Jessica Yaniv and the Return of the Cooing Doves

By Jenn Smith.

It has been a while since I was last published by the Post Millennial, but with the current furor over the Jessica Yaniv case I thought it would be important to interject a transgender perspective that is at once critical of the BC Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) involving Yaniv, but at the same time cautions the reader about getting distracted by prevailing narratives that take our focus off bigger issues.

Set right here in my home province of British Columbia (indeed centered only 20 minutes from where I live), the Jessica Yaniv story has become far too bizarre, expansive, and convoluted to hold my attention in all of its particulars. The story has suddenly gone global because of the strangeness and apparent outrageousness of a transgender person that claims to be a woman despite having male genitalia and who is suing a large number of biological women because they refused to perform a Brazilian wax around Yaniv’s groin.

The media has been focusing on the fact that Yaniv is a pre-op transgender that still has male genitalia, as if this is unusual and uniquely disqualifies Yaniv from being classified as a “woman.” Yet this same media constantly refers to Yaniv using female pronouns, and also seems blissfully unaware of the fact that the vast majority of MTF transgenders still have male genitals – even the prettiest ones.

Coverage of Yaniv’s story has been extensive recently, particularly in the conservative press. More and more keeps coming out about Yaniv’s sordid past and strange proclivities, such as the alleged luring of young girls into sexual conversations and a bizarre obsession with female sanitary napkins. The more I read about Yaniv and the more interviews I saw with Yaniv, the more convinced I became that Yaniv may be suffering from mental health issues.

If my suspicions are true and Yaniv is somebody with mental health problems, that would mean the media is currently having a field day beating up a mentally ill person, which while understandable is perhaps not good form.  Whether or not Yaniv indeed has mental health issues does not excuse Yaniv’s abysmal actions, but it should inform our actions in terms of what we focus on.

Despite the fact that I, as a transgender identified activist, am well-known for criticizing the most intrusive and destructive transgender laws and policies while defending women’s rights, I have reached a saturation point with the unending stream of lurid Yaniv stories and accusations – I am at a point where I now must say, “enough, can we get back to the macro issues here?” The micro or person-specific issues have to be ironed out by the proper authorities (police, mental health workers, etc), the rest of us should be interested in the macro implications of what the Yaniv case is telling us.

The Yaniv case has a lot of similarities – in terms of how it has been treated by the public and the press — to the Karen White case in the UK – a case that saw a transgender identified male (White) put into a women’s prison, where White allegedly immediately began raping women inmates.

Whatever Yaniv has been doing recently or over the past few years, we have to come back around to the fact that Yaniv is actually not the problem. They want you to believe that Yaniv is the problem, just like they wanted people in the UK to believe Karen White was the problem there. Neither one of them were reflective of the real problem, they were merely symptoms — the real problem is a system that has been founded upon a denial of the importance of physical reality that caters to such things happening in the first place.

The Yaniv case (and the Karen White case) reflects the dangers of untethering your laws and policies from knowable, testable, shared physical reality. We now have lawyers debating the meaning of “a Brazilian” or a “Brozillian” etc in the BC Human Rights Tribunal hearing for Yaniv, and saying that “Brazilian has a specific meaning”; but what should be debated in this case instead is the word “WOMAN” and the fact that “WOMAN” has a specific meaning — a very important meaning. We would not have to debate the meaning of “brozillian” etc. if we had stayed tethered to our previously sound KNOWLEDGE of what a woman is.

We have always known that a woman is an adult human female (with a nod to Posie Parker in the UK and the dictionary). The word “woman” is informed by physical reality and a specific identifiable thing in nature that existed long before there was a word to identify it and which has been known to humanity since the dawn of time. That physical biological thing gives us the word, it is not the word that gives us the thing. The word “woman” does not inform reality, it is reality that informs the word “woman.” A woman is not an illusion. A woman is not an appearance.  As the East Indians all know, appearances are not reality, illusion is not reality, that is Maya. A woman is not an appearance or an illusion, a woman is a specific thing, and we all know it. And all these people that have surrendered the word “woman” and its long understood meaning are partially to blame for what is happening now. And now they are wheeling out the big propaganda guns again — the same magical propaganda guns that helped blast holes in reality and get us here in the first place. We are now seeing a return of what I coined over two years ago as the transgender “cooing doves.”

A video is now making the rounds featuring super sexy transgender sensation Blaire White (featured in the title art), who has arrived on the scene to save us all from that nasty ‘ol bad trans Jessica Yaniv. I once labeled White a “cooing dove” in order to describe how such pretty transgender figures were being used as a propaganda tool to sooth and convince a reluctant public (I could have just as easily used the term “purring sex kitten”) regarding changes in laws and policies. Like a transgender version of Elizabeth Montgomery, with a tinkling sound and twitch of the pretty nose, White appears on the screen sucking suggestively on a lollipop, jiggling silicone breasts in a low cut top, and tells us Yaniv is not a “real trans,” and that White will now vanquish the mean troll “fake trans” that “does not even try to look the part,” and save women from such  terrible “fake trans” in the future by speaking incantations of “common sense.”

Mesmerized by Blaire White’s witchy gender transitioning powers (and extensive cosmetic surgery), many women drop their guards and think, “but she sure looks like a real woman, surely she needs our help?” Meanwhile, male talk show hosts like Steven Crowder and other horny (albeit repressed) media people will eagerly rush to interview White again and drool dropped-jawed at how much White looks like a “real woman,” while at the same time thinking things like “if I was in jail …. Blaire would do just fine,” although most would never admit it. I am sorry if this last comment offends anybody, but their are a legion of men out there that think just this way. White does not have a half-million followers because White is so smart; White has a half-million followers because of sexual illusion.

I suspect we will soon see Blaire White’s transgender friend Theryn Meyer doing a version of the same shtick in Canada and maybe Paris Lees in the UK, all cooing, batting their pretty transgender eyes, wiggling their noses and fake boobs, and talking about how they are “real trans” women that have come to save everybody from the mean old fake trans.

But don’t let them do it to you again. The problem exposed by the Yaniv case is, and always was, allowing the notion that a male can be a female (aka, a man can be a woman). It is not possible no matter how pretty a male is. It is an illusion. It is Maya. Maya is not reality. Pretty trans may look like women, but they are not. Blaire White and Theryn Meyer, for instance, will not typically mention in their videos and interviews that they both, just like Jessica Yaniv, still have their male genitals intact, because mentioning that would ruin the illusion they are selling. This raises the question of should Meyer and Blaire White be admitted to women-only services etc., or is it only trans such as Yaniv that are not pretty that should be denied service? Everybody seems to agree that Yaniv demanding intimate service at women-only salons is outrageous, but would it be any better if it was Blaire White or Theryn Meyer? If so, why? This takes us back to illusion and appearances.

Such breaches of privacy, personal autonomy, and security for women that the Yaniv case has shown us cannot be prevented in the future without a recourse to absolute truth and physical reality, because you cannot write things like “men must be super feminine and sexy to be considered a woman” into laws and guidelines designed to protect women. This is an argument I have been making in my controversial public talks for two years, and for which I have been thoroughly and deceptively demonized by the mainstream media and LGBTQ organizations. It was the surrender of truth and physical reality that got us here in the first place and it is only a return to truth and reality that will guide us back to sanity.

We have been the victims of a magician’s illusion. It is time to finally reveal the magician’s secret: the secret is that not only does the magician not saw the pretty woman in half on the stage, but that the woman is in fact a man and no body parts have been severed whatsoever.

As a transgender person myself I can tell you it is okay to be trans and to recognize your biological sex. It is okay to be a man. It is not a shame to be the sex you were born, even if you choose to dress and express in ways associated with the opposite sex. As for changerooms etc., it is not women that need to allow feminine males into their spaces, it is men. So can we please get back to focusing on the big issue, and not allow ourselves to be fooled again by the re-emergence of the “cooing doves.”

(Note: The aforementioned Posie Parker recently made an excellent short video discussing this subject from a woman’s viewpoint and it is well worth watching).