I usually stay out of drama when it occurs in radical feminist and wider gender critical spheres for the sake of my sanity. Usually, it’s not something worth my time anyway - petty infighting or a larger issue, I’m glad to be part of a community which calls out those who do or say messed up things regardless. However, I’ve chosen to cover this particular incident, now a couple of weeks old, because I believe it’s a symptom of a larger issue, one which we might not give nearly enough thought but is extraordinarily important in any feminist’s fight against not just transgender ideology, but patriarchy as a whole.
This situation unfolded on 5th December, when Corinna Cohn, a man who calls himself a transsexual, made an Twitter/X post that is as follows:
I’m a transsexual and a vocal critic of gender ideology/queer theory. In 2014, to distinguish my viewpoint from radical feminism I began calling it “gender critical.” The term was first acknowledged by trans activists who claimed that it was an attempt to “whitewash” the term TERF.
I began documenting TRA uses of the term TERF on Tumblr (http://terfisaslur.tumblr.com) and created the hashtag #terfisaslur. From 2014 to 2015 I used the account @GenerCrit to popularize my criticism of gender ideology. In 2015, under threat of doxxing, I outed myself in an article written by Michelle Goldberg called “The transwomen who say transwomen aren’t women.” This is al [sic] verifiable history.
Gender Critical from the beginning has been an opposition to the conflation of sex and gender identity in law and policy. Gender critical has a limited scope. It’s not anti-trans, it’s not pro-LGB; however, ensuring that biological sex classes are acknowledged and protected can only help those two groups.
If you call yourself “gender critical” then you have merged yourself into a trend created by a transsexual. Congratulations! If you believe the same things I do, I embrace you, at least as far as this issue is concerned. If you feel moral disgust or revulsion now that you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into, then bye-bye! Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.
As you can see, Cohn seems to insinuate that he came up with the term “gender critical”, and alleges that he created a hashtag and blog to archive examples of transactivists using TERF in a manner akin to a slur. In his final paragraph, he says that the trend of “gender critical” was the work of a transsexual - more specifically, himself. It seems as though he was already trying to set up the inevitable backlash as pure “moral outrage”, as though everyone who would be rightfully upset at such an outrageous claim was just some trans-hater.
Cohn’s claims of running a Tumblr blog dedicated to cataloguing transactivist misogyny are unsubstantiated. The blog in question, terfisaslur.tumblr.com (not to be confused with terfisaslur.com, which Cohn makes no mention of) has been active since January 2014, which roughly lines up with Cohn’s timeline of events. However, the blog has been inactive for the last nine years, with no way to get in touch with its owner and verify that this actually was Cohn’s work. His Twitter thread offers no evidence that this was him, and the same goes for his purported creation of the #terfisaslur hashtag.
As for the Michelle Goldberg article which Cohn mentions, this does exist, and the writer says that he created one of the first gender critical trans blogs in 2012, though this is contradicted by Cohn himself, who says that he created the gender critical trend in 2014.
Three days after this initial post, Cohn doubled down while on the Heterodorx podcast, run by himself and Nina Paley. The episode, which discussed everything from Crohn’s Disease jokes to admitted autogynephile Phil Illy donning a dress at the Genspect conference, was also were Cohn spoke a little more on his supposed creation of the gender critical movement. Here’s what he said in response to Paley claiming that those wary of Illy are not gender critical:
And they also hate the term. They disavow it, and will not use it, and will say that they absolutely are not gender critical because gender doesn’t exist. And then when some tr*nny [censoring is mine] comes along and says ‘Hey, I helped create this movement’, then they get all upset about it, Nina.
Here, Cohn is the “some tr*nny” whom he speaks of. His Twitter post and statement on the podcast make it pretty clear that he believes that he kickstarted gender criticism as a trend, and from what it looks like, he may also be alleging that he coined the term “gender critical” itself.
As Cohn has said, this supposedly happened in 2014. Now, anyone with a mere portion of knowledge about the history of gender criticism is well aware of the now-banned Reddit community r/gendercritical, the earliest archive of which is from 29th September 2013. At that point, it had been around for nine days, being created on the 20th. This is several months before Cohn’s first post to what he says was his Tumblr blog. In addition, r/gendercritical was a thriving radical feminist community, and even before the subreddit existed, gender criticism itself was intertwined with radical feminism, which is directly contradictory to Cohn’s claim that he used the term to distinguish his viewpoint from radical feminism.
If that’s not enough, writing using the term “gender critical feminists” was published the day before r/gendercritical was created, and this article mentioning gender criticism was published on 2nd August 2013. Google Trends data also shows that “gender critical” has been a term searched up since 2004, which is as far back as their data collection goes. Spikes of the term being searched increase around 2015-16, but this can be attributed to a multitude of factors, such as I Am Jazz being published in September 2014, or Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner coming out as transgender in April 2015 (and subsequently winning Woman of the Year). Simply put, increasing frequency of these online searches is very likely a result of the general public growing more aware of transgenderism, as well as the backlash to it.
Not far back enough? Oxford English Dictionary states that the first known usage of the term can be traced back to the writings of an F. Barber in 1988. Google’s Book Ngram viewer confirms that it’s been around since the 80s, experiencing spikes of popularity in the 1990s and 2000s before skyrocketing in the last decade. Wikipedia estimates that “gender critical” goes back to the 1970s, which aligns with the peak of second-wave feminism.
It’s very easy to debunk Cohn’s claim that he created the “gender critical trend”. Perhaps he was a somewhat prominent figure in 2014, but he was far from the only one, and being one somewhat prominent figure does not equate to starting a movement. As far as his supposed coining of the term “gender critical” goes, this is blatantly false. Even if he just so happened to come up with that term on his own in 2014, it had already existed for decades prior to that point, and Cohn, with nearly ten years of experience on this topic under his belt, should know that by now.
If Corinna Cohn’s claims of creating the gender critical movement sound familiar, that’s because this is not the first time a man has tried to take credit for the work of feminists, and women in general. Earlier this year, The Daily Wire posted a video clip promoting Matt Walsh’s film What Is A Woman? to Twitter, purporting that said film had started “a movement to protect women and children from radical gender ideology”. What Is A Woman? was released about a year and a half ago, by which time radical feminists and gender critics as a whole were already at the forefront of the fight against transgenderism, and had been for decades. (Don’t take my word for it; radical feminist Janice Raymond published The Transsexual Empire in 1979!)
Matt Walsh in particular has done this before, too. Kellie-Jay Keen, one of the most prominent figures of the wider trans-critical movement, has shirts in her online store with the dictionary definition of the word woman across them. These are a clear nod to her 2018 campaign which saw the definition plastered on billboards - in fact, in the linked video, she’s even wearing the shirt on the interview. Similar t-shirts would appear in a shop connected to The Daily Wire not long after What Is A Woman? was released, something which has not gone unnoticed by Kellie-Jay Keen herself.
Men have a track record of claiming women’s achievements which goes back centuries and is not just applicable to the modern day fight against transgenderism. If you’ve ever seen paintings of wide-eyed children, you’d likely be able to attribute them to Margaret Keane, but in the 1950s and 60s, you would have believed wholeheartedly that they were the work of her then-husband, Walter. He attributed her work to himself and showed it off under his name, confining Margaret to a room where she would paint for most of the day.
It could be argued that even the oft-repeated MRA myth of “man the hunter” is an example of men taking credit for some of women’s achievements. An argument which posits men as the hunters of game in prehistoric societies, and claims that women foraged and stayed home with children, it’s a fantasy which is usually slung around at feminists, despite increasing evidence that women contributed to hunting just as much as men did.
Simply put, what Corinna Cohn is doing by taking credit for the gender critical movement is nothing new, and is in fact something which men have been doing for years uncountable. He is just the next man to do this, one in a long line of men who have attributed women’s work to themselves out of greed, desire for fame, or no reason other than misogyny. However, he needs to be the last in this line - this centuries-old trend needs to die, and fast.
When the fight against transgenderism is won, what will likely happen is that conservative men, and a handful of men who claim to fight alongside us such as Corinna Cohn, will either take credit for or be credited with its downfall. Feminists on the front lines will not necessarily be erased from history, our activism having been documented all over the internet at this point, but they will be erased from discourse. Men such as Matt Walsh like to say that we feminists are somehow responsible for transgenderism, in an attempt to turn both his followers and fence-sitters against us, despite there being much evidence of us taking the brunt of on and offline transactivist abuse. This is just practice for that discourse.
When men like this claim to be responsible for what we have started, the thing to do is to scream as loud as we possibly can:
NO.
Unfortunately, not enough of us are shouting this. While Cohn was criticized in a couple of Ovarit posts, as well as some of the comments on his own post, there are an equal amount of comments praising him for this very fluffed-up achievement. When someone makes claims as fantastical as Cohn has, we should not take it at face value until we have evidence confirming these claims. So far, Cohn has provided us with very little.
In the coming years, the tide will certainly turn further and we need to push back against narratives such as these much harder than we currently are. Our place in history needs to be rightfully cemented; why not start here?
Another event that happened in 2015 which brought a lot of attention - and skepticism - to the increasingly popular trend of middle-aged men "transitioning" is that in December 2015, the New York Times featured on its front page an incredibly long and admiring story detailing and extolling the so-called "sex change" journey and genital surgery of a 40-year-old HIV-positive lifelong criminal with a string of convictions for crimes against others going back to his early teens.
The man, a Georgia native and ex who went by the name Kricket Magnolia Thundepussy Nimmons, was the first bloke to have his "male-to-female" genital surgery paid for by New York Medicaid, meaning funded by taxpayers.
Although the story made it clear that Nimmons was a recent transplant to NY and he'd had never paid any taxes his whole life in NY or in any other jurisdiction because he'd always led what he himself called "a life of crime," the NYT nonetheless presented Nimmons getting his genital surgery paid for by the taxes generated by hardworking New Yorkers as a very good thing.
The hagiographic story - ‘A Whole New Being’: How Kricket Nimmons Seized the Transgender Moment - was embellished with lots of photos and an accompanying video and written from a POV that was shockingly uncritical. Indeed, it was totally unquestioning.
Soon after getting out of prison in Georgia, Nimmons - who'd been behind bars for a string of crimes that included identity theft, credit card fraud, and stealing and cashing welfare, Social Security and income tax refund checks from the disabled, needy, elderly and working poor using forged signatures - boarded a bus to New York City. His move to NYC was entirely because of all the freebies available to HIV-positive "LGBTQ" men like him that had been made available. This included an apartment provided and renovated by the city whose rent was subsized by the city too - along with special disability income, free health care and a plethora of social and legal services specifically for HIV-positive men who are part of the "LGBTQ."
Some excerpts:
"Last year, after getting out of prison in Georgia, she was broken, physically and mentally, Nimmons said. She was jobless, all but homeless and in poor health; her T-cell count, a measure of her immune system’s strength, had fallen to a dangerously low level. She did not know how to save herself from becoming “extinct,” as she put it.
"Then her closest friend, a native New Yorker named Kahmel Gilliard, whom she had once taken under wing in South Carolina, offered a lifeline: “Come on up here to Brooklyn, baby,” he said. “This is a place that will help you take care of yourself, and you won’t have to do anything illegal to survive.”
"So last fall, Ms. Nimmons boarded a discount bus to New York City to start over in a place of greater tolerance and robust, high-quality services for people living with H.I.V. She had no idea that her effort to reboot her life would dovetail with the state’s effort to offer greater protection and care to transgender New Yorkers, as well as with a year of increasing visibility for transgender Americans.
"Within weeks of arriving, she secured a spacious one-bedroom apartment on an eastern Brooklyn boulevard through the city’s H.I.V./AIDS Services Administration, and obtained food stamps. Those two things were crucial: “Once you’re not having to concentrate on whether you have a roof over your head or where your next meal is going to come from, it makes it easier to live healthy,” she said.
"In short order, she became a client of Amida Care, a Medicaid health plan that caters to people with H.I.V. and other chronic conditions. She started getting regular checkups and counseling at the Housing Works Community Healthcare center in East New York. Adhering faithfully to a new antiretroviral medication regimen, she saw her viral load drop and grew steadily stronger.
"The Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has helped about 1,500 transgender people change their names, connected Ms. Nimmons with what she called “a fancy Park Avenue lawyer.”
"For most of her adult life, Ms. Nimmons had lived first part time, then full time, as a woman, aided by hormone therapy, buttocks augmentation and double-D breast implants. But officially, she was still male, and, like most transgender people, she faced routine problems because of the incongruity between her gender presentation and her identity documents.
“I’ve always been passable,” Ms. Nimmons said. “But then you hand over your license to a police officer, and you get the double take. Or worse.”
"In a sign of the times, transgender name-change clinics have become “a new trend in pro bono,” according to a news release from the American Bar Association.
"Preparing to go before a judge [to get a name change] meant preparing to disclose her criminal history and declare it past. Over the spring, she became increasingly confident she could surface from a life underground.
"Until Nimmons' last arrest in 2011, she had provided for herself by hustling, she said. Some hustles were legal, like her makeup jobs, and some were not, like forging checks and committing credit card fraud.
“It was a life of crime,” Ms. Nimmons said. “Even though my harm was never physical to anybody else, I’m ashamed of what I did. But I did it to survive. It’s hard to live regular as a transgender woman, and transitioning is expensive.”
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The New York Times doesn't question Nimmons' justification for his crimes, or the way he waves away their impact on the victims. Nimmons wants the world to think that because he didn't physically beat up the people he stole from through theft of their checks, debit cards and identities and his fraud schemes forgeries, then his crimes against those people - many of whom were needy, disabled and elderly - didn't really cause harm.
In fact, the NYT not only takes Nimmons' account at face value, the paper glamorizes and valorizes Nimmons and his criminal pals. More excerpts:
"Many in her world down South lived off the grid. It was what she called “the lifestyle” — a subculture of black gay and transgender people who embraced a glammed-up outlaw existence because society treated them as too transgressive to participate in the mainstream.
“It was like a secret society,” she continued. “It was also a facade. In the light of day, you’re disowned by your real family, and you’re making illegal money. But at night, you’re a celebrity equivalent to Diana Ross or Whitney Houston.”
"Everybody looked after everybody else, pooling resources, which created bonds but also health risks. Those who were starting to transition shared hormones bought on the black market and gave one another injections. They also sought out illicit liquid silicone to enhance their hips, buttocks and sometimes breasts; on one occasion, Ms. Nimmons said, she almost died after an underground technician “stuck me wrong,” causing a pulmonary embolism.
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In the months leading up to his genital surgery, Nimmons had to be hosptialized and stay in ICU care for several weeks after contracting meningitis related to not complying with his HIV medication regimen and having flings that involve unsafe sex acts.
Nimmons' HIV status and track record of not complying with medical advice and the drug regimen to keep his HIV in check should have given the people on Nimmons' "sex change surgery" team pause about proceeding with his genital surgery. But of course that didn't happen.
As anyone with half a brain could have predicted, Nimmons did not follow the post-op care regimen and so ends up being scheduled for a second genital surgery - again at the expense of New York taxpayers. But the NY Times' story not only makes no comment about this, it actually uses it to further its portrayal of Nimmons' as a hapless sainted figure victimized by the vagaries of fate:
"After an unexpected return to [ genital surgeon] Dr. Rumer’s office on Tuesday, she learned she would need revisionary surgery, which the doctor said happens with patients who do not follow postoperative instructions.
"Ms. Nimmons spent that night tossing and turning, and crying. The next morning, she posted this thought on her Facebook page: “Yesterday was a very trying day for me on the new journey that God has placed in my life. We ask God for a lot of things and with faith we sit and wait. But I have to say, be careful of what u ask for because you just might get it.”
"By Wednesday evening, she had absorbed the disappointment of what will now be a protracted period of transition, given that the corrective surgery will not be done until next year. She determined to “hold my head up high” and fight the oscillations in mood that plague her as she puzzles over a fundamental question.
“Who am I now?” she asked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/us/kricket-nimmons-transgender-surgery.html
Exactly, this is nothing new and has been going on for ages. This is why I disagree that the lies and manipulations that men translate day after day, year after year, both routinely and in response to any little step women take towards their liberation or just better understanding of what is happening, are way more deserving of attention than "petty feminist squabbles". Why should everyone scream to tell something which is obvious? Women's energy is better spent strengthening their own movement, which includes seeing the greater meaning behind the petty conflicts everyone is so quick to dismiss.