Originally a comment by Artymorty on Special.
In all honesty, I feel some pity for Isabella.
I actually started using [the ladies’] only later on during my transition.
The thing is, he made the choice to become a “transgender woman” because he thought society was moving towards a genuine offer, that if he invested enough in a trans identity and body, that society would buy into it, and together they’d have made a successful bargain: he and the female population would be truly integrated.
He didn’t do any of this in a vacuum.
It was a tragic decision he made, and it wasn’t really just one decision, but a long series of steps strung out over time, as you can see here, when he says that at one point he was in some halfway state — at least visibly gender-bending but still using men’s toilets. He’s clearly moved further along the transgender tragectory since then.
This is where I save some blame for even the most well-intentioned sexologists and clinicians who participated in this game, including people I am personally acquainted with, who I’d almost consider friends.
The mistake these clinicians made was to perpetuate a sort of tango, a dance in steps, a pas-de-deux between the patients and the cultural environment they inhabited — between the individuals and the zeitgeist. One partner took a step forward, then the other in turn, and this was gently prodded along in no small part by the clinicians.
The clinical environment of “trans medicine” prodded its patients step-by-step, further and further towards “artificial womanhood”, and it matched that by prodding society, step-by-step, further and further towards accommodations for these artificial women. Those baby steps added up, and it went from teensy little exemptions to a wholesale collapse of women’s rights fairly quickly.
The ugly truth is, if these patients had been told flat-out, bluntly, upfront, that their future lives as “transwomen” did not come with a guarantee that society would continue to dance along to the transgender tune, that there was a distinct possibility that the music would stop and they’d be left to contend with the wreckage of their bodies all by themselves, most of them would never have ventured so far into the trans fantasy.
These male patients took these steps, one by one, because by themselves, each little step felt small enough for female society to absorb them. Each one was a quiet transaction, a small debit away from women’s rights, towards men’s. In many ways, it was the clinicians who told both sides that each of these little transactions, these little concessions — little debits — was too small to matter.
But, as anyone who’s wrestled with an ever-increasing monthly stack of media subscriptions can tell you, all those little debits add up to big money very quickly. In a sense, the trans movement undermined the women’s movement by nickels and dimes.
Here, Isabella is left holding the bag: he’s had all this cosmetic surgery and hormone surgery and psychological conditioning to help him imagine he’s a female, and now female society is saying, NO, we’re pulling out, we never agreed to any of this.
Well, that’s tough. But it’s also tragic. I don’t think he quite realized he never had a written deal with women. And it was probably his clinicians who glossed over that fact as they approved each successive step in his medical and psychological “transition”.
If you ask me, they (the clinicians) bear quite a lot of the blame. Even the so-called “good ones”, the pragmatists who never denied the reality of biological sex and who fully acknowledged the homosexual/autogynephile distinction.
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