I have developed a very unhealthy habit of deliberately seeking out bigoted and hateful content on the internet and studying it intensely in a mostly vain attempt to understand and analyze it. I really shouldn’t do this, because studying the deplorable things people have written online only intensifies my constant and overwhelming anxiety and makes me lose all faith in humanity. I have, however, learned some things from reading bigotry online about the ways bigoted people think.
Transphobia is a bigotry that has existed for a very long time. It is arguably already present in nascent form in the ancient Greek sources from the third century BCE that talk about the Galli, a group of ancient priests who, as I discuss in this article I published in August 2020, deliberately castrated themselves, wore their hair in feminine styles, dressed in traditionally feminine clothing, and worshipped the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele. Nonetheless, transphobia has only recently begun to develop its own discourse. In this article, I am going to use an example to analyze how contemporary transphobic discourse draws heavily on the older, more established discourses of misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism.
Readers should be forewarned that this article discusses a wide range of the most unpleasant and depressing subjects imaginable, including sexual assault, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, child molestation, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, Nazis, the Holocaust, ritual cannibalism, drug addiction, murder, pogroms, and mass genocide. There will also be some quotes with a lot of profanity, slurs, and extreme insults, which I have partly censored. This is not a piece that I enjoyed writing in the slightest, but I feel that the points I am about to make need to be made.
Background on TERFs and the now-infamous BBC article
For those who are not already aware, the acronym TERF stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist.” It refers to people who deliberately co-opt the rhetoric of feminism to justify discriminating against and hating on transgender people. These people generally object to the label TERF, which is usually considered pejorative, and prefer to call themselves “gender-critical feminists.”
TERFs have a significant presence in the U.S., but they have much greater influence in the U.K., where basically all the major news outlets, including even the ones that are usually considered left-wing, such as The Guardian, regularly publish articles promoting their opinions and claims. For this reason, Great Britain has been nicknamed “TERF Island.”
On 26 October 2021, right on the heels of the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle’s transphobia in The Closer, which I wrote about in this post a few weeks ago, the BBC published an article written by a journalist named Caroline Lowbridge titled “’We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’” claiming that there is a widespread problem of transgender women pressuring cisgender lesbians into having sex with them.
If any trans women out there really are “pressuring” cisgender lesbians into having sex, that is obviously wrong and they should not do that. The article, however, goes to extreme lengths of willful misrepresentation to make it sound like the majority of trans women are essentially horny rapists.
The article repeatedly portrays examples of trans women merely being interested in dating women in the first place or saying that it is transphobic for cisgender lesbians to reject them if they do so solely because they are trans and for no other reason as examples of trans women “pressuring” cisgender lesbians into sex. It also relies on extremely dubious sources, including anecdotal testimonies from a small handful of anonymous TERF lesbians, anonymous tweets made in reply to a TERF thread over a year ago, and a dubious “survey” that only circulated among TERFs on social media.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the heading of the article by Caroline Lowbridge that was published by the BBC on 26 October 2021
Introducing Lily Cade
It so happens that a major source for Lowbridge’s article was Lily Cade, an American cisgender lesbian and former pornographic actress. In fact, Cade was the only person in the original published version of the article who was cited under her publicly identifiable name and the article relied heavily on her claims to support its narrative. The article, however, completely failed to mention that Cade has a well-documented history of sexually assaulting women.
At least three women that I am aware of have publicly accused Cade herself of sexually assaulting and raping them personally: Jasmine Summers (who has specifically accused Lily Cade of sexually assaulting her in a women’s restroom), Honey Gold, and Maren Hill. Screenshots of these women’s accusations are shown below. Dozens of others have claimed that they have witnessed her engaging in sexual misconduct.
ABOVE: Screenshot of Jasmine Summers accusing Lily Cade of sexually assaulting her in a women’s public restroom
ABOVE: Screenshot of a tweet by Honey Gold accusing Lily Cade of raping her
ABOVE: Screenshot of a tweet by Maren Hill accusing Lily Cade of raping her
Additionally, Cade herself has publicly admitted to sexually assaulting women and has confirmed all of the above allegations to be true. In response to the allegations against her, she wrote a comment on the website The Real Porn Wikileaks in 2017 in which she openly admits to sexually assaulting women, including the three women I have mentioned here specifically, and apologizes for it. I won’t quote the whole comment here, but here is the part where she admits to sexually assaulting women:
“Eventually, I started to hear complaints, through the grapevine. No one said anything to my face, but people complained to each other, and eventually it made it’s [sic] way to me without names or details that some girls didn’t appreciate the bathroom trips. I felt thrown, because I had thought of these as mutually pleasurable activities. My thinking was warped – I thought I was so good at reading people that I could tell when girls wanted it. I lived to get girls off. I thought of myself as being a good person. I wanted to stand for sexual freedom, not sexual coercion. I thought was on the side of the light. I have failed.”
“I’m deeply embarrassed by these revelations. I did not want to be evil. I remember the incidents with Jasmine Summers, Honey Gold and Maren. I misread the situations so completely that it came as a shock to me that these girls experienced them as assaults. I was aware of some situations where I’d crossed lines, but I didn’t know that these were among them. I didn’t know they felt violated by me. I feel gross about it. I feel stupid. I tweeted about all of these girls, posting photos of Honey and video of Maren. I gave them my number afterwards. I wasn’t ashamed about this, because I didn’t think there was anything to be ashamed of.”
“I feel ashamed now. I thought that that girls [sic] went along with me because they enjoyed it, but they did it because they felt like they couldn’t say no. I thought it was all in fun, but it wasn’t. I played a sexual predator in movies, but it was supposed to be tongue in cheek. I thought of myself as someone who helped girls in the business, not preyed on them. I thought of myself as an artist, not a monster. On the same party bus where Maren says I ruined her Exxotica, I shoved Ron Jeremy for refusing to back off from trying to get in some lesbian action. At another party, I broke Max Hardcore’s nose. I thought I was better than porn’s serial gropers, but I guess I was just the female of the species.”
Lowbridge’s article for the BBC explicitly claims that the author was unable to find any “high profile trans women” who were willing to speak to her. The article states:
“In addition to Veronica Ivy, I contacted several other high profile trans women who have either written or spoken about sex and relationships. None of them wanted to speak to me but my editors and I felt it was important to reflect some of their views in this piece.”
Thus, instead of including quotes from trans women who were interviewed specifically for the article, Lowbridge goes on to include quotes from trans women that she seemingly just found in various places online, deliberately cherry-picking them to fit her narrative.
Lowbridge’s claim that no “high profile trans women” were willing to speak to her, however, is an unambiguous, outright lie. An article for Pink News has confirmed that Lowbridge did, in fact, actually interview at least one “high profile” trans woman who has spoken extensively about sex and relationships: the porn star Chelsea Poe, who claims that she specifically told Lowbridge about Cade’s history of sexually assaulting women. Poe is not mentioned in the version of the article that the BBC published, nor does it mention Cade’s history of sexual assault, as I have already mentioned.
It really looks like Lowbridge, desperate to push an anti-trans narrative at all costs, knowingly relied on a source that she had good reason to believe was suspect (i.e., Lily Cade) and deliberately and dishonestly omitted information she knew about Cade’s history of sexually assaulting women because it would have undermined her narrative. Then, to cover up her dishonesty, she outright lied that no trans women were willing to speak to her.
On its own, what I have already said here would be a major journalistic scandal for the BBC, demonstrating that they are so desperate to attack trans women that they are willing to give an uncritical platform to anyone who is willing to say that trans women are bad, no matter how odious the person in question may be. Unfortunately, this is not all; things get much darker.
Lily Cade’s genocidal screed
Some people criticized Cade for her statements that were quoted in Lowbridge’s article for the BBC. In response, Cade doubled down on her transphobia and published a series of increasingly unhinged, virulently transphobic screeds on her blog. On 2 November 2021, she posted a totally unhinged, virulently bigoted and transphobic screed, which multiple commentators have compared to a “shooter’s manifesto,” titled “Where Are These Children’s Mothers?”
In her screed, she declares (among many other things) that all trans women are “disgusting,” “weak,” “evil,” “pedophiles,” “monsters,” “rapists,” and “predators,” that all trans women are a part of a massive global conspiracy to sexually exploit children, that all trans women are “the literal devil” and smell of sulfur, and that trans women can never be redeemed so long as they are trans. She explicitly calls for genocide, declaring that all trans women who refuse to de-transition and live the rest of their lives as men should be exterminated to end their supposed corrupting influence. She also lists specific, prominent trans women by name, explicitly exhorting her readers to “lynch” them.
This screed was, in turn, followed by another screed on the same day titled “Dead Whores Tell No Lies,” in which Cade advocates even more violence against people whom she sees as enabling the existence of trans women. In perhaps the most horrifying example among many, she urges men to brutally gang-rape and murder the mother of Jazz Jennings for accepting her daughter as trans. She also attacks Jennings’s mother with a whole litany of extremely graphic sexual and scatological insults.
Cade’s website has since crashed and is no longer accessible, but archived versions of all her screeds, including her notorious “Where Are These Children’s Mothers?” screed and her “Dead Whores Tell No Lies” screed, are available on the website Internet Archive. Newsweek has also published the complete transcript of the “Where Are These Children’s Mothers?” screed on their website for anyone who wants to read it. I don’t recommend reading it, since it is not at all pleasant material to read, but I am linking it here just in case anyone wants to verify that Cade really said the things I say she said.
According to this article in Newsweek, on 4 November, one week after the BBC originally published Lowbridge’s article, they removed the portion of the article that relied on Cade as a source. The BBC nonetheless has not offered an apology for uncritically platforming Cade and maintains that their TERF propaganda piece is an “important piece of journalism.”
ABOVE: Photograph from the article published in Newsweek showing Lily Cade on 23 January 2016 at the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, Nevada
The TERF reaction
Many people, including many self-proclaimed “gender-critical feminists,” have expressed horror and outrage over Lily Cade’s calls to exterminate all trans women. The fact of the matter, though, is that what Cade says in her screed is hardly different from what many so-called “gender-critical feminists” say in their forums every single day. She repeats mostly the same claims and talking points, but in a saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud manner.
There are only two reasons why Cade’s screeds have attracted any attention at all out of the hundreds and hundreds of screeds against trans women that are posted online every day. The first reason is because the BBC—a supposedly “respectable” news outlet—wrote an article portraying trans women as dangerous predators that used her as a major source.
The second reason is because Cade explicitly calls for violence against trans women, which so-called “gender-critical feminists” are usually careful to avoid doing explicitly. If, however, Lily Cade somehow came to be in a position of power and authority where she could implement her plans to commit mass genocide against trans women, I am certain that the vast majority of so-called “gender-critical feminists” would go along with it gleefully.
I am not going to try to systematically refute all of Cade’s claims, since, although all her claims are ridiculous, they are manifold. My time right now is very limited and trying to refute everything would take far more of my time than I am willing to spend.
Nonetheless, after reading all her screeds, it struck me just how blatantly they illustrate a phenomenon that I’ve noticed previously, which is how deeply misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism have influenced contemporary transphobia. In the rest of this article, I am therefore going to use Cade’s screeds to illustrate some broader trends that are common in contemporary transphobic discourse.
What is misogyny?
The word misogyny comes from the Ancient Greek first-declension feminine noun μισογυνία (misogynía), which is formed from the third-declension neuter noun μῖσος (mîsos), meaning “hatred,” and the third-declension feminine noun γυνή (gynḗ), meaning “woman.” The word therefore literally means “hatred of women.” For the purposes of this article, however, I will adopt a more technical definition.
I define misogyny as the attitudes and practices arising from the belief that traits or qualities that are perceived as feminine are naturally inferior to traits or qualities that are perceived as masculine. Under this definition, the hatred of women in general is certainly a form of misogyny, but misogyny can also target people who are not women who possess (or are alleged to possess) qualities that the misogynist associates with women.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean with an anecdote. Until the late fourth century BCE, adult Greek men traditionally never shaved their faces. Instead, they wore long beards. Adult men who shaved their faces and went without beards were widely mocked for being like women. The ancient Greek writer Athenaios of Naukratis, who flourished in around the late second or early third centuries CE, tells the following story about the much earlier Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (lived c. 412 – 323 BCE) in his Wise Men at Dinner 13.18:
“Διογένης δὲ ἰδών τινα οὕτως ἔχοντα τὸ γένειον ἔφησεν : μή τι ἔχεις ἐγκαλεῖν τῇ φύσει ὅτι ἄνδρα σὲ ἐποίησε καὶ οὐ γυναῖκα;”
This means, in my own English translation:
“But Diogenes, seeing a man who had his chin in this manner [i.e., shaved], said: ‘I fear that you have something to accuse against nature, that it made you a man and not a woman.’”
Even though Diogenes’s insult is directed against a man, it is an example of misogyny, because his reason for attacking the man is that he thinks the man is acting like a woman.
Thus, misogyny does not solely target women; it can also target cisgender men who are perceived as gender-nonconforming, transgender men, and feminine nonbinary people. In fact, most of the strict norms and expectations that mainstream society places onto men are the direct result of misogyny; men are expected to look and behave in certain ways because to do otherwise is seen as womanly, which is seen as bad.
ABOVE: Diogenes Sitting in His Tub, painted in 1860 by the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme
Misogyny in Lily Cade’s transphobic screeds
Lily Cade would not like Diogenes of Sinope, because, as I mention in this article I wrote back in July 2021, he was notorious in antiquity for frequently masturbating in public. Cade, by contrast, constantly references masturbation in her recent screeds, denouncing it and describing how she thinks it makes men weak and effeminate. One gets the impression that her whole worldview has been shaped by her years of interactions with male porn fans, to such an extent that she finds it hard to imagine anyone who was assigned male at birth doing anything other than masturbating.
I’ve read all the posts Cade made on her blog following the publication of the BBC article. Throughout all her posts, in addition to viciously attacking and advocating violence against trans women, she is constantly saying that women are too weak and worthless to do anything and that men of the present era have become weak and effeminate through masturbating and don’t have “balls.”
To cite one clear example of this, on 31 October 2021, Cade published a screed titled “To the Pu**ified Men of America, if They are Brave Enough to Look,” in which she calls on cisgender men to take action against transgender people, declaring:
“Women can’t stop this assault upon your culture. They are too soft. They put themselves second. They pity, poor beasts, they pity weak men. Only men can stop this. Stand up. Say no. You are stronger than these monsters. You are stronger than the monster within yourself.”
Lily Cade begins her now-infamous screed “Where Are These Children’s Mothers” by addressing “the mothers” of America and the so-called “west” more generally. She says that she is on their side, but promptly goes on to denounce them for being, among other things, too “weak,” “nice,” and “feminine.” She writes:
“You’re the mothers, right? The moms? The mums? I need the mothers on my side. I’m on the side of the breeders. I’m on the side of the children. F*** feelings. I care about the emotional and physical well-being of the future generations, not some spoiled little f*** of the easiest, stupidest, path of least resistance society that has ever existed’s bulls*** delusions.”
“I’m not here to play back and forth games with the actually fa***ts who with the wedge of their actually and your weak, well-meaning, nice, feminine, kindness and your ignorance of the smell of sulfur on the monster before you have rolled a Trojan Horse full of literal baby-f***ing God Damned pedophile monsters into your Ivory Towers, your Kindergartens, your locker rooms, your Olympics, your prisons, everywhere you sought to stand in public. F*** these people.”
I think that these quotes already demonstrate that Cade associates weakness of character with women and strength of character with men and that she sees masculinity as superior. Her misogyny, however, is perhaps most clearly evident in the way she talks about trans women compared to trans men.
Cade focuses heavily on attacking trans women, despite the fact that there are about the same number of trans men in the world as trans women. She makes it very clear that a large part of what she hates about trans women is that she thinks they are weak (and therefore implicitly feminine), rather than strong (and thereby implicitly masculine) as she believes they should be. She writes:
“Trans women are vile, weak, disgusting, whiny, fake-victim masturbators who should be ashamed of themselves. They threatened suicide and you rolled over. You disgust me too. There is but one noble response to a man who tries to use the threat of violence against himself to manipulate a woman’s emotions. f***ing do it then! No woman should ever pity a weak man. Tear your f***ing blinders off, b***h, what the f*** is wrong with you? Your pity rewards weak men for their weakness.”
Later, she says:
“Weak men are the natural prey of whores. I see right through them. I read their dark hearts. Some of them are vile sadists and some are just worthless bootlickers but every single one of them is evil.”
Later again, she denounces teachers, calling them “feminine fools” who pity “weak men.” She writes:
“Your children’s teachers are either in this pedophile cult or the usual well-meaning weak man pitying feminine fools that suborn evil because they’re too stupid to see it.”
She uses the word weak as an insult fourteen times in this screed alone, mostly against trans women and cisgender men who masturbate.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble statue of the god Dionysos dated to the second century CE, currently on display in the Louvre, depicting him as androgynous, beardless, long-haired, and with apparent breasts
By sharp contrast, despite the fact that, as I have already mentioned, there are roughly the same number of trans men in the world as trans women, she makes almost no mention of trans men in this screed. When she does allude to them, she speaks as though trans men are exclusively helpless teenaged “girls” and “young women” whom the evil trans women have indoctrinated and corrupted through their supposed global conspiracy. She completely ignores the existence of well-adjusted, adult trans men who enjoy the lives they are living.
She speaks of trans men’s desire to be seen as men as entirely natural and normal, but she claims that, instead of transitioning, young trans men should remain “girls” and should gratify their desire to be strong and masculine by routinely working out at the gym. She writes:
“End this before it gets worse. Stand up to the cult. Every f***ing teenage girl experiences ‘dysphoria.’ The cure is acceptance and spiritual growth, a f***ing gym routine, hobbies, goals, control over the desires, the intellect trained to guard the heart, compassion . . .”
Near the end of her screed, after declaring that all trans women must be killed, Cade declares that the only reason why trans women are not being systematically killed already is because society lacks masculinity, saying that society needs real men to go out and kill all the trans women. She also once again viciously attacks men who masturbate for supposedly not being manly enough. She writes:
“Pedos get the wall? Chomos get the rope? Where the f*** are the Marines? Where the f*** is the Army? Where are the Farmers with Pitchforks? Where are the Cowboys? Where are the Indians? Where the f*** are the men? Where the f*** are the mothers? How can you stand for this? If my grandfather and all his brothers who stood up to Hitler were still here they would rip the still-beating hearts from every last one of these pedophile monsters in public the same way they have raped your kids. So would every man who walked the Earth before your culture decided to accept masturbation as healthy and not the soul-draining creative energy wasting evil pathetic act of a man not worth his balls.”
In her “Dead Whores Tell No Lies” screed, Cade viciously attacks people assigned female at birth who identify as nonbinary, hurling all kinds of degrading, misogynistic insults at them and telling them once again to “get a gym routine.” She also advocates physically and emotionally abusing children assigned female at birth who identify as nonbinary, saying that, if she had a “daughter” who identified as nonbinary, she would slap them in the face and forcibly send them away to live on a horse farm. She writes:
“No man believes a trans man is a man, and certainly no one believes anything the ‘they’ girls say about anything whatsoever, of course, so it’s not a really a necessary conversation, but if some of your people have snuck in, understand that we speak in the language of power here. English, b***h. Come correct. If you don’t like it, go suck a d*** and make yourself useful. B***h, the men who rape you still see you as a woman, you dumb b***h, you worthless, Benedict Arnold, turncoat, p***y a** b***h.”
“You think you can ‘identify’ your way out of the sex class you stupid slut? F*** your NewSpeak, you spoiled rotten piece of s*** no respect for the women who fought and died and bore forth your foremothers from their wombs, no respect for the sacrifice of your forefathers, no respect for the sins comitted [sic] to write you into history, you ignorant fool of a b***h. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should be deeply, deeply ashamed. I can smell your blood, c**t.”
“Stand down, tool of the system, ignorant dupe, mincing fool, house slave, p***y a** inner urban cannon fodder of the pedophiles c**t. If you were my daughter, I would smack you across the face and send you to a horse farm, so you could remember that you are an animal, that you are sacred, that you exist here and never again. How dare you desecrate the gift of your life by wasting your precious time on this lying bootlicking navel gazing pathetic powertripping bulls***! Get a fucking hobby, b***h. Get a gym routine. Gender identity is a pathetic stupid lie.”
In summary, Cade repeatedly denounces cisgender women for being “soft” and “feminine” and having “pity” for trans women; she characterizes the femininity of trans women as viscerally disgusting, unthinkably evil, and perverse; she attacks people assigned female at birth who identify as nonbinary by hurling basically every misogynistic insult imaginable at them; and she complains that contemporary men are masturbators who are “not worth [their] balls” (i.e., not manly enough).
Yet, when she talks about trans men, she doesn’t have a problem with them for being masculine or wanting to be men. On the contrary, she sees it as only natural for “girls” to be disgusted with their feminine bodies and wish that they had male bodies. Her problem is with trans men actually calling themselves men and taking cross-sex hormones, apparently because she thinks this is unnatural and crossing a boundary that shouldn’t be crossed. She also doesn’t seem to see trans men as indescribably, irredeemably evil in the same way that she sees trans women.
It’s clear that this screed expresses a worldview in which femininity is assigned a negative value and masculinity is assigned a positive value. This is misogyny. Cade tries to dress it up with a casual sprinkling of feminist rhetoric, claiming that trans women are destroying the rights women and lesbians have fought for, but, at the end of the day, it’s clear that her virulent hatred of trans women is motivated to a large extent by her hatred of “men” being feminine.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Farnese Herakles, a Roman marble statue based on a Hellenistic Greek original from the fourth century BCE, exhibiting qualities that are traditionally seen as “masculine”
Bigotry toward gay and bisexual men
Lily Cade’s transphobic screed is also clearly influenced by bigotry towards gay and bisexual men. At first, some readers may think that it is contradictory for Cade to be bigoted against gay and bisexual men, considering that she herself is a lesbian, but it actually makes sense when you examine what she says through the lens of the misogynistic worldview that we have just discussed.
Cade thinks it is good or at least acceptable for women to have sexual relations with other women because she sees attraction to women as a positive, masculine quality. By contrast, she thinks it is disgusting and disgraceful for men to have sexual relations with other men because she sees attraction to men as a negative, feminine quality. She can tolerate women being attracted to men, because she thinks that it’s simply their nature and they can’t help it, but she expects men to be better.
Throughout all her posts, Cade regularly refers to trans women by the f-slur, which has historically been most commonly used against gay and bisexual men. She also frequently uses the word “c***sucker” as an insult. This insult is commonly used, but it’s really quite bigoted if you think about it, because there shouldn’t be anything inherently disgraceful or degrading about someone performing fellatio; it’s a relatively common sexual act that is as morally neutral as any other when it is done consensually. The insult, however, implies that the person using it thinks otherwise.
In her last post before her website crashed, titled “Dead Whores Tell No Lies,” Cade directly attacks gay and bisexual men, claiming that they are guilty for supposedly surrendering the LGBT community to malignant transgender people and accusing them of not being manly enough to stand up to the supposed transgender menace. She writes:
“The Christians were right. Gay marriage was the fall of Rome. You should have given us Civil Unions and not been so cruel, but I get it now. If you had possessed speakers with greater nunance [sic] and articulation and not just angry, stupid, peasants, things might have gone down differently. You saw the pedophile cult to whom everyone else in the gay community but the lesbians were happy to cede the culture. After gay marriage, most of the respectable homosexuals left the spot light and did whatever they did. F*** you, you spineless fa***ts. How dare you stand for this. You know what a man is too, c**ksucking, a**-licking, piss-drinking fa***ts. You’re fucking men too, our men, how could you let this happen to our children? Where the f*** are your balls?”
In addition to attacking gay and bisexual men directly, one of the primary claims Cade makes against trans women actually derives from older claims made about gay and bisexual men.
Throughout all her screeds, Cade repeatedly and emphatically claims, over and over again, that trans women are pedophiles. This accusation is, of course, entirely false and has no credible evidence to support it, but TERFs and other transphobes routinely repeat variations of it.
Transphobes sometimes try to support this claim by cherry-picking the extremely tiny number of cases of individual trans women who have also allegedly molested children and presenting those cases as though they were representative of all trans people. The irrefutable fact, however, remains that the vast majority of trans women are not pedophiles, there is no evidence to support the claim of any correlation whatsoever between trans women and pedophilia, and the vast majority of pedophiles are not transgender.
As it happens, the canard that trans women are pedophiles actually originates from the much older canard that gay men are pedophiles. As of the time I am writing this article, I am not totally sure how this canard originated or whether it has anything to do with ancient Greek pederasty, which was a real and genuinely deplorable ancient practice that, in many cases, involved adult men sexually exploiting adolescent boys who would now be considered minors. (For more information on this subject, I have written about ancient Greek pederasty as a historical phenomenon on my blog a few times, including in this article I published in June 2019 and more recently in this article I published a few days ago.)
In any case, I can say for certain that the canard claiming that gay men are pedophiles is at least sixty years old. The earliest specific example of it of which I am currently aware occurs in the ten-minute black-and-white social guidance propaganda film Boys Beware, which the social guidance filmmaker Sid Davis originally produced and released in 1961.
The film repeatedly describes homosexuality as a dangerous mental illness and directly equates gay men with child molesters, without making any distinction between the two. The film does not even acknowledge the existence of gay men who do not molest children or the existence of people who molest children who are not gay men. It warns adolescent boys to beware the threat that gay men supposedly pose to their health and wellbeing. Despite being inaccurate and homophobic, the film was widely shown in schools and was remade not once but twice—first in 1973 and again in 1979.
ABOVE: Screenshot from the 1961 Sid Davis propaganda film Boys Beware, which directly equates gay men with pedophiles
In 1977, the American celebrity singer and anti-LGBT-rights activist Anita Bryant propelled the notion that gay men are pedophiles to national attention through her “Save Our Children” campaign, which sought the repeal of a recently-passed local ordinance in Dade County, Florida, that prohibited discrimination against people who are attracted to other people of the same sex in housing, employment, and public accommodation.
Bryant’s campaign relied heavily on the equation between gay men and pedophiles, portraying discrimination against same-sex-attracted people as the only way to protect children and the ordinance banning discrimination as a threat to children’s wellbeing. The campaign succeeded in repealing the ordinance, thereby making discrimination against same-sex-attracted people legal in Dade County once again.
Nowadays I think the canard that associates men who are sexually attracted to other men with pedophiles is no longer as widespread as it once was, but it nonetheless remains a part of homophobic discourse. It is, of course, entirely baseless. As this article published in February 2017 in The Atlantic explains, studies have repeatedly and consistently found that there is no correlation between same-sex attraction and pedophilia. The vast majority of same-sex-attracted people are not pedophiles and same-sex-attracted people are not any more likely to be pedophiles than straight people.
Twentieth-century homophobes, of course, did not usually distinguish between men who are sexually attracted to men and transgender women, because they saw both groups as essentially the same thing. Thus, they came to accuse trans women of being pedophiles along with gay men. This is clearly where Lily Cade is getting the idea from. It’s an allegation straight out of twentieth-century homophobia.
ABOVE: Photograph originally from the Associated Press reproduced in the article from The Atlantic showing gay rights activists in Miami, Florida, in 1977, carrying signs protesting Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign
Transphobia and antisemitism
Cade’s transphobic screed is not just influenced by misogyny and bigotry toward gay and bisexual men, but also by antisemitism. The close ties between transphobia and antisemitism have been especially driven home for me by personal experience.
People who have been reading my blog for a while may recall that, so far, Nick Barksdale has posted three videos of interviews with me on his YouTube channel “The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.” I really enjoy doing those interviews, Nick is a very nice guy and an excellent host, and I really hope I have the chance to do more interviews with him in the future.
Unfortunately, underneath every video I have done with him, there are always a ton of people who leave comments attacking and ridiculing me because they assume that I am a trans woman, based solely on my appearance and my voice, despite the fact that I do not ever refer to myself in any way as a woman, let alone a trans woman, in any of the videos.
To my somewhat greater surprise, there are also always nearly as many antisemites who come out of the woodwork to accuse and attack me because they think I am Jewish—despite the fact that I am not Jewish, I do not have a Jewish name, I have no Jewish ancestors as far as I am aware, I have never personally set foot in a synagogue in my life, and I have basically no real connection to Judaism whatsoever.
Their vehement impression that I am Jewish seems to be based entirely on some combination of the paranoid conviction that anyone who expresses even vaguely left-wing-sounding ideas must be Jewish and the bizarre impression that my voice “sounds Jewish” or something.
One thing I found interesting is that some of the people attacking me in the comments seem to think that being a trans woman and being Jewish go together. For instance, here is a screenshot of a comment and a reply that can be seen underneath the video “Can We Judge Historical Figures by Contemporary Standards?” which Nick posted on 19 August 2021:
The surprising historical ties between antisemitism and transphobia
I suspect that many of my readers will find the idea that antisemitism might have anything to do with transphobia surprising, but it really shouldn’t be. It has occurred to me that contemporary transphobes think about transgender women in almost exactly the same way that antisemites have thought about Jewish men for centuries: as weak, effeminate men with “mutilated” penises who supposedly control society despite being an inferior minority and are supposedly a threat to women and children.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were generally horrified by the Jewish practice of circumcision and regarded it as a disgusting and bizarre form of “mutilation.” Greek and Roman sources frequently discuss circumcision with disgust, horror, and mockery. For instance, the Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (lived 38 or 41 – c. 103 CE) mocks a Jewish rival in his Epigrams 11.94 by repeatedly addressing him as “verpe poeta,” which means “circumcised poet,” rather than by his actual name.
Disgust and mockery of circumcision was so widespread in antiquity that ancient Jewish authors felt constantly compelled to defend it, as, for instance, the Jewish philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE) does in his On Special Laws 1.1.2–3, describing it as a “practice that has been mocked by many.” Medieval European Christians generally held the same view of circumcision as the ancient Greeks and Romans, but they carried it to even further extremes. Medieval European Christians came to believe that Jewish men were not fully male and stereotyped them as weak and effeminate.
In fact, starting in the fourteenth century CE, many European Christians came to believe that Jewish men menstruated by bleeding uncontrollably from their circumcised penises, either once a year during Holy Week or once a month like women, as a punishment from God for them having supposedly murdered Jesus. For instance, the Italian Christian scholar Cecco d’Ascoli (lived 1257 – 1327 CE) writes in his commentary on Johannes de Sacrobosco’s treatise De Sphaera in around 1324: “After the death of Christ, all Jewish men, like women, suffer menstruation.”
The belief that Jewish men menstruate from their circumcised penises stuck around for a lot longer than someone might expect. As late as the nineteenth century, some antisemites still believed it in all seriousness. The general view of Jewish men as physically weak, effeminate, and “mutilated” has survived into modern antisemitic discourse. For instance, antisemitic cartoons from the early twentieth century sometimes portray racist caricatures of gender-ambiguous Jewish people who have masculine facial features, but feminine breasts (see, for instance, the image shown below).
ABOVE: 1919 Austrian antisemitic cartoon showing a stereotypical Jew with masculine facial features and feminine breasts stabbing an Austrian soldier in the back with a dagger, illustrating the notorious “stab-in-the-back” antisemitic conspiracy theory that helped give rise to the Holocaust
The Austrian philosopher Otto Weiniger (lived 1880 – 1903), a former Jew who had converted to Christianity, published a book in 1903 titled Geschlecht und Charackter. In the book, Weiniger argues that every person has some degree of a masculine aspect and some degree of a feminine aspect. He argues that the masculine aspect is active, moral, logical, productive, self-aware, dignified, and generally good and that the feminine aspect is passive, amoral, illogical, unproductive, un-self-aware, undignified, and generally bad.
Weiniger directly equates Jewishness with femininity and, although he acknowledges that some individual Jewish men can be good and masculine, he claims that Jewish men are naturally inclined toward femininity as a result of their supposed innate racial psychology. For instance, he writes, as translated by Ladislaus Löb in the 1907 translation of Geschlecht und Charackter published in the U.K. by William Heinemann and in the U.S. by G. P. Putnam’s Sons (on pages 307–308):
“The true concept of the State is foreign to the Jew, because he, like the woman, is wanting in personality; his failure to grasp the idea of true society is due to his lack of free intelligible ego. Like women, Jews tend to adhere together, but they do not associate as free independent individuals mutually respecting each other’s individuality.”
“As there is no real dignity in women, so what is meant by the word ‘gentleman’ does not exist amongst the Jews. The genuine Jew fails in this innate good breeding by which alone individuals honour their own individuality and respect that of others. There is no Jewish nobility, and this is the more surprising as Jewish pedigrees can be traced back for thousands of years.”
Weiniger claims that the modern world is decadent and degenerate because there is too much femininity and Jewishness. On page 329, he writes: “Our age is not only the most Jewish but the most feminine.”
ABOVE: Photograph taken in 1903 of Otto Weiniger, the Austrian philosopher who influentially equated femininity with Jewishness, portraying both as bad
In the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, the Nazis in Germany condemned Weiniger for being of Jewish ancestry, but they embraced his association of Jewishness with femininity. They used passages from Geschlecht und Charackter in their propaganda and aggressively promoted the idea of Jewish men as weak and effeminate, contrasting them with German men, whom they consistently portrayed as strong and masculine.
ABOVE: Nazi propaganda poster for the 1932 Reichstag election, showing a heroic Nazi worker with blond hair, masculine features, and rippling muscles towering like a giant over tiny, weak-looking, Jewish-coded men in suits
The Nazis also tied antisemitism to transphobia in their own way, especially through their demonization of Magnus Hirschfeld (lived 1868 – 1935), a German physician and psychologist who happened to be both gay and Jewish and was also an early advocate for the rights of women and LGBTI people.
In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or “Institute for Sex Research,” in Berlin. The institute did many things, but, among them, it provided shelter to transgender and gender-nonconforming people, offered them employment that they could not find anywhere else, offered medical passes for “crossdressing” (which was otherwise illegal), and, in early 1931, performed the first complete male-to-female sex reassignment surgery on a trans woman named Dora Richter. The institute accumulated a vast library and archive of books and materials related to sex research and LGBTI people in particular.
The Nazis extensively demonized Hirschfeld and the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in the years leading up to their rise to power. They portrayed Hirschfeld as an evil, sexually perverted Jew who was promoting homosexuality and all other forms of unspeakable “degeneracy” as part of the supposed international Jewish conspiracy to harm Germany and the supposed supreme Nordic race.
ABOVE: Photograph of Magnus Hirschfeld taken in 1932
Hirschfeld himself was not in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power, because he was on an international speaking tour, but the Nazis quickly attacked the institute in his absence. In March 1933, they sent Kurt Hiller, the main director, to a concentration camp. On 6 May 1933, the pro-Nazi German Student Union sacked the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, assaulting those who worked there and trashing the building, shouting “Brenne Hirschfeld!” which means “Burn Hirschfeld!”
The Brownshirts subsequently closed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and confiscated all its property, including the institute’s records, which included the names and addresses of gay and transgender people who had been affiliated with the institute. On 10 May 1933, the Nazis held a massive book-burning in the Opernplatz in which they burned the writings of Jewish and leftist authors along with all the collections of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, including both its library and archive, destroying all of its unpublished research.
At some point in all this, the Nazis or their supporters are believed to have murdered Dora Richter, but her exact fate is unknown. The Nazi authorities later used the records they confiscated from the institute to round up the people whose names were listed and imprison or murder them.
ABOVE: Photograph showing Nazi supporters burning the collections of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, along with the writings of Jewish and leftist authors, in the Opernplatz on 10 May 1933
In addition to murdering roughly six million Jewish people in the Holocaust, the Nazis also ruthlessly persecuted and killed people whom they regarded as homosexual men, including gay men, bisexual men, and transgender women.
Homosexual relations between men were illegal in Nazi Germany under Paragraph 175 of the penal code, which was already in place before the Nazis came to power. The Nazis, however, amended the law in 1935 to make it stricter, so that a man could be arrested just for looking at another man in a way that was deemed “enticing.” They also began aggressively enforcing the law in ways that it hadn’t been enforced before.
The Nazis arrested somewhere around 100,000 people who they believed were gay men. They put most of these people into regular prisons, but they sent somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 of them to concentration camps, where they were the worst treated of all the prisoners. The concentration camp guards tortured and murdered prisoners whom they regarded as gay men for fun and the other prisoners treated the people imprisoned for “homosexuality” as the lowest of the low.
The French gay Holocaust survivor Pierre Seel (lived 1923 – 2005) was arrested for homosexuality on 3 May 1941. He testifies that, after he was arrested, the Nazis mocked and tortured him and raped him by forcibly shoving a twenty-five-centimeter piece of wood up his rectum. He was subsequently sent to the Schirmeck-Vorbrück concentration camp. While he was there, he reports that he was forced to watch as the guards murdered his eighteen-year-old lover Jo by having him torn apart by savage dogs—a sight which caused him to develop a fear of dogs that he only managed to overcome years later.
The Nazis also conducted horrifying, nonconsensual medical “experiments” in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps on people whom they regarded as gay men. Such experiments included castrating prisoners by burning their testicles in boiling water, heating and cooling them to extreme temperatures to see how their bodies would react, and cutting open their groins and pumping them full of testosterone in the hope that it would turn them into straight, gender-conforming men.
Paragraph 175 of the German penalty code only prohibited homosexual relations between men; it did not prohibit homosexual relations between women. The Nazis did not criminalize sexual relations between women in Germany because they feared that close platonic friendships between chaste Aryan women might accidentally be mistaken for lesbian relationships and they believed that the danger of chaste Aryan women being falsely accused of being lesbians was greater than the danger that lesbians posed on their own.
The Nazis therefore did not specifically target cisgender lesbian and bisexual women or trans men for persecution in the same way that they persecuted cisgender gay men, cisgender bisexual men, and trans women. Sexual relations between women were, however, prohibited in Reich-controlled Austria under the Austrian penal code and the Nazis are also recorded to have sent at least a few lesbian women to concentration camps for being “asocials.”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a plaque at Mauthausen concentration camp commemorating the gay victims of Nazi persecution
Blood libel and claims about trans women supposedly “sacrificing” children
With that little digression about the complicated historical connections between antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia out of the way, let us return to Lily Cade’s transphobic screeds to look at some of the specific antisemitic tropes that appear in them.
One of the oldest and most enduring antisemitic canards is that of “blood libel”: the false assertion that Jewish people ritually murder innocent children. This canard is literally ancient. Greek and Roman followers of traditional polytheistic religions in the Roman Empire are known to have accused both Jews and Christians of ritual murder as early as at least the first century CE. Notably, the Jewish writer Titus Flavius Josephus (lived c. 37 – c. 100 CE) defends Jewish people against the accusation of supposedly ritually murdering adult Greeks in his Against Apion 2.89–102.
The Christian apologist Marcus Minucius Felix, who lived in around the early third century CE, wrote a philosophical dialogue in Latin titled Octavius, in which a Christian man named Octavius Ianuarius defends his religion against the accusations of a pagan named Caecilius Natalis. In chapter nine of the dialogue, Caecilius claims that the initiation ceremony to become a Christian involves ritually murdering a human infant, drinking its blood, cutting it to pieces, and eating its flesh. He declares, as translated by Alexander Roberts:
“Now the story about the initiation of young novices is as much to be detested as it is well known. An infant covered over with meal, that it may deceive the unwary, is placed before him who is to be stained with their rites: this infant is slain by the young pupil, who has been urged on as if to harmless blows on the surface of the meal, with dark and secret wounds. Thirstily — O horror!— they lick up its blood; eagerly they divide its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together; with this consciousness of wickedness they are covenanted to mutual silence. Such sacred rites as these are more foul than any sacrileges.”
The canard that Christians practiced infant sacrifice and cannibalism seems to have been quite widespread in the Roman Empire, since many other early Christian apologetic authors aside from just Minucius Felix feel the need to defend Christians from this accusation.
The canard most likely arises from a misunderstanding of the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, in which Christians consume the “blood” and the “body” of Jesus in the form of wine and bread respectively. Some pagans may have heard about this ritual and, not fully understanding it, assumed that Christians literally practiced ritual cannibalism.
ABOVE: Fresco from the Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter in Rome, dating to the fourth century CE, depicting early Christians having an agape feast
After Christians became the dominant religious group in the Roman Empire, however, they began to accuse Jewish people of ritually murdering children in exactly the same way that Roman pagans had previously accused them. The Christian historian Sokrates Scholastikos (lived c. 380 – after c. 439 CE) tells one of the earliest known Christian stories of Jewish blood libel in his Ecclesiastical History 7.16. He writes, as translated by A. C. Zenos:
“Soon afterwards the Jews renewed their malevolent and impious practices against the Christians, and drew down upon themselves deserved punishment. At a place named Inmestar, situated between Chalkis and Antioch in Syria, the Jews were amusing themselves in their usual way with a variety of sports.”
“In this way they indulged in many absurdities, and at length impelled by drunkenness they were guilty of scoffing at Christians and even Christ himself; and in derision of the cross and those who put their trust in the Crucified One, they seized a Christian boy, and having bound him to a cross, began to laugh and sneer at him.”
“But in a little while becoming so transported with fury, they scourged the child until he died under their hands. This conduct occasioned a sharp conflict between them and the Christians; and as soon as the emperors were informed of the circumstance, they issued orders to the governor of the province to find out and punish the delinquents. And thus the Jewish inhabitants of this place paid the penalty for the wickedness they had committed in their impious sport.”
Stories about Jewish people supposedly abducting and ritually sacrificing innocent Christian children became practically ubiquitous and widely believed among Christians in western Europe from the twelfth century CE onwards. Late medieval Christians even began to venerate young boys whom the Jews supposedly murdered as saints and martyrs. The most famous of these late medieval boy saints include Saint Simon of Trent, Saint William of Norwich, and Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.
The Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (lived early 1340s – 1400) even includes a story about Jewish people murdering a Christian child in his famous work The Canterbury Tales as “The Prioress’s Tale.” These stories spawned dozens of violent pogroms at various points across Europe in which Christians brutally massacred Jewish people in large numbers.
Late medieval stories of blood libel typically claim that Jewish people need to harvest the blood of Christian children for some nefarious purpose, although what this purpose supposedly is varies. These stories also sometimes fixate on what Jewish people would supposedly do to Christian boys’ penises, with some stories claiming that they would ritually circumcise or castrate the boys before they sacrificed them. (You can see this illustrated in the antisemitic woodcut from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle shown below.)
ABOVE: Antisemitic woodcut illustration for the Nuremberg Chronicle, dating to the year 1493, depicting Jewish men ritually mutilating and murdering the Christian boy Simon of Trent
Stories like this were still in widespread circulation throughout much of the twentieth century. The Nazis naturally exploited these stories. The Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher founded the tabloid-format propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer in 1923. The paper was virulently antisemitic, even by literal Nazi standards, and routinely published fabricated stories about Jewish people supposedly mutilating, sexually molesting, and ritually sacrificing Gentile children in order to stoke public outrage against Jewish people and encourage public support for mass genocide against them.
It also so happens that Lily Cade directly invokes the idea of sacrificing children multiple times throughout her screed “Where Are These Children’s Mothers?” In the context of claiming that all trans women are pedophiles, Cade claims that trans women sacrifice “the souls of children” and describes them as “cutting [children] apart.” She writes:
“A pedophile is someone who sacrifices the souls of children to feed his shadow self. A pedophile f***s kids. A pedophile believes the validation of his monstrous sexual fetish is worth the reap of thousands upon thousands of your little girls and your little boys, your daughters, your sons, your babies, generations of your children, bred now for it, their minds warped from birth, their deep animal truths denied. These tr***y freaks are experimenting on your children and cutting them apart in full view of the public and you stand by and let it happen because you are worried they will call you out for being afraid of them.”
Later, she metaphorically accuses the parents of transgender people of ritually sacrificing their own children out of pity for trans women:
“You have sacrificed your children’s futures on the altar of that pity.”
In her later screed “Dead Whores Tell No Lies,” Cade claims on four separate occasions that the trans women and the “men in power” are addicted to “the blood of virgins”—a claim which seems to be in line with the age-old antisemitic canard about Jewish people supposedly needing to harvest the blood of children.
Whether she knows it or not, Cade is clearly using the imagery of blood libel.
ABOVE: Fifteenth-century painting depicting Jewish men crucifying and murdering the Christian child William of Norwich, as described in one of the most widely circulated late medieval tales of blood libel
Leaving aside the blatant blood libel rhetoric, Cade’s assertions about trans women “cutting [children] apart” seem to be rooted in the entirely false misconception that trans people and trans allies are advocating for young children to be given sex reassignment surgeries. This is a talking point that TERFs and other transphobes are constantly repeating, even though there is simply no truth behind it.
As I previously addressed in my article last year in response to Camille Paglia, no one is performing any kind of sex reassignment surgery on young transgender children, nor is anyone that I know of seriously advocating for young transgender children to be given such surgeries. In fact, giving sex reassignment surgery to underage children violates all the medical codes of ethics that have been established by groups like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
Medical codes of ethics state that pre-pubescent transgender children should not be given any form of medical intervention whatsoever; this means no hormone treatments and no surgeries. Instead, medical codes of ethics hold that pre-pubescent transgender children should merely be allowed to socially transition, meaning they should be allowed to adopt new names, new clothes, and new pronouns to match the gender they identify with, if they desire to do so.
Transgender children entering pubescence may be prescribed puberty blockers, which merely delay puberty. Puberty blockers do not cause any permanent changes to the body and they have already been widely used for decades to treat cisgender children who begin puberty too early.
The reason why a physician may prescribe a pubescent transgender child with puberty blockers is to give them more options when they are older. If the person decides that they aren’t really trans and they want to go back to living as their assigned gender, they can simply stop taking the puberty blockers and go through puberty naturally just like other cisgender teenagers, only a little bit later than some of them. On the other hand, if the person continues to desire to transition, puberty blockers can spare them the dysphoria and struggle of having to deal with secondary sex characteristics of their assigned sex, which are often the greatest source of discomfort for adult trans people.
It is only once a person reaches older adolescence and, even then, only with parental consent that they can begin cross-sex hormone treatment. If they do start taking cross-sex hormones, the hormones take a fairly long time before they start having noticeable effects and, if the person changes their mind, they can stop taking them. Some of the effects of cross-sex hormones that take longer to develop are permanent, including breast growth for trans women and voice deepening and facial hair for trans men. Many of the effects, however, will eventually go away once the person stops taking the hormones.
Under the international standards, a young transgender person is generally not allowed to receive any kind of gender-affirming surgeries until they are at least eighteen years old (which is the age of majority in most jurisdictions). They are also expected to have lived openly as their gender identity and taken cross-sex hormone therapy for at least one year before having surgery.
The only trans person that I am currently aware of who received sex reassignment surgery before the age of eighteen is the German pop singer Kim Petras, who adamantly identified as a girl from the age of two and went on a two-year media campaign starting when she was fourteen to get special permission to receive sex reassignment surgery before eighteen. She eventually received special permission to have it when she was sixteen years old, after she was evaluated by the head of the Frankfurt Hospital psychiatric unit.
Petras, however, was an exceptional case. There may be a few other trans people like her out there who managed to get special permission to have sex reassignment surgery a year or two before they turned eighteen, but the norm is very much that trans people cannot have any kind of surgery before they turn eighteen.
ABOVE: Photograph of Kim Petras, who had to get special permission to receive sex reassignment surgery at the exceptionally young age of sixteen
Unfortunately, there actually are surgeons out there who are performing medically unnecessary, nonconsensual sex reassignment surgeries on underage children—but they aren’t doing those surgeries on transgender children; instead, they’re doing them on intersex children.
When an infant is born with genitalia that do not look conventionally “male” or conventionally “female,” it is routine for surgeons to perform surgery on the infant, without the infant having any ability to give or withhold consent, to make their genitals look conventionally “male” or “female.” In some cases, these surgeries actually involve removing the intersex infant’s working gonads, thereby unnecessarily forcing the person to take hormone replacement therapy for the rest of their life without them having any say in the matter.
Intersex rights activists have been fighting for a long time to get surgeons to stop performing these kinds of surgeries on infants and young children and instead allow intersex children to grow up and decide for themselves when they are old enough what they want to do with their genitals. If you don’t like the idea of surgeons performing nonconsensual sex reassignment surgeries on children, then you should be the fiercest advocate for intersex rights in the world.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of the people promoting unfounded moral panic about transgender children supposedly getting sex reassignment surgeries either ignore or outright support surgeons performing sex reassignment surgeries on intersex babies, because they don’t actually care about protecting children from medically unnecessary genital surgeries. They are only pretending to care as an excuse to attack trans people and claim that the imaginary, sinister-sounding “trans agenda” has gone “too far” so that they can strip rights away from trans people.
The notion of an international transgender conspiracy to harm women
Blood libel is not the only antisemitic trope that Lily Cade invokes in her various screeds. Just as antisemites have long asserted that Jewish people in general (but especially Jewish men) are a threat to children, they are also similarly obsessed with the idea that Jewish men are a threat to Gentile women.
Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer also published countless stories about Jewish men supposedly raping, sexually molesting, degrading, assaulting, and morally corrupting Gentile women. Most of these stories were, of course, totally fabricated, but Der Stürmer was also swift to cherry-pick stories about real incidents, exaggerate them, and falsely present them as evidence that Jewish men are naturally dangerous sexual predators.
Meanwhile, another very old and very widespread antisemitic canard is the claim that Jewish people, despite being supposedly racially inferior and making up a small minority of the overall population, have somehow secretly infiltrated all the institutions of power and are somehow controlling society from behind the scenes for their own nefarious ends.
This often manifests through elaborate and totally unfounded antisemitic conspiracy theories claiming that some kind of international Jewish cabal secretly controls all the banks, the media, and world governments. These are often intertwined with conspiracy theories about the Freemasons and the Illuminati (which I wrote about in this article I published in June 2020).
The Nazis were absolutely obsessed with these kinds of conspiracies and they aggressively promoted the claim that their opponents were either part of the supposed international Jewish conspiracy or controlled by it. (See, for instance, the Nazi propaganda poster from 1938 shown below, which portrays the British prime minister Winston Churchill as a malevolent, Jewish-controlled octopus spreading his tentacles all over the world.) The Nazis’ belief in these antisemitic conspiracy theories is the primary reason why they committed the Holocaust.
ABOVE: Nazi propaganda poster from c. 1938 depicting Winston Churchill as a Jewish-controlled octopus spreading his evil tentacles all over the Earth
Disturbingly, in her screeds, Cade portrays trans women in very much the same manner that antisemites have long portrayed Jewish people, depicting them as a weak and inferior minority that is also somehow secretly controlling society from behind the scenes. She writes:
“Trans women and the shadow lords of the Algorithm control this attention. They are pedophiles, predators, monsters, shadow beasts, the literal devil. These men hate women. They are jealous panty wearing sick masturbating f***s who have infiltrated every level of your society with one goal: Degrade Women. Piss on the faces of your mothers, your daughters, the women who fought to get here. Piss on your right to say no. Cut your breasts off. Sew your pu**ies shut. Take the word mother how the f*** dare you let the actually fa****ts take the word mother from you.”
Later, she writes:
“The evil tr***ies are 1% of the population. They control The Matrix. They do not control real life.”
These are clear cases of her harnessing an antisemitic style of rhetoric to attack trans women. I also strongly suspect that she is using the phrase “shadow lords of the Algorithm” as an antisemitic dog whistle for Jewish people, but I’ll talk more about this later.
Association with Satan and purported smell of sulfur
The disturbing parallels between what Cade says about trans women and what antisemites have long said about Jewish people go even deeper.
Ever since antiquity, Christian antisemites have closely associated Jewish people with Satan. This association is rooted in the Christian scriptures. The Gospel of John 8:44 portrays Jesus as saying to a group of people who are referred to simply as “the Jews” that they are the children of Satan.
We can argue about whether the original author of the gospel intended this statement as a blanket condemnation of all Jewish people or merely a condemnation of this one particular group. Most medieval European Christians, however, interpreted this statement as applying—either literally or figuratively—to all Jewish people. Medieval European Christians told wild stories claiming that Jewish people secretly worship their supposed “father” Satan. Some stories even claimed that Jewish people secretly had horns and tails like Christians at the time believed the Devil had.
From the thirteenth century CE onwards, many European Christians also believed that Jewish people had a distinct smell, known as the foetor judaicus, which they often describe as the smell of sulfur, thereby associating Jews even more closely with Satan and Hell. Some of the earliest medieval authors to mention this supposed smell include Caesarius of Heisterbach (lived c. 1180 – c. 1240 CE) and Bertold of Regensberg (lived c. 1220 – 1272 CE). Both of these notions have persisted into modern times and are common in contemporary antisemitic discourse.
Cade applies all these claims (except the one about the horns and tails) to trans women. She describes trans women as “the literal devil” and “satanic tr***y freaks.” She even claims that trans women have “the smell of sulfur” and that their smell is so distinctive that even “the dogs and rats” can recognize it. This is, of course, exactly what antisemites have long claimed about Jewish people.
ABOVE: Seventeenth-century antisemitic woodcut showing Jewish men consorting with Satan and engaging in disgusting acts with a pig while Simon of Trent lies strapped to a table for the Jewish men to mutilate and murder
Cade’s invocation of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory
Thus, as we have seen, Cade takes all the standard tropes and stereotypes that antisemites have long attributed to Jewish people and applies them directly to trans women. I don’t think Cade does this deliberately; I think that antisemitic canards and conspiracy theories have just become so widely applied to transgender people among transphobes that they are simply part of the air transphobes breathe.
The ties to antisemitism don’t end here, though; Cade explicitly references the unfounded, debunked Neo-Nazi conspiracy theory of the so-called “Great Replacement” or “white genocide.” This conspiracy theory claims that there is a malevolent global conspiracy (which is nearly always stated or implied to be Jewish) that has secretly orchestrated all the social changes of the past seventy years or so from behind the scenes with the deliberate goal to destroy the white race (which, in the conspiracy theory, is assumed to be racially superior) and replace white people with racially inferior people of color.
Proponents of this conspiracy theory usually claim that Jewish people have deliberately made it socially acceptable for white people to be transgender so that they will become infertile and not produce racially pure white offspring. (Proponents of the conspiracy theory seem to completely ignore the fact that, according to a survey conducted in 2015 by the Williams Institute, a research institute at the UCLA School of Law, in the United States, Black and Hispanic or Latinx people are more likely to identify as transgender than white people.)
In any case, Cade seems to believe a version of this conspiracy theory. She writes:
“This is your Great Replacement, b****. These people castrate your kids. They sold them to Big Pharma to be castrated while you cheer them on for living their ‘truth.’”
Cade references the so-called “Great Replacement” again in her “Dead Whores Tell No Lies” screed, clarifying that she thinks trans women are orchestrating it. She writes:
“Behold, The Great Replacement! It’s already here. Not China. Not the Arabs. Tr***ies! The Matrix. Smartphones.”
Here Cade is explicitly taking a Neo-Nazi conspiracy theory and claiming that trans women are the ones who are really behind it. Unfortunately, as we shall see, I strongly suspect that she thinks that Jewish people are involved as well.
The “truly soulless money men”
In particular, Cade seems to think that Jewish people are somehow responsible for pushing the acceptance of transgender people. She says in her “Where Are These Children’s Mothers?” screed that she thinks the pharmaceutical industry is controlled by “truly soulless” pedophilic “money men” who are not transgender, but are secretly pushing for children to become transgender for the sake of profit. She writes:
“I have walked the world and watched this cancer stretch across it. They are making money from this soul reap, not just the evil pedophiles, but the even darker evil of the truly soulless money men who stand by and let it happen because they love money so much. The power structure knows this is horrible, they just don’t care. Your children who agree to be mutilated for the attention of the cult are weak.”
“The f*** do the money men care about a bunch of stupid mentally damaged children with endless scroll addictions? They f*** kids too. They have eyes like mine that truck no pity. You are sheep to them. They are laughing all the way to the bank. That’s why you’re not allowed to speak up. Money. Big Pharma. Look at this ‘science’. The Sacklers had ‘science’ too. Look at these people, the paragons of this paradigm, these mutilated side-show freaks, fake a** whiny victims holding you down in fear, these freak doctors chopping up your babies, do these people seem happy to you? Do they seem wise?”
These “truly soulless” pedophilic “money men” who are supposedly “laughing all the way to the bank” are clearly coded as Jewish, using age-old antisemitic stereotypes that associate Jewish people with literal soullessness, greed, money, and banks. Cade is either deliberately implying that these “money men” are Jewish or picking up on coded antisemitic conspiracy theories without realizing it.
I am not sure if it is a coincidence that, when talking about these sinister “money men,” Cade chooses to specifically and solely mention the Sackler family, the founders and owners of Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma. The Sacklers are genuinely odious people; they aggressively marketed the opioid drug OxyContin to doctors, knowing that it was highly addictive, in order to deliberately create an addiction epidemic and churn enormous profits. But there are a lot of terrible people like the Sacklers in the pharmaceutical industry. Cade could have chosen to mention any of them. It’s interesting that she chose only to mention the Sacklers—who just happen to be of Jewish ancestry.
ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons of an oxycodone molecule (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons of OxyContin, the branded form of oxycodone that Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed to doctors (right)
A clarification regarding transgender hormone replacement therapy
Now, just in case anyone thinks that, antisemitic coding aside, Cade might be making a decent point about the pharmaceutical industry having financial incentive to promote transgender hormone replacement therapy, allow me to clarify something: Although it is true that the pharmaceutical industry does make some money off transgender people, transgender hormone replacement therapy is not by any means a cash cow for them in the way that OxyContin was for Purdue Pharma.
In fact, the pharmaceutical industry does not make any drugs that are specifically intended for transgender hormone replacement therapy, because there’s simply no financial incentive for them to develop such drugs. Instead, transgender hormone replacement therapy is done entirely off-label using non-addictive drugs that are available in relatively cheap, generic forms and that are far more commonly prescribed for other purposes.
The main drugs that are currently used in feminizing hormone replacement therapy in the United States are:
- Estradiol, which is a naturally-occurring estrogen in humans. Every human with functioning gonads naturally produces it and it has important biological functions in people of all sexes, but adult people with functioning ovaries usually produce it in higher quantities than adult people with testes. As a medication, estradiol is an active ingredient in most hormonal birth controls and is commonly prescribed to cisgender women who suffer from low estradiol levels due to various reasons. It is commonly prescribed to help ease the symptoms of surgically-induced menopause in cisgender women who have had their ovaries removed due to cancer and the symptoms of natural menopause in older cisgender women.
- Spironolactone, which is a weak potassium-sparing diuretic that also has anti-androgenic properties, meaning it blocks male sex hormones, including testosterone. It is most commonly prescribed to patients with heart failure, liver scarring, or kidney disease to treat fluid build-up. It is also commonly prescribed to cisgender women to treat problems with acne and/or excessive body hair, which are often caused by unusually high testosterone levels.
Both of these drugs have been widely prescribed for far, far longer than OxyContin has been on the market and neither drug is known to be addictive. Estradiol first became available as a commercial drug in 1933. Spironolactone first became available as a commercial drug in 1959. They are so commonly prescribed that I suspect that every person reading this personally knows someone who has taken at least one of them at some point. If either drug had any significant risk of addiction, I think there would be reports of it by now.
The notion that the pharmaceutical industry is controlled by any kind of Jewish conspiracy is obviously ridiculous, but I do think it is true that pharmaceutical corporations—and capitalist corporations in general—do seek to maximize profit as much as possible regardless of morals or ethics. They do not, however, generally try to maximize profits by selling cheap, non-addictive, generic hormonal drugs that have been on the market for the better part of a century, since these are not the drugs that tend to bring in much profit. Instead, they make their bank off selling snazzy new opioid painkillers—like, you know, OxyContin.
Even if, for some bizarre reason, the pharmaceutical industry decided they wanted to focus all their marketing efforts into selling as much estradiol and spironolactone as possible, it would make no sense for them to do so by trying to increase the number of trans women, since trans women make up a relatively small and unprofitable fraction of the market for these drugs—and a fraction of the market that the pharmaceutical industry knows would be, at the very least, very difficult to grow.
Instead, they would focus on aggressively marketing estradiol-based birth control pills to cisgender women of reproductive age, aggressively marketing estradiol replacement therapy to older cisgender women who are going through menopause, and aggressively marketing spironolactone to cisgender women with acne and/or excessive body hair. That’s where the real market for these drugs lies.
Also, ironically, despite Lily Cade constantly claiming that trans women are disgusting, horny masturbators and sexual perverts, one of the earliest and most common effects of feminizing hormone therapy is a significant reduction in sex drive and loss of desire to masturbate. It is very common for trans women to report losing most or all of their former interest in sex and masturbation shortly after starting feminizing hormone therapy.
There’s nothing wrong with masturbation; it’s a perfectly normal and healthy activity. Factually speaking, though, it’s worth noting that trans women are, if anything, actually less likely to masturbate regularly than cisgender men.
ABOVE: Photograph of estradiol in pill form (left) and spironolactone (right), the two drugs that are most commonly used in feminizing hormone replacement therapy
Meanwhile, transgender men usually only take one medicine: testosterone, which is most commonly administered via intramuscular injection and, unlike estradiol, is not available in pill form in the United States. Testosterone, however, is much more commonly prescribed to cisgender men who, for whatever reason, have low testosterone. There is already an absolutely enormous market of selling testosterone supplements to cisgender men who are obsessed with testosterone levels and think they need more testosterone to increase their manliness.
If the pharmaceutical industry wanted to make bank selling testosterone, they wouldn’t try to increase the number of trans men, since trans men are a tiny fraction of the potential market that, once again, would very difficult for pharmaceutical companies to grow. Instead, pharmaceutical companies would go all-in trying to convince cisgender men that they aren’t manly enough and that they need to get their doctors to prescribe them testosterone to improve their manliness. They would probably be raking in billions of dollars a year if they did that, if they aren’t already doing it.
It also so happens that masculinizing hormone therapy has the exact opposite effect on sex drive from feminizing hormone therapy. While trans women often report experiencing a decrease in libido after starting estradiol and spironolactone, trans men often report experiencing a significant increase in libido after starting testosterone. Thus, if you’re going to try to attack anyone in the trans community by calling them horny masturbators, it would make more sense to accuse trans men, rather than trans women.
ABOVE: Diagram from Wikimedia Commons of a testosterone molecule (left) and photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a vial of testosterone meant for intramuscular injection (right)
The inevitable conclusion: mass genocide
Cade concludes her screed “Where Are These Children’s Mothers?” by advocating the total extermination of all transgender women from the face of the earth, listing specific, prominent trans women by name and imploring her readers to “lynch” them so that (supposedly) no person will ever dare to transition again. She declares:
“Speak truth to power. Trans women are men. They know they are men. If these men can’t slit the throats of these vile personas in public, admit what they have done, take off the dress, look with abject shame upon the affront to God and nature they have wrought in the service of their masturbatory fantasies, apologize for the children they have hurt with their lies and their drugs and their grooming, apologize for the incarcerated women they have fed to rapist monsters, apologize for the lesbian spaces they have desecrated, and devote the rest of their lives to repairing the damage they have done, if you left it up to me, I’d execute every last one of them personally.”
“Cancel the ever living f*** out of this. Cancel this so hard that no man dare walk the path of the trans woman in public ever again! Enough is enough. Lynch Kaitlyn! Lynch the ‘Sisters’ Wachowski! Lynch Laurel Hubbard! Lynch Fallon Fox! Make these men stand up as the men you all know they are and hold them accountable for their shame. Your fear of the truth has shoveled thousands of children down the hole in Buffalo Bill’s basement so he can harvest them for their skins. Enough is Enough.”
Notice that she cites Buffalo Buff as evidence of what transgender people are supposedly like—despite the fact that Buffalo Bill is a fictional character from the 1991 psychological horror film Silence of the Lambs and, as I noted in my previous article about Dave Chappelle from only a few weeks ago, the actual film itself explicitly and very clearly states that he is not transgender.
Alas, this is not the only time Cade references Buffalo Bill in her screeds. She seems to interpret the fictional character Buffalo Bill as an accurate representation of what real trans women are like. This perfectly illustrates my point in my previous article about how negative media portrayals of people whom audiences will interpret as transgender—even fictional characters who are explicitly stated not to be transgender!—influence people’s real-world perceptions of trans people and can encourage violence.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the fictional character Buffalo Bill, played by Ted Levine in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs
Indeed, everything Cade says in her various screeds is exactly the kind of rhetoric that fuels real-world violence against transgender people. According to the Williams Institute, transgender people are over four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cisgender people overall.
Unfortunately, right now, it seems that violent crimes against transgender and gender-nonconforming people are only growing more and more frequent. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), so far, in 2021 alone, at least forty-five transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been murdered in the United States, meaning more transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been murdered in 2021 than any previous year on record. The year on record that previously had the highest number of murders was 2020.
This violence also does not affect all transgender and gender-nonconforming people equally; the vast majority of the transgender and gender-nonconforming people who have been murdered are trans women of color who are predominantly from lower- and working-class backgrounds. White trans people and trans people from middle- and upper-class backgrounds are less likely to be victims of violence.
The ultimate takeaway from all this should be that different kinds of bigotry are not isolated from each other. They are intricately interrelated. One form of bigotry is often directly reinforced and influenced by other forms of bigotry. Thus, when media outlets like the BBC choose to platform transphobia, transphobia isn’t the only form of bigotry they are promoting; they’re also inadvertently promoting all the other forms of bigotry that are reinforced and influenced by transphobia.
You know you’re in for a ride when at the beginning of the article Spencer lists the worst things done or thought by humankind.
I don’t normally give content warnings, but, this time, I felt the warning was necessary, since I talk about so many really horrible and disturbing things, including things that someone might not expect just from reading the title of the article.
Such a great article! Although it’s disturbing to me (as it is to you) to read about so much hate, I appreciate you for shining a light on the problem. I learned a lot (as I always do) from your work. I never would have guessed there was such a strong connection between anti-Semitism and hatred of LGBTQ+ people. Real life is stranger than fiction.
I think that, of all the articles I have ever published on this blog, this is the one that I have least enjoyed writing. Nonetheless, I am glad that I wrote it because I think it’s really important to point out this stuff.
The link between anti-Semitism and hatred of LGBTQ+ people probably would have surprised me too if I hadn’t learned about it gradually in bits and pieces at a time.
I, on the other hand, enjoyed reading the article a lot, it was very intense and led me to a quite long surfing session on relevant subjects. I have to say though i was just amazed by Lily Cade’s writing.
What do you mean by “amazed”? Do you mean it in a good way, or in a bad way? Do you mean that you are amazed by the style of the writing, or by the content?
I have to ask, because, when someone says that they are “amazed” by something, that usually implies that they have a positive opinion of it.
I was amazed by the style of the writing
Eh, personally, I think the style of the writing is terrible.
For one thing, at least half of everything she writes in her screeds is composed of nothing but profanity, slurs, and other degrading insults, generally of a sexual and/or scatological nature. She constantly repeats herself, returning to the same insane assertions over and over again, as though she was writing faster than she could think and she felt she needed to say things, so she just kept saying the same things over and over in slightly different wording. I did not quote most of her rambling repetitions in my article above, which may inadvertently make her writing seem more coherent than it really is.
Occasionally, she writes as though she thinks she is composing high oratory, but yet her “oratory” in most cases makes little sense. For instance, at many different points, she is just repeating the same bland rhetorical question “Where are the . . . ?” over and over again, only swapping out seemingly random groups of people.
In any case, even if her writing were the finest, most polished, Ciceronian oratory, her message is still one of hatred and mass genocide. No amount of silver-tongued rhetoric could ever make the things she advocates acceptable.
Wow. First I want to say how sorry I am that you have to wade in these waters so the rest of us can be aware of how insidious (and long-lived) some of these ideas can be. I’m sorry you had to go through getting those comments on your YouTube appearances. I hope you have some sources of support that can help you integrate these difficult events.
This was hard for me to read — and it was a wake up call. (I guess maybe I’m the one who needs integrating!) I have trans family members and this reminds me what pressures they are under. I also have friends who repeat (in a milder version than Lily Cade’s) some of the canards or fears they have about the emergence of trans people and issues. I’ve used your Dave Chappelle article to try to help them understand.
So thank you. This most recent article has helped be more aware of my own ignorance and given me facts I can use when talking to those who are frightened/triggered/slipping into bigotry over issues of difference.
1. To the reader labeling Cade as a ‘good writer’, It’s concerning to me that you can read an article with the kind of information this article contains & your only comment is to compliment a horrific, antisemitic transphobic person. The fact that Cade is actually NOT a fabulous writer in the first place is unimportant ultimately. The content of her writing is what you should focus on because that’s exactly the kind of hateful, disturbing rhetoric that leads to the fear based violence transgender people experience at a despicable rate.
2. Spencer McDaniel, however is not only a talented writer & journalist, but has written something that will HELP people, not cause more hate & harm. *its antisemitism NO HYPEN though for future publications please. 🙏🏽
Thank you so much! I really appreciate this comment.
I don’t consider myself a “journalist.” I sometimes write about current events, but I don’t do any kind of reporting, interviews, original contemporary research, or any of the other things journalists are supposed to do. I think it would be more accurate to call me a “historian” and an “essayist,” because I do historical research and I write essays.
I do very much hope that this article helps people, but I doubt it will make much of a difference on anything. I’m just doing what I can.
I’m not actually sure why I write “anti-Semitism” instead of “antisemitism.” I’ve just kind of always written it that way and so it seems normal to me. I thought I started writing it that way years ago because that was how Wikipedia spelled it, but I just checked and they actually spell it “antisemitism.”
Hello Spencer,
Long-time reader but first-time commenter. I wanted to thank you for this article. It was… enlightening. Especially the part about antisemitism.
However, there’s one thing I feel the need to mention: that feminism lays the groundwork for this bigotry. The notion that femininity = weakness and masculinity = strength is consistent with patriarchy theory and women’s status as marginalized and oppressed. Also, Cade’s demands that men protect cisgender women veers close to male allyship. Finally, the belief that transwomen and gay and bisexual men are all pedophiles goes well with other, feminist-generated ideas about male sexuality: that they objectify people (male gaze theory), and feel owed sex (male sexual entitlement) and that society normalizes their nonconsensual sex acts (rape culture).
TERFs never co-opted feminism; they’re an extension of it. And it all frames masculinity negatively – thus making it misandry, not misogyny.
But that’s just my take.
I think you’re egregiously misinterpreting feminism here.
There is an enormous difference between benevolent sexism, which claims that all women are inherently weak and in need of constant male protection, and feminism, which holds (correctly) that women are socially disadvantaged in our present society as a result of patriarchy and that men should be allies in supporting women’s liberation and empowerment.
If someone says that women are inherently weak and need men to protect them, then they are reinforcing patriarchy by portraying female weakness as the problem and male guardianship over women (which puts men in a position of power over women) as the solution. If, on the other hand, someone says that patriarchy oppresses women and that men should be allies in supporting women’s liberation, then they are attacking patriarchy by interpreting patriarchy as the problem and its abolition as the solution. These are diametrically opposed things.
Another thing you have to keep in mind is that “feminism” isn’t just one thing; it has many different versions and interpretations, some of which are indeed quite bigoted against various marginalized groups and some of which are not. There have undoubtedly been strains of prejudice against gay and bisexual men and transgender people throughout many forms of feminism from its very inception, but feminism is not responsible for inventing these prejudices, nor are these prejudices integral to it; it has merely absorbed prejudices that are ubiquitous in the society around it. These prejudices are generally prominent in first- and second-wave feminism. Most fourth-wave feminists in the twenty-first century, however, are intersectional and therefore stand in opposition to prejudice against gay and bisexual men and transgender people.
Men objectifying women, men believing that women “owe” them sex, and rape culture are all very real problems that exist in our society. If you don’t believe that these problems really exist, you might want to pay a little bit more attention to the men around you and in the news. For instance, if you want examples of men who think that women owe them sex just because they are men, it is not hard to find them. So-called “incels” or “involuntary celibates” are an extreme example of this; they think that women owe them sex and they hate women for not having sex with them.
The term “rape culture” does not mean that mainstream society necessarily normalizes, encourages, or glorifies rape. Instead, it more correctly refers to aspects of the broader culture and subcultures within it that normalize, encourage, or glorify rape. If you want examples of rape culture, just look at things like Donald Trump bragging to Billy Bush in the Access Hollywood tape about how he likes to “grab ’em by the pussy,” or look at old James Bond movies in which Bond’s penchant for raping any woman he can get his hands on is just as much an aspect of his characterization as the moniker “007.” You can also look at the culture of many U.S. fraternities. For instance, in October 2010, new pledges to Yale University’s Delta Epsilon Kappa fraternity chapter marched through the residential part of Yale’s campus chanting phrases such as “No means yes! Yes means anal!”
This, of course, does not mean that all men necessarily objectify women, believe that women owe them sex, and normalize rape—but these behaviors are common enough and normalized enough among men that they are problems that do need to be addressed.
With regard to TERFs being an “extension” of feminism, you’re not entirely wrong. Many (perhaps even most) second-wave feminists were/are TERFs, including Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Camille Paglia, Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, Sheila Jeffreys, Robin Morgan, et cetera. Gloria Steinem expressed many TERFy opinions back in the 1970s, but she has since changed her views and apologized. J. K. Rowling also has second-wave feminist sympathies. Once again, though, fourth-wave feminists in the twenty-first century have generally rejected TERFs and transphobia and are usually trans allies (or, in many cases, trans people themselves).
To be very clear, I consider myself a feminist, but I am very strongly opposed to “feminism” of the TERF variety.
Thank you for adressing my previous argument, Spencer. It’s always nice when someone’s willing to explain things. But with all due respect, I don’t think I’ve misrepresented feminism. As you said, “it has many different versions and interpretations”. We even agree (to a degree) that TERFs are extensions of the second-wave. Moreover, theory and practice aren’t always the same and most feminists (that I’ve… endured) don’t make the distinctions you do regarding rape culture, allyship, etc. So while my characterization of feminism and feminists don’t apply to you, it’s not wrong either.
P.S. Good luck with your studies. I think you’ll be a great classicist.