Top of the roller coaster
Glinner is explaining to David Baddiel about peaking, and I saw this reply.
The bit about first you climb up believing all kinds of nonsense.
I never did actually believe it.
What did I do? Kept my mouth shut. Watched and waited. Avoided. Evaded. Bracketed. Ignored.
I guess to be more precise what I never did actually believe is that people are or can be the other sex, but I thought maybe possibly it could be that it’s to their benefit to pretend they can. I was far from passionately convinced even of that, but I thought it might be the case, and that I didn’t know much about it.
So I just kept quiet about it for several years. One specific occasion I remember is when Michelle Goldberg wrote a (very good) skeptical piece on the subject in The New Yorker and some people I was then friends with called her every name in the book. I thought they were wrong, but I wasn’t sure enough to disagree with them, so instead I just said nothing.
That was a million times easier to do then. The subject hadn’t devoured everything yet.
My break point happened several years ago, at the wedding reception of two (male) friends. Lovely time, but it was a shock to see a former lover of one of the grooms show up in sparkles, heels and carrying a bag. He had decided he was female, at the ripe age of 55. This was a guy I really liked, and I was absolutely unconvinced he was now a woman: six-foot-four, thin as a rail, deep New Yawker voice. Surgery was out of the question, given his health history. My husband and I sat down with him and chatted for about an hour. He was desperately unhappy with his inability to undergo the full monty. He said he was “stuck.”
It only occurred to me much later that I should have asked him: “What was wrong with being Ralph? Can’t you go back?”
Never a woman, this guy. And never none of them, is my belief now.
I guess I was sort of where Ophelia was; I didn’t believe they were really women, but I never saw any harm in men putting on dresses. I’ve always been a believer in the credo J. K. Rowling got so much hatred for. I think my peak was the FTB attack on Ophelia; I had always been uneasy with the idea of biological males in women’s bathrooms, but I didn’t think people ought to discriminate against trans in housing, jobs, etc. I think we need to get past “girl’s clothes” and “boy’s clothes” to “clothes that fit the way you want to live”. For me, pants and t-shirts for the field, different pants and dressy shirt with accessories for the classroom. Does that make me a male? No, of course not. Nor does putting on scarves, hats, and earrings to dress up my outfit make me female. I could tilt my head, slightly part my lips, and adopt a vacant stare, but that wouldn’t make me any more female…or feminine…than I am now.
I felt uneasy over bathroom bills, because I agreed that males should stay out of women’s bathrooms, but it felt sort of wrong, like I was being intolerant. I knew men in women’s bathrooms was a bad idea, but everyone was so shouty about it. I guess I was kind of relieved when OB departed FTB and came here; I followed and I’m not going back. That way lies madness.
I took “peak trans” to be a little like “peak oil.” It’s a tipping point from which there is no return. At “peak oil,” it becomes clear that the supply will run out soon, at present rates of consumption. At “peak trans,” the realization becomes clear that there is no sense to be extracted from the dogmas.
I think I remember that Michelle Goldberg piece. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I shared it, and a friend re-shared it with the comment “Pretty good writing for a TERF!” That, and then the whole insanity of what went on at FTB, got me rethinking a lot of things.
Maddog, to add: it’s becoming more apparent with each passing year that 2018 was global peak of crude oil and condensate @ 84 million barrels per day. Who knew a worldwide pandemic and demand crash would mask the fateful dropoff of production? It’s a matter now of waiting to see if production numbers recover.
I don’t know how representative of the B&W commentators I am (I’m 44 and live in southern Ireland). I was involved in Science fiction, fantasy and horror fandom, often with people younger than me (in their twenties and early thirties).
Up to 2020, I used to believe in all this transgender stuff. I used to believe that all the “transwomen” in society had completed sex reassignment surgery, had artificial breasts and vaginas, and were similar to natal women in most aspects (except for things like height and chromosomes, which I discounted). I also thought that since such surgery was so difficult and that the people with gender dysphoria had suffered mentally, they should be treated with sympathy – in other words, just like natal women.
I remember hearing when Germaine Greer repeated her criticisms of trans women in 2015, and thinking Greer was being unfair. I was hostile to gender-critical feminism, believing it to be prudish and authoritarian.
I was completely unaware, at the time, that people under the age of 18 were undergoing hormone treatment and SRS surgery in Britain, the US, and elsewhere. I was also unaware that “intact transwomen” (males who identified as women, but retained functioning male genitalia) were entering women’s prisons and domestic violence shelters.
I think it was the response to J.K. Rowling’s essay in 2020 that first made me question the trans ideology. I wasn’t a big Rowling fan- heck, I only knew her work through the “Harry Potter” movies, and even then I only watched them occasionally.
But I saw her receiving a flood of rape and death threats after the essay. And nobody on the pro-trans side condemned them. Nobody said “We strongly disagree with Mrs. Rowling’s views, but sending rape and death threats to somebody who disagrees with our views is unacceptable.”
Link here (warning: offensive language and images):
https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-activists-a-story-in-screenshots-78e01dca68d
At the time, I pointed this out on a science fiction forum I was a member of, and one of the other posters (who’d previously been friendly to me) said “Shut up! Trans women get far, far, more threats than this bigot ever does!”
I was told by another poster there that: “J.K. Rowling”s essay and posts dehumanize and harm trans people and are full of alt-right dog-whistles.” The poster added “If you give us any more of this Graham Linehan shit, we’re going to stop communicating with you.”
I was horrified at this over- reaction. The fandoms I was in turned violently against J.K. Rowling, and threatened anyone who agreed with her, or even still enjoyed her work, with shunning.
I then realised the violent language of the trans movement wasn’t an extremist fringe, but was rather integral to the movement.
That sent me down the rabbit hole. I started looking for “impartial” discussions of the transgender issue, but it was incredibly polarised. Nobody seemed to lay out a “here’s what the TRA side believes and here’s what the gender-critical side believes” style article. Everything I found was either 100% pro-Mermaids /Stonewall/GLAAD or else some form of gender-critical views.
I found this essay by Jane Clare Jones which turned out to be very helpful in clarifying the issues:
http://www.troubleandstrife.org/new-articles/you-are-killing-me/
So now, I agree with the gender critical feminists. I think someone like Kathleen Stock or Suzanne Moore might best represent my views now.
This whole issue is poisoned, as far as I’m concerned, so I just keep my mouth shut.
First: why has the “left” ceded the obviously biologically sound position to the “right”? Even evolutionists like Colin Wright are seen cavorting with the likes of Tucker Carlson and “Mom 4 Liberty.” It makes me sick.
Second: any time I might have something to say, I can be dismissed as “mansplaining” to women what “woman” means.
I hate to say it, but it’s left to the women to sort this out properly , and they have my bestest of wishes.
To summarize: the violent reaction to J. K. Rowling’s 2020 essay was what “peaked” me.
There is a quote from an academic article, “Sex, gender and gender identity: a re-evaluation of the evidence” that I often think about. I think it sums up the gender problem very well.
If there are any lurkers here who have doubts about the trans issue, I would urge you to read these words below and think about them.
Within current debates, if gender identity becomes uncoupled from both biological sex and gendered socialisation, it develops an intangible soul-like quality or ‘essence’. As a pure subjective experience, it may be overwhelming and powerful but is also unverifiable and unfalsifiable. If this identity is held to be a person’s innermost core concept of self, then questioning the very existence of gender identity becomes equated with questioning that person’s entire sense of being, and consequently risks being considered a threat to the right to exist, or even as a threat to kill.
Behaviours such as ‘misgendering’ or ‘dead-naming’ are understood by proponents of gender theory to be destructive, debasing and dehumanising. This might explain why the prevailing discourse has become as sensitive and at times inflammatory as it has.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/sex-gender-and-gender-identity-a-reevaluation-of-the-evidence/76A3DC54F3BD91E8D631B93397698B1A
MC, thank you for that Cambridge link. I read the whole thing.
The situation is horrifying.
I’ve joined another science fiction forum since then. Last week, I reported in a neutral tone on that forum that the “Hog.warts Legacy” computer game (based on the work of the Unspeakable One) had made tens of millions of dollars.
I then got a PM from a “concerned” forum poster, expressing worry that I was going to do a “J. K. Rowling” and giving me a link to watch a “trans Tiktoker” to put me back on the straight and narrow.
Don’t know if I should argue back, ignore the PM, or just reply, “Yes, I’ve watched it. Thank you, I am not a TERF.”
Thanks for mentioning Goldberg’s New Yorker essay, I’d missed it so I read it on archive.org and it’s quite good. That three letters replying to it later all made use of how poor trans persons are victimized so shut up shut up shut up also showed how repressive tactics were being employed then as well to ostracize gender-critical feminists and stifle any discussion about how there were conflicts due to males trying to claim they were women.
My peak happened rather suddenly when my son announced to us that he was really a woman inside. This was patently absurd. His pediatrician wanted to send him straight to the gender clinic. He said to me “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?” I said to him, “I brought my son to you because he was cutting himself. I would like the cutting to stop, not for a professional to do it instead.”
FYI, my son is over it now. I was able to steer him carefully around all the eager affirmers, and find him a real therapist. He’s autistic, he’s not like the other boys, and he feels uncomfortable in his body. The TRAs would have you think that means his Johnson must be cut off, and he must present henceforth as a simulacrum of a woman. He eventually realized that would not be an improvement.
One of the things that struck a bell in my mind in the Cambridge.org article linked above is this sentence:
That’s it, that’s what the epithet “trans kids” means: all kids can be sorted, from birth and permanently, into two categories: trans and cis. The binary goes away, the binary comes back.
Why? Why must the TRAs insist that the natural categories of male and female are nebulous, arbitrary, wobbly, and made up by Victorian colonialists, at the very same time they insist that as soon as a child utters the magic words “I’m trans!” he jumps irrevocably into the other box and may nevermore be “cis?” He is now a “trans kid,” and any consideration that this self-identification may be temporary, may be mistaken, and may later be regretted, any consideration whatsoever that human beings are complicated, children grow and learn, or that we are not fully known to ourselves, is nothing but oppression, by one side of this binary against the other.
Papito is it ok if I guest post that? I ask this time because it’s a bit personal (although of course I assume that no one shares secrets they want kept secret here, but I also assume posts may show up in searches more easily.)
That’s a great tweet, but I can’t say that I believed the claims. I didn’t really care about them; thought them harmless. I’d seen a lot of my gay friends be demonized and suffering, and just sort of assumed that it was a parallel situation. That did all change when I reached my peak moment, which I still remember (it had to do with that Vanity Fair cover and the reaction of the Pharyngula horde). I’ve spent the years since learning what an innocent I was back then.
Ophelia, it’s kind of you to ask. I busted in here some time ago now and chose the name Papito not entirely by random. It’s fatherhood that brought me into this. So yeah, go ahead and guest post that – as long as you correct “know” to “known” in the last sentence. El viejito tiene los fumble-fingers.
I don’t think I had a true ‘peak’ moment, but I do remember when I began questioning some of the ideology. It was the gushing over Caitlyn Jenner’s interview (I forget if it was the Diane Sawyer interview in 2015, or a later one, unfortunately). There was lots of ‘yeah, rah’ and so forth among lefty atheist circles, including FtB, and a lot of outrage about the interviewer asking what was under Jenner’s skirt.
But almost no one was commenting on Jenner saying, “I knew I was a woman because I liked wearing dresses”, or close to that. Which was weird, because it so obviously implies that NOT wearing dresses would make you a non-woman, which seemed a pretty bloody un-feminist thing to say.
I didn’t immediately flop–hell, for ages, even after Ophelia left FtB, I kept reading and very occasionally commenting on Pharyngula and some of the other writers there. For me, it was a gradual drift away, really, as I just kind of got tired of writers I’d respected suddenly just shutting down their critical functioning.
Re #15 “I just kind of got tired of writers I’d respected suddenly just shutting down their critical functioning.”
I had similar reactions. People refusing to engage in good-faith discussion; using witch hunts and guilt-by-association claims instead of making arguments.
I have to say that noticing this kind of quasi-religious tribal behavior on this issue made me more aware of similar behavior regarding other issues. Gender ideology is probably the worst situation by a lot, but identity politics and the tendency toward sloganeering is rather pervasive.
I just bought the idea that trans people were “born that way” as in intersex, but that there were men with AGP who used that in order to play out their fantasies with everyone playing along. Then Josh sent a link to me that explained it clearly and I went “OH! those bastards!”
I had so many friends (now distant acquaintances, or not friends at all) who were very nitpicky and skeptical about everything they dd and thought who would make sure they would check all angles before accepting the truth of anything who were very supportive of trans issues. And I had some internal conflict when they attacked you, Ophelia, not because I doubted your skepticism, but because I had to face the fact that these friends of mine were not being honest about their skepticism. And when there is conflict between people I respect over an issue that can be resolved with critical thinking, but those on one side of the issue start yelling “BIGOT BIGOT HATE BIGOT SHUT UP!” instead of defending their case, then it’s very hard to accept that they are applying critical thought.
One of the difficult issues with peaking is that most of us have a natural empathy towards the kids we remember being bullied for not meeting the standards of their sex in either masculinity or femininity. It’s a very confusing topic, and our instincts to defend those kids is directed towards whatever the doctors say will fix them. So, that’s why I think may liberals have been taken in by it. While I would be stopped dead in my tracks by someone telling me that puberty blockers are safe, and want to research it before I would accept it, there are so many institutions spreading this lie that we are conditioned to accept it. There was a science writer who commented in one of Shermer’s threads yesterday that he would trust the hundreds of doctors who were prescribing over a single famous skeptic’s word. This was a science writer, Their job depends on reviewing the science articles. It doesn’t take much thought to realize that as awful as puberty is, it is necessary for development, but hey, “if some doctors think they’re good then I accept the argument from authority.” Supporters do that because they believe the suicide lie and don’t want “Blood on their hands.” Because they remember the kids with the bloody noses who were called names, and surrounded by bullies with no one to help them. Or, perhaps they were the kids with the bloody noses who thought about killing themselves because they weren’t normal. Perhaps they were the bullies and this is how they deal with their guilt. I think it fits along all of these lines, and then they shut their minds off and accept that anyone who doesn’t buy into the magical transformation of transgender as being mean and bigoted towards those kids.
It was a nurse who was an escort volunteer with me at Planned Parenthood who first explained how great it is that there are drugs that can pause puberty so gender confused kids. I was floored, but before asking her how that could possibly be a good idea I wanted to check into what they were doing to kids. I had already peaked, but this seemed completely over the top. How can anyone mature enough to make a distinction about gender if their development at the crucial stage of adolescence was arrested? I didn’t think that Piaget was that far off or that there was new science that had disproved his theories on the stages of development.
Anyway, I would think that skeptics would take a step back and look at all of this and say “I think there is something a bit off about this. I should look into it.” It’s very weird that they can turn on friends on a dime as soon as we express doubt. I don’t like to name names, but man, there are some people who really surprised me by assuming that I’m a hateful bastard after knowing me for years. It’s like all these people walked through a brainwave interrupter on this subject. I lost some “friends” over the fact that I didn’t hate Monsanto enough to declare all GMO’s poison, but that’s quite a different thing. This is astonishing.
Oh, and I think it’s hilarious when a transgenderist tells me I’m confusing sex and gender but doesn’t expand on it.
Finally, I actually just came to say “Thanks” to Mostly Cloudy for the link. I’m grateful for open publications.
“Finally, I actually just came to say “Thanks” to Mostly Cloudy for the link. I’m grateful for open publications.”
No problem.
As for an introduction to gender-critical feminism, I’ve found this website to be useful. Might be worth pointing newcomers to B&W here:
https://gcritical.org/introduction/
Another of the difficult issues with peaking is realizing that transing kids is a new kind of conversion therapy visited upon kids who don’t meet the standards of their sex in either masculinity or femininity. It’s not anti-bullying, it’s the new bullying. “Johnny is such a girl!” is not made better in any way now that that such an assertion may result in Johnny having his puberty stopped, being put on wrong-sex hormones, and having his genitals cut off. The sissy of today is even less free to be himself once gender ideology enters the room.
Why are you leaving out the bit where you didn’t “say nothing” but you lied through you teeth that “of course” you supported trans rights, and anyone saying otherwise was a liar, liar, pants on fire. Do you remember that lie?
Because suckers like me believed you and supported you only to find to their disgust that you were every bit the transphobic bigot you were suspected of being and them some! Including poor PZ who stood by you and was utterly made a fool of, when you finally decided it was fine to come out as a ranting transphobic looney.
There are, of course, zero trans people who think, “people are or can be the other sex” – what the fuck do you think “trans” means. It’s exactly the same as saying you oppose immigrants because, “I don’t think people are or can the born in a different country to the one they were born in”. Neither do immigrants, so what’s that got to do with anything? And what has it got to do with “pretending” anything? Trans people are people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies. What does this have to do with any pretence? What pretence? I don’t know of a trans person on the face of the earth who claims to have been born with different gonads to what they have, or whatever it is you think they’re “pretending”. If they were “pretending” how would you even know they’re trans? To be openly trans means, surely, that they are not “pretending”.
For fucks sake – “the subject” hasn’t changed. Trans people continue to be a tiny persecuted minority exactly as they were in the 70s. What is new is that having lost the culture war against gay people, the right has chosen a new target, and radicalized whatever suckers it can find into joining the cause. You continue to be as utterly unaffected by the existence of trans people as you were ten years ago. The “devouring” is you being radicalized so that the existence of a tiny persecuted minority that never has, and never will, affect you in any way whatsoever, has utterly consumed you. For fucks sake, snap out of it and stop being a puppet of wankers like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson.
Oh P.S. Here’s a thoroughly feminist critique of the Goldberg piece, which far from being “very good” was an early attempt to launder Janice Raymond style hateful transphobia into the mainstream (and didn’t fool anyone).
This. So much this. It almost sucked me in, as one of those bullied kids (in the case of my tormenteors, I didn’t meet the standard of being human, so when trans talk about dehumanizing, I was sympathetic).
But the drifting away started for me on another issue, actually, which was the body shaming. I don’t think body shaming is good and I do think fat people should be acceptable in society without being snickered at or bullied. But the level of rancor raised against people who commented about anorexia was an eye-opener for me. The idea that we have to accept as a good thing that someone decides not to eat anything because to think someone is too skinny is “body shaming” is so ridiculous I didn’t know where to start. And if you did try to talk sense to anyone, they threatened to shove a porcupine up your anus. While I never worried that I was literally going to be assaulted with a spiny rodent, the over the top response alerted me that these people weren’t thinking rationally, and had no better argument than porcupines to support what they were saying.
[…] a comment by Papito on Top of the […]
Silentbob is back…and as usual, not silent. And still uninformed, since whether he knows them or not, there are many who are saying that trans people are the opposite sex.
” Trans people continue to be a tiny persecuted minority exactly as they were in the 70s”.
So why is Joe Biden expressing such strong support for trans people then?
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/13/politics/joe-biden-daily-show-trans-rights/index.html
Posting screeds like Silentbob’s helps us remember how much willful blindness it takes, and how many people are willing to offer it.
Crimes of religion, in this case, like beating up old women who are just trying to talk, sending rapists into women’s prisons, mutilating children…
Silent Bob #21 wrote:
Are we assigned “gender” at birth? I thought we were supposed to be assigned sex. Gender involves masculinity and femininity. Assigning gender at birth would be putting pink frilly bonnets on girl babies and calling them “quite the little princess” or shoving a male infant into a miniature Green Bay Packers onesie. Which, admittedly, we do.
In which case, if trans people are really just “people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies” they’d be saying “I’m a feminine man” or, perhaps, “I’m a feminine man who wants to pretend I’m a feminine woman and hope others will do so, too.” Which isn’t what they’re saying. There’s no pretense in saying “I want to pretend.”
But I think there is pretense when people say “I know WHAT (not “who”) I am.” Or “TW ARE Women.” They’re pretending that they not only experience the same internal mental state as the opposite sex (no, not “gender”) but can know that. It’s not a matter of whether they’re sincere. I can grant they’re honest in that respect just as readily as I can grant that the religious are sincerely certain they have experienced God. Self-deception occurs when the interpretation of what we experience is considered the gold standard of reliability, without the honest recognition that it has been filtered through a plausible prior narrative or strong personal desire to believe. They are pretending they have the right to be certain.
So, Silent [sic] Bob, you admit that there is a difference between the sexes, and that that difference is immutable. Do you deny that one sex has been oppressed by the other in nearly every human society, both historically and contemporaneously? Do you deny that humans are sexually dimorphous, and that the oppressed sex tends to be smaller and weaker than the other sex? Do you deny that the larger sex has used their size to oppress the smaller sex? Do you deny that in at least some cases members of the larger, oppressor sex who claim to be the opposite gender have physically intimidated and assaulted members of the oppressed sex?
And if you don’t deny all of that, on what basis can you deny allowing the oppressed sex the right to their own name, woman, and their own separate spaces?
Of course there’s also the fact that it’s not a lie that I “support trans rights” – I think trans people should have human rights. But is that what Silent Bob means by “trans rights”? I don’t know, because I haven’t paid any attention to him in years, but judging by that loony comment I would say no. Trans people aren’t pretending anything, he says furiously, when the falsehood of that is obvious. They don’t call it pretending of course, but neither do the people who tell you they have a fortune for you in a Nigerian bank. What people like Silent Bob generally mean by “trans rights” is the right to force everyone to agree that you are the sex you say you are, even when you obviously aren’t. That’s not a genuine right.
Also this business of “YOU LIED YOU LIED YOU LIED” – when they try to bully all of us into lying every hour of every day, and call us names when we refuse. We’re required on pain of ostracism, job loss, bullying, violence, to pretend to believe the dogma, but if we do pretend to believe the dogma – out comes the spittle-flecked invective.
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Ha! I’m actually pleased that guys like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson can see right through the bullshit just like the rest of us. Does that make us alt-right white nationalists? No. The sky is still blue in their world, among other things we agree on. The trans issue is not partisan, it’s a universal problem.
Went to Silentbob’s link. Jos Truitt appears to be a transwoman FWIW. Here’s some quotes:
“This effectively advances the views of a group that wants to see the genocide of trans women, ”
Hyperbolic bullshit.
“Trans-exclusionary radical feminism came out of lesbian separatism, a subset of radical feminism. And members of that subset have consistently undermined their own positions in the service of trans exclusion, a paradox that Goldberg doesn’t address when presenting their arguments. She leaves unquestioned, for example, the position that women are defined and oppressed by men as a class because of pregnancy, an argument that makes no sense for lesbian separatists to make.”
IOW: How can lesbian separatists be oppressed by patriarchy?!? They don’t want anything to do with men! Let alone have sex with them!
“Goldberg uses article space to quote individual Tumblr users who have made angry and violent comments about trans-exclusionary feminists. It is true that these violent comments are unacceptable. But it is also true that they are the statements of young people with no sociopolitical power behind their anger, who are expressing understandable rage on social media directed at a hate group that has targeted them since before they were born. These are not the statements of power actors in a political struggle being published by Routledge, as Jeffreys’ book is, but personal statements of frustration, yet they are given more weight than hate speech based in trans-exclusionary views.”
IOW: These multiple rape and death threats are justified because of the nasty arguments of feminists who question gender dogma and putting convicted rapists with penises in women’s prisons.
“Indeed, as Autostraddle points out, Goldberg mentions 14 trans-exclusionary feminists and quotes nine, while only two trans women are quoted to offer different views.”
As opposed to pro-Trans writers who make a point of citing GC scholars with Genderist scholars on a 50/50-basis. (What makes this particulary admirable is how hard it is to find GC scholars since they keep getting censored and fired.)
“She also presents trans identities with the notion that trans women have male bodies but “feel female.” While an accurate description of trans-exclusionary feminist’s framing of trans identities, and a way in which they have been presented in the past, this is not generally how trans people understand themselves now, and many advocates, including Janet Mock—a prominent figure whose views are not presented in Goldberg’s article—have explained they were never male, and that the existence of trans people calls for a reexamining of simplistic and inaccurate notions about how gender works.”
IOW: Transwomen disagree with how some other people see them. Which makes the other people wrong because???
In your own screed you wrote:
“There are, of course, zero trans people who think, ‘people are or can be the other sex’ – what the fuck do you think ‘trans’ means.”
Unless of course one is “gender fluid” (A VALID IDENTITY!!!!). But tell us; do you believe in biological sex? Or is the body “sexed” by the individual’s gender? (Such as when a penis becomes a female sexual organ because the owner of the penis is a transwoman with a female gender which makes everything else female?)
Your comment and your link are the sort of garbage that makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
“De-transitioning is incredibly uncommon: As writer and advocate Parker Marie Molloy explains, this would be like quoting ex-gays in an article debating homosexuality. If The New Yorker had paid attention to or checked in with major trans advocacy organizations, they could have confirmed that this information was irresponsible and inaccurate.”
So much to unpack. If anyone is denying the existence of anyone else it’s pro-Trans advocates denying the existence of de-transitioners. They’re out there. And in increasing numbers as so many lured into your cult were only marginally susceptible to the delusions and cannot but opt out.
So I’m sure that if the New Yorker had checked in with a major trans advocacy organization they would have repeated your lies.
Thank you; highly informative.
Amazing. There are numerous people who say exactly that, and have done so for years. Many of them have been documented right here on this blog. My own ‘peak trans’ moment was closely tied to exactly that claim, when I clashed with people back in about 2014 one of the FTB blogs of that era in the comment section, where I was told in earnest to quit saying trans women are male.
I leave it to you as to whether this lapse constitutes a lie on your part, or simple forgetfulness.
The problem arises when they also wish to live as the other sex, for instance by crossing from male to female divisions in a sport. The clashes over women’s sports, toilets, rape shelters and the rest only arise because the apparent project of trans activism is to conflate gender transition with sex transition. If they (and you) maintained the separation of gender from sex, there would be no push to enter these sex segregated spaces.
Also, a note on the last clause quoted there: trans people typically do not get surgery. Those that do are the minority.
So, silentbob insists that TRAs know perfectly well that trans folks can’t actually change their sex; then links to an article that insists that “… many advocates, including Janet Mock—a prominent figure whose views are not presented in Goldberg’s article—have explained they were never male, and that the existence of trans people calls for a reexamining of simplistic and inaccurate notions about how gender works” (emphasis mine, obviously)
How the hell do you cope with that level of cognitive dissonance?
***********
And here I have to drag that damned dead horse out of the stall, again.
Walsh, Carlson and the rest are NOT seeing ‘right through the bullshit like the rest of us’. They are simply too blinded by their own flavor of bullshit to accept this one. It’s important to remember that the right-wingers believe ‘gender’ to be as immutable and pre-ordained as the TRAs do; they just tie it directly to biological sex rather than some ineffable internal identity. The notion that gender itself is, in fact, bullshit, never enters their feeble little heads.
I have in fact seen trans-identified people claiming just that. But it’s a motte-and-bailey: argue trans activists and their allies into a corner and then OF COURSE, nobody is claiming that trans people really are the other sex! They know very well they’re not!–
–and then we’re lectured endlessly about intersex conditions, which supposedly support the TRA claim that Sex Is Not Binary. We’re told that sex is assigned at birth–yes, sometimes the word used is “gender”, but there’s also “assigned male at birth” and “assigned female at birth.” (AMAB and AFAB.) Sophie LaBelle’s comic about a little trans girl who talks like a twenty year old college activist is titled “Assigned Male.”
I have a screenshot of the ACLU’s Chase Strangio, tweeting that
And in the Washington Post, just a few days ago, Jennifer Finney Boylan assured us that:
But nobody is saying “people are or can be the other sex.” Nobody. Zero. Nope. Nada.
Freemage, Silentbob is the sort of guy that would quote your own scientific study back at you, but stop one sentence short of the bit that undermines his own premise. I say this not out of a sarcastic, invented example of dishonesty to demean him, I say it because he has done exactly that.
Gobbledygook:
Every item in that collection of possibilities for the biological male includes being male. All of those possibilities for the biological female include being female. Even before birth, each individual is set on one of two developmental paths: male and female.
Everywhere each of those paths end, even the ends dictated by disorders of sexual development, is an end unique to their sex. Trying to muddy up or change those paths with drugs and surgery doesn’t ever put the individual on the other developmental path.
Chase Strangio will suffer from age-related conditions typical to men in the way that only a woman can.
I suspect at least some trans activists would agree that people can’t change sex, and would claim that “transwomen” are actually female from birth, despite that pesky “assignment” as male by some ignorant and transphobic doctor.
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Papito @20:
Transing kids looks victim-blamey to me. It puts the onus on the victim. They push the victim to change instead of getting the bullies to stop bullying. It’s reminiscent of the “if they’re picking on you for X, don’t do X” crap I heard when I was a kid.
I really have to sincerely thank silentbob for they/their/them input into this thread. It turbo charged what was already an interesting discussion, into one that has generated many really fascinating and high quality comments, as evidenced by the number of guest posts and subsequent spin-off discussions.