When you write "teenagers seeking gender conversion", you are closer to the mark than you may realise. GLAAD and its sister organisations have become the exponents of what is essentially a religious movement, and those they label "TERFs" are either heretics or blasphemers.
Once-reasonable people such as Dan Savage have been hoodwinked by this movement into a false sense of solidarity, since gay people were often falsely accused of the very things that trans activists are brazenly doing -- namely targeting children across a broad cultural front for ideological indoctrination, from Drag Queen Story Hour to queer pole dancing to gender theory lessons implicitly and sometimes explicitly elaborated on Cartoon Network shows to schools colluding with young children to hide new pronouns and clothes from their parents.
Each of these things is either ignored or downplayed by the Dan Savages and Freddie deBoers of the world, people who are obviously well-meaning and otherwise-intelligent but who do not see how deeply theological and misguided and damaging this movement has become, specifically as it intersects with children and pedagogy. These things are either not happening because they resemble conservative hysterics from the early aughts, or they are happening and it is good because children should be able to learn queer people exist and if those children weren't destined to be trans themselves there is no danger to exposing them to graduate-level gender theory as presented by ideologues clearly hungry for converts.
Back in the bad old days when gay people were persecuted in the West, gay kids had to worry about conservative parents kicking them out or carting them off to some kooky Bible camp; these days, parents have to worry that their children are being recruited into a cult that will convince them their parents hate them if those parents don't instantly adopt new names and pronouns their children announce to them, and where the state can take those kids away if the parents don't comply, and where the children are locked into a lifetime of drugs and surgeries in the pursuit of an unobtainable miracle. The gay kids themselves must contend with a movement that tells them homosexuality is unnatural; that instead of being same-sex attracted, they have a mismatched gendered soul, and they will have to spend the rest of their lives changing their bodies to match that soul's expression.
This is an unacceptable and unstable state of affairs. I do not know what comes next, but I do not think it will be the best thing for families, for gay kids, or for kids who feel weird about being a boy or a girl.
You are so on point. I agree that plenty of people whose work I typically respect and enjoy are just putting on blinders to avoid getting into the fray because they assume trans rights are the natural successor to gay rights and obviously don’t want to be on the wrong side.
DeBoer wrote a very interesting piece a few days ago about how the working class cannot be lost to the GOP. He didn’t even remotely understand that the culture was issues are extremely motivating to parents right now, much more than whatever economic programs Democrats are talking about in a lot of cases. He, and many others, dismiss those concerns out of hand as either unfounded or bigoted.
DeBoer is an interesting study in just how close someone can be to understanding the bunk of it all while, owing to prior ideological commitments, obstinately refusing to make the last little leap.
He has written with far more eloquence than I could ever dream about the futility of consuming your way into an identity; he has even come dangerously near to identifying the dangerous ways that young people are deluding themselves on social media with multiple personality nonsense.
And yet he must about-face, insist that no no, make-believe identities are terribly important for people to try out and try on, and there is nothing about the modern gender nonsense that is anything like the clear social contagion of multiple-personality disorder (even though many of these "alternates" often have gender identities and detailed gender expressions of their own, which their hosts then put into flesh-and-blood practice). And any concern at all about any of this -- as long as it's trans -- is just religious conservatives wanting to shelter their precious babies from understanding that queer and trans people exist.
Perhaps one day he will understand why this issue and no other is the one that drives him to periodically shut down his comments section; that his flaccid and reactionary defensiveness of the trans religion will not persuade anyone of its rectitude, no matter how many temper tantrums he throws about it when his audience doesn't fall into line; that he has spent a greater and greater proportion of his vast intellectual and rhetorical capital in service to a lie even more obvious and perhaps more dangerous than his workaday classical Marxism.
Wow. You have read my mind and articulated my frustration and confusion far better than I could ever. It’s disappointing to see someone who is very intellectual take zero insight from the fact that his readers become very animated whenever the issue of trans rights becomes a topic. I would doubt that more than 2 are even remotely motivated by religious beliefs or conservatism in their concern with harmful gender ideology.
Freddie banned me for writing "Why do you persistently refuse to recognize that there are real legitimate issues of women's rights when men are legally permitted to declare themselves to be women?"
I’m almost positive I liked that comment before it was removed. I am typically a free subscriber, but paid for a single month to see if his piece about the working class and the GOP would even touch on these type of issues. He dismissed them out of hand. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have children yet, but if you really want to convince me you should listen closer when I tell you that the child tax credit is not even remotely worth me allowing my children to be taught they were born in the wrong body if they do not adhere to strict gender stereotypes at all times.
Word. But having children is not a miracle cure. Sadly, there are tons of parents in the transification camp. Which is why we need hard cold laws to stop the mutilation and sterilization.
Oh Freddie. Some commenters at BARpod theorized that he might have a trans kid in his social or family orbit somewhere, which accounts for his vehemence and epistemic closure on this specific issue. It's the kind of thing you can imagine someone not wanting to confront, because the alternative suggests that what has been done to this kid *might* not have been in his/her best interest, and that's a frightening thought.
I think this every time when a person appears to be "so close". Considering how many people signed the Nytimes letter, I suspect it to be the case for many of them. The likelihood that any particular liberal person has a family member or child of a close friend who is "questioning their gender" is very high IMO.
"Ideologues clearly hungry for converts" is well put. It's quite concerning for me, as a gay dude, to see kids who might easily grow up to be well-adjusted gay adults being medicalized simply for being "gender non-conforming". That's the nub of the whole issue for me. Once people are adults, it becomes a whole different question about self-determination. But for kids... they need space to figure these things out, not a rush to judgment so that adults can pat themselves on the back for being soooo very 'progressive' and 'accepting' now that they can put "parent of a trans kiddo" in their Twitter bio.
I love Jeff's writing but time and time again I get to the comments and encounter this sort of unhinged Diet-QAnon bullshit. You're imagining a wide-ranging, conspiracy intentionally targeting children, conducting evil without reason, taking the most innocuous outreach as proof that the conspiracy is real (Drag Story Hour? Are you actually fucking kidding me?)
I can agree that GLAAD is overstepping and that further research should be conducted, but your take suggests that ANY public trans visibility is part of this deranged conspiracy, and I'm tired of seeing this kind of rabid extremism applauded as the sensible middle ground.
I have a trans-identified daughter, and a trans-identified nephew.
The daughter is a dreamy creative who loves drawing, design, cosplay and watching people play minecraft, and hates math (despite being actually quite good at it). She's by far the most feminine person in our family - way more feminine than her programmer mother or her martial-art-loving motorbike-riding science-studying older sister.
The nephew is a geeky ADHD kid who did the typical tearaway-boy-acting-out thing so much in primary school that he was restricted to half time attendance, who slouches about in his tracksuit bottoms and plays first-person shooters for entertainment.
In my state it has been made ILLEGAL for any therapist to do any sort of exploratory therapy with either of these kids to suggest that maybe they might just be normal kids of their birth sex, or even asking them why it is that they feel like they're of the opposite sex.
Getting hormones, on the other hand, is real easy. My nephew had them within a couple of months of turning 18.
There are many pieces of research showing gender medicine to be somewhere between not very effective to actively harmful. And yet still every major institution has an obsession with "supporting the most marginalised and vulnerable community" ... which somehow means that you can't question whether the drugs that are being promoted to your kid are inappropriate.
Under those circumstances, am I suspicious of the motivations of authority? You're goddamn right I am.
This is a fascinating response to my screed, which while breathless did not posit anything like a conspiracy in its enumeration of observable phenomena.
Famously, Q-Anon is fuelled (or at least was started) by a small cadre of bullshit artists spinning fantabulisms out of literally nothing, and may well now be a self-sustaining cult in its own right. But every single thing I listed (including, yes, Drag Queen Story Hour) is a well-documented phenomenn, often backed by well-funded organisations whose mandate is not so much "innocuous outreach" to the broader community as it is the indoctrination of children into a cultish belief system (which, as it happens, often itself resembles Q-Anon in more than a few respects).
Is it really "rabid extremism" to raise a sceptical eyebrow at children being shown pole-dancing shows by adult drag queens (or taught pole-dancing themselves in school), or at the Cartoon Network incorporating gender theology into their programming and advertisement strategy? Is it "rabid extremism" to think that a school district colluding with children to hide their brand-new pronouns, names, and clothes from their parents might be breaching the educational remit just a tad?
All of these things are happening, often spontaneously, driven by individuals or groups of ideologues intent on capturing children into their belief system; the fact of the matter is not in dispute, except by those for whom the fact of the matter cannot be so because it sounds too "Diet Q-Anon" to be believed. It is not a Q-Anon-style conspiracy, however; in my opinion it is a cult of blue-haired weirdos convinced of their own revolutionary righteousness and animated by some very bad ideas that have broken out of gender studies and sociology departments to convince what well may be a critical mass of said blue-haired weirdos to more-or-less spontaneously organise to put these bad ideas into practice.
And many of these weirdos are indeed targeting children to convince them of the truth of their cultish beliefs before those children have properly developed the capacity to reason. That does not require a conspiracy, it requires people to understand the age-old idea that beliefs sown into the mind before the age of reason are notoriously sticky -- as typified by the old Jesuit maxim to "...give me the child for his first seven years, and I will give you the man."
But I agree I do not offer a "sensible middle ground" to gender theology, any more than I offer a sensible middle ground to Scientology or Shakerism or Voudon or Imperial-Way Buddhism. I simply do not believe in the tenets of these religions and I do not think the state has any business propagating those tenets, especially to the children that the state claims a monopoly to educate for essentially the entirety of their childhoods.
Even scarier than the pole dancers etc, to me, are the books and lessons telling kids they "might be a boy or a girl or neither" and they get to choose. Absolutely shocking this is planted into children's brains.
My daughter (18 yr old) just cheered on a friend who got a double mastectomy shortly after turning 18. Meanwhile she has 1 good friend and an acquaintance who had them done at age 16. I'm seriously terrified about what is going on.
>The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021.
>Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket.
>At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.
Children with a "gender dysphoria" diagnosis who are treated with "watchful waiting" (rather than blockers and hormones) have a desistance rate of 60% to 98%, depending on which study you look at.
The point that I and others are making here is that kids should not be sliced and diced on the basis of a diagnosis with anywhere near that huge of a "false positive" rate.
People drift into such extreme positions or believing things are conspiracies partly because of the shut down of discussion that is happening, most often from the left. I think there is also a big distinction between how some people feel when it comes to children and adults in this arena.
Re Drag Queen Story Hour: note that the NYC group, which has received over $200,000 in public funds to go into public schools and preach, is all in on transification:
>The Dragtivity Book is an educational tool for engaging kids in conversation about gender and identity. ... Featuring 20 pages of fun and educational activities such as “find your own drag name,” “circle your pronouns,” ...
Young kids today need to get inoculated against the transification movement. Chaya Raichik, aka libsoftiktok, has a new book out for 4-8 year olds that attempts to do that: https://bravebooks.us/products/no-more-secrets
I also think this movement asks for a bit more. Gay marriage was a law, a policy, a thing on a sheet of paper. No one was asking for everyone to internally validate or accept people. You could think them gay were icky and gross, and we still wanted your vote for gay marriage. This movement, however, demands that people accept certain metaphysical beliefs about gender: it can be nonbinary, it can change, etc. We're asked to accept people's identities, which I don't see for any other movement. Like, I'm against Islamaphobia, but I'm not asking anyone to accept Islam.
Furthermore, there's tradeoffs here that there aren't for gay marriage. On the greatest hits for the gay marriage movement was "how does this affect you?" No one got hurt by gay marriage. Ok the other hand, there's serious tradeoffs here on things like women's sports.
A person can always experiment with being gay or even dressing in drag, then decide later that it really isn't for them. But trans hormones and surgery have permanent effects.
That's not a "serious tradeoff," it's an issue that no one gave a shit about before and affects truly, truly tiny amounts of people.
My own take on it is that there are few enough trans athletes that it can be effectively solved on a case-by-case basis. The vast, vast majority of people shrieking about fairness in high school sports don't have a trans athlete at their local school.
In my country, 52% of women play sport, and 68% of girls play sport.
Serena Williams once estimated that all of the top 200 male tennis players could beat her. So if you take that seriously, a 1 in 200 rate of physically male people in womens' sports would substantially affect all those women.
That is not in any sense an issue that affects "tiny amounts of people"
Ban after ban, often with one or zero actual trans athletes. An offensive waste of lawmakers' time, all so they can drum up support on culture war horseshit.
Male people have always been banned from female sport. That's the entire point of having female sport. "Transgender girls" - ie, male people - shouldn't be in female sport for the exact same reason I shouldn't play under-12s basketball.
The fact that we have to explicitly say "yes, and that includes if you really feel like you have a feminine personality" is the horseshit. Gender identities don't play sport. Bodies play sport.
Obviously if you say that some male people can declare themselves female and go into the easier-to-win female category just because they feel like it, more and more male people will in fact do so (and this is certainly happening). The time to nip this in the bud is early.
I'm not dismissing this claim out of hand, but can I see a specific examples of a man claiming transness to compete in women's sports without transitioning in other areas of their life?
I absolutely don't care if they "transition in other areas of their life", because a person's feelings of masculinity or femininity have no bearing on whether they should be able to put their body into a competition designed for the other sort of body. Their motivations are irrelevant - the relevant fact is that the exponentially increasing presence of a group of male people who think they're entitled to be included in anything at all that is for female people - thus ending freedom of association on the basis of sex altogether.
If there ends up being 1 or 2 percent of male people considering themselves trans and entitled to enter all female-body things despite their male body, it has the same effect on these female-body activities no matter what they're doing in the rest of their life.
However, lets take Will Thomas, as referenced by MarkS. I think the case for Thomas being an autogynophile is solid (see here: https://www.rebelnews.com/transgender_swimmer_lia_thomas_exposed_report). Some people object to this being much talked about in public, since they consider it prurient interest, unnecessarily embarrassing to Thomas, and that basically a person's kink is their own business. But it's relevant information in this case because Thomas's claim is of having internal psychological and emotional experiences that are similar to that usually found in women, and to literally "be a woman" on that basis.
Not only is there no evidence at all that Thomas's claim is true (and it's completely unverifiable by everyone, including Thomas - how do you know what another person's internal experiences are like, to compare your own with them?), autogynophilia provides a perfectly convincing reason for Thomas' transition - along with the desire to win an easier sporting competition, transition also provides an opportunity to do sexually exciting things in public, including stripping off with unwilling female people (a sexual dominance behaviour).
We have always known that there's a subset of men that like dressing in women's clothes. I don't particularly mind if they do, but obviously if this behaviour is publicly lauded AND also gives the opportunity to gain advantage in other areas, you're going to get more of it.
I guess I don't think it the question of whether it's bad-faith or good-faith matters to me at all... even if a person has transitioned in all aspects of their life, as I suppose many of the more prominent athlete examples have done, they *still* shouldn't be competing in a sexed female division. The advantages of male puberty and adolescence in everything from bone density to muscle development to lung capacity cannot be undone, even under a regime of long-term use of testosterone-suppressing medication (former US Olympic rower Mary O'Connor was just on the Quillette podcast talking about this, using the example of male vs female rowing times). "Claiming transness to compete in a women's sport" is a boogeyman - even if an athlete's trans identity is in complete good faith, they should still be competing in an open division, not a women's division.
Hey, ya notice that I explicitly said "case by case basis?" as my proposal, and yet you're acting like I'm arguing "just let anybody into whatever division they feel like"? Please cut it out with the laughably transparent bad faith.
For the record, after looking into Lia's case, I would say she shouldn't be competing in the women's division, that the assertion that she's a man who transitioned for the sole purpose of winning is lunacy, and that she'd be perfectly competitive in the men's division.
Did you follow college women's swimming before this? Seems like the number of college women's swimming fans has skyrocketed since 2021, lol
Check out https://shewon.org/index.html This site lists all the women & girls who lost to a transidentified man or boy. No one is saying that they shouldn't compete at all, they should compete in their sex category.
Last year, on what should have been a day of great personal triumph, a woman named Emma Weyant swam a personal best in the NCAA finals of the 500m freestyle. She was faster than every other woman in the pool that day.
But she was not awarded the national championship that she had earned through many years of hard work and dedication.
I don't think the rareness of something is a sufficient argument against its importance, or one's ability to hold an opinion about it. I don't have a kid in school, but I read stories of parents with bio-female children competing against bio-males in HS sports, and I'm skeptical that case-by-case will resolve the overarching issue, given the increase in stories like Lia Thomas, Laurel Hubbard, and Natalie Ryan. If we could resolve the issue from the top all the way down by creating "open" categories in competitive sports, isn't that preferable to a case-by-case solution?
I have a high schooler. Until he entered middle school and suddenly had multiple trans and nonbinary friends, I only knew two trans people personally (one an adult, one a child, both transitioned in the last 6 years, both natal females). Now lots and lots of young people are claiming the identity. Which, fine. Unless your identity starts making you a medical patient for life.
It's different, but the element of "you have to support this" was there in gay marriage too. Remember Masterpiece Cake Shop and similar cases like it.
There has always been a tension in the Civil Rights movement between negative and positive rights, and to the extent to which not just actions but beliefs are policed (and what kind of actions compel belief).
Then there are the public square problems like "what are kids going to be taught in school, etc". Parental rights, etc.
In short I think the trans stuff just turns these existing issue up to 11 because its so loony and demanding, but they are fundamental problems to be resolved.
I think John Kerry looks like a badass in the windsurfing photo. Have you ever tried windsurfing? It’s fucking hard. Kerry looks like he’s got it dialed. His campaign suffered from too FEW of those sorts of photos. I’d bet if more swing voters saw the badass windsurfing Kerry photos, he’d have won in a landslide.
It doesn’t matter if Kerry had a Olympic medal in windsurfing- it’s a weird hobby for rich dudes. Mitt Romney probably has an entire team of assassins killing anybody who threatens to release a picture of him and his dressage horses for the exact same reason.
Windsurfing and dressage horses are not at all analogues. Sure, windsurfing requires some startup costs like any outdoor recreation, but it’s hardly a rich man’s sport. It’s got a dirtbag scene, just like snowboarding, rock climbing, fly fishing, etc
Please donate to my GofundMe to bring dressage to urban and rural Appalachian settings. The charity is co-run by Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart. https://youtu.be/uK5AIJQ2tlA
The difference between now and the 2000s is social media. As many have pointed out, ideas that were once popular only in humanities departments of elite universities have spread to exponentially more people via Tumblr and Twitter.
In the 2000s, you couldn't get excommunicated by your liberal friends for not taking the activist position on gay marriage. You absolutely can be today on gender stuff, and it's because these people are living in a bubble and drunk on power. Instead of persuasion, they take the fire-and-brimstone preacher approach of labeling everyone who doesn't agree with them a vicious bigot.
And yet, Democratic Progressivism remains the most common & influential ideology among the wealthier & more socially & politically influential sections of American society. It seems as though excommunicating dissenters does work, if you already have social/institutional power.
Ah, agency equity teams. Honestly no different from what many Fortune 500 corporations have done as part of their DEI initiatives. Those have largely been implemented in a “check the box” fashion, and I suspect these will be no different. Some agencies will likely take them more seriously than others.
Right, nothing at all to worry about! It's perfectly fine to have political officers overseeing things throughout the federal bureaucracy! What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure they're all just the nicest people ever!
"Some children seem to benefit from the child sterilization cult" is not a recommendation for the child sterilization cult. Maybe it's just me, but I suspect that in the fullness of time, the child sterilization cult will be rejected as a "civil rights cause" and be seen instead as a, you know, dangerous cult that sterilized children.
Dr. Mengele did sex-change experiments on Jewish and Roma children. They reportedly enjoyed his warm bedside manner and his patients were well-fed. Though it seems that some of them did get a little upset as they were carted off to the gas chambers after his experiments, because it felt like being ghosted. Plenty there for the "happy" transitioned teen on TikTok to consider, in between the multiple operations by different surgeons, all making it up as they go.
Thanks Jeff. This is a terrifying issue for a lot us, socially, and as always it's great to have a comedic release valve whilst hammering out the nuance.
You know what would sharply reduce the number of medical hacks who sell kids on irreversible gender transition?
Malpractice lawsuits.
We used to have these things were lawyers sued incompetent doctors for injuries they caused, but the Republican Party convinced the public that all lawyers were greedy liars and we now can’t do that any more. Perhaps if someone reminded the public that the laws limiting malpractice suits protect malicious gender surgeons, that would help?
If you want to get depressed about the state of Left discourse on this topic following your analysis to a ‘T’, here’s Rick Perlstein acting as if he had “‘Premature anti-fascists’ were on the right side of history” tattooed onto his inner eyelids:
Yes, as a child of the late '60s, I find it bizarre that people with gender atypical interests are being called trans. Back in those benighted times the message we were sent was that boys and girls could do whatever they wanted. And that's how my wife and I raised our kids, born in the late '90s.
@Carina's list of downsides of medical intervention are unfortunately accurate. I simply don't understand how one can send the message "trans women are women / trans men are men" to children, and then call their resulting choices "informed consent." People need to know that switching sexes is simply not possible. You can use extreme medical procedures to roughly approximate some physical attributes of a body of the opposite sex, but that's not close to the same thing.
Exactly. I think some young girls who decide to transition are doing so because they think the only way to be a woman is to adhere to some false feminine ideal. And if you can’t, or if you think society is a scary and threatening place for girls (which it certainly can be), the solution is to become a man. That leaves no time or space for exploration of what it REALLY means to be a woman, which encompasses a lot of individual variety.
When an adult woman decides to transition, that’s a different story. A friend of mine, born female, transitioned about ten years ago and is happily living as a trans man. He had begun to use a masculine name and pronouns years before starting hormone therapy and having top surgery. Prior to that stage of his life, he was an out lesbian for many years. For him, transitioning was clearly the right choice. But he lived for decades as a lesbian before deciding to take that next step. A teenager just doesn’t know yet who they are.
This movement hinges on overlooking or forgetting that 1) social contagions strike adolescent girls harder than any other group; 2) the American health-care system is a for-profit industry with a built-in incentive to support iatrogenic illnesses. I am not cynical enough to believe that the scores of pediatric gender clinics (not counting Planned Parenthood clinics) which have sprung up in the past 5-10 years don't really believe they are helping children. I think they believe in their mission, which just happens to be result in exactly what would happen if, say, our society decided to sterilize gender-non-conforming/likely-gay children; 3) that the old-school transvestite/transsexual men were in it to get off, and this is still true, which is why your neighborhood trans-folx are the wispy bearded 5'3" froggy voiced "men" and the 6' "women" who are the only "women" at their job wearing mini-skirts & fishnet stockings, and no one dares to challenge that; and 4) lastly, that this movement is anything but progressive because of how it allows men to become the first "female" Jeopardy champion/ass't secr. of health, supports putting rapists into women's prisons, allows any man to walk into any women's locker room/changing room, contends that a lesbian who refuses to have sex with be-penised individuals is a bigot, and undoes decades of fighting for parity in sports, tossing women off of podiums in sports, from golf to swimming to bicycling to weight-lifting.
I wish someone had noticed this before we got to "gee, maybe castrating boys and sending girls into menopause 40 years early isn't such a great idea" but here we are.
I would only quibble with the transification movement being "arguably hostile to the gay community"; I would say that it is absolutely totally manifestly obviously hostile to the gay community!
The transification movement is telling gay kids that they are in the wrong body because they like the same sex, and that the final solution is to be sterilized and mutilated, right now!
I agree with everything, and you point out something that is always completely glossed over.
Even in the best case scenario and medical transition is the best way for this person to live happily in the world - (which is what I always tell people (the small # of people I feel comfortable expressing my concerns to) that I sincerely hope this is the case for my daughters good friend (an ftm - actually was her boyfriend in highschool), that this was the right decision for them. But even if it is. They are now a medical patient for life - they are actively making the body less healthy. They have to live with the cognitive dissonance that they are not truly what they claim and that it something they might have to constantly hide. That can not be healthy.
Finally, about the transing of gay kids. This same kid - his parents are definitely not conservative and would have been fine with a gay daughter, but did the kid have internalized homophobia? As a little kid? Maybe! Was it (among other things such as liking all things boys like etc) a piece of the puzzle? Maybe! What is weird is that to my one friend with whom I share my concerns. I said, well, if XX hadn't transitioned it seems very likely he would have been a butch-ish lesbian. To which my friend was surprised and then said "Oh, I never thought of it that way." I honestly can't believe this isn't more obvious - that people just don't seem to be thinking this through.
The consequences of the surgeries and cross sex hormones can be devastating. Sterility is a given, generally, but loss of sexual function and urinary issues are common. Because many of the people who follow this path document every step online, it's not hard to find many examples. And...yeah. It's pretty obvious if, back in the day, one grew up even slightly gender non-conforming , how tempting it would be now to become a brave and stunning hero.
Do you have a source for conservative parents transitioning their kids? It sounds absurd on its face that there are conservatives who would disown a gay kid but are hunky dory with a trans one.
Not only are there conservatives in the US who prefer trans kids to gay kids, there are entire theological regimes -- such as the vicious thugs in control of Iran -- which make homosexuality a capital offence and either offer or mandate transition as an alternative to getting thrown off of a roof.
I know this sounds like another one of those "Q-Anon-adjacent" things that someone thought up in a fever dream, but here is an article from no less a frothy-mouthed source than the BBC about the Iran regime: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29832690
If Islamic theocrats can view sex reassignment as more acceptable than homosexuality, there is no real reason conservative Christians cannot fall along similar lines of thinking.
What happens if you get caught having gay sex, you both take the mandatory transition option, and then you get caught again? Does Iran detransition you or just throw you off the roof?
Actually, in Iran, while being actively gay is highly dangerous, gender transition surgery is A-Ok and is performed at government hospitals! The only catch is that the patient must conform to the gender laws and regulations of their new sex!
This is also a pretty well understood phenomenon in countries with strongly anti-homosexual cultures. In a theocratic dictatorship the path of least resistance is transing your kid rather than risk their being outed as gay.
"I underestimated how much conservatives hate gender non-conforming behavior in boys – not to mention the specter of him growing up to be an adult gay man who parties, has sex, and so on."
Conservative MEN, specifically.
Far FAR better, they believe (even if they could not put it into these words), to have a daughter accidentally trapped in a boy's body than a gay (and hence UNMANLY) son.
Especially if it's presented as a way to be a Good Parent, a Mama-Bear, who advocates for their little one against the cruel world. Hello, Jeanette Jennings.
When you write "teenagers seeking gender conversion", you are closer to the mark than you may realise. GLAAD and its sister organisations have become the exponents of what is essentially a religious movement, and those they label "TERFs" are either heretics or blasphemers.
Once-reasonable people such as Dan Savage have been hoodwinked by this movement into a false sense of solidarity, since gay people were often falsely accused of the very things that trans activists are brazenly doing -- namely targeting children across a broad cultural front for ideological indoctrination, from Drag Queen Story Hour to queer pole dancing to gender theory lessons implicitly and sometimes explicitly elaborated on Cartoon Network shows to schools colluding with young children to hide new pronouns and clothes from their parents.
Each of these things is either ignored or downplayed by the Dan Savages and Freddie deBoers of the world, people who are obviously well-meaning and otherwise-intelligent but who do not see how deeply theological and misguided and damaging this movement has become, specifically as it intersects with children and pedagogy. These things are either not happening because they resemble conservative hysterics from the early aughts, or they are happening and it is good because children should be able to learn queer people exist and if those children weren't destined to be trans themselves there is no danger to exposing them to graduate-level gender theory as presented by ideologues clearly hungry for converts.
Back in the bad old days when gay people were persecuted in the West, gay kids had to worry about conservative parents kicking them out or carting them off to some kooky Bible camp; these days, parents have to worry that their children are being recruited into a cult that will convince them their parents hate them if those parents don't instantly adopt new names and pronouns their children announce to them, and where the state can take those kids away if the parents don't comply, and where the children are locked into a lifetime of drugs and surgeries in the pursuit of an unobtainable miracle. The gay kids themselves must contend with a movement that tells them homosexuality is unnatural; that instead of being same-sex attracted, they have a mismatched gendered soul, and they will have to spend the rest of their lives changing their bodies to match that soul's expression.
This is an unacceptable and unstable state of affairs. I do not know what comes next, but I do not think it will be the best thing for families, for gay kids, or for kids who feel weird about being a boy or a girl.
You are so on point. I agree that plenty of people whose work I typically respect and enjoy are just putting on blinders to avoid getting into the fray because they assume trans rights are the natural successor to gay rights and obviously don’t want to be on the wrong side.
DeBoer wrote a very interesting piece a few days ago about how the working class cannot be lost to the GOP. He didn’t even remotely understand that the culture was issues are extremely motivating to parents right now, much more than whatever economic programs Democrats are talking about in a lot of cases. He, and many others, dismiss those concerns out of hand as either unfounded or bigoted.
DeBoer is an interesting study in just how close someone can be to understanding the bunk of it all while, owing to prior ideological commitments, obstinately refusing to make the last little leap.
He has written with far more eloquence than I could ever dream about the futility of consuming your way into an identity; he has even come dangerously near to identifying the dangerous ways that young people are deluding themselves on social media with multiple personality nonsense.
And yet he must about-face, insist that no no, make-believe identities are terribly important for people to try out and try on, and there is nothing about the modern gender nonsense that is anything like the clear social contagion of multiple-personality disorder (even though many of these "alternates" often have gender identities and detailed gender expressions of their own, which their hosts then put into flesh-and-blood practice). And any concern at all about any of this -- as long as it's trans -- is just religious conservatives wanting to shelter their precious babies from understanding that queer and trans people exist.
Perhaps one day he will understand why this issue and no other is the one that drives him to periodically shut down his comments section; that his flaccid and reactionary defensiveness of the trans religion will not persuade anyone of its rectitude, no matter how many temper tantrums he throws about it when his audience doesn't fall into line; that he has spent a greater and greater proportion of his vast intellectual and rhetorical capital in service to a lie even more obvious and perhaps more dangerous than his workaday classical Marxism.
Perhaps.
Wow. You have read my mind and articulated my frustration and confusion far better than I could ever. It’s disappointing to see someone who is very intellectual take zero insight from the fact that his readers become very animated whenever the issue of trans rights becomes a topic. I would doubt that more than 2 are even remotely motivated by religious beliefs or conservatism in their concern with harmful gender ideology.
Freddie banned me for writing "Why do you persistently refuse to recognize that there are real legitimate issues of women's rights when men are legally permitted to declare themselves to be women?"
I don't give him any more money.
I’m almost positive I liked that comment before it was removed. I am typically a free subscriber, but paid for a single month to see if his piece about the working class and the GOP would even touch on these type of issues. He dismissed them out of hand. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have children yet, but if you really want to convince me you should listen closer when I tell you that the child tax credit is not even remotely worth me allowing my children to be taught they were born in the wrong body if they do not adhere to strict gender stereotypes at all times.
Word. But having children is not a miracle cure. Sadly, there are tons of parents in the transification camp. Which is why we need hard cold laws to stop the mutilation and sterilization.
Oh Freddie. Some commenters at BARpod theorized that he might have a trans kid in his social or family orbit somewhere, which accounts for his vehemence and epistemic closure on this specific issue. It's the kind of thing you can imagine someone not wanting to confront, because the alternative suggests that what has been done to this kid *might* not have been in his/her best interest, and that's a frightening thought.
He does. He glancingly mentioned it in one of his posts about The Rules.
"Family member", not necessarily a kid. Just to keep the record scrupulously correct.
I think this every time when a person appears to be "so close". Considering how many people signed the Nytimes letter, I suspect it to be the case for many of them. The likelihood that any particular liberal person has a family member or child of a close friend who is "questioning their gender" is very high IMO.
My thoughts exactly.
"Ideologues clearly hungry for converts" is well put. It's quite concerning for me, as a gay dude, to see kids who might easily grow up to be well-adjusted gay adults being medicalized simply for being "gender non-conforming". That's the nub of the whole issue for me. Once people are adults, it becomes a whole different question about self-determination. But for kids... they need space to figure these things out, not a rush to judgment so that adults can pat themselves on the back for being soooo very 'progressive' and 'accepting' now that they can put "parent of a trans kiddo" in their Twitter bio.
I love Jeff's writing but time and time again I get to the comments and encounter this sort of unhinged Diet-QAnon bullshit. You're imagining a wide-ranging, conspiracy intentionally targeting children, conducting evil without reason, taking the most innocuous outreach as proof that the conspiracy is real (Drag Story Hour? Are you actually fucking kidding me?)
I can agree that GLAAD is overstepping and that further research should be conducted, but your take suggests that ANY public trans visibility is part of this deranged conspiracy, and I'm tired of seeing this kind of rabid extremism applauded as the sensible middle ground.
I have a trans-identified daughter, and a trans-identified nephew.
The daughter is a dreamy creative who loves drawing, design, cosplay and watching people play minecraft, and hates math (despite being actually quite good at it). She's by far the most feminine person in our family - way more feminine than her programmer mother or her martial-art-loving motorbike-riding science-studying older sister.
The nephew is a geeky ADHD kid who did the typical tearaway-boy-acting-out thing so much in primary school that he was restricted to half time attendance, who slouches about in his tracksuit bottoms and plays first-person shooters for entertainment.
In my state it has been made ILLEGAL for any therapist to do any sort of exploratory therapy with either of these kids to suggest that maybe they might just be normal kids of their birth sex, or even asking them why it is that they feel like they're of the opposite sex.
Getting hormones, on the other hand, is real easy. My nephew had them within a couple of months of turning 18.
There are many pieces of research showing gender medicine to be somewhere between not very effective to actively harmful. And yet still every major institution has an obsession with "supporting the most marginalised and vulnerable community" ... which somehow means that you can't question whether the drugs that are being promoted to your kid are inappropriate.
Under those circumstances, am I suspicious of the motivations of authority? You're goddamn right I am.
Drug companies are the biggest pushers on the planet-this trans mess gives them even more customers for life.
I am suspicious that they have their next gift lined up already - weight loss drugs
This is a fascinating response to my screed, which while breathless did not posit anything like a conspiracy in its enumeration of observable phenomena.
Famously, Q-Anon is fuelled (or at least was started) by a small cadre of bullshit artists spinning fantabulisms out of literally nothing, and may well now be a self-sustaining cult in its own right. But every single thing I listed (including, yes, Drag Queen Story Hour) is a well-documented phenomenn, often backed by well-funded organisations whose mandate is not so much "innocuous outreach" to the broader community as it is the indoctrination of children into a cultish belief system (which, as it happens, often itself resembles Q-Anon in more than a few respects).
Is it really "rabid extremism" to raise a sceptical eyebrow at children being shown pole-dancing shows by adult drag queens (or taught pole-dancing themselves in school), or at the Cartoon Network incorporating gender theology into their programming and advertisement strategy? Is it "rabid extremism" to think that a school district colluding with children to hide their brand-new pronouns, names, and clothes from their parents might be breaching the educational remit just a tad?
All of these things are happening, often spontaneously, driven by individuals or groups of ideologues intent on capturing children into their belief system; the fact of the matter is not in dispute, except by those for whom the fact of the matter cannot be so because it sounds too "Diet Q-Anon" to be believed. It is not a Q-Anon-style conspiracy, however; in my opinion it is a cult of blue-haired weirdos convinced of their own revolutionary righteousness and animated by some very bad ideas that have broken out of gender studies and sociology departments to convince what well may be a critical mass of said blue-haired weirdos to more-or-less spontaneously organise to put these bad ideas into practice.
And many of these weirdos are indeed targeting children to convince them of the truth of their cultish beliefs before those children have properly developed the capacity to reason. That does not require a conspiracy, it requires people to understand the age-old idea that beliefs sown into the mind before the age of reason are notoriously sticky -- as typified by the old Jesuit maxim to "...give me the child for his first seven years, and I will give you the man."
But I agree I do not offer a "sensible middle ground" to gender theology, any more than I offer a sensible middle ground to Scientology or Shakerism or Voudon or Imperial-Way Buddhism. I simply do not believe in the tenets of these religions and I do not think the state has any business propagating those tenets, especially to the children that the state claims a monopoly to educate for essentially the entirety of their childhoods.
Even scarier than the pole dancers etc, to me, are the books and lessons telling kids they "might be a boy or a girl or neither" and they get to choose. Absolutely shocking this is planted into children's brains.
My daughter (18 yr old) just cheered on a friend who got a double mastectomy shortly after turning 18. Meanwhile she has 1 good friend and an acquaintance who had them done at age 16. I'm seriously terrified about what is going on.
Stealing "gender theology" ... NOW!
>The Komodo analysis of insurance claims found 56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021.
>Among teens, “top surgery” to remove breasts is more common. In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims. This tally does not include procedures that were paid for out of pocket.
>At least 14,726 minors started hormone treatment with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2017 through 2021, according to the Komodo analysis.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/
Children with a "gender dysphoria" diagnosis who are treated with "watchful waiting" (rather than blockers and hormones) have a desistance rate of 60% to 98%, depending on which study you look at.
The point that I and others are making here is that kids should not be sliced and diced on the basis of a diagnosis with anywhere near that huge of a "false positive" rate.
People drift into such extreme positions or believing things are conspiracies partly because of the shut down of discussion that is happening, most often from the left. I think there is also a big distinction between how some people feel when it comes to children and adults in this arena.
Re Drag Queen Story Hour: note that the NYC group, which has received over $200,000 in public funds to go into public schools and preach, is all in on transification:
>The Dragtivity Book is an educational tool for engaging kids in conversation about gender and identity. ... Featuring 20 pages of fun and educational activities such as “find your own drag name,” “circle your pronouns,” ...
https://www.dshnyc.org/dragtivitybook
Young kids today need to get inoculated against the transification movement. Chaya Raichik, aka libsoftiktok, has a new book out for 4-8 year olds that attempts to do that: https://bravebooks.us/products/no-more-secrets
I also think this movement asks for a bit more. Gay marriage was a law, a policy, a thing on a sheet of paper. No one was asking for everyone to internally validate or accept people. You could think them gay were icky and gross, and we still wanted your vote for gay marriage. This movement, however, demands that people accept certain metaphysical beliefs about gender: it can be nonbinary, it can change, etc. We're asked to accept people's identities, which I don't see for any other movement. Like, I'm against Islamaphobia, but I'm not asking anyone to accept Islam.
Furthermore, there's tradeoffs here that there aren't for gay marriage. On the greatest hits for the gay marriage movement was "how does this affect you?" No one got hurt by gay marriage. Ok the other hand, there's serious tradeoffs here on things like women's sports.
It's such a different movement in those two ways
And the gay rights movement also did not require kids to undergo sterilization and mutilation, as the transification movement demands.
A person can always experiment with being gay or even dressing in drag, then decide later that it really isn't for them. But trans hormones and surgery have permanent effects.
That's not a "serious tradeoff," it's an issue that no one gave a shit about before and affects truly, truly tiny amounts of people.
My own take on it is that there are few enough trans athletes that it can be effectively solved on a case-by-case basis. The vast, vast majority of people shrieking about fairness in high school sports don't have a trans athlete at their local school.
In my country, 52% of women play sport, and 68% of girls play sport.
Serena Williams once estimated that all of the top 200 male tennis players could beat her. So if you take that seriously, a 1 in 200 rate of physically male people in womens' sports would substantially affect all those women.
That is not in any sense an issue that affects "tiny amounts of people"
Yes it is.
https://apnews.com/article/lawmakers-unable-to-cite-local-trans-girls-sports-914a982545e943ecc1e265e8c41042e7
Ban after ban, often with one or zero actual trans athletes. An offensive waste of lawmakers' time, all so they can drum up support on culture war horseshit.
Male people have always been banned from female sport. That's the entire point of having female sport. "Transgender girls" - ie, male people - shouldn't be in female sport for the exact same reason I shouldn't play under-12s basketball.
The fact that we have to explicitly say "yes, and that includes if you really feel like you have a feminine personality" is the horseshit. Gender identities don't play sport. Bodies play sport.
Obviously if you say that some male people can declare themselves female and go into the easier-to-win female category just because they feel like it, more and more male people will in fact do so (and this is certainly happening). The time to nip this in the bud is early.
I'm not dismissing this claim out of hand, but can I see a specific examples of a man claiming transness to compete in women's sports without transitioning in other areas of their life?
I absolutely don't care if they "transition in other areas of their life", because a person's feelings of masculinity or femininity have no bearing on whether they should be able to put their body into a competition designed for the other sort of body. Their motivations are irrelevant - the relevant fact is that the exponentially increasing presence of a group of male people who think they're entitled to be included in anything at all that is for female people - thus ending freedom of association on the basis of sex altogether.
If there ends up being 1 or 2 percent of male people considering themselves trans and entitled to enter all female-body things despite their male body, it has the same effect on these female-body activities no matter what they're doing in the rest of their life.
However, lets take Will Thomas, as referenced by MarkS. I think the case for Thomas being an autogynophile is solid (see here: https://www.rebelnews.com/transgender_swimmer_lia_thomas_exposed_report). Some people object to this being much talked about in public, since they consider it prurient interest, unnecessarily embarrassing to Thomas, and that basically a person's kink is their own business. But it's relevant information in this case because Thomas's claim is of having internal psychological and emotional experiences that are similar to that usually found in women, and to literally "be a woman" on that basis.
Not only is there no evidence at all that Thomas's claim is true (and it's completely unverifiable by everyone, including Thomas - how do you know what another person's internal experiences are like, to compare your own with them?), autogynophilia provides a perfectly convincing reason for Thomas' transition - along with the desire to win an easier sporting competition, transition also provides an opportunity to do sexually exciting things in public, including stripping off with unwilling female people (a sexual dominance behaviour).
We have always known that there's a subset of men that like dressing in women's clothes. I don't particularly mind if they do, but obviously if this behaviour is publicly lauded AND also gives the opportunity to gain advantage in other areas, you're going to get more of it.
I guess I don't think it the question of whether it's bad-faith or good-faith matters to me at all... even if a person has transitioned in all aspects of their life, as I suppose many of the more prominent athlete examples have done, they *still* shouldn't be competing in a sexed female division. The advantages of male puberty and adolescence in everything from bone density to muscle development to lung capacity cannot be undone, even under a regime of long-term use of testosterone-suppressing medication (former US Olympic rower Mary O'Connor was just on the Quillette podcast talking about this, using the example of male vs female rowing times). "Claiming transness to compete in a women's sport" is a boogeyman - even if an athlete's trans identity is in complete good faith, they should still be competing in an open division, not a women's division.
Do you think Will Thomas, a man, should have been allowed to swim in the NCAA women's swimming championships, or not?
Simple question, please answer.
Hey, ya notice that I explicitly said "case by case basis?" as my proposal, and yet you're acting like I'm arguing "just let anybody into whatever division they feel like"? Please cut it out with the laughably transparent bad faith.
For the record, after looking into Lia's case, I would say she shouldn't be competing in the women's division, that the assertion that she's a man who transitioned for the sole purpose of winning is lunacy, and that she'd be perfectly competitive in the men's division.
Did you follow college women's swimming before this? Seems like the number of college women's swimming fans has skyrocketed since 2021, lol
Check out https://shewon.org/index.html This site lists all the women & girls who lost to a transidentified man or boy. No one is saying that they shouldn't compete at all, they should compete in their sex category.
Last year, on what should have been a day of great personal triumph, a woman named Emma Weyant swam a personal best in the NCAA finals of the 500m freestyle. She was faster than every other woman in the pool that day.
But she was not awarded the national championship that she had earned through many years of hard work and dedication.
Instead, this man was:
https://pennathletics.com/sports/mens-swimming-and-diving/roster/will-thomas/14590
Men should and must be kept out of women's sports, period.
I don't think the rareness of something is a sufficient argument against its importance, or one's ability to hold an opinion about it. I don't have a kid in school, but I read stories of parents with bio-female children competing against bio-males in HS sports, and I'm skeptical that case-by-case will resolve the overarching issue, given the increase in stories like Lia Thomas, Laurel Hubbard, and Natalie Ryan. If we could resolve the issue from the top all the way down by creating "open" categories in competitive sports, isn't that preferable to a case-by-case solution?
I have a high schooler. Until he entered middle school and suddenly had multiple trans and nonbinary friends, I only knew two trans people personally (one an adult, one a child, both transitioned in the last 6 years, both natal females). Now lots and lots of young people are claiming the identity. Which, fine. Unless your identity starts making you a medical patient for life.
It's different, but the element of "you have to support this" was there in gay marriage too. Remember Masterpiece Cake Shop and similar cases like it.
There has always been a tension in the Civil Rights movement between negative and positive rights, and to the extent to which not just actions but beliefs are policed (and what kind of actions compel belief).
Then there are the public square problems like "what are kids going to be taught in school, etc". Parental rights, etc.
In short I think the trans stuff just turns these existing issue up to 11 because its so loony and demanding, but they are fundamental problems to be resolved.
I think John Kerry looks like a badass in the windsurfing photo. Have you ever tried windsurfing? It’s fucking hard. Kerry looks like he’s got it dialed. His campaign suffered from too FEW of those sorts of photos. I’d bet if more swing voters saw the badass windsurfing Kerry photos, he’d have won in a landslide.
But, yeah, those other two photos are weird.
It doesn’t matter if Kerry had a Olympic medal in windsurfing- it’s a weird hobby for rich dudes. Mitt Romney probably has an entire team of assassins killing anybody who threatens to release a picture of him and his dressage horses for the exact same reason.
Windsurfing and dressage horses are not at all analogues. Sure, windsurfing requires some startup costs like any outdoor recreation, but it’s hardly a rich man’s sport. It’s got a dirtbag scene, just like snowboarding, rock climbing, fly fishing, etc
Please donate to my GofundMe to bring dressage to urban and rural Appalachian settings. The charity is co-run by Snoop Dogg and Kevin Hart. https://youtu.be/uK5AIJQ2tlA
The difference between now and the 2000s is social media. As many have pointed out, ideas that were once popular only in humanities departments of elite universities have spread to exponentially more people via Tumblr and Twitter.
In the 2000s, you couldn't get excommunicated by your liberal friends for not taking the activist position on gay marriage. You absolutely can be today on gender stuff, and it's because these people are living in a bubble and drunk on power. Instead of persuasion, they take the fire-and-brimstone preacher approach of labeling everyone who doesn't agree with them a vicious bigot.
This doesn't work! It has never worked!
> This doesn't work! It has never worked!
And yet, Democratic Progressivism remains the most common & influential ideology among the wealthier & more socially & politically influential sections of American society. It seems as though excommunicating dissenters does work, if you already have social/institutional power.
Yes, totalitarianism works. See Biden's latest executive order to further wokify the federal bureaucracy and install political officers throughout.
What executive order is that? Serious question.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-14091-further-advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-underserved
Ah, agency equity teams. Honestly no different from what many Fortune 500 corporations have done as part of their DEI initiatives. Those have largely been implemented in a “check the box” fashion, and I suspect these will be no different. Some agencies will likely take them more seriously than others.
Right, nothing at all to worry about! It's perfectly fine to have political officers overseeing things throughout the federal bureaucracy! What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure they're all just the nicest people ever!
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over
"Some children seem to benefit from the child sterilization cult" is not a recommendation for the child sterilization cult. Maybe it's just me, but I suspect that in the fullness of time, the child sterilization cult will be rejected as a "civil rights cause" and be seen instead as a, you know, dangerous cult that sterilized children.
Dr. Mengele did sex-change experiments on Jewish and Roma children. They reportedly enjoyed his warm bedside manner and his patients were well-fed. Though it seems that some of them did get a little upset as they were carted off to the gas chambers after his experiments, because it felt like being ghosted. Plenty there for the "happy" transitioned teen on TikTok to consider, in between the multiple operations by different surgeons, all making it up as they go.
>"Some children seem to benefit from the child sterilization cult" is not a recommendation for the child sterilization cult.
+1
"You can debate the ethics of the liberal obfuscation of the time."
Or you can just admit you're okay with lying if it gets you what you want.
“I’ve learned to ignore the fact that if an asteroid targets Earth, our current plan is to shake our fists at it while it destroys us “ --> False! NASA just successfully completed a mission where we knocked an asteroid off its orbit. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroid-s-motion-in-space
Thanks Jeff. This is a terrifying issue for a lot us, socially, and as always it's great to have a comedic release valve whilst hammering out the nuance.
I almost never LOL while reading, but "Beefsteak O’Blammo" got me ...
You know what would sharply reduce the number of medical hacks who sell kids on irreversible gender transition?
Malpractice lawsuits.
We used to have these things were lawyers sued incompetent doctors for injuries they caused, but the Republican Party convinced the public that all lawyers were greedy liars and we now can’t do that any more. Perhaps if someone reminded the public that the laws limiting malpractice suits protect malicious gender surgeons, that would help?
Guilty on both accounts back in the 2000's. I'm glad I have evolved big time since then.
If you want to get depressed about the state of Left discourse on this topic following your analysis to a ‘T’, here’s Rick Perlstein acting as if he had “‘Premature anti-fascists’ were on the right side of history” tattooed onto his inner eyelids:
https://mobile.twitter.com/rickperlstein/status/1577300095963631616
Just vote for and work hard to elect Republicans, and then pass laws against the mutilation and sterilization of children.
That's what I'm doing, after a lifetime (I'm 67) on the progressive left ...
I had always assumed the Neoliberal account was just Noah Smith talking to himself.
Maybe the group account is run by Noah’s rabbits?
Yes, as a child of the late '60s, I find it bizarre that people with gender atypical interests are being called trans. Back in those benighted times the message we were sent was that boys and girls could do whatever they wanted. And that's how my wife and I raised our kids, born in the late '90s.
@Carina's list of downsides of medical intervention are unfortunately accurate. I simply don't understand how one can send the message "trans women are women / trans men are men" to children, and then call their resulting choices "informed consent." People need to know that switching sexes is simply not possible. You can use extreme medical procedures to roughly approximate some physical attributes of a body of the opposite sex, but that's not close to the same thing.
Amen brother. Ditto for my kids born in the late 80s early 90s.
And now this: “American College of Cardiology study says cross-sex hormones create SEVEN TIMES higher risk of stroke.”
https://karadansky.substack.com/p/hormone-therapy-for-gender-dysphoria
Exactly. I think some young girls who decide to transition are doing so because they think the only way to be a woman is to adhere to some false feminine ideal. And if you can’t, or if you think society is a scary and threatening place for girls (which it certainly can be), the solution is to become a man. That leaves no time or space for exploration of what it REALLY means to be a woman, which encompasses a lot of individual variety.
When an adult woman decides to transition, that’s a different story. A friend of mine, born female, transitioned about ten years ago and is happily living as a trans man. He had begun to use a masculine name and pronouns years before starting hormone therapy and having top surgery. Prior to that stage of his life, he was an out lesbian for many years. For him, transitioning was clearly the right choice. But he lived for decades as a lesbian before deciding to take that next step. A teenager just doesn’t know yet who they are.
This movement hinges on overlooking or forgetting that 1) social contagions strike adolescent girls harder than any other group; 2) the American health-care system is a for-profit industry with a built-in incentive to support iatrogenic illnesses. I am not cynical enough to believe that the scores of pediatric gender clinics (not counting Planned Parenthood clinics) which have sprung up in the past 5-10 years don't really believe they are helping children. I think they believe in their mission, which just happens to be result in exactly what would happen if, say, our society decided to sterilize gender-non-conforming/likely-gay children; 3) that the old-school transvestite/transsexual men were in it to get off, and this is still true, which is why your neighborhood trans-folx are the wispy bearded 5'3" froggy voiced "men" and the 6' "women" who are the only "women" at their job wearing mini-skirts & fishnet stockings, and no one dares to challenge that; and 4) lastly, that this movement is anything but progressive because of how it allows men to become the first "female" Jeopardy champion/ass't secr. of health, supports putting rapists into women's prisons, allows any man to walk into any women's locker room/changing room, contends that a lesbian who refuses to have sex with be-penised individuals is a bigot, and undoes decades of fighting for parity in sports, tossing women off of podiums in sports, from golf to swimming to bicycling to weight-lifting.
I wish someone had noticed this before we got to "gee, maybe castrating boys and sending girls into menopause 40 years early isn't such a great idea" but here we are.
Great comment Carina.
I would only quibble with the transification movement being "arguably hostile to the gay community"; I would say that it is absolutely totally manifestly obviously hostile to the gay community!
The transification movement is telling gay kids that they are in the wrong body because they like the same sex, and that the final solution is to be sterilized and mutilated, right now!
South Park literally nailed this with the mr garrison x mr slave romance.
This is such an excellent comment - thank you.
I agree with everything, and you point out something that is always completely glossed over.
Even in the best case scenario and medical transition is the best way for this person to live happily in the world - (which is what I always tell people (the small # of people I feel comfortable expressing my concerns to) that I sincerely hope this is the case for my daughters good friend (an ftm - actually was her boyfriend in highschool), that this was the right decision for them. But even if it is. They are now a medical patient for life - they are actively making the body less healthy. They have to live with the cognitive dissonance that they are not truly what they claim and that it something they might have to constantly hide. That can not be healthy.
Finally, about the transing of gay kids. This same kid - his parents are definitely not conservative and would have been fine with a gay daughter, but did the kid have internalized homophobia? As a little kid? Maybe! Was it (among other things such as liking all things boys like etc) a piece of the puzzle? Maybe! What is weird is that to my one friend with whom I share my concerns. I said, well, if XX hadn't transitioned it seems very likely he would have been a butch-ish lesbian. To which my friend was surprised and then said "Oh, I never thought of it that way." I honestly can't believe this isn't more obvious - that people just don't seem to be thinking this through.
The consequences of the surgeries and cross sex hormones can be devastating. Sterility is a given, generally, but loss of sexual function and urinary issues are common. Because many of the people who follow this path document every step online, it's not hard to find many examples. And...yeah. It's pretty obvious if, back in the day, one grew up even slightly gender non-conforming , how tempting it would be now to become a brave and stunning hero.
Do you have a source for conservative parents transitioning their kids? It sounds absurd on its face that there are conservatives who would disown a gay kid but are hunky dory with a trans one.
Not only are there conservatives in the US who prefer trans kids to gay kids, there are entire theological regimes -- such as the vicious thugs in control of Iran -- which make homosexuality a capital offence and either offer or mandate transition as an alternative to getting thrown off of a roof.
I know this sounds like another one of those "Q-Anon-adjacent" things that someone thought up in a fever dream, but here is an article from no less a frothy-mouthed source than the BBC about the Iran regime: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29832690
If Islamic theocrats can view sex reassignment as more acceptable than homosexuality, there is no real reason conservative Christians cannot fall along similar lines of thinking.
What happens if you get caught having gay sex, you both take the mandatory transition option, and then you get caught again? Does Iran detransition you or just throw you off the roof?
Actually, in Iran, while being actively gay is highly dangerous, gender transition surgery is A-Ok and is performed at government hospitals! The only catch is that the patient must conform to the gender laws and regulations of their new sex!
Oops ignore my comment basically saying this haha
This is also a pretty well understood phenomenon in countries with strongly anti-homosexual cultures. In a theocratic dictatorship the path of least resistance is transing your kid rather than risk their being outed as gay.
"I underestimated how much conservatives hate gender non-conforming behavior in boys – not to mention the specter of him growing up to be an adult gay man who parties, has sex, and so on."
Conservative MEN, specifically.
Far FAR better, they believe (even if they could not put it into these words), to have a daughter accidentally trapped in a boy's body than a gay (and hence UNMANLY) son.
Especially if it's presented as a way to be a Good Parent, a Mama-Bear, who advocates for their little one against the cruel world. Hello, Jeanette Jennings.