We must do MORE
Laurel Collins is an NDP MP for Victoria. She has a long bonkers thread on Twitter listing all the things we must do to rescue trans people from the edge of a cliff over a pool of sharks. I’ll just quote it because too much Twitter is too much.
The rising hate directed at trans people is terrifying, and Conservative leaders are stoking this hate with dangerous discriminatory policies. We need to better support trans & gender-diverse people. [trans flag trans flag]
Here are 29 concrete things we’re fighting for:
29 Concrete Steps: 1 on supporting organizations 2 to 8 on gender-affirming healthcare 9 to 13 on hate & violence 14 to 16 on identity documents 17 to 19 on refugees 20 to 21 on employment & sports 22 on blood/organ donation 23 to 26 on prisoner rights 27 to 29 on sex work & HIV
1. Sufficient, stable funding to support the creation of new trans & gender diverse organizations and support trans & gender diverse orgs that currently exist. Funding should be sensitive to intersectional differences among trans & gender diverse people.
2. For the federal govt to work with provinces and territories to make comprehensive gender-affirming care a reality across Canada. 3. To provide comprehensive gender-affirming care for everyone directly under federal jurisdiction for healthcare.
4 funding mental health research 5 information sharing
6. For the govt to provide targeted funding for research & innovation in gender-affirming surgeries & other areas of gender-affirming care that would benefit from more scientific knowledge, with funding conditional on info sharing around practices developed & their outcomes.
As if “gender-affirming” care is a real thing and needs only more research and innovation.
7. To review testosterone’s status as a controlled substance & develop a policy approach that considers the needs of trans men. 8. To amend section 268(3) of the Criminal Code to restrict cosmetic surgeries on intersex children until they are old enough to consent.
More testosterone, not quite so many cosmetic surgeries on children. Great.
9. For the govt to take a clear stand against the rising tide of anti-trans hate & violence wherever & whenever egregious acts of hate & violence occur. 10. For the govt to host a roundtables on combating anti-trans hate & violence with stakeholders.
11. That the Government of Canada take action to prevent trans-femicides through education campaigns to address harmful ideas that contribute to deadly cis male violence against trans women. These campaigns should be sensitive to colonialism and racism.
That’s the one that alerted me to the whole thread, because irritated women are telling her there’s a woman killed every other day in Canada and no trans people have been killed since 2019.
There are 29 items on this to-do list, as if trans people were the most neglected abused desperate chewed up and spat out people in all of human history.
Why do people think this? I’ll never understand it.
It’s TIMs, not trans people in general (TIFs are only the cosmetic inoffensive face of this). And it’s misogyny – any man who voluntarily sacrifices his selfhood to become an inferior being must be the most fragile and vulnerable person who ever lived.
https://virginiasroom.co.uk/2022/01/falling-from-humanity/
Be careful what you wish for. Look how this turned out for caloric, phlogiston, N-rays and the the ether.
Ah, looking for a loophole via the plight for people with DSDs (NOT “intersex”) in order to cut up “trans” kids, are we?
We’d need to see your definition of “anti-trans hate and violence,” because I’m betting most of what you’d put on the list is neither. Stating that there are only two sexes, and that humans can’t change sex. Correctly sexing someone and using the pronouns appropriate to the correct sex. I’ll bet that those are on your little Index of Proscribed Ideas.
Do the same for women FIRST, and make sure that women are consulted in your little publicly funded trans roundtables, as what you’re going to be demanding will involve taking things from women and giving them to men.
“Squeaky wheels and grease” comes to mind, but we’ve also got trillion-candlepower virtue signaling happening here. “I’M ONE OF THE GOOD ONES! PLEASE DON’T BURN ME WITH THE WITCHES!! DO IT TO JULIA!!!” She hasn’t figured out that she’s not the one to decide whether she’s a witch or not. Salvation is not through works but by the Grace of Trans. She will always be just a single slip or tweet away from vilification and condemnation. If she fucks up once, says the wrong thing, likes the wrong post, it won’t matter if her list was 29 items or 29,000. She’ll be damned. Just like the rest of us.
Not so inoffensive all the time. c.f. Chase Strangio, Stephen Whittle. But certainly TiMs are the driving force behind almost all of the trans-directed social vandalism. TiFs offer a micron thin veneer of justification that it’s not all about TiMs, but we all know that if this was a movement was primarily for the benefit of trans-identified women, we’d be saying trans what?
Oh nice, reducing surgery for intersexed children. That is, for people with genetic conditions or congenital malformations that have an actual impact on life, who may need surgery to treat a real problem. Whether this is motivated by a sense of protection for minors or something else, this seems likely to negatively impact children with an actual physical problem. But hey, they aren’t the T so who cares, right?
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on We must do […]
Isn’t it salvation by faith instead of grace?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide
@Holms:
I dunno about that; “correcting” children with DSDs can very much be as gruesome as Dr. Teatus Deletus (Galileo’s Middle Finger is a good reference for that).
We must do more – in the US the number of gender re-assignment surgeries reported was over 13,000!
We must do more
Of course 9 million US children are food insecure, but we must do more gender affirming.
28 million Americans are without basic healthcare, but we must do more for gender affirmation
Just shy of 600,000 homeless, but again we must concentrate on what’s important
The planet is set to broil but it’s all trans all the time.
I want to come back clueless in my next life. It would make things so much easier.
#7 BK
Decades ago, yes, there was a prevailing idea that appearing male or female was far better than appearing to be neither, and so there was often little more than a guess in the decision to choose which direction to ‘repair’ the child. Today’s doctors have access to much better information-gathering tools however, and can gain a much better picture of the child’s sex. I was not suggesting we return to the earlier cavalier attitude.
Holms, there’s no need for genital surgery on intersex children, unless the condition somehow presents an actual health risk (I haven’t heard of any such cases but I suppose it’s possible a baby could have a hypospadia that makes urination difficult, or something like that.)
Malformations of genitals are often operated on for much the same reason as are malformations of other areas of the body. A child with e.g. a mildly cleft palate might not be experiencing any health burden from that, but they are often given reparative surgery anyway. Malformed genitals are in principle no different, though the fact they are not on public display means there is plenty of time for discussing the option of surgery and what it offers.
However, I’m not convinced that it needs to be locked behind the age of majority, if that is what is meant by “until they are old enough to consent”. Unlike ‘gender confirming’ surgeries, there is an actual malformation at play and so there is likely a stronger justification for surgery; it would be considered reparative, rather than purely cosmetic.
For the record, a cleft palate is an actual health risk–I was born with one and feel the effects to this day.
But, Holmes, I googled and this came up–
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8273980/
I can see operating earlier in this case, had her doctors had access to testing that confirmed her sex. I grant your point.