Guest post: They want to escape the chains of non-personhood
Originally a comment by maddog on Clinicians and parents are trying to make sense of it.
how parents and professionals should respond to children who express distress about their gender
Girls aren’t distressed about their gender. They are distressed about their sex. And why wouldn’t they be? Society teaches girls, from birth, that they are less-than, second class, subservient, and essentially worthless non-entities. Their only value is in their fuckability.
Being a sex object — not a person — for boys and men becomes more critical for girls at puberty, when the consequences of being female — the body’s ability to become pregnant — become acute. No wonder girls don’t want to be girls. Boys have freedom; girls are imprisoned. No wonder girls hate their breasts: palpable objects of sexualization and subjugation.
At puberty, the members of both sexes develop into adults capable of sexual reproduction. Girls suffer life-changing consequences of sex in a way that boys do not. No wonder girls would like to opt out.
Gender ideology purports to offer girls a chance to opt out of their subservient status. Unfortunately, the promise is hollow. There is no such thing as changing sex. It’s simply not on offer. Instead, what girls get is mutilation and permanent medicalization, and a lost opportunity to become a fully developed adult. It’s a fraud, false advertising.
But it’s utterly unsurprising that large numbers of girls fall for the false promises. They want to escape the chains of non-personhood. They want the freedom that is denied to girls and women. No shocker there.
And this no-nonsense post is the kind of thing that causes so many TRA-adjacent people to get so angry at us. I think that some of them really mean well, really care about women, and they hear us tell reality as it is, and it sounds so horrible — because it IS so horrible — that they get angry at us rather than at the situation. They say: “What?! Girls’ only value is in fuckability? What kind of horrible sexist are you?” Because they don’t want it to be that way. Guess what, we don’t want it to be that way, either, but unlike them, we don’t believe that it goes away if we cover our eyes and ears.
And among the false promises are that “puberty blockers are completely reversible” and that the surgeries aned hormone treatments can be reversed. I have seen comments from detransitioned girls lamenting that they cannot regain their breasts, or regain the pitch and timbre of their voices. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s a huge reason why we who oppose this crap don’t believe a damned thing that the proponents say.