Hockey Skates

Not my actual skates

I woke up this morning to see in the Daily Mail that women who work for the National Health Service in Yorkshire are being discouraged from stating their fears about men--oh, sorry--biological males (men) in their private spaces. And, weirdly, instead of people explicitly demanding women's sex-based right to privacy and safety at those times when we are most vulnerable, "South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust has been accused of unlawfully discriminating against employees with gender-critical views."

I'm not sure what to make of this appeal to "belief" except to suspect that the Equality Act no longer protects women's right to single-sex services. This is a serious problem because, as every culture has recognized at all times in history, women and girls are vulnerable to aggressive male sexual interest and violence. Sometimes women have found the lengths their cultures have gone to protect them--e.g. confinement to women's quarters--oppressive in themselves. But in the West men fought themselves and each other in a millennial-long project to make the public streets safe for women and children. (It was originally called Chivalry.) My Orangeman (and therefore anti-Catholic) great-grandfather, already the father of four, took up arms and went back to Europe because of news stories about German soldiers' violence against Belgian nuns. 

It absolutely blows my mind that we're now giving up this culture for a fraction of men--among them very rich men, Helen Joyce documents--who want everyone, especially every woman, to recognize them as women. Well, that's not going to happen. All women are never going to recognize gender-confused men as women because they aren't women and the first thing humans innately notice in all other humans is their sex. 

Ironically, it is easier for old gender-confused men to look like old women because many (or most) old women lose their distinctively feminine features. Our estrogen goes down, leaving androgen to rule the roost. Maybe that's why old women are more quick to wallop men with umbrellas and to stick their elbows in your face in their hurry to be first at the communion rail. However, most men who want to look like women seem to want to look like 30-year-old exotic dancers.  

The first thing I want to say, though, is that I do not "feel like" a woman. I am a woman because I am an ensouled body and my body is female. Everyone around me, perceiving that I have a female body, has responded to me as a girl or as a woman. Having the capacity for self-reflection, I have been in conversation with my female body since I was toilet-trained. Being able to read, I have grasped that female bodies are more vulnerable to male violence than male bodies are and that this has always made an enormous difference to the human race. Having sparred with men (who always pulled their punches) and boys (who once did not) in the relative safety of a supervised boxing gym, I am convinced that the only time a woman should fight either is to escape him. 

Being an ensouled female body, I have gone through the gamut of physical challenges female bodies usually experience, save pregnancy, childbirth, and serious illness. My mother explained menorrhea when I was ten, it happened to me and most girls I knew within three years after that, and this decades-long experience--and the massive cultural baggage it went with--shaped us all. It was a training in keeping a secret, in valuing one's own privacy, in respecting other women's privacy, in living with pain, in being careful, in being compassionate, in being prudent when choosing clothes and, unfortunately, in feeling self-conscious and dirty. 

Beyond the obvious, we also had new kinds of hair growth and taboos around that to deal with. And, since we were not growing up in purdah, we perceived that boys and even (ick!) grown men were looking at and/or speaking to us in new ways. Women did, too, of course, with a directness that could be excruciating, e.g. "You're really filling out." 

Women's lives as ensouled female bodies are deeply rooted in painful and/or culturally embarrassing physical realities, it is little wonder we so often try to escape through our imaginations. However, this is a very bad idea and can lead to serious trouble. Having been handed particular physical challenges (e.g. being significantly weaker and yet attractive to men who might not even like us), girls and young women need to develop their vast capacity for reason. They must grasp the realities of themselves and of the world outside themselves. As they are given a lot misleading advice and false information--particularly from advertisers and pop culture and journalists and irresponsible older relations--this is very much an up-hill battle.  

One of the difficulties of my own generation was being told that everything male-dominated was necessarily better than everything female-dominated. Boys necessarily had the better toys. At 12 I honestly believed that the pinnacle of success would be to become the first female Prime Minister of Canada. (Ha! Kim Campbell became Prime Minister in 1993 when her predecessor resigned, but she is even better known today for a risqué photograph of her holding QC robes in front of her apparently naked body.) 

Never mind a happy marriage with healthy children, standing in the community, enough money for Christmas presents and summer holidays, rewarding work and all the other things that really do bring happiness. No! "First female" this-or-that was the goal The Toronto Star set before my eyes. And this mentality is why, by the way, even though I loathed it (sorry, Aged Ps), I grimly forced myself to play ice hockey for years. I was, most definitely, the First Female Hockey Player in my classroom and possibly my elementary school.  

I don't want to think about what a reproach I was to the noble game of hockey or how my unfortunate sister and I were loathed by our (all female) teammates. Instead I will dwell on the beautiful black skates promised by the title. They were often called "boys' skates" because most girls who learned to skate back then had white skates. White skates were invariably figure skates with a sharp ruffle on the tip of each blade, presumably for spins or whatever else figure skaters got up to. I had such skates before my hockey days, and the ruffles made me trip. Hockey skates were made entirely for support and speed, and I loved them, if not the game.

A preference for hockey skates--like my haircut of despair--made me not a whit less of a girl than other girls, as girls are young ensouled female bodies. It was, however, what is fashionably now called "gender non-conforming," which is why I mention it. Apparently such things now lead girls to believe they are "really boys," just as enjoying dressing Barbie dolls now leads boys into believing they are "really girls." This would be hilarious if it didn't now lead to dangerous experiments with artificial sex hormones and horrific amputations and mutilations. 

Here, then, is a list of things that do not make a woman more a woman than she already is, or magically transform a man into a woman:

make-up, nail polish, fake eyelashes, hair extensions, wigs, hair dye, hair removal, artificially created breasts, artificially created genitalia, any plastic surgery whatsoever, high heeled shoes or boots, pointed shoes or boots, stockings or tights, leggings, leg warmers, dresses, skirts, blouses, ballgowns, twinsets, lacy or satin lingerie, crinolines, corsets, white skates, handbags, hats, high-pitched voices, mincing walks, mannered hand gestures, playing with toys (e.g. dolls) others associate with girls, playing games (e.g. skipping, Ringette) others associate with girls, tricking an infant into thinking you can breastfeed him with your milk-less chest.

That last, by the way, is such a violation of trust that I don't think it would occur to any woman that a man would ever do that to an infant or, if such a pervert existed, that he wouldn't confine his fantasy to strictest secrecy or at least share it only on the darkest part of the dark web. However, I'm very sorry to say that such a man has been making headlines, and it's all very horrible. 

As an ensouled human body, you're male or female whether you like it or not and no matter what doctors do to you. It is fair to say, though, that a very small percentage of boys are conceived with a total insensitivity to androgen. Their bodies outwardly resemble female bodies, and their parents are (or were) advised to raise them as if they were girls. Innocently and naturally resembling girls, they are treated by the outside world as girls--complete with an automatic F on their birth certificates--and, if the truth is kept from them, they believe they are girls. They worry in the same way girls worry when menorrhea does not come, and they cry in the way a girl would cry if doctors had told her she had to have a "hysterectomy." 

And yes, I do know someone with CAIS, so I can never write about these matters without recalling this.