Guest post: The main ingredients of the gender cocktail
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This miasmic swamp of delusional bullshit.
We keep using the word “trans” as if it meant one thing, when the differences between a sensitive, “girly” boy who likes dolls and dresses (previously likely to grow up gay), a teenage girl with no prior history of gender dysphoria who comes to see herself as a “boy” (or “non-binary”, “queer” etc.) through social contagion from friends and online influencers, and a porn-obsessed straight man who gets turned on by the idea of being his own jerk-off fantasy couldn’t be more glaring. We also keep talking about ”gender dysphoria” as a single, one-size-fits-all diagnosis with a single cause (being born in the wrong body) and a single cure (medically ”correcting” the body), when, in fact, different people seek to escape their sex for very different reasons. If anything “gender dysphoria” is a symptom rather than a disease: Something to be explained rather than an explanation. The following is my modest attempt at identifying the main ingredients of the gender cocktail as I currently understand them.
1. The Social Contagion Aspect
Despite attempts to appropriate non-Western concepts of third genders [1] in support of gender ideology, the modern gender identity movement is very much a recent Western cultural phenomenon. Many have pointed out the parallels between the current explosion in trans identification among teenagers and previous mental health fads like repressed memories, multiple personality disorder, eating disorders, various kinds of self-harm (e.g. cutting) etc. These trends all spread throughout the population over time through social contagion, and in every case teenage girls were vastly over-represented among the afflicted.
The physical and hormonal changes associated with puberty can be distressing enough in themselves, especially for girls, and are often accompanied by additional burdens like body-shame, teasing, unwanted male attention etc. In every age vulnerable girls look to their social circle (and, more recently, the internet) for clues to make sense of their distress, and every age has its own specific answer to offer. In one place at one time it might have been repressed trauma caused by forgotten sexual abuse in childhood. In another place at another time girls might be taught to fixate on their weight as the source of their misery. Today, all over the Western world, the standard explanation, eagerly pushed by activists (#2) as well as friends, teachers, therapists, online influencers, children’s books, the mainstream media, public institutions etc. is “you’re born in the wrong body and need to be fixed”.
2. The Social Justice aspect
Of course the trans craze has not arisen in a vacuum, but can only be properly understood in the light of wider intellectual and ideological trends whether you prefer to call it “Critical Social Justice” ideology, “wokeism”, “applied postmodernism”, “identity politics”, “the identity synthesis”, or something else entirely. This movement – which traces its ideological roots back to the French postmodernists of the 1960s and 70s, but has mutated into its current form in elite American colleges and universities – understands society in terms of zero-sum power struggles between privileged (oppressors) and marginalized (oppressed) identity groups (races, genders, sexual orientations etc.). According to the prevailing theory of intersectionality your place in the power hierarchy is entirely determined by the various identity categories you happen to fall into. If your intersecting identities put you in the ”privileged” box, you are considered an oppressor by virtue of existing (regardless of your actions, and regardless of the actual circumstances of your life), which means everybody else has a permanent blank check to attack you in the name of ”punching up”, and you don’t have a right to stand up for yourself.
While Critical Race Theory (the lens through which matters of race and ethnicity are analyzed) does not allow you to “identify out of” your whiteness (and hence your responsibility for systemic racism), Queer Theory (the lens through which matters of gender and sexual orientation are analyzed) does allow you to identify out of your “gender” which has, for all intents and purposes, replaced biological sex as a category in woke orthodoxy. Hence, if you’re a straight, white, able-bodied (etc.) kid, pretty much your only way to earn any “oppression points”, and avoid ending up as a permanent punching bag, is to adopt a marginalized gender identity or some kind of mental health diagnosis (another “identity” that has shot through the roof!) or both.
3. The Homosexual Link
Perhaps the saddest irony of the current crusade to medically “correct” young people’s bodies with puberty-blockers, hormone therapy, surgery etc. is that a disproportionately large percentage of them would otherwise almost certainly grow up as gay. Same-sex attracted individuals were often highly gender-nonconforming as children. Especially in a culture in which stereotypically “feminine” or “girly” behavior in boys is still frequently frowned upon [2], it is easy to understand how a sensitive, “proto-gay” boy might come to think he was “meant” to be a girl. But even for girls the pressure to be stereotypically “feminine” seems to have gotten worse rather than better in recent decades, so it’s hardly surprising that many of the more “tomboyish” girls, previously likely to grow up as butch lesbians, come to the conclusion that it would be easier to live as a boy.
Of course it doesn’t help that practically every organization that used to fight for the rights and interests of same-sex attracted people has turned 180° (#2) and no longer even recognizes biological sex – let alone “same-sex attraction” – as a thing. Only “same gender attraction” is still recognized. According to this redefinition, e.g. a “lesbian” is a person of any sex who identifies as a “woman” while being attracted to other people (once again, of any sex) who identify as “women”. To be exclusively attracted to one’s own biological sex (i.e. exactly what it used to mean to be “gay” or “lesbian”) is now actively condemned as bigotry [3], all in the name of “LGBTQ+” rights and interests!
4. The Autism Link
Another group that is greatly over-represented among the young people currently lining up for “gender-affirming” medical treatment are kids on the autism spectrum. These kids often struggle with social awkwardness as well as feelings of being different and not fitting in with their peers, which, in the current climate, can only too easily be reinterpreted as symptoms of gender dysphoria (#1). People on the autism spectrum also tend to gravitate toward rigid, black and white thinking (girls are into dolls and pink dresses, boys are into cars and blue jeans etc.) and are therefore especially vulnerable to the idea that not fitting the prevailing gender stereotypes is a sure sign of being born in the wrong body.
5. The Sexual Abuse Link
A disproportionally large percentage of the young people seeking out “gender-affirming care” have a history of sexual abuse. It’s easy to see how victims of such abuse can come to see their bodies as forever “tainted” by the experience, which must make the idea of “starting over” in a new body (even as a new person!) seem only too appealing. An abused girl may come to see her femaleness as the source of her victimization. From there it’s a just short step to wanting to escape femaleness altogether. Male victims, on the other hand, may see their abuse at the hands of another male as incompatible with “masculinity”. There are also male victims who decide they have to be girls, because the idea of belonging to the same sex as their abuser is just too intolerable.
6. The Porn Link
Even from an early age children can hardly avoid being exposed to vast amounts of increasingly violent and misogynistic online pornography [4] in which women are being choked, slapped, spat in the face etc. for the gratification of men [5]. A certain kind (#7) of trans-identified males (whom the children are taught never to question, criticize, or disagree with for any reason – only a hateful, intolerant bigot could possibly do such a thing, remember!) frequently portray being used as an object for the gratification of men as an inherent part of what it means to be a “woman”. E.g. trans-identified “Andrea” Long Chu famously summed up “femaleness” distilled to “its barest essentials” as “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. No wonder many girls decide that “if that’s what it means to be a woman, then count me out!”. Come to think of it, if treating women like that is part of what it means to be a “man”, you can probably count a lot of males (myself included!) out as well (#9).
Other males get stuck in an escalating spiral in which they require increasingly extreme stimuli to “get off”. To many trans identified males the road to castration began with an obsession with so-called “sissy-porn” [6] in which males are supposedly “emasculated” and turned into women through endless violence and humiliation.
7. The Autogynephila Link
To most well-meaning liberals and lefties, the word “trans” probably conjures up images of sensitive, “girly”, gay males, as well as “tomboyish”, “hyper-butch”, lesbian females (#3) who only want to live and let live. Who could possibly be so heartless and cruel as to deny these non-threatening, severely distressed young people some special dispensations, even if means making some concessions we probably wouldn’t have made otherwise (being a “man” or a “woman” is about “gender” rather than sex, the only way to determine a person’s “gender” is self-identification etc.)?
There is a problem, however: If you look at many of the loudest trans-identified males out there, they are neither same-sex attracted, nor particularly “effeminate” at all. Quite the contrary, in fact: The last thing these guys can be accused of is displaying too little toxic masculinity, too little aggression, not enough raging entitlement, insufficient need for dominance, or, for that matter, being too nurturing, caring, sensitive, empathetic, selfless etc. As Helen Joyce has pointed out, you cannot truly understand how we ended up in the current mess without acknowledging that there are some extremely motivated and entitled men out there who will stop at nothing to get what they want and destroy anyone who gets in their way. Their goal is unrestricted access to female-only spaces (which, of course, makes them no longer “female only”), the way to get there is self-id (i.e. saying you’re a woman obligates everybody else to treat you, and even think of you, as such for all purposes), and the Trojan horse for smuggling in self-id is to reframe it in terms of compassion towards severely distressed, gender-nonconforming children and teenagers. The thousands of young people currently subjected to experimental treatments are collateral damage.
Autogynephilia (meaning “love of oneself as a woman”) is a male fetish or paraphilia [7], more or less synonymous with what used to be known as “transvestism” or “erotic cross-dressing”. Autogynephiles are straight, often quite stereotypically masculine, men who get turned on by the idea of being their own porn-inspired (#6) jerk-off fantasies. So these are the guys who tend to identify as “lesbians” and accuse real lesbians of bigotry for not being interested in their “lady-cock” [8]. They are also behind nearly all attempts by trans-identified males to force themselves into female only spaces, and the narcissistic rage when women’s boundaries get in their way may very well be the single greatest contributor to the frequently cited “toxicity” of the debate around trans issues.
8. The Wolf in Trans Clothing
The standard response whenever gender-critical feminists bring up the safety issues of allowing biological males to self-identify into female-only spaces is “so you’re saying all trans women are rapists?”. Well, no. The point is not that all trans-identified males are rapists, but that they are precisely males, and as such they are neither more nor less likely to be rapists (or voyeurs, flashers, gropers etc. [9]) than other males. While obviously not all males – trans-identified or not – commit sexual assault, enough of them do that it’s a problem. In the absence of telepathic powers you can’t tell in advance who poses a risk and who does not [10], which means women have a legitimate interest in keeping all males out of their most intimate and vulnerable spaces.
But even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, that no true Scotsman “trans woman” is a threat, how do we tell the “true trans women” from opportunistic predators who only pretend to be trans to get access to female only spaces if the only criterion for distinguishing “trans” from “non-trans” is self-id? Considering the lengths to which male predators throughout the ages have been prepared to go (e.g. studying for years to become Catholic priests) in order to get easy access to victims, the idea that no one who isn’t trans would ever claim to be for nefarious ends is frankly absurd. Besides, we’re also told that any trans-identified male who does commit sexual assault is not really trans but a “cis” man pretending to be trans to prey on women – precisely the thing that supposedly never happens! Despite this, the perpetrator must still be allowed to serve in a women’s prison, the victim must still be forced to refer to her rapist as a “woman” (who committed rape with “her penis”), and the rape must still enter the public record as committed by a “woman”. The level of Doublethink is truly staggering!
9. Escaping Toxic Masculinity
To be fair, it is almost certainly too simplistic to split all trans-identified males into effeminate gays and autogynephiles. It is probably also fair to say that not all males with autogynephilic tendencies are raging, entitled narcissists filled with bottomless contempt for women’s boundaries. At least to a first approximation, all trans-identified males who engage in predatory behavior seem to be autogynephiles, but that doesn’t mean that all, or even most, autogynephiles engage in predatory behavior.
Especially among younger straight males, the desire to distance oneself from precisely this kind of toxic masculinity and predatory behavior seems to be a powerful motive for identifying out of manhood.
[1] Such ideas are typically found in patriarchal cultures with strict gender roles and serve to protect the purity of manhood by defining effeminate (and probably gay) men out of the male sex. Despite claims to the contrary, these men are still not considered women, and none of these cultures fail to distinguish between biological males and biological females.
[2] Suzie Green, the former leader of the trans lobbying group Mermaids is on record talking about how her son’s gender-nonconforming behavior was making her husband uncomfortable, so they took him to Thailand to have him fixed. Others have referred to this practice of converting gay boys into “straight trans girls” (or vice versa) as “trans away the gay”.
[3] Planned Parenthood Toronto famously hosted a horrendously rapey workshop on the topic of “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”, the “Cotton Ceiling” being an obvious reference to women’s underwear, that bothersome obstacle to “Queer Trans Women” (i.e. males) getting into lesbian women’s vaginas.
[4] Typically beginning with more seemingly “innocent” (if somewhat “edgy”) material (cartoons, manga, anime etc.) and escalating over time as the social media algorithms keep suggesting increasingly extreme content.
[5] Children are also taught by woke activists (#2) that only a hateful, intolerant, bigot could possibly see this as anything but “progressive”, “liberatory”, “sex-positive” and even “empowering” to women.
[6] The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), whose guidelines have been adopted as authoritative by health services all over the Western world, has held up “eunuch” as a legitimate gender identity. WPATHs website also used to include a link to a sissy porn site called “The Eunuch Archives” where much of the content was tagged “minor”.
[7] Despite frequent claims that the Autogynephilia diagnosis has been “discredited” or “debunked”, many of these men openly admit the fetishistic aspect of their orientation.
[8] The parallels to “incels” couldn’t be more obvious.
[9] Of course it’s not just a matter of physical “safety”. Women (or men for that matter!) also have a legitimate interest in privacy, dignity, comfort etc.
[10] Although contempt for women’s boundaries – which is precisely what you are demonstrating by forcing your presence on women who don’t want you in their spaces – is a major red flag in itself. Even the “gender-uncritical” feminists used to know this back in the days when so many of them kept eagerly citing the “Schrödinger’s Rapist” argument.
I don’t read a lot of exposition on the trans business (except for an occasional visit to Arty Morty’s site), but I find this very well written, clear, and probably the most complete overview of the subject I’ve seen. If I had to criticize anything about it, it would be that it doesn’t have a proper concluding paragraph. Nice goin, Mate!
Thanks, Mike
You can all take the lack of a proper concluding paragraph as an invitation to fill in the points I must have missed (I was going to include a point about the Münchhausen by Proxy link as well, but I couldn’t get it to work, and finally gave up) :)
Thank you very much for this nuanced and well-thought piece.
One thing I would like to say is, I’m not convinced that gender-noncoforming children actually do have a significantly bigger chance of being homosexual. (There are other explanations to this perception: for instance, perhaps when children are permitted to act in ways that defy the stereotypes of their sexes, later on they will be more likely to admit their homosexuality to themselves and to others.) Anyways, since there is indeed a widespread *expectation* that gender-nonconforming children will be homosexuals, your point about homophobia motivating transidentification very much still stands.
It’s also worth noting that gender-identification is not limited to “trans” people. Although “cis”-identification might entail less, it strikes me as being grounded in the same irrationalities.
Echoing the kudos for Arty Morty, this was an excellent overview.
I’ll join the chorus: excellent post.
I was thinking it would be interesting to have a pie chart showing the percentage of each of the ingredients of the “gender cocktail” and I realized that there’d be no way that trans activists would ever allow research to determine that, and that even the “pie” itself would be suggesting a greater degree of unity and cohesion behind the concept of “transness” than it merits or demonstrates, given the above dissection of the incomensurable eteology of its wildly disparate constituents. Calling all of them “trans” might be politically expedient, but serves nobody well but the predators and autogynophiles who seem to be running the show.
It’s another example of the huge gulf between the supposed mission of trans activism to “help” “actual” trans people (“trans kids” being the acceptable, sympathetic, guilt-inducing, public face of this aspirational wing of activism), and the reality of its political programme, best exemplified by entitled, predatory men invading women’s spaces. The seemingly lofty message “Protect trans kids!” waved before everyone is meant to give cover to the bullying, abusive truth of transactivism’s actual modus operandi. A movement interested solely in the physical and mental health of its putative constituancy wouldn’t be investing so much of its energy in attacking women. How different things would be if this what trans activism actually cared about, and worked towards as its primary goal. But that’s not the trans activism we have. Instead we have a movement designed to destroy women’s rights, cynically using a more benign, humane cover story as a helpful shield for its misogynistic campaign. (I believe that Bjarte, in another thread, aptly called this combination a Trojan Horse.) As currently constituted, genderism’s true aims and purposes are by necessity hidden behind word games, deception, and DARVO because they are so dangerous and repellant. That this movement has managed to attract a huge following of “allies” willing to overlook (or, more disturbingly, knowingly support) this woman-hating agenda is frightening; the degree of government capture and complicity is a nightmare.
I’m not as skeptical of the broader social justice movement, including the “Critical Theory” side of things (though I acknowledge that the latter has often produced the same sort of empty profoundities that you find in many of the softer academic fields) as many here are; I tend to be pretty much on-board with CRT, for instance.
But I will absolutely agree that trans-activism has glommed onto these fields in the same way it has the general LGB rights movement, appropriating and aping the surface, without any of the substance, and often in ways that actually run counter to the goals of those movements, and becoming an instrument of oppression for many folks that SHOULD be defended under SJ thought (women and non-gender-conforming individuals of both sexes being key examples).
Essentially, the trans movement stole women’s place in the broader SJ movement, much like it’s trying to steal their places elsewhere.
I do think there are serious problems with the whole Critical Social Justice framework that makes it almost uniquely suited for the kind of excesses we have seen from TRAs though. As I put it in a previous comment:
If you take as your premise that there is no objective truth anyway, or, if there is, that we have no way of getting (closer) to it, not even in the approximate, tentative way of science, why not just make shit up?
If any appeal to “evidence” and “arguments” is just a naked exercise of power to force the oppressed into accepting the self-serving narratives of their oppressors as “objective truth” and hence unquestionable, why even bother making your case?
If persuading or silencing your opponents are just different means to the same end in a zero-sum struggle for power, why not just destroy anyone who engages in Wrongthink?
If language and discourse creates (what we hold to be) “reality”, why not try to change reality by changing the way we talk about it (making it true, or as “true” as anything ever gets, that some biological males are “women” by forcing everybody to talk about them as such etc.)?
And since I somehow managed to totally screw up this comment last time, I might as well repeat (most of) what I said and hopefully get it right this time:
One of the first lessons of critical thinking is that a person’s arguments have to be judged on their own merits [1] rather than who he or she happens to be. Nothing is true because an authority said so, and nothing is wrong because we have problems with the person who said it.
Woke standpoint epistemology turns this logic on its head: All that matters is who you are. If you belong to an officially approved “marginalized” (and therefore virtuous) group, you have an absolute authority to tell others what to think [2], and they don’t have the right to disagree, question your judgement, or even ask for reasons (to do so would be an act of “epistemic violence”). It’s “not the job of marginalized people to educate you”, remember! If you belong to an officially “privileged” (and therefore morally inferior) group, your views can be safely and conclusively be dismissed in advance, without ever getting to the actual substance of your arguments.
Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott describe how the “Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” of the woke left [3] allows wokesters to discount any argument or opinion coming from anyone accused, rightly or not, of being conservative, as well as whites, males, straight people, “cis” people (ugh!), anyone who has ever said or done anything deemed offensive in the past, anyone who has tried to defend others from cancellation, anyone who has ever lost his/her cool in response to woke bullying etc. etc. Long before you reach the end of the list, practically every person on the planet has been disqualified from consideration by virtue of something (unless, of course, they already agree with you).
[1] Not as straightforward and simple as many movement skeptics like to pretend, admittedly, which is why we can’t do without some degree of trust.
[2] Unless, of course, your views deviate from Critical Social Justice Theory. Then you are either suffering from internalized bigotry against your own kind or siding with the oppressor in exchange for a more favorable treatment. Your views can therefore be safely discounted. No true
Scotsmanmember of a marginalized group disagrees with Theory.[3] The “Efficient Rhetorical Fortress” of the Right is simpler, but basically serves the same function.
Freemage #6:
The puzzling aspect is why modern “trans-activism” now enjoys such an uncritical position as being “left-wing” activism, when that same” trans-activism” involves heterosexual, nondisabled men trampling over the rights of women, non-gender-conforming individuals, and disabled people (people with autism).
If you look at the website of Verso Books (the largest left-wing publisher in the Anglosphere) , you will see numerous articles on it by people like Judith Butler, Sophie Lewis, and Aaron Jaffe, vilifying any feminist who disagrees with the “trans-activism” philosophy. This is despite the fact that Verso is an ostensibly Marxist publisher, and gender self-identification involves rejecting the philosophical materialism that is normally a key part of Marxist analysis.
As Jane Clare Jones put it, modern “trans-activism” is “a biology-erasing thought-system shot-through with a frankly terrifying transhumanist fixation on denigrating the ‘meat-house’ of the body”.
https://janeclarejones.com/2019/02/07/why-british-feminists-are-such-a-bunch-of-evil-witches/
“Trans-activism” is not “philosophically materialist” at all. Yet Verso Books aggressively promotes it.
Re: “The Porn Link” that Bjarte Foshaug discusses. There’s another connection between pornography and “the gender cocktail” that may be worth discussing here.
It’s somewhat distasteful, but I think it needs to be analysed.
A large section of modern pornography features stereotypically feminine Trans Identified Males, and is aimed at ostensibly heterosexual men. Such pornography, as the American Psychoanalytic Association has observed, is very popular with male users:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00030651241263929?ai=1gvoi&mi=3ricys&af=R
Hence the appearance of the “chaser” – the heterosexual man sexually obsessed with trans-identified males.
I suspect that at least some of the “woke straight male allies” aggressively supporting “trans-activism” today, and bad-mouthing the GC and anti-sex work Feminists who oppose it, are chasers. The chaser hates such Feminists because his sexuality is focused on using TIMs in a sexual manner.
He may also use his performative “trans-activism” as a means of gaining access to TIMs for sexual relationships with them.
Remember Jolyon Maugham’s infamous “resisting the temptation to slide into your DMs, for the moment at least” message to the TIM Shon Faye? That’s a chaser sentiment.
It seems so…ornate. Overcomplicated. Adding bells and whistles until all function is buried.
As good an overview as I’ve seen to date. Just one point I’d like to make is regarding a line in ‘The Wolf in Trans Clothing’.
That isn’t true, at least not in the UK. A few months ago I was reading on-line discussion and saw the usual claim that women are not in danger from trans women, which I would have let go without saying anything (I wasn’t involved in the thread at that point) had the claim not ended with “I promise you”. So I went digging and found an article on the Fair Play for Women website about transgender criminality which used Ministry of Justice statistics. I posted the following statistics, but my comment was not well received*.
In March/April, 2019, of the 78,781 men in UK prisons, 17% (13,234) were convicted of sex offences: for the 163 TIM prisoners the figure was 49.7% (81), so just short of three times higher. However, I then compared the number of sex offenders in prison to the male/TIM populations using the most recent UK census figures of ~33,000,000 men and ~48,000 TIMs. In March/April 2019, 0.04% of the UK male population was in prison for sex offences while for TIMs it was 0.16% – four times as many. So it appears that there is a significantly increased risk to women from TIMs than from men in general.
* it took less than an hour for the site’s moderators to remove my comment…and ban me from the site.
https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/
Also, Verso is a sour joke, and has been for ages. We offered it Does God Hate Women? but we knew damn well it wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. MustnotcriticizeIslam.
I’ve wondered that too. But then there’s this:
The following is a wild guess. I wonder if autogynophiles have been able to hijack or short circuit this standard of evaluation by giving the appearance of “stepping down” from their white male privilege, taking up the “cross of womanhood”. Using the “born this way” argument stolen from LGB activism, they get to portray their fetish as a burden, placing themselves as more “vulnerable” than so-called “cis” women, who aren’t required to “perform” femininty because it’s been handed to them on a silver platter like some kind of unearned, undeserved inherited family fortune. Men claiming to be women have to work for it. They have earned their “womanhood”, unlike the evil women so intent on keeping them out of the clubhouse. It’s like combining The Prince and the Pauper with a rags to riches story, with the noble Prince clawing his own way out of self-imposed poverty through shear pluck and gumption. In this formulation, gaining access to female only spaces becomes a heroic victory against the (alleged) privilege and power of haughty “cis” women.
The beauty of it is, that in the post-modern conceptions of power and reality that Bjarte notes above, this story doesn’t have to make sense for it to work. Queer Theory fills in the gaps with word salad, or just ignores them altogether. The biggest magic trick is to transform being female from what would normally be considered in this political taxonomy an “axis of oppression” to an “axis of privilege.” We’re supposed to ignore the fact that women, as a sex class, remain disadvantaged on a global scale. On the other side of the coin, we’re supposed to disregard the continued TiM exercize of male power and entitlement, and their donning of the trappings of stereotypical, sexist , sexualized “femininity” without accepting the second class staus to which females are still relegated. And we’re supposed to stop comparing trans identifying males with Rachel Dolezal because SHUT UP, BIGOT.
Worst of all, beyond all the theory and academic posturing, we’re supposed to discount and minimize the real harms caused to women and girls caused by male intrusion into female spaces and facilities. All in the name of (supposedly) “progressive” solidarity. This stance necessitates a startling degree of cruelty and callousness as part of the package. Because it causes so much harm to women and girls, these victims must be ignored completely, or portrayed as somehow deserving of that harm, because, lo and behold they’re actually bigoted, privileged oppressors. In order for this delusional justification and vilification to be maintained, they can not be humanized, or given any sympathy.
One of the great tragedies of this whole disaster is that these women and girls are forced to turn to right wingers for sympathy and support. Who can blame them? Never mind that the Right is going to use their victimization to push back against the recent, broader gains for LGB rights (thanks Trans forced-teaming!), and that this sympathy and support, however genuine and heartfelt, will not blunt their general, patriarchal, anti-woman stance. When you’re hurt and bleeding, do you ask after your rescuer’s politics? To me, as someone who has tended to lean leftward for as long as I’ve been aware of larger, political issues, this feels like a huge betrayal, a triumph of tribalism over truth, of reflex over reason. Maybe it’s always been this way and I’m just waking up from a complacent naivetey, and that it’s taken the blatant extremism of trans activism and gender ideology to prod me to awareness. Welcome to the real world.
And another tragedy coming from all of this is pointed out by Iknklast in the “How dare women push back” thread:
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2024/how-dare-women-push-back/#comment-3059337
The world is burning down and we don’t have time for this shit.
In the same category as #5 The Sexual Abuse link I’d like to add an emotional abuse link, particularly as regards to social shaming or bullying. It’s not only SA survivors who find themselves desperately attracted to the idea of “starting over.” The present state of technology has I think affected this.
In previous decades, children, adolescents, and young adults who felt rejected by their peers often dreamt of escaping scorn or ridicule by beginning again in some other environment. A new set of friends, a new school, a new town could provide them with a fresh start where they could escape whatever stigma they were under. Status is a strong human drive.
But the ubiquitous presence of social media and an internet which never forgets means that the option is less available — it’s going to be much more difficult to break free of negative labeling by traveling. It’s going to be easier to keep thinking that yes, you really are a loser. Kids feel increasingly trapped by their past.
The culture now provides the emotionally damaged an attractive new option. No, you’re not a loser — you’ve just been hiding your true, very different self, one which is authentic and comfortable. Stay where you are, but start over as a new gender. Because there’s no wrong way to be a trans girl or trans boy, you don’t have to change a thing about you. Your peers are now obligated to celebrate you, and almost immediately you find you’ve got new friends and even a support group.
The greater the emotional abuse, the more profound the relief and the more intense the self-identification.
Acolyte of Sagan, #11:
Sadly, sex offences do not imply convictions and prison sentences; the judicial system is not reliable and many male offenders get away scot-free. As a result, it’s possible that TIMs have a higher conviction rate without actually being more likely to commit sex offenses.
There could also be other demographical elements at play. For instance, males and TIMs don’t necessarily have the same age distribution (if we consider only adults, I would suppose that TIMs tend to be younger than males as a whole), and age affects rates of rape. So a lower proportion of TIM seniors could also be an explanation to the difference in figures.
I’m not saying that TIMs don’t pose more of a threat to women than the male superset, or that we should disregard that possibility. It’s just that prison figures aren’t much help in figuring out whether it’s the case or not. I haven’t looked into this topic very much, but it seems like information is scarce, unfortunately.
Ophelia Benson # 12:
A few female acquaintances of mine have speculated darkly on why Verso Books’ largely male execs are pushing the “sex work is empowering and socialist” line so hard.
Oh, heck, I forgot to mention this. Remember when the Verso blog infamously referred to Native American women who had been involuntarily sterilised as “womb carriers”?
https://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2022/06/native-womb-carriers.html