The female penis

The case of rapist Isla Bryson has brought the "female penis" to public attention. Malcolm Clark in The Critic:

In a documentary I made for ITV over 20 years ago, April Ashley, the first transwoman in the UK to undergo what in the early 1960s was called a sex change, described the unbelievable pain of the operation at the hands of Dr Burou in Casablanca. At least there was some sort of wayward logic to April’s story. If you hate your male body to the point of suicidality, then I suppose losing your genitals no longer feels like such a terrible outcome.

It was this desperate argument that gave us the original Gender Recognition Act in 2004. Hansard’s record of the debate is full of references to the courage of a tiny, vulnerable minority who were so troubled they were driven to radically change their body.

Although gender recognition was not made dependent on surgery, the implication was that those who didn’t avail themselves would be a miniscule exception. As the years rolled by, and trans people became more accepted, and the definition of trans expanded exponentially, the central importance of surgery to transwomen dwindled. In 2018 when the feminist organisation Fair Play for Women studied the evidence, it revealed that 97 per cent of transwomen had had no surgery at all.

This posed a dilemma for the trans lobby. It knew that the public would not be happy with a man who said he was now a woman entering women’s spaces if he brought his best friend with him....

As a response to growing awareness, trans activists began to take a new line. Now they claimed that the expectation that becoming a woman legally should require physical change is unbelievable bigotry. That’s why self-ID gets rid of the need for any medical diagnosis. How dare we expect people who want access to medical treatment to have a medical diagnosis. Instead a new model is posited that does away completely with the need for physical change.

The argument runs like this. Whenever someone male thinks he is a female then that means he — sorry, she — instantly becomes female. That’s not all. This then also erases his “male” past, because it means he must have always been a biological female. His penis? That was always female. Da nah!

The argument is encapsulated by the prominent American trans activist Chase Strangio, who in 2016 pushed the new orthodoxy: there is no such thing as an inherently male or a female body. Our bodies have no biological sex until we decide what sex they are:

"By embracing a narrative that one is born with a “male body,” we reinforce the idea that only the bodies we assign male at birth —  bodies that have medically normative penises —  are male."

It helps if the argument is presented with academic postmodern-style talk of "embracing narratives" and "medically normative penises". A blunt "female penis" rather gives the game away. 

If you’ve ever been confused by how proponents of trans rights can maintain that gender self-ID doesn’t in any way infringe on single sex spaces, then the missing piece of the jigsaw is this trick that switches the biology of a male person on a whim. This allows trans activists to argue single sex spaces remain single sex because any penis attached to a male body becomes a female appendage, and its owner is a biological female too. In effect a woman could enter a crowded changing room where she was the only person without a penis, and she’d still be in a single sex space — as long as all the other blokes believed they were females.

This raises an important point. If and when the UK government ever gets around to emphasising biological sex in the Equality Act, defining “woman” as an “adult human female” won’t be enough. “Female” will have to be defined too. The possession of a penis at any stage in a person’s life should exclude them from that category.

The trans lobby seems to believe the invention of the “female penis” is a brilliant sleight of hand. I’m not so sure. Over the years the public has tolerantly, if often rather reluctantly, gone along with each increasingly bizarre claim from the trans lobby. Surely, with growing public awareness, the female penis really won’t stand up.

The reporting of the Isla Bryson case, with frequent straight-faced mentions of "her penis", brought the whole business some much-needed clarity: everyone could at last see the absurdity. The trans lobbyists maybe thought they'd get away with this, but it's clearly been a farce too far.

Comments

[Dom]

“ … the female penis really won’t stand up.”

There’s a viagra commercial about that.

[johnd2008]

Perhaps a large steel toe capped boot applied violently to the female penis might bring a little clarity.