Guest post: Plumbers would have done a better job
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Way too offspring-focused.
These offspring-focused risk-avoidance strategies are….
If someone else had written this, it would be considered satire. It’s certainly ludicrous when you translate it into other scenarios:
”These safe-landing focused risk-avoidance strategies are…not without potentially-harmful consequences for people who believe they are pilots.”
”These not-sinking focused risk-avoidance strategies are…not without potentially-harmful consequences for people who believe they are pilots.”
”These no-meltdown focused risk-avoidance strategies are…not without potentially-harmful consequences for people who believe they are nuclear power-plant engineers.”
Let’s look at this load of shite a little more closely.
These approaches reinscribe binarized notions of sex…
Well, sex isn’t “binarized”, it is binary. Its binary nature isn’t a “notion.” It isn’t being “reinscribed” it’s just there as a brute fact. The “experts’” inability to see or unwillingness to admit this should have precluded them from having any say at all on this issue. Nobody is filling in the blanks, or “overwriting” some other reality out of politically motivated spite and malice. Their jumping up and down, holding their breath until they turn blue won’t change that. Words don’t work that way, not even those coming from sociologists. Funny how they try to make it look like the position that conforms to the facts of material reality is the blinkered, unreasonable, ideological one. If someone is pregnant, that someone is female, however they “identify.” They’re speaking from how they would like biology to be, rather than from how it actually is. Stonewall biology anyone?
…resulting in social control in their attempts to safeguard against non-normative potential future outcomes for offspring.
And this is a bad thing if it impinges on the woman’s fantasy that she is male. It’s not “social control” that is transphobically insisting that wrong sex hormones are bad for the developing fetus; it’s just the way things are. It’s a real consequence of the choice TiFs make in pursuit of an impossible “identity.” (just as no longer being able to make the cut on men’s sports teams is a natural consequence of the TiM pursuit of a “female” identity.).If they really were men, they wouldn’t have this problem at all. The fact that they do have this complication, that they must make a decision around the “treatment” they’re insisting on, is simply emphasizing the fact that they are not male. More thorough treatment might have rendered them sterile, but that is a different thing. And as a passing thought, might it not be in society’s interests to reduce the number of birth defects in children? Might it not be in the child’s?
These offspring-focused risk-avoidance strategies and approaches are, we argue, part of the gendered precautionary labour of pregnancy and pregnancy care itself ….
The “labour of pregnancy” is determined by sex, and while there is likely always some degree of “precautionary” care involved that perforce falls to women alone, my understanding is that most women who choose to go through with their pregnancies are aware of this, and are prepared to do this for the health of their children. It is not a bad thing for women to behave in this fashion. A good part of pregnancy care is working towards the birth of a healthy baby. Certainly the health of the mother is vital too, not just as a mother-to-be, but as a person in her own right. Sometimes conflicts between the two will arise, and balances will be need to be struck, depending on the circumstances and consequences. But to disregard the needs of the fetus altogether in service of upholding a mistaken self-image is incredibly selfish. If you don’t want a child, get an abortion. If you do want a child, then take responsibility for it. That this will entail some degree of inconvenience, discomfort, sacrifice, and yes, danger, is a part of that choice. You can’t “Yes, but” your way out of it. It comes with the territory. Putting your unborn child in danger needlessly, for selfish and misguided reasons, is not a good idea, and not the best start at parenting one can imagine. Encouraging women to do this for ideological reasons of deluded “gender identity” isn’t really something to be proud of either.
…and not without potentially-harmful consequences for trans people.
I wouldn’t trust the sociologists’ determination of the “potentially harmful consequences” for trans people, given that they likely claim “misgendering” is “actual violence.” So on one side we have unwarranted threat inflation of unspecified “potential harm” being promoted by people who think calling a man a man, or a woman a woman, is to be ranked with GBH. What of the actual harmful consequences to the unborn child whose heath and well-being they are so cavalierly discounting?
Why was this “panel of experts” consulted at all on this matter? What have they contributed, apart from counselling selfish irresponsibility that aligns with their ideology? Do they also consult on matters of plumbing, or subatomic physics? They’d be equally qualified to do so, meaning not qualified at all. Going in the other direction, I’m sure plumbers would have done a better job,
Well that’s because plumbers recognise, errr, plumbing; and know what bits of plumbing are for, and which bits connect where. I’ll back away from this analogy now.
This is a perceptive comment.
I think we’re also seeing the result of the forced teaming of trans and gay. Back when homosexuality was considered a disorder instead of a difference, there was a lot of concern about preventing any prenatal influences or causes. If it was genetic, then a gay parent might pass it down to his or her children and that would be bad. When social attitudes changed, worrying about that particular “birth defect” became a sign of bigotry.
I’m not sure what all the consequences of the hormonal cocktail trans-identified females take would be for a developing fetus, but isn’t one of the primary ones mutations in sex traits? Masculinization of genitals or changes in brain development for both males and females would be live possibilities. In which case, a simplistic interpretation through the lens of gender ideology would be “this is a trans or intersex baby — and there’s nothing wrong with that, bigot.” Being trans is not a birth defect.
They’re drawing a heavy handed analogy between a gay parent having a gay kid and a transman having a “trans kid” — and acting accordingly. Needless to say, this jumps over all sorts of actual biology which will come down on the actual baby.
It is a well-known fact of nature that cells, tissues, and organs which have evolved to serve one function can be re-adapted for another. Jaws are thus believed by one school of biologists to be derived from distantly ancestral gill arches of fish. As is also well known, one’s sex is determined by one’s ancestral DNA, and sex arguably first evolved very early on in the history of life, thanks to the advantages it conferred on the species displaying it.
Animals arguably embark on sexual adventures out of a conscious desire for pleasure rather than for reproduction, even though the latter commonly results as well..
BUT as one Australian prime minister memorably said, “life wasn’t meant to be easy.” Sex has arguably played an ambiguous role in many human activities and stages: revolutions, wars, etc. As The Bard memorably had a shepherd say in A Winter’s Tale :
A mixed bag indeed.
https://keck.usc.edu/news/how-did-vertebrates-first-evolve-jaws/
Most biologists, however, don’t argue that. For most of the history of life on Earth, life was asexual. Sex is a rather recent development. Bacteria have ways to exchange DNA to maintain diversity and wellbeing, and sex is a costly adaptation. It took a long time before sexual organisms evolved.
That doesn’t change the rest of the thread; sex evolved in what is truly ancient history in not only the lifespan of a human, but in the lifespan of humanoids of all sorts. It does serve an adaptive function, allowing it to evolve in spite of the heavy energy costs. Still, the most successful organisms on Earth are the asexual ones.
But…saying it is recent doesn’t mean western colonialists imposed it on anyone. ;-)
It was those damned eukaryotic colonists.
The full paper is freely available here, for anyone with the stomach to plough through it.
WaM, you are so right. Colonialism at its earliest. We just can’t leave anything untouched, can we?
I can imagine trans activists promoting this idea to “create” “trans kids” as a goal in itself. Because they’re so special, sacred and holy, we should make more of them! This would be a little bit more involved (and sinister) than simply planning for your child’s future college and profession.
And this will be glossed over and hidden, in service to the worthier goal. I can see it being touted by rich, larping AGP TiMs who wouldn’t dream of sacrificing their own bodies, or those of their children, but would relish the thought of an even larger cadre of fully committed trans activists to command.
Once you start thinking even a little bit about these issues, you run up against the incoherence and contradictions of trans claims. One characterization of transness is that it represents a mismatch between the material organization and development of the body, and some internal mind state. Normally such a disjunction would be considered a bad thing; “gender affirming care” is an attempt to “treat” this disjunction on the bodily side of the equation. It seems to me that the goal of this approach is to pass for cis. What else is TWAW but a claim to be cis. Yet “transness itself is to be centered, affirmed and celebrated. They want it both ways; they want to be just like everyone else (in trying to bridge the gap between bodily sex and mental “gender identity,”) yet at the same time remain “special.” “Cisness” is the desired, yet impossible goal, while the term is used as an epithet by trans activists.