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Quote by Sheila Jeffreys

“Transvestites are seeking to empty the word 'woman' of meaning and are forming language about female biology to suit their own sexual excitements and to prevent any challenge to their ideology. They have created their own language to downgrade women's status such as the word 'ciswoman' which they use to distinguish adult human females from 'transwomen'. In this way they demote those born female to just one variety of the category of women and provide an object lesson in how men have labelled and defined women to suit their purposes over the centuries of male domination.”

Quote by Sheila Jeffreys

Author

Sheila Jeffreys
Sheila Jeffreys

Sheila Jeffreys is a renowned political scientist born on May 13, 1948. Her research focuses on gender politics and feminist theory, offering profound insights into issues of gender inequality and women's rights. more

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“Men who practice transvestism as an expression of the male sex right have been turned into a rights-bearing category, an oppressed minority whose excitements have precedents over the dignity, safety, and civil and political freedoms of women, and even the existence of women as a social and biological category. This achievement has depending upon obscuring their sexual motivations in favour of the idea that they are somehow essentially female in their heads.”

“There can be no liberation of women without a complete transformation of the way that male sexuality is constructed. Whilst the eroticising of women's subordination remains the basis of what is seen as sex, women cannot escape coercion in the bedroom, sexual harassment on the streets and at work, and the requirement to service men's excitements in the way they dress and behave. Women's appearance, behaviour, body language, opportunities are shaped by this 'duty'.”

“The most obvious proof that male sexuality is constructed to be abusive is the fact that men do not rape women in the breakfast cereal isle of the local supermarket. They are not subject to forces beyond their control. Men's sex right is socially constructed and expressed only where there is likely to be no immediate sanction. Men's sexual violence towards women is a product of their minds and not their biology.”

“Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease? No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace - they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship - they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return?”

“Men's sexual violence in all these forms ensures women's awareness of their second class status and constructs the way in which women interact with the world. However, many of the forms of men's sexual violence are not taken seriously, they are blamed on women, hidden, or compartmentalised so that the whole picture of how women's lives are affected cannot be grasped.”

“The forms of men's fetish behaviour that have been unleashed in recent decades are not private. They do not consist of fantasies that men keep to themselves but affect women profoundly. In some cases, as with contemporary men's transvestism, they threaten the whole understanding of what women are, attack the very basis of feminism and destroy women's human rights because the men actually claim to be women.”