…and, right on cue and appropriately, covers half the story.
Straplined TRANSGENDER IN TORONTO on the cover, the October 2015 Toronto Life, the journal of the dumb rich, runs a giant faux-first-person piece about Toronto transgendered persons. Writer Catherine Youdan leaves out half the story on two of her subjects.
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Dr. I. Alex Abramovich is back – and bustier than ever! Not quite, I suppose, because she states that she had a double mastectomy. She further talks about her elective testosterone and its effects (“my voice deepened, I grew facial hair, and I became more muscular”). She plans to “fertilize [her] egg with donor sperm,” and her girlfriend “will carry the baby.” Yet at the same time she all but shrieks “[P]eople feel like they have the right to ask intrusive questions about my body” – presumably not pertaining to her breasts, voice, facial hair, musculature, or eggs, because she talks about those freely. And here’s the kicker: “If I weren’t trans, people would never inquire about my genitals.”
That may have something to do with the immutable biological fact that “men” don’t have the genitals you do, madame.
Given the documentation in the article, Ms Abramovich has so much privilege as a transgendered person it borders on classic male privilege. She has a Ph.D. and she succeeded with her pet project, an “LGBTQ youth homelessness” shelter that everyone, including me, supported. Yet what Youdan fails to document is this academic’s willingness to file false police complaints when supporters of her homeless-shelter project state the fact that she is female.
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You couldn’t swing a cat in Parkdale without Daryl “Sophia” Banks posting about it on Twitter. That’s the same place this aggressive, unstable man calls gays and lesbians transphobic, gets banned for a while for carrying out the transgender habit of issuing threats, and insists up and down that some women have dicks. Indeed, she tells Youdan “Who says a woman can’t have a penis?” (Basically everyone but you says that, Daryl.)
Fortunately, Banks has bugged out to Montreal. I’d say he’s now somebody else’s problem except that transgender aggressors like him do their dirty work online.
Elsewhere we meet a colossus who somehow got himself on the Canadian “women’s” dodgeball team. Throughout we hear of great distress, depression, dysmorphia, and suicide attempts, but nowhere are we told which of those things might have predated the subjects’ gender confusion.
When asked why Abramovich’s and Banks’s history of threats and aggression didn’t make the cut, Youdan ignored the question.
Updates (2015.11.20)
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For the online publication of the article, Toronto Life editrix Sarah “Not Wedgie” Fulford dubbed it “[f]ive powerful, honest, brave memoirs on what it’s like to be trans in Toronto.” (Note the word “honest.”)
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The December 2015 issue declared that the article “elicited near-unanimous applause.” Only one letter to the editor is published. Cara Ware wrote: “Sophia Banks’s story had me in tears…. So many people are misinformed or uneducated about what being transgender really means.”
Well, let’s give the floor to Daryl “Sophia” Banks, who will inform and educate us that being transgender means having a cock and pissing standing up: “Pissing while standing is going to be my new thing to ‘piss’ off transphobes and gender-policing trans people.” Because, according to Daryl, his penis is female because he is female.
I am not sure how “many people are misinformed or uneducated about what being transgender really means.” “Many people” know very well that MTFs are men dressed as women who nonetheless act like men, for example. And I wonder if Ms Ware would welcome Daryl Banks, and his penis, as they stood up to urinate in the ladies’ room. (If I could reasonably contact Ms Ware, I’d ask her.)
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Meanwhile, Toronto Life carefully refused to publish my letter to the editor.
In Caroline Youdan’s piece, her transgender subjects told tales of employment discrimination. But I didn’t see any indication that the victims of this discrimination took the alleged perpetrators to the Human Rights Tribunal. Obviously an onerous process, but if you don’t do that while also spinning a yarn to a journalist, your discrimination is nothing but a talking point.
Nor did I see in Youdan’s piece any acknowledgement of the war of attrition waged online by Toronto transgender activists. Dr. Ilona Alex Abramovich and Daryl “Sophia” Banks are among the worst offenders here, the former filing a false police report in one case and the latter constantly threatening gays and lesbians on Twitter. (In fact, Banks’s Twitter account was suspended for just such a threat.) Abramovich talks about “his” testosterone-altered voice, facial hair, and muscles, “his” double mastectomy, and “his” egg, yet balks when people ask about genitalia – a contradiction Youdan glosses over.
Transgenders may face illegal discrimination, but they are the aggressors against the real gay and lesbian community, feminists, and everyone who dares to state that feelings cannot trump biology. Here Youdan follows the downtown-progressive script that “trans*” are the most oppressed “folk” ever, failing to note the hammers they swing at everyone who knows – as the core Toronto Life demographic does – that no woman has a penis.