From Antiques Roadshow to…

Axios is in a swivet.

Transgender and nonbinary people across the U.S. are navigating an upended sports landscape — on top of additional rollbacks of their protections and civil rights — following President Trump‘s February executive order banning trans athletes from women’s sports.

Same old lie. The issue is male athletes in women’s sports.

“If you can dictate my identity on a sports field, why can’t you then dictate my identity in different areas of public life?” asked Sydney Bauer, a rower, runner and journalist who covers sports and LGBTQ+ rights.

Stupid question. Stupid framing. Stupid choice of words. Nobody’s “dictating” anyone’s “identity.” Some people are pointing out realities and the areas where they make a difference. Nobody gives a fuck about Sydney Bauer’s idenniny; the fucks are given about what sex people are.

Trump’s Department of Education alleged last week that the University of Pennsylvania violated Title IX by allowing a transgender swimmer to compete on the women’s team.

Again: the issue is not “transgender”; the issue is male.

We know they know this, because they keep doing it. They are very careful not to say “by allowing a male swimmer to compete on the women’s team” because they know damn well that if they put it that way the problem leaps off the page. They’re carefully obfuscating and lying, in an effort to help men invade and ruin women’s sports. Nice.

You have got to be kidding.

Fears Trump’s foreign film tariffs could ‘wipe out’ UK movie industry

Trump’s WHATS???????

Donald Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on movies made outside the US could wipe out the UK film industry, ministers have been warned, as they came under immediate pressure to prioritise the issue in trade talks with the White House.

100%! Tariffs! On movies!!!

Well hey, at that rate, how about 100% tariffs on foreign books, too? Retroactive, of course. Make it hurt to buy a copy of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Lucky Jim, The Needle’s Eye, Alice in Wonderland, The Origin of Species, The Rise Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – just think of all the money to be made!

Donald Trump’s threat to impose 100% tariffs on movies made outside the US could wipe out the UK film industry, ministers have been warned, as they came under immediate pressure to prioritise the issue in trade talks with the White House.

Whatever. Why should anyone but the US be allowed to have a film industry?

In an extraordinary intervention, Trump announced his intention to impose the levy on all movies “produced in foreign lands”, stating that the US film industry was facing a “very fast death” as a result of incentives being offered overseas. The UK is among the countries offering film-makers generous tax incentives.

The US president said he had already ordered the commerce department and the US trade representative to begin instituting such a tariff. He said on his Truth Social platform the issue was a “national security threat” because of the “concerted effort by other nations” to attract productions. “Hollywood is being destroyed,” he later told reporters. “Other nations have stolen our movie industry.”

And Hollywood is relevant to US national security how exactly?

Here’s another stupid thing:

Statement on Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010

We are leaders of centres, research groups and networks, of scholarship, teaching, learning, and expertise in gender, feminist, women’s and sexuality studies across the UK. We are dismayed by the recent Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010.

Oh I see, they’re expert leaders and leader experts. They know things. They have expertise. They know more than we peasants and nose-pickers do.

This judgment, which states that ‘sex’ for the purposes of the Act refers to the ‘sex of a person at birth’, was handed down after a refusal to hear any testimony from legal experts on gender reassignment or from trans, nonbinary, or intersex people.

That’s shocking. It’s as shocking as handing down a judgment on the rights of non-gremlins without inviting a single gremlin scholar to give testimony.

We do not believe it provides more legal clarity on the relationship between gender and sex. Instead, it adds more confusion and gives more potential for transphobic opportunism and harm in an already fraught area.

For what? What tf is “transphobic opportunism”? Are we gender skeptics hanging around hoping for an opportunity to push a trans laydee into a mud puddle? Or what?

If anybody in this mess is opportunistic it’s the men who pretend to be women. They get opportunities to barge into women’s groups, discussions, rights, organizations, centers – everything. Women are not getting any opportunities out of the arrangement.

We are also deeply concerned by responses to the judgment by the Equality and Human Rights Commission and organisations such as the British Transport Police. These responses have already used the judgment to declare the exclusion of trans people from facilities and services, and to align policies with ‘biological sex’. 

Liars. That’s a brazen lie. Men who claim to be women are now being excluded from women’s facilities and services, because they are men. None of this is about “the exclusion of trans people”; it’s about not letting men force themselves on women.

This is their expertise? The boringly familiar “expertise” of saying “trans people” to disguise the fact that they’re talking about men intruding on women? Pffffffff. That’s not expertise, it’s just cheating and trickery.

We reject the framing in the media and in public discourse that puts women, and/or feminists, at odds with trans people. This is especially the case in relation to the inclusion of trans women in women’s spaces. Womanhood is lived; it is not biologically given or legally bestowed. 

Oh really! The expertise just gets better and better. Womanhood is not a matter of which sex you are, it’s about how you live. Grow your hair, put on lipstick, simper, point a toe, and you’re there.

There’s more. It doesn’t improve. It ends with a list of centers and institutes and similar.

Oy oy oy.

Trump admits not knowing anything.

Donald Trump said “I don’t know” when asked if he needed to uphold the US constitution when it comes to giving immigrants the right of due process as he gave a wide-ranging TV interview broadcast on Sunday.

Let’s be very clear. This isn’t some guy waiting to pay for his cigarettes at a 7/11, this is the fucking chief executive of the whole large bossy globally-busy country. He is supposed to know this stuff. Just for a start, he swore an oath to do exactly that, not once but twice. He swore an oath to uphold the constitution and says he doesn’t know if he needs to uphold the constitution. He says it in public.

In a sane world that would be impeachment right there.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump replied when asked by Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker whether he agreed with his secretary of state Marco Rubio, who had previously expressed support for the idea that everyone had the right to due process.

When pressed Trump continued: “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the supreme court said. What you said is not what I heard the supreme court said. They have a different interpretation,” the US president added.

Whatever their interpretation may be, we can be sure it’s not “Donald Trump can ignore the Constitution.”

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Then he announced an Australian DOGE.

I think a lot of people were dabbling in conservatism because they’d been alienated by the left’s creeping dogmatism. But with Trump 2.0 everybody realized no matter how badly the left had been tainted by extremism — and all of us in the gender trenches have the scars to prove just how bad it got — the right is dangerous, too, so much so that it’s become an existential threat to democracy.

I’m furious at the Liberal party. I’m furious at the CBC. I’m furious at pretty much all of Canada’s progressive apparatus. But I’d rather work to repair it than to see the conservative apparatus take over. Every time I read the right-wing National Post I’m reminded I’d rather see the CBC overhauled than dismantled. Every time I hear what the Tories or the People’s Party have to say on just about any issue besides gender extremism, I’m reminded that gender is the lone, tiny island of common ground between me and them, and the rest is a vast ocean of get-the-fuck-outta-here-with-your-backwards-bullshit.

Some stubborn optimism still lingers in me that Trump 2.0 will flame out soon and spectacularly — and in the aftermath the left will do some soul searching and come back to its principles.

I will give Rome Nero and when he is done with Rome, Rome will be done with emperors altogether. It will be bad, exceedingly bad… worse even than Caligula but they have to have the whole terrible truth about just how bad it can be before they come to their senses. Let all of the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out.

— Robert Graves, I Claudius.

Claudius was tragically wrong: Nero was indeed a disaster, but instead of spurring reform or a return to republican values, Rome simply continued deeper into autocracy. The imperial system adapted, survived, and endured for centuries after — often brutal; never democratic.

Claudius’s grim, utilitarian gamble was rooted in the belief that Rome still had a moral centre that could be shocked back into balance. History proved otherwise. Now the US has its Nero, and it’s facing the same test.

Seeing how high the stakes have gotten, Canada and Australia smartly decided not to take the bet.

JKR has one of them there long post items on TwitterX, and as usual it’s a good read.

These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue.

An elitist badge of virtue or a desperate measure for the sake of avoiding punishment. We don’t know which are which, of course. I wonder often how real the apparent conformity is – I wonder just how much of it really is fear of fellow pretenders. Maybe all of them are pretending; maybe most of them are.

I often wonder whether the signatories of such letters have to quieten their consciences before publicly boosting a movement intent on removing women’s and girls’ rights, which bullies gay people who admit openly they don’t want opposite sex partners, and campaigns for the continued sterilisation of vulnerable and troubled kids. Do they feel any qualms at all while chanting the foundational lie of their religion: Trans Women are Women, Trans Men are Men?

Same. So very same.

Maybe they wonder the same about us, when they’re not too busy trying to get us fired or shunned or otherwise punished. I’ll answer the question in my case: No. No qualms. The combination of absurdity and venom killed any possibility of qualms long ago. The claims are so ridiculous and the bullying is so disgusting there’s just no room for qualms. I don’t believe all the howling about how fragile and crushable they are. Look at the broad grin on the face of horrible “Sophie Molly” and try to summon up a qualm. It can’t be done.

I have no idea. All I know for sure is that it’s a complete waste of time telling a gender activist that their favourite slogan is self-contradictory nonsense, because the lie is the whole point. They’re not repeating it because it’s true – they know full well it’s not true – but because they believe they can make it true, sort of, if they force everyone else to agree.

And forcing, or trying to force, everyone else to agree is so much fun. It’s the best fun many of them have ever had.

The foundational lie functions as both catechism and crucifix: the set form of words that obviates the tedious necessity of coming up with your own explanation of why you’re one of the Godly, and an exorcist’s weapon which will defeat demonic facts and reason, and promote the advance of righteous pseudoscience and sophistry.

Five stars; would read again.

It’s all that good. Read on.

Originally a comment by Rev David Brindley on Trump boosts the other team.

Peter Dutton is the first opposition leader to lose his seat. As late as January all the polls were predicting he would be the next Prime Minister with a sizeable majority. Then he announced an Australian DOGE to be headed up by a woman wearing a MAGA hat, an uncosted plan to build 7 nuclear power plants around the country, sacking 47,000 unspecified public servants, and most tellingly, insisting that women would be forced back into the office instead of working from home, and if they didn’t like it, they could quit or job share.

He would announce a policy today only to reverse the announcement tomorrow. Sound familiar?

He would not appear at media events all previous party leaders attended, would only do interviews with Sky (our Fox, also Murdoch owned) and refused press conferences with other media. Sound familiar?

And his team? Well, who could blame Angus Taylor (shadow treasurer) for forgetting to log into his sock puppet account before tweeting in reply to himself “Well done Angus. Good job, Angus.”? It’s not like he planned to manage a multi billion dollar economy, is it?

To them Australia would be God’s Own Paradise, if it wasn’t for the immigrants stealing Australian jobs, if it wasn’t for the loss of manufacturing to China, and if it wasn’t for the Australian people preferring their nationalised health system over the US model Dutton wanted to impose.

I didn’t change a single person’s vote, I am sure, but I was still pleased to do six hours standing in the sun handing out Labor How To Vote Cards in a seat Labor will never win, but where the fight is all about as many Senate votes as we could garner.

There’s a lot that Trump doesn’t know, but whether or not he has to adhere to the US Constitution shouldn’t be one of them.

President Trump — when asked if he thinks he needs to uphold the Constitution on “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” — said, “I don’t know,” but added that his lawyers “are obviously going to follow what the Supreme Court said.”

Dude. You can say you don’t know what’s on the menu for dinner tonight, but you can’t go saying you don’t know whether you have to uphold the Constitution or not. It’s like not knowing how to apply the brakes when you drive a car.

The response came after a series of questions regarding the right to due process for people living in the United States and the Fifth Amendment. During this exchange, Trump said he wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants — who]m] he called “some of the worst people on Earth.”

“I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it,” Trump said.

So how does he know they’re some of the worst people on earth? The one thing he knows they have in common is that they’re undocumented. How does he get from there to “some of the worst people on earth”?

He doesn’t, because he can’t. It’s a non sequitur. He doesn’t know what a non sequitur is. If he did, his way of talking would be radically different.

Welker then pressed Trump on whether he, as president, needs to abide by the Constitution and the rights it provides to people in the U.S.

“I don’t know,” Trump said. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.”

Wrong answer. This time not a non sequitur, just a wrong answer. What is the right answer? “Of course the president has to abide by the Constitution.” Answering “I don’t know” is not, repeat not, acceptable.

That doesn’t matter to him, of course, or to the army of toads who do what he tells them, but it matters in general. It matters to history; it matters to the record; it matters to whether or not the US goes full dictatorship.

Later in the interview, Trump refused to rule out the use of military force on Greenland and said, “it could happen.”

“We need Greenland very badly,” he said. “Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security.”

Mm. Great. Very reassuring. When you’re grabbed off the streets and locked in a dungeon it’s a huge relief to be told your captors are going to cherish you, and all of that.

Of course they do.

Transgender footballers plot to flout ban and play on

Transgender women and their allies have threatened to flout the ban on those born male playing in women’s football in England.

Telegraph Sport has been shown WhatsApp messages from those involved in a women’s league plotting to ignore a ban announced by the Football Association following last month’s Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces.

Fae Fulconis, who plays for Hackney Women in the sixth tier of the female game, told The i Paper: “I’m going to fight this ruling. If they want to ban me, then they can physically come and get me off the pitch.”

What does that sound like?

Oh yes: rape.

It sounds like what it is: men flatly refusing to take women’s “NO” for an answer. Men treating women like so much obstructive garbage who have to be pushed sharply aside, and if they still won’t shut the fuck up, beaten to a pulp.

Fulconis, one of around 20 trans women affected by a rule change that comes into force on June 1, added: “My birth certificate says that my sex is female, my passport says F, I see no reason why I can’t play football, so I’m going to play.

Of course he sees no reason, because he can’t hear what women are saying, because his contempt for women is so deep and so profound that it makes him deaf to our voices.

“I’m going to fight this ruling. If they want to ban me, then they can physically come and get me off the pitch. The ban goes really against the spirit of football. It goes against what women’s football is about, and it is also a complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of who trans women are.”

Women’s football is all about men playing it instead of women? I did not know that. I did know about the not listening and not giving a shit, but I did not know that other thing. So is there any way women’s football can be about women playing football? I suppose that’s too much to ask, isn’t it. Mustn’t be greedy. It’s quite the compliment to have the word “women’s” in the name, so I shouldn’t expect more, like letting women actually play.

“Sport should be a safe haven. The basic point of football is 22 people of different backgrounds coming together and on the pitch, they are completely equal for 90 minutes, and they are only judged by their ability to kick a ball.”

“People” meaning men, of course. Not women. Obviously. What would be the point of having them on the pitch?

What do we get in return?

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has secured a second term in office in a disastrous night for his conservative rivals, as voters chose stability over change against a backdrop of global turmoil inflicted by US President Donald Trump.

Australia’s return of a left-leaning government follows Canada’s similar sharp swing towards Mark Carney’s Liberal Party, another governing party whose fortunes were transformed by Trump. The loss of Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton’s seat mirrors that of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.

I’m happy for Australia and Canada, I really am, but the price is too high.

Oh. good. god.

Stonewall is poking its foot over the line Mummy told it not to cross.

Stonewall will be referred to the Charity Commission on Monday unless it withdraws “wrong and dangerous” advice on the meaning of last month’s Supreme Court ruling on women’s rights.

Sex Matters, the women’s rights group, say the controversial LGBT charity has encouraged “organisations to act unlawfully” by suggesting they delay any changes to female facilities such as toilets and changing rooms.

It’s heart-warming that Stonewall is so desperate to keep punishing women for being women. It’s impressive that Stonewall’s great project these days is to urge men to invade women’s toilets and changing rooms, because obviously women are bad people – spawn of the devil, you know – who need to be punished not once but all the time, every hour of every day. We all hate women, right?

On Thursday, Stonewall accused the Football Association of rushing into banning trans women, who are biologically male, from the female game.

And they said the Supreme Court’s historic judgment – that the definition of a woman was based on biological sex – had not yet become law.

Which is not how that works. Supreme Court rulings are the law. Stonewall, on the other hand, is a bunch of shits.

When misogynistic labels become ordinary language:

An NHS trust has come under fire for using the derogatory term “terf” in a guide on how to support transgender staff.

In documents drawn up by the North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT), the guidance uses the slur, which stands for “transgender-exclusionary radical feminist”, to describe women who do not want to share single-sex facilities with trans women.

The women in question do not want to share single-sex facilities with men. The fact that they’re men is the part that matters. The fact that they call themselves trans is just a kind of veil drawn over the awkward fact that they are men. The men part should be front and center.

The document also claims that it is “unlawful” to exclude trans women from women-only spaces around the hospital.

Yeah right and it’s also unlawful to exclude burglars from your kitchens and living rooms.

It comes after the Supreme Court ruled the opposite two weeks ago, declaring that a woman is defined by biological sex under equality laws.

It means those born male are not able to access a women-only space even if they have changed the gender they identify as…

For the simple and easy to grasp reason that changing your label doesn’t change your sex. Sex is not a matter of “identifying as”; it’s a matter of brute fact. It’s a given. It is what it is. You can change it in your own head but nobody else on the planet has to agree with what’s in your head.

The trust’s guidance also makes claims “some cisgender people have unlawful discriminatory views of trans people using single-sex spaces such as using gendered toilets”.

Unlawful views!! We’re not even allowed to have our own views now! They think we’re committing a crime by having “views” such as “people can’t change sex.” They think views can be “unlawful”.

We’ll be told to ask permission to have our own thoughts at this rate.

Cricket.

Transgender women have been banned from competing in all levels of women’s cricket with immediate effect, the England and Wales Cricket Board has announced.

In an update to its transgender regulations, the ECB said “only those whose biological sex is female” will be able to participate in women’s and girls’ cricket.

It doesn’t get much more tautological than that. Men and boys won’t be able to participate in women’s and girls’ cricket. Well duh: that’s what it says on the tin: women’s and girls’ cricket. Obviously men and boys won’t be able to participate. Yet all this time all these people pretended otherwise. Could it be because women and girls just don’t matter?

Amelia Short, a transgender cricketer for amateur side Lindow, says the ECB should have consulted with transgender players before altering its policy.

Well that’s bullshit, and the BBC should have recognized it as such instead of solemnly including it. There is nothing to consult about. Things for women and girls are for women and girls. The end.

“What the ECB has done is not give us as transgender women a chance to say that there isn’t much advantage going on. We’re not doing an injustice to the women’s game,” Short told BBC Sport.

Ah fuck off. You don’t need a chance to say. You’re not involved. It’s not yours. Go away. Whining about not being consulted is like burglars whining that the people in the house didn’t leave a window open for the burglars. You are not women so get out.

Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns for human rights group Sex Matters, said the ECB’s previous policy was “never coherent” and “indefensible”.

“Now that the UK Supreme Court has said it is lawful to exclude ‘all men, including trans women’, the ECB has done the right thing,” said McAnena.

At least the BBC gave her the last word.

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on More in the spirit of Mao than of Mill.

In regards to education around trans “rights”, I’ve sometimes thought that a good start to getting people to see gender ideology for what it is would be to get them to examine and understand the following concepts:

Understanding the concepts would be useful, but I believe that an understanding of where and how the modern concept of transgender actually began would explain so much about why the ideology is such a confused and confusing mess.

So far as I can tell, it started in the late 1990s as a purely philosophical idea centred on a post-modernist ‘no absolute truths’ view of sex and gender – I think I am therefore I am, if you will. From there it was taken up by the social sciences and expanded by such writers as the high priestess of gender ideology, Judith Butler, whose writing rivalled that of the greatest of theologians insomuch as it said very little, proved even less, but did so in such dense, impenetrable prose that it baffled the reader into submission: uncertain as to whether they were reading genius or bullshit, too many erred on the side of genius.

Believing that they had understood what in reality was intentionally unfathomable, the new converts began teaching that gender was more than a social construct, it was at the core of one’s very existence, and suddenly a new generation of students had their heads filled with what they thought was a stunning new insight into the human condition. Those students went on to spread the word to the wider world, and here we are, fighting a muddle-headed ideology based on nothing more than a flawed philosophy that should have been contained within academia but escaped to mutate and cause havoc.

Dude is angry that men can’t ruin women’s sports any more. Dude needs to find a better hobby.

“I’m a male footballer forcing my way onto a women’s team and I will keep doing it until they stop me.” “Fae” Fulconis, piggy man.

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice offers a selection of cold cuts Trump ramblings that reveal and emphasize how gone his brain is. Listening to such ramblings is torture, but reading them is not as much like having nails driven into your head, and they do underline how empty it is in his head.

Trump has always been an ignoramus who masks his intellectual shortcomings with bombast and declarations of his own brilliance, but his rambling nonsensical responses in these latest interviews should set off alarms…

Well, sure, but that’s been true all along, and he got elected anyway.

But there is a kind of morbid entertainment in probing the infinite emptiness.

Time asked Trump, “You recently signed memos calling for an investigation of Chris Krebs, a top cybersecurity official in your first term. Isn’t that, though, what you accused Biden of doing to you?” Trump’s response to this question was totally incoherent.

I think Chris Krebs was a disgrace to our country. I think he was—I think he was terrible. By the way, I don’t know him. I’m not—I don’t think I ever met him. I probably saw him around. You know, I have people come in, like the other one. He came in, and he’s on CNN all the time as like an expert on Trump. I have no idea who he is. And Chris Krebs the same thing. I guess he probably said he knows me, but I have no idea. And you know, oftentimes I’ll have some people sitting right here, and behind them will be 10 or 15 people from their agency or their office, and they’ll stand there, and then all of a sudden, I’ll hear that like I’m, you know, they’re all time experts in me. I know very little about Chris Krebs, but I think he was very deficient.

People voted for that.

Time pointed out that Trump has made zero deals since his trade adviser Peter Navarro promised “90 deals in 90 days.” Trump simply denied this reality.

No, there’s many deals.

When are they going to be announced?

You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals.

Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?

I’ve made 200 deals.

You’ve made 200 deals?

100%.

Then Trump imagined himself a “a giant department store,” the way a small child might imagine they’re a dragon.

I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.

The wave continues.

ECB update on transgender participation in women’s cricket

The ECB is today announcing a change to its regulations regarding eligibility for transgender players in women’s and girls’ cricket. This is based on the updated legal position following the recent Supreme Court ruling.
 
With immediate effect, only those whose biological sex is female will be eligible to play in women’s cricket and girls’ cricket matches. Transgender women and girls can continue playing in open and mixed cricket.  

Bam.

Our regulations for recreational cricket have always aimed at ensuring that cricket remains as inclusive a sport as possible. These included measures to manage disparities, irrespective of someone’s gender, and safeguard the enjoyment of all players. However, given the new advice received about the impact of the Supreme Court ruling, we believe the changes announced today are necessary. 
 
We acknowledge that this decision will have a significant impact on transgender women and girls. We will work with Recreational Cricket Boards to support people [affected] by this change in our regulations.

I wonder – did England and Wales Cricket Board ever say it would work with Recreational Cricket Boards to support people affected by its regulation that allowed men to intrude on women’s cricket? My educated guess is that it never did.

We maintain that abuse or discrimination has no place in our sport and are committed to ensuring that cricket is played in a spirit of respect and inclusivity.

Even to the point of keeping men out of women’s cricket…eventually.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on What we don’t like makes us special.

All a diagnosis of gender dysphoria tells us is that a patient is in distress and is ruminating about his or her body. That by itself should only be the beginning of a proper clinical assessment, but far too often it’s treated like a conclusion. [Artymorty]

Exactly. One of the most evil things that gender ideology does is to claim that dysphoria = trans, skipping right past the phenomenon of “desistance”*. The motivation to fast track children into “social transitioning”, puberty blockers, surgical procedures, etc., is to short-circuit and pre-empt desistance by pretending it doesn’t exist, because the alternative is that “transness” doesn’t exist. After all, how can a supposed “gender identity” be anything core, fundamental, unchanging, or eternal, if you can outgrow it? But recruit/trap them before they get a chance to think about things too much, and you’ve won yourself a whole cohort of children (and often parents), who are now fully committed. Having invested their very bodies (or those of their children) in the “cause,” these True Believers will be all the more motivated to defend the ideology, rather than admit that they were fooled and misled by adults who should have known better, and that they have made horrible, irreversible mistakes.

Regret and detransition must, like desistance, be hidden and denied, because it is not the actual health and wellbeing of children that must be defended but their “transness”. Admitting the possibility of mistaken diagnoses leads to questioning the the standards used for a diagnosis of “transness” in the first place. Can’t have that. This is the real meaning behind all of those “Protect Trans Kids” t-shirts. It’s not children being “protected”, but their “diagnosis” as trans. This is tragically ironic: “gender affirming care” is going to inflict more harm on these children than “cis” society is ever likely to. Buying into the “dysphoria = trans” claim means more mutilated, sterilized children. Who’s protecting them?

For those children whose mental or psychological distress is not resolved by going through puberty, whatever it is they are suffering from, it can not be the result of having been “born in the wrong body.” That does not happen. If this supposed “cause” is taken off the table, what is left of “transness” at all? Very little, apart from a movement of bullying, intimidation, and emotional blackmail led by predatory, misogynistic, narcissistic, fetishists.

* We’re often told by gender activists that we must “educate ourselves” about trans “rights”. I believe that most of us here have done exactly that. But we have not reached their approved conclusion. They’re not interested in truth or enlightenment. They want obedience and submission. They want us to re-educate ourselves, more in the spirit of Mao than of Mill.

In regards to education around trans “rights”, I’ve sometimes thought that a good start to getting people to see gender ideology for what it is would be to get them to examine and understand the following concepts:

Desistance and detransitioning

Forced Teaming

DARVO

Institutional Capture

DSD vs “Intersex”

Autogynephilia

among others. Feel free to add to this list.