To Dave Rubin and Abigail Shrier: A letter of thanks

Today, I watched the Rubin Report interview with Abigail Shrier. I was about halfway through typing up a Twitter thread about it when I decided breaking it up into 280-character segments just wasn’t a sufficient way to get my point across. The interview was about the epidemic of false gender dysphoria and transsexualism with dangerously high rates of regret in teenage girls. There are two huge nerves that it struck in me, and the biggest is that when I was a teenager, I was that girl.

I discovered I was sexually attracted to women when I was eleven, perhaps twelve years old. Living in Arkansas at the time (this was the early 2000s), this was basically a death sentence for my social life, at a time when I was most desperate for acceptance among my friends and classmates. In all honesty, there was a certain amount of … I hesitate to call it self-hatred, I don’t want to believe I ever sunk that low, but I was anxious and bitter about the changes I was going through, about these two lumps growing on my chest, about the abdominal cramps I would get every month, and of course my inexplicable fascination with something I was sure everyone around me thought was weird at best, and Satan’s very own influence at worst. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have parents who didn’t hold those beliefs (at least, not as strongly, as Mom is Episcopalian, as is Dad, after converting from secular Judaism), and supported me fully. I can’t possibly be grateful enough to them for it.

The thing is, if I were eleven or twelve today, I can see how easily I would’ve been drawn into this movement, and it frightens me just a little, but it’s that sort of relieved fear, like I just dodged a bullet, the fear of something that would never have happened. I’ve come to recognize and accept that both mentally and emotionally, I’m actually rather masculine. I’ve had no problems presenting as a male under the guise of anonymity when it suits me. I’m combative, argumentative, competitive. I concern myself with things, rather than people. When examining events, situations, or possibilities, I have to go back in after the fact to add the human element to my decisions, to manually consider others’ feelings, when to most women, it seems to come as naturally as breathing. And indeed, through middle and high school, I was a total tomboy, something of a loner, a nerd with only nerd friends because to deal with the social side of it, I retreated into an obsession over the video games, anime, manga, and the proto-internet, which before had merely been things I enjoyed.

I never really found balance until the mid-2010s. That was when Progressivism’s facade cracked. I had to really look at myself and question who I was, and what I was doing. In doing so, I dodged that bullet I talked about earlier. I think there’s a certain amount of internalized oppression inherent in social justice activism, and in effect, I simply realized it wasn’t healthy for me, and discarded it. I learned to love myself as a woman — that it was okay to be one. But not only that, I realized it was okay for me to not act very feminine and still be a woman. I took my biggest weakness, and made it my strength. It is, so far, the greatest personal victory of my life. I started wearing skirts again, dropped my hatred for the color pink, wore makeup (not a whole lot, though, I’m by no means an expert!) and I felt empowered for it — all the more so because I’d done it myself; it was my own decision. I found equilibrium between my femininity and masculinity. And this isn’t to say that that equilibrium wouldn’t be vastly different in other women! But if I were eleven or twelve today, with how tomboyish I was, how obstinately masculine I presented… there’s no doubt in my mind that the idea of transition would have been an irresistible lure. All those things Abigail talked about in the interview, I think they would have been the perfect storm for me. I have, especially in my teenage years, fantasized about being a man. What it would be like, how people would treat me, how I would live. Today it’s little more than a fleeting thought experiment, but…

To this day, I still wish I could be a futanari, or what the Japanese call a hermaphrodite; specifically, an otherwise biological female… with a penis. But the futanari fetish is an interesting one, and certainly polarizing even within its own community, with some believing it means / should mean only male-to-female trans people, others that it should only mean true hermaphroditism, with varying degrees to which male-ness and female-ness should be expressed or actualized in genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. (Traps/femboys are an adjacent fetish.) For whatever reason, the idea of having a dick, if only to find out what sex is like with it, appeals to me; but I would never do it if it meant I had to become a man. This would not have been true some fifteen-odd years ago. That desire would have been channeled into a decision — a transition — I’m almost certain I would’ve regretted for the rest of my life.

So, yeah. There, but for a little self-respect, go I.

Oh, yeah, the other nerve. That was from near the end of the interview, where you two talked about how the persecution of lesbianism has shifted from Right to Left. Honestly? I have no problem with trans women. Many of them, I consider friends, and honestly hope they see me the same way. But the activists are obnoxious, and all the more abusive because they believe they’re doing the right thing by coming down on those of us who just aren’t attracted to anything without a real, natural pussy. All trans people are, of course, valid, but there’s such a thing as taking it too far. I didn’t know that part about a trans convict being moved to a women’s prison. But TBH, I’ve already gone deep on this topic here, here, here (NSFW!!), here, and here.

I honestly don’t know how to end this, so again, thank you, to both Dave Rubin and Abigail Shrier for this unexpectedly hard-hitting interview.