Guest post: Dragging more people into the maelstrom
Originally a comment by Artymorty on How to make a right.
There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights.
A big part of the problem stems from people’s mistaken conception of “trans people” as a fixed subset of the population — directly analogous to gay people: a small group of individuals who were born with an innate and harmless condition that caused them to be discriminated against and persecuted by the rest of society — when in fact “trans people” are an open identity group whose membership can grow or shrink depending on its appeal at any given time or place, just like political movements, religious movements, and subcultures like hippies and punks.
The number of people who loudly announce themselves to be transgender (or who quietly drop the label) is directly dependent on the pros and cons of doing so. Every time you change a policy to make it “more trans inclusive,” you’re not easing the burden on a small, fixed group of people who can’t help but be innately “trans” and who would otherwise struggle to cope with their day-to-day lives without the concessions that supposed trans “rights” offer. Instead, you’re incentivizing more people who’d otherwise have carried on just fine to hop aboard the trans train.
You can see how the conflation of “trans rights” with gay rights came to be. It was a very clever marketing ploy by the trans activists to hitch their wagon to the gay rights movement:
There have always been men and women who, in the privacy of their minds, were far more attracted to members of the same sex. Some of them found the prospect of opposite-sex relationships to be completely unbearable to the point of impossibility, whereas others managed to carry on “in the closet” and go through the motions of heterosexual life, despite their private longings. The number who “came out” publicly was correlated to how well society included and accommodated them. But the number of people who were innately homosexual never actually changed. And no one has been able to identify any drawbacks to legally and culturally incorporating them into society.
The same cannot be said for the following groups of “closeted” people:
There have always been straight men who, in the privacy of their minds, find it sexy and appealing to imagine themselves as women and who would love to make everyone else imagine them as women, too. There have always been men who secretly enjoy crossdressing. There have always been men who fantasize about getting naked in women’s locker and shower rooms. There have always been men who predate sexually on children and who dream of having the kind of unsupervised access to children that women are freely granted and that men are prohibited from.
There have always been teenage girls who long to be boys — to escape from the ever-present burden of objectification. There have always been lesbians who long to move through the world free of the everyday grind of homophobia and misogyny they’re subjected to, simply for looking and acting the way they naturally do.
There have always been gay boys and young men with naturally feminine attributes, for whom the thought has crossed their minds, “If only I were a beautiful young woman, hunky young men would find me attractive instead of repulsive, and I’d be so much more popular! I’m so ashamed to be gay. I feel like a freak…”
There have always been social chasers, people who need to be at the centre of the party, who get unbearable FOMO at the sight of a big glittery rainbow parade they weren’t invited to.
None of these people are innately transgender. None of them need special sex-denialist privileges in order to carry on with their lives. None of them. In fact, everyone — all of society — is far better off if none of them are designated as a separate class of special people who are granted special “rights” to force everyone else pretend not to see their sex. Automatically granting “trans rights” to some of these groups of people poses an immediate threat to the safety of women and children: making “trans” a no-questions-asked all-access pass to women’s safe spaces does just that. Granting “trans rights” to others undermines women’s rights and gay rights by disincentivizing society from its responsibilty to address the burdens of societal prejudice unfairly carried by women and gays, and instead pushes unhappy women and gays to simply modify themselves and irreversibly damage their bodies in order to conform to the status quo. This is what the bogus concept of “trans kids” does.
These supposed “trans rights” are just dragging more people into the growing maelstrom. It’s threatening to drown us all.
A good explanation, as usual. Thank you.
On one side we have women who have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get the definitive answer (“No”) to the question “Is it legal for individuals and organisations to use the existence of a small population with dysphoria to remove the right to privacy, dignity and safety from women and children?”
On the other side we have people who claim that women aren’t ever entitled to have anything of their own without being forced to share with men, who have threatened and enacted violence against women meeting to talk about the situation, and accuse everyone who disagreed that they were entitled to invade everything set aside for women of being Nazi bigots intent on genocide.
By the way, one reason I don’t believe the people who claim that Israel is attempting to commit genocide against Palestinians by not letting them wipe out Jews is that the claim is being made by the same people who are also claiming that women are attempting to commit genocide against men by not letting men play on their sports teams, change in their locker rooms, use their toilets, invade their shelters, and strip them of the language they need to describe themselves and what is happening.
The trans ideology is at its worst when it draws the line of battle with women and the same-sex attracted right across the bodies of children.
The idea of “trans children” came about because adult men who modify themselves surgically to look more like women never pass as women, so they think if only they had started the modification before puberty they’d pass. So they project their inner turmoil, self-hatred, and sexual kinks onto other people’s children. Children are easy to manipulate, and the nerdy ones are always looking for an explanation as to why they don’t fit in. Throwing them a glitter party and calling them brave if they say the reason is because they’re trans is irresistible to many. Some of the parents are likewise gullible and will become boosters of their own children’s sterilization and mutilation; some are not, and this cult may break those families.
The next step after convincing a kid to say they’re trans is to elevate that statement above any other. A kid can say they want to be a musician and the parents say that’s great, let’s get you lessons, knowing that by the time college graduation rolls along the kid will likely have found a profession that pays. A kid can say they want to be an astronaut and parents will say that’s great, you have to study calculus and get in shape. A kid can say they’re emo, not goth, and the parents will say super, we’ll save on white pancake makeup. Anything a kid identifies as, parents understand it might change, and in the long run it doesn’t matter, a kid has to go through a lot of different phases, and can be motivated to learn things from any of them. But the job of the trans cult is to make sure the kid never grows out of saying they’re trans, which they would without intervention.
That’s what the gender centers are for, and the puberty blockers. Their stated function is to prevent the puberty that would develop secondary sex characteristics, and thus make the eventual trans adult pass better. Their practical function is to prevent the adolescent brain from growing, and prevent the kid from growing out of the phase where they identify as trans. Can we lock in a poet phase, or a scout phase, or a train-lover phase? No, but we can lock in a trans phase, medically. And we can train a generation of doctors to lie to children and parents and say they will kill themselves if we don’t.
Every day a new family is thrown into years, and perhaps a lifetime, of pain because someone has sold the trans lie to their child. There will never be a righting of this wrong, there will never be accountability for all the doctors and teachers and therapists who pushed this snake oil, who decided the line of battle for a kink ideology had to be fought over the bodies of children.
Well. That’s clarifying.
[…] a comment by Papito on Dragging more people into the […]
Someone I know has a relative who would be normally going through puberty. This relative is a girl who thinks of herself as a trans-boy (that is the way I would put it).
She gets freaked out by menstruation & is on some sort of hormones to make her more masculine.
I had the thought I mentioned that some variants of birth control, like taking The Pill continuously rather than with a week off or some sorts of IUD suppress menstruation as well as ovulation.
So I want to run the question by people, especially women who have some actual experience with this:
Do you think using that would be pretty much harmless, rather than just being less bad than puberty blockers or male hormones?
Less bad. Perhaps we might say very much less bad. But still not as good as not taking hormone-altering drugs at all – how could it be?
Jim Baerg, it isn’t unusual for girls to get freaked out by menstruation; I don’t know if it’s the norm, because I had few friends in high school, and my sisters just sort of shrugged it off (but my family is less than normal, so that is meaningless data). This is made worse by a world that treats menstruation as something to hide, to be ashamed of, something bad that women do.
Male puberty is difficult, I imagine, but it is not treated with the same shamefulness, which allows boys to navigate it with much more ease. Girls often have no one they can talk to, and if they try to talk about it, people get grossed out. Adults will hush them.
Left on their own, most girls will manage to work their way through it and come to grips with it, even if they never like it. Prodded by friends and family to hide it will make it more difficult, because it can be difficult to share your experiences and discover you are normal, and there is nothing bad about it. Making it a secret, a shameful one at that, is a great invitation to girls to go into depression, or anxiety, or maybe even desire to be a boy. It took me years to work through it, but I managed. I would have managed quicker if I could have had people to talk to me, let me know it was just something my body was doing to prepare me for eventual childbirth, and that it would do that even if you never intended to have children.
There are side effects to the methods you mention, not as bad as amputation of healthy body parts or stopping puberty, but still side effects. The thing that is needed is a rational approach to menstruation that doesn’t involve anyone going into paroxysms of horror or shushing.
Iknklast:
I acknowledge that women, generally, have it worse going through puberty, but some men also find it a very difficult period.
Certainly, as a male, I *hated* going through puberty.
I was the first boy in my class to get chest hair (at 14) and I hated P.E. classes, because in the changing room, the other boys would taunt me with jeers of “Look at the gorilla!” and “It’s the Neanderthal Man!”
I also didn’t know what an Adam’s Apple was, and before my father explained it to me I was frightened when my AA first started developing, because I thought something was stuck in my throat.
Later in life, I sometimes wished I could have gone straight from age 12 to age 20 with no difficult teenage years in between.
Thankfully this was the 1990s, and nobody outside the Netherlands was telling young people about how “puberty blockers” were a magic “pause button” to stop adolescence. Certainly teenage Me would have loved some way to stop Me going through puberty.
Oh, yes, definitely that. I wished that, too, and not just because of puberty. Teenagers can be horribly cruel to other teenagers. I wouldn’t go back to that period if I had a time machine, not even for all of Elon Musk’s money.
Of course, I went through puberty in the 1970s in the United States, so my experience would be more unique to that time and place, and man, Oklahoma is an uptight place! They were maybe more so in the 1970s than in the 1990s, but I think they’re going backwards.
At least I’ve never been sent to a hut to wait out my period.
Thanks for the replies.
Now I am wondering if giving the link to this post to someone who appears to have bought into Trans would help or just get that person’s back up?
Puberty was traumatic for my son. Not for my daughter. Not for me, nor for my wife. It made it hard for us to help or understand what he was going through.
I was on the small side before puberty, and afterwards, I was suddenly on the big side. I grew a foot in two years, and filled out fast. Like Cloudy, some people called me “Gorilla”; unlike Cloudy, I took it as a compliment. I had a full, thick beard at 15; other kids in my high school weren’t going out of their way to insult the only guy in 10th grade who could buy beer.
I really don’t know why puberty is more traumatic for some kids and not for others. I think autistic kids usually have it worse, because they hate it when things change, and that includes their bodies.
Papito, I suspect you (or your wife) explained puberty to your daughter? No one told me anything until the day I thought I was bleeding to death. Even then, they just handed me a pad, showed me (sort of) how to use it, and didn’t really tell me what was happening. Fortunately, I was at home, so I did not have the Carrie experience. But it was horrifying…I thought I had contracted some dreadful disease, maybe something like syphilis (I didn’t understand how STDs were contracted yet; it made sense because of where I was bleeding).
I think girls benefit when society loosens up the shaming and the whispering. I don’t know about boys, but I would assume they benefit too. It’ll still be hard to go through puberty, but if we didn’t have to deal with boys figuring it out and shouting obscenities at us, mothers whispering like we’d done something to be ashamed of, and fathers scurrying the other way and hiding when you put tampons in the grocery basket…it would remove the artificial challenges, and leave only the things that we can’t change.
I don’t see that happening anytime soon, but in some places, I think it has. Places like Oklahoma appear to be going backwards.