Social Justice Usage
Source: Curlew, Abigail. “Girldicks, trans feminine embodiment, and tucking that shit in.” Medium, January 30, 2019.
Trans women often tuck their lady bits under a thick layer of undergarments called a gaff. It is a practice of inserting the testicles into their sockets and folding your ladydick between your legs. A gaff (or a double pair of panties) holds it all together. Not only does this hide our bulge and allow us to wear cute yoga pants, but it gives us a sensation of having a different sex organ. Now I tuck everyday. Tucking ladydicks doesn’t have to be about gender dysphoria. At first, I wanted to hide away my bits because I was ashamed of having them. My sense of dysphoria around my ladydick was heightened by my internalized shame. But now I do it because I feel good about my tuck.
New Discourses Commentary
“Ladydick” (or “girldick”) is a slang term usually used within (often aggressive) forms of Trans Rights Activism to indicate the intact penis of a transgender woman who has not undergone bottom surgery (removal of the male genitals, etc.). That is, it is a trans woman’s penis. It is more rarely used to refer to a trans man’s clitoris, particularly when enlarged by testosterone treatments. While the term is used in (relatively) neutral fashions, it has become famous in the rendering “choke on my ladydick,” which is thrown at lesbians, especially, and sometimes straight men who are deemed “transphobic” for not having sexual interest in trans women.
Like many of the cruder concepts in the activism around Critical Social Justice, “ladydicks” are not particularly hard to understand in and of themselves. It is the greater (critical) cultural context around the concept and its Theoretical rationale that are more interesting and in need of explanation. In this case, there is the transgender aspect, in particular the belief that “trans women are women,” even when bearing an intact penis, and therefore that the intact penis is, in fact, a woman’s penis. There is also the ironic or, more often, aggressive manner in which this term and concept are employed (see also, politics of parody, queering, and queer Theory, and also aufheben).
The first of these concerns—the belief that trans women are women—is endemic to queer Theory and the related gender ideology (see also, gender studies). In these branches of Theory, especially because of their postmodern influence, it is considered necessary to disrupt the stability of categories of both sex and gender (see also, aufheben, deconstruction, and queering). This is achieved particularly by dragging them out of the realm of biology (see also, science and reality, and also, biological essentialism and sex essentialism) and into the realm of social constructivism (see also, pseudo-reality and paralogy) and thus self-identification (see also, identity and identity politics). This activism proceeds upon the assumption that if sex and gender are both (merely or mostly) social constructions, then it is not possible to use biology to constrain a person to a particular gender identity or sex category, thus liberating them from the oppression of normativity (particularly, cisnormativity) and the violence of categorization. More than that, the concept of “ladydick,” in being inherently contradictory to biological reality, achieves a dialectical negation (aufheben) or deconstruction of the idea of maleness and femaleness.
The notion of a “ladydick” accomplishes this in at least two ways. First, it destabilizes the category of woman by indicating that some people with penises (usually considered men) are in fact women if they are transgender—not just trans women but women as “rightly” understood by queer Theorists. The very idea of a woman with a penis—that is, a “ladydick”—does this by default. Second, it fully decouples biology and sex (not just gender) by referring specifically to a feature of anatomy in an apparently paradoxical way (see also, aufheben and deconstruction). In addition, it does these things with a certain degree of irony by employing the modifier “lady,” which has certain refined connotations, and by deliberately using crude language (“dick”) when more clinical language would suffice (see also, genderfucking). This highlights the intrinsically disruptive nature of the queer activism in play.
This last point leads into the second issue—the aggressive manner in which the term “ladydick” is frequently used within Trans Rights Activism. Though it is sometimes employed in a purely descriptive or “informative” way—comparing it, for example, to the related concept of the “front hole” (which means “vagina,” to be distinguished from the “back hole,” or anus)—it is also frequently used in a clearly aggressive way. It is very clear that the rhetorical power of the term “ladydick” is intentional by the activists employing it, and it is therefore frequently deployed in aggressive contexts, such as by telling someone (aggressively) to “choke on” or “suck my ladydick,” or some other vulgar expression of sexual intent or even assault. In this sense, partly because of the ridiculousness of the term (as opposed to simply saying “penis”), the term “ladydick” appears to be an intentional tool by which biological men who identify as transgender women can bully people, perhaps especially including lesbians and trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) who refuse to accept the absurd claim that women can have penises (even if they recognize, quite inclusively, that trans women can).
This usage gains a particular poignancy in light of the fact that Trans Rights Activists using a term like “ladydick” are often doing so either to verbally assault someone they have identified as transphobic or, importantly, to do so specifically to women (often lesbians) who are unwilling to have sex with people who are, in some important respect, not women. Indeed, Trans Rights Activists, along with many queer Theorists and gender ideologists, tend to regard lesbians who see themselves as women attracted to (biological—see also, cisgender) women as intrinsically transphobic. This fact puts the L and certain subsets of the T in “LGBT” at direct odds with one another on a non-negotiable point. It goes without saying that in many cases these Trans Rights Activists are biological men who want to have sex with (lesbian) women who aren’t interested in them even if they are trans women.
See also, mathematx and white mathematics.
Related Terms
Aufheben; Biological essentialism; Cisgender; Cisnormativity; Critical; Deconstruction; Dialectic; Disrupt; Embodiment; Front hole; Gender; Gender identity; Gender studies; Genderfucking; Identity; Identity politics; Ideology; Inclusion; Liberation; Men; Normativity; Oppression; Paralogy; Politics of parody; Postmodernism; Pseudo-reality; Reality; Queer (v.); Queer Theory; Science; Self-identification; Sex; Sex essentialism; Social construction; Social constructivism; Social Justice; Theory; Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF); Trans Rights Activism; Trans women are women; Transphobia; Violence; Violence of categorization
Additional Examples
Source: Curlew, Abigail. “Girldicks, trans feminine embodiment, and tucking that shit in.” Medium, January 30, 2019.
Some time ago, I went out for a coffee with a trans woman I had met online. She informed me that she never tucks, and she is not bothered by others perceiving her with a girldick. I was in awe with her absolute refusal to be shamed into hiding. Even around the person I trust most, I was nervous about using my girldick in any way that felt masculine. My partner was the most supportive person I knew when I transitioned. She accepted her new lesbian relationship right from the start and has never deadnamed or misgendered me. But I could no longer fuck in missionary. Whenever I was on top, I felt like a man and that really impacted my ability to have sex. As we adjusted to the new conditions of our sex life, I began to be more comfortable in positions that are typically gendered masculine. This was because she fully accepted my womanhood. She came to see my ladydick as feminine before I did. This was a powerful de-stigmatizing influence that profoundly shifted my sense of dysphoria.
Revision date: 3/23/21
3 comments
Hey, I notice you’re using “trans woman” instead of “transwoman” around here. This construction implies that an adjective “trans” modifies “woman” instead of a creating a discrete category of people separate from “women.”
Is there a reason for this? Seems like you’re conceding some ground there.
Anyway, thanks so much for writing these translations! They are seriously awesome and fill a desperate need. I’m eating them up!
Gotta go take a shower now. Blergh.
I first saw the term ‘girldick’ used by an activist telling JK Rowling to choke on his. Once I’d sent the screenshot of it to a friend I thought it was game over – nobody could see that and not piss their pants at the absurdity and WAKE UP! But she just said ‘she (JK) has made them very angry hasn’t she?’ No WTF? No laughing emojis, no condemnation at a woman being abused for telling the truth. I knew then that this was gonna be a long, hard, head banging road. I don’t do Twitter – would lose job / mind if I did but I ‘lurk’ on James’s Twitter as well as many other US people’s & my UK compatriots. You are doing such fantastic work. Thank you.