Denise Caignon of 4thWaveNow vs. transgender people

Denise Caignon is an American author and anti-transgender extremist.

Caignon founded anti-transgender site 4thWaveNow in 2015 and has appeared in the media under a number of aliases, including:

“Marie Verite”
“Denise Canaan”
“Janette Miller”

Caignon’s site became one of the most prominent transphobic platforms, surviving a purge of similar anti-trans sites that violated hosts’ terms of service. Caignon is a key developer of the controversial “rapid onset gender dysphoria” diagnosis. Caignon’s child Chiara Caignon-Lewis is a prominent member of the “ex-trans” wing of anti-trans activists.

Background

Denise Jeanette Caignon was born in 1955 to a family that moved frequently. After graduating from Louisville Collegiate School in 1973, Caignon soon moved to California and began getting involved in second-wave feminism.

Self-defense and “take back the night” initiatives were an important focus of second-wave feminism starting in the 1970s. The belief was that direct confrontation can exert community control over rapists’ behavior. In 1972, not long before Caignon’s arrival, Santa Cruz Women Against Rape (SCWAR) was founded as an “alternative anti-Rape organization in which women support women.” The non-hierarchical collective had many lesbian members and offered a 24-hour rape hotline and free self-defense workshops. They also maintained a published list profiling alleged male rapists, assaulters, and harassers.

One of the women involved with the SCWAR hotline was queer activist Gail Groves. During six years working on the rape hotline, Groves realized that many stereotypes about sexual assault were inaccurate. Caignon and Groves studied judo together, and they soon founded Santa Cruz Women’s Self-Defense Teaching Cooperative. They also founded Women Who Resist: The Success Story Project to catalog strategies for preventing and surviving a sexual assault. In 1987, they published these first-hand reports as Her Wits About Her: Self-Defense Success Stories by Women. They taught a class that role-played real situations, recommending that students prepare for common issues like attack cues and verbal abuse from attackers.

Caignon has helped produce other publications and served as an editor of the Buddhist publication Turning Wheel for many years, guest editing three issues: intentional communities, engaged lives, and fundamentalism. Caignon ended that work in 1999 to spend more time with spouse Tim Lewis and their child Chiara.

After living in California for 27 years, Caignon moved to North Carolina and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to be a speech-language pathologist. In keeping with a longstanding interest in intentional communities, Caignon has a residence in a cohousing community in Carrboro. Caignon earned a master’s degree in 2007 and practiced in the area until retiring in 2014. Caignon’s focus was on aphasia related to strokes. Caignon helped develop Life Interest and Value (LIV) Cards, a way for people with speech loss to improve communication.

Caignon’s child Chiara began identifying as transgender online in 2013, at age 16. Chiara had already come out as queer and had started dating, but an incident at school had left Chiara with few friends in real life. Chiara turned to online communities, claiming that popular trans users on Tumblr and YouTube caused a multi-year obsession with transition.

At age 17, Chiara came out to Denise via a texted link to a gender clinic. Denise refused to let Chiara take medical transition steps, which led to a lot of fighting. At the height of the fighting, Denise got heavily involved with posting anti-transgender materials online and attending trans-exclusionary events:

I was fortunate to be able to meet two detransitioners I’d discovered online in person when I attended the Michigan Women’s Music Festival in 2015.

In 2015, Denise sent Chiara to a Florida horse farm for nine months, after which Chiara says the desire to transition subsided without taking any legal or medical steps. Denise and Chiara have since teamed up to be the most high-profile family in the modern ex-trans movement.

Unlike the second-wave feminism of Caignon’s youth, third-wave feminism is largely trans-inclusive. Caignon’s site name 4thWaveNow is a call to replace that third-wave feminism with a transphobic fourth wave.

References

UC Santa Cruz: Regional History Project: The 1970s. https://library.ucsc.edu/reg-hist/the-1970s

Moller, Catherine Harper (1984). The Silence is Broken. My Experiences with Santa Cruz Women Against Rape. University of California, Santa Cruz

Caignon, Denise; Groves, Gail , eds. (1987). Her Wits About Her: Self-Defense Success Stories by Women. HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0060550783

Japenga, Ann (December 10, 1987). Rape Group Accused of ‘Smear’ List : Man Sues After Name Appears in Warnings. Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-12-10-vw-27980-story.html

Levoy, Gregg (November 6, 1990). Teaching women to fight back. Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1990/11/06/teaching-women-to-fight-back/605287cd-e0cf-4672-b3a3-642e3f0074b4/

Groves, Gail (1995). “And He Turned Around and Ran Away.”
in Patricia Searles, Ronald J. Berger (eds) Rape and Society: Readings on the Problem of Sexual Assault. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429493201

Caignon, Denise, consulting ed. (1999). Turning Wheel: Journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship

Helena Norberg-Hodge, ‎Peter Goering, ‎John Page (2001). From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture. [Caignon handled production and layout] Zed Books ISBN 978-1856492232

Moon, Susan (2004). Not Turning Away: The Practice of Engaged Buddhism. Shambhala Publications ISBN 9781590301036

Haley KL, Helm-Estabrooks N, Womack J, Caignon D, McCracken E (2007). A pictorial, binary-sorting system allowing “self-determination despite aphasia. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Boston, MA.

Haley K, Helm-Estabrooks N, Caignon D, Womack J, McCulloch K (2009). Self-determination and life activity goals for people with aphasia. Annual Convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, New Orleans, LA

Haley KL, Womack JL, Helm-Estabrooks N, Caignon D, McCulloch KL (2010). The Life Interest and Values Cards. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Department of Allied Health Sciences.

Media appearances

Kennedy, Dana (May 11, 2022). Anguished parents of trans kids fight back against ‘gender cult’ trying to silence them. New York Post https://nypost.com/2022/05/11/meet-the-parents-of-trans-kids-fighting-gender-cult/

[McCann, Charlie] (September 1, 2018). Why are so many teenage girls appearing in gender clinics? The Economist https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/09/01/why-are-so-many-teenage-girls-appearing-in-gender-clinics

Williams, Grace (February 19, 2019). A grand conspiracy to tell the truth: An interview with 4thWaveNow founder & her daughter Chiara of the Pique Resilience Project. 4thWaveNow https://4thwavenow.com/2019/02/27/a-grand-conspiracy-to-tell-the-truth-an-interview-with-4thwavenow-founder-her-daughter-chiara-of-the-pique-resilience-project/

McIntyre, Carl (2010) Aphasia. Bonus materials: Interview with Denise Caignon, MS, CCC-SLP, Carl’s Speech Pathologist

Boyce, Benjamin (April 9, 2022). Biden Admin Goes All-In on Transitioning Children | with Denise from 4thWaveNow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88Dk5U0uiqY