Okay now I just don’t know what to believe.
Adrian Harrop tells a woman what her experience is.
https://twitter.com/DrAdrianHarrop/status/1081360068879241222
But we are always told it’s Forbidden to deny anyone’s Lived Experience. That’s a big no-no. Subjective experience trumps mere physical facts, we are told over and over and over. So why do the rules suddenly change when it’s someone who doesn’t claim to be trans or to be literally the other sex?
Also, what in fact is the difference? How can we tell when the difference is present when all it seems to be is “but more so”? Gender nonconformity is totally different from gender dysphoria because gender dysphoria is like gender nonconformity but waaaaaay more so. Oh? So, how do we measure it? How can we tell? How do we know?
Harrop seems very confident that it’s because of “the agreed and specific definition” but he’s just blowing smoke in the Trumpian fashion.
All these fiery little radicals, but they’ve apparently never heard a thing about the way medical categories have changed over time, have been shaped by existing prejudices, have been oh so conveniently adapted to fit the needs of the rulers. Remember “drapetomania”?
Drapetomania was a conjectural mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. It has since been debunked as pseudoscience and part of the edifice of scientific racism.
Harrop is peering confusedly out of a window in the edifice of scientific sexism.
Comments
21 responses to “Harropsplaining”
Yes, but…not if that someone is a woman. Born a woman, stayed a woman, but never felt comfortable with the rather rigid roles required of a woman.
Shortly after I received my B.S. in Biology, and while I was working on my M.S., a wetland scientist working in a job that allowed me to happily tromp around in wetlands (and get paid for it!), I was at a bridal shower for my brother’s soon-to-be-wife, also a water scientist. We were happily chatting about interests we shared. My mother turned to one of the other relatives, and said, very loudly, “Can you believe it? And [X] (me) was never even a tomboy!”
The idea that a woman could enjoy doing the things I was doing, and didn’t want to spend her time vacuuming and cleaning spit up off the carpet all day (I did do some of that, but after work), was so foreign to my mother, and because I wasn’t a tomboy, she totally couldn’t understand (I wasn’t a tomboy because I totally lacked the ability to climb trees; all the girls in my family played more boy games than girls, because our brother wanted someone to play with, and my younger brother was too young). I also wasn’t particularly feminine. I was a quiet, isolated child who spent most of my time reading, doing neither particularly girl things nor particularly boy things. I never had any female friends, because the girls say me as weird. I didn’t have any dates, because the boys saw me as weird.
Did I have gender dysphoria? I didn’t like what was expected of my gender. I didn’t practice what was expected of the other gender, nor did I insist I was a boy. Some doctors tried to direct me toward the idea that I might want to be a boy, but I never went there. I saw no reason why a girl couldn’t do math, and science, and tromp in wetlands, and wear flat shoes…and society has moved in a direction to agree with me. Now the trans* activists are trying to force all of us back in the other direction with their idea of gender essentialism that is less about what you are born than what you feel, but is still just as essentialism as the conservative, you are the gentials you are born with, view.
Mermaidemojisplaining.
Isn’t this just a plot summary of feminism vs. patriarchy? (Except maybe the fistfight part.) My guess is that every girl goes through anger/frustration/rage when she runs up against the arbitrary limits placed upon her because she is a girl (or woman). This is the shit that gets papered over by the glib use of the term ”cis” by trans activists, in their confident assertion of cis privilege enjoyed by natal women.
YNNB, you just don’t understand! We (“cis”-women) were, and are, comfortable in the roles we are assigned at birth! We never have any call to feel anger/frustration/rage, because only trans people are oppressed or discriminated against or treated in a way they can’t perceive themselves! I, for one, have been thrilled to death to submit to my husband, have children, bake cookies, and put on pearls when I vacuum (not really; my husband would probably willingly crawl over a bed of broken glass before he would insist that I do any of that).
Oh, Ophelia. You silly, silly uterus-bearer.
Gia Milinovich “identified as” the other sex for a time in her childhood, but she clearly got over it.
If she hadn’t gotten over it, and, (especially) if she currently identified as trans, she’d have had gender dysphoria.
See?
It’s a convenient diagnostic tool, hindsight is. Especially if you need an excuse to fast-track gender dysphoric children into medical treatment. If they decide later that transition was a mistake, they were never REALLY gender dysphoric to begin with.
Check this out.
https://4thwavenow.com/2017/07/23/i-just-gave-him-the-language-top-gender-doc-uses-pop-tart-analogy-to-persuade-8-year-old-girl-shes-really-a-boy/
Lady M, the funny thing is, I’ve never seen strawberry pop-tarts in a package marked Cinnamon. For some reason, they usually get it right. (Though I’ll admit, I haven’t eaten Pop-Tarts in years. For some reason, as an adult, I just don’t find them appealing. So maybe now it is common to mis-package Pop-Tarts). So they’re using an analogy that the kid could pop back (if they are sophisticated enough) and say “And how often does that happen? Hmmm?”
Lived experience may never be denied, the sole exception being: women. A tiny, insignificant fraction of the global population I’m sure we can all agree. And of those people whose lived experience can be ignored, there is another exception whose lived experiences must never be questioned for a second lest ye be declared guilty of genocide: shouty trans activists. That is, the most important fraction of womenkind, who must be accommodated in all things.
This exception to exception thing seems a bit… lopsided. Skewed.
Towards males.
What kind of fucking weirdo uses an analogy about food being in the wrong box to make out that a person’s actual physical body is just “person packaging”? How is this the obvious conclusion? How is it not obvious that a foil wrapper is to a pop tart what clothing is to a person? And that maybe with food it’s important that it’s labelled correctly because someone might die if they eat the wrong thing, but with humans, it really doesn’t matter at all which kind of clothing they wear because they are human beings and they can wear whatever the hell they want without it making any material difference to what they are?
Christ, what an arsehole.
The sort of weirdo who can get away with such pseudo psycho-babble because their patients are children yet to form the critical thinking skills necessary to see through the warped logic, and their audiences are highly defensive of the superficial nature of their lives.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
I’ve been angry about this all day. I’d like to see these people live their lives by the motto “anything I thought when I was three years old can’t have been wrong” and see where it gets them.
Also, let’s see you remove your wrapper and see how you feel. Oh wait, you’re dead now? Maybe your analogy is shit.
Aaaaand another thing: If “people” at this girl’s school are asking why a boy is using the girl’s bathroom, then they need be told that they are mistaken and that it is, in fact, a girl with short hair using the girl’s bathroom. I just don’t buy it that the kid’s reaction would be “I need to enrol as a boy”. It makes no sense. Children know nothing about admin. Someone makes a fuss about the bathroom, a child either says “but I am a girl!” or “fine, I’ll use the other bathroom”
This kid is the perfect example of a child just being herself and getting flak for it, and to manipulate her into thinking something isn’t right with her and pretend she worked that out for herself is just despicable.
Catwhisperer, that entire transcript is just chock-full of wrong.
I am so sick of this ‘assigned at birth’ bullshit. The baby was obviously female, no assignation necessary. It is only where there is physical ambiguity about the child’s sex that assignation comes into play.
Nope. In the real world the question might be asked once, the child (or a teacher) would clarify the matter; ‘I’m a girl, I just have short hair, that’s all’. Problem solved. Besides, are we to believe that this child was the only short-haired girl in the school?
Bullshit! Three-year-olds just don’t talk like that.
Why is that crazy? Parents make shit up about their kids all the time. Twitter is full of parents sharing their obviously fake tales of their three-year-olds’ deep, philosophical thoughts. What a nice way, though, of passive-aggressively bullying the child into believing the adults’ version of events.
Which is where the doctor should have said ‘Right. And don’t let anybody tell you different’. Interview over. But of course the doctor wouldn’t say that, she (he?) relies on twisting kids’ minds to stay in her job as ‘gender doctor’, which is a new one on me. This is manipulation of impressionable, vulnerable minds for the sake of pursuing her own career and the insidious trans agenda. Shame!
When my son was three, he claimed to be an elephant. We treated it as play, and he grew up to be a human. Funny how that works.
And he was an extremely bright child, but he would never have said anything like what was reported about that child.
And short hair and pants? Puleez! That would make all women I know males (except me; I maintain long hair because my hair is totally unmanageable short- yes, I’m weird, and my body chooses to be weird right along with me). I thought we settled all this decades ago, at least by the 1970s, when girls (in my school, at least) were allowed to wear pants to school, and lots of girls were cutting their hair short. Even in a conservative, Christian town like Edmond, Oklahoma. Were we all really boys and just didn’t know it?
And I find it hard to believe that people were actually asking why a boy was using the girl’s bathroom, unless it was a visiting parent who was so backwards that they’ve never seen girls that dress comfortably and wear their hair short (which means they have not watched any television, seen any movies, or even left their house for decades). Perhaps the girl looks a bit “boyish” (whatever the hell that means), but damn. No, no, no, no, no. This is a total fail.
It does have a whiff of the ‘ideal’ case history designed to raise Dr. Olsen-Kennedy’s trans-cred (or patient list).
It’s like we’ve learned nothing as a society from the Satanic Panics of the 80s and 90s, where well-intentioned investigators would lead children into telling wild stories about abuse.
But we’re still pretending that not only do children not lie, but that they are not susceptible to leading questions or prone to telling adults what they obviously want to hear.
Unless it’s curbed somehow, this will end up destroying a lot more lives than did the Satanic Panics, and they were horrendous enough both in detail and in scope.
One thing that is being overlooked in this is that up until the age of ten or-so, kids look pretty androgynous anyway. Most little boys could easily pass for girls if dressed in girls’ clothing and with the right hair style, and vice versa. It would be easy for a parent of a boy, but who wanted a girl, to tend toward dressing and styling the child in a more feminine way, whether consciously or unconsciously, and thereby setting the ball in motion, so to speak.
If the child in the case study is to be taken as real, it is all-too possible that the mother wanted a son and has steered her daughter in that direction. Very religious people tend to be strict parents, so I doubt that the girl would have had the freedom of choice over her hair and clothing that is suggested unless her choices mirrored those of her mother, or were her mother’s preferences drip-fed into the girl from birth.
AoS, your scenario is possible, but I was assuming that the child just preferred short hair and “boyish” clothes. As even the doctor put it, “was completely presenting male whatever that means—short haircut, boy’s clothes” — whatever that means indeed.
So this kid is perfectly happy with her short hair and “boy’s clothes,” and using the girls’ bathroom because she considers herself a girl and (quite properly) sees no contradiction between being a girl and liking certain hair and clothing.
Then some uptight folks at the school start pitching a fit because a “male-presenting” kid is using the girls’ bathroom. So the kid reasons — quite logically — that if my clothes and hair make me a “boy,” and I have to either change them or else use the boys’ bathroom, then fine, enroll me in school “as a boy” and I’ll use that bathroom. But as her initial response to the doctor’s question reveals, she doesn’t think she’s actually a boy — the very question confuses her. Of course she’s a girl, she just wants to be treated like a boy, so she can have her hair and clothes the way they are, and doesn’t care which bathroom she uses. Problem solved, right?
So then she’s dragged to a doctor, who gives her this speech about pop-tarts and how wrappers don’t determine what something is on the inside, and the kid seizes upon it as the solution to her problem. Her parents weren’t cool with pretending she was a boy so that she could make these problems go away, but now the doctor has introduced her to this new idea — that maybe she really IS a boy! And adopting that doesn’t require her to change her body or make any sacrifices (at least, none she cares about right now) — she’s been handed a way to get to keep her clothes and hair the way she likes and get all these persnickety grownups to shut up about it, because an authority figure (a doctor, no less!) has put a stamp of approval on it. She’s a “boy on the inside,” which means — she gets to wear short hair and “boy’s clothing,” and has no other consequences as far as she knows.
Jesus Christ. Give me 10 minutes with the average 8-year-old, and I could have them swearing that they were a Satanist Communist from Alpha Centauri if it meant they could get whatever it was they really wanted.
If an eight year old girl wants to be treated like a boy, it doesn’t mean she’s trans, it means she’s a bloody smart cookie. And a feminist. I suspect that’s the problem for a lot of people.
Screechy Monkey, whichever scenario best fits, the result is the same. The adults have manipulated a child into adopting a trans identity when all she wanted was to be herself, which on the face of it is simply a girl, happy to be a girl but wanting none of the traditional girly frills. One of my daughters was and still is like that. From the time she was old enough to show a preference she wanted nothing to do with skirts or dresses, hated having her hair anywhere near shoulder-length, scorned dolls (she despised Barbie and Cindy with a passion); basically she rejected all the female stereotypes. Not once did she ever doubt her sex (or gender), she just refused to conform to the expected roles associated with them. She didn’t even care when she was teased at school for being boyish, dismissing the taunts as stupid because she was obviously a girl, just not a ‘meat Barbie’ ((her own expression).
We were perfectly happy to let her express herself as she wanted, but she would have been an ideal subject for the conversion (transversion?) therapy as outlined in the above case study if we, her parents, had pushed her along the lines of questioning her gender.
AoS, I agree.
I’m open to the idea that gender is more than just genitals and chromosomes and other physical manifestations. I can wrap my head around gender dysphoria, I think.
But it makes no sense to me to define gender based on currently prevailing cultural stereotypes (or, perhaps, those that prevailed a couple of decades ago and are hopefully weakening a bit). I certainly don’t see what it accomplishes that would be better done by just accepting that people don’t have to conform to gender stereotypes.
And that’s always what these kinds of explanations and stories sound like to me. No matter how much I “shut up and listen” as we are so frequently told to do in these matters.