Lies about Transgender People and the Vagina Monologues

This is one in a series of essays exposing falsehoods forwarded by feminists who are suspicious of or antagonistic toward transgender people. This series includes Debunking “Trans Women Are Not Women” Arguments and my forthcoming essay Transgender People and “Biological Sex” Myths. If you appreciate this work, please consider supporting me on Patreon.

These days, almost every anti-transgender hit-piece written from a feminist perspective will mention an incident that occurred in 2015, in which Mount Holyoke College canceled a scheduled performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues for not being inclusive of transgender people. By citing this instance out of context, these writers attempt to assert or imply that:

1) all trans people must want to censor The Vagina Monologues.
2) more sinisterly, trans people are trying to stop women from talking about their vaginas.
3) this is yet another example of why feminism and trans activism are inherently incompatible.

However, this framing purposefully ignores two crucial factors.

why my piece won’t be appearing in The Stranger

On Wednesday, June 28th, the Seattle news outlet The Stranger published an article called The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren't. Amongst its numerous flaws, it gave credence to the notion that there is a “social contagion” to become transgender, and that this is a cause behind why some people eventually decide to detransition.

Back in 2016, I detailed both the biased thinking behind, and the potential harm caused by, this notion, in my lengthy and nuanced essay Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation: A Guide for Understanding Transgender Children Debates (and in this follow up). Herzog reached out to interview me for her The Stranger article, saying she had read my essay. I was open to it at first, until it became clear to me that she was planning to legitimize that “social contagion” theory in her piece. When Herzog's article came out last week, I penned a blogpost called Stop pitting detransitioners against happily transitioned people, in which I pointed out the skewed framing and several (albeit not all) of the misconceptions that Herzog's article forwarded.