Next phase
Your brain on gender ideology:
“Are you transgender?” Participating in a study for their public-health class, neither Alex nor Luna knew how to answer. Alex uses they/them pronouns and identifies as agender. They are also among a growing number of young people who have been raised in a gender-neutral manner: their parents did not refer to them as a boy or a girl until they were old enough to choose for themselves. Whatever genitals Alex was born with is not common knowledge. If you are agender and were never assigned a gender, does that make you transgender?
If you were raised by deranged parents, does that make you deranged or just tragically confused?
As for Luna, today she identifies as a woman, which aligns with the gender she was assigned at birth. But this is a recent development: Luna identified as a boy for as long as she can remember and, after coming out as trans, lived openly as one throughout her childhood and adolescence. As a woman who has detransitioned, she often feels that she has more in common with transgender women than with cisgender ones, whose gender identity corresponds to the gender they were assigned at birth. Although Luna doesn’t call herself transgender, she fears that answering ‘no’ to the study’s question means that her gender trajectory and experiences will be erased.
So Luna is so tragically under-educated that she thinks participating in a study is the same as an autobiography.
The difficulties Alex and Luna experienced might seem unusual. But many individuals find themselves unmoored from binary terms such as male and female, or cis and trans
Ah here we go. Phase 2. Trans is no longer the Hot New Thing that it’s treason and heresy to ignore. Trans is now your parents’ boring old politics and the new thing is to see “cis and trans” as evil binaries. Perfect.
These identities are not trivial. How people identify shapes not only their experiences of marginalization, but also their bodies.
For sure. If you identify as a rock then that shapes your body – you become a turnip.
Human experiences are inevitably richer than the categories we carve out for them. But finding the right concepts and language to describe their diversity is an essential part of the scientific endeavour. It helps researchers to capture the experiences of participants more accurately, enhances analytical clarity and contributes to people feeling included and respected.
That’s science!
FTFY.
How old is Alex? Has Alex gone through normal puberty, without drugs or surgery? If so, I’m guessing one could figure it out, though it seems like an odd way of putting it. (And if Alex went through any sort of schooling, or ever saw a doctor, Alex probably knew what sex Alex was, regardless of the efforts of Alex’s parents.)
The “whatever genitals Alex was born with is not common knowledge” part conflates identities with biological sexes, and that’s the most dangerous part.
It’s one thing for a young person to imagine in her own mind a suite of gender-role personas, like characters in a story, and then to declare which of these imaginary gender-role characters she has cast herself to play. So far, so foolish.
But to then cross over into declaring that these different characters have different biological sex characteristics… that’s where the irreversible harm comes in. Harm to herself, because she’s likely to develop psychological distress over the mismatch between her imaginary character’s body and her real-life body, and harm to everyone else, by promoting the erasure of women’s rights by undefining the words man, woman, male, and female.
I want to say to that writer, it’s you who’s impoverishing the human experience by turning the biological sexes into cardboard characters. Real life is a lot richer without all the hokey gender horseshit. As Julie Bindel said twenty years ago, “Think about a world inhabited just by transsexuals. It would look like the set of Grease.” Even the names gender roleplayers choose for themselves have a whiff of soap opera cheese to them: it’s a world of lissome, wispy Chloés and rugged, raspy Chases.
If Gender: Phase Two involves discovering that none of the characters you’ve created in your mind are three-dimensional enough to capture your true complexity, then Gender: Phase Three will be discovering that the whole exercise was a colossal waste of time and energy. If you’re lucky, you get to Phase Three with most of your body intact. But many won’t. And publications like Nature share the blame for that.
My head hurts from trying to parse whether “they” refers to Alex or to both Alex and Luna.
I can understand that “are you transgender” might be a tricky question to answer, especially in light of this bizarre category of “trans nonbinary”. I can also understand that the study might have questions that seek to understand people who have gone through transition in some form, and Luna might have relevant answers to those questions stemming from when she called herself a boy. But that’s a fault of the study, naively thinking that people who have gone through some version of transition consider themselves transgender, especially forever. Failing to provide this relevant information to a flawed study does not constitute “erasure” of Luna’s past, in any way.
Oh gawd I just saw that Florence Ashley is one of the authors. He’s one of the most extreme activists out there. It’s a joke that any organization takes him seriously. He was one of the chief architects of the attempted coup at the World Health Organization. A quick recap: the WHO convened a working group to develop a comprehensive global health policy around transgender. Ashley was part of the group, which consisted entirely of trans activist extremists. They tried to circumvent scrutiny and oversight to ram an extremist policy through, but a number of organizations (including LGBT Courage Coalition, which I’m involved with, and LGB Alliance Canada, which I lead) launched petitions and letters of complaint and succeeded in halting the working group, and getting Florence Ashley booted from it.
Mind boggling how so many people confuse science with science fiction. It can’t be sheer ignorance or lack of education, there has to be either a failure of common sense, or some kind of self imposed refusal to accept reality involved. It sure doesn’t look like mental health to me — quite the opposite. Are there people who grew up (sort of), never understanding the phrase “play time’s over” or never feeling the need to heed that directive? I realize the internet generally reflects a very distorted reality (particularly on this subject), but is there a whole generation — a high percentage of which who can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff? The universities aren’t helping either, with the ‘gender studies’ departments. Even some (who identify as) scientists and philosophers (yeah right) fall for this quasi-religious crapola.
Richer? How about weirder.
Never dreamt of in my philosophy, to be sure.
Truth.
We could even think further that if the ultimate expression of this was “sex reassignment” complete with sterilizations, then Elon really would have something to worry about. In a hundred years they’d all be extinct. How’s that for science fiction?
But many categories aren’t “experiences” and it impoverishes lives to assume they are.
“Loona is a 5’6” female. But saying that she’s 5’6” simply doesn’t capture her inner truth of experiencing the world as 5’7.” She always knew her assigned height was wrong — she knew it as long as she could remember. Loona felt more at home among girls of 5’7.” Yardsticks simply can’t measure that.”
This is circling the nub of the issue isn’t it?
What I think ‘we’ all want is a world in which your sex, sexuality, what you wear, and how you style yourself are unimportant. A world where we treat each other with respect and just get on with life in safety and security.
Where we differ is that the gender identity crowd are shouting let us do what we want and don’t you dare point out the emperor has no clothes – everything is just FINE. While the gender critical crowd are saying we live in an imperfect world in which women are badly treated and are often unsafe. For that reason sex matters as a way of ensuring safety and equal rights are respected. in the mean time people should be allowed to dress and express themselves as they wish, but you’re still the sex you are when certain matters are being considered. One day we hope to live in a world where this is less important.
A part of me suspects that some trans folk don’t want that perfect world because they get off on pushing the boundaries and others don’t want it because the current state of play makes them special (they would be mediocre otherwise). Others are truely deluding themselves that by asserting everything is fine it will be.
As long as women are teated like shit and preyed upon by a significant percentage of the male population, sex matters.
Yes, they are. Your sense of “identity” is trivial. For that matter, so is mine.
What’s not trivial is the effect the idiotic gender identity movement has had on society.
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My navel gazing is extremely significant you guys.
All navel gazing is special, all navel gazing shall have prizes.