FFS Friday: Amanda Kovattana

October 25, 2024

FFS (Female Free Speech) Friday honors women and girls who are speaking out about the harms that “gender identity” poses to women and girls as a sex class. FFS Friday posts are free and shareable. If you would like access to content that delves deeper into the movement to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls and to stop the abolition of sex, please consider a paid subscription.

This week’s FFS Friday honors Amanda Kovattana (@AmandaKovattana), who recently recorded a podcast with the group Women Are Real (@WomenAreReals) about her awakening to the fact that men are invading female-only spaces, including lesbian dating spaces. The podcast is available here.

In the podcast, Amanda explains an experience from 2014, when she met up with a man who calls himself a lesbian. It was quite evident to her that he was a man. She explains that she was an out lesbian in the San Francisco Bay Area and had made it her goal to make lesbians more visible. She couldn’t quite believe that this man thought that he could just be accepted as a lesbian, having no idea what life is actually like for women in general and for lesbians in particular. She started talking with other lesbians in her area and learned that many of them had encountered these men who call themselves lesbians. She wondered, “Who are these people and how do they come to see themselves as women?”

I met Amanda in person at the 2023 convention of Women’s Declaration International USA (WDI USA), “Accelerating the Women’s Liberation Movement.” She was working at the registration desk, and when I approached, she smiled and handed me an autographed copy of a book called The Unexpected Penis: Conversations on the Gender Trail. She had just published it in June of that year. The book is available on Amazon and this is its description: 

Long time San Francisco Bay Area lesbian activist, Amanda Kovattana, explores gender identity, the emerging cultural shift that is changing the face of the gay liberation movement she helped make visible in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Informed by her childhood as a tomboy in Thailand and raised with indigenous third-gender knowledge, she follows the trail to trans events and gender-critical protests in search of understanding of this Western phenomena. In her humorous, plain-speaking style, she shares her journey and five-year research that will bring the reader up to speed on gender identity, a hotbed issue of our time.

In the podcast, she explains that “the unexpected penis” refers to the 2021 incident at Wi Spa in Los Angeles, when a man was in the female-only section of a nude spa, walking around with his fully erect penis in front of women and girls. He was permitted to do this because he claims to have a woman “gender identity” and California law (CA Civ. Code § 51) prohibits discrimination in business establishments on the basis of “gender identity.”¹

Amanda also made headlines earlier this year, when she confronted Judith Butler during a talk Butler was giving in San Francisco. For anyone who doesn’t know, Butler is a professor at UC Berkeley and is perhaps most famous for publishing a book in 1990 called Gender Trouble. It’s an extremely tedious read, but I forced myself to read it while writing my book The Reckoning. The crux of it is that “women” and “men” are made-up categories and that gender is liberating; it is perhaps the most anti-feminist screed I have ever read. Butler is a “queer” theorist who thinks that sex isn’t real. The feminist Martha Nussbaum once called her the “professor of parody” and accused her of “hip defeatism.” In 2021, Butler said that believing in the material reality of sex is “fascist.” She’s a lesbian who calls herself “non-binary” and demands “they/them” pronouns—such pronoun usage is reflected in her Berkeley bio, which reads as though Judith Butler is an entire academic committee unto herself.

Amanda attended the talk, and when it came time for Q&A, raised her hand. When she was called on, she asked, “If gender is supposed to liberate us, why can’t I, as a lesbian, have a dick-free space, a space free of penises?” Butler’s answer: “You can have such a space at home unless you have a son.” In other words, lesbians, if you don’t want to see penises, you should just stay at home, according to Judith Butler. Amanda’s exchange with Butler earned her a story in The Daily Mail, and she wrote all about it on her Substack, “Tales from the Gender Trail.” 

I applaud Amanda for asking Judith Butler this question, which earned her no praise from Butler’s fawning audience. We have to keep asking these questions. We have to keep speaking out. They can’t ignore all of us forever. Amanda, today’s FFS Friday is for you.

1. It’s worth noting that California does this in a very indirect way. It prohibits discrimination in business establishments on the basis of sex, and defines “sex” as follows: “Sex” includes, but is not limited to, pregnancy, childbirth, or medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth. “Sex” also includes, but is not limited to, a person’s gender. “Gender” means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender expression. “Gender expression” means a person’s gender-related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth. CA Civ. Code § 51(e)(5).