It’s almost as unfathomable as putting forth a candidate who is openly stupid, evil, and cruel.
Committing your party to promulgating an ideology that is so obviously based on lies is not a winning strategy. It gives your opponents a weapon that they can use against you, and for which you have no honest response. Unless and until left-leaning parties realize that trans “rights” are not in the least progressive, they open themselves up to well deserved criticism for propping up dangerous, misogynist, bullshit. For the right, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Consider the abortion issue. Using “women” and “girls” when discussing abortion is associated with significantly greater support across party lines. To use Genderists’ dehumanizing language despite this demonstrates where their real priorities lie.
By the same token, knowingly pushing Genderist (or other generally divisive) policies, ideology, and rhetoric prioritizes support for those things over victory. That would be justifiable in a world where they don’t simultaneously claim that Trump is an existential threat. We’re asked to put some things aside and hold our noses to vote for candidates we may dislike, and Democratic politicians must do the same. If Trump truly be the threat they claim, then they would do so willingly. They don’t, which suggests that they don’t actually see Trump as the threat they portray him to be.
Here in OZ we have one party for, one party against. At the election next year, I will vote for the party that is for, not because I agree with that policy, but because electing the other mob would be akin to handing Australia over to Trump.
I’m 72 and have voted in every election since I was 18, and I have never been 100% in agreement with the policies of those who got my vote.
I’m also reminded of the JFK quote …ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
A few words from a far ranging speech when politics was about who could make the country, and the world, a better place. A time when safety nets, social security, universal healthcare, workplace health and safety, decent wages, women’s rights, and more were the agenda of the times. The mood was one of joint success, shared rewards.
How it happened, I am not 100% sure, but I do know that Murdoch, the Chicago School, and their fellow travelers had a large hand to play.
Now, we have moved to a time where we ask not who can protect me from harm, but who can do most harm to those I despise.
Rev, I’m not sure that’s true. I do think the issue is not one that cost them the election; there are too many other things going on. But Trump’s campaign was hitting the trans issue hard in the last week or so; ads that said the Dems want men to play on women’s sports teams were frequent.
I wonder what would have happened to trans if they stayed away from the sports issue? Suddenly they’ve got the visibility they claim to want…and it’s pissing people off to see women playing against men…and being told to shut up if they complain.
Sports is too visible, too prominent, and too important to too many people for the trans issue to go into it quietly. They did at first, but now they’re moving into much better known and more popular sports.
That being said, I was not happy to see that our abortion amendment was about ‘patients’ and ‘people’ and women were never mentioned once. That issue failed. The one to enshrine an anti-abortion clause in our constitution passed.
…knowingly pushing Genderist (or other generally divisive) policies, ideology, and rhetoric prioritizes support for those things over victory.
The bolded part is the part I don’t get, and is the core ingredient of the dictum I’ve noted here on a number of occasions: “Every organization that embraces trans ideology turns to shit.” How is it that these institutions (or at least some sufficiently powerful, decision-making fraction of them) have been able to so completely delude themselves that genderism is in any way progressive, and are willing to maintain that belief in light of the manifest harms to women, children, lesbians and gays, (whom one would expect to be the normal beneficiaries of progressive attention). They can’t not know that these harms are happening.
Depending on their degree of support for the trans “rights” that are causing these harms, they have to discount, downplay, or ignore them. They also now have a vested interest in getting others to do the same, whether it be through (mis)information, or actual enforcement. This deliberate institutional suppression and disregard for the injury and distress caused by their support of trans “rights” will often run counter to the organization’s original mandate and reason for being. It inevitably results in a bewildering, Kafkaesque “opposite world” of inherently contradictory and antithetical consequences for the “allies'” own operations. We end up with self-censoring news media failing to report fully and honestly about gender issues; prison systems offering incarcerated male sexual predators more female victims. Health systems eroding the clarity and accuracy of communications by removing the word “women” from bulletins nominally meant to alert women of health risks; sports federations forcing women and girls to play alongside and against men, thereby risking injury and disability; rape crisis centers refusing to offer exclusively female care or spaces; organizations originally established to win and protect the rights of gays and lesbians which have dropped same-sex attraction in favour of enforcing a homophobic same gender attraction based agenda. All of these end points are perverse inversions of the original, normal functions of these bodies. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. TWAW.
Again, I return to my real question. I can almost see what the gender zealots within these bodies and agencies get in return for essentially destroying the credibility and reputation of the organizations they’ve shackled to the cause of trans “rights”: woke cookies and the happy glow of militant self- righteousness in fighting for a Good Cause. I imagine that people have betrayed more for much less than that. But what’s in it for the captured and subservient institutions themselves? What’s the payoff? Why do they let this happen in the first place? Why do they let it continue, once the price being paid (by both the institutions and the innocent victims they’re supposed to ignore) becomes clearer? How far will sunk cost fallacy take you away from what you’re supposed to be doing before you finally admit the costs are truly sunk? How does an organization benefit from having its purpose turned around 180 degrees to make it go backwards? Who outside of trans activism (and the trans medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex), actually benefits from associating themselves with this cause?
Without Trump, I’m not sure I’d have really picked up on the gender stuff.
Oh, not in any direct way. But those years of the Trumpsters glibly telling blatant fucking lies in every press conference, every speech, they sensitized me. And then I saw the genderists lying like that, so glib and blatant and utterly indifferent to how obvious the lies were, and I couldn’t UNsee it.
YNnB: As to why organizations (and politicians, and celebrities, and and and …) continue to support the Genderist project in the face of all the evidence that it’s harmful in general, harmful to women, homosexuals, children, and the mentally impaired, and harmful even to their own interests, I’ve been thinking that it’s probably a similar mechanism to how ESG has gotten such a stranglehold on corporate behavior in recent years. The capital investments available for those who meet ESG requirements are tempting, and the requirements themselves seem minor if you don’t think them through very far. For companies with business models that require large upfront infusions of capital to fund financially risky projects, such as film and video game makers, ESG monies can represent enough to approach something like financial security.
The problem is that ESG requirements actually aren’t trivial. They have a deleterious effect on a company’s market performance, both because of compromised product quality that serves something other than customer demand and because of change to internal structure that make responding to customer desires more arduous. All that’s left to them when a product fails to perform as it should is to rely ever more heavily on capital gotten from maximizing ESG scores. In the end, such companies are left entirely beholden to those entities who determine ESG metrics, producing substandard goods (as instructed by their masters) for dissatisfied consumers.
That sounds an awful lot like a command economy to me.
I mean, how often have you wondered why companies keep making hyper-woke stuff despite general consumer hostility toward that kind of thing? You’d think that corporations, being primarily concerned with profit, would prioritize that and not keep making shit that people aren’t buying. You’d think that politicians, being primarily concerned with the maintenance of their own power, would prioritize that and not keep supporting policy agendas that actively turn off and demoralize the very voters they’re nominally trying to court.
Of course there’s more to it, and of course any attempt to distill such a complicated question as why rightwing authoritarian populism has been so successful down to a single explanation is bound to be wrong, or at least a gross oversimplification. People are attracted to Trumpism for lots of different reasons, most of which can almost certainly not be directly blamed on the Left, including actual racism, sexism, homophobia etc.
Still, with the possible exception of Yascha Mounk, I have not been impressed by most of the leading voices on the topic of democratic breakdown when it comes to the excesses of wokeism. As much as I respect Timothy Snyder, I was disappointed to hear him dismiss concerns about campus free speech during the Q&A after one of his public talks (free speech is about the right to criticize the government, not about spewing bigoted hate etc). Anne Applebaum has put the word ”cancelled” in quotation marks and held up Putin’s claim that, according to Western orthodoxy, there are now (from memory) 36 genders as an example of Russian misrepresentation and hyperbole. We can argue about the exact number, but that’s hardly a substantial issue. I also seem to remember Levitsky and Ziblatt dismissing concerns about trans rights activism as a rightwing moral panic etc. People know there’s more to it than that, and people concerned for the future of democracy are not boosting their credibility by talking as if there was not (which is a shame, because I still think they have a lot of good things to say).
Just because the likes of Trump and Putin don’t have an honest atom in their bodies, they are obviously not going to refrain from telling the truth if it’s in their interest, and when liberals and lefties go out of their way to serve them such a spectacular own-goal as they have been doing in this case, they would have to be idiots not to accept the gift. Even Trump is not that stupid.
Just stop. My “clown” child is terrified. I’m terrified for him. Very soon you will not be writing about trans people in America. They will be hiding or worse.
Your wishes are coming true. Women are now protected by the party who understands what real women are. The cultural war is over. Your side won.
Last week. Pre-election in Washington, a state where trans support is rated quite high. Even so, note the sluggish police response, the nonchalant school official reactions, the lack of consequences for perpetrators. What do you think that looks like as maga takes full control of exectutive branch and dept of ed?
My fam is in Missouri. Yesterday the high school hallways swarming with kids excitedly donning maga gear yesterday. Its only day 3. What kind of legislation do you think MO legislators are already crafting? Escape to a blue state, maybe? What do you think Project 25 holds in store, nationally?
Theres a lot of hyperbole on the internet. This is not hyperbole. By the middle of next year your “trans agenda” fear mongering will be vindicated. Real women (not even using the c*s word anymore) will now be protected from the threat people like him posed.
O noes! Kids wore MAGA “gear”! How terrifying it must have been to see citizens openly expressing political affiliation. Not at all welcoming like hallways flooded with rainbows and signs decorated with barbed wire and slogans promising violence to those who dissent from the one true faith.
And yes, violence against children is bad, we’ll all agree. So you certainly won’t be selectively playing victim and ignoring incidents like sexual assault on girls in their school locker rooms by “girls” with penises, incidents that authorities tried to hide lest they reflect poorly on the most marginalized group ever. You wouldn’t be so crass, obviously.
But then … Harming children is bad. That includes surgical mutilation, hormonal alteration, and psychological manipulation.
It wasn’t because of the GC side that Trump got so many votes, but the TRA side. When parents see their daughters sharing changing rooms with boys, and their daughters losing in sports to boys who, in many cases, have hurt someone, when they see men in women’s prisons, that’s the problem. Not those that say it is a problem, but those who insist they be there.
In short, your side may not have won, but you were contributory to your own loss, much more so than those of us who know what a woman is. The reality is most of the country knows what a woman is. While I did vote for those who are trans-friendly, some people could not bring themselves to, not caring perhaps as much about issues like abortion and separation of church and state as I do, not minding if there is a dictator as much as I do.
Just stop. My “clown” child is terrified. I’m terrified for him.
What about trans-activism's propensity to encourage suicidal ideation in the group it' s claiming to "help" and "represent", along with the continuing narrative that the ENTIRE WORLD is out to get trans people? Does this not also fuel terror?
The refusal to believe that humans can change sex is not a denial of trans people's "right to exist", it's a refusal to believe what amounts to a religious belief. My denial of the reality of the Catholic claim of the Real Presence of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine used in their ritual of Communion is not a denial of Catholics "right to exist," or a denial of their basic human rights. It's me declining to share a religious belief, a decision to disagree with a claim about how the world works. They are free to Commune all they want, but I am not required to believe alongside them. They’re just eating bread and drinking wine. I am under no obligation to believe otherwise. In the past, the Catholic church’s use of state power to enforce its beliefs on others resulted in people being tortured and murdered for disbelief.
Similarly, I am not obligated to share your belief in the validity of “transness.” People can’t change sex. They can’t be “born in the wrong body.” Sex is binary and immutable, not a spectrum. I am not saying that the distress and discomfort felt by people suffering from dysphoria is not real. I am saying that the “trans” explanation is incorrect. It’s about as valid and useful as attributing psychological or medical issues to astrology or phrenology.
Self reporting is not always accurate. People suffering from anorexia are not actually obese. Their self-image is incorrect. To treat them as if they actually do need to lose weight would be dangerous and cruel. What if “transness” is same? If the source of the discomfort and distress that dysphoric children feel is not caused by “being born into the wrong body” or “misalignment” between the sexed body and a putative “gender identity” then maybe “gender affirming” “treatments” based on these potentially incorrect assumptions might be cruel and dangerous too. Most dysphoric children desist. Claiming they’re all “trans,” and pushing them onto a pathway of lifelong medicalization short-circuits any chance of desistance and self-acceptance they might have had. What if there are no “trans kids”? Not because they don’t exist, but because “transness” itself doesn’t? Protect “trans kids”? Yes. I’m for that. Protect them from trans ideology.
If you want to believe that humans can change sex, that’s fine, but I am under no obligation to believe that men are women, or that women are men. Neither is anyone else. Trans activism’s use of state power to promote and uphold this essentially religious belief upon others is not a good thing. The unlikeliness of this belief does not keep it from causing actual harm. Despite its metaphysical confusion and incoherence (not to mention its probable non-existence), its unwarranted and unethical adoption and enforcement by government agencies, and other organizations, has caused and continues to inflict real-world, terrible consequences for women and girls, among others. But don’t take my word for it. Ask the imprisoned women forced to accept as cell-mates male sexual predators who suddenly decide they’re “trans.” Ask women who are victims of sexual assault having to access a rape crisis centre that has no single sex, women only services because it recognizes “all women,” meaning that they believe that men can be women. Ask the women and girls cheated of sports championships or team spots by males because the governing bodies of their sports have decided to be “inclusive.” Ask the students forced to attend classes taught by a male teacher wearing grotesque, fetishistic, prosthetic breasts. Protest or resistance to any of these intrusions is punished and covered up. The intrusions themselves are officially protected and sanctioned. We are told that the real victims in all of this are the men pretending to be women. Just another lie we’re supposed to swallow and parrot, all in the name of “inclusion” and “being kind.” No, it’s not the Inquisition, but I have no doubt whatsoever that, given the opportunity, some trans activists would eagerly embrace such power, and exercise it as ruthlessly. The ability to dismiss the suffering of others is already there, ready to play on bigger fields with more powerful tools. Loss or removal of their current power would be a good thing. It would not be a loss or rollback of the “rights” of a “victimized and marginalized group”, but the long-overdue correction of an unaccountable, back-room, under-the-table, over-reaching power-grab which gender ideology shouldn’t have been given in the first place.
Very soon you will not be writing about trans people in America. They will be hiding or worse.
And your evidence for this is what? Losing unwarranted power and influence is not like being hunted down and imprisoned. No longer having the whip hand (see above) might feel like persecution, but it’s not martyrdom or genocide by any stretch of the imagination. Don’t go looking for your “trans” Ann Frank just yet. Nobody is coming to get you.
The most likely reason people “will not be writing about trans people in America” will be the same reason that nobody writes about “Scorpio people” or “Sagittarius people” or “Philoprogenitive people”; not because they don’t exist, but because, like astrology and phrenology, transness is bullshit.
If you and your child were to be honest about what is going on with the trans issue, you would be more able to resolve it in a way that protects him, or her in the long run. The transgender issue is an artifact of toxic masculinity. Those children who experience the sexism and bullying of not conforming to the gender expectations of their sex are now being shepherded into a belief that they have a gender identity that is different from their sex, and that the gender identity is what takes primacy in defining whether they are male or female; and that is a dangerous social lie that has taken hold.
Rather than resolving the identity issue, the transgender movement exacerbates it because it affirms that male superior roles are “natural,” while female subservient roles are also natural. We should instead be affirming that males with femimine personae are still males, and that females with masculine personae are yet females. But now we are swimming against a tidal wave of gender confusion with the belief in gender identity. To question it in any way is considered bigotry, and so few people want to be thought of as bigoted (except for the redhatted uglies, of course) that they don’t look at this issue with any sort of skepticism.
I’m sure that you honestly believe that your child is trans and needs your protection as such. But this belief is a result of a social phenomenon that actively puts women at risk of violence, preventing women from having safe private spaces away from males and especially when women are vulnerable. There are men who are keenly aware of the social stigma of questioning trans identities, and so they use this to claim they are trans in order to access women’s private spaces. In clamoring to ensure that men who identify as women are safe from men who get freaked out about such things, society has ensured that women will be cornered in locker rooms, in restrooms, in homeless shelters, in rape crisis centers, and other refuges women have fought for in order to have respite from the dangers of male dominance.
Protect your child, yes, but protect him or her by helping them resolve their sexual identity in a way that affirms rather than denies their true nature. There’s confusion among adults in this issue, not helped by the stigma attached to those who are trying to right it. IImagine how it is for children, who are trying to figure out gender even in the best of circumstances.
Did you stop for a minute to really think about what exactly “trans” IS? There’s no question that you love your child. Isn’t that all the more reason to look long and hard at what’s going on with your child, no matter how frightening it may seem to look directly at it?
I’ll tell you what trans is NOT: it is not some innate state of being. “Being trans” is not like being gay, which is inborn. “Transness” is not something anyone is born with. Your child was not born “trans” and your child is not fated to “be trans” for the rest of their days. Transness is an idea in people’s heads, and it’s one that causes very real emotional distress. But it is nevertheless still just an idea in people’s heads. (Gayness is not. Gayness can be materially measured and studied via numerous methods.)
There have never been people anytime in history who exhibit the symptoms that young “trans people” have begun exhibiting in our current culture, right after social media came to prominence. You can prove this to yourself by simply looking at your own high school yearbook. Anyone over age 40 can do the same. This isn’t because some vast subset of the human population has up until practically yesterday suffered and died in some kind of transgender closet, with all of those deaths being somehow magically erased from any and all logs of history. It’s because until the idea that it’s possible to have been “born in the wrong body” was planted in people’s minds and then advertised 24/7 on social media, virtually nobody thought to be distressed about it before. That’s what’s called a social contagion.
Whatever your child is experiencing, they are experiencing it entirely because of ideas they were exposed to in their cultural environment. (I say “they” so as not to offend, but it sounds like you have a daughter who is in denial about her sex, because she is confused about the concept of sex, because a subculture has emerged on the Internet whose adherents set out to make everyone confused about the concept of sex. And because she is in distress about the sexist social ideas that are laden on women and girls by our sexist society.)
There are no trans kids. Only kids confused about sex. Read this essay about it, if you’re interested.
Your wishes are coming true. Women are now protected by the party who understands what real women are. The cultural war is over. Your side won.
What “side” is this, I wonder? To the extent of my awareness most commenters here are quite far from being fond of Trump or of the right’s attitude towards gender. I for one certainly did not wish for this. I really don’t trust that Republicans will protect women. No, I’m not convinced that they understand what real women are – oh sure, they may be more inclined to root the category of “women” in biology, but to most anyone sufficiently far on the right, this comes bundled with a set of completely preposterous assumptions about what it implies. In this prejudiced optic, women are not simply adult human females – they are housewives, subservient creatures, breeders. They are inferior on all counts and, in order to live properly, must place themselves under the care and rule of husbands. If they are assaulted, it is their own fault for being dissolute and tempting the men – just as they did from the start, getting Him kicked out of the Hortus Deliciarum and bringing sin unto mankind. I am not unaware that by pointing out these views I might upset moderates who do not uphold them, but the truth is this sort of nonsense enjoys a huge traction within right-wing politics. And that is most definitely NOT understanding what women are.
Therefore, you will understand that I don’t think “the cultural war is over” – I’m inclined to believe that it’s getting more intense! And “my side” is quite far from having won.
Let us be clear here: for an extremely long amount of time, mankind has held this completely crazy belief that there exist immense innate cognitive differences in humans depending on sex. That’s not true! The differences that stand up to scrutiny are rather small, too much so to actually be of much use in understanding people. Even for fairly consistent distinctions (such as the sex an individual will be attracted to), you do get notable variation. And it’s quite likely that, with better scrutiny, we’d find these differences to be even smaller! The issue is, sexism affects virtually everyone’s life, experiences, and character. There’s so much stuff we ought to throw out the window – we’ve (kind of) tackled a few big things, such as voting rights, but unfairness still abounds, be it in judicial treatment of rape or in the color of babies’ clothes. As much as we like to pretend that we aren’t horrifyingly prejudiced, we are. Even little details show how much we’re willing to accept this nonsense: why do we tolerate these little bathroom signs with pants for men and dresses for women? Somehow, go figure why, people don’t see those for the terrible thing they are! If you start looking, you’ll notice that everywhere, everywhen, our society is chock-full of misogyny and double standards. To get rid of all this junk would require a thorough purge, a great effort indeed. We’d have to work hard to change our attitudes and cleanse ourselves of all these biases nipping at the back of our minds. We’d have to call out all of these sexist demarcations and drop them once and for all. We’d have to overcome all the individuals, the churches, the corporations that are profiting from it, and fundamentally alter society.
Now, who wants to do that? Mental restructuring is difficult and inconvenient. Changing society is worse in both regards. If only we had some comfortable cop-out, which allowed us to feel better about ourselves without having a real reform… I think you can see where I’m going with this. We pretend that sexist stereotypes are actually innate “gender identities” which are unrelated to sex. Sure, the concept might not make a lot of sense, but it fits well within our current system, which we’ve been raised into and haven’t bothered to properly question! Of course, the majority of people are “cis” and have gender identities aligned with their sexes, and of course those who have un-aligned gender identities often need to fix that through surgery, but still, it’s completely unrelated to sex. We get to think that we’re not actually judging and organizing people depending on their sex by externalizing all of our prejudice into a new construct and redirecting it a bit. It’s like one of those so-called perpetual motion machines that simply shuffle energy around without creating anything new.
All in all, gender identity is a convenient way to justify conformity to sexist stereotypes and to encapsulate non-conformity. I can appreciate that it might have some positive effects by helping to normalize atypical behaviors, but ultimately I feel that it really misses the point. You will understand that I don’t ascribe evil intentions to those who believe in gender identity, quite the contrary. As I said, I think it stems from a discontent with our screwed-up social order, combined alas with the trap of convenience – once you’re involved deeply enough in something, you’ll defend it even if it makes no sense. I don’t think I need to tell you what the consequences are in this case.
I’m not convinced that they understand what real women are – oh sure, they may be more inclined to root the category of “women” in biology, but to most anyone sufficiently far on the right, this comes bundled with a set of completely preposterous assumptions about what it implies. In this prejudiced optic, women are not simply adult human females – they are housewives, subservient creatures, breeders. They are inferior on all counts and, in order to live properly, must place themselves under the care and rule of husbands.
Exactly. Great summation. And that is why I think KJK is really off base with her embrace of the ridiculous worldview of the far right. Getting men out of women’s bathrooms and other spaces is to be desired, but not at the cost of getting women back into the restricted and repressive existence we once knew. I am old enough to have grown up on the cusp of the changes, and I don’t want to go back. Abortion wasn’t legal many places when I was born. Contraceptives weren’t legal many places. And worse…married women could find it difficult to open checking accounts, couldn’t likely get a loan without their husband co-signing, and in some places might not be able to purchase and own property. It wasn’t as bad, perhaps, as in Saudi Arabia, but it was bad. Housewives were addicted to Valium and booze because it was so awful. There was no such thing as no-fault divorce. Colleges could still turn you down for being a married woman. And girls were kicked out of high school when they got pregnant – the very time they are most in need of continuing their education so they can make enough to raise the kid. I was there…I saw girls leave my high school, the hushes and whispers that followed them. One of them came back after the baby; she was treated with derision…and, of course, the boys vied with each other for who could get her…whatever they wanted.
This is what Trump voters want; this is what they voted for. That’s why those GC feminists who embraced the right are going to find themselves horrified probably every day. They don’t see clearly enough to realize that Trump and his ilk aren’t about protecting women; they’re about repressing them.
iknklast: I think the idea they have is that by joining with the Republicans, they then constitute a proportion of Republicans, and as Republicans, they can have a voice in the direction that the party goes. Now, the same thing could be said of being part of the Democrats, and the ultimate decision fulcrum is which party someone bets is more motile. If someone were to think that the Dems aren’t likely to be able to pull back from the woke precipice, then it wouldn’t be entirely irrational to try to effect change from within the Reps, just as someone else might try to do the same from within the Dems.
It’s almost as unfathomable as putting forth a candidate who is openly stupid, evil, and cruel.
Committing your party to promulgating an ideology that is so obviously based on lies is not a winning strategy. It gives your opponents a weapon that they can use against you, and for which you have no honest response. Unless and until left-leaning parties realize that trans “rights” are not in the least progressive, they open themselves up to well deserved criticism for propping up dangerous, misogynist, bullshit. For the right, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Actions reveal real beliefs and values.
Consider the abortion issue. Using “women” and “girls” when discussing abortion is associated with significantly greater support across party lines. To use Genderists’ dehumanizing language despite this demonstrates where their real priorities lie.
By the same token, knowingly pushing Genderist (or other generally divisive) policies, ideology, and rhetoric prioritizes support for those things over victory. That would be justifiable in a world where they don’t simultaneously claim that Trump is an existential threat. We’re asked to put some things aside and hold our noses to vote for candidates we may dislike, and Democratic politicians must do the same. If Trump truly be the threat they claim, then they would do so willingly. They don’t, which suggests that they don’t actually see Trump as the threat they portray him to be.
How many votes did the Dems’ support of trans people cost them?
Probably not many.
Here in OZ we have one party for, one party against. At the election next year, I will vote for the party that is for, not because I agree with that policy, but because electing the other mob would be akin to handing Australia over to Trump.
I’m 72 and have voted in every election since I was 18, and I have never been 100% in agreement with the policies of those who got my vote.
I’m also reminded of the JFK quote …ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.
A few words from a far ranging speech when politics was about who could make the country, and the world, a better place. A time when safety nets, social security, universal healthcare, workplace health and safety, decent wages, women’s rights, and more were the agenda of the times. The mood was one of joint success, shared rewards.
How it happened, I am not 100% sure, but I do know that Murdoch, the Chicago School, and their fellow travelers had a large hand to play.
Now, we have moved to a time where we ask not who can protect me from harm, but who can do most harm to those I despise.
Rev, I’m not sure that’s true. I do think the issue is not one that cost them the election; there are too many other things going on. But Trump’s campaign was hitting the trans issue hard in the last week or so; ads that said the Dems want men to play on women’s sports teams were frequent.
I wonder what would have happened to trans if they stayed away from the sports issue? Suddenly they’ve got the visibility they claim to want…and it’s pissing people off to see women playing against men…and being told to shut up if they complain.
Sports is too visible, too prominent, and too important to too many people for the trans issue to go into it quietly. They did at first, but now they’re moving into much better known and more popular sports.
That being said, I was not happy to see that our abortion amendment was about ‘patients’ and ‘people’ and women were never mentioned once. That issue failed. The one to enshrine an anti-abortion clause in our constitution passed.
Wasn’t that second guy fired and criminally charged?
Only when he got caught stealing women’s bags at airports a second time. The first time was just a mistake [oopsie, head tilt].
The bolded part is the part I don’t get, and is the core ingredient of the dictum I’ve noted here on a number of occasions: “Every organization that embraces trans ideology turns to shit.” How is it that these institutions (or at least some sufficiently powerful, decision-making fraction of them) have been able to so completely delude themselves that genderism is in any way progressive, and are willing to maintain that belief in light of the manifest harms to women, children, lesbians and gays, (whom one would expect to be the normal beneficiaries of progressive attention). They can’t not know that these harms are happening.
Depending on their degree of support for the trans “rights” that are causing these harms, they have to discount, downplay, or ignore them. They also now have a vested interest in getting others to do the same, whether it be through (mis)information, or actual enforcement. This deliberate institutional suppression and disregard for the injury and distress caused by their support of trans “rights” will often run counter to the organization’s original mandate and reason for being. It inevitably results in a bewildering, Kafkaesque “opposite world” of inherently contradictory and antithetical consequences for the “allies'” own operations. We end up with self-censoring news media failing to report fully and honestly about gender issues; prison systems offering incarcerated male sexual predators more female victims. Health systems eroding the clarity and accuracy of communications by removing the word “women” from bulletins nominally meant to alert women of health risks; sports federations forcing women and girls to play alongside and against men, thereby risking injury and disability; rape crisis centers refusing to offer exclusively female care or spaces; organizations originally established to win and protect the rights of gays and lesbians which have dropped same-sex attraction in favour of enforcing a homophobic same gender attraction based agenda. All of these end points are perverse inversions of the original, normal functions of these bodies. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. TWAW.
Again, I return to my real question. I can almost see what the gender zealots within these bodies and agencies get in return for essentially destroying the credibility and reputation of the organizations they’ve shackled to the cause of trans “rights”: woke cookies and the happy glow of militant self- righteousness in fighting for a Good Cause. I imagine that people have betrayed more for much less than that. But what’s in it for the captured and subservient institutions themselves? What’s the payoff? Why do they let this happen in the first place? Why do they let it continue, once the price being paid (by both the institutions and the innocent victims they’re supposed to ignore) becomes clearer? How far will sunk cost fallacy take you away from what you’re supposed to be doing before you finally admit the costs are truly sunk? How does an organization benefit from having its purpose turned around 180 degrees to make it go backwards? Who outside of trans activism (and the trans medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex), actually benefits from associating themselves with this cause?
Without Trump, I’m not sure I’d have really picked up on the gender stuff.
Oh, not in any direct way. But those years of the Trumpsters glibly telling blatant fucking lies in every press conference, every speech, they sensitized me. And then I saw the genderists lying like that, so glib and blatant and utterly indifferent to how obvious the lies were, and I couldn’t UNsee it.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Historians […]
YNnB: As to why organizations (and politicians, and celebrities, and and and …) continue to support the Genderist project in the face of all the evidence that it’s harmful in general, harmful to women, homosexuals, children, and the mentally impaired, and harmful even to their own interests, I’ve been thinking that it’s probably a similar mechanism to how ESG has gotten such a stranglehold on corporate behavior in recent years. The capital investments available for those who meet ESG requirements are tempting, and the requirements themselves seem minor if you don’t think them through very far. For companies with business models that require large upfront infusions of capital to fund financially risky projects, such as film and video game makers, ESG monies can represent enough to approach something like financial security.
The problem is that ESG requirements actually aren’t trivial. They have a deleterious effect on a company’s market performance, both because of compromised product quality that serves something other than customer demand and because of change to internal structure that make responding to customer desires more arduous. All that’s left to them when a product fails to perform as it should is to rely ever more heavily on capital gotten from maximizing ESG scores. In the end, such companies are left entirely beholden to those entities who determine ESG metrics, producing substandard goods (as instructed by their masters) for dissatisfied consumers.
That sounds an awful lot like a command economy to me.
I mean, how often have you wondered why companies keep making hyper-woke stuff despite general consumer hostility toward that kind of thing? You’d think that corporations, being primarily concerned with profit, would prioritize that and not keep making shit that people aren’t buying. You’d think that politicians, being primarily concerned with the maintenance of their own power, would prioritize that and not keep supporting policy agendas that actively turn off and demoralize the very voters they’re nominally trying to court.
Of course there’s more to it, and of course any attempt to distill such a complicated question as why rightwing authoritarian populism has been so successful down to a single explanation is bound to be wrong, or at least a gross oversimplification. People are attracted to Trumpism for lots of different reasons, most of which can almost certainly not be directly blamed on the Left, including actual racism, sexism, homophobia etc.
Still, with the possible exception of Yascha Mounk, I have not been impressed by most of the leading voices on the topic of democratic breakdown when it comes to the excesses of wokeism. As much as I respect Timothy Snyder, I was disappointed to hear him dismiss concerns about campus free speech during the Q&A after one of his public talks (free speech is about the right to criticize the government, not about spewing bigoted hate etc). Anne Applebaum has put the word ”cancelled” in quotation marks and held up Putin’s claim that, according to Western orthodoxy, there are now (from memory) 36 genders as an example of Russian misrepresentation and hyperbole. We can argue about the exact number, but that’s hardly a substantial issue. I also seem to remember Levitsky and Ziblatt dismissing concerns about trans rights activism as a rightwing moral panic etc. People know there’s more to it than that, and people concerned for the future of democracy are not boosting their credibility by talking as if there was not (which is a shame, because I still think they have a lot of good things to say).
Just because the likes of Trump and Putin don’t have an honest atom in their bodies, they are obviously not going to refrain from telling the truth if it’s in their interest, and when liberals and lefties go out of their way to serve them such a spectacular own-goal as they have been doing in this case, they would have to be idiots not to accept the gift. Even Trump is not that stupid.
Just stop. My “clown” child is terrified. I’m terrified for him. Very soon you will not be writing about trans people in America. They will be hiding or worse.
Your wishes are coming true. Women are now protected by the party who understands what real women are. The cultural war is over. Your side won.
Catastrophize much?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/crime/article295069444.html
Last week. Pre-election in Washington, a state where trans support is rated quite high. Even so, note the sluggish police response, the nonchalant school official reactions, the lack of consequences for perpetrators. What do you think that looks like as maga takes full control of exectutive branch and dept of ed?
My fam is in Missouri. Yesterday the high school hallways swarming with kids excitedly donning maga gear yesterday. Its only day 3. What kind of legislation do you think MO legislators are already crafting? Escape to a blue state, maybe? What do you think Project 25 holds in store, nationally?
Theres a lot of hyperbole on the internet. This is not hyperbole. By the middle of next year your “trans agenda” fear mongering will be vindicated. Real women (not even using the c*s word anymore) will now be protected from the threat people like him posed.
Again, you won.
O noes! Kids wore MAGA “gear”! How terrifying it must have been to see citizens openly expressing political affiliation. Not at all welcoming like hallways flooded with rainbows and signs decorated with barbed wire and slogans promising violence to those who dissent from the one true faith.
And yes, violence against children is bad, we’ll all agree. So you certainly won’t be selectively playing victim and ignoring incidents like sexual assault on girls in their school locker rooms by “girls” with penises, incidents that authorities tried to hide lest they reflect poorly on the most marginalized group ever. You wouldn’t be so crass, obviously.
But then … Harming children is bad. That includes surgical mutilation, hormonal alteration, and psychological manipulation.
DARVO doesn’t work around here.
It wasn’t because of the GC side that Trump got so many votes, but the TRA side. When parents see their daughters sharing changing rooms with boys, and their daughters losing in sports to boys who, in many cases, have hurt someone, when they see men in women’s prisons, that’s the problem. Not those that say it is a problem, but those who insist they be there.
In short, your side may not have won, but you were contributory to your own loss, much more so than those of us who know what a woman is. The reality is most of the country knows what a woman is. While I did vote for those who are trans-friendly, some people could not bring themselves to, not caring perhaps as much about issues like abortion and separation of church and state as I do, not minding if there is a dictator as much as I do.
What about trans-activism's propensity to encourage suicidal ideation in the group it' s claiming to "help" and "represent", along with the continuing narrative that the ENTIRE WORLD is out to get trans people? Does this not also fuel terror?
The refusal to believe that humans can change sex is not a denial of trans people's "right to exist", it's a refusal to believe what amounts to a religious belief. My denial of the reality of the Catholic claim of the Real Presence of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine used in their ritual of Communion is not a denial of Catholics "right to exist," or a denial of their basic human rights. It's me declining to share a religious belief, a decision to disagree with a claim about how the world works. They are free to Commune all they want, but I am not required to believe alongside them. They’re just eating bread and drinking wine. I am under no obligation to believe otherwise. In the past, the Catholic church’s use of state power to enforce its beliefs on others resulted in people being tortured and murdered for disbelief.
Similarly, I am not obligated to share your belief in the validity of “transness.” People can’t change sex. They can’t be “born in the wrong body.” Sex is binary and immutable, not a spectrum. I am not saying that the distress and discomfort felt by people suffering from dysphoria is not real. I am saying that the “trans” explanation is incorrect. It’s about as valid and useful as attributing psychological or medical issues to astrology or phrenology.
Self reporting is not always accurate. People suffering from anorexia are not actually obese. Their self-image is incorrect. To treat them as if they actually do need to lose weight would be dangerous and cruel. What if “transness” is same? If the source of the discomfort and distress that dysphoric children feel is not caused by “being born into the wrong body” or “misalignment” between the sexed body and a putative “gender identity” then maybe “gender affirming” “treatments” based on these potentially incorrect assumptions might be cruel and dangerous too. Most dysphoric children desist. Claiming they’re all “trans,” and pushing them onto a pathway of lifelong medicalization short-circuits any chance of desistance and self-acceptance they might have had. What if there are no “trans kids”? Not because they don’t exist, but because “transness” itself doesn’t? Protect “trans kids”? Yes. I’m for that. Protect them from trans ideology.
If you want to believe that humans can change sex, that’s fine, but I am under no obligation to believe that men are women, or that women are men. Neither is anyone else. Trans activism’s use of state power to promote and uphold this essentially religious belief upon others is not a good thing. The unlikeliness of this belief does not keep it from causing actual harm. Despite its metaphysical confusion and incoherence (not to mention its probable non-existence), its unwarranted and unethical adoption and enforcement by government agencies, and other organizations, has caused and continues to inflict real-world, terrible consequences for women and girls, among others. But don’t take my word for it. Ask the imprisoned women forced to accept as cell-mates male sexual predators who suddenly decide they’re “trans.” Ask women who are victims of sexual assault having to access a rape crisis centre that has no single sex, women only services because it recognizes “all women,” meaning that they believe that men can be women. Ask the women and girls cheated of sports championships or team spots by males because the governing bodies of their sports have decided to be “inclusive.” Ask the students forced to attend classes taught by a male teacher wearing grotesque, fetishistic, prosthetic breasts. Protest or resistance to any of these intrusions is punished and covered up. The intrusions themselves are officially protected and sanctioned. We are told that the real victims in all of this are the men pretending to be women. Just another lie we’re supposed to swallow and parrot, all in the name of “inclusion” and “being kind.” No, it’s not the Inquisition, but I have no doubt whatsoever that, given the opportunity, some trans activists would eagerly embrace such power, and exercise it as ruthlessly. The ability to dismiss the suffering of others is already there, ready to play on bigger fields with more powerful tools. Loss or removal of their current power would be a good thing. It would not be a loss or rollback of the “rights” of a “victimized and marginalized group”, but the long-overdue correction of an unaccountable, back-room, under-the-table, over-reaching power-grab which gender ideology shouldn’t have been given in the first place.
And your evidence for this is what? Losing unwarranted power and influence is not like being hunted down and imprisoned. No longer having the whip hand (see above) might feel like persecution, but it’s not martyrdom or genocide by any stretch of the imagination. Don’t go looking for your “trans” Ann Frank just yet. Nobody is coming to get you.
The most likely reason people “will not be writing about trans people in America” will be the same reason that nobody writes about “Scorpio people” or “Sagittarius people” or “Philoprogenitive people”; not because they don’t exist, but because, like astrology and phrenology, transness is bullshit.
@Bevin
If you and your child were to be honest about what is going on with the trans issue, you would be more able to resolve it in a way that protects him, or her in the long run. The transgender issue is an artifact of toxic masculinity. Those children who experience the sexism and bullying of not conforming to the gender expectations of their sex are now being shepherded into a belief that they have a gender identity that is different from their sex, and that the gender identity is what takes primacy in defining whether they are male or female; and that is a dangerous social lie that has taken hold.
Rather than resolving the identity issue, the transgender movement exacerbates it because it affirms that male superior roles are “natural,” while female subservient roles are also natural. We should instead be affirming that males with femimine personae are still males, and that females with masculine personae are yet females. But now we are swimming against a tidal wave of gender confusion with the belief in gender identity. To question it in any way is considered bigotry, and so few people want to be thought of as bigoted (except for the redhatted uglies, of course) that they don’t look at this issue with any sort of skepticism.
I’m sure that you honestly believe that your child is trans and needs your protection as such. But this belief is a result of a social phenomenon that actively puts women at risk of violence, preventing women from having safe private spaces away from males and especially when women are vulnerable. There are men who are keenly aware of the social stigma of questioning trans identities, and so they use this to claim they are trans in order to access women’s private spaces. In clamoring to ensure that men who identify as women are safe from men who get freaked out about such things, society has ensured that women will be cornered in locker rooms, in restrooms, in homeless shelters, in rape crisis centers, and other refuges women have fought for in order to have respite from the dangers of male dominance.
Protect your child, yes, but protect him or her by helping them resolve their sexual identity in a way that affirms rather than denies their true nature. There’s confusion among adults in this issue, not helped by the stigma attached to those who are trying to right it. IImagine how it is for children, who are trying to figure out gender even in the best of circumstances.
[…] a comment by Mike Haubrich on Historians […]
Bevin,
Did you stop for a minute to really think about what exactly “trans” IS? There’s no question that you love your child. Isn’t that all the more reason to look long and hard at what’s going on with your child, no matter how frightening it may seem to look directly at it?
I’ll tell you what trans is NOT: it is not some innate state of being. “Being trans” is not like being gay, which is inborn. “Transness” is not something anyone is born with. Your child was not born “trans” and your child is not fated to “be trans” for the rest of their days. Transness is an idea in people’s heads, and it’s one that causes very real emotional distress. But it is nevertheless still just an idea in people’s heads. (Gayness is not. Gayness can be materially measured and studied via numerous methods.)
There have never been people anytime in history who exhibit the symptoms that young “trans people” have begun exhibiting in our current culture, right after social media came to prominence. You can prove this to yourself by simply looking at your own high school yearbook. Anyone over age 40 can do the same. This isn’t because some vast subset of the human population has up until practically yesterday suffered and died in some kind of transgender closet, with all of those deaths being somehow magically erased from any and all logs of history. It’s because until the idea that it’s possible to have been “born in the wrong body” was planted in people’s minds and then advertised 24/7 on social media, virtually nobody thought to be distressed about it before. That’s what’s called a social contagion.
Whatever your child is experiencing, they are experiencing it entirely because of ideas they were exposed to in their cultural environment. (I say “they” so as not to offend, but it sounds like you have a daughter who is in denial about her sex, because she is confused about the concept of sex, because a subculture has emerged on the Internet whose adherents set out to make everyone confused about the concept of sex. And because she is in distress about the sexist social ideas that are laden on women and girls by our sexist society.)
There are no trans kids. Only kids confused about sex. Read this essay about it, if you’re interested.
https://artymorty.substack.com/p/there-are-no-trans-kids-only-kids
Bevin:
What “side” is this, I wonder? To the extent of my awareness most commenters here are quite far from being fond of Trump or of the right’s attitude towards gender. I for one certainly did not wish for this. I really don’t trust that Republicans will protect women. No, I’m not convinced that they understand what real women are – oh sure, they may be more inclined to root the category of “women” in biology, but to most anyone sufficiently far on the right, this comes bundled with a set of completely preposterous assumptions about what it implies. In this prejudiced optic, women are not simply adult human females – they are housewives, subservient creatures, breeders. They are inferior on all counts and, in order to live properly, must place themselves under the care and rule of husbands. If they are assaulted, it is their own fault for being dissolute and tempting the men – just as they did from the start, getting Him kicked out of the Hortus Deliciarum and bringing sin unto mankind. I am not unaware that by pointing out these views I might upset moderates who do not uphold them, but the truth is this sort of nonsense enjoys a huge traction within right-wing politics. And that is most definitely NOT understanding what women are.
Therefore, you will understand that I don’t think “the cultural war is over” – I’m inclined to believe that it’s getting more intense! And “my side” is quite far from having won.
Let us be clear here: for an extremely long amount of time, mankind has held this completely crazy belief that there exist immense innate cognitive differences in humans depending on sex. That’s not true! The differences that stand up to scrutiny are rather small, too much so to actually be of much use in understanding people. Even for fairly consistent distinctions (such as the sex an individual will be attracted to), you do get notable variation. And it’s quite likely that, with better scrutiny, we’d find these differences to be even smaller! The issue is, sexism affects virtually everyone’s life, experiences, and character. There’s so much stuff we ought to throw out the window – we’ve (kind of) tackled a few big things, such as voting rights, but unfairness still abounds, be it in judicial treatment of rape or in the color of babies’ clothes. As much as we like to pretend that we aren’t horrifyingly prejudiced, we are. Even little details show how much we’re willing to accept this nonsense: why do we tolerate these little bathroom signs with pants for men and dresses for women? Somehow, go figure why, people don’t see those for the terrible thing they are! If you start looking, you’ll notice that everywhere, everywhen, our society is chock-full of misogyny and double standards. To get rid of all this junk would require a thorough purge, a great effort indeed. We’d have to work hard to change our attitudes and cleanse ourselves of all these biases nipping at the back of our minds. We’d have to call out all of these sexist demarcations and drop them once and for all. We’d have to overcome all the individuals, the churches, the corporations that are profiting from it, and fundamentally alter society.
Now, who wants to do that? Mental restructuring is difficult and inconvenient. Changing society is worse in both regards. If only we had some comfortable cop-out, which allowed us to feel better about ourselves without having a real reform… I think you can see where I’m going with this. We pretend that sexist stereotypes are actually innate “gender identities” which are unrelated to sex. Sure, the concept might not make a lot of sense, but it fits well within our current system, which we’ve been raised into and haven’t bothered to properly question! Of course, the majority of people are “cis” and have gender identities aligned with their sexes, and of course those who have un-aligned gender identities often need to fix that through surgery, but still, it’s completely unrelated to sex. We get to think that we’re not actually judging and organizing people depending on their sex by externalizing all of our prejudice into a new construct and redirecting it a bit. It’s like one of those so-called perpetual motion machines that simply shuffle energy around without creating anything new.
All in all, gender identity is a convenient way to justify conformity to sexist stereotypes and to encapsulate non-conformity. I can appreciate that it might have some positive effects by helping to normalize atypical behaviors, but ultimately I feel that it really misses the point. You will understand that I don’t ascribe evil intentions to those who believe in gender identity, quite the contrary. As I said, I think it stems from a discontent with our screwed-up social order, combined alas with the trap of convenience – once you’re involved deeply enough in something, you’ll defend it even if it makes no sense. I don’t think I need to tell you what the consequences are in this case.
Exactly. Great summation. And that is why I think KJK is really off base with her embrace of the ridiculous worldview of the far right. Getting men out of women’s bathrooms and other spaces is to be desired, but not at the cost of getting women back into the restricted and repressive existence we once knew. I am old enough to have grown up on the cusp of the changes, and I don’t want to go back. Abortion wasn’t legal many places when I was born. Contraceptives weren’t legal many places. And worse…married women could find it difficult to open checking accounts, couldn’t likely get a loan without their husband co-signing, and in some places might not be able to purchase and own property. It wasn’t as bad, perhaps, as in Saudi Arabia, but it was bad. Housewives were addicted to Valium and booze because it was so awful. There was no such thing as no-fault divorce. Colleges could still turn you down for being a married woman. And girls were kicked out of high school when they got pregnant – the very time they are most in need of continuing their education so they can make enough to raise the kid. I was there…I saw girls leave my high school, the hushes and whispers that followed them. One of them came back after the baby; she was treated with derision…and, of course, the boys vied with each other for who could get her…whatever they wanted.
This is what Trump voters want; this is what they voted for. That’s why those GC feminists who embraced the right are going to find themselves horrified probably every day. They don’t see clearly enough to realize that Trump and his ilk aren’t about protecting women; they’re about repressing them.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Historians […]
iknklast: I think the idea they have is that by joining with the Republicans, they then constitute a proportion of Republicans, and as Republicans, they can have a voice in the direction that the party goes. Now, the same thing could be said of being part of the Democrats, and the ultimate decision fulcrum is which party someone bets is more motile. If someone were to think that the Dems aren’t likely to be able to pull back from the woke precipice, then it wouldn’t be entirely irrational to try to effect change from within the Reps, just as someone else might try to do the same from within the Dems.