FEMALE
- Eva Castor
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
Image by Eva Castor
By EVA CASTOR
“The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.”
—E.M. Forster
1.
Bragg Creek is a thickly forested hamlet in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
Within its boundaries you’ll find exclusive million-dollar homes tucked into towering evergreen woods so that, even if you’re looking for it, you rarely get the sense of the kind of money, or historical good fortune, one needs to be able to call the place home.
We were recently stopped there to pick up a vegan butter tart that is sheer decadence. Technically it’s not a tart but more of a huge slab of tart dough base thickly drizzled with sticky caramel and dotted with pecans and cranberries. It costs the world but it’s worth both the money and inevitable sugar crash.
Braving the Saturday lunchtime rush, my husband went in and ordered two tarts along with two tempeh, vegan cheese and sauerkraut panini-style sandwiches. These epicurean delights went into the large wicker basket that I had already packed with a blanket, thermos and various snacks.
Then we drove further west into the foothills where we parked and headed into the bush with our two camp chairs and lunch. Then the two of us, long married now, spent a relaxing hour admiring the spruce and pine trees across the river valley until the sun took up company with a broad bank of clouds, forcing us to use the old blanket as cover rather than set dressing.
We split a non-alcoholic beer and talked about nothing in particular. It was all very “the kind of thing old people did on a Saturday” and hey, somehow that’s become us now.
We’ve been lucky.
As we were leaving, the sun legally divorced the clouds making for a gorgeous trip home.
On our way out of town our little GTI ate up the blacktop like the speed queen she was, turning the long hill up and out of the hamlet into what felt like an amusement ride. I realized that I felt content.
Then, a most curious thing and unexpected thing happened to me. As I glanced to my right, I noticed Bragg Creek’s Banded Peak School shining in the sun.
We’ve driven by this neat little school hundreds of times without incident but on this day, as I studied the lay of the land around the school—in particular the thick woods and sharp-pointed treetops—my inner voice spoke up.
Out of the blue it said, “How long until a man in a dress shoots up a little country school like this one?”
Unaware that my intuitive voice had spoken, our spritely car continued propelling us into the future, so I had to quickly turn around to see the school again as we flew past it.
Looking back, I noted the black bruises of day’s end now falling at the school’s edges, the sharp lines seemed to have decomposed into the darkening woods—an ignoble ecology I’d never noticed before.
It turned out it would be just three days until a man in a dress would shoot up a little country school. Only this school would be in British Columbia not Bragg Creek.
During and after the massacre the RCMP would—and will continue to—refer to the man whose uncontrolled male violence caused murder and misery, as a female.
Because the word female means anything now.
Because the word female means nothing now.
The word “female” had been on my mind for some time before the RCMP warned citizens to shelter in place and to beware of a “female in a dress with brown hair,” when what the public needed to be aware of was an armed and dangerous man in a dress.
2.
It all began a few weeks before when I’d attended an appointment at my endocrinologist’s office. Much like my first visit, the second was also a comedy of errors from start to finish; beginning in a rather damp fashion when my thermos of chai tea leaked through my canvas tote bag and coming to its completion with the term “Gender Identity: female” appearing without rhyme or reason on my clinic requisition form.
When I read those words on my paperwork, I stopped walking and just stood there, frozen in the confluence between the hallway that led into the warren of offices and the busy waiting room. After a moment I realized I was blocking patient traffic and I moved forward, the enraging paperwork now crinkled up in a ball in my angry little fist.
What did it say? I thought. WHAT DID THAT PAPER SAY? Gender Identity: female?!
My mind raced. The use of the word “female” here could have indicated several things; the office wasn’t aware that under Gender Identity’s most basic language construct I should be called a “ciswoman” as I wasn’t identifying as a “transman” or “nonbinary person.”
Perhaps that was the case.
Or maybe it was more sinister.
If this designation was being applied to everyone’s medical records, maybe using the word “female” on women’s paperwork was not an accident made by an untrained staff member.
Perhaps using “female” on women’s paperwork was by design, opting us all into Gender Identity without ever having to explain what it means. After all, women may not know what Gender Identity means but we know we’re female.
So, when the elderly immigrant at the clinic sees her paperwork, she has no idea that her unchallenged designation of “Gender Identity; female” signals her total acquiescence to a medically enforced social construct which, although it is clear about gender being fluid, would happily put her autistic grand daughter on chemical castration drugs and then wrong sex hormones rendering the girl sterile and sexually dysfunctional for life because, according to the institutions which govern us, her “Gender Identity” was not “female.”
They don’t put that in the small print because there is no small print.
In fact, when I arrived the woman at the desk asked if I still had the same phone number and address, but she never asked me if the “Gender Identity” they had secretly applied to my chart, had changed since my last appointment.
Why, it’s almost as if the whole thing is made up.
3.
As soon as I got home from that appointment, I lodged a formal complaint with Patient Relations. I demanded to know if they were doing this to everyone in the system or just at this office. I wrote in my complaint that I do not have a “Gender Identity: female” and that I wanted it struck from all my paperwork.
Within a few days I got a phone call telling me an investigation would be opened into how this happened and that I could expect a decision within a few weeks. I stressed to the women handling my case that while the designation of a “Gender Identity” might seem neutral, in action it leads to the eradication of our female only public spaces and rights.
For how can a girl or woman advocate for her sex-based rights and protections when the words “girl”, “woman” and “female” have been stolen, deconstructed from their designations based in material reality and then reconstructed to act ideologically, to no longer to indicate our immutable sex-class but rather an ever-shifting social construct called Gender Identity.
After I made the complaint, I felt dirty.
As if I’d been involved in something unexpected and unwanted that was happening on another level.
The word female was at the heart of this feeling. I couldn’t exactly pin down the reason this was haunting me, so I shifted the question to the back burner to let it sit for some subconscious processing. This is a trick I learned from a mnemonic expert.
It was no surprise then when, a few hours later, I remembered this:
"At the center of sissy porn lies the asshole, a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed. Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is."
The writer of this quote is a man called Andrea Long Chu. He is not an outlier. He is an openly out sissy hypno-porn-addled misogynist who has since been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
In “Females,” Chu writes frankly about consuming sissy hypno-porn to the point that it made him “trans.” All that sissy hypno-porn? That makes him female, just like me.
He’s female like the male rapists housed in what were women’s prisons. He’s female, like the boxers who beat women up in the ring at the Olympics.
He’s female like any man is female. They are men. They are males.
They are girls and women and females, too.
You can tell this because it’s critically important that, despite any risks or offence that may be caused, when a man ends his own life after his uncontrolled male fury explodes into a murderous rampage, first at home and then in a little school that is tucked back into the woods in a small community, the RCMP honor the man’s identity and call him female.
The weaponized arm of the Canadian legal system has attributed this crime to the females of Canada because female means both anything and nothing now.
We are undone. I am becoming nothing. Not ether. Not snow. Not dust.
I am only Gender Identity: female.