The “I Pretended to Be Nonbinary” Moms for Liberty Leader Is Our Neighbor
Our community has been putting up with her harassment and transphobic fixation for over a year.
This Chair of a Moms for Liberty chapter? This one going viral for her account of faking being nonbinary to her doctors to “test” how easy it is to get gender-affirming care?
SO many tax dollars have been wasted on this woman and her endless FOIA requests, looking for evidence of a conspiracy of “gender ideology.”
Meanwhile, she has publicly posted names of teachers with pride flags in their classrooms, doctors who provide gender-affirming care, and LGBTQ+ advocates (including me) to her audience of right-wing transphobes who, predictably, throw around the term “gr00mer” in response. (Some of our educators have suffered far worse, with police waking them at 2 am to check for bombs.)
She has also posted, more than once, comments about chummy conversations with “Chaya” — the one and only Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok, whose call-outs over her enormous platform are consistently followed by bomb threats. (Could there be a connection here?)
In this (long, rambling, “I ain’t gonna read all that” except I had to) “essay,” she recounts how she convinced her doctors that she was nonbinary, received a testosterone pump for hormonal therapy, and set up appointments — that she never intended to keep — for both top and bottom surgery.
She claims she threw out “red flags” that she might be mentally ill, then was horrified when doctors still took her desire for gender-affirming care seriously.
Her implication all along is if a 53-year-old grown adult woman is able to get gender-affirming care so easily, then imagine how easy it must be for children!
If you have concluded that logic is not her strength, you are correct.
There is so much wrong with her actions and her story that I can’t possibly cover here, so let me just point out one deep contradiction in her stated beliefs and her actions:
On many occasions, she has claimed she is “liberal,” “a feminist,” a defender of “women’s rights.”
I lived much of my life as a cisgender woman before I came out as genderfluid, and I have experienced in my personal life as well as my professional research how women, historically and today, are often disbelieved about their own health. The word “hysteria” comes from a Latin word meaning “womb.” Women, and especially nonwhite women, have had to fight against a white, male-dominated medical establishment to be taken seriously about our health problems, particularly ones that affect women more than men, or where symptoms manifest differently in women than men.
Women have been told that their pain, fatigue, trouble breathing, and other symptoms are “all in your head” or could be solved “if you just lose some weight,” only to discover later they were suffering from heart disease, cancer, genetic disorders, and other serious, sometimes life-threatening conditions.
With her stunt, the Yolo County Moms for Liberty Chair is advocating for a health system where disbelieving patients — particularly patients who are not cis men — is the norm. She is appalled that her account of her own experience is taken seriously by her doctors.
This is the future the right wing wants: a future where anyone who is not a cis man must convince medical gatekeepers that, yes, they do in fact need life-saving healthcare. Anti-abortion legislation has never been about saving the lives of fetuses and babies; it’s just about stripping body autonomy away from women and other pregnant people. We know this because the right wing also attacks birth control — one of the best methods of abortion prevention — as well as food programs, healthcare, childcare assistance, gun violence prevention, and other policies that help keep living children alive.
This stunt is just the latest example of how transphobes, by attacking the rights of trans people, end up undermining and eroding the rights of cisgender women.
Feminism that excludes trans women isn’t feminism at all. It’s just another way for patriarchy to dehumanize all women — cis and trans alike.