#abolish gender
Abolition Journal’s Inaugural Issue – Call for Submissions
Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics is seeking submissions for the journal’s inaugural issue. Abolitionis a collectively run project supporting radical scholarly and activist research, publishing and disseminating work that encourages us to make the impossible possible, to seek transformation well beyond policy changes and toward revolutionary abolitionism. In that spirit, the journal invites submissions that engage with the meaning, practices, and politics of abolitionism in any historical and geographical context. This means that we are interested in a wide interpretation of abolitionism, including topics such as (but in no way limited to): prison and police abolitionism, decolonization, slavery abolitionism, anti-statism, anti-racism, labor organizing, anti-capitalism, radical feminism, queer and trans* politics, Indigenous people’s politics, migrant activism, social ecology, animal rights and liberation, and radical pedagogy. Recognizing that the best movement-relevant intellectual work is happening both in the movements themselves and in the communities with whom they organize, the journal aims to support activists, artists, and scholars whose work amplifies such grassroots activity. We encourage submissions across a range of formats and approaches – scholarly essays, art, poetry, multi-media, interviews, field notes, documentary, etc. – that are presented in an accessible manner.
Abolition seeks to publish a wide variety of work and this call is open to various forms of writing and creative material. While strict word limits will not be enforced, we suggest the following ranges for submissions:
- Short Interventions (1000-2000 words);
- Scholarly Papers (5000-10000 words);
- Interviews (3000-5000 words);
- Creative Works (open).
All submissions will be reviewed in a manner consistent with the journal’s mission. We are building relationships for a new kind of peer review that can serve as an insurgent tool to work across and even subvert the academic-activist divide and reject hierarchical definitions of “peers.” Thus, our Collective and Editorial Review Board are comprised of individuals who approach abolitionism from varied personal, political, and structural positions. Unlike most journals, our review process includes non-academic activists and artists in addition to academics. Editorial decisions will be made according to principles of anti-hierarchical power, democratic consensus, and with a preference for work produced by members of under-represented groups in the academy and publishing. For more information about the journal, please see our website,http://abolitionjournal.org. All of our publications will be accessible, free, and open access, rejecting the paywalls of the publishing industry. We will also produce hard-copy versions for circulation to communities lacking internet access and actively work to make copies available to persons incarcerated and detained by the state.
To be considered for Issue One, please submit completed work (including papers, interviews, works of art, etc.) by January 15, 2016. Submissions and inquiries can be sent to [email protected].
[Photos in banner image: Ferguson protester from James Keivom/New York Daily News; Mi’kmaq anti-fracking protester from @Osmich]
Post link
“Completely reversible.”
The truth is that even without puberty blockers, HRT or SRS, the practices that transgender ideology promotes can leave lasting physical damage and emotional distress.
The affirmation model is putting our most vulnerable young women through a modern meat grinder.
Transgender ideology is harmful. Sex is the body, genders are the chains. Abolish gender.
What really irks me about TERFs and their concept of bio-essentialism is like: your views are just as bad as the patriarchal and systemic views of intersex people, which is so counterintuitive to their position as feminists.
If your stance on “"womanhood”“ is reliant on what part you have between your legs and it’s function you are literally just parroting the "woman are inherently different than men for biological reasons” that the system has been feeding you that you I would assume oppose.
Women ARE inherently different than men for biological reasons.
Women are physically weaker on average than men and the female reproductive system is designed to give birth. These two biological realities made women both easy to overpower, and the only way to create more men.
Feminine gender standards are designed to make women believe they are lesser and that their worth is determined by how sexually submissive and available they are to men or by how many children (especially sons) they can provide for men.
Femininity literally would not exist if women were just as strong as men, or if men could birth their own children.
That is why womanhood is not a gender identity. Womanhood is the state of being part of the oppressed sex, a person whose body parts make them easier to turn into profitable human property. Without feminine gender being imposed upon us, without men controlling, beating, raping, and killing us, we can be every bit as successful and capable as men are allowed to be.
This is why sex matters and gender should be abolished. Sex is the body, gender is the chains.
That’s between you and the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines lesbian as “a homosexual woman”; defines homosexual as “attracted to one’s own sex”; and defines sex as “a person’s genitals”. So yeah, that’s kind of why this is all inherently about “somebody’s fucking genitals.” That’s just how sexualities work.
You can make up your own definitions for these words or use the wrong label for your sexuality all you want, but don’t be mad at the rest of us for using words correctly.
And there’s nothing wrong with being bisexual and not caring about which genitals your partner has. So maybe stop erasing yourself.
“Trans man here. I have a uterus and can have periods and get pregnant. Am I a woman? If you say yes, then you’re transphobic. If you say no, then you agree that men can have periods and get pregnant.”
Yes, you’re a woman because you’re biologically female. You might not look like it, and you might pass for male in your daily life, but by virtue of having female body parts (especially with the ability to get pregnant), you are still subject to misogyny that discriminates against all of your fellow adult human females.
You could die of an ectopic pregnancy due to lack of safe abortion access just as easily as any other woman. You could suffer complications or die from one of hundreds of medical issues that have only been studied using male patients. Misogyny affects you even if nobody knows you’re a woman.
And no, that’s not transphobic. I’m not afraid of trans people, nor do I hate them. I just don’t agree with gender ideology. I think it’s obvious bullshit.
Ideology-based medicine | Nathan Williams | The Critic Magazine
One of the most important questions that science can answer is “does this medical treatment work?”. In an ideal world, scientists would be able to tackle this question objectively and dispassionately, and impartial science communicators would summarise the available evidence in a fair and balanced way.
We do not, of course, live in an ideal world — and the truth about medical treatments can often be clouded by ideology, passionate beliefs or deliberate misinformation. This is often because questions that may appear to be narrow matters of fact turn out to be intimately linked with identities. So, the issue of whether dexamethasone cures Covid became a matter of political identity (particularly once President Trump championed it). Similarly, homeopathy is about much more than just believing that highly dilute solutions of certain substances can cure diseases. Homeopaths sign up to a philosophical worldview at odds with mainstream medicine and science in profound ways.
I discovered myself just how strong feelings can be when I made a BBC Science film which explained why homeopathy is very unlikely to be effective. In response, a French scientist (once highly regarded) wrote me a letter suggesting my blood be used as a cure-all (a homeopathic in-joke since the more toxic the substance the more effective it is as a treatment when prepared homeopathically).
The interplay of medicine and identity perhaps explains why currently the most poisonous of all topics is that of transgender medicine. This is a subject where identity is at the very heart of the issue. How we should treat people with gender dysphoria (particularly children and adolescents) has become a highly charged area where mere evidence plays second fiddle to which side of the ideological divide you’re on. Nowhere is the toxicity of this issue more clearly shown than in the goings-on at the Science Based Medicine (SBM) Website. SBM is a long-running blog, founded by Dr Steve Novella a clinical neurologist, and co-edited by Dr David Gorski, a surgical oncologist. The blog aims to present medical information based on the principles of science and was founded explicitly to combat pseudoscience. If ever a science based approach was needed, it’s for this topic.
To that end, SBM recently published a review of a book, Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier that questions the current practice of prescribing hormone-blockers to trans-identifying children. The book makes the case that a new phenomenon is spreading rapidly — of teenage girls suddenly identifying as trans despite no previous history of gender discomfort.
Shrier believes this is a social craze, spread by peer influence and turbo-charged by social media. It’s not unusual for girls going through puberty to feel unhappy with their bodies and to have a desperate need to carve out their own identities. What concerns Shrier is that girls who identify as trans are now placed onto a pathway of medical treatment, starting with hormone-blockers that delay puberty, that leads almost inexorably to further hormone treatment and even surgery with irreversible consequences including breast removal, lifelong infertility and the possibility of terrible regret.
Is Shrier right? The short answer is we don’t know. There’s a terrifying paucity of good quality science in this area. We don’t even have the most basic data such as how many boys and girls identify as trans or how the incidence is changing. The SBM review concluded that Shrier’s book raised legitimate grounds for concern whilst the lack of good scientific studies makes firm conclusions impossible. That nuanced article didn’t last long. Within days SBM had removed the article, apparently because it was “below the minimal acceptable standard”. This is the only article on SBM ever to have been retracted, a particularly astonishing decision since it was written not by some one-off contributor, but by Dr Harriet Hall, one of the site’s 3 editors (along with Novella and Gorski) who has written over 700 articles for the blog.
Clearly something extraordinary is going on; either a highly experienced doctor and blogger has written something so egregious it — uniquely for SBM — had to be retracted, or Novella and Gorski (N&G) removed a perfectly good article for ideological reasons. You can read the withdrawn review republished here to make up your own mind.
An explanation, of sorts, appeared a few days later with the publication of a piece written by N&G themselves which summarises the Shrier book and the evidence surrounding it. Almost as soon as it was published, the suspicion was raised that N&G had written their article without actually having read the book, so thin was their understanding of the book’s contents. They’ve since confirmed to me via email that they had not in fact finished reading the book at the time but said that “David has read the introduction and first couple of chapters” (how much if any Steve Novella has read is unstated). Their justification is that they were critiquing Hall’s review — not the book itself. But a brief read of their article shows this to be disingenuous. Indeed they conclude that the book’s central claim “is not supported by any evidence and is cobbled together with a gross misreading of the scientific evidence.” It’s hard to see how you could justify reaching such a conclusion without the basic courtesy of reading the book you criticise. Rather they seem to have come to a view without even having to open the book, telling me “the title of the book in and of itself is very inflammatory”.
Their article goes on to examine the evidence relating to the claims in Shrier’s book and was followed by several further blogs written by guest writers all of which reach a similar conclusion — that Shrier is entirely wrong. There’s nothing wrong in publishing opinion pieces offering a different perspective from Hall’s review but — as so often when it comes to the trans issue — only one side of the issue is allowed. Worse, these almost unreadable pieces are riddled with errors, misrepresentations and half-truths, giving the lie to the notion that the only thing wrong with Hall’s article was its accuracy. Hats off to the writers who have documented in excruciating detail the many problems with these articles:
How Science-Based Medicine botched its coverage of the youth gender medicine debate
A comment on Science-Based Medicine’s ‘The Science of Transgender Treatment’
Since it would take volumes to detail all the problems, I’m going to concentrate just on the article by N&G and on one specific question: are hormone and hormone-blocking treatments effective for the teenage girls described in Abigail Shrier’s book?
Firstly N&G describe puberty-suppressing hormones as fully reversible (no evidence provided). And yet the NHS information page states “Little is known about the long-term side effects of hormone or puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria … It’s also not known whether hormone blockers affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.” The WPATH guidelines specifically linked to in the N&G article state “there are concerns about negative physical side effects of GnRH analogue use” (for instance, on bone development and height) and in particular that there are “adolescents who will never develop reproductive function in their natal sex due to blockers or cross-gender hormones. At this time there is no technique for preserving function from the gonads of these individuals.” At best it’s questionable how reversible hormone-blockers are, but N&G seem happy to disregard any uncertainty on the issue.
The crucial question a blog like SBM should be asking is “do hormone altering treatments work for transgender children and adolescents”? You might expect their article, titled as it is “The Science of Transgender Treatment”, to be packed full of scientific evidence. Yet only two studies on this topic are linked to. The first is a 2020 study which G&N say found that hormonal therapy in trans teens decreased suicidal ideation. In fact the study found no statistically significant improvement for female-to-male youths (the demographic relevant to Shrier’s book) in any measure. Nor do they find any significant difference in suicidal ideation in any group. But it gets worse. This was a longitudinal study with no control group — so even if there had been a difference it would be impossible to say it was due to the treatment. Imagine if a homeopath had shown that in a group of people with flu, all given homeopathic remedies, some of them had improved with time. Novella and Gorski would rightly have considered this evidence worthless.
The other quotedstudy is even less convincing: a survey asking transgender adults to self report the treatments they received as teenagers. Such studies are prone to so many sources of error and bias that they could only be considered the very weakest form of evidence and certainly not sufficient to reach any conclusions on effectiveness. Normally the hallmark of a science-based approach is that any quoted study is properly placed in context with a clear assessment of the strength of evidence provided. Yet N&G quote these two studies with not a single mention of their very great weaknesses.
N&G cryptically say “there are more studies” (no citations given) but one would presume they have chosen the 2 most convincing examples. And yet N&G go on to conclude “there is copious evidence supporting the conclusion that the benefits of gender affirming interventions outweigh the risks”. I think I’ve shown that the evidence gets nowhere near that level of certainty. But you don’t need to take my word for it. You can read the assessment of NICE (the UK’s highly regarded National Institute of Health and Care Excellence) which concludes that the outcomes from hormone blockers are of “questionable clinical value”, and that “the studies themselves are not reliable and changes could be due to confounding, bias or chance.” A review of post-puberty hormone treatment reached similar conclusions.
Or read the review from the BMJ Evidence Based Medicine Blog, which concludes: “There are significant problems with how the evidence for Gender-affirming cross-sex hormone has been collected and analysed that prevents definitive conclusions to be drawn” and wonders whether the use of such drugs is justified given they “can cause substantial harms and even death”. Such comprehensive reviews from respected sources would normally be prize nuggets for a science based blog. Why N&G fail to even mention them is left for the reader to ponder.
The brutal truth is we have virtually no good-quality scientific data on how best to treat children and adolescents with gender dysphoria — and know even less about the sorts of cases described in Shrier’s book. This is scarcely surprising given the deeply toxic nature of this topic, where any scientist who presents the “wrong” results faces bullying, censorship or worse. That leaves parents and medical professionals in a deeply unhappy situation; having to make life-changing decisions with scarcely any data. But as one blogger put it when Lupron, one of the drugs now used to treat trans children, was proposed as a cure for autism: “If you’re going to give a potent drug like Lupron to children, a drug that can almost completely shut down the synthesis of both male and female steroid hormones, you’d better have damned good evidence that it’s likely to help to make it worth the risk.” The blogger? Dr David Gorski on a site called Science Based Medicine. That, at least, is something Gorski and I can agree on.
This guy says Dylan Mulvaney’s daily “girlhood” TikToks are making him feel like maybe these things are things he could do too.
Here’s a lesson for you guys: women don’t want to talk to strangers in bathrooms or locker rooms or changing rooms, and especially not men, because we get sexually assaulted or raped in spaces where we’re vulnerable.
Being mostly alone, in a public space, and partially or totally naked is NOT a time we want to be talking to strange men to validate them.
Please take note. This is not the great idea you think it is. If you think you’re facing backlash now, just make it a thing to strike up conversations about how your “girlhood” is going with us in our spaces and see how fast public opinion tanks.
If you look up “terf” on any of these blogs you will find plenty of proof babes! So many of them have their tags hidden too, what scared and pathetic wastes of air can’t even admit how ugly they’ve become. TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN, PERIOD. No one is showing dicks in your face, putting a gun to your head and forcing you to fuck it. Let trans women and lesbians live in peace for the love of fuck the earth is dying cause of capitalism and the greed of the 1%!!
appropriately-inappropriate (linking the terf-y post cause their tags are hidden)
black-diaspora (linking the terf-y post cause their tags are hidden)
jadedrops (linking to the terf-y post cause their tags are hidden)
spacemonkeyg78 (linking to the terf-y post cause their tags are hidden)
an-angry-lesbian (linking to the terf-y post cause their tags are hidden)
memelovingradfem (linking to the terf-y post cause their tags are hidden)
No terf if allowed to be safe from ridicule and public shame! Every. Singe. One. Of. You. Is. FOUL
Again with the lists of undesirables really lmao
@theladyoflove you missed me off your list xox
look at all these meanie ladies that don’t center me for fetishizing sexist stereotypes uwu block and stay safe
lol y’all make my fuckin’ brain lag
I love these lists, I always find excellent blogs I’ve missed.
me: dress how you want!! gender is fake!!! nothing matters!!!!!!
trans person: i like gender tho
me: hell yeah i respect that!!!! i apologize and don’t mean to dismiss your identity with my optimistic nihilism!!!!!!!
Good post OP
Denounce gender roles but respect gender identity.
Denounce gender roles but respect gender identity.
Gender roles? Garbage
Gender identity? Wonderful
Those are literally the same thing, when someone says “since I was little I played with barbies and liked to wear dresses and make-up, all those signs shown I was always really a girl inside and now that i transitioned I can finally be the girl I always was” then it just shows that the whole thing is just the same damn stereotypes. Without gender (so the enforcement of femininity on girls and masculinity on boys) then they wouldn’t be gender activism. People would just wear whatever the fuck they want, act however they want, and the categories “men” and “women” would be breathable, especially women. But that’s a feminist idea and we all know here that gender activism has become more important than feminism/women’s rights. So let’s continue reinforcing gender and drive gender non conforming girls (mostly) but also gender non conforming boys into a path of medicalisation, it’s way better and there’s money to make. Plus nobody gives a fuck about actually helping kids and adults with dysphoria. And anyone who’s speaking up and saying there is logic in this ? Will be demonised. Don’t say “feminazi” by the way, say “terf” instead, you’ll fly perfectly under the radar.
“Feminazi” is used by the right wing conservative misogynist.
“Terf” is uses by the left wing liberal misogynist.
Gender is a system of sexist and homophobic expectations.
“gender identity” literally cannot exist without “gender roles” aka “gender stereotypes”
y’all were SO close to being self-aware lmfao
i like how this turned out :•)
first post of 2021; happy new year!!! also, thank you all for the support :)
quote from @sexnotgender on instagram
the more you know
and your gender too!
