Tag Archive | Tolerance

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…

Wrong Life

Jan28

This was written by a friend. I have attempted to strip any identifying information from the original piece to protect the author. It expresses how it feels to be transgender in America in 2026. Right now, in 2026, transgender people are the target of government genocide. Each step becomes more explicit. Each action becomes more violent towards the trans community. This is how The Holocaust happened. You are living through such a moment right now. What you do, other than just posting on social media, will determine what happens to trans adults and children in the near future. If you let them murder us without a fight, you are complicit.

Wrong Life

Every once a while I encounter a quote that brings me up short and helps re-frame how I see the world. Such is the case when I came across this quote by Theodore Adorno as I researched the rise of Nazi Germany, and the origins of the Holocaust:

“A wrong life cannot be lived rightly”

Out of context I interpreted it to mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (e.g. Jewish, Sinti, disabled) nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good ones.” No matter their character, achievements, capability, “wrong life” can only have a negative value to society. The only way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum to zero on both sides.

This thought stopped me in my tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it explained everything I was both feeling, and seeing over the past year. It was the grand unification theorem of my inner world, and what I was seeing that was external to me.

I am wrong life. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter. Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication. Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the content of our character, and not government fiat that people like me are incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that ultimately decided I must be destroyed.

But none of it matters. My government, and the people that voted for it, have declared me wrong life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the President explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life was a feature and not a bug. The GOP spent hundreds of millions of dollars spreading the narrative that anyone who doesn’t want wrong life eliminated is against the herrenvolk.

At the same time, this sentence helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust than other civil rights atrocities in American history. For most other marginalized groups in American history it was still possible to be one of “the good ones”. For black people, there was room for acceptance of those who “knew their place”. Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy. Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater of Operations. Hispanics were long used for their agricultural labor or valued as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other Americans, but it wasn’t a negative number.

Mine is.

And that’s the fundamental difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today, and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as non-citizens of the Reich than previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place” as second class citizens.

This quote snapped into place why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of German history than the US. It’s also the most useful framework for understanding why Republicans are targeting transgender people with literally over a 1000 bills per year designed to make life impossible enough that they either leave the country, detransition, or live in a country where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.

They see us as wrong life. And even those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is the dark side of politics: it looks like the quick and easy path to power to take this position in public. Any Republican that does not behave as if transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party, and away from the levers of power.

I have expressed some of these frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of “well, I don’t think of you that way.” While appreciative of such support, they simply don’t matter because the people who express these thoughts have no institutional power. My own sense of self worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is meaningless if my transgender son and I are spending our last moments holding our breath and trying to claw our way through concrete with our fingernails while taking a “shower” with 100 strangers. All it provides is a further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared us to be “wrong life.”

Only the government’s opinion matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in their eyes, and the eyes of the people keeping the government in power. That government has made it clear it intends to remain in power in perpetuity at any cost. I will always be wrong life if I remain in the United States. The only way to change the equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can have some value greater than zero.

I want my life to have a positive value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a relief it will be when I do not have to spend every waking moment aware of being wrong-life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, here you find my soul laid bare in Hell.

I No Longer Trust You

Nov29

This is an expansion of something I did as a series of posts on BlueSky.

Occasionally, I think about the poet, Renee Vivien, and what LGBTQ people went through to live as themselves in the past. Second photo is a copy of one of her poems called Prolong The Night. Its words shout to me of the pain that existing in patriarchal cishet society must have carried.

Make no mistake but conservatives are coming for all LGBTQ people. You won’t save yourselves by throwing trans people under the bus first. Now that he’s elected, Project 2025 is loudly proclaimed by his entire administration as their guiding document. If they win, the idea of freedom dies.

I used to believe that Americans were better than this, that they’d try to rise above this hate, these lies, this violent murderous intent that oozes from every corner of the GOP. But I no longer believe that. Even those few that voted against Trump still harbor that ugly hatred of LGBTQ people.

But I’m reminded of the voyage of the MS Saint Louis, a passenger vessel that, in 1939, with more than 900 Jews aboard, was turned back by the United States to Europe. Those people were taken in by other countries than Germany but it didn’t matter because Germany overran France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and more, and many of those 900 still ended up in concentration camps and died. America turned its back on those refugees and then incarcerated its own Japanese-American citizens. I wondered if America had changed since the 1940’s and I now have my answer. You have not and I have no faith in any of you anymore.

I hadn’t planned on being laid off in Dec 2023 but I was, and forced into retirement because, as the saying goes, the same people that want us to work until age 70 are the same ones who won’t hire us after age 50. And while I still run rings around younger software engineers, I’ve been forced out.

So I’m working towards a different career, with a different goal – enough financial stability to let me leave this rotting corpse of a nation and settle myself elsewhere. To those of you choosing to stay and fight, may Inanna bless you, protect you, and save you from what’s to come. I no longer think America is capable of avoiding an era of darkness that could put both Stalin and Hitler to shame. And I expect trans people to be just the first of many sacrifices on the altar of fascist scapegoating.

But as for me, I am tired. Years and years of this only to watch Kamala Harris and the entire Democratic Party turn their backs on us during the final weeks of the election have proven to me that, just like in the 1930’s, Americans will turn us in to the fascists as soon as they demand it. Americans have always been fundamentally moral cowards and they still are.

If you’re cisgender, I now automatically no longer trust you. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries, Seth Moulton, Colin Allred, Sherrod Brown, and so many more have proven to me that you’re never to be trusted. That you’ll turn on marginalized people if it’s your path to power. Do I trust a few cisgender people? Yes, I do, but they’ve been there for me. I’ve seen what they’ll do versus your own silence when all you needed were words to fight back. You don’t have the guts to fight back tooth and nail, when the violence really begins because you couldn’t even muster words when that was all that was needed.

So don’t come into my comments proclaiming that you’re different, that you can be trusted, that you’ll protect us. Because I know, with certainty, that as soon as the fascists point their guns at you, you will turn on us again. LIberals are joking that half of America turned out to be people they wouldn’t trust with the location of Anne Frank. Well, sad to say, Anne Frank wouldn’t be safe with you liberals either, and you just proved it.

All that Democrats had to do was fight back in September and October of 2024, yet you didn’t. You kept trying to change the subject. You kept trying to gloss over the existence of trans people. You wouldn’t stand up for 0.6% of the population. Hey, to the rest of you LGB people? They won’t stand up for you either. You’re a Jew? You’re just 2.4% of the population and they won’t stand up for you either. In fact, Trump might just deport you all to Israel, to help hasten this “end times Armageddon” madness on the right.

But in the end, I now know you’ll turn tail and run, hide, or do anything except protect those targeted by the far right. Don’t object because your actions, or rather, your lack of actions when it could have mattered, have already convicted you.

Authenticity and “Passing”

Oct4

I originally wrote most of this as a comment to another blog I follow. But I realized it’s useful and wanted others to have the chance to consider this as well.

I really really dislike the term “passing” but I’m going to use it here because so many people in the community understand it. I prefer to think of it as just acceptance of who I am.

One of the things about “passing” seems to be a lack of effort. And I don’t mean that in the way some people might think. In fact, perhaps I mean it the opposite way.

When we’re unsure of ourselves, when we’re not authentically ourselves (which I agree is hard!), we start to “act”, and our role in society becomes performance art rather than just who we are.

But the funny thing is that people seem to be able to detect performance art versus authenticity. Maybe we try too hard. Maybe we make subtle mistakes or maybe we’re acting so hard that we don’t make mistakes. Maybe we “act” too hard and it sends signals to others.

I’m not really sure. But what I do know is that as I acquired personal inner peace, as I began to simply “be me” as opposed to someone society thought I should be, my issues with “passing” vanished.

Yeah, I admit I’ve had medical help along the way as an MtF trans woman but that help, while it definitely helped, wasn’t the final piece of the puzzle for me.

It was when I finally found a way to “be me” that I stopped acting. And almost as soon as I stopped acting, I stopped getting misgendered, etc. I know it’s not that easy for everyone. I know that hormones need time to work. I know that there are other aspects. But regardless of all those things, it does seem to me that “passing” includes being authentic, just “being you” rather than a construct.

NOTE: Part of finding that inner peace, for me at least, did come from surgery. Once I completed GCS, then I began to finally, for the first time in my life, begin to feel positive about my own body. So surgery played a role there too, but only a role.