Reasons
Sometimes I try to think of a way I could change my mind about all this and join the orthodoxy, and I can’t really do it. I’m quite sure I couldn’t change my mind to the point of believing that men who say they are trans really are women (or that women who say they are trans really are men). I would still see men saying they’re women, not women. But could I perhaps convince myself that I should pretend to think that? Or that it doesn’t matter what I think about it, the point is to affirm them and validate them no matter what I think? Those two would be more possible than the first, I guess, but that’s not saying much.
In other words no, I don’t think I could. I don’t think I could do it morally. I think it’s morally wrong to insist on everyone agreeing to the fiction (aka the lie), and I don’t really see how I could change my mind about that either.
This is how I see religion too of course. I’m pretty allergic to the widespread assumption that belief is a good thing, and that even if we don’t believe ourselves it’s kinder to play along, or at least not say aloud that we don’t believe.
So, I’m too narrow-minded, or stubborn, or vain, or inflexible to be able to change my mind on this subject. But then there’s also a big hole where reasons for doing so should be. With religion we can at least understand how some people find it consoling, especially if they gloss over the eternal punishment bits and so on. With gender religion I for one can’t even see that.
You?
This is a bandwagon I never fully jumped on. I felt pretty sure (and still do) that trans should have the same rights everyone else has. I didn’t think, and still don’t, that they are actually women, or that they belonged in women only spaces.
I can’t think of something that could make me believe that, some piece of evidence. I actually can think of evidence that might make me believe in God, though I’ve never seen it, but this? No, can’t.
I think about this a lot. Here are some of my thoughts:
On the medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria: I believe it’s wrong. However, I could change my mind if future (strong) evidence shows that:
1) Children treated with blockers (and mastectomies) really do have a better quality of life, in the long term, than children than children given alternative treatments–AND
2) It becomes possible to accurately predict which patients would benefit.
I don’t think I’m going to change my mind that the word “woman” is best defined as “adult human female.” I might possibly accept a Peter Tatchellian polysemic “can also mean” casual use of “woman” for “males who adopt female-coded gender norms, full-time,” IF we had an actual, falsifiable definition of “trans woman”–and were clear on the difference–
–but that’s simply not going to happen. It’s antithetical to Queer theory and to everything the current TQ+ movement is fighting for.
In other words, before I could even think of changing my mind about the claim that trans women are women, I’d need an decent definition of “trans.”
(I feel the same way about “God.” A Challenger would first have to tell me what she actually means by that word. Is she talking about Spinoza’s nature? The OT’s Yahweh? What are we talking about?)
P.S. Sorry my first comment went off track a bit. These issues are closely connected and sort of cluster together in my head.
Another factor is that so many trans women have made it so clear what they think of us that that too would make it harder to Believe. In short there’s too much bad blood by now.
I used to think that of course trans women were women, in a sense, but of course there are differences, each group has their own set of needs and problems, and so each deserved to have their own spaces. Much of this I justified through the flavor of linguistics I prefer, but I won’t bore you with the details.
But it slowly dawned on me that for the true believers, that would make me a terf. And when I saw how the true believers treated anyone who tried to have a reasonable discussion about how to define a woman*, I realized that I was among the wrong crowd.
*As I’ve said before, I was mostly unaware of the Grand Shunning; I think it was seeing how the horde treated Lady Mondegreen (who, among other virtues, has the best ‘nym going) that was the last straw. I really don’t miss the preening puritanism of that crowd.
Well here’s something: what if it were actually possible to change sex? I certainly can’t envision it happening short of some magic potion (which does in fact seem to be what Pathfinder’s iconic shaman did and how that’s distinctive from something like True Polymorph I couldn’t tell you), but what if we somehow managed to develop technology that made a true sex change possible?
It’d definitely flip a few things on their head…
Interesting question and responses. I suspect many/most of the readers here ponder this at least from time to time.
I’ve always tried to be supportive of the underdog and the needy. On the flip side, I’ve always required that people or groups I support at least try a bit to help themselves, and that they treat others with basic respect. A recognition of fundamental realities, as opposed to woo, is also a requirement.
I do believe that trans folk should receive exactly the same basic rights as everyone else. I don’t believe that merely copying the reactionary view of women/manhood makes one so. I find myself placing trans folk into that category (TF) rather than man or woman. Until such time as the ability to truely change sex at a fundamental level (as in the Culture) arises, I’m unlikely to change my view. I accept a trans man in my workplace using the male toilets simply because they’re a nice person, who makes a major effort to pass as male, they’re nice, and they represent absolutely zero threat to anybody (diminutive). I don’t see why women should accept males in their private spaces though, especially when so many are per formatively being women, while being extremely male in their behaviour. I wouldn’t regard them as safe or trustworthy either.
I’m very much with Lady Mondegreen on the treatment of minors (or mentally unwell/disordered adults for that matter). I don’t see that kind of research on the horizon any time soon given the array of confounding factors and the blind rage from TRAs if the idea of anything other than total acceptance of mantra is proposed.
In short, I would be open to having my mind changed on a number of points, on the basis of quality data and empirical changes in the behaviour of many who are/claim to be trans. I’m not about to hold my breath.
I think about this a lot, too. I’m friends with a few transsexual females, and I’m very fond of them. Although I still see them as females, and they themselves openly acknowledge that they’re female, I find myself naturally referring to them as ‘he’ most of the time. They look and sound like men; they act like gentle, kind hearted men. They’re often quite open about the feelings they had that led them to transition, and how their ideas and beliefs have evolved over time. With these particular people, I find that the topic of trans is very easy terrain to negotiate and talk about.
With transsexual males I’ve found it much harder to make that kind of connection, although there are a couple I’d consider myself friends with.
I think these kinds of transsexuals, “rational transsexuals” for lack of a better term, are a bit like “secular Jews” or “cultural Catholics” in the sense that they still identify with the religion and benefit from connection to some of the tradition, but they don’t take the faith literally anymore, if they ever did. They don’t mind that I’m a gender atheist and I don’t mind that they’re not gender atheists; we’re mostly on the same page so it’s no matter.
That analogy isn’t perfect for a number of reasons; one in particular is that those who do “join the faith” of trans can’t just leave so easily — they’re stuck living in irreversibly changed bodies for the rest of their lives. So for those who do “lose the faith”, they may find it much easier to continue to identify as transsexual simply as a matter of practicality: their bodies have been physically “trans-sexed” and they’re not likely to be perceived as members of their natal sex ever again. They’re not spiritually transsexual; they’re just bodily transsexual.
One of the biggest obstacles for me is the imposition on everyone else; the expectation and demand that we play along, and the imputation of malice and hatred if we don’t. They hand us a script and expect us to learn our lines. This is not any kind of private consolation, but a demonstration of the power they have to make people jump through hoops. Marginalized my ass. Private religious belief doesn’t rely on that. Trans demands are rude and presumptuous. It relies upon everone adopting the retooled language, to assent or at least acquiesce to the lies the movement is so dependent upon.
With genderism, the punishment for disobedience is in the here and now rather than the hereafter. When religion had more power, it meted out plenty of physical punishment to bodies on Earth, not willing to count on their gods to deal with sinners after their deaths. Of course this is still the case in far too many places, particularly where Islam still has the powers of a state religion, but it is much reduced in the countries that used to be the realm of Christendom. Fortunately trans activism does not have this kind of power, but the mindset is certainly there: If the means became available, they would make full use of such power, as they already do with the state powers they already enjoy.
Ditto. Define your terms, stick to those definitions, and prove the existence of phenomenon and provide a material explanation for its cause, and maybe we can talk. There are so many questions about how the world would work if gender identities really existed, but genderists ask none of them. It’s like the intense lack of curiousity amongst astrologers about the mechanisms and phenomena that would have to be operating in the universe for their belief system to actually work. Where’s their research program? How would they disprove their hypotheses? But no, there’s nothing. Show me there’s actually something there to study or bugger off.
Having changed my mind about this a lot in the past (back in the days when FTB was not yet a totall cesspool, I subscribed to TWAW), and noticing that otherwise smart people do believe in TWAW, I think about this a lot.
IMO, definitions are never absolute, they are chosen in such a way as to be most useful for the purpose at hand.
So, there is no a priori reason why the word “woman” has to be interpreted based on the biology of the person involved and not on a purely social role. Both definitions might work, depending on the context and the society they are used in. This is, to my understanding, the POV of TRA who say “In everyday situations, we do not need to know nor are we able to know what biological sex a person truly has (even though in most cases we can infer it correctly).”
I accepted this view for a long time because it seemed reasonable to me – when I talk to a student who says “I am female”, then I accept this without questioning because the sex/gender of the student is irrelevant to our relationship.
To me, as I said, this point of view is not unreasonable per se.
However, it only works if the assumption “the biological sex of a person is irrelevant in most social contexts” is true. And, in our world, it is not. Most glaringly obvious from things like FGM, forced marriage, abortions of female foetuses, forced prostitution, menstruation shaming etc. The way women are treated in our society is always colored by their biology – women seen as sex objects (yes, I know that some trans people see this as a priveledge…), women being subjected to violence/rape etc, women facing problems in jobs because they might get pregnant etc. (The comment by that surgeon you cite in one of the previous posts proves this point quite nicely).
As long as this is true, we need “women” to mean the group subjected to this kind of treatment in order to unite this group – that is why using words like “people who menstruate/are pregnant etc” does not work: It fractures a marginalized group (women) into a bunch of seemingly unconnected subgroups and makes it impossible to see the systemic oppression of women (to the delight of patriarchy).
So I do not object to a redefiniton of women as “someone who fulfills the social role of a woman” on principle – in a different world, this definition might work (like in the Star Trek TNG Universe where we have practically perfect equality between the sexes). In such a world, gender could be more important than sex, the word woman could denote a social role and for the few situations where biology actually is important, a different word might be invented.
I think that many people who say TWAW are doing this with such a world in their minds – “let us pretend that sex actually plays no role in order to achieve such a world”. Of course, this is the equivalent of “I don’t see color”, but this is something they fail to understand.
Alas, we do not live in such a world. And in our world, it is and remains important to name women as a group to fight against their oppression by men.
Lady M:
I’d need to add (strong evidence that)
3) This treatment leads to no negative consequences for any subset of the population at least as large as the set of those treated.
It may make some people healthier and happier to be allowed to own slaves, for instance, but we’re not going to be doing that.
One big problem with this is that if they can get you to tell a lie, then they own you.
I used to support the whole transgender movement. I was convinced it was only adult men who were having gender reassignment surgeries, and that they only identitied as women after completing the surgeries.
Learning about Mermaids and the Trevor Project, and their advocacy of medicalization and surgery for gender non-comforming children and teenagers, really shocked me. And I was horrified to see so many people like f Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mara Wilson, Neil Gaiman and Jameela Jamil supporting Mermaids and calling anyone who even mildy disagreed with the organisation “a bigot who wants trans children to die”.
Steven @ 12 – Yes, true, and that’s pretty much why I couldn’t stand to be at FTB any more. All of those goons who wrote posts denouncing me were indeed trying to own me, and it made my skin crawl.
It certainly is hard to believe that so many practiced skeptics buy into this, that I question myself on what I could possibly be missing. I check my uniform for skulls, but seeing none, I can’t make out how “we’re the baddies.” I know for certain that I don’t hate anyone, and can’t accept that gender atheism is any more based on hate than is atheism atheism. (Should we call it “cis atheism?”) Yet, I cannot see a way to accept that trans women are women, by any other means than changing the definition of the word “woman” to be, essentially meaningless.
“What is a woman?” “Anyone who feels like they are a woman, despite their sex.” “Feels like a woman, how?” “Feels like their expression and experience is that of a woman.” “And how do they identiify that? Giving birth? Having a period? Being harassed by men since the age of 11? Teased for being either flat chested or having large breasts? Having to do all the housework in a relationship?” “No, feeling like a woman skirt go spinny.” “So feeling feminine due to social stereoptypes of dress and appearance?” “That’s so reductive.” “But men who choose to should be able to dress in feminine attire?” “Yes.” “But what makes them women, then?” “That’s what they feel like! You’re mistaking sex and gender! They’re different!” “Yes, I know. What do you mean by it?” Link to something by a captured organization that doesn’t explain shit while patronizing the readers that they should just accept it as is.
This is not an exact transcript of any specific exchange, but an amalgamation of several attempts to nail the gender jelly to the wall. Like God, it just is.
My daughter, who has a traumatic brain injury, has found her niche as a volunteer at the Collectors Corner at the Science Museum. It gives her meaning, and she gets great feedback from the volunteer coordinators that she’s the ace volunteer there. She volunteers as many shifts as she can because she lives in a group home and while she loves her fellow residents, they don’t provide the sort of intellectual exchanges that she craves. So, she tells me about her boss, Auna who is just fantastic and gives her warm fuzzies about how great my daughter is and is a self-taught paleontologist who spent 20 years on digs before moving to Minnesota. Last weekend I met Auna and it turns out that yes, Auna is a very nice person. But, Auna is not a woman. The name should be the first hint.
No, in that situation, I do not go into TERF mode and create an uncomfortable situation for my daughter who has finally found something that she loves to do. I just let it ride and have a conversation with Auna about rocks and bones at the Collector’s Corner. I don’t misgender him, I just don’t use pronouns. I don’t hate Auna, but I do seethe at an ideology that promotes the idea that he is a woman. If he were a gender traditional fundamentalist Christian I wouldn’t draw him into a debate about religion, either.
The point is, being skeptical about gender ideology is not hateful towards individuals as much as they try to make it so, and use that to justify their threats of violence against women who stand in their way from being recognized as something they are not. The hate claim is a projection of their, and their allies’ inabilty to deal wtih the truth of gender: women are the subordinated sex, and trans don’t get the victimhood they so badly desire.
Hello again!
Blood Knight in Sour Armor #6:
Nice question. The opinion that changing sex is impossible seems very widespread among gender critical people. But (to my knowledge) very few of them – if any – ever discuss the details. “Impossible” – with our current state of knowledge and technology? “Impossible” – forever, both now and in the future? The second sense is stronger and if this is what is meant, I would really like to know the justification. Why exactly should it be impossible?
For example, pregnancy and childbirth are not possible for trans women with our present knowledge and technology. Is there a reason to think that it is not possible in principle (forever)? Moreover, would you change your mind if trans women *could* get pregnant? Would you qualify them then as real women?
Or perhaps it’s not about pregnancy and childbirth but about producing ova? If the trans woman’s body could be (medically) made to produce ova, would you change your mind? Would you qualify them then as real women?
Or perhaps it’s about something else? I’m really curious.
By the way: my suspicion is that we will not have to wait for too long before some of the current craziness about “trans rights” will pass away (you know, people are bored so easily!). However, some of the issues will remain with us and they will become even more acute due to the advances of medicine. In particular, I can see no reason to think that current trans women are the same as the trans women of the future. Can you?
@Ariel,
That’s kind of like asking if Dr. McCoy is still Dr. McCoy after he’s been sent through the transporter, or merely a copy of Dr. McCoy. The knowledge and skills needed to change a person from male to female, to the point where they are virtually indistinguishable from a biological woman, are so far beyond our current knowledge and skills that they are in the realm of science fiction, and are likely to remain there for as long as any of us are alive.
I’m quite fine with people, trans or otherwise, who don’t ask me to accept things uncritically, or turn my back on our shared reality.* It’s not as easy as saying many or most trans people do this. I would think, given the lengths they go to in order to ‘transition,’ or present themselves in a certain way, shows that most of them are under no illusions about their natural biology. I feel sympathetic towards anyone who’s having genuine existential horror about their lot in life. Isn’t this something many of us go through when we’re young (some adults as well)? Very relatable I think, even if not about sex or gender specifically. I also think children should not be encouraged to make permanent decisions about anything involving their sexuality until they are well past puberty, and that these ideas, and the consequences of acting on them, are not something an immature mind can fully grapple with. Who I am not fine with are the “allies” and enablers who ignorantly pave the way for lived fantasies to be treated as reality. Some of them may believe they are helping, but more often then not they are predatory and exploitative, or just compliant rebels without a clue, too afraid to disagree, and too eager to jump on the bandwagon. Liars, cheaters, bullies, tyrants, idiots — I can definitely do without these types and particularly the people who support them, and they are always the most visible, but I’m not inclined to think trans people are any of these things in disproportionate numbers. I fully reject trans as an ideology, and the promotion of it, but what I think generally, is that people are rather more deserving of individual consideration, supported by a live and let live underpinning. Of course how the trans ideology damages feminist and LGB progress is particularly galling. If an ideology is harming anyone, mentally or physically, then there’s something fatally wrong with it. Don’t ask me to comply, or recite the liturgy. I’ll think my own thoughts, thanks all the same. I suppose I could change my mind about any number of things, but not if it’s in conflict with reality as I know it, or my concept of fairness.
* Other than the temporary suspension of disbelief, or thought experiments and the like.
@16+17 I think it’s very likely possible in early fetal development, but if done that early, how would we be able to distinguish one from the other *potential* outcome? This also would eliminate the agency of the fetus. What they want is a reversal after some amount of development, which is why they think it’s better to block puberty while the secondary sex characteristics can be more easily manipulated. Here again, conforming to some idea of a sociological ideal rather than a biological one, because as we know, sex change operations are not possible. People with some knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics should know how things like this work (or don’t).
I don’t think anyone can ever really believe that transwomen are literally women.
Take for example the Samoans. They’re one of countless indigenous cultures that have strict social roles assigned at birth according to sex, but they also make exceptions: they’ve carved out a third “role” for male children whose personalities show an extreme misfit to the male-assigned social role. (No such luck for the misfit females: as long as they’re capable of having children, they’ll be forced into the babymaking/passive/homemaking social role.)
So these fa’afafine — feminine men designated as a different “gender” than the other men — wear women’s clothes and perform some of the duties that Samoan society assigns to women, but no one in Samoan society treats them as though they’re literally women. For example, they never get married and start their own families. Men do occasionally have sex with them, but only furtively, and only because their society prohibits males having sex with females outside of wedlock.
We see the same thing all over the world: people are capable of understanding that there are some men who don’t “fit” male stereotypes and would rather try to mimic female ones in order to fit in, and vice-versa for women looking to fit male stereotypes. But humans can always see that that’s not the same thing as sex. Our brains are hard-wired to distinguish biological sex, and the best we can ever do to accommodate the misfits-who-wish-they-weren’t is to recognize that misfits-who-wish-they-weren’t are a somewhat common thing, and to carve out some social etiquette to make them comfortable.
Of course, the better solution is to carve out social etiquette so that these so-called misfits don’t feel like misfits in the first place — teach girls and boys that it’s perfectly fine to express your personality any way you like, damn the sex stereotypes.
One big problem that gets in the way of that is the human male sex drive, and it interferes in two ways: firstly, patriarchal society likes men to be manly and women to be womanly; and secondly, there’s that problem of men who pretend to be women because they’ve got kinks in their sexuality.
Ariel @16
I don’t think we’re looking that far into the future.
One point that I try to make when arguing about these issues is that sex is not a superficial cluster of attributes. Genderists seem to think, “Oh, your gonads are outside your abdomen, and you have one of those bigger-than-the-other-kind phalluses? OK, on that basis you were assigned male! But no big deal–gender identity is more important, and, anyway, if you take these hormones, and change your plumbing, then you’ll be female.” No, sex is more than that.
People talk about transplanting wombs so that males could gestate and give birth, but that, if possible, would–allow men to gestate and give birth. What about the rest of these birth-givers’ bodies? Their skeletons, their cardiovascular systems, their muscle mass (yes, even on hormone therapy)? And–would all the male people who took advantage of this technology “identify as” female? Might not some say, “I’m a male, a man, and I want to take advantage of this technology in order to have this experience”?
You suggest suggest using medical technology to actually change someone from one sex category to the other, gonads and all. That’s interesting, but I think it belongs in the realm of transhumanism rather than transgenderism.* It’s far beyond anything we can begin to do now. Yes, maybe in a few years it will be possible for males to gestate babies–I said “maybe,” a lot more is involved than a uterus transplant–but, well, they’ll still be the people whose bodies are organized around the production of sperm rather than ova. They’ll be like male seahorses. We don’t call those seahorses “female,” even though they gestate and give birth to their young. We know they’re male, because they provided the small gametes involved in creating those young.
* Would we also change these people’s skeletons, musculature, cardiovascular systems? Would we need a word to distinguish people who were born into this reproductive category from those who were changed into it via complex medical procedures? I dunno. I think this belongs in the same realm of speculation as, what if I could fly and had a robot friend? That would be very cool.
Could we in principle change someone’s sex? Sure, but it would involve alterations so radical and so subtle that I don’t think it plausible, much less useful or ethical. Because what needs to change is not just a few body parts, but rather an entire suite of interpenetrating systems, all of which together compose the system we call sex. Transplant a functional uterus and ovaries into a man, and he’s still a man, because (a) that uterus is not from his body, (b) the eggs in the ovaries are not from his DNA, and (c) his body is not just unequipped to regulate those organs, it’s developed to maintain the complementary set of organs. Calling him a female or a woman would be even more laughable than calling a black man white because he got a heart transplant from a white man. Or saying that I have 20/20 vision because I wear glasses.
I don’t know if it’s still in use, but there used to be a very similar bad argument, named for a forum user, in online RPG discussions: the Oberoni Fallacy. People often try to argue that a particular rule is not dysfunctional/inconsistent/broken/problematic by appealing to the fact that the DM (dungeon master) can always modify the rule to make it work. (No, really. This is a remarkably common argument.) That this argument is fallacious ought to be obvious. It would be like if I were to say that your TV isn’t off because you can turn it on.
To be a particular sex means that your body is such that it is organized around the production of a particular sort of gamete. That doesn’t involve just the bare presence of ovaries or testicles; it involves every part of your body that is a product or component of the evolved system of sexual reproduction. Having wide hips is a part of being a human female, just as having broad shoulders is a part of being a human male, and this is not at all in tension with the fact that not all women have wide hips and not all men have broad shoulders. That this needs explaining to adults will never cease to amaze me. Losing is a part of playing roulette, but not every player will lose. Injuries are a part of contact sport, but not every athlete will get injured.
All this is to say that while the bar is high, a human sex change isn’t an analytic impossibility. One can certainly imagine a fantasy world in which some magic spell could effect all the necessary physical changes. I doubt technology will ever be so advanced as to be indistinguishable from that magic, though.
Of course, none of this touches on the psychological aspects of being and growing up and living as a male or female. It also doesn’t even begin to examine potential ethical considerations. Genderism is built on so many layers of sophist bullshit that peeling them away is actually frustrating, because it’s like cutting heads off mythology’s stupidest hydra. I genuinely feel dumber for having to do things like explain that saying all women are female doesn’t reduce women to their genitalia or limit the ways to be a woman. All triangles have three sides and three vertices, but there are infinite varieties of triangle. What none of them is, however, is a rectangle, because rectangles have four sides and four vertices. This means that there is a set of things that are true of triangles and things triangles can do, and this is not the same as the set of things that are true of rectangles and things rectangles can do.
Gah! WHARGARBL!!1!
Some folks have commented on having an easier time dealing with and accepting transmen. In addition to the fact that transmen don’t pose any added risk to anyone, I think part of that comes from the fact that the medical process of transition seems to produce considerably more visible results in women than in men; HRT, in particular, has a dramatic impact on a woman’s body and voice; in men, the same process is considerably more subtle in effect.
Another point–‘rational transwomen’ seemed to be vastly more common in the Ago Time, before social media had fully warped the discourse space. I’d met a few, at least, who presented simply as people who were trying to live their lives as best they could, in the same way as the rest of us. That was why I used to be on the TWAW train, myself–I figured there were issues, sure, but that these could be resolved with a bit of reason and mutual empathy
Of course, that was back when being trans required more commitment than that needed to tilt your head, so there may have been a bit of selection bias against raging narcissists in my sample. You had to really suffer from severe and intractable gender dysphoria if you wanted to go through those hoops.
[…] a comment by Nullius in Verba on […]
@ Mostly Cloudy #13:
The capture of the Trevor Project was a special stab in the heart/stab in the back to me. I remember Tim Gunn and other out gay celebrities telling gay kids, “It gets better.” These spokespeople were undoubtedly bullied as adolescent gay and lesbian youth, but they found that, as time went on, and they grew older, the circumstances of life did change. They became happy and successful gay and lesbian adults. The bullying of young LG people had led tragically to many suicides and suicide attempts. The purpose of the Trevor Project was to assure young LG people that, despite social ostracization from (usu. religious) anti-gay bigots, they need not go to the extreme of suicidal ideation, impulse, or attempts. Life really does (did) get better. People learned that we can get along together, and that we have common shared values, such as love and support with/from a life partner. That someone else has the same rights and protections as you do, does not diminish anything that you have. It turned out that the “gay agenda” was pretty much the same as anyone else’s: get up, go to work, get married, take care of family, pay taxes, do the household chores, help the kids with their homework, and the million-and-one other things that most people do every day. There was no scary bogeyman hiding underneath the ordinary people who just happened to be lesbian or gay. This was important to me, because I lived through an era in which it wasn’t exactly safe to let your employer know you were a lesbian or that you were gay. The work of the Trevor Project really did help things “get better.”
Now, instead of working to prevent young people from committing suicide, the Trevor Project instead tells non-conforming kids that they WILL — they are much more likely to — commit suicide UNLESS they get special gender magic, such as stunting their growth with puberty blockers, crippling their bodies with the effects of wrong-sex hormones, and mutilating themselves with irreversible surgeries. From protecting kids from harm, the Trevor Project has pivoted to actively promoting harm to gender non-conforming kids who, in the normal course of things, would grow up to be lesbian or gay adults. Now, it DOESN’T get better. It gets worse. The Trevor Project whipsaws their target audience between two competing harms: suicide (total annihilation, or self-erasure) or “transition” (self-harm or self-mutilation). It’s one species or another of self-abnegation. The Trevor Project has made itself an instrument of evil against the interests of gender non-conforming children. They ruin lives instead of saving lives.
And it’s all so disheartening. Once the organizations created to combat anti-gay bigotry and discrimination had largely achieved their goals of legal and social equality and acceptance, those organizations looked around for something to do, to justify their continued existence as powerful and influential structures on the social/political scene. Once organizations have a deep structure and substantial financial backing, they are unwilling to put themselves out of business by achieving their primary goals.
If anything should stand for the protection of gay and lesbian rights, it should be Stonewall. GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, was precisely about GL people, gay men and lesbian women. However, once the target policy of marriage equality had been achieved — a pinnacle of social and legal acceptance and integration of gays and lesbians in general society — the vast infrastructure of civil rights mobilization for gay men and lesbian women had no more need of its vast warchests of charitable moneys and armies of motivated civil rights activists. They looked around and latched onto what they (perhaps) believed to be the next group in need of similar mobilization: transgender rights advocates.
In my view, this impetus to maintain political relevance, by taking on the cause of T, following their successes with respect to LG rights, has been a capital mistake. The forced partnering of T with LG, piggybacking off the success with respect to LG rights and protections, has harmed everyone involved. The extremism of T demands has undermined a great deal of the achievements of the movement for gay and lesbian rights. The forced partnering of LG with T has led to a backtracking of support for gays and lesbians. It is conceivable that some states may act to abrogate marriage equality in state law. The packing of the US Supreme Court with radical right wing extremists makes the prospect of overruling Obergfell a real possibility, undoing decades of efforts to achieve equal protection under the law for lesbians and gay men.
The T enterprise, in and of itself, is antithetical to gay and lesbian people’s rights. It constitutes an updated form of conversion therapy against people who would otherwise be lesbian or gay. The failure of the former LG organizations to recognize the threat to their former work is a profound betrayal of all the brave men and women who fought for gay and lesbian rights.
Greed and the hunger for continued power led many organizations created for the benefit of gays and lesbians to turn their backs on the partners who brought them to the dance. Former LG organizations allowed T to take them over. LG and T can’t coexist compatibly, because their interests are opposed to one another. The T parasite has been allowed to consume the host LG organizations, leaving nothing but a husk of the former organization in place. The hollowed-out organizations continue to trade on the decades of influence and good will wrought by LG advocates, to now ignore (at best) or denounce (at worst) LG rights in favor of all T, all the time. They are very close to dismantling LG rights, and the rights of women, in their quest for T hegemony. It’s ludicrous. It’s infuriating. It’s insane. It’s fundamental betrayal. It’s unadulterated evil.
“Now, instead of working to prevent young people from committing suicide, the Trevor Project instead tells non-conforming kids that they WILL — they are much more likely to — commit suicide UNLESS they get special gender magic, such as stunting their growth with puberty blockers, crippling their bodies with the effects of wrong-sex hormones, and mutilating themselves with irreversible surgeries. From protecting kids from harm, the Trevor Project has pivoted to actively promoting harm to gender non-conforming kids who, in the normal course of things, would grow up to be lesbian or gay adults. Now, it DOESN’T get better. It gets worse.”
Yes, it’s depressing what happened to the Trevor Project and other organisations for LGB youth.
Cultural homophobia in Western society must be far stronger than LGB activists previously suspected. Hence the success of this movement to “cure” gay people by using chemicals and surgery to turn them into imitations of the opposite sex, and why said movement even now enjoys such dominance in Western society.
maddog don’t you mean the It Gets Better Project?
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I can’t imagine that the men and women who founded these institutions would have ever imagined that their successors would have ended up eagerly following the example set by Iran.