Janice Raymond: 'There Is a Deafening Code of Silence about Trans Activists' Misogyny'

This article is an excerpt from Janice G. Raymond's 2021 book: Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism, published by Spinifex.

If anyone questions any tenet of transgender ideology, it is called violence against trans-identified persons; if parents question the prescribing of dangerous puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones given to their children as young as eight, that is called violence against trans children who are being denied “needed medical care”; if lesbians or other gender-critical women refuse the sexual overtures of natal men who claim to be lesbians, that is called violence against “trans lesbians” who wield their “lady sticks.”

A self-declared “woman” (i.e., man) can engage in the worst kind of threats and violence against feminist critics, but no woman can dare to speak out against trans dogmas without being accused of hate speech. Any questioning of trans truths invites threats and violence against so-called “TERFs.”

At the core of trans ideology is the insistence that self-declared “women” (i.e., men) are women. But self-declared “women” are not women historically, experientially, or biologically and certainly not by reason of a simple declaration that they expect everyone to accept because they say it is so. “I feel it, thus it is real.”

The feeling may be real, but the facts are otherwise. If critics don’t cooperate in this fantasy, they are labeled “violent ‘TERFs.’” Any dissent from trans dogma is considered a mortal sin, even when male biology and masculinist behavior are graphically on display. In translandia, any disagreement with trans dogmas is treated as disputing trans existence or, in trans speak, as “killing us.”

There is an undercurrent of actual violence in the mob rule of trans activists that harass, bully, and threaten especially radical feminists and lesbians and makes cowards of many bystanders.

As more of these gender posses are allowed to wreak their “narcissistic rage” on natal women who disagree that men can be women, male entitlement is solidified and misogyny spreads like the plague. Gender-critical women can’t expect solidarity from groups like the Human Rights Campaign or the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), but women should be able to expect support from organizations that promote women’s human rights, especially those who campaign against violence against women. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

[…]

The ever-present threat of violence is perpetrated by trans activists who have become experts in the classic art of reversal, i.e., the act of changing or making something change to its opposite. For example, in the trans world, women become perpetrators, not victims of male violence. Reversal is a strategy trans activists have perfected.

“TERF” is a slur, and its use has enabled enormous levels of bullying, abuse, and violence against women, especially in trans tweets that appear on social media. Two of the most frequent trans refrains are “Kill All TERFs” and “Punch TERFs,” as if punching and killing are games in which one player tries to surpass the other in viciousness.

The following small sampling of screenshots documents the utter depravity of trans abuse, harassment, and misogyny, which pervade sites like Twitter and other social media. Hundreds of tweets and retweets are incitements to violence used by perpetrators who employ bullying and intimidation as their weapons and who oppose open discussion and civil discourse. This sample of tweets is only a fraction of those online:

“shoot a TERF today.”

“All TERFs deserve to be shot in the head.”

“somebody slap this TERF cunt across the face.”

“trans women aren’t real women, ya know what’ll be unreal? ur pain when my fist meets ur face”

“All TERFs need to cease existing. All of them. Gone. Wipe them from the Earth. They are a plague to be purged.”

“pop quiz: if you kill a terf, is it a crime? Answer: it is not. They are not considered lifeforms.”

“Enjoy my lady stick in your mouth.”

“why can’t we just throw every TERF into the volcano and watch them burn.”

“I wanna direct a snuff film where multiple TERFs get shot in the head but don’t die, they just suffer in agony.”

“my feelings on gun control are rather complex but there’s one group who I’d have no problem with openly carrying assault rifles. Arm trans women.”

Some of these threats of violence are aimed at specific women and even children:

“murder Germaine Greer.”

“hope someone slits Germaine Greer’s saggy fucking throat.”

“@sarahditum @TerrorizerMir suck my girlcock cunts.”

“I’d pay to watch someone violently tip her ovaries from her abdomen.”

“I want to set every single TERF kid on fire”

“I can’t believe these dumb bitches [a handful of trans women who counsel moderation] who are like, ‘Don’t threaten TERFs with violence, violence is wrong.’ Beat TERFs. Lynch TERFs. Especially get TERFs fired from their jobs. This is a war between them and us for our very existence. Bowing out = losing.”

Trans violence against women on social media mirrors the wider cybermisogyny that pervades woman-hating sites. Even when actual violence is threatened, social media companies do not take seriously the posts that target women, such as “I kill bitches like you.” Instead, the posts are passed off as “controversial humor,” rather than as incitements to violence against women.

Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube host such harassment claiming they are not the arbiters of people’s free speech. Yet they forcefully intervene when feminists post online to expose and counter the misogyny of trans activists, by censoring and cancelling gender critics’ accounts.

It is outrageous that this online preoccupation with killing radical feminists is ignored and treated as insignificant, and instead Twitter has closed down the accounts of feminist critics such as Meghan Murphy, the editor of Feminist Current. Twitter permanently shuttered Murphy’s account in November 2018, after she referred to a self-declared “woman” as “him.”

Many will justify this kind of menacing behavior as less than actual violence, or simply excuse it as the blather of vocal trans activists online. This kind of intentional unawareness encourages those who should know better, and the public-at-large, from condemning these venomous tweets. Those who plead ignorance can hide behind the smokescreen of free speech and not speak up when trans activists threaten women, or they dismiss trans Twitter harassment as acceptable because it is “only” empty threats.

When women are the targets of venomous trans tweets, women don’t experience this misogyny as an empty threat. As Andrea Dworkin has written, “most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.”

When the bullying and incitement to violence comes from those who claim to be “women” (i.e., men), many will minimize it because self-declared “women” are considered a victimized class. Appeasers will claim that trans violence against natal women is a small part of the trans activist community. But this claim is belied by the actual numbers of trans activists who reveal their true hatred of women, blatantly displayed on social media.

Even if one assumes only a small segment of the trans movement acts out this hatred of women, we are still left with a vocal number of men who target women online and are applauded and inspired to escalate their abuse. Those who would attack and censor feminist critics are not just outliers in the trans community.

[…]

If the threats, bullying, and harassment perpetrated by trans activists are not yet inciting mass physical violence, these threats are definitely normalizing violent behavior, whipping up mob tactics, and encouraging “lone-wolf” violence.

Unfortunately, many people want to “see no evil, hear no evil.” There is a deafening code of silence about the misogyny of trans activists and a painful lack of responses, especially from progressive men and women, to challenge rampant trans tyranny at women’s events and on social media. Too many bystanders are looking the other way and are allowing trans violence against women to spread, whether in words or in deeds.

Equality for women cannot exist with the fiction that men can be women or with the threats, the bullying, and the harassment that undermine women who bravely reject men’s self-declaration as women.

In an age when falsehoods are commonly taken as truth, Janice Raymond’s new book illuminates the "doublethink" of a transgender movement that is able to define men as women, women as men, he as she, dissent as heresy, science as sham, and critics as fascists. Meanwhile, trans mobs are treated as gender patriots whose main enemy is feminists and their dissent from gender orthodoxies.

Buy the book here.

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