A Letter to My Former Bandmates

Why I wrote a song opposing locking up violent men with women in prison

Also! a new love song, “Still I Send You Love,” also written for my former bandmates

Dear former bandmates,

You have decided you can no longer communicate with me, let alone play music with me.  We touched the stars together, as you sometimes do in the key of A minor or B flat, as you sometimes do when you forget everything else but jumping together into the river of sound.  I saw those stars wordlessly reflected in your eyes, and I know you saw them in mine. 

The crown of a great tree, a moonrise, swaying grass. 

And yet, because I wrote a song, you left my band.  You unfriended and blocked me on Facebook.  You told me I am aligned with dangerous people who are “the Proud Boys without the Guns.”  The Proud Boys!  Me?  An extremist paramilitary white supremacist?  I must have missed the group text about attacking the US Capitol in a violent insurrection. 

I have conservative Christian neighbors who are horrified by the violent acts of the Proud Boys, as are all decent people. My neighbors are fond of Brian and me, though I imagine they think our yard a tad overgrown and our politics a bit lefty.  My neighbors have become used to our eccentric behavior as they walk by our house and hear guitars or drums seeping through the cedar walls.   They loved our band too.  When I sadly told my neighbor Tom the story about the band breaking up, Tom scratched his head and said: “Elizabeth and the Proud Boys…now there are two things that I never thought I’d hear in the same sentence!”

Tom had no trouble understanding why I wrote the song.  It is obvious to him:  men should not be locked up with vulnerable women in prison, even if the men “identify” as women.  It’s just simple safeguarding based on the commonsense knowledge that, as a class, men are bigger, stronger, and more violent than women.   How is it that feminists like me agree more with Tom than you, my beautiful, quirky, and brilliant tribe of musicians? 

Maybe you wonder: “what happened to Elizabeth?  Does she have a brain tumor?  Has she been watching Fox News?  Has she slipped down a white lady-boomer rabbit hole clutching her racist, transphobic pussy hat?  Can we save her?”

My brain is fine.  For the record, I am still pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-LGB rights, and still a feminist.  Like my conservative neighbor Tom, I just do not deny biology or common sense.  Men are not women just because they say they are. 

I realize it is hard to understand, given how much we have been gaslit to mistrust what our own eyes tell us.  We want to be kind, and we want to be seen as kind.  This “selfless self-concept” is the Achilles heel of most of us progressives.  But I have learned that protecting my noble fantasy of myself can blind me to the truth.  Some progressives see Lia Thomas standing on the podium next to women who look like children in comparison and earnestly declare: “Yes, that is a woman I see!  Good for her!” 

I know you, my dear band mates, probably believe Lia Thomas is a woman and should be viewed and treated as a woman in every regard.  And yet, the fact that I do not believe “trans women are women” and you do believe that statement is not the reason I wrote the song. 

I can love and accept you if you believe Lia Thomas is a woman, just as I can love and accept others in my life who believe things that I don’t believe.  I don’t believe people get their own planet when they die and I don’t believe crystals can cure cancer, but I dearly love people who do believe those things.  I believe that melodies are channeled from a place I call the Tune Yard, and you may well think, “that’s pretty out there Elizabeth, but whatever works for you!”

The heart of the problem is not the belief “trans women are women” itself:  it is that this essentially metaphysical doctrine is being codified in laws and norms and creating harm.  It’s also eroding the rights we have as women based on our biological sex.  Our founders in America understood that religious beliefs should not dictate our laws:  the separation of church and state.  Our government should support people of all beliefs.  “Lia Thomas is a woman because Lia Thomas says so!” leads to laws and policies that enshrine this unscientific, faith-based belief.  These encoded laws then force those of us who do not share this belief to be governed and harmed by it. 

The result benefits Lia Thomas, who in the catechism of queer ideology is an “oppressed” person whose needs should thus be prioritized above others.  But it is a terrible policy for all the girls and women who are edged out of prizes, scholarships, and empowerment.  Lia wins because this religion is enshrined in sports policies.  All women swimmers are demoralized and defeated. 

I wrote Tomiekia’s Song because of a very bad California law that codifies in statute a belief that a male prisoner is a woman if he declares himself to be.  This declaration gives him (and also men who declare they are nonbinary or intersex) the right to be housed with women prisoners.  The statute makes it very clear that these men can keep their male genitals, and they do not need to take hormones.  This is the law, currently being defended by the ACLU.  Rapes, abuse, and trauma are resulting for women in California and all over planet earth because of similar laws.  Who would have guessed?  Hmm…maybe feminists?

When I first heard the words of Tomiekia, a California prisoner forced to be locked up with violent male predators, I tried to push her voice away.  But I could not, and the song emerged.

After years of study, it has become crystal clear to me that my progressive tribe is wrong on this issue of enshrining transgender ideology into law.  Since I have started questioning my progressive tribe, I have met so many brave and brilliant women and men who, like me, find themselves politically homeless.  These people I admire are not motivated by hatred.  They care about truth.  Some are trans-identified themselves, many are gay and lesbian.  Many have suffered great personal losses to take a stand about the harms happening, harms that are not being reported by the mainstream press.   I have added my voice to theirs because my conscience demands it.

So even though I still love you, I oppose codifying these misguided beliefs into law.  That is why I wrote the song, to give voice to real women being harmed in prison.

When I wrote Tomiekia’s Song, my goal was not to hurt you, or any trans-identified people.  When I wrote Icy Storm, I was moved by the harm being done to children by gender ideology.  I did not intend to hurt you.  I have nothing to do with the Proud Boys or any other organized group. Like you, my former bandmates, I am very worried about the far right weaponizing this issue.  I am very worried about backlash to gay, lesbian, and trans-identified people.  I condemn the Proud Boys storming and threatening a Drag Queen Story Hour this week in San Francisco, although I question the value of making explicitly sexualized presentations to young children. 

Harm is harm.  Our laws and public policy need to be based on shared reality.  The biological reality is that humans are a dimorphic species.  We can no more change our biological sex than our blood type.  The science has not been “updated.”  The fact that two out of every 10,000 people have abnormal sexual development does not mean that sex is a spectrum.  These “intersex” folks have important needs and concerns, but the sex binary remains the foundation of reproduction in our species, as with all other mammals.  Gender non-conforming and gay kids should be celebrated and encouraged to express themselves however they wish.  They should not be funneled into some Unicorn version of a gender binary, complete with pink and blue boxes.   Those stereotypical visions of gender are leading to irreversible physical and emotional harm to which children cannot truly consent. 

You know—or used to know—that my songs come from love and truth. They still do.  Music brought you to me, and music caused you to leave.  Here is a song I wrote for you, my beloved former band mates, on the full moon in May, straight from that Tune Yard in my heart.  This song has nothing to do with my fight against gender ideology.  It is just a love song for friends who are far away from me. “Still I send you love.”

This journey has been strange, painful, and frightening.  I admit that I am scared about losing more friends and being viciously attacked as so many men and women have been.  But I have also found joy and freedom from leaving the tribe and seeking truth.   Some of us are compelled to buck the tide, even as we fear drowning. 

My door is still open. 

Love,

Elizabeth