A puzzle

Comments

4 responses to “A puzzle”

1. 

   Artymorty

   Feb 27, 2026 4:08 PM

   Not all wants are social injustices. The way I see it; that’s the key, in my mind.

   People want stuff really really bad all the time. Sometimes tragically. Cancer patients really really want to not have cancer.

   But also fantasists really really want to have whatever their fantasy is.

   It’s not just that the trans thing is a fantasy. It’s not just that it’s superficial. In fact to some of them it really hurts so much it’s perhaps closer to cancer in a way. It’s a deep, deep pain and a life-threatening thing.

   But it’s still not a social injustice.

   We made a terrible mistake — we, as in liberal society — when we let transvestites’ deep compulsions slip into the category of social injustices.

   Entitled men will push and push and just seemingly naturally try to find a way to get what they want no matter what. No matter the cost to anyone else. Their logic is driven by self-interest, wholly, radically, entirely. I thought we all thought this was obvious. And I thought we all saw that trans was that.

   I have failed to understand what other people understood in the same way that most everyone else has in this mess.

   I’m just as guilty as the rest of us in this regard. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Pretty much all of us played a part in this mess.
2. 

   Your Name’s not Bruce?

   Feb 27, 2026 7:27 PM

   The assumption is widespread that they want what they want with far more desperation than we want what we want. I think that assumption is false, and I also think they have no right to think it’s true.

   You might be being too kind here. I’m not so sure they believed it was true themselves. They might have claimed they believed this, but I think that ultimately they just didn’t give a shit. It was always just good old-fashioned male entitlement, pushing on regardless, because they wanted what they wanted, but it had to be camouflaged in fragility and powerlessness. Anyone else’s wants were beside the point, but the inability to make their case by making a comparison on properly calibrated want-o-meters, meant that trans activists had to hedge their bets on any sort of comparison or measurement by piling on threats of suicide, and claims of impending trans genocide, so that these kinds of assumptions and claims were not probed too deeply, or at all. The whole “NO DEBATE!” strategy was an exercise in deflection and avoidance of any kind of argument or justification for all trans claims and demands. It was a cover for a radical, behind-closed-doors political movement that strenuously rejected all examination and inquiry, based on the supposed desperation and vulnerability of its promoters and beneficiaries.

   How do you argue against “Give us what we want immediately, or we will kill ourselves”? Allies could run interference and claim cruelty and callousness in response to the mildest doubt or question, transforming critiques of any of the claims of gender ideology into campaigns that were “denying trans peoples’ right to exist.” This approach simultaneously deligitimized and demonized critics, particularly those from the demographic that would pay the highest cost for the fulfilment of this movement’s unreasonable, irrational, incoherent, and dangerous goals: women.

   Trans activists denied that there was any conflict between their desires and women’s needs, and that women had absolutely no legitimate reasons to oppose those demands. Arguments based on the easily predicted dangers to women’s rights, dignity, health, and safety were all derided as cynical pretexts to indulge in bigotry and hatred against “trans women.”

   Government institutions themselves weren’t so much weighing or comparing wants and needs, as they were simply plowing women’s justified concerns under, in favour of men’s wants, however hideously unjust, collateral damage inflicted by Karen Whites, Barbie Kardashians, and Isla Brysons be damned. Again, it was dressed up as a matter of “safety” for the men, but women’s safety was simply ignored. Women’s concerns were made invisible, and treated as if they did not exist. It became the ultimate zero-sum game, and women lost completely. Incomprehensibly, grotesquely, some women cheered this on. Who needed Orwell or Kafka when you had Sturgeon?

   Why should we dedicate ourselves to lying for them because of their depth of feeling while they treat our feelings as so much dross?

   Because if you don’t we’ll make you. This is where the bullying and intimidation came in handy. If the emotional blackmail they tried in order to play on female socialization to “be kind” didn’t work, there was always the stick. Or the baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, or the dead rats, or the effigies hung with nooses, or the threats of guillotines, or the brandished guns, knives, the smoke bombs, or the smashed windows, blockaded meetings, the punches, and kicks. Threats of rape and murder. Or the police and courts.Yes, oh so helpless and marginalized they were. You will love Big Brother or else.
3. 

   iknklast

   Feb 28, 2026 6:56 AM

   it was dressed up as a matter of “safety” for the men, but women’s safety was simply ignored

   This was helped by the change over the previous two decades or so in how we viewed the marginalized. In fighting racism and xenophobia, as well as ableism, it has become natural to assume that someone in a marginalized group cannot be criticized, because that is criticizing the group as a whole. If a person of color, or a Muslim, or a disabled person, commits a crime, we are not supposed to talk about it even as an individual who committed a crime, because that was smearing the group as a whole.

   So we are not supposed to talk about the crimes against women committed by trans men, and if some of them become too much to ignore (say, ‘Isla’ Bryson), then we have the ‘no true Scotsman’ to fall back on. They aren’t really trans if they are doing things like that. Oh, and they are doing things like that because, as trans, they have had so much trouble being accepted by society. Oh, and it’s perfectly okay for a trans woman to rape a lesbian, because her need not to be raped is not as major or as important (indeed, not important at all) in comparison with the needs of the trans for sex.

   All of this in the interest of maintaining a delusion that even the strongest allies of trans should be able to see through easily. The need to side with the ‘marginalized’ is so strong that they didn’t even have to demonstrate they really were marginalized. All they had to do was stick their T on the end of LGB, add a couple of colors to the pride flag, and shout.
4. 

   Mike Haubrich

   Feb 28, 2026 12:29 PM

   The quandary is that if one admits that the danger is to women, that transwomen aren’t actually women. So, you just can’t allow that to be spoken, and have to ignore the threat to women’s safey.