Receipts: More from Kara Dansky
The "no plausible deniability" campaign continues
I’ve now set up a Receipts tab on the BROADview navigation bar; think of it as plausible deniability insurance. Here is a vast collection from Kara Dansky, who has been trying to raise awareness in and through the media for nearly a decade. Feel free to send more my way.
—Lisa
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LTE to WaPo March 26, 2026, no response:
To the editor:
Re the Post’s March 26 article “Transgender women athletes banned from female Olympic events by new IOC policy”:The Post’s coverage of this important news item is misleading at best, and inaccurate at worst.
The headline is close to accurate (though I wish the Post would use the simple and straightforward word “men”), but it is followed by this subheading: “Transgender women athletes are now excluded from the Olympics after the IOC agreed to a new eligibility policy It aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on women’s sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games.” This strongly suggests that male athletes who call themselves “transgender” are being excluded from the Olympics entirely, which is not true.
The policy that the IOC announced on Thursday morning simply states that athletes will be required to undergo a simple and non-invasive sex test in order to compete, and that only female athletes will be permitted to compete in the women’s category. Male athletes will be eligible to compete in the men’s category. That’s it.
In a survey of female athletes at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, 82% said that sex testing should be continued and 94% said they were not made anxious by the procedure. Female athletes want sex testing.
This is a very sensible move on the IOC’s part to protect the integrity of female sports. The Washington Post would do well not to mislead readers about it.
Kara Dansky
LTE to NYT March 24, 2026, no response:
To the Editor,
Thomas B. Edsall’s March 24 opinion piece, “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?,” is a welcome contribution to the discussion about why elected Democrats are out of touch with the majority of voters on the “trans issue.”
There has been very good reporting on this phenomenon, including in the Times. That reporting demonstrated that the vast majority of voters (including 67 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Independents) think that male athletes (including “transgender women”) do not belong in women’s sports.
When voters are asked clear questions, using precise language about specific scenarios, even stronger majorities understand that sex is real and matters. Polling commissioned by the group Women’s Declaration International USA in the fall of 2023 shows that:
4 out of 5 voters understand the word “women” means adult humans who are biologically female.
88% say a female 12-year-old attending a sleep-away summer camp for boys and girls, who has been signed up by her parents for a girls’ cabin, should be assigned bunkmates who are female only.
87% say an elderly or disabled female client of a home health agency who requests only women home health aides help her with showering should be sent female aides only.
This issue truly is not complicated.
Kara Dansky
Lifelong Democrat
Former President, Women’s Declaration International USA
To WaPo March 18, 2026, rejected; to Newsweek March 22, 2026, rejected; eventually published by The Hill on March 31
“Gender Identity” Renders Women’s Rights Unspeakable: The era of “swinging dicks” litigation
“It is truly a testament to where we are as a society today that it must be said in the context of federal civil rights litigation that women don’t have penises.”
I wrote those words in an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed by the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) in the matter of Olympus Spa v. Armstrong.
In his March 12 dissent to a decision in the case, Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit put it more colorfully: “This case is about swinging dicks,” he wrote. The language caused an uproar, and rightly so.
But Judge VanDyke isn’t wrong.
Olympus Spa is a traditional Korean-style spa near Seattle, Washington. It is open to women and girls aged thirteen and over, who visit to soak in herb-infused baths, lie on sand in warm rooms, and eat Korean food. Nudity is expected and, under certain circumstances, required.
In 2020, a man sought access to the spa. He was denied because the spa is only for women and teenaged girls.
This should have been straightforward. Most Americans of both sexes understand that it’s sometimes appropriate to have single-sex spaces. However, we are living in an era in which society (and sometimes, the law) allows for people to “identify as” the opposite sex.
This is the era of “trans,” or “gender identity.”
After the man was denied access, he filed a complaint against the spa before the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC). Claiming that the spa’s female-only policy violated his rights under Washington state law., he argued essentially as follows:
State law prohibits public places from discriminating against people on the basis of their sexual orientation.
State law defines the phrase “sexual orientation” to include “gender identity.”
He identifies as a woman.
Therefore, the spa discriminated against him on the basis of his sexual orientation.
He won. The WSHRC agreed that state law gave him a right to access the spa because he identifies as a woman.
On appeal, the Ninth Circuit agreed that Washington state law requires a female-only spa to accommodate a man who identifies as a woman.
Judge VanDyke disagrees.
The majority–and some commentators–were outraged at the language in his dissent. Slate called it “crass and indecent.” The lead judge in the majority called it “vulgar barroom talk.” A concurring judge said: “We are better than this.”
They are not wrong.
Judge VanDyke should never have had to come out swinging, as it were, on behalf of the women and girls who did not consent to sharing a nude space with males. He said as much:
You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong.
However, he used the phrase very deliberately, and for good reason.
This is literally a case about whether a man, with male genitalia, should be able to access what is intended to be a female-only space in which women and girls as young as thirteen are naked. It is a clear example of the real-world harms to female citizens when the words “women” and “girls” are redefined to include males.
Judge VanDyke’s dissent echoes arguments in WDI USA’s brief before the court: that women have fought hard for centuries for our rights, that we have largely succeeded in winning those rights in the law, and that all of that goes away when men are permitted to “identify as women.”
Judge VanDyke chose his startling words carefully in order to make an important point. He said:
[A]s much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa—some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.
He’s right. If the man in question hadn’t claimed a female “gender identity,” the majority of the Ninth Circuit would presumably have agreed that Washington’s criminal statutes against flashing and voyeurism applied. But because he invoked the shibboleth “I identify as a woman,” the rights of the spa’s female patrons seem to have evaporated.
Judges and pundits alike are more interested in language-policing those who speak out against sex crimes than in preventing those crimes against women in the first place.
This case may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. If it does, the Supreme Court should say, unambiguously, that it is wrong for state law to force unconsenting women and girls to see penises. It should affirm, once and for all, that women are female and men are male.
It should not have come to this, but this is where we are. Let the era of “swinging dicks” litigation come to an end.
To Newsweek Feb. 16, 2026, no response:
Hillary Clinton: Women’s Rights Champion Turned Traitor
Presidents’ Day was February 16. Hillary Clinton, the woman who in 2016 nearly became the first female President of the United States, spent the weekend pandering to a man who calls himself a woman.
As a feminist and a lifelong Democrat, I voted enthusiastically for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary and general elections.
She had, after all, championed the Family and Medical leave Act, worked to increase funding for child care, helped start the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, campaigned for access to emergency contraception, voted in favor of abortion, and co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (about fair pay for women).
Based on her record I, like many of her supporters, was confident that at a fundamental level Hillary Clinton both understood women’s rights and was committed to protecting and advancing them.
That’s why I was so disappointed to watch her platform a man during Saturday’s Fundamental Rights for Women panel at the Munich Security Conference.
As moderator, Clinton introduced U.S. Representative Sarah (born Timothy) McBride as the very first speaker. She described him as “someone who’s been involved in this work for a long time, in trying to explain, and truly bring people together, around issues of gender.”
To make matters worse, Clinton pretended that McBride is a woman. She described McBride as a “US Congresswoman from the state of Delaware.” She continued (speaking to McBride), “As a gender rights champion, and also the first openly transgender member of the United States Congress, you’ve been on the front lines of this fight.”
When Clinton described McBride as someone who’s “been involved in this work for a long time,” what did she mean by “this work?”
As a former national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign (a leading organization in the push to prioritize self-declared “gender identity” over the material reality of sex in law, policy, and culture), and a close family friend of former President Joe Biden, whose administration did more than any other to advance the goals of the gender identity movement, McBride has certainly been involved in the work of making it possible for men to “identify as” women, over the objections of actual women.
McBride has, however, never done a thing to protect the fundamental rights of women. Quite the opposite, in fact, because McBride works to ensure women have no right to exclude men who call themselves women (“transgender women”) from female-only spaces, sports, or opportunities.
Clinton’s fulsome praise of McBride in Munich was not her first betrayal of the female sex. While in 1995, Clinton famously stood on a UN stage in Beijing and declared that “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all,” it appears that “once and for all” really only meant until the early 2010s.
That was when the entire Democratic Party establishment decided that some men are women if they say so, if they mimic the stereotypes associated with femininity, and/or if they take hormones and have surgeries to make them more closely resemble women (i.e., “are trangender women”).
An early adopter of the new Democratic orthodoxy, in 2010, then-Secretary of State Clinton relaxed the rules for changing sex markers on passports so that surgery was no longer required.
It has not always been clear what, exactly, Hillary thinks about all of this. In 2019, she gave an interview with her daughter Chelsea. The interviewer asked them both if someone with a beard and penis can ever be a woman, Chelsea offered an enthusiastic “Ye-ess. Yes.” Hillary, however, looked “uneasy.”
When asked about sports, Chelsea stated that “she supports children being able to play on sports teams that match their gender identity.” Hillary was more cautious: “I think you’ve got to be sensitive to how difficult this is,” Hillary said. “There are women who’d say, ‘You know what, you’ve never had the kind of life experiences that I’ve had. So I respect who you are, but don’t tell me you’re the same as me.’ I hear that conversation all the time.” Hillary said that men should “absolutely” not be in women’s bathrooms and Chelsea glared at her.
Two days later, she posted on Facebook to say that “Trans rights are human rights.” She continued, “Let me be clear: transgender people deserve nothing short of full equality.”
Clinton’s capitulation on “gender” probably eased her relationship with her adult daughter, and with other Democratic elites, but at what cost?
People often use the word “gender” as a euphemism for sex, but this is dangerous. People like McBride have capitalized on the general public’s acceptance of the use of “gender” to mean sex in order to fight for men’s rights to be legally and socially recognized as women.
There was a spot on that panel in Munich that was meant for a woman. And Hillary Clinton gave it to a man who calls himself a woman.
In 1995, Secretary Clinton promised us that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, “once and for all.” Now she has completely abandoned us. As a traitor to her sex class, she should be ashamed.
Democratic contenders in 2028 should draw a lesson from the woman who was never President: speak the truth, even when pressured to lie. In doing so, you will protect your legacy—and you might just get yourself elected.
To WSJ January 5, 2026, no response:
In 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s House Bill 500, which limits women’s and girls’ sports to biologically female athletes. Five years and much litigation later, Little v. Hecox is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet, ahead of oral arguments scheduled for January 13, the ACLU has asked the Court to declare its own suit moot. Why?
On the surface, Hecox and the similar West Virginia v. B.P.J., which justices will hear on the same day, present a narrow question: May states, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, maintain single-sex sports?
In both cases, U.S. appellate courts have ruled that laws excluding males from women’s and girls’ sports violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the West Virginia case, an appellate court also ruled that the state’s law violates Title IX (which prohibits sex discrimination in education). A Supreme Court decision is expected next summer.
While the current Court seems unlikely to take up former President Biden’s position that the transgender movement is “the civil rights issue of our time,” the scope of its rulings in these cases could vary widely.
As the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter wrote in September, “What we don’t know–and won’t know until that ruling is handed down—is whether that ruling will be narrowly tailored to the context of athletics or implicate a broad range of rights for transgender people.”
In other words, will the Court issue a few limited protections for female athletes, or will it finally address the elephantess in the (court)room? Does the class “women and girls” mean female people? Or does it mean people of either sex who say they are female?
In seeking to have Hecox declared moot, the ACLU may hope to avoid a definitive answer to that question from the conservative-majority Court.
It is not only conservatives who resist redefining the words “women” and “girls” to include males. A 2023 survey conducted by SurveyUSA on behalf of Women’s Declaration International USA (a feminist organization of which I am a past president) found that four out of five American voters, including two thirds of Democrats, understand that women are “adult humans who are female.”
The Supreme Court has already decided that women as a sex class deserve protection under the Equal Protection Clause. In 1971, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that women are people for equal protection purposes, and the Court agreed. The case was Reed v. Reed, and it concerned an Idaho law that explicitly elevated males over females in the administration of probate estates. The Court rightfully ruled that this was unfair to women. A long line of jurisprudence followed, culminating in the landmark 1996 case U.S. v. Virginia, in which the Court (led by Justice Ginsburg) ruled that the Virginia Military Institute could not exclude women.
How long can the Court delay facing the issue head-on?
In 2020, Justice Samuel Alito issued a dissent to the Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, in which a 6-3 majority ruled that employers may not discriminate on the basis of “transgender status.” The decision did not define “transgender status,” leaving muddled the question of whether, under the law, some males are women if they call themselves “transgender.”
He warned: “Although the Court does not want to think about the consequences of its decision, we will not be able to avoid those issues for long. The entire Federal Judiciary will be mired for years in disputes about the reach of the Court’s reasoning.”
His warning was prescient. In case after case, the federal courts are being asked to consider who qualifies for accommodations and protections designated for women and girls.
During the summer of 2024, after the Biden Administration announced that it was redefining the word “sex” to include the concept of “gender identity” in regulations pertaining to Title IX, the federal judiciary had to grapple with over twenty lawsuits about what words like “sex” and “women” mean. Outside the Title IX context, federal courts have faced the question of whether female-only spas and sororities are permitted to exclude men (“transgender women”).
Last year, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the matter of United States v. Skrmetti, which concerned state laws banning the administration of “puberty blockers” and other hormones to children. While advocates hoped to make the case that the phrase “transgender people” constitutes a sufficiently coherent category of people to be considered what is known in the law as a “quasi-suspect classification,” they faced skepticism from several justices.
Justice Alito questioned ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as to whether “transgender status” is immutable. Strangio acknowledged that it is not “immutable,” but maintained that it is a “distinguishing characteristic.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett challenged the U.S. Solicitor General on the question of whether “transgender people” have historically lacked political power. This matters in part because one of the reasons the Court initially extended equal protection to women was that women had historically been excluded from civic institutions like the franchise and juries.
Six members of the Court ruled earlier this year that laws such as the one at issue in Skrmetti are constitutional. Significantly, Justices Alito, Barrett, and Thomas published concurring opinions stating they would have ruled explicitly that the phrase “transgender status” is not a “quasi-suspect class.”
However, the Court did not go far enough in Skrmetti, and it failed to clarify the ambiguity left by Bostock. Unless the Court rules unambiguously that “transgender” is not a “quasi-suspect class,” and that women and girls exist as a coherent sex class, courts and lawyers will be left (again) to grapple with these matters.
In the sports cases currently pending before the Supreme Court, the Court has two options: it can uphold Justice Ginsburg’s important legacy by ruling that women and girls—and only women and girls—belong to the female sex class, or it can, once again, leave the matter for another day.
I am friendly with the folks at TFP and a few days after Charlie Kirk was killed, I pitched the idea of publishing my interview. TFP said they passed my message on to Bari, and nothing ever came of it.
To spiked August 24, 2025, responded and rejected
Fighting for Women’s Sex-Based Rights is Not “MAGA”
It’s feminist
August 24, 2025
As readers surely know, in April of this year, the group For Women Scotland (FWS) won a stunning legal victory before the U.K. Supreme Court, when the Court ruled that the words “woman,” “man,” and “sex” refer to biology with respect to the U.K.’s Equality Act.
Now, Dr. Rebecca Don Kennedy, the head of Scotland’s Equality Network, is calling FWS “MAGA” in an article published by the Scottish outlet The Herald. As a U.S. Democratic feminist who has never voted for Donald Trump, this makes me quite cross.
According to The Herald:
The issue quickly moved from the fringes to the centre to Scottish and UK politics. At first, Kennedy wondered: “Where was it coming from? Down south? America?”
She adds: “I think now we know that it’s coming from concerted MAGA rhetoric.”
…
Kennedy believes the culture war around trans people “tracks” on to the timing of the first Trump presidency.
If Kennedy had done her research, she would know that American leftist feminists have been fighting for women’s sex-based rights for decades, long before an odious man named Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office.
She would know that an American leftist radical feminist lesbian named Lisa Vogel founded the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF or MichFest) in 1976, and that it had to fight to protect its female-only policy when a bunch of men calling themselves women started inserting themselves into it in 1991. She would know that a different American radical feminist leftist lesbian named Janice Raymond published a book titled The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male in 1979, and republished it in 1994 with an Introduction warning us of the emergence of the word “transgender.” None of that had anything to do with Donald Trump, who, according to investigative journalist Wayne Barrett, spent the 1970s running his father’s New York real estate company and discriminating against black people.
If she had done her research, Kennedy would know that the American radical feminist group Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) was founded in 2013 to fight for women’s sex-based rights, free from men who call themselves women (I served on its board from 2016 to 2020). She would also know that the global feminist group Women’s Declaration International (WDI) launched in 2019 in New York and that the American chapter (WDI USA) was formed in 2020 (I served as the president and member of the board of directors of the U.S. chapter from 2021 to 2024).
Kennedy goes further and suggests that fighting for women’s sex-based rights is akin to opposing abortion, and that it’s only men who fight sex-denialism in the law. She said, “Many of the men attacking trans rights would strip abortion rights from women in a heartbeat. The ultimate objective is quashing women’s rights. Once we allow trans women to be scapegoated it’s a slippery slope.”
Kennedy is right that many American men would love to strip women of the right to terminate a pregnancy. That is one reason I have never voted for Donald Trump (I have voted Republican once in my life, in a 1990s mayoral race, where the Republican was openly pro-abortion rights and I believed the Democratic candidate to be corrupt). But to compare the fight for sex-based rights to the American right-wing obsession with stripping women of abortion rights is ludicrous. American leftist radical feminists support abortion rights.
WoLF’s mission is to “restore, protect, and advance the rights of women and girls using legal argument, policy advocacy, and public education.” Among other objectives, it “defends women’s bodily sovereignty and unapologetically supports abortion on demand.” When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, I published a piece on the WDI USA blog titled, “How the Supreme Court Got it Wrong in Dobbs.” It stated, “The U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) stands categorically and unapologetically in support of women’s and girls’ right to terminate a pregnancy at will, on demand, and without apology.”
The day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, I launched the Democratic Women’s Declaration (DWD). I am ideologically left of the Democratic party, but I have been a registered Democrat since 1990 (except for a few years in the early 2000s, when I was registered Green). I care about women and girls as a sex class. Article IV of the DWD states:
Only women are capable of becoming pregnant. Women must have access to medical care with respect to pregnancy, including during the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal periods. Accordingly, all areas of law, policy, and practice should ensure that the full reproductive rights of women and girls, including access to comprehensive reproductive services including abortion, are upheld.
The DWD was inspired by the global Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, the Labour Women’s Declaration, and the Green Women’s Declaration.
In more recent years, other U.S. groups have popped up, including Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG), which opposes reckless medical interventions that ignore developmental science, supports the rights of women and girls to single-sex spaces and sports, believes there’s no wrong way to be a boy or girl, and is committed to open dialogue and free speech. There’s also the LGB Courage Coalition, a “lesbian and gay advocacy group committed to promoting evidence-based medical care, ending the medicalization of gender nonconformity, safeguarding homosexual rights, and building a pathway back for LGB individuals who have undergone medicalization.” The LGB Alliance also has a U.S. chapter. Some individuals in these groups may vote Republican, but none of the groups can fairly be accused of being “MAGA.”
WDI USA and WoLF are nonpartisan American feminist organizations. The DWD is a feminist document, inspired by leftists in the U.K. To impose the label of “MAGA” onto FWS ignores decades of American feminist organizing and fighting for the right of women and girls to exist as a sex class distinct from men (and for abortion rights).
This has nothing to do with Donald Trump. This has everything to do with women. To paint FWS as “MAGA” is inaccurate at best (and insulting to women at worst). Rebecca Don Kennedy should know better. She probably does.
To Spectator, June 23, 2025, no response:
U.S. v. Skrmetti: A Transatlantic Return to Reality
In the matter of U.S. v. Skrmetti, the U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld Tennessee’s ban on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones intended to disguise the sex of minors. The decision strikes a major blow against the human rights abuse that is pediatric “gender medicine.”
But its full implications are even broader. Although the U.S. Court did not go as far as the U.K. Supreme Court did in April when it found that the words ‘woman,’ ‘man,’ and ‘sex’ refer to biology, the Skrmetti decision confirmed what broad majorities of Americans have known all along: that sex is real, in the law and otherwise.
In this case, the state of Tennessee enacted a law that protects minors from harmful drugs such as puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. It is well established that such drugs cause long-term harm such as sterility, disease, and the inability to develop sexual function as an adult.
And yet, a group of minors and their parents, represented by the A.C.L.U. (where I worked from 2012 to 2014), sued the state, demanding access to these harmful drugs. They argued that the Tennessee law violates their right to equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
They won at the district court level, but lost when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rightly ruled that the phrase “transgender people” is not a coherent category of people under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court majority did not address that aspect of the lower court’s ruling, though Justices Barrett and Alito agreed with the Sixth Circuit on it.
Progressives frame Skrmetti—and the entire conflict over “gender identity”—as but one front in their larger war on Trump and the G.O.P. “I didn’t pick this fight around trans rights,” said Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director. “The right-wing conservatives of the MAGA G.O.P. have made this one of their cause célèbre issues…”
In response to the Court’s decision, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer took to X to decry “Republicans’ cruel crusade against trans kids.” His fellow Democratic Senator Ed Markey declared, “Today, hate won. The far-right justices of the Supreme Court endorsed hate and discrimination by delivering a win for Republicans who have relentlessly and cruelly attacked transgender Americans for years.”
Elected Democrats, progressive activists, and even most news outlets tend to credit the political right with all opposition to so-called “gender identity” (or “trans”).
But this narrative simply isn’t true, either in the U.K. or in the U.S.
The founders of For Women Scotland, who brought the case that led to the U.K. legal victory for sex over “gender identity,” are left-leaning liberals who found themselves politically homeless as the gender lobby marched through the parties and institutions of the left, steamrolling women’s sex-based rights along the way. The “lesbian interveners” who bolstered the feminist case likewise hail mostly from the political left.
The same is true of grassroots advocates for the material reality of sex in the U.S. In the Skrmetti case, not only did left-leaning lesbians, gay men, feminists and Democrats rally outside the Supreme Court in support of the state of Tennessee, but the feminist group Women’s Declaration International USA filed a friend of the court brief, urging the Supreme Court to reach the result it issued last week. (I represented WDI USA on the brief).
WDI USA’s brief argued that the word “transgender” is a linguistic sleight of hand that has no coherent meaning, is not an immutable trait, and does not describe a politically powerless group of people. It said that children have an international human right to grow into adulthood. It maintained that sex is grounded in material reality, whereas “gender” is grounded in regressive stereotypes. Further, it asked the Court to rule that the Tennessee law is not sex discrimination.
I am pleased to see that the Supreme Court agrees.
Chief Justice Roberts concluded the majority opinion by saying, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.”
Justice Alito mostly agrees, but says that he is “uneasy” with the Court’s analysis as to whether the Tennessee law “discriminates against transgender people” and that he “would reject the plaintiffs’ argument for a different reason: because neither transgender status nor gender identity should be treated as a suspect or ‘quasi-suspect’ class.’”
He continues: “Transgender status is not ‘immutable,’ and as a result, persons can and do move into and out of the class. Members of the class differ widely among themselves, and it is often difficult for others to determine whether a person is a member of the class. And transgender individuals have not been subjected to a history of discrimination that is comparable to past discrimination against the groups we have classified as suspect or ‘quasi-suspect.’”
Like Justice Alito, I am disappointed that the majority did not clearly rule that “transgender” is not a protected category for equal protection purposes. As WDI USA argued in its brief, using the ACLU’s own tortured definition of “transgender,” the U.S. Supreme Court “ought not want to be the Court that establishes such a classification for a group of people that, at least according to the ACLU, includes part-time cross-dressers.”
Dissenting, Justice Sotomayor said, “In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition ‘identify with’ an identity ‘inconsistent’ with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.” Somehow, Justice Sotomayor manages to know what “sex” means, but fails to see its relevance in the realm of medical treatment. It’s an assertion we might have expected from Justice Brown-Jackson, famously “not a biologist.” (Surprising no one, Brown-Jackson joins Sotomayor’s dissent, which the latter issued “in sadness.”)
How have the feminists who supported Tennessee in Skrmetti found themselves siding with the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in opposition to three of the four female Justices?
It’s not because they are secret conspirators with the right. It is because sex—not self-declared “identity”—is the basis for all genuine feminist advocacy.
For lesbians and gay men to fight discrimination against their same-sex attraction, the law must recognize the material reality of sex. For women and girls to fight discrimination against their female sex, the law must recognize that female is a material fact, not a feeling.
Sex is real and immutable; it’s not complicated. It is a fact of human existence so fundamental that it even got Justice Samuel Alito to agree with radical feminists. If American progressives are serious about defeating Trump and the G.O.P., they should look across the Atlantic for a preview of how the battle between sex (reality) and “gender identity” (fantasy) must inevitably end.
Labour has started to come around; what next, U.S. Democrats?
To WSJ June 18, 2025, no response:
U.S. v. Skrmetti: A victory for feminists and reality
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided the matter of U.S. v. Skrmetti, and it confirmed what broad majorities of Americans have known all along: that sex is real, in the law and otherwise.
In this case, the state of Tennessee enacted a law that protects minors from harmful drugs such as puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. It is well established that such drugs cause long-term harm such as sterility, disease, and the inability to develop sexual function as an adult.
And yet, a group of minors and their parents, represented by the ACLU (where I worked from 2012 to 2014), sued the state, demanding access to these harmful drugs. They argued that the Tennessee law violates their right to equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
They won at the district court level, but lost when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rightly ruled that the phrase “transgender people” is not a coherent category of people under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
In the coming days, progressive commentators will shake their heads and lament that this decision was made by the Court’s conservative majority. The political right is often credited with all opposition to so-called “gender identity” (or “trans”).
But this narrative simply isn’t true.
In the Skrmetti case, not only did left-leaning lesbians, gay men, feminists and Democrats rally outside the Supreme Court in support of the state of Tennessee, but the feminist group Women’s Declaration International USA filed a friend of the court brief, urging the Supreme Court to reach the result it issued today. (I represented WDI USA on the brief).
WDI USA’s brief argued that the word “transgender” is a linguistic sleight of hand that has no coherent meaning, is not an immutable trait, and does not describe a politically powerless group of people. It said that children have an international human right to grow into adulthood. It maintained that sex is grounded in material reality, whereas “gender” is grounded in regressive stereotypes. Further, it asked the Court to rule that the Tennessee law is not sex discrimination.
I am pleased to see that the Supreme Court agrees.
Chief Justice Roberts concluded the majority opinion by saying, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.”
Justice Alito mostly agrees, but says that he is “uneasy” with the Court’s analysis as to whether the Tennessee law “discriminates against transgender people” and that he “would reject the plaintiffs’ argument for a different reason: because neither transgender status nor gender identity should be treated as a suspect or ‘quasi-suspect’ class.’”
He continued: “Transgender status is not ‘immutable,’ and as a result, persons can and do move into and out of the class. Members of the class differ widely among themselves, and it is often difficult for others to determine whether a person is a member of the class. And transgender individuals have not been subjected to a history of discrimination that is comparable to past discrimination against the groups we have classified as suspect or ‘quasi-suspect.’”
Like Justice Alito, I am disappointed that the majority did not clearly rule that “transgender” is not a protected category for equal protection purposes. As WDI USA argued in its brief, using the ACLU’s own tortured definition of “transgender,” “this Court ought not want to be the Court that establishes such a classification for a group of people that, at least according to the ACLU, includes part-time cross-dressers.”
Dissenting, Justice Sotomayor said, “In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition ‘identify with’ an identity ‘inconsistent’ with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.” Somehow, even Justice Sotomayor manages to know what “sex” means. And yet, she dissents “in sadness.”
Meanwhile, feminists on both sides of the Atlantic are celebrating. In April, grassroots group For Women Scotland secured a major victory when the U.K. Supreme Court made it clear that the words “sex,” “woman,” and “man” are defined biologically in that nation’s law.
Like their U.S. grassroots feminist counterparts, the founders of For Women Scotland are left-leaning liberals who found themselves politically homeless as the gender lobby marched through the parties and institutions of the left, steamrolling women’s sex-based rights along the way.
As a lifelong Democrat (except for a few years as a member of the Green party), I sympathize. Every day, I hear from rank-and-file Democrats and leftists who are angry at party leadership for throwing women and girls under the bus. They are also angry at the party for (as they see it) handing easy wins to President Trump and conservatives each time elected Democrats take the side of “gender identity” over sex.
How have the feminists who supported Tennessee in Skrmetti found themselves on the same side as the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court?
It’s not because they are secret conspirators with the right. It is because sex—not self-declared “identity”—is the grounds for all of their advocacy as civil rights classes.
For lesbians and gay men to fight discrimination against their same-sex attraction, the law must recognize the material reality of sex. For women and girls to fight discrimination against their female sex, the law must recognize that female is a material fact, not a feeling.
Sex is real and immutable; it’s not complicated. It is a fact of human existence so fundamental that it even got Justice Samuel Alito to agree with radical feminists. What will it take for the liberal justices and elected Democrats to come around?
To Boston Globe, and later to The Free Press, no response from either, April 2025:
Boston Marathon’s Policy on Sex and Gender Should Be Scrapped
A man will compete in the female category at next week’s Boston Marathon. According to the website hecheated.org, Riya Young Suising, born Robert Chien Hwa Young, has competed in the female category in races more than 330 times, including at least eight Boston Marathons, and placed on the podium for his age group more than 130 times. His presence in the female category in Boston this year will unfairly impact all female competitors, including former world record-holder, Paula Radcliffe.
Not only does Boston allow men into its female category, it also has a “non-binary” category, predictably dominated by men. The qualifying times for the “non-binary” category are the same as the women’s times, meaning men who claim to be “non-binary” can ‘earn’ a coveted Boston Qualifier despite running up to 30 minutes slower than men who don’t claim a special identity. So men get three categories for fair competition, while women get none. Young only secured a place by lying about his sex, as he failed to run the men’s qualifying time for his age group.
Far from being unique, Young is part of a trend, or rather a tidal wave, of men and boys (often called “transgender women and girls”) competing in women’s and girls’ sports.
An August 2024 report by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, stated that as of last March, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports to males.
The website shewon.org, dedicated to “archiving the achievements of female athletes displaced by males in women’s sporting events and other types of competitions expressly for women,” states that more than 1500 female athletes in more than 900 competitions have lost more than 2100 medals in 44 different sports to males.
A January 2025 poll conducted by the New York Times and Ipsos indicated that 79 percent of American voters, including 67 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Independents, don’t think men should be in women’s sports.
In February, President Trump signed Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Since the EO, the U.S. Department of Education is pursuing at least six state-wide Title IX investigations in addition to dozens of investigations into individual universities and school districts.
Simply put: There are two immutable sexes, male and female. We play sports with bodies, not “identities.” A man can never be a woman, regardless of cross-sex hormones and surgeries, regardless of falsified documents. Everyone knows this.
How did we get here? Janice Raymond is a radical feminist lesbian and professor emerita of women’s studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, having served on its faculty since 1978. In 1979 she published a groundbreaking book, The Transsexual Empire, in which she explained how allowing men to call themselves women harms women and girls as a sex class. In 1994, she published a reprint of the book, warning readers of the emergence of a new device: the word “transgender.” When she retired in 2002, the Boston Globe included her among several “marquee talents.”
Article 7 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights states that women have the right to participate in sports and physical education designated for women only: “To ensure fairness and safety for women and girls, the entry of boys and men who claim to have female ‘gender identities’ into teams, competitions, facilities, or changing rooms, inter alia, set aside for women and girls should be prohibited as a form of sex discrimination.”
If you agree that no man or boy should compete in women’s sports, please contact the individuals and groups below, all of whom are committed to protecting the sex-based rights of women and girls, including exclusion of men and boys from athletic competitions designated exclusively for female athletes.
Join us to save women’s sports!
Mara Yamauchi, Two-time Olympian and member, Advisory Group, Sex Matters
Elizabeth Chesak, Women’s Declaration International USA
Kara Dansky, Democratic Women’s Declaration
Martina Navratilova
Jenny Poyer Ackerman, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender
Jennifer Sey, XX-XY Athletics
Kim Jones and Marshi Smith, Independent Council on Women’s Sports
Sharon Byrne, Women’s Liberation Front
Janice Raymond, Professor Emeria, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Riley Gaines, 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer
Selina Soule, women’s sports advocate
Linda Blade, International Consortium on Female Sport
Emily Kaht, Marathon runner
To The Free Press, July 2024, no response (later published in The Washington Examiner):
An Open Letter to Vice President Kamala Harris
Dear Madam Vice President,
I am writing to ask you to consider the leftist radical feminist critique of “gender identity” (or “trans”) as you continue on your likely path to securing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention next month.
I am a lifelong Democrat. I registered as a Democrat in 1990 and the only time I have not been a Democrat was a brief period in the mid-2000s when I was a registered member of the Green Party; I re-registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary election. I am also the president of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International, which works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout U.S. law, policy, and practice (my term as president expires at the end of this month). We are predominantly leftist radical feminists. We are a nonpartisan organization that is not aligned with any political party; in this piece, I am speaking solely in my personal capacity.
My life-long progressive credentials can not fairly be questioned. So it is from that standpoint I say with a not small dose of bitterness that the Democratic Party has completely abandoned women and girls. It has done so at the altar of the nebulous, sexist, regressive, authoritarian, homophobic concept of “gender identity.” I know that you know this; all the Democrats in positions of power know it. This is why I wrote the book The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. A copy of that book is making its way to your office as I write. I hope you will find a minute or two of time to at least take a peek at it before the DNC.
You and I have met on three occasions: at an event sponsored by the Stanford University Black Students’ Association when you were the District Attorney of San Francisco and I was the executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School; in an elevator at an event about the plight of incarcerated women that was taking place at a journalism museum in Washington, D.C. when you were a senator from California; and at a fundraiser for your 2020 presidential campaign. All three encounters were very brief, and you would have no reason to remember meeting me at any of them.
I have followed your career over the years.
I was in the audience during the 2017 symposium “Women Unshackled: Policy Solutions to Address the Growth of Female Incarceration” when you were a U.S. senator. I remember listening to you speak movingly about the plight of incarcerated women. You talked about the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, which would mandate that female inmates receive free menstrual products, outlaw shackling and solitary confinement for pregnant women, and provide that the location of a mother’s children would factor into her placement in the federal prison system. After the event, you told reporters that many of these solutions were “pretty obvious.” You argued that “this is something that should not be thought of as even bipartisan—this should be a nonpartisan issue.” I agree with you completely. Neither should the dignity of women and girls or the material reality of sex be partisan issues.
I was also in the audience during the 2012 Women in the World conference at Lincoln Center in New York City, where you appeared on a panel with your sister, Maya. At the time, you were the Attorney General of California and Maya was the Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice at the Ford Foundation. I distinctly recall you and Maya discussing the importance of teenage girls having access to menstrual products in schools and juvenile detention facilities. For a moment, you appeared to be uncomfortable discussing the topic, but then you settled in and said something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s okay, we’re all women here, right?” Indeed.
I know you know that women are exclusively female and that there are no male women. I especially appreciated your questioning of then Judge Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing, emphasizing the differences between male and female bodies when it comes to laws that regulate the provision of healthcare.
I worked with Maya during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. I was part of a team, led by Maya, to help Clinton craft her positions and policies on criminal justice topics. Maya and I met once in person at Clinton’s Brooklyn, New York campaign headquarters and corresponded frequently by email and phone. In May 2019, I wrote her an email message, laying out the entire Democratic progressive case against enshrining “gender identity” in the law including, especially, the argument that including “trans” along with the sexual orientations “lesbian, gay, and bisexual,” is homophobic and regressive. I explained that “gender identity” erases women and girls. I sent her a written version of testimony that lesbian radical feminist Democrat Julia Beck had read to the House Judiciary Committee the previous month, explaining the threats that “gender identity” poses to the human rights of women and girls. I asked her to share the contents of my message with you. She did not respond. When I learned that she had joined the board of directors of the Arcus Foundation (one of the largest funders of “trans” and “queer” causes) in 2017, I understood why.
Democrats like me have been trying to explain all of this to Democratic Party leadership for years. Every day, I hear from rank-and-file Democrats (and, importantly, former Democrats) about how disgusted they are with the Party’s complete abandonment of women and girls (including lesbians) as a sex class at the altar of “trans.” We have been begging you to change course. We have been ignored.
A tiny handful of Democrats have broken ranks with Party dogma and voted to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls (and to protect children from harmful hormones and surgeries that block puberty and cause long-term problems including loss of bone density, loss of sexual and reproductive function, and premature death). I wrote about them in my book, The Reckoning, in a chapter called “The Democrat Defectors.” I commended them. I celebrated when Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) voted against the judicial nomination of Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn to a seat on the District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Netburn had authorized the placement of a male prisoner who had been convicted of multiple counts of rape and child sexual abuse in a women’s prison. But there are too few of these Democrats.
In late 2019, as the 2020 presidential election was heating up, comedian Bill Maher did a segment called “Nowhere Else to Go.” In it, he mocked all the Democratic presidential candidates, including you, admonishing them to “stop being weird.” He called you the “Rosa Parks of pronouns” because you had announced your “preferred pronouns” during a town hall earlier that year. He mocked Elizabeth Warren for supporting the use of taxpayer dollars to fund “sex changes” for “transgender prisoners.” He also made fun of candidate Julian Castro’s support for abortion rights for “transgender women.” Maher criticized this, saying, “They can’t get pregnant! They don’t have a uterus (unless they’re in prison and Elizabeth Warren buys them one)!”
The Democratic presidential ticket prevailed in 2020 for two reasons, in my view: (1) a clear majority of Americans wanted Donald Trump to go; and (2) many Americans foresaw the overturning of Roe v. Wade and wanted Democrats in place at the highest levels to protect abortion rights (which I firmly support). I’m not at all sure the same will be true this time. I cannot tell you the number of people who have told me that they plan to vote for Donald Trump this year because of this issue. Trump made it that much harder for you by saying clearly during the RNC in Milwaukee earlier this month that he’s committed to getting men out of women’s sports—a position that is popular with the vast majority of American voters. The Democratic Party, yourself included, handed him that talking point.
It’s not too late. You can still do the right thing. You can stand up at the DNC and say that a woman is an adult human female and a lesbian is a female homosexual. You can say that sex is real and sometimes matters. You can say right out loud that sex is immutable and no man is ever a woman—even if he claims to be one, even if he adopts the traditional stereotypes of femininity, and even if he has his penis surgically removed. You can apologize to American women for that utterly embarrassing letter you sent to Dylan Mulvaney (on White House stationery, no less) celebrating his supposed “365 days of girlhood.”
You profess to care about American women and girls; it’s time to walk the talk. Many of us will be watching and hoping you do the right thing.
LTE to Washington Post Sept. 3, 2025, no response:
To the Editor:
Regarding “TV writer Graham Linehan’s arrest over transgender posts sparks free speech outcry in the UK,” thanks to The Washington Post for reporting on this important story. It’s not just sparking free speech outcry in the UK; the outcry is happening in the US too.
Unlike the UK, the US has a First Amendment, and Americans are unlikely to be arrested for our X posts that stand up for women and girls as a sex class, at least not while on US soil. But that does not mean we aren’t vulnerable.
I am a lifelong Democrat and a feminist. I understand that women and girls exist as a sex class. I use my time and energy to make sure that our rights as women and girls (female human beings) are protected. That means excluding men (“transgender women”) from women’s sports and spaces. I will not apologize for this.
I am the former president of the group Women’s Declaration International USA, which works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout US law, policy, and practice. I have also published two books on the topic of protecting women and girls as a sex class. I publish a newsletter on Substack called The TERF Report. I also launched the Democratic Women’s Declaration the day after the 2024 US presidential election.
This issue is not going to go away, and elected Democrats need to address it head-on.
I have been invited to speak at the Battle of Ideas in London in October. This is an annual conference that addresses a variety of topics, and welcomes all viewpoints. It’s a free speech zone. I’m scheduled to land at Heathrow on the morning of October 10. Will the Met Police arrest me too? I look forward to finding out.
In solidarity with Graham,
Kara Dansky
To The Washington Post, January 2025, no response (eventually published in spiked):
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/05/whats-at-stake-in-the-trans-us-supreme-court-case/
To the NYT, January 3, 2025, no response:
To the editor: Mr. Carville is both misguided and short-sighted
On January 2, the Times published an essay by Democratic strategist James Carville titled, “I was Wrong About the 2024 Election. Here’s Why.” His conclusion? “It was, it is, and it will always be the economy, stupid.”
Carville is right that the economy played a role in persuading a majority of the electorate to cast votes for Trump. But what Carville and the vast majority of other prominent Democrats steadfastly refuse to acknowledge is that countless rank-and-file Democrats have had it with the party’s full-throated embrace of “gender identity” or “trans.”
I am a leftist radical feminist. I hear from rank-and-file Democrats every day who tell me that they voted for Donald Trump and/or that they have left the party completely over this issue. And we know from a post-election survey by Blueprint that concerns over “trans” were more important than concerns over the economy.
In 2023, I published a book called The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, warning the Democrats that this was coming. I published an open letter to VP Harris in August, asking her to say at the 2024 DNC that a woman is an adult human female. Nothing is going to change until the Democrats get the memo: Voters, including many rank-and-file Democrats, have had it with the sexist, homophobic, reality-denying, authoritarian “trans” movement.
To the NYT Dec. 5, 2025:
To the editor:
Thanks for Ross Douthat’s December 4 opinion piece and interview with Chase Strangio from the ACLU, “The Shifting Politics of Transgender Rights.”
It’s very interesting to learn that Strangio is now interested in discussion and compromise. For over a decade, Strangio has been insisting that “trans women are women and trans men are men,” without showing even a hint of willingness to engage in either discussion or compromise. About one book critical of the transgender movement (Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage) Strangio tweeted “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
What has changed since that tweet?
The ACLU represents a male athlete in the matter of Little v. Hecox, a case before the Supreme Court. It is scheduled for oral arguments on January 13, and expected to be decided next summer. Hecox is a male athlete (a “trans woman”) who challenged Idaho’s 2020 law protecting female-only sports in educational institutions in the state. After five long years of litigation, the ACLU has attempted to withdraw the original 2020 complaint and asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the entire matter.
Could it be that Strangio is now open to discussion and compromise because Strangio knows that the ACLU stands little chance of prevailing before the Supreme Court?
It’s clear from the interview that Strangio knows that the general public is no longer going along with the lie that a person’s sex can be changed. I have been fighting for the sex-based rights of women and girls for more than ten years. I would be happy to talk at any time.
To The Atlantic March 29, 2024, no response:
Subject line: Pitch: A Riposte to Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Dear Ms. Kim, et al.,
As a radical feminist, lifelong Democrat, and the author of the 2023 book, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, I am one of the women often called a TERF: “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” as Katha Pollitt explained in her recent review for The Atlantic of Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? I think your audience would be interested in my response to Butler’s claims that those who oppose “gender identity” are embracing “fascism.”
Pollitt asks whether “in 10 or 20 years, the present moment might seem like a parenthesis in the long history of an overwhelmingly sexually dimorphic species.” I predict that it will.
For all Butler’s insistence that feminist objections to gender constitute a “phantasm,” the material reality of sex is and will remain salient in the lives and politics of human beings—especially women and girls, whether they consider themselves feminists or not.
But Democratic Party leadership must not be allowed to slink away quietly from the harms it has imposed on American women and girls in the name of “gender identity.”
I wrote The Reckoning because too many women have been raped in prison. Too many women have lost out on opportunities, competitions, and medals in sports. Too many children have been harmed medically and psychologically. The Democratic Party must be held accountable—not allowed to simultaneously impose the tenets of the new gender religion and also conceal them from the American electorate, with whom they are deeply unpopular.
A Washington Post article from yesterday suggests I am right to be concerned. It appears that the Biden Administration is trying to memory-hole its support for laws and policies that harm women and children by, in this instance, tabling its proposal to redefine sex to include “gender identity” under Title IX until after the November elections.
Women, including lesbians and black women, make up the most crucial segment of the Democratic Party base. As voters, they are in a bind: the Democratic Party is the only major party to embrace women’s critically-important reproductive autonomy rights. Yet to vote for Democrats is to endorse their platform that being a woman is not a material reality, but instead a subjective idea, informed by stereotypes, that anyone of either sex can claim.
How long can party leaders expect women to give up their own safety, privacy, and dignity—and that of their daughters—in the service of the unfalsifiable, pseudo-spiritual, even (thank you, Judith Butler) “phantasmatic” concept of “gender identity?”
Women all over the world are rejecting their left-of-center parties for refusing to represent their interests and for sacrificing women and children at the altar of “gender identity.” If the Democrats in power don’t change course, American Democratic women will, and should, vote accordingly.
If you would like to discuss the possibility of publishing a longer form of this analysis, please feel free to reach out.
To the Spectator, Jan. 26, 2024, no response
Dear Mr. Moore,
On January 24, New York NBC News affiliate Channel 4 published this headline: “Man posing as transgender woman raped female prisoner at Rikers, lawsuit says.”
To feminists who have for years raised the alarm about male prisoners in women’s facilities, the allegations echo a 2017 U.K. case, in which Karen White (born Stephen Wood), sexually assaulted two women at HMP New Hall.
Describing White, Prosecutor Christopher Dunn told the court, “She is allegedly a transgender female…The prosecution suggest the reason for the lack of commitment towards transitioning is so the defendant can use a transgender persona to put herself in contact with vulnerable persons she can then abuse.”
Former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon did essentially the same thing when she said that convicted rapist Adam Graham (Isla Bryson if you believe the pretense) was “almost certainly faking” it when he “claimed” to “be transgender.”
“Posing.” “Use a transgender persona.” “Faking ‘being trans.’” In other words, the problem with the policies that incarcerated White, Graham, and the alleged Rikers rapist in women’s facilities wasn’t that these prisoners were male but that they weren’t sincere enough in their claims to be women.
Would their female victims have been less harmed if the perpetrators could be proven truly to believe that lady souls animate their bepenised bodies?
Rather than aiming to read the minds of convicted criminals—famed, as a class, for their honesty and integrity—-might it not be more effective for prison officials to assess inmate placement on the basis that in the United States, 93-97% of sexual offenders are male?
The “gender identity” faith insists that once a man utters the shibboleth, “I am a woman,” his sex ceases to matter under any circumstance.
Therefore any man who reminds the public of certain stark differences between the sexes must be disavowed. “Transwomen are women,” incant believers. Women as a class do not rape. Therefore no rapist is a true “transwoman.”
It’s a convenient sleight of hand, but a pitiful excuse for logic. Perhaps that’s because the real logic behind the pretense that some men claiming to be women are not really women and some men claiming to be women really are women is this: Men and boys are entitled to what they want, no matter the cost to women and girls.
Men pretending to be women are men. “Trans” is all a pretense. Can we all please just stop pretending?
The U.S. chapter of global feminist organization Women’s Declaration International is grateful to the Spectator for being one of the few publications in the anglosphere to publish feminist and other critiques of “gender identity” and its associated policies.
We hope that an opinion piece of 800-1,000 words by our president, Kara Dansky, will be a good fit for the Spectator’s audience both in the U.K. (a.k.a. “TERF Island”) and abroad.
Kara Dansky is a radical feminist and an attorney with an extensive background in criminal justice law and policy. She is the author of two books: The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. She serves as president of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International.
Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Megan Rose
Vice President, Women’s Declaration International USA
To the NYT Nov. 13, 2024, no response:
Will the Democrats finally start listening to the TERFs?
I’m glad to see some Democrats starting to pay attention to the fact that sex is real and that it matters.
On November 7, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Moulton is not backing down. On November 12, he told the Boston Herald, “I’m not going to refuse to have this debate, and I’m not going to apologize for bringing up the issue. This is the problem with Democrats: We’re more concerned about offending people than actually talking about issues, and that’s why a majority of Americans just think we’re out of touch.”
I’m glad to hear Democrats expressing these sentiments in support of female-only sports.
As we all know, the Democrats got trounced in this election cycle. And we know for a fact that this issue played a role in the 2024 presidential election. According to polling, “The results paint a clear picture: Democrats were punished for inflation, misalignment on immigration and cultural issues, and Biden.” The top two reasons not to vote for Harris were inflation and immigration. But the top third reason was “’Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class’ (+17).” The third was “the most frequent criticism among swing voters who broke for Trump (+28).”
The thing is, the Democrats were warned that this would happen. Specifically, they were warned by the TERFs–the leftist radical feminists who know what a woman is and aren’t afraid to say it. I’m a lifelong Democrat, staunch leftist, and radical feminist. I also know what a woman is, and that sex is real and that it matters. That makes me what is sometimes called a “TERF.” Gender identity activists coined the term as a slur for any “trans exclusionary radical feminist” who opposed their demands, but many women have reclaimed it in recent years. Some of us say it stands for “tired of explaining real facts” or “tired of explaining reality to fools.” All it really means is that we’re women of the left, feminists, who understand that sex is real and that it matters.
Two books served as warnings to the Democrats of what was in store for 2024: 2021’s The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls, and 2023’s The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls.
I wrote both books; I did my best to warn the Democrats. They didn’t listen.
The problem arose when the Democrats in power and the establishment left (by which I include traditionally progressive organizations like the ACLU, where I once worked) started telling everyone that some men are women if they say they “are transgender” or if they claim to have a “female gender identity.”
President Biden has been saying that “transgender discrimination” is the “civil rights issue of our time” since 2012. In 2015, Congressional Democrats introduced the so-called Equality Act, which would redefine the word sex to include the nebulous, sexist, homophobic concept of “gender identity” for all purposes under U.S. civil rights law, in both chambers of Congress. In 2016, President Obama issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. schools, instructing them to interpret the word sex to include “gender identity” for all Title IX purposes. At that time, few Americans had any idea what was going on, because no one with any real power was telling them.
Things have continued largely unabated on the political left ever since.
Groups like the ACLU continue to insist that some men are women, that they deserve to be housed in women’s prisons if they claim to be women, and that it’s perfectly fine to give children puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and sometimes surgeries (all collectively and euphemistically referred to as “gender affirming care”) if the children think they are “born in the wrong body” (i.e., they “are transgender”).
I can already hear the objections: “Men aren’t being housed in women’s prisons!” “There are hardly any biological boys playing in girls’ sports!” “Kids are not getting gender surgeries!”
To these objections, I say: Men are being housed in women’s prisons, but most media outlets won’t tell you that (only relatively obscure feminist publications such as Reduxx will). There are hundreds of men and boys playing in sports intended for women and girls and even if there weren’t, how many is too many? And yes, thousands of children received “gender affirming care” in the form of either hormones or surgeries or both between 2019 and 2023 in the United States.
TERFs have known all of this for a long time. We’ve been sounding the alarm; no one listened. I hear from rank and file Democrats every day who tell me they have tried to explain the problem to their Democratic lawmakers, who ignored them.
So I published The Reckoning in November 2023 to tell the Democrats to knock it off, already. I told them that if they didn’t change course, they would bleed female voters. I warned them of what was coming. In August 2024, I published an open letter to Vice President Harris, practically begging her to say out loud at the Democratic National Convention that a woman is an adult human female. I didn’t expect her to, and she didn’t.
President Bill Clinton knew this was going to be a problem and warned the Democrats to knock it off. President Clinton, you were the first presidential candidate I voted for. If you would like to have a word with an OG TERF, let me know.
It’s so good to have all of these collected in one place. Thank you, Lisa, and thank you, Kara. As I am still in the midst of dealing with being fired from my California therapy practice for my public work on this topic, I’m feeling more discouraged than ever that this madness will ever end.
Thank you, Lisa!