Guest post: These people walked through a brainwave interrupter
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on On top of the roller coaster.
I just bought the idea that trans people were “born that way” as in intersex, but that there were men with AGP who used that in order to play out their fantasies with everyone playing along. Then Josh sent a link to me that explained it clearly and I went “OH! those bastards!”
I had so many friends (now distant acquaintances, or not friends at all) who were very nitpicky and skeptical about everything they dd and thought who would make sure they would check all angles before accepting the truth of anything who were very supportive of trans issues. And I had some internal conflict when they attacked you, Ophelia, not because I doubted your skepticism, but because I had to face the fact that these friends of mine were not being honest about their skepticism. And when there is conflict between people I respect over an issue that can be resolved with critical thinking, but those on one side of the issue start yelling “BIGOT BIGOT HATE BIGOT SHUT UP!” instead of defending their case, then it’s very hard to accept that they are applying critical thought.
One of the difficult issues with peaking is that most of us have a natural empathy towards the kids we remember being bullied for not meeting the standards of their sex in either masculinity or femininity. It’s a very confusing topic, and our instincts to defend those kids is directed towards whatever the doctors say will fix them. So, that’s why I think may liberals have been taken in by it.
While I would be stopped dead in my tracks by someone telling me that puberty blockers are safe, and want to research it before I would accept it, there are so many institutions spreading this lie that we are conditioned to accept it. There was a science writer who commented in one of Shermer’s threads yesterday that he would trust the hundreds of doctors who were prescribing over a single famous skeptic’s word. This was a science writer, Their job depends on reviewing the science articles. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that as awful as puberty is, it is necessary for development, but hey, “if some doctors think they’re good then I accept the argument from authority.”
Supporters do that because they believe the suicide lie and don’t want “Blood on their hands.” Because they remember the kids with the bloody noses who were called names, and surrounded by bullies with no one to help them. Or, perhaps they were the kids with the bloody noses who thought about killing themselves because they weren’t normal. Perhaps they were the bullies and this is how they deal with their guilt. I think it fits along all of these lines, and then they shut their minds off and accept that anyone who doesn’t buy into the magical transformation of transgender is mean and bigoted towards those kids.
It was a nurse who was an escort volunteer with me at Planned Parenthood who first explained how great it is that there are drugs that can pause puberty for gender confused kids. I was floored, but before asking her how that could possibly be a good idea I wanted to check into what they were doing to kids. I had already peaked, but this seemed completely over the top. How can anyone be mature enough to make a distinction about gender if their development at the crucial stage of adolescence was arrested? I didn’t think that Piaget was that far off or that there was new science that had disproved his theories on the stages of development.
Anyway, I would think that skeptics would take a step back and look at all of this and say “I think there is something a bit off about this. I should look into it.” It’s very weird that they can turn on friends on a dime as soon as we express doubt. I don’t like to name names, but man, there are some people who really surprised me by assuming that I’m a hateful bastard after knowing me for years. It’s like all these people walked through a brainwave interrupter on this subject. I lost some “friends” over the fact that I didn’t hate Monsanto enough to declare all GMO’s poison, but that’s quite a different thing. This is astonishing.
Oh, and I think it’s hilarious when a transgenderist tells me I’m confusing sex and gender but doesn’t expand on it.
It’s not just friends, but family. After 30+ years, my s-i-l thinks I have magically overnight become a hateful fascist bigot who can’t be trusted to invite her and the foster kids over for barbecue and a swim without genociding them. What the hell do you take me for?
It seems one doesn’t have to be “trans” to be a member of the cult. Even solidly “cis” people believe that doubting any of the genderist woo is damnable heresy.
They were all born this way, but only in retrospect.
As a child, feeling a strong identification with the other sex is 80%+ likely to mean you are not trans, because kids with those feelings mostly move past them and identify with their sex again if allowed to go through puberty. There is no method for distinguishing between the kids who will get over it and those who won’t, no difference in intensity of feeling.
But that small percentage who don’t get over it? Totally, all born that way.
Papito,
This seems as good a place and time as any to report something that I heard last weekend. I was at a talk featuring two gay men who wrote “graphic novels” about gay issues.
For them, the whole “transgender” thing was excellent for the way that it supposedly recognized gender fluidity. (We all know that it tends to do the opposite but let’s just go with it for now.)
These guys were middle aged. The first guy was slender, fit, wearing a dress shirt (dark pink) and white slacks. He said he had been a very effeminate child. He hated boys. Boys bullied him. Boys were interested in stupid things. He felt no connection with other boys. He thought he should have been born a girl. I couldn’t hear everything but he talked about walking around after taking a bath in a robe with a towel wrapped high on his head. (This was one of his “feminine” mannerisms.)
Then he grew up and got comfortable with being a gay man. (Of course this was in a society where gay rights were beginning to win victories.)
The other guy was very large, musclar, bearded. He said that as a child he hated “gender.” He didn’t want to be any gender. The first Halloween costume he’d made by himself was a half-male/half-female character that he wore for a few years until it got too small for him.
Around about puberty he said he got “attracted to masculinity.” [“I wanted to fuck masculinity.”] So how to access it? By becoming masculine himself. Hence the body-building. He described himself as one of those very promiscuous gay men people hear about. Hundreds of partners so far.
It sort of made me think about AGP men, who would be attracted to femininity. But there’s a difference to being an effeminate man and a man who wants to be female and turns himself into a caricature.
Papito
As a child I had a strong identification with the other sex.
I didn’t get over it. I got a clue. (Though looking back, I don’t believe I ever believed that I was in any way a woman. I just wanted to be one. And I knew I wasn’t. I do fantasy. A lot. I just try not to believe it (or only believe it in the way it should be believed) and I think I’ve mostly succeeded. These days I don’t worry about it. I’ve been lucky to live a life full of extraordinary women who have accepted me for what I am – another human being. I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve found it helps if you treat women as human beings. (I don’t get along with men that well because I can’t do the macho bullshit that’s apparently necessary to ward of the gay.))
Yeah, I know I should be telling this to the TIMs but we all know they’re never going to listen.
Francis, thanks for pointing out that the feelings of discomfort in one’s body, and/or discomfort with others of one’s sex and/or gender roles, don’t always go away. Many of these boys and girls – though not all – will continue to feel these emotions and sensations well past puberty, and into adulthood. What does go away, for the great majority of the kids who are determined to say they’re the opposite sex, is that particular interpretation of those feelings and emotions.
For some the change is from a kid who thinks he’s really a girl to a man who seems more feminine than other men, or who is gay, or who has more female friends than male friends, but who, nonetheless, knows he’s a man. As “Me” suggests, sometimes great changes happen in puberty, and sometimes sexual attraction is one of these great changes. Wanting to use your genitals has a degree of conflict with wanting to cut them off.
Maybe the adult TIM frenzy to roll out ‘gender-affirming medical care’ to the youngest of boys has something to do with getting them before they change their minds. Maybe part of it is voyeuristic, transition by proxy, turning boys into facsimiles of women more convincing than they will ever be. If you trans boys before the great changes to mind and body of puberty happen, then in retrospect, they were all always that way, born that way. If you let female-identifying boys go through their natural maturation, the fact that most of them will realize that they’re not actually women puts the lie to the retrospective reification of the trans identity of the kids whose puberty was stopped. They didn’t have to have always been that way.
I have learned to accept that my discomfort in my body is not going to go away; I’ve been in therapy off and on most of my adult life. I’ve just come to embrace it as part of who I am, because I might as well. I avoid mirrors most of the time, and in my mind my body actually does fit me. Even though I know it doesn’t, I manage to deal with it.
I don’t have gender dysphoria, per se, but mostly the sense when I look in the mirror that I am looking at someone else, and the sense that my body is not right. It never led to desires to be male. If I had been born later, things might have been different, and I might now be living with a maimed body by trying to make it look like me.
Indeed.
I’d never thought of it in that way> I’ve tended to think of AGP support for transing kids, putting them through proceedures and regimens that they themselves might not dream of subjecting themselves to as the recruitment of self(?)-selected cadres who are totally committed to the cause (having made actual sacrifices of flesh and blood), using them as “footsoldiers” as it were, in the fight for TiM access to female spaces and the erasure of “woman” as a word and sex class with its own needs, interests, and facilities away from men. Sure there are plenty of trans “allies” who, while not trans themselves, are in this fight because they’ve bought into the bullshit, and/or they want to take advantage of the opportunity that trans activism offers to beat up on women both figuratively and literally and be rewarded for it. But those who have actually submitted themselves to “gender medicine” from a young age are all in. Like it or not, they’re in it for life (unless of course they detransition and then they are cast out as heretics to be demonized and villified even more that TERFs for their betrayal).
I figure AGPs are already shielding themselves with the “most oppressed” story, and the “impending trans genocide” lie, why not hide behind the “need” for “gender affirming care” of “trans youth” to “prevent suicide” trope as well? How many AGPs are at risk of any of the dire consequences of being “trans” that they use as emotional blackmail to get what they demand? They’re not helpless and marginalized. How many really believe in “trans genocide” yarns they spin and amplify? Are they at risk of suicidal ideation? I don’t buy it. Maybe I’m just cynical, or paranoid, painting them as some kind of evil Bond villains, controlling events behind the scenes, but we’ve all seen enough shadiness, skullduggery, and institutional capture to know that something organized seems to be happening. Sometimes events take on a life of their own, and others jumping on the bandwagon might steer things in unexpected directions, and some organizations may be going along for their own interests, which happen to align for the moment with trans activism, but someone, somewhere started this. How much direction there is or isn’t is hard to discern, but the fact that there is direction seems pretty clear. Trans activism wouldn’t have gotten as far as it has as quickly as it has if were a genuine, grassroots social justice movement . Because it’s not. Not grassroots, not “social”, and is not in the least interested in “justice” for anyone but themselves.
“Wanting to use your genitals has a degree of conflict with wanting to cut them off.”
(Sorry I don’t know how to do blockquotes here.)
As a man who quite likes his genitals (and always did fantasies notwithstanding) it terrifies me that If I had been born in, say, 2001 rather than 1961 I may have been persuaded to have cut them off or more likely rendered them non-functional. (The Jazz Jennings thing breaks my heart.) That’s why I’ve never bought the trans “this is our thing shut up and let us speak”. (That and the fact that I know it is at heart a women’s thing.)
iknklast, I share your feelings about mirrors. I can’t bear to see what time has done to my body. But the thing is I think that might change. I recently realised that I don’t have to pay attention to what the great Australian poet Les Murray called the erocides (people of both sexes who make it the their business to tell others, apropos of nothing, that not only do they not find them sexually attractive but that no one could.) I’m not suggesting that this is personally relevant to you. I think I know you well enough by now to know that it isn’t relevant but I’m sure it’s very relevant to the fight we’re in together here. (I just haven’t worked out how yet.)
Papito, do you remember where you got that 80% figure from?
Holms, every study done, even back to when there were very few kids involved, shows the majority of these kids desisting. It’s probably more today, given how much the cohort has changed.
Here’s James Cantor’s rundown of studies conducted from 1972 to 2013:
http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html
Totaled together, 80% of the 489 kids in that set of studies stopped identifying as trans, i.e. desisted. In that set of studies, 57% of the kids who desisted were gay.
Francis, you use blockquotes by employing the symbols that in math might be called “greater than” and “lesser than.” These symbols will enclose a “tag.” The tag will be “blockquote” in this case. One set of symbols bracketing that tag will appear before the text to be quoted, and a second set of symbols – plus the right slash (/) after the first (lesser than) symbol, and before the tag – will appear afterwards.
Different tags, such as “em” for emphasis, which gives you this can be employed in the same way.