Well, maybe not you specifically, but trans rights activists who completely disregard the battles women have faced to maintain access to woman-only spaces.  

I would hazard a guess many other women who have survived domestic violence feel the same way, but having rescued themselves from their bad situations, they have no desire to embroil themselves in a new trauma.

But I will no longer be that person.

I am genuinely afraid of transgender women (men who have “colonized” womanhood), in so many ways.

Most pragmatically, I am afraid of losing my job, which provides medical insurance for my family, should I accidentally mis-gender a coworker. This would be catastrophic as I have child with serious medical issues.

I am afraid of speaking publicly about my growing concern regarding women’s rights to segregated accommodations, because I face canceling and blackballing on social media— which provides me with an avenue for continued connection with my extended family, as well as a side income in terms of freelance writing opportunities.

I am afraid of losing the continued esteem of friends and family who have wholeheartedly embraced the gender ideology movement, particularly in terms of (unaffiliated) political causes I am passionate about.

However, at this point, I’ve grown more afraid of MtF transgender people themselves than any of these peripherals—and I mean all transgender people— including those who may genuinely be struggling with conforming their perception of themselves to the objective reality of their bodily sex. They refuse to allow any dissent, from “gender critical” (meaning honest) women, about the hijacking of our sex-based rights.

Those suffering from gender dysphoria allow dangerous men to utilize their pain in order to harm women.

This is unconscionable.

Not only are we discouraged from dissenting by people, but critics are actively sought out and hounded by trans “allies” online. People who identify with their biological sex come to the rescue of fragile men (yes, men) who are too sensitive to defend themselves against the “violence” of women… “violence” which most often consists of our vocalizations and public writing. We are chastised when asking for privacy in public bathrooms/changing rooms, or for the ability to seek segregated shelter in domestic violence facilities/while incarcerated – despite the fact these spaces were created precisely due to our biology. Even our requests that discussions about what it means to be female in the world today be guided by those who have experienced the evolution from girl-child into woman, are maligned as bigotry.

Females are no longer permitted to speak about our experiences of womanhood without the approval of men.

The irony here is trans individuals and their allies seem to be those who previously championed sex-based rights. Many are straight women — often those who believe they have the right to speak for all women (we see the same thing in discussions about reproductive rights, where a small but vocal minority refuse to acknowledge women do have diversity of thought about abortion). Some are men who haven’t transitioned but for whom a transition is imminent, and who are already imagining (what they perceive as) a women’s life for themselves. These men are attracted to cosmetics and wearing a pink pussy hat, but will never be able to grasp the deeper psychological reality of what being female means. This doesn’t matter. They will have the last word on womanhood, their ideas much more valuable than mine.

But their ideas are wrong.

Because for the entirety of their existence in the English lexicon, gender and sex have been synonyms. Gender norms have varied according to various cultural and social constructs, but gender and sex have always colloquially meant the same thing. To suggest otherwise is a pernicious lie. No one will call them out on the lies though: we’ve all become too afraid.

Some who dispute this will share narratives of historical outliers, like Joan of Arc, or stories of non-binary indigenous people (from every continent/ethnicity), or of unusual women who chose to live like men in times where a women’s right to live freely was not guaranteed, as evidence that transgender people have always been with us. Not only do we have no evidence women like Joan of Arc believed they were genuinely men, the insistence on hijacking women’s accomplishments against the odds to count as male successes is the epitome of appropriation. This is a malignant and insidious mimicry of patriarchy which provides no benefit for women.

Trans ideology is the real face of toxic masculinity.

These anecdotes are also irrelevant in our current discussions about sex and gender, because they do not erase the fact that for all of evolved human history the biological classification of the sexes, as female and male, have been objective realities, and whatever gender norms an individual or culture have in place have nothing to do with the innate sex of a typical human being.

This is reality, and anyone claiming otherwise is lying.

The breadth of the lies involved here is dangerous to the core fabric of our society, because historically speaking, it has been weak-minded men who involve themselves this deeply in women’s issues.

Especially when those issues threaten their sovereignty or their access to our bodies and minds. These men desire to control women and will use any device they can to accomplish this goal. In the past we have seen such things as public health measures wielded as weapons against the independence of women. Currently, the cudgel of choice is the trans-activist movement. And it terrifies me because I have lived in a home with a weak-minded man and suffered incredibly because of it.

When I was a young girl, my mother moved into a section 8 apartment, an event she had waited years for. It was the first time she had ever lived outside the home she was born into. Within weeks she invited her boyfriend (R), a drug-dealing/using psychopath and occasional car detailer, to come live with us, along with his young son (S). For the duration of our time with R, he used cruelty and lies to keep the household under his control. My mother was only powerful when it came to passing his cruelty on to us, which she did, with relish.

S and I experienced incalculable sexual abuse at his hands.

The disembodied body is part of that sexual abuse experience. I am unwilling to concede to womanhood (in general) being parceled out in pieces because I was sold and bought in pieces as a little girl. Acknowledging and affirming trans ideology is deeply personal to me— it  would force me to acknowledge and affirm the things my abuser said to me while sexually exploiting me.

It would make his characterization of me true. I would become what he said I was- a conglomeration of functional parts. Until you have been called a box or a hole by a person violating you (often with a preceding sexual descriptor), you can not internalize the sheer panic induced by the words, “uterus owner”, “person with a cervix”, or any other phrases currently used to describe women.

When writing portions of this earlier I became ill, even contemplating this makes me feel like I’m going to vomit. My body shakes and my heart races.

It’s a profound type of pain.

Those who can not see the correlation between separating women’s physical sex characteristics from their very existence as women, and the exploitation of women are wildly privilege.

My external genitalia and reproductive organs are more than window dressings for my soul. My body parts are me, and I am a woman.

You can not be a woman if you are a man, because you are a man.

So to be crystal clear:

When I am in the presence of a man who is masquerading as a woman, I am in the presence of a man who is trying to own women’s body parts for himself. It’s a nihilistic dominance of women.

If I will not give them my sex, they will take it from me, until there is no safe space, no place I can hide. Until the objective reality of me as a human ceases to exist and I again become nothing more than a box.

I will leave, 100% of the time. Because I do not want to share space with you. This limits my access to sex-segregated spaces. Spaces explicitly meant to assure I’m as safe as possible.

I have no obligation to accommodate, much less affirm, what I understand is clearly predatory behavior. It took me a long time to internalize this, because like most women: I’ve been trained to be “nice”. But lying to men who engage in ownership predation isn’t “nice”. It’s self-immolation, and I’m not ready to die.

This is a boundary I will not cross.

I have had my fill of men who want to invade women’s spaces to subject them to a distorted idea of what women are – which most often, with these types of men, involves objectification for sexual gratification. I promised myself long ago that I had no obligation to succumb to the unfettered control of anyone who expects me to lie to them in order to stay safe, and I refuse to do so now for the sake of “trans-rights”.

I have lived in a home with a weak-minded man as a child, and because of this I made the choice to surround myself with confident men --  I made the choice to marry a man who wasn’t threatened by my autonomy, and to raise sons who didn’t need to feel they were in competition with women, and those choices were acts of liberation.

I cultivated relationships with good men and in doing so created a new life for myself devoid of the cage of shame and fear that abuse had built.

But if I want to maintain some level of normalcy in my life today, I must allow myself to be coerced into accommodation. You have made it socially unacceptable for me to appropriately respond to what I perceive as a dangerous situation. You have now forced me to engage with your malignant insanity outside the walls of my house.

So I stay home.

If your “gender identity” doesn’t correlate with the objective reality of your sex… I should have no more obligation to take that into consideration when assessing my health and safety, any life choices I make, or how I support women-centered social justice issues, than I do any other extenuating factor.

But I am expected to squash my intuitive knowledge about predatory behavior. Knowledge that all women carry in their core, even the ones who claim to be allies.

So yes, I am transphobic. Just like I was fearful of the men who came into the house I shared with a predator. Because people who ask you to lie about an observable truth are dangerous.

I am again regularly ensconced in environments where I must be cautious of how I express my femaleness — the very essence of my existence — in order to avoid receiving the wrong kind of attention from men… or their enabling female “allies”.

And until very recently I stewed in this fear and allowed myself to be limited because of it.

My fear is not gone. I could still lose all of what I have, if I continue on this path. But doing the right thing is always frightening. So now I am choosing liberation for the sake of the women, and men, that I love.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear…”

Yes, I did almost die last month. I know this is a dramatic statement, but it was a dramatic event: minding my own business, driving down 84 East, obeying the speed limit of course, when out of the blue a monster buck jumps in front of my car and in an instant, I no longer own a vehicle.

This is not the way I’d intended to begin this conversation with you. But things are what they are and maybe that’s a better way to start because it’s more honest.

My byline says “Sarah St. Onge” and I’ve promised to be well-behaved, but it’s going to be difficult because I’m really disaster girl, the cosmic manifestation of Murphy’s Law.

If it can go wrong, it will.

Fortunately, I have a somewhat docile disposition so once the calamity has passed, I’ll accept my bad luck with little rancor until the next frightful event.

This time I really did it though, as we live on the financial margins already and winnowing our transportation options down to one auto is probably going to have a pretty catastrophic effect on our family. I’m having a bit more trouble accepting the bad luck this time because my husband’s work truck has 400k miles and we have a limited time left on it.

C’est la vie.

For me at least.

Because: Disaster Girl.

So… It’s nice to have you in this space.

This is the one-and-only-time I’ll be giving this type of warning.

TW- childhood abuse of all types, including sexual. I don’t generally believe in Trigger Warnings™ because we can watch sex and gore on Saturday afternoon Netflix and chill dates and be ok with it so as adults, we should all be able to handle discussing these things as well.

But this post is specifically meant to clear the air before we go on our what-well-behaved-people-were-thinking-and-doing-in-2021 way.

I grew up in Southern California, Orange County to be exact. I now live in NY, the Hudson Valley. I’ve had the pleasure of living in two red counties in two true-blue states for most of my life which is a wild way to experience growing into adulthood as an abuse survivor. The red dynamic tells me I must pull myself up by my bootstraps (still looking for those bootstraps) and the blue that none of my (abuse-informed and extremely toxic) life decisions matter in terms of how my adulthood has unfolded. Neither of these options ring true, and none of the performative public outcry regarding how we’re supposed to live genuinely reflects what the average person is experiencing. As a result, I’ve developed what I’d like to think of as a unique outlook although it’s really not unique at all, and was the predominant view of human existence before the insanity we’re living in now happened:

Sometimes people have bad upbringings, sometimes people make bad choices, and sometimes people have bad outcomes and maybe we just all do the best we can with what we’re given. I’m neither a Professional Victim or a Strong and Powerful Woman™. I survived a really terrible childhood and made some really terrible life choices and I just want my kids to do better than I did.

To that end: Things I may be discussing with you-

How I was supposed to be an abortion. Twice.

How my mom removed me from a safe home, with my grandparents, and into a home with a man who sold children in return for drugs.

How when I returned to the safe home, she decided to check out completely and left me to raise my younger sister.

How I ran away from home at 15 — dropping out of high school.

How I lived on the streets and couch-surfed.

How I was pregnant by 17 and again at 19.

How I had an abortion and it utterly ruined me as a human being.

How I left an abusive relationship.

How I migrated from CA to NY in hopes of being a more resilient person.

How I got married and became Normal™ (Just kidding).

How I was stalked by a neighbor for a few years/how small-town police can be incredibly evil.

How I held my dying daughter in my arms and the whole world went still.

… and I’ll stop with this list, there, because after that everything was touched with gray for a while.

The string that binds these things together is the interior life I lead and how it relates to what I’m seeing in the world right now. Because this list is perfunctory, an outline of subjects which may come up in future posts, and it doesn’t properly express the depth of my animosity towards those who would corrupt children or those who sell killing as liberation. It doesn’t express my alarm regarding how I see society mirroring the things I experienced living with a severely mentally ill parent (thanks Josh Slocum for verbalizing things I’ve been noticing for years now).

Mostly it doesn’t provide us with a guide on how to live a normal life when the world around us is absolutely bonkers, which is what I hope to do with this space.

To that end:

• This week when you’re going out and about in the world, contemplate the balance between your personal history and how you perceive the world and how you experience social interactions based on those perceptions. We can change what’s happening in the world right now, if we’re brave enough to do it-

  we can say “no” to cancel culture

  we can say “no” to divisive agenda

  we can say “no” to ontological victimhood

  so why aren’t we?

I have thus far been a well-behaved woman. I have been married for twenty years and have five (living) children. I wake up at 8 a.m. every morning (I work late nights so allow myself the luxury of waking a bit later than the average middle-aged adult). I count my calories and carb to protein ratio in order to avoid succumbing to a family history of type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. I color my roots and have been employed as a shift manager for a big-chain retail store for the last fifteen years.

I am your typical lower-middle class female. Retirement is unlikely for me. My children are working class, but not “townies” — they will succeed where I failed. I don’t have a lot of savings and I worry about the rent.

I know you’ve been told the woman who Ms. Ulrich was focused on was the revolutionary female, and we are supposed to take her commentary on the well-behaved, as an incentive to misbehave…. but the vast majority of women who have moved history are women like me. And I believe it’s time for us to sit down and have a chat about how well-behaved women are moving through the world today.

So here we are. This conversation won’t be focused on politics or prolife activism, although those things will definitely make their way in, as my interest in them is integral to my personality. This conversation is about me… and you… and how we can make sure history doesn’t just favor those who have the means to assure their progeny build libraries, but includes the narratives which make up the lives of everyday people.

I am glad you’ve chosen to join me in making our mark on this world.