A sub-department of the Social Justice Movement
Ray Blanchard interviwed at Quillette:
I published my early writings on autogynephilia in specialty journals with very small circulations. I intended them for a tiny readership of clinicians who specialized in the assessment and management of gender-dysphoric patients. However, this work attracted the attention of two individuals who decided to promote it more broadly, one online (Anne A. Lawrence) and one in a book (J. Michael Bailey). These efforts, especially the book, enraged three influential trans women—two of them senior academics—who attempted to get Bailey fired from his teaching position at Northwestern University for writing it. This campaign has been documented in detail by Alice D. Dreger, a medical historian. Paradoxically, the efforts of trans activists, then and today, to completely suppress any mention of autogynephilia in public discourse has resulted in an increased public awareness of it. I think the self-defeating behavior of trans activists has persisted because the idea of autogynephilia cuts too close to the bone. If the idea had no resonance with them, they would simply have ignored it, and the idea of autogynephilia would just be one of many forgotten hypotheses of gender identity disorder.
Subsequently other strange and unexpected (to me) events befell my notion of autogynephilia. Modern trans activists reframed transsexualism/transgenderism as a political problem rather than a clinical problem. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, trans activism become a sub-department of the Social Justice Movement, and the Social Justice Movement became a primary combatant in the ongoing, pervasive Culture Wars.
And that is the hell we are now living in. The flat denial that autogynephilia exists became a canon of modern trans activism, along with the flat assertion that trans women are women, and the accompanying dictat that failure to accept and echo that assertion is evil, the most evil evil possible, and deserving of ostracism and violence.
And that’s fucked up. No other branch of political activism is like that, because it’s nonsensical and thus tyrannical. To be an Approved Person you have to affirm falsehoods, and you have to keep on affirming them many times every day, and you have to bully and harass anyone who refuses to Affirm the Falsehoods, and you have to insist that trans women are the most marginalized vulnerable group in the universe. You have to “center” your politics, including your feminism, on men who fetishize themselves as women. How’s that working? Badly.
Streisand Effect strikes again.
I wonder what kind of role guilt plays in this. Anyone who’s looked at religious fundamentalism can see that guilt, like doubt, can be the underlying driver of people’s fundamentalism. I was thinking about how it’s no longer enough to be respectful to transwomen and use feminine pronouns as a courtesy (to the ones who are deserving of respect and courtesy, that is), now we’re obligated to convince ourselves that we really can’t see that they’re male, and the only way to do that is to minimize (really, to try to erase entirely) in our heads what the differences between men and women are. And we feel guilty because it’s really difficult, if not impossible, to override millions of years of evolution’s influence on our ability to perceive sexual dimorphism.
We can tell men from women easily, even when men go to great lengths to appear like women. We can usually tell on the spot whether someone is a man-identifying-as-a-woman versus merely a masculine-appearing woman. But we’re uncomfortable consciously acknowledging and identifying those differences between men and women that allow us to make that distinction, perhaps because we worry about alienating gender-outlying women, or perhaps because talk of sex differences can feel nervously close to talk of enforcing gender norms. And so we feel guilt for intuiting in our guts what on a conscious level we’re supposed to deny — that the differences between men and women are fundamental and still matter, even in the case of men who want to be women.
Jane Clare Jones did a Reddit Ask-Me-Anything the other day, in which she said,
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/du04b9/ama_jane_clare_jones/
Indeed, it would be nice if our material bodies didn’t matter anymore, but we still live in the real world, and it ain’t so. Sex is real and material and it absolutely matters.