Transgender Ideology Isn't About Dignity. It's Warmed Over Misogyny | Opinion

Twenty years ago, my father, Irish author Jack Holland, wrote a book called Misogyny: the World's Oldest Prejudice. It's a sweeping look at how hatred and fear of women has been a part of nearly every society in human history. The need to control women's sexuality, women's voices and women's power have been a feature of societies from Victorian England to Afghanistan under the Taliban to ancient Greece and Rome. "What history teaches us about misogyny can be summed up in four words: pervasive, persistent, pernicious and protean," my father wrote in 2006, in his last work before he died.

I have to admit that when he wrote it, I didn't understand the urgency of the subject. Back then, I was certain that we were past the worst of the crimes against women, at least in the West.

Yet lately, my father's words about the shapeshifting nature of misogyny have been ringing in my ears. Some aspects of the transgender ideology taking over the liberal establishment are all too reminiscent of the kinds of misogyny my father so aptly pointed out. Recently developed tech platforms and the medical-industrial complex seem to me to have collided with the world's oldest prejudice, the primal drive to control and appropriate female bodies.

Does this sound like extremist fear-mongering? If it does, it's probably because in our culture right now, the reality is being hidden behind a veneer of kindness and inclusivity to which most decent people adhere—without realizing that by inclusivity, some trans activists seem to mean the wholesale destruction of female privacy and identity. The transgender issue has been nested in the movement for gay rights, which means that for many people, questioning it at all looks like a threat to return to the bad old days of intolerance. But it's more accurate to say that the trans movement itself is in many ways a return to the bad old days, with a uniquely 21st century spin.

You can see it in the reaction women face when they protest the sudden appearance of biological men in our changing rooms, prisons, and sports. Social media is full of examples of violent terminology posted by trans women voicing their outrage against TERFs—which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.

Posts calling for "stab a TERF today" and to "make them afraid" or "choke on my girl dick" and have been populating the internet for years. One trans woman threatened to torture, rape, and kill his own mother—only to be housed in a women's prison. Another, a cyclist, was pictured menacingly carrying a baseball bat in the colors of the trans flag. A third doused women's rights activist Kellie Jay Keen in tomato juice, then posted a photo with the casually misogynistic tweet, "Tomato juice is rich in Vitamin C and lycopenes, really good for old saggy wrinkly skin." Last fall in New York City, a trans activist screamed threats, including "I will f**k you up" and "No man wants you" and "these t*****s are more real than you will ever be, b***h."

Similar contempt has been leveled at older women since time immemorial; now it's just hiding behind the pride flag.

These may sound like extreme examples plucked from the margins. Yet rationalizations for this type of behavior pervade academia and policy, just like justifications for witch-burnings preoccupied the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.

In 2019, Left-wing trans writer Andrea Long Chu wrote a book called Females, which laid out in a flippant and mocking way the case for woman-as-subhuman. "Getting f****d is what makes you female because f****d is what a female is," says Chu, who defines a female as "any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the other." Femaleness, writes Chu, only hurts sometimes, but "is always bad for you."

Extremist and marginal, you say? NPR called the book "surprisingly tender."

I am not claiming that every person who identifies as a trans woman is a misogynist or a predator. But it is a documented fact that some well-known predators and misogynists have adopted a trans identity explicitly because our misogyny-ridden society has decided that the male predator's feelings about his identity are more significant than women's safety.

Object at your peril. Consider what happened to J.K. Rowling, whose vocal support for the idea that women and girls should have penis-free spaces in dressing rooms and prisons caused a huge backlash that endures to this day. The misogyny of that backlash has been explosive and explicit.

Is it any wonder that large numbers of young women and girls want to erase their femininity?

We know that there is an element of social contagion to the growing number of trans-identifying young women. But it often feels like it's on steroids. The other day on the radio, I heard a young female singer who goes by "they" pronouns discussing an artist who inspired her, a well-known French lesbian who now says she is a man. In the 19th century, George Eliot wrote under a man's name because society did not take female writers seriously. Today, women are choosing to identify out of womanhood. Is that progress?

The trans movement is not the root cause of misogyny, nor is it misogyny's only home. And certainly, there are transgender individuals who don't hate women. But as a movement, there are core components of the ideology which are undeniably the latest manifestation of a hatred of the female that stretches back millennia.

In a recent podcast, a formerly trans-identified woman called Leigh Janet Marshall said something that could have been lifted directly out of my father's book: By watching porn, she learned as a young girl that men being sexual still retain their personhood, but women being sexual become animals. This made her want to shed her female identity.

The idea that a sexual woman is not really human but rather a frightening, animalistic creature who inspires horror is one of the oldest tropes in the misogyny playbook. How can it still be rearing its head in our supposedly enlightened, scientific and secular society, never mind successfully infecting the psyches of girls being raised in bastions of liberal America?

My father grew up in working class Belfast of the 1950's, where most families lived hard lives. The Catholic Church and strict social hierarchies enforced rigid sex roles. In his book, he writes that wife-beating was a fairly regular occurrence. He recalls his confusion when he observed as a young boy the grim reality for some women in his neighborhood juxtaposed with the supposed reverence for the Virgin Mary in every Catholic church. The message was contradictory, but also clear: Women are fine, but only within confines set and defined by men.

His book had a distinct liberal bias, but the nearly 20 years since he died have shown that even in an ultra-permissive, sexually free secular society which has loosened the bonds of family and abolished patriarchal norms, even then, misogyny finds a way to destroy women and girls.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.