A goodbye letter from Eva Castor
“You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.”
Diamantina is derived from the Greek name “Adamantis.” The name means ‘diamond’ or ‘unbreakable.’
This has certainly proven to be an apt name for you Diamantina, She Who Will Not Peak.
Yesterday, it came time for me to fold my hand and declare myself out. I’m cashing in my chips and closing the bar down. As we used to say at The Westward Club at the end of the night, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
1.
It was in the year 2021 AD that I first revealed myself to you.
“I am a Terf,” I said.
Your face was a study in blankness. A Terf? What was that?
“I am a Terf,” I said again. My vagus nerve sent prehistoric impulses to my brain and stomach, a bad case of Terf nerves if you will. Had I made a fatal error? Was I ready to make my case? Would you freak out and storm off? Panic made my innards churn. Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is to say that men are not women.
But I was well past the point of pretense and so on I went. Seeing you only once a year, and believing you to be a feminist, I rolled the dice and said my piece.
But you were not a feminist. You are a meninist. You were and still are, a devotee of Judith Butler, She of the Incohesive and Obfuscating, praise be to her bowel movements.
I didn’t realize that you were a Genderist at the hour of your departure that afternoon, when we were saying goodbye on the sidewalk and I was thanking you for not storming out of my house after I made it clear that men were not women.
I was nervous because I had already experienced this loss of several valued relationships with “My Old Twitter Friends.”
These were friends of a decade or more, made on the internet but still, friends who exchanged Christmas cards and recipes and once, a bag of vintage 1940s quilt pieces, all pre-cut and ready for the talented hands of Liz Smith, a quilter of some renown. These women were dear friends to me. Friends who on January 20th 2021 called me transphobic and hateful after a newly minted President Biden consumed Title IX like an eclipse eats the face of the sun and I had the bad judgement to complain publicly. I was told to “Delete your tweets” and to “Unfollow the RadFems” and asked “Is the hill you’re going to die on” — which I thought to myself, “Well, it’s material reality so…. yes?”
On that day, because I dared to say that Biden had made it so that any man could say he was a woman, more than half a dozen of these women I had known for a decade unfollowed my account before dinner time. It was my birthday.
Unlike them, when I told you I was a Terf, you did not abandon me. I think that was because you thought very little about the whole encounter. You didn’t realize it is a jog through a mine field to say the magical spell-deflating words: sex is real and immutable and men are not women or girls or babies or dogs.
That summer’s afternoon I felt that I had made an excellent first volley and at some juncture you would realize, “Holy crap. This shit is WACK.” But it’s almost four years later and you haven’t changed your position on anything so far as I can tell. You also have never paid for your beliefs, unlike a woman trapped with a man in her a prison cell. Nor have you been a poor but fast girl who was cheated out of her college scholarship by a boy who can run rings around her in the girl’s track events. Unlike hundreds of girls and women I've tried to tell you about, you practice the mantra of “Be Kind” from the safety of your comfortable home in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities.
But there are clouds on your horizon. You and your daughters live in a former communist country whose current leaders are intent on implementing the destruction of your sex-based rights this very year. They will call it "Self ID" and you and your daughters will learn first hand what it’s like here at home in Canada. I advise you to get ready for degenerate and mentally unwell men in the women’s changing room at the gym you and the girls use because that’s what is on the menu. Cock and balls. Maybe their genitals will have been mutilated by an insane surgeon or maybe the man Esther meets will be like Planet Fitness guy, a creep of the “I’m a fully intact man, wearing men’s clothes, washing my hands at a sink in a women’s change room right in front of a teenage girl who looks as if she wants to crawl out of her skin” variety.
Who can say what kind of men will show up into your daughter’s sports and your women’s writing group? Men come in all shapes and sizes and paraphilias. “May you live in interesting times” is a curse, not a blessing and your lives are about to become very interesting.
2.
The second time we spoke about my being a Terf I explained that I had undergone a year long dissociative episode during the time period where I was being sexually assaulted at a babysitter’s house. I was passed around from the grandfather to his two teenage grandsons the entire school year. Some afternoons all three would have go at me. It was humiliation after humiliation and no one seemed to notice me falling apart. After the first few months of this abuse, I simply disassociated into being The Black Stallion. I explained to you that if I was a girl in that situation in our current age, I have no doubt that I would disassociate into the cult of genderism and I would be on a fast track to a double mastectomy, masculinizing doses of testosterone, reproductive organ failure, increased change of heart attack or stroke and multiple irreversible surgeries.
That day, for the first time in our relationship, in order to explain to you why I am a Terf, I opened up about the sheer volume of harms done to me by boys and men and your response was, “Well none of them were trans, Frenchy!”
In that instant you chose upholding genderism over hearing your friend and understanding the meaning and reality of her words.
To be honest, over the years you have gone to some great lengths to not think about any of these issues in a serious and critical fashion. Do you remember the ‘Giant Breast-Fetish Shop Teacher’ scandal? Maybe that guy was trolling or maybe he was a humiliation and milk porn degenerate paraphiliac who had gone right off the rails, I don’t know.
But I do know that rather than consider the children and adults forced to participate in his fetishistic behavior in the public realm you asked your teen daughters what they thought and when they said it was fine and that he was just being his real gender you agreed.
I felt like ‘Chloe, the back seat car girl’ because I could not believe what I was hearing from you.
Trying to break through the fog of giant latex breast gender permissiveness, I even told you the story of how in 1979 my mom had to fight the school board to get me into Wood Shop instead of Home Economics. After a stressful few weeks, I became the first girl in the school district to take Wood Shop and I went alone into that lion's den.
To get to the school where the shop was, I had to take the bus with fifteen boys who all completely ignored me. I sat on the very back seat all by myself, disassociating from the entire process, my mind as clouded as the Emergency Exit door’s grimy window. When we arrived at the school for the first class, the shop teacher sat me down at a desk in the corner. He gave me a box of wooden off cuts and a bottle of white school glue and that was that. He never taught me how to use a single tool. I don't recall passing so much as ten words with anyone in that room throughout that whole semester, the loneliness and resentment marinated me into a state of soft panic and constant anxiety.
After I told you this story, I asked you what you thought a girl taking a class with Giant Breast Fetish Shop Teacher might feel like but that never got us anywhere either.
You’re really very good at not processing these issues.
3.
A year later, on the occasion of the third and final time we spoke about genderism, I thought I’d worked out a way to cut through the fog. I developed ‘The Survey’ —a two-page series of questions which revealed to me that you didn’t know enough to have an opinion about whether or not women should take testosterone during their pregnancy.
Or whether or not men should induce male nipple discharge and then put a hungry baby on them so they can have their nipples sucked.
Or whether or not a toddler girl was signaling her boy gender if she pulled a barrette out of her hair.
You were unsure if seven-year-old boys should crush their genitals so their crotch looks smooth and flat or if six-year-old girls should wear a soft fabric dildo which is filled with dry pinto beans inside a special pocket in their underwear so they can be affirmed as trans boys.
You were unsure about almost everything. The one issue you were mostly clear on was your belief that people should have to use someone’s “preferred pronouns.” I argued. You shrugged. You told me that your daughters had a non-binary classmate in their class and you didn’t want anyone to be mean to them.
Recognizing that the default position of inane verbal deference was being framed as kind and that this put me in the terrible transphobe camp I angrily said, “Excuse me, are you suggesting that because I won’t call that girl ’they/them' you think I’m mean to her? I’d be the best thing to happen to that girl because I’d tell her:
“No. I’m not going to pretend you’re something other than your sex and the whole nonbinary thing would be embarrassing nonsense if it wasn’t so dangerous. You’re being used by corporate interests and perverted men and you’re acting in a fashion which is not in your best interest. Just stop it. It’s stupid. Be cool.”
That was our final true-Terf conversation. The year was 2023.
Since then, you’ve been ignoring my carefully curated emails.
I try to send easy content which will arouse your interests: the details of Sall Grover’s trial because it’s about language, Rosie Kay’s cancellation from her dance company because that’s theatre related and for your daughters, stories of college girls who are being told that the man who has been invited to live with them as a sorority girl is a man sitting on the couch with a pillow over his erection but he is he is actually a woman and they’re transphobes for daring to complain. I sent the emails and got no acknowledgements, no replies. And still, I persisted.
It took a year but finally, mitigating relationship factors arose starting in the fall of 2024 and continued into the holiday season when I spoke with three different women about my concerns about genderism and unlike you, they all understood instantly.
One told me she can’t speak freely about her sex-specific hand-made products for fear of being cancelled by the Instagram gender mob.
Another woman told me she didn’t like men coming into her store and trying on the women’s clothes she sells. She also told me she’s not going out to eat as much as when we had sex-based public bathrooms. With another woman not-so-casually listening in from the rack of scarves, the owner explained that she has a plan of what to say if a man comes into a restaurant washroom but it’s just safer and easier to eat at home now.
My neighbour, who got the exact same email I sent to you, a piece about chemically castrating children with Lupron and opposite-sex hormones in order to affirm their gender, wrote to me within hours of my sending the email out saying:
“I am also against mutilating children in the name of gender.”
All of a sudden I realized how easy this was when it wasn't you I was speaking with.
In these frank and reassuring conversations, each of the women I connected with actually thanked me for broaching these issues with them. It was a revelation to me. Unlike you, these women wanted to ask questions and learn more.
Then, a few days before New Years Eve, my husband spoke with an artist in her late sixties. She told him how sad she was that girls today didn’t have the rights that she had in the 1960s and that she thought that transing kids was child abuse.
After three years of you stone walling I couldn’t believe how regular women were so open to talking about these issues without saying, “It’s complicated” or “I don’t agree with you about kids” or “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Maybe that’s the difference between women living under Self ID for eight years and a woman who only hears about it second hand. Unlike many women and girls around the planet, you feel you can opt out of it by just not talking about it anymore because, unlike many, you still can.
As President Trump’s Executive Orders began to come in and the orders implementations began to remove the mechanisms of genderism, I wanted to celebrate with you but when I wrote you, I heard nothing. And then I became very angry. I have been working for seven years and I deserved to hear some congratulations from you. But none were forthcoming. I began to view our relationship through an entirely different lens. Instead of thinking how hurt you would be if I wanted to distance myself from you, I started to question my integrity as well as my mental wellbeing and time and resource usage.
And so here we are, it’s 2025 and after forty years of the occasional shenanigan and tapas nosh, we’ve come to a fork in the road.
It turns out that I don’t believe in sterilizing people (especially kids!) and I’m a woman: an adult human female so I’m heading off on the road marked “Sex-Based Rights and General Rationality” and you’re off to “Be Kind Land”, where sterilization and genital mutilation is an act of life-saving medical care and a girl is anyone who says so. I hear it’s rainy at Be Kind Land at this time of year. So you better bring an umbrella.
All kidding aside, I am saddened that we are experiencing this parting so late in life but also, I am somewhat relieved not to have to justify to myself why I had a child abuse enabler in my small circle of friends.
Perhaps we will be well met in the not too far off future because the forecast in the republic you live in calls for Self ID and frankly my dear, I think you’re about to find out that you do in fact, give a damn.
I hope you’ll call me when the penny drops. I don’t hold a grudge.
I do however, hold the line.
Creative processing
The author's notes
Here’s what I recently learned about me:
I let an unsatisfactory relationship go on much longer than I should have because I didn’t want to do to Diamantina what my old friends did to me when I announced I was a Terf on Jan/20/2021.
It was Inauguration Day. I was pretty stoked. I wasn’t a Trump fan and although I was a three-year-old Terf, I didn’t know that Joe Biden was going to go all in on the first day of his Presidency with an Executive Order which gutted Title IX and redefined girls and women from our immutable sex class into an identity class which any male could opt into with a transformative spell: I identify as a woman.
When I saw what Biden had done I wrote an outraged tweet and within minutes I was told to “delete your tweet” (there’s a first time for everything!), “unfollow the RadFems!” (you know who you are, lol) and that all time Terf classic, “Is this the hill you’re going to die on?”.
I read that last question and, in my head, I heard the answer in a voice that sounded eerily like Addison DeWitt from “All About Eve”.... “Well it’s material reality so…yes?”
By the end of that day seven or eight friends had unfollowed me. This wasn't your regular Twitter account. It was a carefully curated and locked account where I had a decade-long history with just a few people. We sent Christmas cards and condolence cards. I once sent Liz a bag of fabulous 1940’s quilt triangles I scored at an estate sale. I liked them and I thought they liked me. But I was a horrible evil transphobe so, bye bye bye. Man. It sucked hard. I tried to salvage relationships with the remaining ladies but they were almost all genderists so I abandoned that account, made a new one and went full Terf. In the end I followed more RadFems, lol!
I know that I carried that hurtful experience of cancellation into my nearly forty-year relationship with Dimantina. I was also pretty nervous that she would dump me when she learned I was a Terf. “Once bitten, twice shy,” as my mom used to say. But Diamantina never did freak out on me although she never Peaked either. Not for my lack of trying.
In order: I first experienced fear then hope, then mild frustration which slowly morphed into a befuddled kind of confusion that led to tortuous self doubt in my abilities and how she perceived me. On one occasion there was proper shock and then a flash of anger and now, after another two years of soft gender nonsense and her grey rocking my Terf emails, there’s mostly just a slow burning contempt. You can’t be friends when you feel like that about someone. I don’t have any respect for her position which, as far as I can gather, is the classic “Be Kind” nihilism.
She’s on the right side of history, if you know what I mean.
In 2023 I asked her a question. It went a little like this:
Should men take drugs to induce the production of male nipple discharge so that they can put hungry infants to their nipples?
A pretty loaded question I thought, lol.
It was a multiple-choice answer: A. Agree, B. Disagree, C. Not Sure and D. Need more information.
Diamantina choose D. Need more information.
I should have stepped back right then and there. But when it comes to Peaking I've got a deep David Lo Pan streak in me: "...we all keep trying, like fools."
Last week I stepped away from Diamantina via a fairly sharp-toned email.
I should have checked out way earlier, before the resentment fermented into anger and disapproval but I had figured she'd Peak sooner or later. I can Peak most women in under ten minutes. It's pretty easy and I'm good at it. It's been really weird that I can't Peak her. 'Tis but a mystery to confound!
I just can't hang out with her while she thinks kids are born in the wrong body. It's creepy. It was making me feel weirded out. You know? You want the people around you to not be enabling a genital mutilating, child sterilizing, female right stealing, animal abusing, porn saturated, sissification cult. I think that's not too big an ask. Just...be cool, my baby. Be cool.
I probably pissed her off but just in case, I tried to leave the door open because I believe that given enough time almost everyone will Peak and if she can figure it out, I'd like to do tapas once a year until one of us is six feet under.
Also, Self ID is headed her way this year and with teenage daughters who like to go the the gym to pump iron, I reckon real gender trouble is just a degenerate man in their change room away.
Only time and trans will tell.
Eva Castor
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