Why Do Helen Lewis, Victoria Smith, and Other “Gender Critical” Activists Lie About My Work?

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I have been writing about feminism (and other topics related to sex, gender, sexuality, sexism, and social justice) for about 25 years now. I have conveniently chronicled all that work (including links to all my online essays over the years) on my writings webpage. Admittedly, some people are most (or only) familiar with my first book, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, which was published in 2007. While I believe the book has held up pretty well over the last couple decades, I recognize that some passages are susceptible to misinterpretation given that they were written for a somewhat different era. Which is why, when the second edition of Whipping Girl came out in 2016, I added a Preface to contextualize those arguments—in other words, the most common misconceptions about the book are addressed right there in the very first pages.

Of course, feminists sometimes disagree with one another about definitions, goals, strategies, framings, theories, and so on. By and large, when feminists disagree with me about such things, they don’t intentionally misrepresent me or smear my reputation—we simply discuss our differences of opinion, and it is often quite constructive, in that we come to better understand where one another is coming from.

There is one massive exception to this: “gender critical” activists. That link will take you to a primer explaining this strand of feminism, which is unique in that it portrays women’s rights and trans rights as being diametrically opposed—a view that no other strand of feminism holds. While I strongly disagree with most gender-critical arguments and talking points, I don’t purposely misrepresent them or engage in ad hominem attacks in the essay—I just point out their shortcomings and provide evidence to the contrary.

But sadly, the converse is not true. Gender-critical activists have repeatedly twisted my words to make it sound like I’m deranged or deluded or driven by sexual deviance. Sometimes they do this by quoting me out of context, other times they flat-out make stuff up about me. When the primary goal of their “feminism” is to demonize trans people, they feel free to fabricate stories about us out of whole cloth.

Two instances of gender-critical writers intentionally misrepresenting my work occurred last week, so I want to address them here. The least egregious of the two was committed by Helen Lewis in an article she wrote for The Atlantic about the recent UK Supreme Court decision. There are numerous errors in her piece, but I will focus here on what she said about me:

For more than a decade, the LGBTQ movement has argued that “trans women are women” and that no attempt should ever be made to treat the two groups differently. But are women discriminated against because of their biology, or because of what the trans theorist Julia Serano has termed femmephobia? One definition would apply to trans women, and the other would not.

So first of all, I did not invent the term “femmephobia”—femme lesbians coined the term long before I appeared on the scene. Second, it’s not a word that I regularly use—it doesn’t appear at all in Whipping Girl and appears only once in passing in my second book Excluded. The link Lewis provides weirdly points to my trans, gender, sexuality, & activism glossary which lists over 200 terms, the overwhelming majority of which I did not coin.

Perplexed by where Lewis got this idea from, I googled “‘femmephobia’ origin” and the AI at the top of the page said, “The term ‘femmephobia’ was coined by Julia Serano in her 2007 book, ‘Whipping Girl’” (which, as I said, it wasn’t). If you scroll down a few entries, you can find a Sage Encyclopedia of LGBTQ+ Studies entry for Femmephobia, which correctly states that the term had been around since at least the mid-1990s.

In addition to relying on AI hallucinations about my work, Lewis creates a classic straw man argument, claiming that I believe that women are discriminated against due to “femmephobia” whereas gender-critical activists like Lewis correctly surmise that women are discriminated against due to “biology,” the latter of which supposedly excludes trans women. Apparently, The Atlantic doesn’t do any fact checking, because I have never said anything remotely like this. For one thing, I am literally a biologist and have written extensively about biology and sex (as well as gender-critical misunderstandings about the subject).

My view on these matters is quite clear even if you were to only read the first few chapters of Whipping Girl: Upon hormonally transitioning—which biologically changes a person’s sex characteristics—people began perceiving me as female, at which point I began to experience sexism on a regular basis (and I write about those experiences at great length). Of course, there is more to sexism than just this—and yes, I do believe that women are sometimes disparaged for their feminine gender expression independent of or in addition to being disparaged for being female. But the notion that I don’t believe that sexism targets women for their bodies or biology is absolutely farcical.

Speaking of farcical, the second incident involves Victoria Smith, who writes for the conservative UK magazine The Critic, where she seems to be their in-house gender-critical columnist. Once or twice a year, I get a Google alert that Smith has mentioned me in her latest article. I have never formally responded to any of them before, partly because there isn’t enough time in the day to pen reactions to every conservative media outlet that misrepresents me or trans people more generally. But also because every Smith article I had come across (up until now) critiqued a parody of my stance on femininity that I forwarded in Whipping Girl. I have already addressed these sorts of misinterpretations in a 2014 essay I wrote for Ms. (although it’s likely that Smith isn’t familiar with it since it was published in an actual feminist outlet rather than a conservative rag).

But what Smith wrote in her recent article is so completely beyond the pale that I feel compelled to respond. Here is the passage:

The logic — as laid out very clearly in Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, one of modern-day trans activism’s “foundational” texts — is this: women are indeed decorative objects, existing to service men’s sexual demands, and what’s more, they love it really. Old-style feminists have claimed otherwise because their “cis privilege” makes them unaware of how much they enjoy non-personhood. Like a fish unaware of water, the cis woman is unaware of her innate “femininity” — her pre-disposition to being a porn object — whereas the trans woman must valiantly struggle to access it, which makes her far more authoritative. “When I look into trans women’s eyes,” writes Serano, “I see a profound appreciation for how fucking empowering it can be to be female, an appreciation that seems lost on many cissexual women who sadly take their female identities and anatomies for granted, or who perpetually seek to cast themselves as victims rather than instigators.” There you go, “progressive” men. If a “cis woman” tells you she doesn’t like being defined as a fuckable non-person, just remind yourself it’s the privilege talking.

The idea that I have argued that women are “decorative objects, existing to service men’s sexual demands” and “pre-dispositioned to being a porn object” is not only patently false but outright vile. I have been very vocal about the harms of nonconsensual sexualization in both Whipping Girl (especially Chapter 14) and throughout my most recent book Sexed Up (which was endorsed by several prominent feminists). And Smith taking a single sentence (the “trans women’s eyes” line from Chapter 16) out of context to suggest that I’m somehow giving cis men permission to sexualize women is both delusional and gross.

After the above passage, Smith adds: “I imagine most of these men have not read Whipping Girl (whereas most ‘terfs’, in an effort to be good trans allies, have).” The idea that gender-critical activists like Smith have read Whipping Girl in order to be “good trans allies” is preposterous. Smith read my book for one purpose and one purpose only: quote mining. To make her seem “far more authoritative” as she caricatures my views and depicts me as a monster.

The title of this essay was posed as a question: “Why Do Helen Lewis, Victoria Smith, and Other ‘Gender Critical’ Activists Lie About My Work?” I think the answer is fairly obvious. They lie about my work because they habitually lie about trans people more generally, whether it be about sports, restrooms, gender-affirming care, biological sex, and so on.

They lie because the very existence of trans people who are feminists (and there are many of us) undermines the “trans activism vs. feminism” false narrative that they and their religious-right brethren have been peddling.

They lie because the facts are not on their side. So instead, they resort to concocting tall tales about us.

I understand why they do it. What I don’t get is why many cis editors and readers seem unable or unwilling to see through this ruse. Unless, of course, they too harbor similar anti-trans views.

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