Define “wipe out”
This is how they derive the “they want to wipe us out!!!” lie. They translate successful treatment into wiping them out. Their condition is their idenniny so treating the condition equals genocide.
Making gender dysphoria go away=wiping out trans people, is the logic here.
But. The people in question still exist.
That makes it not genocide, not “they want to wipe us out.”
If people change political parties they don’t cease to exist. They change, but they don’t cease to exist. If believers turn atheist or atheists turn believers, same thing – they still exist, they’re just different.
A change in belief can of course be a very profound change, but no matter how profound it is it’s still not death.
It is possible for people to think of their former selves as dead in a way. Maybe we all do, in a way – but it’s a metaphorical way, a “feelings” way, a way in the head. It’s not literal death.
What if trans people were forced to accept treatment they don’t want, to get rid of their gender dysphoria? What if they’re blissfully happy pretending to be the other sex, and want to leave it at that? They should be left in peace, surely, provided they’re not harming other people. No men in women’s sports or prisons or rape crisis centers or awards, which would probably slash the number of blissfully happy trans women to near zero, but other than that, do watcha want. But either way, getting rid of the dysphoria is not getting rid of the person who had it.
The alternative to their thinking that being cured of Gender Dysphoria replaces their true self with a boring old cis stranger is a conviction that the only possible way to deal with it is transition or death. Having a female gender identity would be analogous to being human. You canât âfixâ being human. Getting rid of GI requires resetting a GI that cannot conceivably be reset. Thus, weâre forced to kill them.
My doctor helped me cure my anorexia; I had no idea he was killing me!
Sastra, that’s something I see all too often in works of art, science, and other things. The idea is that if a person has a disability, or something, they are genuine, happy, and who they are. The idea of curing it is to make them “boring” ordinary people. The assumption, of course, that ordinary people are all boring, which isn’t something I’ve experienced. Some are, some aren’t. And what you find boring depends on what you find interesting…it is different for other people.
This makes significantly less sense than the arguments of the believers in “multiple systems”. If you really believe that you have multiple “people” inside your head, you’ll believe that therapy that integrates the personalities is killing people. But here, if you believe that there’s only one person “inside” you, namely you, how is it killing you to make you comfortable with your body?
Yet again, they show that they are in a cult. All the data are showing that medical + surgical interventions lead to a worse outcome than watchful waiting + counselling in most young people who have ever expressed a ‘trans identity’ or desire to ‘change sex’, or in very young children whose parents have interpreted age-appropriate imaginative or ‘gender non-conforming’ play (which, as Dennis Noel Kavanagh has pointed out, is normal for autistic children and those who will grow up to be same-sex attracted) in the worst possible way for the child.
In the Good Old Days pre-cult, only around ten percent of children diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’ continued to feel distress after puberty and not all of them went on to ‘transition’, so we can expect the current fad for ‘transitioning’ one hundred percent of children, whether or not they are diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’, to lead to a ninety percent detransition rate. That is a very distressing thought, and a far worse outcome for those individuals than psychological help to accept reality would have been.
Only a cultist would regard non-medical, non-surgical interventions to be ‘genocide’.
Rather like the more militant members of the ‘Deaf Community’, who ranted in a similarly hyperbolic manner about treating deaf children so that they could gain some hearing; those adults also claimed a genocide of their culture and community. Nonsense, say I. When I was offered the chance to give my son some hearing, I jumped at it. He was only four months old, so couldn’t consent for himself, but I felt certain that he’d love to be able to hear. Who wouldn’t want to be able to fit into wider society, and lead a normal life?
If a medical researcher talks about preventing or reversing diabetes, is this a statement of genocidal intent? Or is it simply a recognition of the reality that, all other things being equal, people with diabetes would live happier and healthier lives without diabetes?
Gender dysphoria has a nasty habit of metastasizing into an iatrogenic endocrine disorder. Perhaps there are so e people whose distress over their sexed bodies is so intolerable and intractable that the benefits of medical transition outweigh the risks, but on a purely somatic level, of course transitioning is less healthy than not transitioning. It’s better not to undergo major surgery to remove normal, healthy body parts if you don’t have to. It’s better not to use medications to radically alter your normal, healthy endocrine system if you don’t have to. This should be obvious to anyone with even a modicum of common sense.
And the kicker is that trans people take all the meds and get all the surgeries and in the end, they’re still stuck as the sex they were born as. Few of them fully pass as their target sex,š and none of them have functional genitalia of their target sex. Because sexual orientation actually does operate on the basis of sex (quelle horreur), they struggle to find romantic and sexual partners. In a way, transitioners remind me of children trying to dig a hole to the opposite side of the earth. In some sense, they’re making progress towards their goal, in the same way that yes, technically, if you dig two meters down you will be two meters closer to wherever the antipode is. I used to have breasts, and now I don’t! I used to be flat-chested, and now I have gynecomastia! But just like the kid swinging away with the shovel, they’re never going to get where they’re trying to go.
So yeah, in conclusion, I don’t see anything genocidal about helping people with gender dysphoria find a viable path other than medical transition, particularly given that the results of medical transition are consistently oversold and its risks are consistently understated.
(1) To be fair, lot of trans-identified females do end up as more-or-less convincing men, but the type of “man” they become is overwhelmingly “weird little guy with a funny voice who kind of pings my something’s-off-here radar.”
Gender non-conforming play isn’t unusual for those who are not autistic or same-sex attracted, either, unless society tells them to play “with girl’s toys” or “with boy’s toys”. I am neither autistic nor same-sex attracted; most of my play as a child was with my siblings, and we tended to play “boys” games. I thought dolls were the most boring things in creation; what can you do with them? I’m sure girls who like dolls can answer that, but I couldn’t. My dolls preferred to fly out the window to sitting around and talking over tea.
This is part of that same mindset that leads people to trans, the idea that a girl who plays with “boys toys” will grow up to be a lesbian…unless she’s autistic. This is the same messages we all hear, that lead to girls doubting they are fit to perform in a “man’s” world, and take on only caring and nurturing roles even in their career because that is what “girls” do.
As someone who was gender non-conforming, and a mother who didn’t throw a fit (which was unusual for my mother; she threw a fit about nearly everything), I can testify that it is training, not necessarily inherent preferences, same sex attraction, or autism that makes kids choose the toys they choose. Yeah, there are some studies that show that boys tend to head for “boys toys” and girls for “girls toys”, but those studies are done on children who can choose the toys. No matter how you bring up your kid, they are going to be living in the world. They will learn quickly what they are “supposed” to do, and will do it…or will be rebellious and actively act out against it.
In a family that rigidly enforced gender roles in most places, I am fortunate that my mother didn’t do that with play. I suspect part of that was so she wouldn’t have to spend money on toys, and so she could kick us all outside to play when we bothered her, but whatever. Any reason works. I grew up learning that girls can play with balls, cars, yoyos, legos, and ride boy’s bikes. I also learned that boys could play only with boys toys, so there are some places my mother’s inherent laziness did not manifest.
@Iknklast:
The anorexia comparison is illuminating. I’m not actively anorexic, but I have a history of it, and even now I would not react well to anyone who seriously attempted to sell me on the idea that I don’t have to have a certain body type or a certain BMI to live a fulfilling, worthwhile life. That conversation would get very ugly, very fast. So in that sense, I suppose I can sympathize with trans-identified people who rage at attempts to help them reconcile with their actual sex.
The difference is that not having certain body type/BMI does in fact incur severe social penalties, particularly for women. (One of the delightful things about having an eating disorder is the sheer amount of brazen hypocrisy you encounter: people who openly regard fat women with pity and contempt will then turn around and ask you why you’re so afraid of gaining weight. Well, gee, buddy, I don’t effing know. Guess I must be crazy.)
But trans people aren’t motivated by an obsessive (but still mostly reality-based) terror that they will tumble into a despised social underclass if they don’t maintain rigid control of their bodies. They are not trying to ensure that their bodies remain socially acceptableâquite the oppositeâand in fact they incur major social penalties when they transition. True, many woke individuals and institutions chant endless praises of trans people and go through contortions to avoid offending their delicate sensibilities. However, I suspect that on the level of actual in-person interactions, even many allies don’t especially enjoy the burden of pretending that an obviously male person is a woman or an obviously female person is a man. Validating gender identities feels very virtuous, I imagine, but I also imagine it’s the kind of performance that one doesn’t want to have to put on too often.
Another reason that the eating disorder/gender dysphoria analogy falls short is that eating disorders have nothing to do with sexual paraphilia. (Maybe there’s a link for a tiny handful of individuals. But as a general rule, no.) In contrast, gender dysphoria/trans identity very frequently grows out of sexual paraphilia, or is at a minimum closely intertwined with it. (This is especially true for males, but I think it’s also an underacknowledged factor in the surge of trans-identified females.)
Feminists trying to refute genderist gospel are often on the back foot because of our inability to plainly state that most of the male people who identify as women get a powerful sexual thrill out of it. If we do come out and voice this impolite truth, we end up looking like Bible-thumping conservatives frothing at the mouth about the bizarre perversions practiced by sodomites. And for obvious reasons, discussing the sexual element of transness becomes especially sticky when trans-identified teens are involved. So we fall back on inoffensive analogies with eating disordersâand yes, these analogies do capture some dimensions of what’s going on (self-harming behavior, obsessive hatred of one’s own body), but they really don’t give an accurate reflection of the full picture.
Hence why “deadnaming” is considered to be so “bad,” though the demand to respect a current name or the use of the former one does not kill (or resuscitate) anyone.
And feelings-in-the-head aren’t all that powerful in the real world, which is why TiMs aren’t women, and why saying the name of an actual dead person, who is actually dead, does bring them back to actual life.
Well that’s a whole lot of genocide right there. Off to The Hague with you!
Even more absurd in its intentional dishonesty was Nicole Valerie’s second tweet: “we need a humane way to p*t d*wn these transgeners” – a highly inventive paraphrase presented as a direct quote.
I was thinking of deaf culture activism when this came up. The “genocide” parallel is there, but there are differences. How many people choose to sacrifice their hearing to join the “Deaf Community?” Does the “Deaf Community” recruit membership by encouraging people to purposely, permanently damage their hearing?
Many of them seem to seek out and embrace the idea of being a “despised social underclass,” weaponizing this supposed “marginalization” to blackmail and bully. Of course they don’t want to be subjected to the actual burdens of really being in an underclass (just like some TiMs crave the validation of patriarchal sexual objectification (because they see it as evidence of “passing”), but don’t really want the shitty pay and scutwork that too often is the lot of women), they just want the moral high ground they think being “oppressed” gives them.
let’s say, hypothetically, that it were actually possible to change a persons sex. Completely. DNA, biochemistry physical structures, the whole lot. So a man suffering dysphoria could be made into a woman. If, as claimed, the dysphoria, the disease, is caused by the mismatch between identity and body, then they’ve just been cured. They are now literally a woman, the dysphoria has gone, they are no longer trans. By Sall’s reasoning that is still genocide. A trans person has been removed from the population.
We can’t literally change sex of course. The best we can hope for is some kind of poorly functioning mimicking of the other sex. But if it’s possible to treat the dysphoria, so that a persons suffering and unhappiness is eased, surely that’s a good thing? I suspect the number of young trans people who actually suffer from primary dysphoria is pretty low, with many suffering instead from anxiety about puberty, entering adulthood, socialised gender behaviour, same sex attraction, etc. All mixed up with factors that make such a tumultuous time even harder – depression, autism etc.
I feel real compassion for those kids. Not so much for the AGP and none at all for the men who abuse the situation to gain access to vulnerable women and girls.
An article in The Washington Post about the increasing level of rape and other forms of violence teenage girls are suffering.
Honestly, when I read that, I can understand why so many girls don’t want to identify as such.
Rob @11,
That hypothetical is essentially the state of things in the Culture civilization of Iain M. Banks’ sci-fi novels. As far as I know (haven’t read them all yet), it’s only really a plot point in one of the books. It’s not mentioned as being used to treat dysphoria, just as one of the many ways that citizens of the Culture can mess around with their bodies — they also can implant glands that secrete various mood-altering substances on demand, etc. And it is reversible.
I do wonder which of the controversies of the trans debates would go away if that kind of technology existed. Of course, we’re so far away from that that it isn’t anything more than a thought experiment.