Easy Mode

by Anonymous

The ubiquitous striped thigh-highs that transwomen wear while taking selfies with gaming controllers have a nickname, they’re called programming socks.

These socks have a hit-on-me quality that is revealed by the bare thigh visible below a short skirt. When worn by women on Halloween, they often comprise part of a “sexy” costume version of a Not Otherwise Sexy Thing such as a human skeleton, Snow White or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Borrowed from girls’ knee socks, the striped thigh-highs add a dollop of cartoon porn to childlike innocence for the high numbers of male programmers who want to look like sexy Gamer Girls.

The proliferation of transitioning programmers is anti-intuitive. Women's status is below that of men in tech jobs and online gaming circles. Women are disparaged in the crudest and most sexually violent terms for living life on Easy Mode, a choice in gaming that serious players disdain. These incels and men’s rights adherents who haunt Reddit and Twitch are bent out of shape by the fact that women are allowed to vote. They ask ‘If women are equal, why can’t we punch them?’

Women, they reason, don’t even need to jostle up the male hierarchy and steal men’s opportunities in the workplace. Women can start an OnlyFans, or barter childbearing for room and board provided by a man, or hustle for tips in a tank top. Women never have to do anything Hard, because men will do it for them in exchange for sex. Monetizing one’s female biology is the definition of Easy Mode for the men’s rights set, and resentment of Easy Mode is the infrasound of their grievance.

What then, other than perhaps the irresistible pressure of a sexual fetish, could convince a Hard Moder to slip on programming socks and a bralette for selfies? Well, nothing. It is a sexual fetish, called autogynephilia, which turns men on when they imagine they are women. When sanitized as trans ‘gender euphoria’, autogynephilia redefines womanhood as getting an erection while doing woman things: wearing a skirt, shaving their legs, tucking in a tampon. It’s an if-then that only a tech geek could take seriously. Dismissing the nuanced and variable-laden possibility that men and women come in all sorts, the code runs along depressing lines; IF performing the secret rites of femininity is arousing, THEN he is a woman.

Today, wonder of wonders, he doesn’t need a therapist to resolve any cognitive dissonance about that, he can self-identify. He can pull up a seat at the vanity table, where lipstick reveals his inner she/her, and finally play the game in socks that make him feel like a living doll. To opt out of Hard Mode as a man is impossible, but embracing womanhood is Easy.

That if-then logical fallacy is not good for women, who lose legal protection and representation when biological sex is a category open to personal interpretation informed by trans Reddit mods. Under gender self-ID, there is one kind of woman, born female, protected and regulated for her reproductive biology, and born male, whether he keeps his penis or has it removed, though the chances of that are between 5 and 13 percent. Woman and self-ID transwoman are one, impossible to differentiate by any criteria, and equal in women’s rights and protections, including single-sex spaces.

Single-sex spaces exist because even a casual glance at arrest and conviction records shows that allowing men to share public facilities with women is dangerous to women, especially women prisoners. Nicola Sturgeon might admit, after a bottle of wine, that self-ID is unpopular when it rapes women and puts on a wig to dodge getting locked up with other men. Scotland thought so when it asked her if a double rapist, self-IDing after he got caught, was a woman or a fraud opting into Easy Mode jail, where the women can’t get away.

The shortly thereafter ex-First Minister was backed into a corner by the question of a double rapist’s womanhood. It was hard going, as ‘woman’ is now an undefinable and exclusionary term in trans ideology, except of course for transwomen, who are women because they are women.

Asking for a definition of the word 'woman' is now smeared as a right-wing dogwhistle, which is convenient for those seeking to dismantle women as a class protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Self-ID renders women an open class defined by those who opt in, which is not a definition that women will find politically useful as it continues to place males in women’s prisons and locker rooms, in women’s seats at policy-making tables, in domestic abuse shelters, scholarship and employment and single-sex programs, and in their sports.

Opposing self-ID is not right-wing or bigoted, it is justified self-interest for women, a vigorous defense of rights earned by women. Women should not be sacrificing rights in order to avoid accusations of bigotry from the kind of man who dictates how they should feel while forced to share a shower with him.

Women are still adult human females, even if it is hate speech to say so, with rights and protections based on biological sex. Women’s rights belong exclusively to those born female.

The my-way-or-the-highway branding “Transwomen are Women” does not work for women. It is high fantasy that any man who cares to enter a single-sex space with women and girls can do so without diminishing the privacy, dignity and safety of those women and girls.

The idea that any man deserves access to any female space is pure misogynistic resentment. To the aggrieved male, women have shot right past equality and on into privilege over him, attacking his status with diversity hiring, assembling without men, and failing to defer.

The men who use self-ID access to publicly flaunt a fetish or opportunistically harm women and girls far outnumber the tiny population of genuinely dysphoric men for whom medical transition is a legitimate treatment. It is not feasible, however, for women to attempt to separate them at the changing room door.

Self-ID is the Easy Mode brass ring. It grants all men entry through any public door a woman closes behind her. Following her inside puts her back in her place, under the eye and at the disposal of men. It is punitive redress for Easy Mode. It is especially telling that trans activists are not interested in fighting for equal recognition and facilities of their own. Only women’s rights will do.

Trans activists believe men decide who the women are and that women don’t get an opinion about it. That goes a long way to illustrate why adult human females should find self-ID as regressive and alarming as the idea that feeling cute in programming socks is womanhood.