Helena Kerschner was prescribed testosterone shortly after her 18th birthday. A year and a half later, she realized that hormonal treatment was just a distraction from deeper “social and emotional” issues. “In my own life,” she writes, “I can see how being inundated with pornographic imagery as a young woman, much of it violent, and being repeatedly told that this was normal and even cool led me instinctively to look for an escape from womanhood.” Today, Kerschner tries to wrap her head around why so many girls like her opt for hormones and surgery, and what she’s discovered isn’t pretty. Women are hesitant to embrace femininity – and in some extreme cases their womanhood itself – in a society that ignores sexual difference to their peril.
Escaping Degradation
In The Daily Scroll, Kerschner identifies the impact of pornography on youth culture as a destabilizing force for many women like herself, whether or not they have ever identified as transgender. The sudden spike in female transitioners, she believes, represents a renunciation of femininity in order to avoid sexualization by men and the pressure to conform to a pornographic ideal. To girls who “notice that this culture wants them to be sexual objects, who…are pressured into regurgitating how fantastic and progressive porn culture is, the very idea of being a ‘woman’ becomes repulsive.” It’s not the fact of being a woman, but the pressure to embody a parody. As she poignantly describes it,
“Many young girls today, including those that identify as trans as I did as a teenager, internalize a hyper-sexualized caricature of what a girl or a woman is. It mirrors the image of women as extreme sex objects that boys derive from porn, but whereas for boys that may be titillating, for some girls it becomes the reason why they feel they aren’t really a ‘girl’.”
The Young TERFs
It turns out that an unprecedented number of young women are attempting to escape womanhood in the way Kerschner did, according to an investigation by journalist Abigail Shrier. But just as the number of female transitioners is growing, so is the number of “detransitioners” telling stories which challenge trans ideology. To these often young women, surgery and hormones were not about survival, but coping with the ways in which womanhood and femininity are devalued in the eyes of society. The notable Bell v. Tavistock decision in the U.K. favored Keira Bell, whose teenage transition had been rushed through by National Health Services despite her inability to give consent as a minor. Young women like her and their defenders are frequently called “TERFs,” or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, since they deign to criticize the transgender movement for threatening categories which protect women’s interests. J.K. Rowling famously endured cancellation at the hands of transgender activists and the very people she catapulted to fame and fortune – all for voicing her very real concerns that abolishing the sexual binary undermines the very foundation of women’s legal protections.
Vulnerability Is Not Weakness
In a world so heavily informed by rationalism and an emphasis on what our minds can make believe, the murky area of fertility radically challenges the boundary between self and other, between individual and community, between what is within and outside of our control. In a world where might makes right, where mental coercion for political purposes wins out against biological and social reality, the very dignity of women is threatened. In a world where femininity is mocked by counterfeits and associated with submission and patriarchal oppression, the natural vulnerability that comes with being a biological woman grows. Young girls have yet to come into their own as women, yet to figure out how to deal with the experience of their ever-changing body and emotional landscape. In such a deracinated world as ours, where dependency is considered weakness, acknowledging the natural vulnerability of women and their orientation towards relationship is as horrid a thought-crime as one could commit. Women must be strong, tough, on the same footing as men, and only those who get with program of becoming fully-autonomous individuals untethered by biological constraints are worthy to have their voices heard. Those who are too emotionally fragile to endure being pushed into a feminist box or to accept the brutality of market-logic are forced to wonder whether it’s worth being a woman at all.
There’s No Escaping Womanhood
Contrary to the promises made by transgender activists, well-meaning doctors and therapists, it is not possible to change sex. There’s no escaping womanhood if you were born a woman, only acceptance and learning to be comfortable in your own skin. No woman is the same as another, no woman needs to be as conventionally “feminine” as the next. Not every woman is particularly emotional, sensitive, or socially attuned. Not every woman will experience menstruation, or childbirth, or desire to get married. But the truth is that an overwhelming majority of women desire to be feminine, are sensitive, and will experience these things. For millennia, it has been the case that women bore the brunt of destructive customs and policies which excluded them from making their voices heard. Women have fought for centuries to be affirmed in equal dignity with men in deed as in word. Today, it seems that the advances women have made throughout the years are being threatened by an order inimical to women’s thriving. Our best defense is to embolden the Helena Kerschners in our lives to embrace their womanhood, to boldly uphold sexual difference as a force for fruitfulness, and to declare vulnerability a gift of life shared by all. Take a stand against those seeking to belittle femininity and to erase womanhood, especially if you are in a position to do so. This is a matter that should concern all of us, for the sake of our wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends.
