Tag Archives: lesbian history

Genderqueering the Dead

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by Carrie-Anne Brownian

Carrie-Anne is a thirtysomething historical novelist, historian, and lover of many things from bygone eras (except for the sexism, racism, and homophobia). She can be found at Welcome to My Magick Theatre, where she primarily blogs about writing, historical topics, names, silent and early sound cinema, and classic rock and pop; and at Onomastics Outside the Box, where she blogs about names and naming-related issues. Her only “child,” an 18-year-old spider plant named Kalanit, has thankfully never had any issues with her gender identity!

Carrie-Anne has written two other pieces for 4thWaveNow: “The boy with no penis” (about the case of David Reimer) and “Transing the dead,” a companion piece to this article.

She can be found on Twitter @

As trans activists have demonstrated many a time, propagating their ideology takes precedence over accurately representing history. They have a long track record of posthumously declaring famously gender-defiant people (many of them LGB)  to be trans, despite a complete lack of evidence (from either primary or secondary sources) to support such an extraordinary claim. Many have also declared old works of literature about LGB people, and women who posed as men to live freer lives and have more opportunities, to be part of a trans canon. Seeing as the modern-day trans umbrella is so broad and vague, trans activists feel confident in including anyone who wasn’t or isn’t one million percent a collection of rigid stereotypes.

Enter the latest trend in this misrepresentation of history: Genderqueering the dead.

In December, Katie Byford, a photographer, filmmaker, and poet, started a Twitter thread about nineteenth century female photographers, such as Eveleen Myers, Emma Barton, Constance Fox Talbot, Minna Keene, and Clementina Hawarden. After this wonderful celebration of female pioneers in photography, Ms. Byford made another thread, this one holding up Claude Cahun, Marianne Breslauer, Florence Henri, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach as “transfemale,” “genderqueer,” “trans,” and “queer.”

These lesbians were referred to with “they” pronouns, in spite of never having claimed to be anything but women, and no other evidence pointing to a trans identity. Like many other lesbians and gender-defiant women throughout history, they had short hair, wore stereotypical men’s clothes, and shunned the role of dainty little ladies immersed in all things domestic and stereotypically feminine.

Before these women’s true stories are presented, let’s look at the history of the term “genderqueer,” and the concept of claiming to be neither male nor female.

According to anthropologist April Scarlette Callis, in “Bisexual, pansexual, queer: Non-binary identities and the sexual borderlands,” people only began “identifying” as homosexual in the nineteenth century, when sexuality was medicalized in the wake of modern scientific developments and the decreased influence of religion. She quotes George Chauncey, a Yale history professor, as saying that gender roles, not sexual partners, were used to determine sexual orientation in the early twentieth century. E.g., only butch lesbians and effeminate gay men had labels attached to themselves, not lesbians and gay men who had less gender-defiant style and behavior. Only in the mid-twentieth century were people officially labeled homosexual or heterosexual.

The first recorded use of the word “genderqueer” is in an article from August 1995 by Riki Anne Wilchins, published in In Your Face: Political Activism Against Gender Oppression. Ms. Wilchins used this word to describe those with unnamed or complex gender expressions. In her 1997 autobiography, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, she identified herself as genderqueer.

In June 2001, in The Village Voice, E.J. Graff used the word in “My Trans Problem,” in which she pondered whether trans people belong in the LGB movement:

“Many of us who are homoqueer, or queer in our sexual desires, are also at least a little genderqueer—more butch or sissy than we’re supposed to be…For lesbians as well, genderqueer (a masculine woman) has at times trumped homoqueer (a woman who has sex with a woman) as the defining stigmata…As many gender-passable homos win a place at the Thanksgiving table, our genderqueered sibs are still beaten, fired, harassed, and murdered not for the sex they have but for the sex they appear to be.”

Also in 2001, “GenderQueer Revolution” and “United Genders of the Universe” were founded to fill a perceived gap in the representation and celebration of people who considered themselves neither male nor female. In 2002, the term went mainstream with the publication of GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, a collection of thirty-eight essays edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Anne Wilchins. Ever since, usage of the term and identification with the concept have been steadily rising.

While Ms. Wilchins may have had sincere intentions and a specific identity in mind when she coined the word, as had those who were early adapters of the concept, the explosion of identity politics, queer theory, and postmodernism over the past 5–10 years have rendered it as meaningless and catch-all as “queer.” Today, many consider “genderqueer” an umbrella term which includes identities such as “non-binary,” “demigender,” “trigender,” “bigender,” “agender,” “neutrois,” and “pangender.” Some people involved in identity politics even consider the word offensive and archaic nowadays, and have supplanted it with “non-binary.”

Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, Self-Portraits Reflected in a Mirror, ca. 1920, Jersey Heritage Collections.

Thus, this concept didn’t exist when the abovementioned female photographers were alive. Claude Cahun, the first cited, was born as Lucie Renée Mathilde Schwob in 1894, and adopted the unisex name Claude sometime between 1917 and 1919. She experimented with several different surnames before settling on Cahun. Historically, it’s hardly been uncommon for lesbians to adopt male names, but this did not mean they were trans men or “genderqueer.”

In 1909, at age fifteen, she met seventeen-year-old Suzanne Alberte Malherbe, who later adopted her own new name, Marcel Moore. They quickly became friends, creative partners, and lesbian partners. In 1917, Moore’s widowed mother married Cahun’s divorced father, making them stepsisters. Their creative partnership may have diverted attention from their lesbian relationship. Both were active in the anti-Nazi resistance movement on the island of Jersey during World War II, and were imprisoned and sentenced to death after being discovered. They were saved by the island’s 1945 liberation (“Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,” Tirza True Latimer).

Claude Cahun Jersey Heritage Collection

Cahun described Moore as l’autre moi (the other me), and they remained partnered until Cahun’s death in 1954. After Moore’s 1972 suicide, she was buried next to her lifelong partner at St. Brelade’s Church on the island of Jersey. Over the course of their lifetimes, neither claimed to be anything but women; they were gender-defiant lesbians.

The second photographer to be posthumously genderqueered was Florence Henri, born in 1893. Though she was a very prolific, well-known avant-garde photographer in her heyday, her name is largely unknown today. “Meet Florence Henri, The Under-Acknowledged Queen Of Surrealist Photography,” a Huffington Post article by Priscilla Frank, claims she “toyed with gender binaries, using her personal appearance to emphasize the performative nature of gender.”

Florence Henri © Centre Pompidou, Paris

Henri’s 1928 self-portrait is cited as an example of this, because it features herself “dolled up almost as if in drag” (i.e., short hair and a so-called man’s shirt), and two silver balls reflected against a mirror, “equivocal symbols of both testicles and breasts.” Posthumously identifying Henri as “genderqueer” on account of this is a huge stretch. She was bisexual and at times adopted a tomboyish, androgynous style. She never claimed to be anything but female!


Marianne Breslauer Estate/Fotostiftung Schweiz, 2009

The third and fourth photographers cited, Marianne Breslauer and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, were close friends, though not romantic partners. While Schwarzenbach was a lesbian (who entered into a lavender marriage of convenience with bisexual Achille-Claude Clarac in 1935), Breslauer appears to have been heterosexual. Breslauer was born in 1909, and rose to become one of the leading photographers of the Weimar Republic. Her anti-fascist activism and Jewish background eventually drove her out of her native Germany. After World War II, she and her husband became art dealers (“Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s”).

Schwarzenbach was born in 1908, and dressed and acted “like a boy” from a very young age. She also adopted the name Fritz. Neither of her parents ever forced her to adopt a more stereotypically feminine role. Her own mother was also bisexual, and had a long-running affair with opera singer Emmy Krüger, as well as other women, which her father raised no objections to (“Swiss writer’s life was stranger than fiction,” Isobel Leybold-Johnson).

 

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, © Marianne Feilchenfeldt-Breslauer

Throughout her life, Schwarzenbach continued dressing and behaving “like a man,” and exclusively had relationships with other women. Many times, she was mistaken for a man. Her attempted suicide, not her personal style, caused a much greater scandal among her family and their conservative circle. Breslauer described her as “neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel.” She travelled all over Europe and Asia as a prolific photographer and journalist, and tragically died from a bicycle accident at age thirty-four (“Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s”).

On a related note, LGBTQ Nation and Ha’Aretz recently reported the discovery of alleged trans or “third gender” burials in a 3,000-year-old grave in Hansalu, Iran. This ancient city was almost continuously inhabited from the sixth millennium BCE till the third century of the Common Era. Among its claims to fame are the Golden Bowl of Hansalu and the Hansalu lovers, two male skeletons who seem to be embracing. The city was violently sacked and burnt around 800 CE, possibly by Urartians, which froze one of its layers in time, much like the eruption of Mount Vesuvius did to Pompeii. Thus, researchers have found a wealth of incredibly well-preserved artifacts, buildings, and skeletons (“Iran’s Pompeii: Astounding story of a massacre buried for millennia,” Catherine Brahic).

Biologically female skeletons were typically found with jewelry, needles, and garment pins, while biologically male skeletons were usually found with weapons, metal vessels, and armor. Simply because 20% of skeletons were discovered with objects associated with the opposite sex, or a mixture of objects, art historian Megan Cifarelli has presented this as evidence of “non-binary individuals” and “a third gender.”

Predictably, the Ha’Aretz article goes on to appropriate and misunderstand known “third genders,” such as India’s hijra and the Two-Spirits found in various Native American cultures. The evidence of such social categories doesn’t negate the reality of being male or female, nor does it have anything to do with post-modernist, queer, trans activist theory. On the contrary, they’re based upon a sex binary. People who don’t fit into either role find a place in these “third genders,” and thus are freed from the expectation of heterosexual marriage and sex, childbearing, having to wear certain clothes, accepting certain social and familial roles, and so forth. Most importantly, everyone around these people understands they’re still the biological sex they were born as.

Native Americans have repeatedly asked people to stop claiming to be Two-Spirit when they haven’t any Native American blood. Not only does this appropriate their culture, it doesn’t take into account how diverse Native American culture is. Not all tribes had/have Two-Spirits. For example, the Iroquois, who kept a much more extensive documentation of their people’s history and daily lives than many other tribes, never recorded Two-Spirits among their ranks. The Apache likewise have no records of them, though they were kind and respectful to Two-Spirits from other tribes (ibid).

Both the Apache and Iroquois had very egalitarian societies, in different ways. Apache adults typically had sex-segregated roles, but children were raised to do things associated with both sexes. Because their tribe was almost constantly at war with other tribes, it was essential to know how to do basic life tasks (e.g., sewing, cooking, hunting, construction) in the event of a sex imbalance either at home or in the trenches. Meanwhile, Iroquois women enjoyed great amounts of political power and authority. Hence, there was no need for Two-Spirits (ibid.).

One tribe that does have Two-Spirits is the Lakota Sioux. Their record of such a category extends as far back as their written history. They also had extremely sex-segregated roles from a very early age, and permitted polygyny. Lakota Two-Spirits were always men, never women. Men who didn’t conform to their tribe’s rigid rules about “proper” behavior were put in the camp with women and children, which didn’t enjoy as high a quality of life or social standing as the men’s camp (ibid.).

Another tribe with Two-Spirits, the Dene of Alberta, Canada, historically treated their women horribly. To give just one example, Dene women were forced to go hungry, if their husbands dictated it, during famines and food shortages. They were among the most mistreated, oppressed women among all North American tribes. Thus, the evidence makes it clear that progressive tribes had no need for Two-Spirits, while ones with the harshest, most rigidly-enforced sex roles required this social category as a way to deal with gay and gender-defiant men. In spite of not being regarded as “real men,” they still had the social power to opt out of manhood. Women weren’t allowed to opt out of womanhood. And again, none of these Two-Spirit men ever claimed to be women, nor were they seen as such (ibid.).

To get back to the topic of the grave, it seems more logical to conclude that the presence of stereotypically male or female objects with the opposite sex is evidence of gender-defiant individuals, possibly lesbians and gay men. If there were indeed a “third gender” in this society, it had nothing to do with modern-day views on the subject. It just goes to show that society may have had great acceptance towards non-conformity, so much so they buried these people with said objects. There also may have been other reasons they were buried with those objects; e.g., a soldier wanting to mend his uniform, both men’s and women’s clothes using garment pins, or women passing themselves off as men to fight in a war or rise to a more prominent social position.

The most recent paleoanthropological evidence reveals that our Neanderthal cousins had a very egalitarian society, with women as well as men hunting dangerous game face-to-face and taking equal part in all aspects of their daily lives, far more so than our own direct ancestors in the Homo sapiens sapiens line (The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story, Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse). Does that mean Neanderthals were all “genderqueer” themselves?

By declaring all these people “genderqueer,” part of a “third gender,” and automatically under the trans umbrella, young people who are gender-defiant themselves are being done a grave disservice. When they see no role models from history, in whichever field they may be passionate about (art, photography, music, writing, acting, science, medicine, mathematics, etc.), in addition to a dearth of gender-defiant examples in their own real lives or modern society, they’ll be more likely to believe they must be trans or “genderqueer” themselves. There are almost no available counterexamples to convince them otherwise — to help them see that it’s very possible to be a perfectly normal, happy woman or man who doesn’t behave like a walking, talking stereotype.

Youth in previous generations, not all that long ago, had high-profile gender-bending examples like Annie Lennox, Boy George, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Prince, Marlene Dietrich, and just about everyone with a New Romantic style in the Eighties. Today, however, young people are being sent the message that preferring short hair, trousers, boxer underwear, button-down shirts, and no makeup; or pink, makeup, long hair, stereotypically feminine clothing, and jewelry, means they must be trans or “genderqueer,” instead of simply a normal  tomboyish, effeminate, or androgynous person.

Calling strong, proud women and lesbians “genderqueer” and using “they” pronouns erases, insults, and demeans who they truly were, in addition to doing a disservice to today’s young women. Respect for the dead is a common value across cultures and eras, and this is a painful example of the exact opposite.

Transing the dead: The erasure of gender-defiant role models from history

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This is a guest post by frequent 4thwavenow commenter Carrie-Anne Brownian, a thirtysomething historical novelist, historian, and lover of many things from bygone eras (except for the sexism, racism, and homophobia).  She can be found at Welcome to My Magick Theatre, where she primarily blogs about writing, historical topics, names, silent and early sound cinema, and classic rock and pop; and at Onomastics Outside the Box, where she blogs about names and naming-related issues. Her only “child,” a 16-year-old spider plant named Kalanit, has thankfully never had any issues with her gender identity!

 by Carrie-Anne Brownian

A most disturbing development in the current climate of transactivist zealotry has been the posthumous transing of famous gender-defiant women.  Women such as Joan of Arc, Mulan, Carson McCullers, Radclyffe Hall, Mountain Charley (Elsa Jane Forest Guerin), George Sand, and Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, to name but a few, are now being claimed as transmen.  Like so many other things about the modern trans movement, this is inherently sexist and harmful to women, particularly young women just starting to figure out who they really are; young women who sorely need strong female role models..

As discussed in a previous 4thWaveNow post “Hippocrates rolls in his grave: In search of the dysphoric trans tweens of yore,” there is absolutely no historical evidence whatsoever for the existence of desperate, suicidally dysphoric trans kids.  There is, however,  a long history of “third” genders in many cultures, but those people somehow managed to live happy, healthy lives without suicidal thoughts, drugs, and surgeries.  Many transactivists claim trans-identified people have always existed, but just weren’t openly spoken about, or were deep in the closet.  However, we only have to take a cursory look at the ample historical evidence regarding gays, lesbians, and left-handers to know this claim is a bunch of horsefeathers.  Those groups of people have always existed, and the historical record shows it.  In a retroactive attempt to rewrite history, the transactivists have seized upon gender-defiant historical and cultural figures of both sexes, primarily women (as well as claiming the intersexed as trans).  While true historians should always be open to new evidence and willing to exchange old beliefs for new if there’s a compelling enough reason, there’s a big difference between legitimate historical revisionism (e.g., shifting attitudes about Christopher Columbus, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Crusades) and outright denial or rewriting history to fit an agenda.  And once trans activists have posthumously labeled a dead person as one of their own,  they get very upset when such dead “trans” people, such as Billy Tipton, are referred to by their biological sex.

For much of recorded human history, even into the twentieth century, women who wanted to serve in combat, travel or live alone, work in most professions, get published, compete in sports, or conduct research felt compelled to disguise themselves as men.  That didn’t make them transmen; it made them girls and women with no other options in a patriarchal, androcentric world.  No one would have, for example, published George Eliot, or taken her seriously as a writer, had she used her birth name of Mary Ann Evans, just as Kathrine Switzer had to sign up for the Boston Marathon as K.V. Switzer as recently as 1967 because women weren’t allowed to compete.

 

NPG 669,George Eliot (Mary Ann Cross (nÈe Evans)),by Sir Frederic William Burton

George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans, widely regarded as one of the greatest Western writers of all time

This may be hard for liberal Westerners under the age of twenty-five to comprehend, but women have historically been denied access to positions of power, most careers, education, legal protections, politics, combat roles, club memberships, athletic competitions, and so forth, solely on the basis of being female.  Women even had to fight for the right to use their own names on legal documents, instead of being forced to sign as Mrs. Husband’s Full Name, or to do anything of importance without a husband or father’s co-signature or permission.  By anachronistically pretending all these brave, trailblazing women were truly men, the historical realities of institutionalized sexism and male privilege are written out of existence, and impressionable young people will be led to believe women haven’t played any kind of important role in history.
For various reasons, women across the ages have wanted to serve in the military, in spite of it being all-male for much of human history.  Many people are familiar with stories of soldiers and sailors who were eventually found out as women.  Yet the modern spin is that all these women were really transmen, not women who had no choice but to disguise their true sex in order to join an all-male military.  By taking away this important part of women’s history (regardless of what one’s own personal feelings regarding war and the military might be), and reclassifying them as men, women’s historic achievements in this field are erased.  A young person who genuinely doesn’t know any better may someday believe only men served in the military prior to the modern era. It’s easy to extrapolate that a young modern woman might feel she needed to “transition” if denied role models of brave women soldiers from bygone eras.

 

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Radclyffe Hall, author of the first recognized English-language novel with a lesbian theme

 

Probably unsurprisingly, though still infuriatingly, many lesbians have been coming in for the posthumous transing treatment lately.  One prominent example is Radclyffe Hall (née Marguerite Radclyffe Hall), author of the groundbreaking lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, and an earlier, somewhat lesser-known novel with lesbian overtures, The Unlit Lamp.  Ms. Hall was what would today be called a butch lesbian, just like the protagonist of The Well of Loneliness, Stephen Gordon.  Her first longterm partner nicknamed her John, which she went by for the rest of her life.  However, in spite of her stereotypically masculine appearance and male nickname, she never actually claimed to be a man.  It’s not exactly uncommon for lesbians to go by male monikers, and butch lesbians are just as much real women as women bathed in pink, glitter, and makeup. So another female role model bites the dust, leaving butch or more “masculine” appearing/behaving lesbians bereft of an important historical ancestor. 

As per the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theory of sexual inversion, it was believed gays and lesbians were born with the stereotypical traits of the opposite sex; e.g., girls wanted short hair and hated dresses, while boys preferred crocheting to hunting and displayed emotions openly.  When they were attracted to members of the opposite sex who adhered more closely to gendered stereotypes, it was considered to be “latent heterosexuality.”  But again, Ms. Hall had relationships with other women, as a woman.

 

460px-harold_piffard_joan_of_arc

Jeanne d’Arc, the teenage girl who became a great hero

Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) has long been a hero to many, particularly the people of France, for her decisive role in the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years’ War.  During the military campaigns in which she participated, she donned traditional male attire.  When she was captured by the enemy and put through kangaroo court, her so-called offenses were heresy and witchcraft, though the technical reason was cross-dressing.  Joan promised to return to wearing women’s clothes after her abjuration, though she continued wearing men’s clothes in prison to guard against rape.  A dress or skirt offered no such practical protection.  Indeed, several days after her abjuration, an English lord tried to rape her, and she resumed wearing men’s clothes.

In 1803, Napoléon Bonaparte declared Joan a national symbol of France, and in 1920, she was canonized in the Roman Catholic Church.  Throughout the ages, many women have looked up to her as a great hero and inspiration, starting in Joan’s own lifetime with famous writer Christine de Pizan.  She’s also been the subject of countless poems, plays, books, operas, paintings, sculptures, and films.  Joan’s presence in movies goes back almost as far as film itself, to 1898.  Her trial and execution are depicted in one of the greatest films of the silent era, The Passion of Joan of Arc, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Maria Falconetti in her only major film role.  This powerful film never fails to move me to tears.

Joan never claimed to be a man, though she’s been taken up as a trans hero by countless modern-day historical revisionists and transactivists.  Some of them claim she had to be trans simply on the basis of not having adhered to feminine stereotypes and moving beyond the societal roles dictated for women, even in the absence of a sexual reason behind her cross-dressing.  Leslie Feinberg, in Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, claims Joan’s donning of armor was an example of cross-gendered expression in a society which dictated only men could be warriors. Yet another source claims Joan’s cross-dressing automatically made her trans or “queer.”

All these people are applying their own biases and contemporary views to a historical era they clearly know nothing about.  By making the trans umbrella so wide, these activists are making it a lot harder for the tiny minority of people who have legitimate, overwhelming, lifelong bodily dysphoria and bodily dysphoria alone to get treatment and be taken seriously.

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Carson McCullers, American novelist and playwright

A very recent addition to the posthumous transing of the dead phenomenon is the lesbian writer Carson McCullers (née Lula Carson Smith).  In an article published in The New Yorker on 21 October 2016, author Sarah Schulman claims “McCullers had issues with her gender.”  She gives such “proof” as having “tomboyish” protagonists named Frankie and Mick; going by her middle name, Carson, instead of her birth forename Lula; supposedly never having slept with any of the women she romantically pursued; and once having declared, “I think I was born a boy.”  This kind of postmodernist, historical revisionism threatens to eventually declare every single lesbian, feminist, and gender-defiant woman ever really had to be a transman.

One more example of a gender-defiant woman getting posthumously transed is Mountain Charley, whose true name was Elsa Jane Forest Guerin.  She was a legendary hero of the American frontier, and has been written about in such books as Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier, by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith.  She also wrote her own memoirs, in which she never claimed to be a man.  The true account of her life makes it clear she donned male attire to earn money to support herself and her two children, and to get revenge on her husband’s murderer.  Young girls who love dressing up as cowgirls and hearing stories about the Old West could’ve once gravitated towards her a hero, but instead, she’s now being passed off as unambiguously male in a Tumblr comic.

Gender-defiant men have also been coming in for the posthumous transing treatment, such as Prince, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, even Jesus.  I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually try to get their claws into my favorite actor, Rudolph Valentino, who was well-known for being gender-defiant.  The powers that be were very upset at how a man who wore jewelry, showed emotions and sensitivity, engaged in “feminine” pursuits like gardening, and spent more than five minutes grooming himself could “corrupt American manhood” and lead women away from macho he-men dripping with machismo and the stereotypical “all-American” boy next door.  While racism and xenophobia were also factors, there’s no denying a large part of the status quo’s uneasiness was because of Rudy’s gender-defiance.  He’s long been painted as a closeted gay man (without a shred of evidence), so posthumously transing him would only be the next logical step for these people who can’t think outside of sexist stereotypes.

Gendered stereotypes aren’t biologically and genetically encoded into our brains.  When a man like Prince wore makeup and cross-dressed, he was doing it as a man, not a transwoman.  Similarly, when Kurt Cobain expressed discomfort with the macho role and male stereotypes, he wasn’t motivated by feelings of being trapped in the wrong body, in spite of modern-day claims to the contrary.  It’s called having a personality, and using one’s own mind and feelings instead of letting society dictate exactly how to think, speak, dress, and behave.  Real people aren’t collections of sexist stereotypes.

When young women of today are told these inspirational, trailblazing, heroic, talented, gender-defiant women were really men, they’re losing a very important source of pride regarding what women are capable of.  In its place, they’re getting the message that women who don’t perform femininity, who want to be more than sex objects, wives, mothers, and Barbie dolls, can’t possibly be real women.  It’s as if we’ve collectively stepped into a time machine taking us back to the 1950s, when women who wanted to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, mechanics, architects, professors, scientists, businesswomen, basically anything other than wives and mothers by the age of twenty, were looked upon with hostility, fear, and suspicion, even believed to be mentally ill.

To date, I’ve twice read Brett Harvey’s The Fifties:  A Women’s Oral History, and both times felt alternately glad I never had to live in a world like that, and shocked and heartbroken for these women who had to deal with so much institutionalized sexism, lesbophobia, and misogyny.  Now we’re devolving into that same kind of cultural milieu, only with different trappings.  It’s like the 1950s 2.0.

Young men also suffer, in different ways, when they’re told real men are macho he-men who can’t possibly enjoy looking pretty, feel comfortable displaying emotions, or engage in pursuits like ballet or fashion design.  Under that kind of logic, all the great danseurs like Nijinsky, any man who ever entered a career devoid of machismo, and just about all the gender-bending men who proudly and unashamedly took on the New Romantic style of the early Eighties were all transwomen in the closet.  Seeing positive, high-profile examples of gender-defiant men can only help young men, by showing them real men come in many different forms.

As a name nerd, I also can’t help but notice a parallel to the massive rise in popularity of traditionally male names for girls, and the subsequent, permanent loss of most of these names to the girls’ side.  Parents frequently say they want to give their daughter a name like Riley, Aidan, Dylan, Tyler, William, Jordan, or Kyle because it sounds “strong,” as though a name like Elizabeth, Katherine, Margaret, Octavia, Ophelia, or Zenobia is horribly weak and passive.  Likewise, many parents declare a name like Julian, Micah, Nikita, or Adrian is too “girly” for a boy, and fear he’ll get beaten up for not having a name drenched in machismo.

In the brave new world of the transactivists, everyone is a collection of rigid sexist stereotypes, and any deviation from this 1950s-style binary must really be the opposite sex.  All girls and women love pink, only go to university for a Mrs. degree and drop out once they’ve gotten it, exclusively wear dresses and skirts, don’t leave the house without makeup and perfume, have long hair, wear high heels all the time, never do anything active, and derive their greatest pleasures from being full-time wives and mothers.  All boys and men, meanwhile, have short hair, never wear makeup or any article of clothing even remotely associated with women, love sports, are emotionally distant, excel at STEM fields, and hate shopping.  Minus positive gender-defiant role models, impressionable young people will be, and are being, led to believe they must really be the opposite sex.

In 1976, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”  Now, under the aegis of historical revisionists, women don’t make history at all, unless they were really men.