The Daily Signal - Best of 2019: She Once Thought She Was a Man. Now She’s Fighting the Patriarchy.

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

When she was around 13, Eliana Bookbinder began questioning her gender after reading a lot online. But in time, she came to realize she was a woman—and now she’s fighting for feminism. Daniel Davis and Katrina Trinko interview Bookbinder to learn more about her journey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast, and I'm Kate Trinko. We're on a short hiatus for the holidays, but we wanted to share one of our favorite interviews from 2019 with you. We'll be back to our regular programming on Monday, January 6th. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to Scotus 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Joining us today is Eliana Bookbinder, a young woman who is a member of the Women's Liberation Front and who had her own gender identity struggle as a young adult. Eliana, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me. Okay. So when did you first start to think that you were a man? And what made you think that? Probably I started thinking that around when I was 12 or 13. I'd had a lot of issues. I had very masculine interests. I wasn't super comfortable with my body.

I was very, very uncomfortable with feminine clothing and makeup, things like that. And I sort of started to think, okay, maybe I'm not actually a girl. Maybe I'm actually a boy. And did you talk to anyone about feeling that, like tell your friends or your parents or anything? I didn't. I kept it mostly to myself, I think entirely to myself until a few years later. I did read a lot about it online, although I never actually mustered up the nerve to post and receive feedback. So when did you begin to actually identify as a man and how did that process come about?

What happened was I was reading a lot. I was on Tumblr and Facebook and also a blogging sort of community that I followed. And I was seeing a lot of stuff about how, you know, being trans, you know, is about not fitting in with the gender roles you're assigned, you know, not being very feminine woman or very masculine man. And like it's all about how, you know, you feel about your gender identity.

And I remember thinking, you know, I don't feel like a woman. And I don't, I'm not very comfortable with sort of feminineity. And I'm much more comfortable with sort of traditionally masculine activities. and clothing. So I guess I'm a boy. And it was definitely influenced a lot by the blog as I was reading and the people I followed on Tumblr and Facebook. And when you decided you were a boy, did that affect what your name was? Did it affect how you dressed? What did that actually mean? So I never quite got out, got to like coming out. I started thinking, you know,

I picked out a name. I was just going to go by, I think, Eli, because it's a shortening of Eliana. But I never actually got, I would always dress, you know, T-shirt, jeans, shorts, things like that. So it didn't only change how I dressed, because I already dressed in a very masculine way. I never got to the point of actually, you know, getting a binder, but I was looking around online for where to find one. there are disturbingly places where you can actually get used binders from older trans-identified women or donated

if you're a young woman who can't get one herself, which is kind of disturbing. So how did your family and friends take to the transition that you had? I never, I sort of came to my senses before I really told many of them. I think I maybe told my brother who was kind of more. confused about it than anything else. Hearing about it later, my parents were really like, you know, how could this have happened to our kid? Because they thought I was, you know, pretty well insulated from it.

I was homeschooled. I didn't have that much, like, I didn't have any, you know, in real life friends who were transitioning or anything like that. But I had enough friends and sort of contact with people who were transitioning online that I heard about it. So you now identify as female, correct? I now accept that I am a female human being. Okay.

So what sort of changed you to that, or not changed you to that because you are biologically that, but what made you accept it? It was actually, it was two things. One was the blogging community I followed that had some trans people and some non-trans people in it, sort of had a major schism

around someone saying, well, trans women aren't just women full stop. Like, that's not what those words mean, which, you know, I was a little budding scientist. I was like, yeah, you know, if you're transitioning from A to B, that means you're not B. Like, that doesn't make sense. And I sort of from there started to see a lot of the logical fallacies in the trans ideology. I also started working at Boy Scout camp, which doesn't sound like it'd be a, you know, great place for a little, you know, someone who thinks they're trans, a little trans-identified girl. But for me, it was the first place where I'd been, you know, really valued for my, you know, mastical interests. I was very interested in science.

I was, you know, really good at starting fires. I was physically strong. I was valued for all of those things. Those were valuable skills in this. community at Boy Scout camp, but I was also definitely female. Like I was in the girls' campsite, you know, there were other girls and women who were, you know, very masculine. We were valued, but we weren't men.

And that's so interesting because I think, you know, having been a teenage girl myself, it is such a turbulent weird period where you feel so much pressure to conform to a certain image and it does seem that increasingly it's a very narrow image. Like you must be interested in all these things. And yeah, I remember that I wasn't very interested in makeup. And it's funny how you can be under so much pressure for something like that. Yeah, it's really weird because it's like I, you know, among other things, makeup just makes my eyes water a lot.

So I don't like wearing it. Yeah, it's tough if you have allergies. Yeah. So it's like I wasn't interested in it. I like being able to, you know, run around and move freely. got in a lot of trouble and I was little because I had a dress for going to a friend's, my parents' friends' friend's wedding. I was like, okay, I guess I'm going bicycle riding in this.

She did not end well. So what about after that in college? Did you join a feminist group on campus? No. I went to Erlham College, which is a little liberal arts school in rural Indiana, run by Quakers. And there wasn't really a particularly, there wasn't really a feminist group on campus. There was the action against sexual violence coalition, action against sexual violence, something. And they were, you know, they had a mission working on sexual violence.

And our women's center actually got renamed my junior year, the Center for Inclusive Gender Identities. So it was not a very, you know, radical feminist friendly place. So what was your college experience? Did you share your prior gender identity struggle? Did you talk about how you felt that trans women were not women in exactly the same way that women are? And how do those conversations go? Not well. I kept mostly quiet, but like even just posting on Facebook that, you know, I think that, you know, people who are obviously men wearing dresses aren't women.

And I had people ask mutual acquaintances if I was dangerous, like if I was physically dangerous, which was really funny because I was walking around with a cane. I still have a cane. And I had hate mail slipped under my door. It was not a good time. There was, I got excluded from a lot of, like, on campus social stuff because I was considered dangerous. And this was just because of your views on gender. Yes. Just circling back to, you know, we were just talking about makeup and all that.

And one of the things that I've noticed is, yeah, like this huge pressure from society that if you're a certain way, if you're a boy who likes musicals, you know, you're probably gay or maybe trans. If you're a girl who likes, you know, wearing shorts and T-shirts and doesn't want to wear dresses, you might be a trans guy. And I'm just sort of curious, what do you think can be done to our culture? How do we make it so we don't make these boxes so narrow? Like, I just find it so interesting that you talked about at Boy Scouts camp that you were able to be able to. to do all these things and you felt valued for doing all these things, but you felt valued as a woman. And I just feel like our society right now, they act like they're all woke, but we have such narrow boxes.

I don't fully know. I think definitely working on like decoupling femininity from what it means to be female. I don't fully know. It's something that I think about a lot, but it's not something I have any good answers for. I think honestly, a lot of it is accepting. you know, working on it, showing young girls and boys that, yes, there are, you know, adult men who like musicals and there are adult women who, you know, chop wood and, you know, make fires and, you know, build stuff and showing that there's not showing them, you know, gender nonconforming adults

who are still okay in their bodies. Right. Because, I mean, I would just say at the end of the day, what makes you, your gender is, you know, It's not liking to wear dresses or something. It's much deeper and much more innate than that. Yeah, it's like what makes me a woman is the fact that I am an adult, human, and female. So tell us about the women's liberation front and how it fits into the larger, I guess, LGBT movement. So the women's liberation front or wolf is a radical feminist organization.

we work to basically liberate women from the patriarchy. And our view is that sex role stereotypes or gender are fundamentally the – what's the phrasing here? The part of the hierarchy that puts men over women, the patriarchy, and that we should abolish them. We shouldn't have sexual stereotypes. I wouldn't say that they're necessarily part of the LGBT movement. Yeah. A lot of the LGBT movement actually doesn't really like us very much.

We're more part of the, you know, feminism movement. But we're kind of, we're our own little thing. And why does the LGBT movement reject groups like yours? Because we, you know, are against transgender ideology. We don't think that a man can become a woman like in any sort of very meaningful way. Particularly, we don't think that what makes a woman a woman is, you know, the makeup and the hair and plastic surgery and things like that. Well, I wanted to ask you about a bill that's getting a lot of traction. Well, among House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi is pushing a bill called the Equality Act.

and it would advance kind of transgender theory across the country in so many ways, including in education. And it would basically make gender defined by your own kind of mental state rather than anything objective that people can just observe. Do you have any thoughts about that bill? The equality bill is kind of a train wreck, honestly. It's a, like it poses a direct danger to women and girls because of how it takes sex, which we all know to mean, you know, male and female, and replaces it with gender identity, which is this sort of intangible like spirit that people just know in themselves. There's no external way of validating it. There's no, you know, sort of reality check. whereas, you know, we can tell if someone's, you know, 99% of people, we can tell if they're

male or female. It also makes it so that you could just say, you know, I'm a man, I'm a woman, there wouldn't be any sort of, you know, requirement that you at least have had a diagnosis from a medical professional. And this bill really, really negatively impact or would negatively impact the safety of women and girls. It would make it so that, like, I couldn't request a female doctor because I, I, I If I requested a female doctor, I could also get a male doctor who says he's female.

Same for, you know, chaperones, handling intimate care at a hospital, supervising drug tests. That's actually happened a few times. Also for supervising children on overnight trips, I would not be able to say, you know, if I had children, I want my female children supervised by a female caregiver because I could request that, but the person they consider a female caregiver could be a man who just says he's a woman.

It would also desegregate based on sex. Hospital rooms, locker rooms and group showers where people are naked, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, all these places where women and children are vulnerable would be open to any male, any man who says that they're a woman. Does the Women's Liberation Front share your view officially? Have they come out against the bill or if not?

I'm holding our U.S. Equality Act, gender identity impact summary. So, yes, they are officially against the U.S. Equality Act. And circling back, you know, where you see anecdotally more and more teens are struggling with their gender identity nowadays. And, you know, schools are reporting unprecedented numbers of kids, you know, wondering if they're trans, et cetera. What would you say, you know, if a girl around 13, 14 came to you and said, I'm struggling with my gender identity? I would say that, yes, being a woman in a patriarchal society can suck. It can feel like you're trapped in a box.

There are no good, like, there are no good options. and like you are like a freak for not wanting to be feminine. It can feel like, you know, maybe if you were a boy, people would take you seriously. Maybe if you were a boy, you could, you know, do what you wanted to do. But that is just another form of the patriarchy. What it's trying to do is trying to get you to mutilate your body and, you know, reject your body, which is like the embodiment of who you are instead of rejecting sexist ideology. and that it's okay to be uncomfortable with your body.

I'm still uncomfortable with my body often. Just because you're uncomfortable with your body doesn't mean that your body is the problem. The problem is sexism and misogyny. We can work on, you know, you can work on accepting your body and having your interests. You don't have to either change your interests or your body to fit into sexist ideology.

That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the interview, and again, we'll be back to our regular podcast programming on Monday, January 6th. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, the Leah Rampersad, and Mark Geinie. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.