Of the other gender
The Tavistock ruling part 2.
The Tavistock deals with cases referred to it from across England and Wales. Until 2011, puberty blockers were only available at GIDS for those aged 16 or older.
In the year 2019-20, of 161 children referred to GIDS, three were aged 10 or 11 and 95 under the age of 16.
95 out of 161. Eeeeesh.
Diagnosis of gender dysphoria involves children demonstrating at least six of a series of behavioural traits as well as an “associated significant distress or impairment in function, lasting at least six months”.
Ah yes behavioral traits, like wearing the “other” clothes for example. The patterns include:
• A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender.
• A strong preference for wearing clothes typical of the other gender.
• A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.
• A strong preference for toys, games or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.
• A strong preference for playmates of the other gender.
• A strong rejection of toys, games and activities typical of one’s assigned gender.
• A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.
• A strong desire for the physical sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.
The whole thing rests on the social rules about “gender.” The language in almost every item makes that plain. “Clothes typical of the other gender,” “cross-gender roles,” “stereotypically,” “the other gender,” “assigned gender,” “experienced gender.” The only purely physical one is the “strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.”
Lots of people dislike the social rules about gender, and rightly so, because they’re stupid. Get rid of the damn rules! And in the meantime, defy them. It’s a win-win: it’s easier than drastically altering your body, and it avoids all the drawbacks to drastically altering your body.
In short, dislike of social conventions isn’t something that requires chemical sex reversal. Social conventions are social, not physical, so trying to medicate them away is futile as well as harmful.
Speaking outside the Royal Courts of Justice after the ruling, Keira Bell said she was “delighted” with the ruling: “This judgment is not political, it’s about protecting vulnerable children … I’m delighted to see that common sense has prevailed.”
Paul Conrathe, the solicitor who represented both claimants, said the ruling was “an historic judgment that protects children who suffer from gender dysphoria … This may have led to hundreds of children receiving this experimental treatment without their properly informed consent.”
And who speaks for the other side?
Lui Asquith, from the trans children’s charity Mermaids, said: “It’s frankly a potential catastrophe for trans young people across the country and it cannot be exaggerated the impact that this might have, not only on the population of trans young people that require hormone blockers, but it may potentially open the floodgates towards other questions around bodily autonomy and who has the right to govern their own body.”
Or maybe it’s a rescue for “trans young people” who wake up from their delusion a few years down the road.
Which is an exaggerated statement in itself. Of course it can be exaggerated; it is exaggerated every day how horrible, how awful, how murderous ordinary medical practices are to “trans” children.
As for those damn gender roles…my grandmother thought they would go away, and my generation would have it better. It was heading that way for a few years, but now? Bic for women? I was writing with men pens for my whole life? Who knew? Pink legos for girls? What’s wrong with ordinary legos?
Even when they get things right, there are so many things wrong, like accepting the things listed as being an inherent part of your gender. Feminists fought this for so long, now we see the ‘progressives’ making mincemeat out of all our work saying instead of abolish gender roles, just change your gender! Don’t abolish the patriarchy, embrace it by moving into the other box.
I’m glad for the ruling. I hope more follow.
Trans young people? Older people who identify as young people?
Oh, ye of little faith. Not only can it be exaggerated, it will be exaggerated until it becomes nothing less than a final solution, and if previous inventions are any guide, they will be accusing JK Rowling of personally paying for the Zyklon B.
Which makes me wonder. Let’s assume we accept the claim that the mismatch between someone’s sex and their “gender identity” is neurological and occurs during fetal development in the womb. We’ve got a little XX assigned-female-at-birth baby who is “really” a little boy.
Now imagine that this infant has been born in a country in which all the sexual stereotypes have been reversed. Women are considered brave, aggressive, independent, and ambitious, whereas men are supposed to be timid, self-effacing, dependent, and content. Boys play with princess dolls and toy stoves; the racing sets and pop guns are for the girls. Individuals of course vary and nobody perfectly conforms to these social standards — but they’re all aware of them.
Is the baby still transgender?
Sastra, it depends on whose gender expectations you use to answer the question. By the standards in play in our culture, if the girl wants to play with dolls and stoves, likes pink things and prefers dresses to trousers then she’d fail to meet the criteria. In your theoretical culture, however, she’d pass with flying colours.
In a culture that is rational enough to accept that gender norms are bullshit, there would be no such thing as transgender. If the girl maintained a conviction that she was really male then the only diagnosis would be that she was transsexual (a forbidden diagnosis nowadays, of course, because it confirms that sex is binary).
A frivolous thought about that list of diagnostic criteria: the one about a dislike of one’s genitalia has me wondering if I might be a tad on the trans side. I wouldn’t say that I dislike my genitals as such, but I do think that male genitals are ridiculous-looking things, like an afterthought stuck on at the last minute and which have no aesthetic qualities whatsoever.
A more serious thought about the same item: doesn’t that condition put the lie to the claim that there is no link between genitalia and sex, and to the accusations that the belief that genitalia are a pretty good guide to an individuals sex is nothing more than a n obsession or fetish?
If a “transgender child” is transgender if born in one culture but not in another, the idea that gender identity is innate flies out the window. A different culture wouldn’t change someone’s sex. It therefore shouldn’t make a difference to gender identity.
To rescue it, I think TRAs would have to bring up the idea of a gender identity which transcends gender twice — over, and back again. A trans boy would be a little female who is naturally gender-conforming but insists she’s really a gender-nonconforming boy. You couldn’t apply any test here but self-identification… and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for any kid to contentedly fall in line with gender stereotypes to general approval yet pipe up with “but this is supposed to be wrong for me! Why aren’t you angry?”
I agree entirely, Sastra. The TRAs have taken sex and gender and thrown in so many contradictory definitions that they’ve effectively created a human version of the Penrose staircase illusion.
It’s a house of mirrors. Which is you? Which is the mirror image?
I had hot wheels, popguns, legos (not pink) and a train set as a kid, so I must be a man. Yet I just ranted at a friend that I’m STILL getting ignored in meetings on systems I’m the team expert on, even though this last meeting was in chat, blowing my theory that it was simply the pitch of my voice the guys couldn’t hear over each other. So, there must be more to this gender stuff than meets the eye (and ear and toy preference).
Seriously, things were better when I was a kid, and they were better when my Mom was a kid. She grew up playing with bows and arrows, running through the woods and fighting with the boys. The only picture I ever saw of her as a kid she was in a t-shirt and jeans, just like her brothers. She was born 95 years ago (OMG, I just did the math).
What happened to us?
And of course, even if we were to accept the most conservative and reactionary version of gender stereotypes imaginable at face value, not a single person who ever lived was less representative of traditional notions of “femininity” (as in being nurturing, caring, understanding, modest, emphasizing cooperation over competition etc.) than loud, aggressive, infinitely entitled male bullies who revel in hateful, violent rhetoric against women, telling them to “die in a fire” as well as suck their “lady-cock”, posing with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire etc.
Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I think the much stigmatized “autogynephilia” explanation is spot on: In short, this has a lot less to do with traditional notions of “femininity” than the hyper-sexualized, objectifying, fetichized notion of femininity conveyed by pornography. These guys want to be their own jerk-off fantasies.
Bjarte, I was talking to my teenage son about gender dysphoria and the cult of trans yesterday, and our conversation turned to the subject of pornography. I told him that when I was a kid pornography consisted of magazines with pictures of naked ladies. Some kid got ahold of such a magazine somehow, and it made the rounds or was hidden under a bed. That is positively antique now, like being titillated by glimpsing an ankle.
Pornography nowadays is all video, all online, and increasingly violent. My son says there’s almost no pornography without violence. It doesn’t resemble what real people do when they have sex very well at all. It’s not just a jerk-off fantasy, it’s a bizarre and violent jerk-off fantasy. It’s hard to blame a pubescent girl for not wanting to be the target of such violence, or a pubescent boy for not wanting to be its perpetrator. And the predatory trans cult is out there trying to channel that teenage angst into self-mutilation for their own validation.
If this type of pornography is the fodder for the TIMs’ concept of femininity, it should be no surprise that the violence of their inspiration is turned around and folded into their expression.
“Empowering”, my ass…