On Saturday October 28th 2023, Instagram began to buzz. The Helsinki Shadow Bookfair¹ had posted a notice about cancelling Emilia Männynväli’s book presentation. The titular essay of her book Toiste en suostu katoamaan (roughly I Refuse to Disappear Once More in English) was said to include passages that many considered transphobic. The announcement mentioned the event’s safer space principles as the grounds for the cancellation. The organising collective felt it couldn’t hold the conversation in a way that would be safe for trans people. In the comment section of the post, leftist cultural influencers one after the other harshly condemned The Shadow Book Fair’s decision.

It was considered a dictionary example of cancel culture. Some considered it outrageous that ideas were censored in the name of trans people, that grouping trans people together assumes that we need to be protected from free discussion. The organisers were called narrow-minded dogmatists and sectarian fanatics guarding orthodoxy. Many people stated that the text wasn’t so bad after all, it would have been good to discuss it. Some continued the discussion for a long time without reading the text itself, underlining that they are talking just about the cancellation decision and not the actual text. Despite many requests, nobody defined in detail why and in which parts the essay could be considered transphobic.

The discussion continued in a multifaceted way after the Shadow Book Fair ended. The Shadow Book Fair organisers published a press release a few days later. Antti Rautiainen commented on the topic soon afterwards on his blog. In Yle’s Kulttuuricocktail podcast a discussion on the topic was led by the journalist Pauliina Grym, who was joined by the biologist Atte Komonen, the gender studies professor Leena-Maija Rossi, and the postdoctoral researcher Joonas Pennanen. Grym also wrote an analysis based on the podcast episode. Veikka Lahtinen and Pontus Purokuru discussed the topic in their Mikä meitä vaivaa? podcast. Lahtinen also commented on the topic earlier on Instagram. Voima published Maija Alander’s text about the purpose of safe spaces. Leona Kotilainen, who was part of the Shadow Book Fair’s organising collective, published her own account about the decision-making process. Eventually Emilia Männynväli herself discussed the topic with Laura Gustafsson in the Syndikaatti podcast, funded by Voima. Later on, Saara Särmä and Raisa Omaheimo wrote about the essay itself,  looking at how it rejects allyship and intersectionality. Most of the space in the discussion has been taken by people who, according to my knowledge, are not transgender.

There are at least three different discussions present: the discussion about the Shadow Book Fair’s event cancellation decision, the discussion about Männynväli’s essay, and the discussion about biological sex and gender in general. Then there’s also the discussion about the discussion itself. I will consider some of these more in depth and give more surface-level comments on others.

Biological sex in birds and other non-human animals

Biological sex is something that should perhaps be discussed more in relation to being trans, so that it wouldn’t just be a tool for the trans-erasing gender theories produced by cisgender people. I’ve researched the topic in depth in recent years while studying the gender multiplicity of the wading bird species the ruff. It’s true that if the most common definition of biological sex is used – males create small and moving gametes, and females create large and stationary ones – the number of sexes becomes two almost without exception.

Often fungi and protists are mentioned as having tens of thousands of sexes, but as they are so far removed from humans, their significance remains mostly symbolic. Some biologists define their thousands of procreation combinations as mating types rather than sexes. Multicellular organisms which reproduce through sexual reproduction are almost always divided into males and females. This is true from plants to insects to vertebrates.

Personally, I struggled with this seemingly binary nature of biological sex for a long time. I thought it was naïve realism to place sex only in the gametes, and that we perceive the world as such because we are trapped inside a massive confirmation bias, where the assumption of a binary sex creates perceptions of binary sexes, which affirm assumptions about binary sex, which leads us to see signs of binary sex and so on. The more I researched the topic – to find gaps and something with which to widen the gaps – the more I ended up simply having to face the fact that if we define biological sex through gametes, there are only two of them.

After we accept this, sexual diversity begins. Gametes do not define any other characteristics of an individual; not their chromosomes, their hormones, nor their roles regarding parenthood. Let’s list a few examples from the avian world: in many shorebird species, the male is the sole caretaker of their young. In most birds of prey, the females are much larger and stronger than the males. In phalaropes, the females are dominating, aggressive and court the males. The sex chromosomes of birds function oppositely to those of mammals – males have two same chromosomes, and females two different chromosomes.

Hormones also function in birds the other way around, so to speak, compared to mammals; the lack of oestrogen triggers the development of male-typical sex characteristics, while in mammals they are triggered by testosterone. This is why chickens fairly often develop rooster-like characteristics as they age. Similar ageing-dependent fluidity in sex characteristics appears also in wild birds, such as in the bluethroat and the redwing. For a long time I thought this was only due to hormones, until I found out that usually birds only use a single ovary and if it stops functioning the other starts to develop, but by no means always into an ovary, sometimes into a testicle and sometimes into an ovotestis, which is a mixture of, or an intermediate form between an ovary and a testicle

In multiple bird species there occur variations where some males look either entirely like females, such as in ruffs or western marsh harriers, or slightly more female-like than other males, for example in European pied flycatchers. In addition to the female-looking males, there is a third type of male ruff, the appearance and behaviour of which is something sort of in-between typical males and females. What is notable is that in all of these species, males and females typically look so different that it’s easy for humans to separate them from each other. There are huge amounts of species where it’s impossible to distinguish the sexes with the human eye. Birds, on the other hand, are able to recognize and distinguish each individual member of their own species. This is interesting, because while the differences are so subtle to our eyes, it’s almost impossible for us to know if there are similar fluidities in sex characteristics within these species as well.

Even though the gamete-based definition of sex produces two sexes, it does not mean that all individuals should be either one of them, or only one. Worker bees do not produce gametes, so in a way they do not have a sex. There are over 500 species of fish which change their sex as part of their life cycle. Some of them might change it several times. Some fish species as well as worms and gastropods are both sexes simultaneously, as are most plants.


The sexes and genders of other species are not directly related to human sexes and genders. Sexes and genders that diverge from the norm are however often characterised as unnatural, so it might be validating to know that other species also have more complicated and malleable sexes than what is taught in those infamous elementary school biology books.

Biological sex and gender in humans and what is understood as ‘truth’

Human gender, on the other hand, is a more complicated matter, at least to us humans. Not because we are special or better than other species, but because we are the same species and can communicate with each other about our experiences. It’s more complicated exactly because transgender people exist. It’s more complicated because our lives are entirely suffused with technologies and culture. Humans don’t have the ability to change their sex characteristics from within their own bodies. Humans also don’t have the ability to produce enough body heat to survive in these latitudes without technologies such as clothes or buildings. Nobody, however, considers clothes or buildings unnatural. Sex and gender technologies are carefully guarded because our society hates trans women. That somebody would want to ‘give up the male position’ undermines the hierarchy consolidated around the patriarchal nuclear family too fundamentally.

Sex is always already gendered, to paraphrase Judith Butler. That we interpret sex characteristics in a specific manner follows from countless, intergenerational repetitions. Layer by layer, gender is outlined. Its meanings are connected specifically to bodies, not to identities. There is no pure, authentic biological sex that would exist somewhere beyond meanings. Males produce sperm and females produce ova, but how we interpret the sexes of our fellow humans based on their facial bone structure for example is not dictated by gametes.

While discussing transness and gender we indeed focus too much on identities. Instead, we should focus more on lived lives and material conditions. Historian Jules Gill-Peterson writes in her recent book A Short History of Trans Misogyny that transmisogyny, as in misogyny specifically focused on trans women, is not interested in identities. It’s a form of disgust and prejudice linked with homophobia, racism, and class hatred, that is directed at people who are feminine but are read as men. These prejudices are intertwined and define the societal positioning of an individual regardless of how they identify.

Transmisogyny as a phenomenon is older than what we nowadays consider trans womanhood. Many cultures in different parts of the globe have genders that face transmisogyny from colonialism. These genders, such as the Indian hijras and the batés of the Crow people, do not fully correlate with the trans womanhood of our times, but colonial powers have treated them in ways that are comparable to transmisogyny of our times. According to Gill-Peterson, they have been transfeminised. The persecution and suppression they have faced is not because they identified as women, which to my understanding they didn’t, but due to colonialist violence and its attempt to suppress and deny genders that have been appreciated in their own cultures.. Since genders are impossible to fully weed out, the end product has been the marginalisation of individuals who diverge from binary gender norms, pushing them outside societal structures, which has led them to rely on marginalised ways of making a living, such as sex work. The stigmatisation of sex work has in turn influenced the general impression of transfeminised people.

When discussing transness, too much focus is put on the idea of gender incongruence and dysphoria. I don’t experience gender incongruence when I’m seen as a woman. It gives me great joy every time, even over a decade after first discussing the matter publicly. If transmisogyny is focused on people who are feminine but are read as men, then wouldn’t we get rid of it by not automatically reading them as men? This doesn’t have to lead to misgendering feminine men.


In the conclusion of her book, Gill-Peterson introduces the term scarcity feminism. It’s based on the idea that advocating for the rights of one group would negatively impact the rights of another group. For example, the right of trans and nonbinary people to not be misgendered in healthcare is seen as a threat to non-transgender women’s right to be gendered correctly. Similar examples can be found in discussions over whether men’s equality will weaken as women gain more rights, or whether anti-racism threatens white people’s right to their own identities.

In the Kulttuuricocktail podcast episode focusing on biological sex, Leena-Maija Rossi says that surely challenging the binary is eventually better for us all. The feminist icon and Professor Angela Davis (whom Emilia Männynväli also references in her essay that sparked this debate) has in many speeches and interviews discussed how the advancement of trans and nonbinary rights is for the benefit of all, and how we have challenged the structures of gender is a sign of how we can also challenge other structures of oppression.


Männynväli talks about aspiring towards truthfulness in her book’s preface and its titular essay. I think of the term agential realism, developed by Karen Barad and related to Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges. We can know what is true in the world once we accept that the apparatus with which we produce that knowledge (such as an essay or microscope) is part of the knowledge being produced. Knowledge never exists independently, simply as it is, but instead it’s a phenomenon, where the ‘object’ of knowledge and the being that handles that knowledge influence each other.

Barad approaches the topic through quantum physics. Electrons, which belong to the tiniest parts of matter, behave differently when they are observed. If they are observed with machines developed for perceiving wave motions, they show up as waves. If they are observed with machines developed for perceiving particles, they show up as particles. Even if the observing happens only afterwards, their behaviour still changes according to the observation methods that are being used. Matter itself, of which everything consists of, including our gendered characteristics, is strange and indeterminable. How we name things influences their truth.

The Meaning and History of TERF as a Term

In the Kaiken takana on naisviha (roughly Behind it all is misogyny) episode of Syndikaatti podcast, Laura Gustafsson presents a conspiracy theory (her term) that she apparently cooked up all by herself, which is that the concept of the TERF could be a hidden weapon planted by the political right to create disarray within the left. The other speaker of the podcast, Männynväli, goes along with this thought. The theory is entirely ahistorical. It also includes a certain mirror accusation; trans people and their allies are accused of creating disarray, even though it’s specifically the trans-exclusionary rhetoric that creates a sense of disarray, since trans people cannot join forces with feminists that exclude us. Regarding the far right and who plays into their games – transphobia is their own norm.

In the episode, Gustaffson and Männynväli also discuss J.K. Rowling. They present the view that she has been the victim of a groundless ‘witch hunt’. Death threats received by Rowling are obviously unambiguously wrong. But our heroes unthinkingly swallow the idea that Rowling is not actually transphobic. Rowling has, for example, opposed gender reassignment treatments and presented views about trans women being a threat to cis women. As for her latest gimmick, she has denied that the holocaust targeted also trans people, which can be considered holocaust distortion and denial.

TERF is a shortening of trans exclusionary radical feminism. There have been attempts to define the term as a slur, and the people it refers to prefer the term gender-critical feminist. The TERF attitude has its roots in the 1970s lesbian separatist movement, which discussed whether trans women can be accepted into spaces meant for only women. The 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male by the radical feminist Janice Raymond is a classic work of transphobic feminism. The term TERF was used first in 2008 when the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival decided to exclude trans women from the festival. Judith Butler comments on the usage of TERF like this: “If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists?” Since TERF as a term is controversial, many have started labelling the gender-criticals as anti-trans activists, for example.


It’s perhaps advisable to refrain from immediately calling someone a TERF if they unknowingly blurt out something that could be interpreted as transphobic, and if you wish to establish a dialogue with them. Sometimes, however, you have to call a spade a spade.

About Männynväli’s Essay

Let’s start with stating directly why this text can be considered transphobic, and more precisely transmisogynistic: it simply defines womanhood in a way that doesn’t leave space for trans women to exist indisputably as women. Despite the requests, nobody has specified where in the text this becomes evident. Perhaps it hasn’t happened because it’s more or less in the entire essay. It remains debatable whether the transmisogyny is due to lack of knowledge, or whether it’s intentional. Regardless, the concern here is an entire worldview, not only a few misplaced word choices.

Männynväli and her advocates have said that she’s only writing about her own experience as a woman. This is obviously true. Nevertheless, she makes many expansive truth-claims and writes in the preface of the book that “… as far as I write through my own experience, there is nothing special or individual about it. It is a societal reality shared by many.”²


The essay doesn’t mention transness at all. That wouldn’t matter if the essay didn’t deal with the discourses on transness. Männynväli challenges the identity-focused conceptualisation of gender but turns it into a caricature that doesn’t really correlate with any prevalent conceptualisations of gender. She writes: “When gender around 2015 became only a matter of identification, first in the mouths of progressives and then in the official discourse, I was left reeling. I did not comprehend what this ‘woman’ is, that you can experience yourself to be, separately from your body.”

Why is the word woman in quotes here? In a way it’s fairly useless to even take note of this, since the entire idea of a gender separate from the body is really a strawman. That your gender identity doesn’t match with the gender you’re assigned at birth doesn’t make gender something separate from the body. Trans women are trans women specifically because of our bodies and the societal meanings reflected on them. If gender was a thing separate from the body, we trans women would simply be women. In an optimal world, that is what we would obviously be in a social, legal, and experiential sense. Biologically (and our conceptualisation of biology is always culturally tinted) we are however always and specifically trans women.


“For me, my womanhood has always been equivalent to my female body and my potential to become pregnant. I found it debasing that according to this new doctrine, I was not strictly speaking defined as a woman, simply because it seemed I was lacking this something, something. A woman’s soul? The desire to be a woman? I do not know how my experience of growing up into a woman could have been more thoroughly overlooked and bypassed.”

There’s some strong projecting as well as internally conflicting statements in this quotation. Who is this evil gender theorist denying Männynväli’s womanhood? Was she suddenly often misgendered in her daily life? Later on in the text she says that she was still, without fail, seen as a woman. Why does she feel that challenging the gender system is a threat to her own womanhood? Within a few sentences she says that she lacks an experience of womanhood and right after, that her experience of growing up into a woman has been bypassed. Throughout the essay she consistently says she is a woman, but simultaneously claims that she has no experience of being a woman.


This same pattern of denial-then-statement repeats: “I felt like shouting “I am no less of a woman, even though I do not especially feel like it”. And what does it even feel like? I felt my womanhood only through its physical component, and I felt it thoroughly.” Doesn’t feel? Feels thoroughly? Which one is it, then? It seems that while shadowboxing, it’s necessary to say things that are as contradictory as possible.

Männynväli challenges the usage of the prefix cis. According to her definition, a cisgender person’s gender identity correlates with their ‘biological sex’ and that the person does not experience gender dysphoria. Männynväli attacks this definition: after all, she does not have a gender identity, and she has experienced gender dysphoria in her youth. It’s an illusion that cisgender people would never experience gender dysphoria or would never do any gender-affirming treatments. Nearly all people experience some kind of gender dysphoria at some point in their lives and do things to alleviate this: with clothes, with makeup, by changing their body into a specific shape through working out, by adopting certain ways of speaking and gestural mannerisms, as well as by using medications – including hormonal medication, such as steroids, hormone-replacement therapy for menopause, or medication that prevents balding. Some of these things happen unconsciously, such as adopting mannerisms of speech and gestures, some consciously. Some people engage in many gender affirming treatments and behaviours, some engage in few or none.

Perhaps a better definition for being cisgender would be this: a person who is not transgender. Here is probably the real problem: if someone considers transness an unwanted characteristic, they do not want to be defined through a term that is linked to it. The previously mentioned historian Jules Gill-Peterson, who has written about the history of transmisogyny, has given up on using the prefix cis and instead uses the term non-trans women when speaking about women who are not transgender. This might be rather clunky in Finnish and of course would make women who hate trans women very distraught. Obscuring and challenging cisness is also a known TERF dog whistle. ‘Dog whistle’ refers to communication where for example racist or transphobic communication is coded so that those with similar opinions are able to recognise it, while it’s possible to claim innocence to others.


Männynväli writes about how becoming a mother ultimately confirmed her experience of womanhood. She claims that it has been shown that the special quality and protection of the mother-child relationship is weakened by more widespread usage of gender-neutral language. It’s worthwhile to examine the sources used to back up this claim in more detail.

One of them is an opinion article, not a peer-reviewed, scientific analysis of existing research, for example. The definition of the correlating term opinion piece goes like this: “An opinion piece often includes personal thoughts, beliefs, or feelings or a judgement or conclusion based on facts. The goal may be to persuade or influence the reader that their position on this topic is the best.” This article is signed by ten people. Of those ten, Karleen D. Gribble, Susan Bewley, and Hannah G. Dahlen have also written this case report on a woman who previously considered herself to be a trans man and is grieving her inability to breastfeed due to her top surgery. (This is slightly tangential and goes to ad hominem argumentation, but I want to highlight some aspects about the worldview of these writers.)

This article misgenders all transgender people and spreads panic about how ‘young women’ in increasing numbers are seeking gender reassignment treatments. This article, which is based on a single case, uses very biased language, and presents the worldview which recognises the genders of trans people in a twisted light – like for example in this quote: “you can’t assume based on how someone looks that they believe in gender identity and that they are going to want to be interacted with as if they are transgender.” Again – is the worst thing that can happen to a cisgender person that they are accidentally considered transgender? Is gender identity a matter of belief? Regretting medical transitions is very rare. According to a study, top surgery is regretted by less than 1%, while generally all medical operations are regretted by as many as 14%.


Susan Bewley can also be found on the Transgender Map website, where she is described as an anti-trans activist, and has been a speaker at a conference by the transphobic Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Transgender Map is obviously a biased source, so here’s also a quotation from a text from the website binary.org.au (sic!), where Bewley is one of the authors: “There is a lack of consensus demonstrated as to the exact nature of the condition. Questions remain for psychiatrists regarding whether gender dysphoria is a normal variation of gender expression, a social construct, a medical disease or a mental illness. If merely a natural variation, it becomes difficult to identify the purpose of or justification for medical intervention.” In other words, this text presents the idea that gender-affirming treatments for trans people could be pointless, which is obviously absurd to all of us whose lives have been saved by such treatments.

The other reference for the claim that gender-neutral language would be harmful to women is an article by the Sydney Morning Herald, which discusses, amongst other things, the previously mentioned opinion article, which is used as the first reference. Männynväli presents her claim as if it was unambiguously and scientifically true that gender-neutral language harms women. However, the newspaper article presents other differing viewpoints and challenges this claim. The article also discusses Holly Lawford-Smith’s article Those birthing people – they’re women, which was published by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and consequently removed from their site in under 24 hours. According to this article, Lawford-Smith considers herself a gender-critical feminist and her critics consider her to be a TERF.


Echoing her sources, Männynväli considers gender-neutral language and its references to bodily features, e.g “people with uteruses”, dehumanising. She however doesn’t discuss the need for  gender-neutral language in the first place: not all pregnant and birth-giving people are women, and not all women have uteruses. Gender-neutral language is therefore more precise and more truthful – except if you deny the existence of trans and nonbinary people’s genders.

Männynväli offers a gesture of goodwill to gender minorities: “Accepting scientific facts obviously also includes accepting the fact that there always has been and will be exceptions and borderline cases. There are people who are not clearly men or women in their physical characteristics. There are people who experience chronic distress over their gender or relate more to some social and cultural construction of gender than to their bodies. Gender has more aspects than the biological one, and everything appearing in nature is natural.” However, she also writes: “There might be exceptions in chromosomes, but everyone carrying Y chromosomes are men and those without it are women, irrespective of their karyotypes.” So, in Männynväli’s worldview, trans women are men who experience gender dysphoria, and trans men are women who experience gender dysphoria.


TERF dog whistles also include the term dysphoric female/woman. This gesture of goodwill then seems more like a smokescreen, intended to hide the transphobia of the essay from those who don’t recognise it. Transgender and intersex people are also not exceptions or borderline cases, and as I have previously expressed, the distress related to transness is largely to do with the violent restrictions of transition treatments and the inability of cisgender people to see transgender people as members of their genders. Being transgender is not inherently distressing in and of itself, and does not mean hazily relating to something separate from the body.

“Could there be anything more misogynistic than to say that a woman born from a woman has nothing to do with womanhood?” Männynväli writes. Woman born woman is also a term from TERF language. Männynväli writes that she will raise her child gendered as a girl, correcting her course later on should her child so wish, since it’s “very rare that a child does not embrace their so-called biological sex.” In the 2023 national school healthcare questionnaire, 5,5% of all youths considered themselves as part of a gender minority. Parents of course make their own decisions about gendering their child until the child can communicate about the matter, I don’t see this as a major problem. Männynväli, however, continues: “I considered it a more likely threat that the child would not learn to appreciate themself, if we fell silent on physical sex so comprehensively that we would not even give it a word.”


I consider self-appreciation to be born from  positive connections with other humans, and from being seen as who you are. Männynväli herself states in the beginning of the essay how she felt relatively free from gender before puberty. And that when the problems started, it was due to her surrounding community’s sexism and misogyny, both of which are based on a strict gender division, which she supports. And what if the child is, after all, transgender or nonbinary? Then they would’ve been spared years of misgendering already, by the time they can comprehend the matter themself. Being gendered correctly feels the best, but not being gendered at all feels a thousand times better than being misgendered.

Männynväli mentions that women are over 14 times more likely to die in natural catastrophes. In the source that backs up this claim, the reason mentioned is the weaker socio-economic position of women, not their biological sex. Oppression of women also concerns trans women. Black trans women are in a particularly vulnerable position. In 2023, 320 transgender people were murdered, 94% of whom were transfeminine and 80% experienced racism.


The essay has a section that discusses the historical discourses surrounding who can be  counted as women. White bourgeois women, aspiring for the vote, were at the centre of first-wave feminism. Quoting the sociologist Beverly Skeggs and the journalist Maryan Abdulkarim, Männynväli highlights how working-class and black women have been defined as too loud, too strong, and too sexual to be real women. All of these adjectives are also applicable to the stereotypical conceptualisations of trans women, who now occupy this borderline position of who counts as a woman.


The final nail to the essay’s coffin is this: “I consider the non-bodied, hazy thought-woman to be quite a middle-class and neoliberal fantasy.” I’m unsure whether Männynväli is speaking of trans women here. Maybe (hopefully) not. Maybe this is just the same strawman that appears throughout the essay, the idea that some kind of a progressive elite thinks that gender identity is just a spiritual phenomenon. But as the entire essay has grounded real womanhood in the ‘biological female body’, it’s difficult not to see this sentence as a direct attack towards trans womanhood. Transgender people can be working-class and non-academic. Our experiences of gender are as embodied as cisgender people’s experiences.

Lastly

There have been discussions about wokeness and cancel culture throughout the diverse networks of the extra-parliamentary left in recent years. Some years ago, I wrote a response to Mikko Mäki’s article in Taide magazine, where he criticised identity-based art because its critiques cannot be based purely on the work itself, as the maker’s persona is so substantive to the work. Taija Roiha and Mia Haglund discussed both of these texts in their podcast Omaa luokkaa, categorising Mäki’s position as ‘anti-woke’, my position as ‘woke’, and ‘post-woke’ as the position to aspire towards, which they perhaps considered themselves to represent.

The Mikä meitä vaivaa? duo published a series of posts on “32 theses of woke activism” the same day that the controversy around Männynväli’s event began. When seen in a negative light, ‘wokeness’ is considered a way to guard orthodoxy, and that it’s this insistence on the correct usage of language that splits and fragments the left, and stops large, unifying fronts from forming.


Some will undoubtedly consider this text to be wokeness of the highest order. Despite woke originally being a positive term, used by Black Americans to describe people who are able to perceive oppressive structures in society. The right hijacked the term and began to use it in a negative sense.


I saw someone on Instagram say that dissing wokeness is the leftist millennial version of the boomer ‘you can’t say anything these days’ discourse. Doesn’t the act of splitting activism into ‘unwanted woke activism’ and ‘wanted non-woke-activism’ then actually cause the extra-parliamentary left to be split and fragmented? Is it woke for transgender people to call for cisgender people to treat us in ways that don’t harm us? Männynväli’s essay also discusses walking on eggshells, and that what follows is even stuffier voices being given space. Männynväli’s essay already has this stuffy voice, we don’t have to wait around for it anymore. There’s no need to walk on eggshells, but you do have to think and be responsible for your words.

Cancel culture itself is another term born from the conflicting pressures of left and right. I’m not certain about the roots of the term, but to my understanding, it comes from a practise in activist circles to exclude people from the community, that have committed sexual violence towards another member or members of said community. In the Syndikaatti podcast, Männynväli supports this kind of cancelling, but also claims that someone could lose their job just for defending someone who has accidentally said something problematic. I have personally never heard of this happening.


Looking at Finnish mainstream culture, it’s clear that not even those who have been sentenced in court for rape or sexual assault lose their positions, see for example Aku Hirviniemi or Roope Salminen. Männynväli and Gustafsson complain about how activists use up their energies being hypervigilant towards others instead of doing some ‘real activism’. They themselves use up their energies being hypervigilant about this so-called hypervigilance, and by spreading transphobia. The opponents of cancel culture often behave in the exact ways they accuse ‘cancel culture representatives’ of behaving. They attack others with aggressive word choices and make judgements about cancellations before even knowing anything about what has happened.


And my last word; if I hear the Finnish anglicism ‘känkelöinti’ one more time, I will throw up on the speaker.