Cisgender Women Pay Attention!

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

This essay is specifically directed to cisgender women. I have heard all of the debates about that term “cisgender.” For the record, I am a Black cisgender woman which means I was assigned the biological designation of “female” at birth and identify as a woman.

I am not a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. I am a feminist who welcomes anyone, cisgender or transgender, who identifies as a woman and who is trying to help us women out. I welcome the guys too. The more inclusive you are, the more you learn.

Too often, we cisgender women assume that transgender women’s problems and issues (i.e. access to healthcare, safe housing, safety from violence, the ability to play sports, and etcetera) have nothing to do with us. We could not be more wrong.

I recently read a fantastic and disturbing essay on Substack by Kira Rosa titled “The Dismantling of Reproductive Rights is More Insidious Than You Think.” It is her analysis of how cisgender women’s right to control their own bodies has been steadily eroded over time.

What caught my attention in her essay was her analysis of Felon 47’s Executive Order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” I know that’s a mouthful.

The order is designed to make trans women disappear by virtue of eliminating any accurate human definition or category for them. You’re either male or female which is biological fiction. This leaves intersex individuals in the lurch. I encourage you to do your own research about intersex individuals and also research what hormone therapy does to and for a transgender woman’s body.

When you consider that less than 1 percent of the US population is transgender; along with the fact that only 10 transgender athletes currently play on the collegiate level, you should know by now that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to meet a transgender person in your lifetime. You may meet them, but you may never know they are transgender.

The Executive Order says virtually nothing about transgender men. Trans men are ignored because the point of the order is to restrict and control all women’s reproductive choices.

Rosa pointed out that the language in this executive order establishes that a person is formed at the moment of conception. The order insists that anything blocking or interfering with the process of reproduction is against this order. In other words, she argued that this anti-transgender order can just as easily be used as an anti-abortion and an anti-birth control directive against cis women.

Individuals who seek to control the reproduction of cisgender women use people’s biased and misinformed opinions about transgender women as litmus tests before they place restrictions on cisgender women.

Felon 47 and Republicans have used transgender women as their political football for years now. They are obsessed with cis and trans women’s bodies. Yet, this obsession begs the question: Exactly how do they (or you) know whether a woman is transgender or cisgender?

I have had transgender friends and students, but I did not always know they were transgender until they told me. I have also met many cisgender women who looked like men to me. So I stopped making any assumptions about gender based solely on appearances over 30 years ago.

Right wing nuts will eventually insist that there is only one way to absolutely determine whether a woman is trans or cis; that proof will most certainly require that their genitalia be examined.

So, are we prepared for our little cisgender, but tom boyish, daughters to have to drop their panties for anyone who demands it? Are any of you willing to expose yourself on demand? Do these kooks in the Republican Party really think they will easily get away with this?

Republicans, Felon 47, and huge numbers of White Christian Nationalist wackos want cisgender women to believe that transgender women are their enemies, or worse, that trans women are actually men just waiting to sexually assault you when you use a public toilet. I urge you to research what happens to the penis of a biological male transitioning to female.

It is these hyper-masculine Republican kooks who are the ones that cis and trans women need to be afraid of. Let’s face it, anyone obsessed with another person’s genitalia is up to no good. Anyone obsessed with controlling a woman’s reproductive organs has an agenda.

The hard truth is people classifiable as “white” are disappearing. The world has always been majority people of color. Right now, however, the average ages of peoples in countries in Southeast Asia and in Africa range from 20 to 30 years of age. The average age of a European is 44 years old with one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

The negative reactions to transgender women, birth control and abortion are not anchored in any religious beliefs coming from the political and religious Right. They don’t give a damn about cisgender or transgender women of color. They only care about whether white cisgender women reproduce babies. Trans women are seen as not reproducing babies, but that’s not always true.

Let me paint another scenario. Imagine you are a cisgender woman or girl who, by ordinance of Felon 47, has to be either physically inspected by some government-appointed matron or carry some card verifying that you are a cisgender woman before you are allowed to enter a women’s public restroom to simply urinate.

Imagine the requirements for receiving a gender identity card are achieved by having your DNA, your genitalia, and your hormones tested. God forbid you are a cisgender woman whose body naturally produces high levels of testosterone. Two cisgender women athletes were disqualified from competition at the Olympics because their bodies naturally produced more testosterone than the Olympics deemed acceptable. And that’s the problem.

Felon 47 and his henchmen (and women) not only want to invalidate the identities and lived experiences of trans women, they want to create a single standard for who and what a cisgender woman is when there is no one-size-fits-all definition of what a woman is. Women come in a variety of shapes and sizes with bodies that generate different levels of hormones that vary throughout the year, and vary from one woman to the next.

What’s next? Do they throw menopausal cisgender women under the bus because they no longer have the capacity to reproduce or because their hormone levels have certainly dropped since they were in their childbearing years?

Are cisgender women slowly losing the right to determine our own gender identities without the interference of men in power who don’t have a clue what being a woman means to each woman individually? Do we cisgender women attempt to deny gender dysphoria (look it up) as a real condition in some vainglorious attempt to deny womanhood to transgender women who we don’t always understand?

We lose nothing by protecting the rights of transgender women. But we could lose everything ignoring our connections to trans women and the policies that affect their health and well-being, and ours.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

Additional Resources:

I wrote a little micro-history about various gender identities in world history. If you would like to know more. Just click anywhere in this paragraph.

For a brief explanation of what gender dysphoria is, click anywhere in this sentence.

All blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a direct reference to this hyperlink: https://leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers. All Rights Reserved.

Crooks and Routh: Dress Rehearsals?

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I’m a historian. We rarely write about anything until some time has passed. What I have written below is speculation right now. I have some serious questions as these two events have played out (or rather, not played out much) in the media:

Do you remember when Felon 47 was at a rally back in July of 2024, and there was an attempt on his life by a 20-year old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks? Remember that?

Crooks shot and killed a supporter in the crowd, injured two people in the crowd, then hit Felon 47 on the ear. I don’t know about you, but the shot that grazed Felon 47’s ear seems suspicious. A bullet aimed at an ear is likely to lodge into the side of someone’s head. Then Crooks was killed. It is now 2025 and there is still no known motive.

Then remember Ryan Wesley Routh, a man in his late fifties, who tried to take a shot at Felon 47 while he was playing on a golf course at Tr*mp International Golf Club in September 2024? The Secret Service shot at least four rounds at Routh who was hiding in the shrubbery with an SKS-styled rifle. Routh survived and was charged with an assassination attempt.

Thomas Matthew Crooks (L); Ryan Wesley Routh (R).

The last actual assassination of a president occurred in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald. Later a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as he was being transferred to the county jail. Oswald was shot and killed on live television.

Later in 1981 John Hinckly, Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan as he was waiving to supporters. Reagan was seriously injured, but he survived.

I bring these events up because killing presidents and presidential candidates has always been extremely difficult. Yet, Felon 47 had two would-be assassins before he ever took office. Were these attempts dress rehearsals? We don’t know.

Here’s the deal. Felon 47 and his puppeteer Elon stay front and center on the news. They remain topics for perpetual discussion and debate.

Right now Felon 47 is all bluster with his threats to invade sovereign nations and put tariffs on everything he can think of while we speculate about the sinister things Elon is doing to our democracy behind the scenes. It is what we don’t see that we need to worry about.

If someone were to actually assassinate Felon 47 who would take his place in the White House? The most logical answer is his Vice-President J. D. Vance.

But we already know that the Republican Party is completely illogical right now; and the Democratic Party is still trying to behave as if they don’t know that the old political play book has been destroyed.

Crooks and Routh could very well be two isolated haters of Felon 47. Yet, both of these men got within striking distance of potentially assassinating Felon 47. Given the excessively high security surrounding presidents and presidential candidates, the real questions are how did these two men get past security and why did they attempt to assassinate Felon 47; and is something else on the agenda?

©️Leslye Joy Allen

To End Crucifixion

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

The first time I heard of crucifixion outside of a biblical context I was watching the film Spartacus, released in 1960 that starred Kirk Douglas. I was in high school in the 1970s when I first saw the film on television.

Crucifixion was one of the most excruciating and barbaric of all forms of execution. The person on the cross, slowly and agonizingly, died from suffocation as their rib cage was forced upwards. They could not fully breathe and eventually they died.

No moment in the film Spartacus brought me more tears than the fight scene when the slaves “Spartacus” (Douglas) and “Antoninus” (played by Tony Curtis) were forced by Roman authorities to fight each other to the death.

Spartacus and Antoninus, who loved each other like brothers, were determined to kill one another in order to spare the other the agony of crucifixion. Spartacus eventually kills Antoninus. In grief, Spartacus yells at his tormentors, “He’ll come back. He’ll come back; and he’ll be millions.”

That scene gave me the sense that when the best people die, they will somehow be reincarnated and other people of goodwill will join them. That belief, however, has never brought me much comfort.

MAGA supporters are not likely to understand my interpretation of the themes in the film Spartacus. They follow orders, not facts. They don’t think of people on the Left, or people of peace as anything other than unrealistic and subhuman. They don’t think compromise with people with whom they disagree is anything other than a show of weakness.

MAGA adherents of all races and ethnicities believe in White male supremacy in a world that gets browner by the day. While U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers round up every undocumented brown worker they can find, Felon 47 wants to annex countries inhabited primarily by people classifiable as white.

White male supremacy only functions when people believe in the stereotype of the “Great White Father” who is considered the only one fit to lead and to appoint others to important positions. This is part of the reason why a lot of voters voted against their own interests and against their own people.

Felon 47 supporters always claim to be Christians. I do not entirely trust the Christianity formulated in the Western World because the people who formulated it cannot even so much as admit that there is virtually no such thing as a person classifiable as “white” that was/is native to any location in the Middle East or North and Eastern Africa.

A sandy blond-haired, white-complexioned, blue-eyed Yeshu’a has always been a lie. So, when you engage with MAGA supporters (and many anti-MAGA folks) you are engaging with people where generations of their families have prescribed to the lie for centuries. Felon 47 stepped into a centuries old illusion, proclaimed himself to be sent by God, then went around autographing Bibles.

I can count on one hand the Christian ministers I respect; most of them are women. They inspire. They pray. They analyze. They talk about justice. They talk to you like you have a brain; and they do so without the big egos and the expectance of deference I have encountered from a few too many clergymen.

At the end of all discussions and analyses, Yeshu’a’s life still ends the same way. No matter how good he was, he was still executed by crucifixion which was the Roman Empire’s method of execution for paupers and other petty criminals.

No matter how popular an itinerant preacher Yeshu’a was, church fathers and the Roman government considered him a threat to their power; and they used every lie, every smear campaign against him until many of his own followers turned against him and called for him to be put to death.

I do wonder when we, particularly those of us in the Western World, will get sick of that perpetual narrative where someone has to die in order to free us?

Must the good man or the good woman always be the sacrifice? Or, have we absorbed a skewed Western Christian Worldview for so long that we cannot even imagine any form of salvation, deliverance or peace without someone being killed?

Is some form of crucifixion inevitable or merely a twisted human habit where we refuse to think our way out and fight our way out of problems we cannot completely face so that we require a martyr to prove we were, at least, thinking in the right manner? That kind of thinking should not ease our consciences.

Maybe I’m a fool, but I still think that if we learned anything—even from an edited and modified form of Christianity—it ought to be that goodness and mercy and fair play may get someone jailed or killed, but it should not have to be that way.

Church services are often filled with sermons that make Yeshu’a seem more like a spirit than a flesh and blood man who once walked the earth. And if it is true that he died for our sins, exactly when do we accept that the point of his crucifixion was for us to do more than just acknowledge the awful habits of human history where we persecute or allow good men and women to continue to be persecuted?

Felon 47 and his underlings corrupt every precedent set by Yeshu’a. They resemble the Roman government and its sycophants while they embrace the Nihilistic principles of a 19th century Russian Party that used terrorism and assassination as part of their reform.

MAGA supporters and Felon 47 let people be detained or die in order to stave off the inevitability of the collapse of the White Western World. But will we, who know Felon 47 is wrong, fight to stop the deaths, persecutions, and detentions of people who only want to work and feed their families?

Will we ever admit that the story of Yeshu’a’s crucifixion means that we are charged with ending the blood-letting, the needless assaults, the threats? Will we ever be brave enough to end needless persecutions; or will we watch these modern-day crucifixions as if we were watching the fight between Spartacus and Antoninus thinking that it is only a movie. So, no one actually died.

Tony Curtis (left) ; Kirk Douglas (right) in the film SPARTICUS, 1960. Alamy Stock Photo

Walk With a Book

Posted on January 25, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I remember the first time I heard someone say, “If you want to hide something, hide it in a book.” The comment depressed me.

When you are a historian, you have books everywhere. You have to read all the time. I have not seen the top of my dining room table in nearly 15 years as it is covered with stacks of books. Books occupy every nook and cranny of my home.

With the United States ranking 36th in the world for literacy, with a 79% literacy rate, with only 25% of literate adults reading above the 6th grade level, we are already dumb. We can expect to see more decline in literacy with Felon 47 living on Pennsylvania Avenue.

So, I have a proposal. It might not change anything, but it is worth a try. Walk out of your door with a book in your hand or tucked under your arm everyday for at least a month.

Let kids and other adults see you walk with that book. And don’t say you can’t do this. You have carried books before when you were in grade school.

Make your book/s visible at your job, on a trip to a store. Hell, go for a walk with your book until someone asks you why you always have a book in your hand or under your arm. And then have the audacity to tell them why.

Enough Is Enough

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I have more than a few favorite writers, journalists, and/or activists on Substack. One of them is Lorissa Rinehart. When she wrote that too many children are addicted to social media, I got the impression that she drew on scientific studies and her own observations.

She delivered a good hard punch to catch our attention. She wrote:

You should be aware that an addiction to substances like Crystal Meth are among the most difficult of all habits to kick. Rinehart waxed poetic about how the Zuckerbergs and the Musks of this world prey on the minds of our children in much the same way drug dealers pounce on entire communities.

Her statement reminded me that addiction to social media is one thing that aided and abetted our current political climate. She reminded me that our children are particularly vulnerable to social media propaganda pushed by the Far Right.

So, here are some family practices I suggest that I learned from a friend of mine over 15 years ago. My friend limited TV viewing to one night a week with the whole family watching together. Her kids were only allowed 3 days per week to surf the web at home for 1 hour each day with parental controls on.

The rest of the week she and her offspring discussed Art, Music, Current Events, School and Books at the dinner table. After dinner there was homework. After homework they would pick a topic to discuss or a book to read together over the coming week. I must say she now has some of the smartest young adults I have met in quite a while.

Now, before you say that all of this is too difficult to do; that your work schedule is too difficult to navigate around in order to do any of this; or that you are not sure if you can get your kids to participate in anything like this, answer a few questions for yourself.

When is the last time you read a book or visited a library? How often do you have face-to-face conversations with friends and family, with everyone’s cellphone silenced or turned off and put away out of sight?

If you have not done any of the above in quite some time or you have stopped doing most of it regularly, consider how social media has altered how you communicate with others. Come to think of it, social media has altered nearly everybody’s way of communicating.

Social media is not inherently evil nor inherently good. Social media’s information, however, is the easiest information to manipulate and the fastest to spread. Now think of how easy it can manipulate your children’s ideas about the world and themselves, often before you know anything about the ideas that have formed in their heads. Before I say anything else about Meth addiction, think about social drinking.

If you are a social drinker who is not an alcoholic, you tend to know your limit. You might feel a mild buzz, feel a bit relaxed, but not drunk. In your youth you probably learned the hard way when to say “I have had enough.” Long term Meth addicts don’t have any moments of “I have had enough.” They often suffer from everything from depression, psychotic episodes, an inability to sleep, and tooth decay.

Unlike addictions to controlled substances—legal and illegal—social media addiction has no noticeable physical symptoms. So, when it comes to social media, do you know when enough is enough for yourself? More importantly, do you know when enough is enough for your kids? Think about that for a while.

(Stock drawing of kids on their cellphones)

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: Politics