Guest post: Like some sort of activist auto-immune disorder
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The spectre.
Affirmation is a powerful psychological tool, but like all tools (nuclear power or nuclear bombs) it needs to be applied with rigour and care for the outcome.
Interesting insight. Thank you for sharing this.
We seem to be dealing with the “nuclear bomb” version of this psychological tool. These desperate people are being told that affirmation needs to be paired with drastic body modification. The self-defeating, self destructive internal voice is being catered to and appeased, not talked off the ledge. The social contagion aspect turns the phenomenon into a patient driven one, with sufferers demanding the “true path” to what they’ve been told will make them better. At the same time, the watchfull waiting approach which would leave them intact and, if successful, happier in their own, uncut skin, is condemned by activists as “conversion therapy.” The activist path is encouraging sufferers to listen to the inner voice telling them to jump into the lifelong, medicalized “journey” to a place they can never reach.
A major twist on this weaponized “affirmation” approach is that the entire rest of the world is supposed to join in with the “affirmation.” It is no longer an internal dialogue, but a play in which we’re all expected to read our scripted lines and follow the blocking that the reified, empowered and enthroned “gender identity” demands. Everyone else is supposed to go along with the fiction that yes, these people have actually changed sex. We are unwittingly and unwillingly pressed into being a part of their “therapy.” Failure to comply results in our punishment as cruel monters out to cause “harm” and “suffering” to these people who have become, at the same time, our wards and our masters. We are to dance to the tune chosen by these marginalized, vulnerable dictators, whose zealous supporters can have us cancelled and fired for using the “wrong” words.
And whatever is happening with, or done to genuinely dysphoric individuals, the “affirmation approach” has in turn been appropriated by fetishistic AGP males in order to demand access to female only spaces. And this appropriation goes farther still. The therapeutic language, along with Self-ID, become tools to be used by predators and cheats who might not even be dysphoric or AGP at all, but who see and seize an opportunity they can exploit. Trans activists, having failed to acknowledge the threat that Self-ID represents to women’s spaces perforce defend predators when they defend the “right” of TiMs to access those spaces. Because there is no way for women to distinguish between “harmless” TiMs and run-of-the-mill male predators, trans activists have effectively taken the predators under their wing so as not to weaken their own supposed claim to women’s spaces. If a few women suffer as collateral damage from predators who take advantage of the opening that TiMs have made, oh well. It’s all a part of “validation” and “affirmation.” We all have our parts to play, though we don’t all have a choice in the matter. Some of us are stars, some of us are only extras.
That all of these different, conflicting groups get lumped together under the “trans umbrella” within the even broader, forced-teamed LGBTQetc. “community” makes responding difficult, as opposing the boundary-breaking behaviour of males who claim to be trans is trumpeted as an “attack” on the “entire LGBTQ community,” even when it’s really just an attempt to protect women from creepy males. In the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, we have the bizarre, unexpected spectacle of lesbians defending their same-sex attraction and association against genderist “lady dick lesbians” being turned outcast for “attacking” the very community of which they are ostensibly charter members. To paraphrase the promulgators and aplogists of “TWAW,” The L is right there in the name! But like some sort of activist auto-immune disorder, the “community” turns on part of its own body, giving the lie to the loudly asserted claim that there is “No Conflict” between women’s rights and trans “rights.” A little “affirmation” goes a long way.
Could be the latest iteration of misery loving company.
Just sayin’.
Is at least some of the force in forced teaming being applied by social conservativces?
Sure, I think social conservatives might have a tendency to indiscriminately lump the LGBT..etc. alphabet soup people together as, in their minds, a bunch of deviants weirdos and perverts, with little regard to differentiate between them, as it gives conservatives a bigger target, but I think force behind the teaming is coming primarily from the T. The aim of trans activists is to use this bigger “community” to advance their own particular goals, usually at the expense of the other members of that supposed “community,” (see lesbians in the OP). The double standard is built into the activism itself, and is vigorously enforced, despite the hypocracy and conflict obvious to anyone who cares to look. “NO LGB WITHOUT THE T!” benefits the T more than it does the LGB, who were doing fine on their own. What does “gender identity” have to do with sexual orientation in the first place? They’re completely different things that have little or no real overlap of interests.
Trans activists are allowed to have exclusively “trans” events; lesbians, gays and bisexual people are not permitted to “exclude” the T. That would be “transphobic,” yet exclusively trans events and organizations are not similarly stigmatized as “homophobic” in turn. In fact the reaction to the more outrageous demands of trans activism are resulting in splash damage to LGB rights precisely because of the parasitic relationship insisted upon by trans activism. At the same time, legislative initiatives intended to keep boys and men out of girls’ and women’s sports teams, for example, remove mention of males altogether and describe such legal provisions as being “anti trans” and “attacks” against the entire “LGBTQ…community.” Captured media dutifully report stories about these measures in the trans-approved way, forcing the public (if they even bother) to dig through weasle wording to find that these sorts of laws are designed to males out of female sports. You’d never know that reading most media stories or listening to gender-addled Democrats.
I strongly suspect it’s the other way around. It’s not that the “affirmation approach” was introduced for the sake of “genuinely dysphoric individuals”, and predatory autogynephiles and other male pervs are simply “appropriating” it. The whole point of self-ID, automatic affirmation, and the sacred nature of “gender identity” in general, was always to get predatory males into female only spaces. But of course they can’t come straight out and say that. As a PR strategy it’s much more convenient to sell self-ID in terms of “kindness” towards non-threatening, sensitive gay boys or teenage girls in severe distress than allowing “Marion” (she/her) here to wave “her” boner around in women’s changing rooms. Then, once the critical concessions (TWAW, TMAM, being a “man” or “woman”, “boy” or “girl” is about “gender” rather than “sex”, the only way to determine a person’s gender is self-ID etc.) have already been made in order to be “kind” to suffering kids, there is no longer any way of denying “Marion” access to women’s changing rooms while being consistent.
Helen Joyce has also made the point that autogynephiles have a stake in framing gender identity as innate (“I don’t have a fetish, I really am a woman inside, and always have been”), and one implication of that claim is that there has to be such a thing as “trans children”. I strongly suspect this is indeed the origin of the very idea of trans children, and the sensitive boys and distressed girls now being mutilated, like the women forced to share their most intimate spaces with pervs like “Marion”, are all collateral damage.
I hadn’t thought of it going in that direction. Self-ID yes, but not the psychological affirmation aspect.
Bjarte, I think you’re on to something. Back in the 90s, therapists felt free to not affirm. As I think I mentioned here before, when my therapist asked if I wanted to be male, and I told him no, I just wanted to be female in my own way, he approached therapy in that manner. If he did that now, he would probably be in trouble with the genderites.
We’ve seen some cases noted where the individual did not present as trans, but did have tomboy characteristics, and the therapist actually talked them into believing they were trans. In fact, I think Ophelia did a post about a woman who, presented with a young tomboy who did not feel she was a boy, gave her the pop tart analogy about the wrong wrapper. By the time she left her first session, she was convinced she was trans.
I do think affirmation went from trans to the LGB. I think prior to that, what was requested was merely acceptance, allowing people to be who they were and love who they loved. There was no demand that we “affirm” their belief about themselves. Why? Because they didn’t need that for a simple factual belief. They do for delusional beliefs.
Colin Day wrote:
I think conservative ideas about men being men (masculine) and women being women (feminine) and trans being like gay are the foundational source of the trans activist claim that being trans is like being gay. Most Genderists aren’t co-opting or using the Religious Right to confuse the public into accepting a forced teaming of LGB and T; they genuinely believe that far-right conservative bigotry reveals a real, legitimate connection between the two groups. It’s a sort of negative proof which appeals to superficial resemblances and a reliably wrong enemy.
In secular forums I was surprised by how all my rational arguments related to sex and gender were regularly derailed by what I considered irrelevant pleas to stop, please stop and just look at who was agreeing with me: Christian fundamentalists and toxic Republicans. Doesn’t that tell me something? They hated gay people and gay rights. Can’t I then see this was their agenda and that questioning trans identities was following it? Eventually I started to suspect that this wasn’t an attempt to manipulate me by pushing my buttons; it was the button they themselves had pushed to get where they were on sex, gender, and why there’s no LGB without the T.
Iknklast wrote:
Yes, this is why transgender people are so much more vulnerable than other groups.