Another week, another viral video in the gender wars.  This week we have a Black American woman in a Californian spa, horrified at the sight of a naked man in all his splendour walking around the women’s section of the spa where women and children are naked.  The woman declared loudly that she doesn’t want any “swinging dicks” where women and children are in states of undress. She said the sight of the penis was traumatising.  

It reminded me of an incident when I was about 11. At the time I was living for the first time in my life without a sexual abuser in my household.  I thought it would be a time I could relax, sleep and be a kid.  But I was a very emotionally unstable girl.  

One day I was walking down the street with two school friends, and as we passed a parked car, one of the girls started laughing and pointing at a man in the car. I looked and saw nothing special, then he looked down motioning to show me something. He was wearing a ladies petticoat and had his penis out from under it, and was masturbating.  Although my friends thought it was hilarious, I froze in absolute terror. After a minute I started to shake and cry uncontrollably, in a reaction I now understand to be shock.  

My friends took me somewhere safe and tried to calm me down. They couldn’t understand what was happening to me, because they didn’t think we were in any danger; they were right, this was just a “wanker” to use a colloquialism. My reaction was that of a traumatised girl. I now assume that the man, like many men, had a paraphilia called autogynephilia. He didn’t chase us or try to touch us, he wanted us to see him, in female clothing with his genitalia exposed. This was what aroused him, the female presentation and that we could see his genitals.  

Dr Ray Blanchard established the word “autogynephilia” to describe a sexual orientation defined by sexual arousal at the thought or image of oneself as a woman. Autogynephilia is a condition that seems to be exclusively felt by males who are typically sexually attracted to women, although they may also identify as asexual or bisexual.”

Some men with autogynephilia transition to live as women, usually later in life, when they feel they can no longer repress their impulses and live a life presenting as a male.  They don’t usually have what is called “bottom surgery” and don’t necessarily have gender dysphoria.  This is a different kind of psychology that leads to transgenderism from the many gender dysphoric males we are presented with in the media.  The transgender males we see on television more frequently, are formerly gay men who fully transition.  Some are popular public figures like YouTuber Blaire White or much loved Australian entertainer Carlotta.  

With the expansion of “trans” to include a range of males, including autogynephilic males and “non binary” males, many of them heterosexual, women are being asked to culturally condition themselves to get over the sight of male genitalia in a women’s spaces.  In some places like California, it is not just a cultural norm, single-sex spaces are illegal to create. On the video of the black woman in the spa, a white man comes up to her, calls her a “dick” and tells her that this is a transgender woman she is calling a man.   

Laurie Penny, a prominent feminist, journalist and writer with over 176K followers on Twitter defended the transgender male person’s right to expose himself in a female space. She acknowledged the existence of trauma triggers for women at the sight of male genitalia in an intimate female space, but she said such feelings were “not always based in logic”.   

When a man asked Penny about his daughter, who would be too traumatised to undress in front of a male-bodied person, and already has to endure the hypersexualisation of her body by society, Penny replied that his daughter’s need for same-sex spaces, might not be able to be balanced against “a trans women’s right to be included in public spaces to be free from harassment”.  Notice the use of the little girl’s “need” and the trans woman’s “right”.  

This is now the standard progressive feminist position.  The trans “right” is based in his vulnerability to emotional trauma at having people recognise his sex over his gender identity. The act of looking at a naked male and seeing a naked male with your female lizard brain, especially as a danger to you and your daughter, is now an act of “transphobia”.  This social justice sleight of hand effectively abandons the single-sex protections women and girls have always needed to engage in full citizenship.  

Last week in Britain, a case was brought against the crown by a female prisoner in an attempt to make prisons single-sex. She lost, but not without some startling confessions from The Crown and some astounding developments.  One surprise was the revelation that 50% of the males who are applying to enter the female prisons in the UK are sex offenders.  The other was that the Crown brought in a person who was both a queer theory academic and criminology specialist, to address this issue.  The queer theory “criminologist” claimed that the reason there were so many sex offenders among the transgender identifying male prisoners, was that the prisoners were identifying as transgender to access the female estate. A shocking revelation to nobody. 

What is astounding, is the admission itself, because queer or gender theory, routinely denies that males will identify with a female gender to access female spaces with nefarious intentions. In this instance, the queer theorist had no choice but to make the admission, because given the data, the only other explanation would be that trans identity increases male-pattern violence. Because the proportion of sex offenders in this transgender cohort was higher than the percentage of sex offenders in both female and male prison populations.  Queer theorists continually insist that trans identification abates male-pattern violence.  Nobody can really believe this, because it presupposes a belief in “gender” as mystical.  

Historically in cultural studies, “gender” is the word we use to describe the meanings cultures give to sex. Gender exists in culture; sex exists in biology. When psychological associations began to concede that gender dysphoria may be in some way the expression of a kind of gender “self”, it handed what were formerly “cultural constructionists”, a window of unprecedented control over sex-based legislation. Embedding the “gender self” as a legal entity, and placing it above the rights of sex, means that sociology-based experimental theories of gender have been used by lazy and over-reaching governments to address sex-based problems. In reality, women are being coerced into believing their biology is inconsequential to their vulnerability to male violence. 

Ultimately the British court made it clear that there was a conflict between trans rights and women’s safety, but because of the raft of legislation that has been passed, it was unable to protect the women prisoners from the male transgender prisoners.  Once the ethereal concept of “gender identity” is in law, males and females are required to act out invented realities.  

The infrastructure that females need to protect their bodies from male bodies, becomes subject to the gender rules that are now set by cultural elites. Hence when Daniel Andrews addressed two Melbourne women murdered in parks, instead of discussing the infrastructure women need to be safe, he said the problem is about “the behaviour of men”.  Sexed problem, cultural solution.  

The right to the protection of the vulnerability of the female sex, that was the cornerstone of the women’s rights movement, has been taken away by one simple Executive Order in the US, when Biden placed gender identity over sex as a protected characteristic. A woman in the US is now what the government say she is. She is an identity, a set of characteristics as vague or specific as government or courts feel at their leisure to define her.  

In California, trans-identified male prisoners are being housed with women and it is leading predictably enough to the consequences everyone predicted. One woman was punched so hard by her transgender cellmate that she couldn’t chew for three days. It is easy to see how dissenting women could get a transgender cellmate as a form of punishment and torture.  The power to subject a woman to a rape and a beating is now in the hands of an administrator of a privately run prison system.  

Women can’t even look to international law for assistance, because with the much sited “Yogyakarta Principles” of international human rights for gender identity, any government can adopt the rationale of state-sanctioned sexual coercion.  

The Wi Spa incident shows that if women want to participate as full citizen’s, they have play the gender identity game. To enter the Wi Spa a woman must agree that her naked body and that of her daughter will be subject to the male gaze, only by pretending that person with a penis is a woman, can she enjoy the progressive utopia. Sexed problem, cultural solution.  

A psychiatrist once told me that subjecting a child to sexual assault was the “worst thing you could do to a person”.  This struck me as strange because I would have thought murder was worse.  What the psychiatrist meant, was that he couldn’t fix the damage the childhood sexual assault caused to a human brain. That many people will just have to live with this psychosis all their lives, and some do not survive this psychosis.  

We must therefore assume, that among us, are a large number of women who live with the psychological effects of sexual trauma. Such women are not going to declare this trauma as one declares their pronouns.  And it would be no use, because her sexual reality does not exist in law or cultural power the way pronouns do.   

What we have instead, is a mandate by government, through civil rights and hate speech laws, to effectively criminalise the expression of sexual trauma, women’s rights, men’s rights and conveniently, political dissent.  “Progressive” government’s, institutions and organisations will not focus on any problem that doesn’t have a cultural solution. They will claim the “root causes” of any problem is in the beliefs and wrong culture of the population. The solution is in the monitoring, assessment, and alteration of populations cultural attributes. 

To maintain this control, culture progressives have to ignore the realities of sex and indeed any problem that doesn’t have a solution in cultural theories of gender or race.  It compels cultural progressives to strategically ignore Autogynephilia, the PTSD of rape victims and the belief that little girls shouldn’t be exposed to male genitalia.  Because the existence of these realities exposes the naked emperor. Governments that are cloaking over-reaching cultural control in increasingly powerful civil rights and social justice legislation.    

Since the Wi Spa video, there was a protest outside the spa that was attended by feminists, mothers, church groups, Antifa and the Proud Boys. Violence resulted and a Twitter storm of debate.  A woman made a YouTube video after being frightened away from the protest by Antifa.  She said that last year she and her six-year-old daughter attended the Korean spa for an adventure.  Clearly, she was a modest woman and found a nude spa a daring thing to do, but felt they were safe in the women’s area. Then a “full-bodied” trans or non-binary identified male came and joined them in the hot tub.  She was so shocked that she didn’t tell her husband for days and when she did, she did so in tears. This modesty, shock and shame of women and girls is being reframed as hate, lies, deviant behaviour and amazingly “internalised misogyny”.    

Amidst the debate, a prominent trans activist named Zinnia Jones has tweeted the solution that mothers should, “Tell a 9-year-old not to stare at peoples junk, maybe?” This argument is now echoing from trans activists and progressive feminists throughout Twitter.  It is an attempt to place deviance on women and children, rather than on the male. Because the vulnerability of the male is what the progressive dictators find more useful to protect.  

Women have always been prepared to negotiate their spaces with vulnerable males, particularly those who have had reassignment surgery. But now women like myself are demanding sole power over women’s spaces by female people.  Because we don’t trust trans activists, we don’t trust LGBT groups, and we don’t trust governments or psychologists who have exposed our vulnerability and refashioned our trauma as hate. 

Edie Wyatt has a BA Hons from the Institute of Cultural Policy Studies and writes on culture, politics and feminism. She tweets at @MsEdieWyatt and blogs at ediewyatt.com.