Safe haven
Tattoo v neovagina.
I think I get what the reasoning is from their point of view: gender transition procedures are (in at least some instances) literally life-saving. People will die without them.
If that thought is accurate the reasoning may possibly make some sense. But is it accurate?
Well, first, not all magic gender-havers claim to be suicidal, or threaten to act on suicidal thoughts, or do in fact commit suicide. Second, blackmail by claims of suicidal ideation is just that: blackmail. That doesn’t make any difference on the personal level – if parents are convinced their kid will kill xirself then claims about blackmail and the wider society aren’t going to mean a damn thing to them – but it does make a difference on the policy level and especially on the rhetorical level. In other words it would be nice if activists for trans ideology would stop using suicide as a blackmail lever.
So, to sum up, kids under 18 ruining their bodies and their futures are not comparable to kids wanting tattoos. Tattoos are not comparable to luxury hysterectomies or penis removals. Tattoos are at worst unattractive or annoying to others. Medically unnecessary hysterectomies or penis removals or puberty blockers are in another category altogether.
For this reason, saying “Golly gee minors can’t decide for themselves whether to have a tattoo but they absolutely can decide to destroy their sexual parts” is reckless and idiotic.
Hmm, not knowing where that quote comes from it’s difficult to know, but I read it as pointing out the contradiction between the concern for safeguarding regarding tatoos and the abscence of same regarding “gender care”; with – to me – the invitation to consider the latter unreasonable.
Eh? Which quote? If you mean Francione’s tweet then yes, that is what he’s pointing out, and I’m agreeing with him at slightly greater length.
I think your last paragraph might be misunderstood as being aimed at (a paraphrased version of) the tweet, rather than the policies themselves.
Even if we granted that adolescents who are “really” transgender would feel so bad they might commit suicide if they didn’t get surgeries to “correct” their genitals, the inextricable flipside of that is that adolescents who turn out to be “not really” transgender would feel so bad they might commit suicide if they did get surgeries which rendered their genitals “incorrect.”
Surely, then, it would be best to wait until they’re adults for surgeries. The risk of enduring a couple years in adolescence with the “wrong” genitalia is far outweighed by the risk of enduring the entirety of one’s adult life with genitalia that’s been surgically rendered “incorrect.”
That’s granting an awful lot, of course. But the point is, even in the baby blue and rose-coloured worldview of gender ideology, the logic still doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Add to that the fact that these surgeries don’t really change genitalia from male to female, and that there are risks (the surgery has an incredibly high complication rate, up to 50% in some clinics), side effects (lifelong medical patienthood and a significantly lowered life expectancy), and main effects (sterility)…
I give up!
To misquote Jonathan Swift, you can’t reason someone out of a position he was never reasoned into. The tools of rational argument won’t get us anywhere with these people. This is a socio-cultural/quasi-religious phenomenon. People came into these beliefs through strange eddies in modern political and cultural dynamics. And those are the tools we’ll have to use to get people out of it. Whatever benefits the gender ideology tribe is offering to its prospective members, we need to identify them and undermine them, or counter-offer with something better. And I’ve actually got an idea about where to start. Hear me out:
Ironically, the appeal of gender ideology is its unpopularity — most people don’t actually like it.
All the civil rights movements started out unpopular, and only became popular through arduous campaigning and struggle. This pattern repeated itself enough times that everyone absorbed three things:
1. The eventual outcome for all civil rights movements is success and widespread adoption by society. Why should the next one turn out any different than all the ones that have come before it?
2. The eventual outcome for those who oppose civil rights is social shame. For this reason, overt opposition to sex equality, racial equality, sexual orientation equality, disability rights, etc, has largely quieted down. (I may still have anti-gay colleagues, but no one’s said anything overtly homophobic to me in a workplace for 20 years because they know they can’t anymore.)
3. The eventual outcome for those who embrace civil rights is social capital — virtue. The earlier someone joins a new civil rights movement, the more virtue she will eventually receive. The very earliest adopters of civil rights eventually get statues and holidays in their honour.
This pattern suggests that the more overt opposition a (supposed) rights movement has, the earlier it is in its inevitable trajectory to widespread adoption, and the greater the virtue will be amassed by those noble souls who were the earliest to heed the calling of progress. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the same pattern of human behaviour that has driven people to join religious sects. Call it the economics of religion.
It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme where the product is “progressive values” and the reward is “virtue.” It doesn’t actually matter what you’re selling; the point is that you always have to have more people below you to sell it to, or the whole thing collapses. The other civil rights causes have lost their usefulness precisely because they no longer have a huge pool of outspoken opponents. There isn’t an anti-gay or anti-Black equivalent of JK Rowling, and by progressive logic today, that’s a weakness for those movements, not a selling point.
The best way to stop a pyramid scheme is to point out to everyone that it is a pyramid scheme. You don’t keep people out of Amway with bad reviews of the junk they sell; you do it by showing them that the whole thing is a scam and if you sign up, you’ll go broke. Unfortunately for some, they don’t get the message until they start seeing people around them go broke.
For this reason, we don’t need more science to prove that there are only two sexes or that sexchange surgeries are risky and harmful — deep down, everybody already knows this, just like deep down every Amway salesman knows his products are garbage.
We need to show people that gender identity ideology is an ersatz “civil rights campaign” and those who get on board are not going to end up alongside Martin Luther King, the Suffragettes, and the Stonewall rioters on some imaginary Mount Rushmore of civil rights heroes. We need to remind them of the very real civil rights they’re destroying right here and now, nevermind some imagined future where they’ll reap so much virtue.
Unfortunately for many, they won’t get that message until they start seeing people around them regret the surgeries they’ve been sold.
Is this backwards? Or are you channeling TAs?
Arty, that’s an interesting point, and goes along with a lot of things I’ve thought. The one thing that stood out to me is the bit about early adopters. I think that’s mostly true, which is why you hear things about how “so and so used to be on the other side” as an argument against listening to so and so.
It was sort of the opposite in the atheist movement, though. Many conferences I attended where late adopters (especially clergy) stood at the podium giving us all their story, and became a go-to voice for atheism, while the rest of us who were already there, often from a very early age, were not regarded as anything other than window-dressing, sort of. Instant validation for the new adopters.
Maybe because it wasn’t so much a social justice movement as an “out of the closet” movement? So those who adopted atheism in the past six months were to be feted and celebrated to ensure they felt the warm fuzzies to keep them in the fold? I wish I knew…
Hahaha I think I constructed that sentence about risk incorrectly. But you know what I mean!
Arty @ 4 – great stuff.
But there are plenty of anti-feminist anti-women equivalents of JKR.
Maybe that’s inevitable when it’s a matter of half of all humanity, but it’s galling all the same.
@iknklast
That’s so true about atheism. Fascinating. I’ve never thought of it that way before. Some kinds of movements celebrate early adopters over new converts, and others celebrate new converts over the early adopters/pioneers. There’s much to think about there.
One thought:
To prioritize early adopters is to rank people according to their standing within the group: an emphasis on purity.
To prioritize new converts is to celebrate the cause itself over the group: an emphasis on growth.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Safe […]
I’ve thought about this a lot, and all along – that it’s protest-envy. I think people envy us boomers because we got to be there for the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the return of feminism, and finally and too slowly, the LG liberation movement. Envy envy envy.
Sadly for them this thing is just a parody.
The pyramid scheme simile is brilliant.
I tweaked the rogue sentence iknklast notes.
What puzzles me most about the “life-saving” argument is that it is contradictory to other tenets held by TRAs:
1. Women who object from fully intact males in their dressing rooms etc. are told that of course a woman can have a penis and that they have to get over their fixation with genitalia. So why exactly don’t TRAs tell teenagers who think “To really become the other gender I need surgery” to get over *their* genital fixation and to understand that of course they are the other gender no matter their biology/puberty? How can a puberty be wrong if the outcome of that puberty has no bearing on whether you are male or female because women can have penises?
2. TRAs believe that people can be gender-fluid and that you can feel like a man one day or week and like a women on another. So why would this only work on a timescale of days or weeks and not months or years? Why is it not possible that you may feel like a woman in your teens and like a man afterwards (or vice versa)? And if this is possible, isn’t surgery for teens a bit premature?
Excellent points.