Guest post: Under the transgender umbrella
Guest post by tigger_the_wing.
A lot of people do not know that the T in LGBT no longer stands for ‘transsexual’. In fact, people are these days called ‘transphobic’ for using the word ‘transsexual’ – even those who refer to themselves as ‘transsexual’. The ‘trans’ people in the recent posts I have made are those who consider themselves to be ‘under the transgender umbrella’. Here is a graphic from an information leaflet [pdf] which explains who counts as ‘transgender’:
Note: People with disorders of sexual development KEEP asking trans activists to leave them out of it and to stop using the outdated term ‘intersex’. Just as the trans activists ignore women’s boundaries, they ignore them, too.
Note 2: Male transvestites and drag performers are a MUCH bigger demographic than transsexual men. So much so that they had no difficulty changing the T to the meaningless ‘transgender’, nor changing the whole focus of the LGBT charity Stonewall to centre straight misogynist men.
Note 3: Gender variant/Gender queer is utterly without a coherent definition. Literally anyone can fit in here because *no-one* completely conforms to their society’s gender ‘norms’; partly because those change from year to year, and mostly because we all have individual personalities and tastes in clothing, hobbies, etc.
Note 4: Since gender critical feminists DEFINITELY don’t follow gender norms, by the trans activists’ own rules that makes us all ‘gender variant’, and so trans. Calling us ‘cis’ is MISGENDERING US. The worst crime anyone can commit, according to them; worse than murder.
Note 5: Trans activists have distorted Stonewall’s original mission to support the LGBT, to kick out the LGBT altogether, and bring in performers and fetishists instead.
What absolutely astonishes me here is the flippant way the seemingly sacred Gender Identity Theory is tossed aside while one of their most insistent talking points — “A Trans Woman is NOT a transvestite!” — is whipped out, reversed, and shaken in our face. If a man-in-a-dress who identifies as a man-in-a-dress is transgender, then what happened to that little area somewhere in the fetal brain that evolved to give us certainty-feels about whether we’re a girl or a boy? Doesn’t it need to go wrong? Isn’t there supposed to be some deep-seated conviction in the Transgender soul that one’s assigned sex doesn’t match? Is Gender Identity now so last Tuesday?
I await the upcoming Battle between the Transgender Umbrella and the Genderbread Person. It should be epic.
A friend asked me:
So I translated it:
Sastra, I think that is the point; to keep everyone off balance. It’s a cult of narcissists. If there is no consistency, anyone can be wrong-footed at any moment and they can get more narcissistic supply from watching people scramble not to be accused of ‘transphobia’ (another definition-free term).
@tigger_the_wing #3:
Possibly. But my guess is that it could also be there’s no “They,” just a lot of “theys” — and they’re not all on the same page.
Given the enormous growth and success of the Trans Rights movement, how could they be? There’s the Butlerian academics, the columnists at Teen Vogue, activists from Stonewall, whiners from Tumblr, elite journalists, teenage rebels, social justice warriors, and skeptics gone bad. One TRA will castigate me for thinking adolescents can just go to a gender specialist and get hormones and surgery like that — “why, it takes years of careful vetting, you liar!” — while another one is furious that I want years of careful vetting because “kids would DIE without that immediate affirmation, TERF!”
And of course we’ve all seen how clear, concise, and consistent they are with their terms and explanations. It should promote a similar harmony.
I’m tempted to think the clash between those who wish to widen The Umbrella and those who want to stick to The Narrative will smile benignly past each other like alties with diametrically opposed remedies at a Wellness Faire, but I think there’s too much passionate involvement for that. There’s also a passionate involvement with Purity, which has a tendency to spiral. It’s bad enough that they’re wrong. Adding in a desire to turn each other in for wrongthink is, I hope, fatal.
Re “those who wish to widen The Umbrella and those who want to stick to The Narrative”
I’m convinced there are significant numbers of people who are in both camps, alternately or simultaneously, without noticing the conflict.
There is a joke. A real estate agent was extolling the virtues of this lovely house, right on the beach, you can walk a few steps to the sea in your pajamas in the morning. But what about during hurricane weather? Don’t you worry, the house is miles from the shore, you’ve got plenty of protection.
It seems to me I hear doublespeak as plain as this from people who don’t really want to think deeply about the issue, just “support a marginalized group”, you know.
Is it bad that these people have basically made me immune to emotional blackmail? *Insert Scrooge quote here*
Who knew that Flip Wilson was really a transwoman?
It all seems like so much gibberish to me.
It reminds me a bit of those modern Christian debaters who like to challenge atheists, “You are being too simplistic. Those arguments don’t apply to *sophisticated* theology,” so they continue to think that atheist arguments have not touched their position. This supposedly more robust, “sophisticated” theology, is never brought forth, however. It’s never articulated. Its sophistication is never put to the test. The people who claim to know this more sophisticated theology only manage to put forth arguments that are not different from the unsophisticated ones that the atheists have already poked holes in.
BKSA #6
“Bah! Humbug!”
@maddog1129
Ironically, PZMyers was the one who coined the term “courtier’s reply” for this (referring to the emperors new clothes). Whose blog is now full of (logically faulty) courtier’s arguments on why sex in humans is fluid/irrelevant/cannot be determined etc…
This thread seems relevant:
https://twitter.com/JonathanShedler/status/1370212738388041728
It’s nothing we haven’t talked about here before, but is very well and succinctly put.
@Sastra #4
You are, of course, correct that there is no unified ‘they’. But, given the people getting the most out of the confusion are behaving in a most narcissistic way (and may well be full-blown narcissists of one stripe or another) they all benefit from the confusion in the extra attention they get. It is not at all unusual (as anyone who has ever had anything to do with a narcissist for any length of time will tell you) for a solitary narcissist to impose contradictory rules of behaviour on their marks just so that they can always have an excuse to punish others’ behaviour and get a thrill out of the sense of control of others which they don’t have over themselves.
I love this particular sentence:
And of course, if self-identification is definitive proof of a certain brain-type, what does that imply wrt. those who detransition? Do they literally change to a completely different kind of brain?
If I’m reading this correctly, then you meet the minimum requirements to be trans if::
1) You deviate in any way (no matter how slightly or how severely) from your internal judgement about what is an accepted behavior or appearance for your sex.
2) You believe that this deviation is the only thing about you that is important, so everyone else must celebrate you for it.
I’m looking forward to the day when they try to claim John Cleese as one of their own.
That’d be a blast since he has tweeted that the entire enterprise is silly.
Oh, don’t be silly! We all know Cleese is a trans mouse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZx9YBhZrZA
(incomplete and audio only but it was all I could find. I wouldn’t be surprised if the complete sketch had been removed after protests from the Usual Suspects)
I found it! :-D
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2y1jou
That is PERFECT.
TMAM! :-D
I see the leaflet as the Lambda 10 Steering Committee ordering students to close rank on one point — to brand everything under the umbrella as Trans™ and Transgender™ (Identity™).
Under the umbrella, students are free to one-up each other with incoherent bullshit as long as they remember to brand their bullshit as Trans™ and Transgender™ (Identity™).
The steering committee formed in 2014, around the same time that Glamour magazine awarded Caitlyn Jenner a 2015 Women of the Year Award, putting “transsexual” down the Memory Hole to rebrand him as Trans™ for Transgender™ (Identity™).
Jennifer Bilek’s 11th Hour blog documents the big money behind the gender identity movement. It helps me understand how changes happened so fast around 2015. As one of the changes, I believe there was a top-down direction of the branding, and I see the leaflet as an example.
Steven and David have a new post up at SBM to address their critique’s of Harriet’s post:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-science-of-transgender-treatment/
and my comment on said post:
Well said.
Thanks! i’ve been learning from the best.
That’s a really well-worded question, Mike. Thank you! I wonder if anyone will read it. I do hope so.