your hands too. Trump didn’t do this alone. You let him.

Carry that guilt to your grave. And to every spineless Democrat in Congress seeking “common ground” with these fascists? May you burn in hell.