FFS Friday: Jenny Poyer Ackerman

July 26, 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.

Today’s FFS Friday honors Jenny Poyer Ackerman, who describes herself as “a reluctant expert in the astonishing human drama that is gender identity ideology. Also, a mom with an Etsy shop.”

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Jenny is the author of the Substack, “TransMuted: Observations from an ROGD mom’s seven years in the rabbit hole of gender identity ideology, hoping to save you the trip.” She says in her launch of TransMuted: 

You likely found your way to this page via my article, “What is Chris Thinking?,” which was published on Wesley Yang’s Substack last week. Wesley covers an array of cultural phenomena, and has lately been championing the cause of parents who find ourselves in this uncanny predicament: our child (usually a daughter) has been firmly persuaded (usually online) that she’s a boy.

What escalates this moment from silly teenage confuzzlement to five-alarm-emergency is the chilling discovery that the entire culture — yes, that one, the one we all live in — is in on the con. It was somehow reprogrammed, in secret (while we slept?) in order to bolster and concretize our daughter’s confusion, alter her mind and body and potentially spirit her away from us altogether, to an imaginary world in which benevolent, glitter-encrusted eunuchs will see to her care, because “non-affirming” parents, as everyone will agree, are genocidal monsters.

The piece she was referring to, “What is Chris Thinking?” is available here. 

In that piece, she was talking about Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s “All In” With Chris Hayes, and the podcast Why is this Happening? As I read it, I was chuckling to myself. Jenny’s writing is always poignantly funny, and in this piece she is extremely critical of her 2021 self for thinking there was any way Hayes could possibly be persuaded to have an honest discussion about the ravages of “gender identity” on all of society, but on children in particular. Don’t worry, Jenny, we’ve all been there. I once wrote to family members of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren to explain the leftist feminist critique of “gender identity,” thinking, “surely this will persuade them!” Needless to say, it did not. 

In any event, Jenny’s piece wondering what the heck is going on with Chris Hayes struck me as particularly amusing because of my personal experiences with Hayes and Chase Strangio, the Deputy Director for Transgender Justice at the ACLU. Hayes had interviewed Strangio in 2021 and it was after listening to that interview that Jenny decided to email Hayes to ask him to consider some alternate views.

I met Hayes many years ago, when I was senior counsel for criminal justice policy at the ACLU, in Sacramento during an event about the topic of mass incarceration. He gave a talk and I approached him afterwards to ask him a question (which I no longer remember). Our exchange was perfectly polite, but not remarkable. I remember thinking at the time that he was, at a minimum, thoughtful.

Several years later, in 2019, I came upon one of his early interviews with Strangio on Why is this Happening? Right off the bat, Chris opened the interview with: 

So when I was in college in 1997 to 2001, my then partner, now wife, we were in college together. We met freshman year. And as one does when one is young and in love and in college, we spent a lot of time talking about the things that we were reading and studying, and staying up late and debating them. And Kate, who's been a guest on here before, was a gender studies major. Well, gender studies, religious studies. And in gender studies, she was reading all this literature that I would then kind of read as well so that we could talk about it. And one of the things she read then was the theorist Judith Butler. And Judith Butler, you may or may not know her, she writes in this incredibly difficult, some might say, recondite or impenetrable prose. But some of her basic theoretical ideas are both fairly simple and elegant and also really profound. And one of the most central is the idea that gender, maleness and femaleness, as we think about it, is performance. It's something that is produced by a set of performative actions in a social context.

I think in 2019, that doesn't seem like a crazy, radical thing to say, partly because of the success of both movements for LGBT rights and also Butler and other theorists' work in popularizing this basic idea. But at the time, I remember having my mind blown a little bit because we are taught from such a young age that male and female, man and woman, boy and girl, are central characteristics of the universe. They're just things out there in the world like atoms. An atom just is. That's a unit of mass and it is a sort of coherent entity in the universe itself. It's part of the fabric of the universe. And I think that we learn that male and female are part of the fabric of the universe. That's just the way it is. And I read Judith Butler, thanks to Kate, and she basically says, "Not really, it's a category that we make. A category that is maybe not that different from, say, Brahmin and Untouchable," right?

Hayes has been “all in” on “gender identity” for a while and I immediately abandoned any respect I had ever had for him. During that interview, Strangio said, “I am a civil rights and constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution and the legal system.” Why an ACLU lawyer can get away with saying such nonsense will never be clear to me. Strangio and I have had a few interactions (in person and online) over the years; she doesn’t like me very much.

Jenny has been publishing touching, funny, informative pieces on her Substack ever since. And I’m thrilled to say that she will be joining Women’s Declaration International USA during its third annual convention, “Amplifying the Women’s Liberation Movement” this September in Atlanta to participate on a panel called “Protecting Women’s Sex-Based Rights as a Democrat in Today’s Environment.” Women who are interested in attending can learn more here. 

I have the deepest respect for the mothers who are in this fight to protect their children and to help other parents who find themselves in the terrifying and painful position of having their children declare that they are “trans.” Jenny is one of them. Give her a like and a subscribe if you can.

Jenny, today’s FFS Friday is for you.