Thomas Wictor

The Hampshire College Sex Blog got a question from Anonymous.

How do you recommend women keep their genitals fresh and clean without any unnatural products?

Here’s the beginning of the answer:

Great question! First, we’d like to quickly address the language of saying “women” instead of “female-bodied people:” not everyone who identifies as a woman has a vagina/vulva.

Well, the “Sexperts” blew it (so to speak) because the questioner said nothing about vaginas or vulvas. The questioner said “genitals.” But the sexperts were so eager to cram their sociopolitical agenda down everyone’s throat (in a sense) that they read something that wasn’t there. The questioner could easily have been someone who identifies as a woman but lacks the traditional lady parts.

I recently discovered the concept of cisgender, defined as when a person’s genitals match his or her self-identify. Thus a human with a penis who self-identifies as a male is called a “cis male.” The notions of cissexism and cissexual assumption are part of “cisnormativity,” as opposed to heteronormativity, which posits that heterosexuality is the norm.

This road will lead us to absolute ruin. Trust me. I’ve experienced it firsthand. We’ll get to that later.

Forcing me to say “female-bodied person” is deranged and just another malignant attempt to control me. I won’t do it. Sorry.

Before you lose your mind in righteous outrage, let me tell you about the clerk in the bookstore nearby. This was a post-op transsexual, male to female. I’ll use the term “she,” because the person had the parts. She was about six three, broad shouldered, and looked exactly like Joey Ramone with breasts.

None of her colleagues ever seemed to talk to her, and the customers waited to go to other clerks. People openly expressed their disgust with her. Since I’m not afraid of transsexuals and self-identify (see what I did there?) as an outcast, the first time I had her as my clerk, I went right to her with my pile of books. When I signed my check, she said, “A fellow lefty.”

“You too?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Put ‘er there, sister sinisterite,” I said and held out my left hand.

She laughed and shook it. After that I always made it a point to go to her cash register. She seemed very lonely. We discovered a shared love of Holling Clancy Holling and Robert McCloskey.

I could easily have gone out to dinner or even become friends with her. She was funny and smart. But I’ll tell you the truth: I felt extremely sorry for her. Adding breasts and a vagina did nothing for her. It may even have made things worse, given the way people reacted to her.

But

She had breasts and a vagina, so I can call her “she.” Yes, her chromosomes were still XY, because there’s no such thing as chromosomal surgery. My opinion is that if someone has gone as far as having gender-reassignment surgery, I’ll call the person by the gender he or she wants. Makes no difference to me.

I draw the line, however, at calling Bradley Manning “she” just because he announced that he’s now a woman named Chelsea. Tough titties, Brad. You’re a dude. The Wikipedia entry says this:

Advocacy groups such as GLAAD, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) encouraged media outlets to refer to Manning by her self-identified name and pronoun.

So if I self-identify as a ’68 Pontiac Firebird, even though I have no engine, wheels, transmission, seats, or headlights, are you required to refer to me by the pronoun “it”? Will reviewers of my books have to begin with “From 1968 Pontiac Firebird Thomas Wictor comes a novel of rage and redemption…”

Can I go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and demand that I be registered? Do I have the right to gallop down the freeway and sue the crap out of any highway patrol officer who pulls me over?

What if I told you that I’m coming over to your house to give you a ride to the airport? Are you required to try and climb inside me, and then the two of us will stumble about fifteen feet before I collapse from loss of blood?

No, you’re allowed to say, “Tom, you’re not a car. I’m sorry. I know you want very badly to be a car, but you’re not one.”

Pretending that I’m a car and forcing everyone else to pretend that I’m a car gets us into the territory of thought control and demonic peer pressure. I lived five years in a nation that did that to its citizens: Japan. It gives Norway a run for its money in terms of a confused, inhumane culture.

In the northern island of Hokkaido, there’s an indigenous group of aboriginal people called the Ainu. When I went on exchange program to a Japanese university in 1983, an expert on the Ainu gave us a lecture on them. Before he entered the room, the Japanese professors told us to make no mention of his Ainu heritage. We were to treat him as though the were an ethnic Japanese who just happened to study the Ainu. We were not to included him in the group he spoke about.

The expert came in, and he looked just like this guy.

Here we had an Ainu telling us about his culture, and we all had to pretend he was an ethnic Japanese studying people who had nothing to do with him. It was demented. The reason we had to do that is because the Japanese are cartoonishly racist. In Japanese the equivalent of the N-word for white people is keto, which means “hairy one.” Most Japanese could never accept the fact that some white people could understand their precious language, so they’d call us N-words to our faces. They’d also refuse to serve us in clubs.

Despite the racism I moved to Japan in 1985 and became a conversational English teacher. In one of my classes, there was a young Japanese businessman with sky blue eyes. I’d never seen anything like it.

“You’ve got amazing eyes,” I told him. “I didn’t know there were Japanese with blue eyes, much less light blue ones.”

“My eyes are brown,” he said firmly.

I felt the chill I always get when confronted with total irrationality. “No, your eyes are light blue, like a cloudless sky. They’re almost white.”

Now he was angry. “My eyes are brown!” he nearly shouted.

I turned to the other students. “What color are his eyes?”

All eleven of them said that his eyes were brown. I gave up.

That experience wasn’t a one-off. A year or so later, I met a young Japanese woman with beautiful green eyes, the color of a Heineken bottle.

“I’ve never met a Japanese with green eyes,” I told her.

She frowned and said, “My eyes are brown!”

This time I didn’t bother arguing. I knew by then that the culture made them do this. Because of rigorously enforced conformity and thought control, the Japanese suffered a catastrophic nuclear disaster on March 12, 2011. The power company, the two government regulatory bodies, and the Ministry of Industry—which promotes nuclear power—were all aware of the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s deficiencies, but the culture prevented anybody from doing anything about it.

In order to save face, the power company lied about the plant’s safety features; in order to not make the power company feel uncomfortable, the government simply accepted the lies.

When the power company was questioned, it said, “My blue eyes are brown,” and the government lacked the fortitude to say, “No, your eyes are sky blue.”

The power company certainly wished that its plants were up to standard. Since those charged with protecting the public pretended that the power company’s wishes were reality, the Japanese are still contending with the meltdown almost three years later.

If we become a culture in which everyone is coerced into accepting falsehoods simply because it’s what others want, we’ll have our own Fukushima sooner or later. Telling the truth isn’t “hurtful,” bigoted, prejudiced, or intolerant.

I can demand that you call me “it” because I claim to be a 1968 Pontiac Firebird.

But you’re under no obligation to indulge me.