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Back when I was in college, I went to see a doctor for a very specific problem. I am not a detail-oriented person so I’m not sure if this was a new problem or if I just hadn’t noticed because I never had one of those light-up magnifying mirrors, but suddenly I was finding my chin occasionally popping out a coarse black hair. This was horrifying to me, because that is how beards start, and girls do not have beards. And I checked a lot of other boxes for “girl,” like boobs and ovaries and, well, a box, and stuff, so this seemed…unnatural.
At first I just plucked the hair and moved on, but over time I noticed more and more and then I started really thinking about it: yes, I checked SOME “girl” boxes but there were other boxes left unchecked.
For instance, I have always been very competitive. I’ve always played lots of sports, including sports like football involving physical contact. That’s not a “girl” thing. I always liked math and science! Not for girls. I was always adventurous, and loud, and unapologetic about my opinions, and these are all not girl things. These are boy things.
Suddenly I realized I had the answer: I had a hormone imbalance. I had HIGH TESTOSTERONE. It explained everything! I just needed to get on some medication and then I could stop plucking beard hairs, and who knows? Maybe I would start liking makeup and boy bands.
So I went to the doctor and requested a blood panel. And a few weeks later, I got a call from the doctor’s office informing me that all my bloodwork was perfectly normal. “What about the testosterone,” I asked. “Normal,” they said. “Are you sure?” “Yes. Normal. That’s good. Congratulations.”
Because it turns out that all the things I thought of as “not girl” things are, in fact, girl things. Girls are competitive. Girls like math. Girls are loud. And yeah, girls have facial hair. All girls have facial hair, except for those with alopecia. Around 10% of women have what doctors identify as “excessive” facial hair due to conditions like a hormone imbalance, often due to polycystic ovarian syndrome or PCOS, but surveys suggest that way more – like 75% – have unwanted facial hair that they’ve removed. Those are women like me, with “normal” hormones. Because for women, growing dark hairs on our faces, or our backs, or stomachs, or breasts, or pubes, is NORMAL. It’s just not socially acceptable. And when you grow up with an idea of “womanhood” that features a perfectly smooth face, you assume that if you deviate from that, you are broken. There’s something wrong with you that has made you less of a woman, and you need to fix it or hide it.
I was thinking about all this recently thanks to the recent reaction of transphobes like JK Rowling to seeing the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif beat the ever loving snot out of her opponent, Angela Carini of Italy, in the second round of the Olympics.
Rowling, along with other internet doctors like Logan Paul and Donald Trump, decided Khelif is actually a transwoman, meaning they think she was assigned male at birth. Let’s be clear: that is absolutely 100% not true. Khelif was assigned female at birth, was raised as a girl (for which there are many photos, as well as her own father’s testimony), she is a woman today, and accordingly “female” is the designation on her passport, which is what the Olympics uses to determine gender.
And not for nothing, but in Algeria it is illegal to be openly lesbian, gay, or transgender. There is no gender affirming care. There are no surgeries or changing your listed sex in government documents. LGBTQ people not only have no rights there but are actively hated and often beaten in the streets.
That tells us two things: first, if Khelif WAS a trans woman we’d know it because she would be at the embassy requesting asylum. And second, JK Rowling and her army of TERFs have put this woman’s life at risk. Because while her friends and neighbors in Algeria are cheering her on, all it takes is a handful of cops, or vigilantes, to take these allegations seriously and to do something about it. Something like what two bigots did to university student Assil Belatla in 2019 because he was “suspected” of being gay.
That’s the risk Rowling is taking with Khelif’s life. And why? Not because of her chromosomes (which we do not know). Not because of her hormones (ditto). Not because she tried to groom a minor, or molest someone in a public restroom, or whatever else transphobes pretend to care about. Simply because she was a little too good at her sport. Because when her opponent dropped her hands, Khelif punched her in the face, like she was taught.
By the way, you’ll hear that Khelif is known to be trans because she was banned from competing in another championship last year. That is absolutely wrong and misleading. Last year, the International Boxing Association tested just four of hundreds of athletes and ended up banning two of them from their championship: Khelif and Lin Yu-Tin of Taiwan. They did not explain why they banned them, but did say a few weeks ago that it was not because of elevated testosterone, claiming they didn’t even test for that. This week they said actually it WAS elevated testosterone. Not only has the IBC been confusing and opaque on this issue, but they’ve been horrible for years and many people suspect them of just being another arm of the Kremlin, which is why the Olympics permanently banned them last year. They’re the first professional organization to earn that particular distinction, which is impressive considering that FIFA exists. The IBA really won the gold medal in shadiness.
So no, we don’t know why she was disqualified and honestly it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter! This is all complete bullshit. She is a cis woman who is being attacked for being too good. JK Rowling and her minions have done exactly what advocates for trans rights have said they would do for many years: they have weaponized their transphobia against ALL women. This is the final and inevitable result of transphobia: the policing of all women’s appearance, of all women’s behavior, of all women’s success.
I know in the past, I’ve focused on the bad science transphobes use, like in my most recent video on the Cass Report. But the fact of the matter is that this is not a scientific discussion. To paraphrase Andrew Lang, the transphobes use science the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: more for support than illumination. They have started with their conclusion: that trans people are immoral monsters. They then backtrack from there, until they reach the point where cis women like JK Rowling, presumably feminists who in any other case might argue that women should be free from traditional gender roles in order to be whoever they want to be, are attacking other cis women for being too masculine.
I’ll point out that this ridiculous cis-on-cis-woman violence is inextricably tied to race and sexuality. Yes, I relate to all of this as a woman who has veered far outside of acceptable female gender stereotypes who knows she would eventually be put up against the wall in TERF Gilead. But preceding me will surely be millions of nonwhite and homosexual women, thanks to Western society’s “standard” vision of femininity: pale, delicate features, blonde, blue-eyed, thin, heterosexual. We identify traits found more often in white women as “feminine” and traits found more often in women of color as “masculine.”
I can’t imagine it’s a coincidence that white women generally have less body and facial hair than women of other ethnicities.
Like I said, I know this is a bit of a different take compared to my previous videos on trans issues, and a big part of that is that I strongly feel that we should protect trans lives regardless of any benefit it may have for me, a cis woman. But I know that unfortunately there are many people out there who simply will not care about an issue unless it affects them directly, or someone they care about. So know this: witch hunts don’t just kill witches. I mean, they don’t kill any witches but you take my point: a witch hunt is a witch hunt because it finds witches wherever it can, and a trans hunt will do the same. Cis women will be harassed and killed by their authoritarian governments for being too masculine. Female athletes will be pushed out of their sports for being too good. Little girls will have their genitals checked by security guards before they can enter the bathroom. Women everywhere will go through life knowing that if they do not conform to society’s expectations of them as women, they will not be safe. And that is unacceptable.
