To All The Emilys

My attempt to understand - and address - your reservations about sex realism.

Ted Bundy knew exactly how to pull women into his orbit.

Of course it helped that the notorious American serial killer was good-looking, but he was also smart. He knew it would take more than looks to override women’s natural caution when it came to following a strange male to a secluded spot where he could overpower them, and well, you know the rest.

So what did Bundy do? He projected vulnerability. He cosplayed having a physical impairment, at times wearing a sling, at other times a fake cast or limping with crutches. Sometimes he simply pretended to be lost. By feigning helplessness, he knew he could gain the trust of his victims. In other words he preyed on women’s kindness and took advantage of their empathy. Given their eventual demise, this would prove to be quite literally an example of suicidal empathy on the part of women.

I thought of Bundy after being interviewed for a story on Trump’s executive orders dismantling the edifice of gender ideology. That wasn’t how the story was framed though. The headline was “Will Trump’s rollback of transgender rights have an impact in NZ?”

The writer was Emily Simpson. I know and like Emily. I’ve known her for years and I’ve written for her in the past. So I know she’s a smart, decent woman but for some reason she couldn’t come to grips with the intellectual incoherence at the heart of gender ideology. Despite giving her the full blast of my entire scientific knowledge (only two sexes, show me the third sex, sex expressed in every cell in your body and can’t identify your way out of sex - the usual blather we sex realists are almost bored with by now), she wasn’t convinced.

She used the word nuanced a lot and gave examples of friends with gender non-conforming children who I gently suggested were probably gay which was just fine. I deliberately didn’t say there’s no such thing as a trans child for fear of being damned for erasing trans people. Softly softly. She also said she’d never encountered a man in a woman’s toilet and, I gathered from her reaction, that she wouldn’t be too worried if she did.

The thing is it’s not just Emily. Not in my world at any rate. There are a lot of Emily’s out there. Lefty women, high on empathy, low on judgement, who want to believe that there’s more to this sex realism than it appears. They make much of the phrase ‘shades of grey’ and, of course, that wretched word too often bolted on to weak arguments, ‘nuanced.’ The brutal binary logic of sex is an offence to people who fancy that they can see the complexity of life in a way sex realists can’t. A friend wrote on my fb page that “bodies can be tricksy things” before disappearing from my life for good.

I don’t intend to revisit all the tenets of sex realism since better people than me have made the case for biology - and obviously I didn’t do it well enough to convince Emily. But I want to address some key aspects of their misgivings. First, their overweening empathy.

Empathy is great. Who doesn’t like the person who empathises with your troubles, who can put themselves in other’s shoes? But like many virtues, empathy can be misdirected and thus rendered lethal (I’d say weaponized but don’t you just hate that word now?)

For instance if Emily’s friend’s gender non-conforming children are persuaded they are trans, they may be put on medication to suppress puberty and later given cross sex hormones to mimic the puberty and characteristics of the opposite sex. Left alone to be who they are, it is more than likely that these non-conforming children would turn out to be gay. Better to be unmedicated and gay surely, than medicated and possibly mutilated in the name of trans.

In this instance excessive empathy would lead to a crime against children. The empaths don’t seem to realise that by endorsing this delusion, they are effectively transing the gay away.

As well, their empathy for men afflicted by gender dysphoria or perhaps just a sexual fetish, leads them to advocate for the removal of protections and rights of women. It’s okay if a feminine male wanders into a female toilet. It’s fine if a woman traumatised by sexual abuse is assigned a male to female therapist. It’s no problem for an elderly woman to have intimate care performed by a transwoman. Or for a woman to be patted down by a trans police officer. Because transwomen are women. Except, the truth is, and our eyes confirm it, they are not. They are male. Always will be.

Like Emily, I don’t recall any instance of meeting a transwoman in a public bathroom but that’s not to say it won’t happen. If I’m in Christchurch I could easily bump into Cassie Love (see below) in the women’s toilets. He boasts on social media about using them and no one saying a thing.

Which is such a male thing to say. Of course no woman confronted him. Women know men are stronger and more powerful. We exist in a climate of male violence. Who is going to challenge a man in your private space unless there are others present and you are confident of their support, because, sad to say, the empaths might shout you down?

Even if you don’t mind sharing this space with a LARPing male and think the social sanction is largely symbolic, you have to consider that a woman who has experienced sexual abuse might be upset. Or perhaps a woman has run into the women’s toilets to get away from a threatening male. There’s always a chance that a predatory male will take advantage of this new right.

The lefty woman invariably talks about the knock-kneed, breathy, feminine man she knows who likes dressing as a female and aping girlish vulnerability. Tortured and harmless, poor dear. But identifying as female doesn’t alter male patterns of violence. Information is sketchy in New Zealand but it is clear trans identifying males are over-represented-in-nz-prisons. 2024 British data revealed that over 70% of transgender prisoners were serving sentences for sex offences or violent crimes.

Single sex spaces exist for a reason and it is the ultimate folly to argue for exceptions to this rule. This is our good nature being used against us and it confirms what I’ve thought for a long time.

Gender ideology isn’t about trans rights. Trans people didn’t lack rights before this nonsense took off. This is about men’s rights. The activists are Ted Bundy clever, appealing to women’s empathy to disarm us, to dismantle our protections and give them carte blanche access to women and girls. Faced with a male in our single sex space, often all we might feel is discomfort, (frankly that alone should be enough) but the social permission puts us all at risk of worse.

Trump’s edict wasn’t about rolling back trans rights. The headline should have read “Will Trump’s rollback of gender ideology have an impact in New Zealand?” For the sake of women and girls, (and our collective sanity), it has to.