Guest post: One day when the bottom has fallen out
Originally a comment by VanitysFiend on The bindweed.
I hope one day when the bottom has fallen out of the trans movement we can have a proper belly laugh at all the people who should’ve known better but still somehow fell for it and subsequently pissed away their reputations as a result, but right now this just feels sad. Sad that the website where I first learned about Lupron and its use in crank medicine as a treatment for autism is now promoting an ideology that uses that exact same drug to stall the natural development path for adolescent humans because it thinks it’ll help children change sex.
There’s a dark beauty to this level of stupidity that just can’t really be appreciated in the present. To me stunting the process that turns a child into an adult seems so obviously like the prologue to a dystopian Sci-fi classic like Brave New World that it should be easy to dismiss out of hand, and yet here we are, doing it to thousands of kids every year.
When that day comes, they’ll still find a way to blame it on feminists. My money is on something along the lines of ‘If you hadn’t been so strident and hateful, others would have been able to hear what you were saying’.
On second thought, I don’t think they’ll ever admit feminist women’s concerns were valid and their analysis correct. It’ll just be their fault because, when is it not?
Simon, I imagine it will be sort of like every other fad or ideology, or maybe the Satanic Panic. True believers will believe, but everyone else will move on. Their star will fade, and no one will remember them.
I’m guessing that in-world, the Epsilon semi-morons weren’t allowed to swap their black uniforms, don grey, and identify as Alpha pluses.
iknklast
I hope you’re right. Reversing the legal changes that have already been made in much of the Western world is not going to be easy though. Like Helen Joyce I suspect the end result will be something like “Ok, let’s say women only have to give up half the rights and protections we have taken from them and call it a compromise”. Once again I am reminded of the following cartoon joke:
“You owe me $100!”
“What are you talking about? I don’t owe you anything.”
“Ok, let’s compromise. Let’s say you only owe me $50.”
Simon @#1:
I can see a lot of people who either supported it or looked the other way blaming people like Helen for not doing enough or for exploiting the situation by writing a best selling book. “If I’d known what was actually happening, you know, the stuff you wrote about in your book Helen, I’d have killed those monstrous doctors and carried the children to safety myself” followed by a “So why didn’t you, when you knew what was happening”. Feminists and other groups will be damned for playing by the rules in a scandal that with hindsight, obviously merited an extra legal response.
Your Name’s not Bruce? @#4:
Well since you asked I was imagining something more like Logans Run where “The Elevated” live in a protected area called “The Safe Zone”. Freed from the base desires of “Adultification” they know not sexual violence and live lives of simple, innocent pleasure reading YA literature, watching old movies and TV shows, eating fast food, and playing in oversized indoor playgrounds*, all watched over by the facilities central AI and tended by androgynous, rubber skinned droids who exist only to serve.
Outside “The Safe Zone” things are different, civilisation collapsed centuries ago and humanity has regressed to a primitive and savage state. Without the aid of ancient medicine the humans there take on an even more archaic and bestial form as they age. Hair sprouts from inappropriate locations, muscles embiggen, breasts appear out of nowhere, and the strange urinary tube that is present on around half of all humans engorges to ridiculous sizes, frequently exceeding four inches in length! A totally unnecessary change from the perspective of The Elevated as it makes wearing the formfitting onesies that are common in The Safe Zone even more awkward.
I guess the broad theme of the story would be the infantilization of a society. It’s one thing to be immature for your age, or to generally dislike the adult world and to pine for a simpler time in your life, but would stopping the process of becoming an adult in a biological sense actually fix anything? Can it be morally justified? If adult passions destroyed the world that was maybe some of the survivors decided that the only way to stop it happening again was to build a society where adult passions never emerge. If we can stop people becoming true adults do we have a duty to offer it to children or is there a moral obligation to let nature take it’s course? Is it moral to privilege adulthood over childhood?
*Is there actually a broad English name for those big indoor play areas? Where I’m from people over a certain age call them “Jungle Gyms” because there was a place here back in the 90s called “Jungle Jims” that was very popular for children’s Birthdays and what not.
Vanity’s Fiend, they called them Jungle Gyms long before the 90s, at least in the US. They were calling them that in the 1960s when I went to school and in the 1950s when my husband went to school. My understanding is that the name came from the idea of monkeys playing.
Something I never understood, since childhood is sort of an awful place to be in many ways. Being an adult is difficult and fraught with tension, but I would choose it over childhood any day.
@iknklast#6
Firstly, how do you conjure a quote box?
Secondly, that’s interesting about Jungle Gyms. I guess the local Jungle Jims that I grew up with was just being funny with it’s name.
“Something I never understood, since childhood is sort of an awful place to be in many ways. Being an adult is difficult and fraught with tension, but I would choose it over childhood any day.”
And Thirdly. I think there’s a lot of people whose mentality is the opposite of yours, it’s very noticeable in geek circles, probably always was, but as geekdom has become more mainstream it’s allowed geeks to become even more childish. I guess I’m stuck in the middle on that issue. I’m not so bad that I’m sitting in room surrounded by vintage action figures from my favourite IPs but I still have a fair amount of my actual childhood toys carefully stored and largely out of sight that I just refuse to get rid of. I see the allure of childishness but recognise that it’s best not to wallow in it.
How to conjure a quote box:
blockquote between 2 angle-brackets, the first plain, the second with / before the word.