Letters from the Front, US Edition: Part 1

In our new series, “Letters from the Front”, we will be bringing you the perspectives of GC feminists from various locations around the world where gender ideology has taken hold. 

First in our series is “Letters from the Front, USA Edition”. Our US contributor, who goes by the alias “Katie Sharp”, describes the minefield of paranoia and self-censorship she experiences living in an urban area captured by gender ideology.

Biden’s Executive Order has devastated women’s rights and boundaries, and Queer Theory has spread from the confines of academia to pervade the culture. No one, and certainly not the press, is willing to speak up. 

With a palpable sense of tension, she compares her daily life to George Orwell’s 1984, or life in a fascist regime. As she says, “The problem is that the American Left has their vision of Nazis and Fascists all wrong. They think Fascists are right wing. That’s not true. Fascists don’t have a side, they are simply Fascists. Their only interest is in forcing whatever they believe down the throats of everyone else, reality be damned.”

Her writing, while often humorous, conveys the starkness she feels at the direction her fellow Americans are taking, seemingly unable to see the dark underbelly of the latest “progressive” trend.

When I was a kid, I read 1984. I probably read it too young, but I used to imagine myself as livingunder Big Brother. I created elaborate secret diaries with cunning hiding places. (Which was fine given my mother’s habit of snooping through my room and reading said diaries.) I read about his furtive trips to bookstores, buying up cheap trinkets of a time long past. I thought that kind of life might be romantic, and I was dizzy at this idea that all of society could be so easily coerced into believing such mass lies and insanity, all for the “greater good.” I imagined what it might be like to be persecuted for believing the government and everyone around me was wrong, and heaven help me if I said what I truly felt out loud.

It feels strange to me that here I am, forty six years old and I’m now living Winston Smith’s life. Only Big Brother isn’t some paternal guy in a poster, he’s a man in a wig and a dress drilling “Trans women are women. Trans women are women” and he says he’s my sister, and I’m his “cister.” He’s got an obvious erection, but I can’t notice. I can’t say. I can’t leave. Everyone around me is cheering but I sit there and look at the truth and keep my goddamn mouth shut.

In late October of 2022, I got a weird circular with my name as the addressee. This is strange, I don’t get a lot of mail. I read the headline and my heart stopped.

The headline read: “No more boys and girls? Pritzker family leads push to replace ‘Myth’ of biology.”

I flipped it over, trying to determine where it came from. It was called North Montgomery News, a paper I’d never seen before. An internet search called up nothing on where this paper had originated, but the stories could all have been considered heavily critical of gender ideology. Only this paper was using genderist language, which meant it was likely coming from a right wing source. It was also a few weeks before elections, which always means a spike in weird mailers with a political agenda.

I was terrified. I was so conscious of locking up my feminist research, obliterating my searches, making myself as anonymous as possible online and locking up any old social media that might give me away.

Does someone know? I kept racing through my mind. And will they give me away?

I watched the NextDoor feed for the next day or so, and my mind calmed at others reporting they had gotten similar newspapers, and they were being called out as “right wing propaganda,” and the ubiquitous “TERF” was thrown around for good measure lest anyone squeak some concern that the paper had some valid points, which it did. A few days later, a new “issue” of this publication arrived with something about opposition for gun control and complaints about tent cities. I am not registered as a Republican nor Democrat, so they likely mailed anyone with “Independent” next to their name.

I was still safe. The only people who knew were my family who barely tolerated me and close friends who agreed.

I am the Radical Feminist next door.

My existence is precarious here in the margins of a neoliberal neighborhood that bathed itself in political feelgoods during the pandemic. I walk amongst yard sign activism and continuous leaping from one Current Thing to the Next.

During the pandemic I took five-mile walks through the posh neighborhood. I’d pick out new books from “little free libraries” and leave one of my homemade “transwomen are men” stickers inside. The next day, my stickers would be removed. I saw a lot of signs saying “feminism is for everyone.” One day I took a Sharpie with me and blacked out “everyone.” I wrote in “women.” The next day, the sign was gone.

When the local youth group with the pink and blue flag had an event at city hall, I got up at 4am and plastered the park where their event would be with “Woman; Adult Human Female” stickers and “Everything is Transphobic.” They had decorated the park the night before, and I took great pleasure in stickering their own poster board creations.

When the town held “trans day of remembrance,” I got up early again and left a candle and a note at the vigil site. The note detailed how one gender ideologist had died, while over 35 women and girls had died or gone missing in the same span of time.

It’s all for naught, of course. I’m spitting into a hurricane.

My husband called me ‘transphobic’ once. Once. He never did it again, but it took an ongoing domestic campaign for him to accept that this is the hill his wife will likely die on. Eventually I wrested an apology from him. But it hurt. It hurt so bad that the woman he’d known to take in little animals and who devoted endless hours of volunteer work for youth organizations, that he’d call me a bigot just that easily. He still ignores my texts and leaves the room when I start to talk about this.

My son still rolls his eyes when I talk about ‘sex-based rights.’ He’s gay, but he’s young, so he’s likely not seeing that I’m out here on this hill for him, too. I don’t want him to get accused of a ‘genital preference.’ I feel like he wants to understand, though. When Posie Parker came to a nearby town, he offered to go to the rally with me. I explained I’d have to cover up and disguise myself, if I were recognized I’d lose my job. He said he understood, and we went.

We stood there, watching the Genderist mob encircle and outscream the women who were simply advocating for sex-based provisions in law, and I asked him, “Who is the fascist here? Who is afraid for the truth to be said?”

He looked on. “Nothing is being accomplished here.”

“That’s the point.”

But he still rolls his eyes when I start to get mad about kids on hormones.

I very much understand what the Suffragettes were up against. They were up against it all. Their families, their employers, their colleagues, everyone. The hill you choose to die on is a lonely place. Worse, everyone who knows you’re on it thinks you’re crazy for being there. Your existence on the hill is treated as a defect to be tolerated, one you’ll eventually grow out of and learn better than to be on. Just another phase for the bimbo, I guess.

The governor of the next state over is JB Pritzker. His brother is a man in a dress who owns a lot of property in the neighborhoods to make them Air BNB’s, and influences a lot of public policy. Needless to say, the man in the dress likes policy that benefits other men in dresses, and now the Chicago Public Schools no longer have separate male and female bathrooms.

Oddly enough, CPS policy on parents changed at roughly the same time, so now Parents are no longer allowed in school during school hours. Not without a lot of advance notice and red tape. Twitter began to leak out that girls were avoiding drinking water during the day to avoid having to use the bathroom with males. There was nothing in the news, no outrage from journalists. Women’s bathrooms, barely 150 years old in this country, were going away quietly with not a whisper of the protest that brought them about.

I remembered my own experiences with male bullies in grade school, and I cried for those girls. “They just want to pee!” I screamed in the car, the raging scream of someone just so helpless to do anything about it.

That poor Camry. I should buy it some nice accessories as repayment for being one of the best therapists in my life. I work in entertainment. I used to be a Production Manager and a Stage Manager for mid-size theatres, but now I enjoy a comfortable nine to five in one of the industries that services those theatres. I love my job and I love what I do. I feel I can offer an expertise to smaller groups that may help them spread their joy. And I like that.

I have to tread very carefully, lest my Radical Feminist politics be known. I cringe when I see pronouns in email signatures, dreading the day when I get asked to display mine. I keep hoping that’s where I’ll draw the line.

One of my staff is non-binary, so we have to use “they/them.”

I take a deep breath every day as I follow along, swallowing my pride and all my anonymous heartfelt ranting online. I say “they,” like a docile sheep. I hate myself sometimes for it, but I have to if I want to remain employed.

She came to me one day and asked me to buy a sign for the boy’s warehouse bathroom. She wanted an “All Gender” sign for it. I said I’d work on it. I ignored it. A few days later I walked by that bathroom, and she had taped up the existing sign, covering it up into nothing. It was no one’s bathroom. Just a bathroom. But when a Male is in there, she quietly opts for the private bathroom in the office suites. I don’t say a word.

This past summer was hell for womanface shows. Every other call in June was for a womanface show. “We’re doing a fashion benefit!” Said one group, something about Brave. “We need a runway!”

I looked them up, largely as a way to determine their ability to pay but also out of curiosity. They were a group from the city, mostly black kids wanting to be women, and they offered “gender rooms” with dresses and makeup to try on. They even offered tutorials and classes for makeup.

When I was a Girl Scout, the leaders got this weird idea that the ragtag bunch of tomboys in front of them needed a make-up badge. So they called all the local Avon ladies (this was late 1980’s) and got them to give us all their unused samples. Unused samples, of course, were shades of puce and lavender and nothing anyone would wear. We spent the entire meeting drawing on each other’s arms with the tiny little lipstick samples and painting our faces with colored powder and laughing.

At the bottom of the screen for the Gender Ideologists was a link to donate unused cosmetics or money (preferably money) to their cause. I closed the tab.

When they came to pick up the materials for their runway, they arrived in crop tops, manicured hands and cheap hairdos. They fell out of the rental van, all laughing and in great delight at this idea of working to achieve their fashion show benefit.

“These are the decks,” I walked to the pile of heavy 4’ x 8’ decking. “They weigh eighty pounds each, so we need two folks who can lift fifty pounds or better on each side.” The men, all wiry and lean, all looked at each other in horror.

“Honey, there is no way that is happening,” one of them snarked, flipping his hand in disdain. His fingers were tipped in pink and flashed with rhinestones.

The others, similarly dressed in tight clothing, all laughed in glee.

My nonbinary coworker and myself, a forty five year old woman, loaded the decks for this group of weak men who were just refusing to do anything because they were ‘women.’

What were we?

I bit my tongue and said nothing.

I study history, and I love World War II. I read about how normal, everyday people in Germany were so scared to speak up against the Nazis for fear of social reprisal, and I think, “Is that me? Am I like that?”

Here in America, anyone who says anything against the idea that kids can be “transgender” is vilified as a Right Wing Conspiracy Theorist who not only voted for Trump, but actively participated in the January 6th Riots and are card carrying Proud Boys. We are also pegged as White (I’m sorry, YT or whyte) Women/Karens and therefore somehow exempt from any serious conversation because obviously we are unable to speak on anything other than the offerings of the local wine club. The consensus is that we clearly want these children to die, preferably slowly and by their own hand. Our views are so dangerous we may face hate crime charges for voicing them out loud.

This is a frightening place to be. History says this is the part before Bad Things happen. I told my husband, “I know what it feels like to be in Nazi Germany and not support Nazis! I know what that is! And I hate it! I used to wonder how 1984 could happen, and now I know. I live in a madhouse!”

He looked at me like a deer in the headlights, likely hoping I’d shut the hell up before the neighbors heard and reported me for Wrongthink. Like they did in Soviet Russia during Stalin’s purges.

The problem is that the American Left has their vision of Nazis and Fascists all wrong. They think Fascists are right wing. That’s not true. Fascists don’t have a side, they are simply Fascists. Their only interest is in forcing whatever they believe down the throats of everyone else, reality be damned. Hitler didn’t win because he was smart. He won because he was a charismatic bully that everyone underestimated. That’s why I don’t underestimate men in dresses or furries.

Americans are not that bright, but they love a good cause. They are genuinely some of the most well meaning idiots on the planet. As an American who deals with Americans on a day to day basis, I feel okay in asserting this as fact. Sometimes I genuinely wonder how it is that my fellow Americans don’t wander into moving traffic more often.

Americans want to show they care. Whatever your cause, as long as it fits onto a yard sign, doesn’t ask anything more of them than placement of said yard sign, and can be resolved in two weeks, they are 100% behind you. This is why our initial lockdown for Covid was only two weeks. That’s our attention span.

Americans also love trends. When I was growing up, I was forced to learn the Boot Scoot Boogie and the Macarena because my mother believed in all things Trendy and Popular. Genderism is a very fun and flashy trend, and it’s very easy to get behind. All you need is a Rainbow Flag with the Pink and Blue Chevron and a strong stomach.

If you blend up American Idiocy, a really big heart with no critical thinking skills, a short attention span and a sincere love of all things trendy and youth-oriented, it’s easy to see why Genderism has taken such a strong foothold here. When you add in the “Good Guy/Bad Guy” Marvel Comic Culture with everyone being Hero-Pilled into looking for a common, obvious foe, it’s easy to see how people like me end up in the crosshairs. Americans need a cause. Somehow if we rallied against the consumer Credit Culture that has so many of them by the financial balls, that would be a harder sell. But recalcitrant women have historically been an easy target, so here we are. “Kill Terfs” appears on t-shirts, mugs and baby onesies.

Americans of this generation likely see themselves as participating in the current Civil Rights movement. They missed out on MLK and Bra Burning and Woodstock, so they pick up rainbow t-shirts and hats and flags from Target to show they’re all in support of something that they think needs civil rights. None of them were there to know that the Civil Rights movements of the past were all hated. They had no friends. MLK didn’t have t-shirts at Target, and he certainly didn’t advocate for killing anyone.

If anyone believes the opposite side of their civil rights movement deserves death, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. A bumper sticker I see frequently is “Well behaved women seldom make history.” And I look at the driver and it’s a polished, suburban white woman who likely donates to the YWCA and feels pretty good in her moral superiority for chastising women like me who just refuse to get with the program.

If only they knew what that bumper sticker really meant.

It means being the annoying adult at family gatherings who can’t help but let her politics slip, engendering eyerolls from her own son. It means not taking your Kindle to work anymore, lest someone turn it on and find themselves face to face with Helen Joyce. It means going to work every day, unable to say what you did all weekend because what you did was rail against the very people who are doing business with you, and research all the ways in which they are wrong. It means dipping your toes in subjects you never thought you’d need to know about, like gene expression and crime statistics and structures of power within state actors. It means fending off blatantly stupid arguments like “eels can change sex” and “intersex is as common as red hair,” with real statistics and facts the other party will simply ignore anyway and revert to calling you a TERF and a bigot.

A lot of Americans sport the “Rebel Fleet” symbol on their cars. If only they knew that when you are in a Rebel Fleet, advertising it means death. I always laugh when I see “Rebel Fleet” symbols on cars alongside pink and blue flags. Bless their hearts. Being a rebel means panicking at some new mail, for fear that someone knows. Someone knows you’re in the Rebel Alliance who says men are men and men can never be women and lesbians don’t have penises and predatory males will exploit loopholes to hurt people. It seems strange to me that the form my Rebellion took was saying things like “Pedophilia is bad,” and “the majority of rapists are men.”

Did other civil rights groups feel like they were simply stating the obvious?

It bothers me that the backlash to Genderism will likely send Gay Rights and Women’s Rights into the proverbial Stone Age. If sex has no meaning, then it follows that the 25th Amendment is useless. Title IV is already gutted and hollow. Policies that feminists suffered and bled for are falling like dominoes under the heels of Autogynephilic men like Richard Levine, and Americans, in their dumb desire to champion underdog causes, cheers.

Valclav Havel wrote about the grocer who puts the sign in his window. He does so because he was told to, and if he doesn’t, people will ask why. I think about that whenever I walk down the main street of my little neoliberal haven, with pink and blue chevrons proudly raping their rainbow flags on display. Do any of them really know what these flags mean? Where they came from? Why those colors, in particular? I am always sorely tempted to walk in and talk about Monica Helms, the Navy cross-dressing fetishist who invented the trans pride flag.

My non binary co-worker asked about scheduling time off for the cosmetic double mastectomy. I swallowed my bile and said January would be best. Of course, she called it something else. The cute name that hides what it really is. I have this great scene in my head where I march into the General Manager’s office with the Time Off request and say, “They are getting their cosmetic double mastectomy. I agreed to pronouns. Nothing else,” and marching out.

Nothing of the kind will happen, of course. I’ll say nothing. And I’ll support her through it, because this woman is genuinely great, she just grew up Southern Baptist and is doing what anyone would rationally do when confronted with an image of woman as Wivestock; Reject it. I can’t wholly blame her. But if I could ask her anything, it would be, “What makes you think I accept it?”

There are moments when I stop and think, “Wouldn’t it just be easier to let it go? Just roll over, accept it. Stop fighting it all. If you just stay in like you do now, mind your business and avoid people, you’ll be fine.”

I think of Winston, sitting in the old cafe drinking gin flavored with clove oil. I think of him often as I sit at night and drink bourbon and water, a lot of water, trying not to obliterate my brain because my husband said he didn’t know if lesbians had penises or not. His son is gay.

The hill I chose to die on is two plus two equals four.

Winston failed. He gave up.

But I’m a woman.