I know that many conservatives operate in bad faith, but still... why can't anyone just say that a woman is an adult human female? Oh right, saying that would Empower the Cons, and we can't have that.
I haven't followed trans issues as closely as some, but I agree when you say that many progressives mistakenly believe that this fight is exactly like gay marriage and that it's easy. It's not. There's way thornier questions here, the sports question being a good example.
And finally, I don't think J.K. Rowling (who is left wing on many, many things) is a vicious monster. There. I said it.
"[W]hy can't anyone just say that a woman is an adult human female?"
There are two parts to the answer to that.
First, a pedantic point about grammar: the normal way of saying that would be "adult female human" (which is what dictionaries usually say).* "Female" is normally an adjective; "human" normally a noun and not a noun-qualifier.
Second, because the whole point is: is a trans woman a woman or is she something like a woman but not really quite all the way there (or is she a man, in which case you're just being fully prejudiced)? If she is a woman and *therefore* she is female, then sure, fine, no issues. But if you want to say that there is a distinction between sex and gender and that she (gender) is male (sex), then "adult human female" excludes her from being a woman. So, if you want to say that a trans woman is a woman, then you either have to accept another definition ... or you have to accept that a trans woman is female. If you don't want to accept that a trans woman is a woman, then saying "adult human female" is a way to do so without it being as obvious that you think she's a man.
Sure, phrases like "a male woman" or "her penis" are unusual and seem a bit odd. But unusual people are going to result in unusual phrases. If you go by the gender/sex division that Jeff advocates, then you have to deal with the gender-word (her, she, woman) and the sex-word (male, female, and various body-parts) not lining up in every single person. Some people seem to be OK with the idea of "a male woman" as a description of a trans woman. But most seem to revolt and end up either saying that trans women are female or saying that trans women are men.
*You can tell the word-order is weird because anti-trans activists get it wrong when it's not the set phrase "adult human female" - there have been several amusing cases of people comparing adult human females to adult human chickens or similar, exactly because you'd expect the species-noun to be the last word of the phrase.
Your attempted pedantry is specious, Mr. Gadsden (if you will forgive me for the thought crime of assuming you will answer to "Mr." based on the hundreds of years your first name has been a man's name and the masculine character of your avatar -- these are scant evidence upon which to base something as consequential and offensive as casually using an unwanted label in a brief exchange).
To the point, "human" is quite often a noun qualifier -- human being, human rights, human sacrifice, and human nature are among the most common phrases in which the word "human" appears, all of which employ it as an adjective. Similarly, "male" and "female" are quite often employed as nouns, from Richard Attenborough documentaries about animals to casual conversation where the participants emphasise the animal nature of human beings (see, there it is again). The phrases "adult human male" and "adult human female" are thus perfectly grammatical, and far more natural to the language than many of the inventions of the language magicians that have taken over the progressive discourse.
Your aside accusing someone of "prejudice" for recognising that a trans woman is a man also misses the mark. It is not prejudice to fail to respect the language norms of a metaphysical belief system to whose tenets you do not adhere. You are not ipso facto prejudiced against Muslims for refusing always to bookend the word "Mohammed" with "the Prophet" and "(peace be upon him)" -- it is simply you exercising your right to use language outside the paradigm set by Muslim theologians. Furthermore, it is not prejudice to openly contest or even deny the tenets of another's belief system, even when they are present; you are not ipso facto prejudiced against Christians if you say you do not believe Jesus was the Son of God, or that you do not acknowledge his human sacrifice (look, another case!) on your behalf, even if you say these things in the company of Christians for whom they are direct contradictions of reality and extreme contraventions of social etiquette.
Gender-critical people do not share the gender theology to which you evidently subscribe. That does not make them bigots or transphobes; it means they do not accept the tenets of your religion as adequate explanations for the physical and social phenomena that occur around sex and gender.
Funny to see a reply that starts "Your attempted pedantry is specious" and then fails to rebut claims actually made ("Mr. Gadsden" didn't state that "adult human female" was ungrammatical, simply nonstandard).
As for the latter half of your comment...it's basically waffling. Yes, disrespecting a belief system's language norms is not "ipso facto" prejudice. And contesting a tenet of a belief's system is not, in itself, prejudice. But those are trivial points that miss the obvious point that both of those things CAN constitute prejudice depending on the exact situation.
We recognize that Holocaust denial constitutes antisemitic prejudice by default, even though that too is simply disagreeing with a tenet of a particular belief system (orthodox history). If a Holocaust denier wanted to argue that denying the Holocaust doesn't make them a bigot or a Judeophobe, they'd have to make a specific argument to that effect, not just harp on the trivial generic point that factual disagreements in general aren't intrinsically bigoted.
True, Mr. Gadsden did not employ the word "ungrammatical" explicitly. He merely explained that he was making a grammatical point about why a phrase should not be considered part of normal usage (i.e., why "anyone" cannot say the phrase in question), which I believe I effectively rebutted with examples showing the individual elements of the contested phrase to be perfectly ordinary parts of common usage. If you like, you can mentally substitute my word "grammatical" with "normal", and it will not reduce the impact of the provided examples.
As for the rest of your comment, it is...not even wrong. It neither rebuts anything I wrote nor does it capture the essence of Mr. Gadsden's accusations. His remarks, that disagreeing with trans ideology in some (or indeed every) particular makes one "fully prejudiced" (or, in downstream comments, "straightforwardly anti-trans" with "[hostility] to them as people"), very clearly indicate that he believes any deviation from what Mr. Maurer unfortunately labels "the left-wing canon" is, in his own words, prejudiced, anti-trans, and/or hostile towards trans people.
Mr. Gadsden did not qualify this statement; he did not speak of possibilities or exact situations. He is obviously operating under the assumption that any deviation from trans orthodoxy connotes transphobia, in every circumstance, for everyone.
In that, he is mistaken -- just as mistaken as are fundamentalist Christians who insist that failure to follow their norms and espouse their beliefs is anti-Christian bigotry. My response, analogising his metaphysical belief system to the established world religions, was hardly waffling or special pleading or hairsplitting, but rather a straightforward rhetorical point.
With your Holocaust-denier comments, one can assume your implication to be that trans ideology is not an ideology at all -- that it is a science at least in the same way that history is a science, and that disagreeing with its assumptions or its findings is (or at least can be assumed to be) a sign that the disagreer is a bigot comparable to an anti-Semitic denier of the Holocaust. But, given the level of obtuse boorishness and close literal reading your comment evinced, I will not press or respond to this assumption. I am frankly not interested in playing the game you are trying, however wittingly, to set up with it.
Instead I will state plainly, on my own account, that trans ideology is much closer to a religion than it is to a science. To wit,
- The ideology posits an unfalsifiable set of precepts to explain a certain class of observational phenomena.
- These precepts have become the lens through which a significant and growing number of people view the world and their place in it, often with the zeal of the freshly-converted.
- The ideology has arrogated to itself the monopoly of explaining said phenomena; any alternative explanations of the observations, any criticism of the observations themselves, and indeed failure to adhere to any of the ideology's tenets are met with an anathema spelled out by an accusation of transphobia.
- The ideology insists that its precepts elaborate a fundamental truth of the human condition to which every person alive is a party, whether they choose to be or not, which exposes everyone in the world to the threat of being anathematised as soon as they receive the ideology's Good News.
That sounds an awful lot like an evangelical religion espousing a metaphysical belief system to me.
Disagreeing with trans ideology may certainly connote prejudice against people who consider themselves trans in much the same way as disagreeing with Christian or Muslim or Buddhist ideology may connote prejudice against people who consider themselves Christian or Muslim or Buddhist. But it is far from the foregone conclusion that Mr. Gadsden's remarks made it out to be.
I have no interest in talking you out of your religion, much like I have no interest in talking a Christian or Muslim or Buddhist out of theirs. You may hold yourself to whichever language norms or faith tenets you feel like. But you do not get to smuggle your metaphysics into the public square and apply them to me.
Yours is a faith I simply do not share. I bear no ill will towards trans people, nor the vastly greater numbers of converts to the trans religion, but I shall not be bullied into espousing their beliefs.
I don't see that your rebuttal was effective, since (1) RG had already addressed "individual elements of the contested phrase" himself, and (2) the normal meaning of a conjunction of words is not, in general, the conjunction of the normal meanings of the words (recall the "yeah, right" punchline of the famous linguistics joke, or the fact that Grape-Nuts famously includes neither grapes nor nuts).
The rest of my comment was indeed not a rebuttal of what you wrote; I merely wrote that what you wrote was waffling and point-missing, not that what you wrote was incorrect. You defended yourself against RG's accusation of prejudice on generic grounds ("It is not prejudice to fail to respect the language norms of a metaphysical belief system [...] Furthermore, it is not prejudice to openly contest or even deny the tenets of another's belief system"). Those generic grounds are unconvincing since the actual motor of arguments like these is the specific content of concrete claims (hence why, as I wrote, neither of us would be convinced by e.g. a Holocaust denier using a generic argument like yours).
Meanwhile you implicitly analogized belief in, and acknowledgment of, trans identity to religion. Then you explicitly called it a theology. And now you're expounding on that. As before I'm perceiving that as waffling: like, yeh, if you wanna post basically the Internet's billionth variation on Wokeness Is Really A Religion When Ya Think About It, you can, and if you define "religion" broadly enough you won't even be wrong. It's an uncompelling point to score, though, because when "religion" is defined so broadly, most politically weighty complexes of beliefs amount to "religion" and the point diffuses.
Did you notice that TERF/"Gender Critical" ideology ALSO counts as a religion by your 4 bullet points, mutatis mutandis? Insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 MEN 👏👏 is exactly as metaphysical as insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 WOMEN 👏👏.
>Insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 MEN 👏👏 is exactly as metaphysical as insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 WOMEN 👏👏.
Well, no, because TERFs define the categories of "man" and "woman" based on immutable biological characteristics which can be directly observed, whereas TRAs define them based on a mysterious metaphysical essence which cannot.
I thought his rebuttal was highly effective. But I imagine a devout Christian would also find his rebuttal wanting. Am I wrong? How does one tell if they’re on it? You wouldn’t be persuaded by anything. So your belief is literally unchallengeable. So what’s even the point of a reply? Proselytizing?
And democratically of a billion people (your words) call something a religion. Well. It’s a religion. Of course the members of that religion don’t think they’re a cult.
I assume I’m talking to someone that never was religious and left that religion am I correct?
I don't believe trans women are women. I refer to them as women and use their preferred names and pronouns as a social courtesy, but they are not literally women.
By way of analogy: a man and a woman have a son together. The couple divorce, the man emigrates and never returns, and the woman marries another man. The stepfather and the son form a very close bond, to the point that the son refers to the stepfather as "dad".
As a social matter, the man is the boy's father, and no one has any problem referring to him as such.
As a BIOLOGICAL matter, the man is NOT the boy's father, and it would be erroneous to refer to him as such. It would be an imposition if the stepfather started demanding that everyone treat him like the BIOLOGICAL father rather than the SOCIAL father (e.g. asking people if they can see the [entirely fictitious] facial resemblance between him and the boy).
You sort of gestured at this point without actually making it, but it would be really convenient and save us so much time if we could just collectively agree that the terms "male" and "female" refer exclusively to sex, not gender. I know some trans women feel "excluded" when people point out that they are not female, but we still need a quick and easy way to refer to someone's SEX as distinct from their gender. If we use the same term to refer to gender as well as sex, then the whole concept of being trans collapses into incoherence, as it rests on a mismatch between an individual's sex and their stated gender.
If cis women and trans women are both "female women", that seems tantamount to asking us to believe that there are NO DIFFERENCES AT ALL between the two groups, which is obviously absurd.
> it would be really convenient and save us so much time if we could just collectively agree that the terms "male" and "female" refer exclusively to sex, not gender.
I could just as easily assert that it'd be really convenient and save us so much time if we just agreed that "male" and "female" refer exclusively to gender, not sex. Asserting convenience like that doesn't actually move the ball forward, it's just an expression of personal preference about language use.
> I know some trans women feel "excluded" when people point out that they are not female, but we still need a quick and easy way to refer to someone's SEX as distinct from their gender.
You can...add the word "sex" when you're talking about sex? A 3-letter monosyllable seems "quick and easy" to me.
> If we use the same term to refer to gender as well as sex, then the whole concept of being trans collapses into incoherence
Your fallacy is: non sequitur. One word having two meanings doesn't mean that the two meanings represent the same concept; the terms "male" and "female" referring to sex OR gender depending on context doesn't mean that sex and gender are the same thing. Consider national/ethnic descriptors like "Serbian" and "Japanese" that can refer to formal citizenship OR ancestry/ethnicity. That doesn't collapse "into incoherence" "the whole concept of being" a naturalized immigrant to Serbia or Japan.
So you are being straightforwardly anti-trans. Fine. At least I know where I stand.
There are a bunch of ways of getting to a place where trans women are treated as women. But one of the ways that we treat trans women as women is that we refer to them as "she" and "her". If you won't do that, then you are being straightforwardly hostile to them as people.
This isn't new; the first vaginoplasty was done in Berlin in 1930/1; Dora Richter was murdered by the Nazis in 1933 and they burned the records (which is why we don't know which year her operation was done in). Hormone Replacement Therapy dates back to the same era and was routinised in the 1950s. Transgender men and women were regularly referred to with their correct pronouns right back in the 1950s. Plenty of trans men and trans women have "passed" well enough that people only knew they were trans if they were told so - and have done so since at least the early 1960s. We're talking about a time before the *second* wave of feminism really got going; this is not some 21st century innovation.
Sorry but how do you jump from "pronouns refer to sex" to "anti-trans" and "hostile to them as people"? I can simultaneously believe that trans people are free to live whatever life they want or dress however they like, *and* that "she" refers to a human female, as in XX chromosoms and having a uterus.
I may indulge trans people I meet by using their favorite pronoun as a matter of courtesy, maybe I'll even do it instinctively if (say) a transwoman happens to look like a non-trans woman. One doesn't have to be an ass, much like I don't go into a church and shout "there is no god" even though I'm an atheist. But if trans activists can't make peace with the thought that many people will stick to the biological perspective, I think it says more about them than about me.
You're the exact kind of person who welcomes male rapists identifying into female prisons. And a "transwoman" is a male who identifies as and wishes to live as a female. Now how does calling the heroes who run female-only rape crisis centers "TERFs" improve the trans experience? It doesn't. A woman is an adult human female, and that deserves and demands to be its own protected class. I went back to nursing school in my adulthood and can tell you first hand that women take a dim view at being referred to as "birthing parents" or "cervix havers" or any other such anti-woman nonsense. This argument, from your side, is basically begging for Republican landslide victories, their pure idiocy on Roe nonwithstanding.
I'm tired of reading bad faith arguments from bullying so-called "liberals". And to say that that they're not basically shoving kids with legitimate emotional problems under the "trans" umbrella while ignoring medicine and common sense is pure folly at best and a cynical lie at worst. I support compassionate treatment for anybody who wants to be trans and I support proper evidence-based medicine as well. They're not mutually exclusive. Gaslighting rape victims, detransitioners, and lesbians is the road to nowhere and your argument causes more harm than good.
This may surprise you, but saying people support rapists is not an effective way of communicating with them.
Especially as I don't think that trans women should be allowed into the general population in female prisons unless they've had genital surgery (or, maybe, a thorough safety assessment - and any assessment that doesn't say "no" a lot is not thorough enough for me). They clearly shouldn't be in the general population in male prisons either - even if you take the extreme cases, it's instantly obvious that they would be bullied in male prisons too.
I don't know what the ideal solution is for prisons. But it isn't allowing men to claim to be women and go and rape women, and it isn't allowing trans women to get the shit kicked out of them in men's prisons. And it isn't solitary confinement for all trans women either.
Second, we do not protect classes of people. We protect individuals who are subjected to discrimination because they are believed - by the discriminator - to be members of a class. In anti-discrimination law, it doesn't matter whether you are a woman or not; if you are discriminated against because the person discriminating against you treats you as a woman, then you are protected. That applies to cis men too: if someone attacks a cis man from behind because he has long hair and they think he's a woman, then that was misogyny and you could get a hate crime enhancement on the sentence.
As for the nonsense about "cervix havers", I'd love to see examples of that actually happening outside of shouty idiots on social media. You see "people with cervixes" when talking about cervical smears. But that's because trans men weren't going for their smears - because, funnily enough, when you write to a man and say "women need to have cervical smear tests" they get put off going because they know they're going to be treated like shit. Creating an environment that is welcoming to trans men without putting off cis women is hard. I'm quite sure some people get it wrong the other way. But it's hardly anti-woman to want people to turn up to their smear tests. It's not an anti-woman conspiracy, it's a desperate attempt to stop people dying of cancer.
If you'd settle for "most people use pronouns to refer to apparent biology most of the time", I wouldn't argue at all. Most binary trans people look like they are the sex that they want to be.* Nearly all binary cis people look like the sex they are. We don't go checking beyond a quick glance. There are a few people that we go "oh, she/he looks weird" and we have to work out or ask which one to use. But mostly, guessing by looking works pretty well.
The other bit (the bit you start with "the problem comes") is, I think, legitimate, when it's someone jumping on normal casual speech - and there's certainly a few people who go over the top about "pregnant women". But there are a lot who also go OTT about "pregnant people". I think there's a huge difference between the language that gets used in normal conversations (no-one is ever going to say casually "women and other people with cervixes"), and what should appear on formal medical information ("women and other people with cervixes should have a cervical smear every three years").
Something I notice happens is that a document is put up in a specific context getting publicised as if people were saying that it must be used for everyone. For instance, Brighton in England has a fuck-ton of LGBT+ people and their maternity department has more lesbians and trans men giving birth than anywhere else in the country: they wrote a bunch of guidelines for what you might want to say instead of the normal words when the normal words don't work (things like "birthing parent" and "non-birthing parent" for when "mother" and "father" wouldn't work, e.g. lesbians or trans men). These weren't intended to be used these for everyone, but a guideline to have in mind so their staff wouldn't use a word that is blatantly wrong because they panicked and they can't think of anything else to say. That's where a lot of the things like "chestfeeding" come from - basically, some intern was told "nurses and midwives keep fucking up in front of the patients because we have so many lesbians and trans men having kids here: can you invent some words that won't piss everyone off?" So someone found this and publicised the one page with the two lists of words (without mentioning the previous page that described the context where they were meant to be used) and did a "wokies are trying to replace 'breastfeeding' with 'chestfeeding'"story. Of course, some idiots responded to that by insisting on using that everywhere. Of course they did: have you met people? Lots of them are idiots. But they were, well, nobodies ranting on twitter and the vast majority of pro-trans people think they are exactly that. There wasn't an attempt by a hospital to replace the words with other words, just to suggest some alternatives when the normal words don't work (also, at least half of them were for lesbian couples, not for trans people at all).
Reminds me of "Winterval" (one city in England, once, decided that since they were having a whole bunch of different Winter festivals, they should have one big branding across all of them, starting at Halloween and ending with Chinese New Year - so they called it "Winterval". Christmas was obviously part of it. And someone at a newspaper claimed they were trying to "replace Christmas with Winterval" and no-one has ever been able to shift that incorrect claim)
*Yes, most. It takes a few years, but they mostly get there. One reason this gets confused is that, like any movement, the most noisy and annoying members are people in their early/mid twenties - and trans people in their early/mid twenties are, pretty much by definition, usually very early on in their transition process, which means that they are the most in-need of requiring people to refer to them as being of a sex that they do not appear to be. I know a bunch of people who were very shouty in their early twenties and didn't, at that time, look much like the gender they'd transitioned to. Those same people, now in their forties, are much quieter, not shouty on social media any more, and look a lot more like the gender they have transitioned to. But they've been replaced by another generation of other shouty young people (in fact, that replacement cycle has run at least three or four times).
No it's not. Boats have female names "because the rigging costs more than the hull" is the quip you'll hear from a sailor: in other words, there are recognized social conventions connected to that "fucking around," which makes it consequential, and that is what the fuck we're talking about. That's why a trans woman is a woman, not a man, and that's why we make a distinction between sex (which is emphatically not simple) and gender (which is informed but not determined by sex). Because it's consequential.
Plenty of people can "just say that a woman is an adult human female" so your question's plainly bogus. I think you're just stomping your foot about people not adopting your chosen shibboleth.
Anyway, Richard Gadsden's commented on that more politely than me, so I'll focus on J.K. Rowling.
I don't see that Rowling "is left wing on many, many things" — she's a liberalish centrist who'd be outflanked to her left by the entire Bernie wing of the Democrats. She did oppose Brexit, which you could count as a left-leaning position (though one that a lot of centrists and quite a few conservatives were happy with), and she didn't like Trump (though plenty of people didn't, Never Trump Republicans included). She nominally supports abortion and gay marriage, but it's not clear what that support entails beyond an occasional tweet...and Rowling's chummy with homophobes, including on Twitter, so.
Perhaps the easiest way to discern Rowling's ideological tilt is to see where she put her money: she donated $2 million to Britain's Labour Party when it was in its Blairite-Brownite phase, before staunchly opposing Jeremy Corbyn (the Party's only left-wing leader this century).
As for "vicious monster"...well, there's room to argue what "monster" means exactly, but Rowling's pretty vicious. There. I said it. Even if you don't count handing megabucks to a party of government that lied a country into a war of aggression, she's vicious in how she wields SLAPPs against commentary she finds embarrassing or ideologically inconvenient. (Why yes, Rowling does also like to pose as a defender of free speech, including signing that one Harper's letter in 2020. She's certainly a blazing hypocrite even if she's not a monster.) She even threatened a random Scot into withdrawing a tweet that ACCURATELY AND LITERALLY VERBATIM quoted a tweet where she wrote "I've ignored porn tweeted at children".
I mean the mediocre and cowardly Harper's letter that came out during America's biggest wave ever of civil-rights protest, explicitly acknowledged that wave, then didn't say a word about the massive police violence it met — surely the most salient infringement of American "justice and freedom" at that time. You know, the letter that alluded to individual incidents without spelling out which ones it meant ("Editors are fired for running controversial pieces" etc. — which editors, which pieces?) and refused to engage any of their specifics ("Whatever the arguments around each particular incident"). That letter.
our of curiosity how many (your words) "uncle Toms" signed the harpers letter? The one Slate told you to hate. The one you hate because you don't WANT to understand it or the people on it?
Just like jokes it's totally okay to NOT get something. Some people don't GET jokes. And some people don't GET what people are trying to say. But you're right. It would have taken real strength for those people to just fall in line and tow the platform. That would have made them truly honest intellectuals. Why be honest when you can fall in line?
I criticized the letter for its actual content. That's what it means to take its signers seriously. What you just did is the opposite of taking "the people of color [...] who signed the harpers letter seriously" — you're deflecting criticisms of the actual letter by gesturing at the race of (some of!) the signers. I'm not the one needing an excuse here.
Have you seen the Matt Walsh documentary "What is A Woman?" It's something that's probably being watched and passed around way, way more than the total silence in the press would lead people to believe. Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog were some of the only open-minded liberal types I know of that watched it, reviewed it, and gave it a fair shake. Is Walsh's film a right wing polemic? Mostly yes, but the salient issue about it is that it's not at all crazy, and most sensible people — which is most people, beyond political affiliation — are pretty chilled by what's in it.
Lefty/liberal types (and I'd argue the Hillary Clinton/K-Hive/"Colbert'n'Stewart, who'll kill comedy forever" types are not in any way liberal or left at this point, just bitterly partisan for uber-corporate, technocratic, PMC worship) would have been smart to get ahead of this issue by not totally blackballing/isolating/tarring/libeling/slandering the aforementioned Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's early work on some of the more sensitive parts of the trans issue. When I saw the Walsh film, I kept thinking that someone not blinded by empty partisanship could have produced a similar documentary with that duo at the helm years ago — who, unlike Walsh, don't ultimately maybe think that any gender care should outlawed altogether. Had that alternate reality version of the film been made, we could have maybe prevented this current morass, which is one of a few issues maybe serious and stupid enough to remove all (formerly) liberal parties from power in the west for a generation, with likely wildly reactionary replacements.
We're in a place where this is in no way related to the gay and lesbian marriage issue. Most sensible people, and even many of the evangelicals deeply opposed to that issue on religious grounds, could at least understand, or even empathize, with the argument as a question of pure equality. The trans issue has become so cultish that it makes Scientology seem radically normal, with a bizarre set of beliefs and language regulations that's making seniors and independents repelled by Trump's behavior rethink voting against him again. If you go deep into Mississippi and talk to religious conservative types (and I sometimes do, and they're mostly very nice and smart people!), most of them will even agree that trans folk should be free to live the way they want to live, without harassment or discriminatory laws, but this argument is totally untethered from the issue of simple "equality" at this point.
That famous and sensible liberal types like J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle have somehow become the new face of "transphobia" for honest and often thoughtful work — that dares to question a bizarre and byzantine belief set that changes its rules daily, like the fundamentalist pseudo-religion on heavy psychedelic drugs that it is — shows how wild this has become. I have a lot of friends in my little corner of NYC that bridge multiple generations, and are life-long professed socialists that worked for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, are discussing how terrifying a lot of this is in private, and how their non-profit work has mostly (as described in that recent Ryan Grim piece) become lengthy Zoom meetings about language policing and pronouns.
It's such a shame. I was once a big fan of Jon Stewart (and the now-dead world of late night comedy in general). He can be really funny (still!), but our broken-brained modernity has shown him to be a dim bulb, with no principles or voice of his own. A typical affliction these days, yes, but it's a shame to see Stewart affected by it. We could use someone like the old Stewart to come at this issue with wisdom and empathy and sharply pointed humor, but that Stewart would probably be banned by Twitter.
I have many disagreements with Matt Walsh (I'm an atheist, feminist, lesbian) but it's striking how he does what liberals *used* to be good at -- challenging elites, pointing out absurdity. The first half of "What is a woman?" is in the style of the old Daily Show field pieces, and it works!
Meanwhile, Jon's gender episode is just cringey and awful. Yeah, he backsassed a conservative politician on camera, but he came off as a smarmy douche throughout the episode. He endorsed very dumb arguments while talking down to the audience.
His coverage of the issue was irresponsible (the evidence for medical transition of minors is weak, with many bad outcomes that people should consider) and it wasn't funny at all.
We've ceded comedy to CONSERVATIVES. I never thought I'd see the day.
Right on. I always argue that comedy isn't ever naturally partisan or political, and that it's chaos interpreting and sending up order. Since "order" is now represented by a party whose apparatchiks are deeply embedded in the ranks of what was once comedy, it's left them open for easy comedic destruction.
Political comedy is good, and necessary, and late night comics always skewered politicians. But they didn't seem like they were parroting political party talking points until very recently. I saw Ice T tweet about how he doesn't trust either party and that the democrats and republicans are "just the same bird" recently. He's undoubtedly right about that, but that "bird" has become the center of the universe. Comedians, who were mostly liberal, used to not be riding one of the wings of that bird, always fighting to be the victorious "wing." Comedians were like the semi-intelligent primates on the ground below throwing rocks at the bird, trying to make it go off course, crash, or just show its true nature. And they had targets besides that bird: they'd get bored and go throw rocks at the fish or the other animals; they created chaos everywhere!
The grand irony about Stewart's fall into partisan dumb-brain and anti-comedy is that no one watches him. He's getting what, 100,000 viewers on his Apple show? Mildly interesting political vloggers with zero experience and zero staff, and a computer and a little homespun honesty (and who are now considered the most dangerous people on earth by PMC types), are easily quadrupling that on YouTube. He's become about as relevant as MoviePass in 2022.
I subscribed simply to like your comment. You are 100% right. I’m an independent -> moderate liberal who was repulsed by Trump, and it has been shocking to watch Democrats double down on what are perhaps the most off-putting and regressive set of ideas I’ve ever seen (and I’m not talking about treating trans identified people with kindness and respect). It absolutely is a cult and one that liberals are seeing first hand when their daughters come home demanding that they be referred to with he/him or they/them pronouns (which is happening across the country). On top of that, the entire Democratic Party up to the President is whole heartedly supporting the medicalization of these young girls who are clearly going through a phase. That’s not even mentioning the sports, bathroom, locker room, and self-is issues that Democrats also support. I really can’t believe all of this is happening.
I'm a lifelong lefty/liberal and I agree that the Democratic Party has embraced some truly bizarre shit that isn't in keeping with left-liberal politics as I remember them in my lifetime. It's become a bitter, paranoid team-sport party, and the newly minted unholy union of the neoliberals and the neoconservatives is telling here. Is there a Iraq War-birthing neocon who hasn't very publicly joined the Democratic Party, and learned to stop worrying and embrace identity politics?
A few interesting, related points:
1. Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky mined near-identical territory that we've discussed in this thread on Breaking Points this Friday; i.e. how the failure of "#resistance" media to even discuss trans issues has ceded that issue totally to the right. Worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EORJzd6ighY
2. Christopher Rufo, who's probably become the most powerful activist on the right was very smart in taking issues that had been being seriously discussed in small "heterodox" corners of the left-liberal sphere and repackaging them, with a heavy dose of fear-mongering, for the right. He honestly scares me (he's said that any controversial books should be removed from libraries paid for by taxpayers), but it was a winning tactic. The arguments about "CRT" can be traced back to a number of things like the World Socialist Web Site's bringing in a who's who of important liberal historians to debunk the ahistorical, and wholly opinion-based sociological "1619 Project," that was (and is) being introduced to many school curricula as legitimate history. Similar to targeted smearing of liberal journalists like Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal's early, thoughtful work on the troubling aspects of trans ideology and medicine, Rufo and his crew saw easy openings on topics that the new Democrats (I refuse to call them "left") consider totally verboten.
3. Tying all this together is what Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira calls the "Fox News Fallacy" (https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-fox-news-fallacy) where people living in the Dem-aligned/MSNBC/NPR/NY Times bubble think that any topic covered by Fox News is automatically false, and forced them to axiomatically grasp the opposite idea, even if opposite idea is really, really dumb. Matt Taibbi's book Hate, Inc. (serialized at Taibbi's Substack) should also be mentioned here, the main thesis of which is that MSNBC/CNN took a page from Fox News' successful playbook in the Trump era and rebranded news as partisan-heavy, fact-lite entertainment designed to keep viewers seething with inchoate blood rage at the opposing "team" at all times, and Trump-around-the-clock-mania was the perfect vehicle to deliver these evil dopamine hits ad infinitum.
We're in a wildly complicated and conflicted time, and there are so many things that led to the Democratic Party becoming this idiotic, divisive and angry. (We haven't even discussed how internet/social media addiction is a big part of this). Everyone always tries to apply simplistic ideas and solutions to these problems, and it's beyond annoying. We need people to step away from their partisan bubbles and use their own eyes and brains to view this quagmire, and hopefully use some real human empathy to repair our increasingly broken civilization. And this includes Maurer's old boss John Oliver, who just happened to make a seething, opinion-heavy, fact-lite tirade on trans issues days after this story and this thread. It's almost like he's reading this shit! Mr. Oliver, I think you're very funny, and your show has done some good journalism, but you're not half as clever or as open-minded as you think you are; imagine if you dropped the ultra-partisan routine and approached these issues with a truly critical eye? This world could use someone like that.
The John Oliver segment was infuriating. Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal just recently released an episode of Blocked & Reported that goes through and dismantles all of the arguments made by Stewart & Oliver, but I'm sure the average viewer who is only tangentially familiar with this topic will think that Oliver's arguments are airtight. Of course, it helps that he's able to appeal to the authority of nearly all of the major medical associations in the US and a litany of "scientific" studies that have been given a veneer of legitimacy due to institutional capture in gender medicine.
Yes, I came across the term "Fox News Fallacy" about a year ago, and I've seen nearly all of my Democratic friends engage in this fallacy whenever I discuss certain issues with them. If Tucker Carlson or Hannity have taken a certain position on a topic, Democrats will reflexively assume that position is flawed somehow. Hyper partisanship has made it nearly impossible to have any kind of productive discourse on a handful of sacred issues.
I hope we can pull back from the brink and find some way to reach across the aisle and find some common ground. I think it will require competent leadership with Obama-esque likability who's main objective is to bridge the partisan divide. Unfortunately, I don't see leaders like that currently in the pipeline.
> Had that alternate reality version of [Walsh's] film been made, we could have maybe prevented this current morass, which is one of a few issues maybe serious and stupid enough to remove all (formerly) liberal parties from power in the west for a generation, with likely wildly reactionary replacements.
Aha, there's the bit where you threaten those of us to your left with proto-fascists, just because we don't kowtow to reactionaries like Walsh enough for your liking.
> We're in a place where this is in no way related to the gay and lesbian marriage issue. Most sensible people, and even many of the evangelicals deeply opposed to that issue on religious grounds, could at least understand, or even empathize, with the argument as a question of pure equality.
That sounds like rewriting history to me. The tropes wielded against trans people (sick fetishists, bathroom predators, groomers who "recruit" children) echo those wielded against gays and lesbians who demanded their rights, including marriage. And the anti-gay-marriage rhetorical armory included the argument that gays and lesbians were demanding a special right for themselves, since they already had the same right as straights to marry someone of the opposite sex — a transparently obtuse refusal to empathize with (or indeed understand) "the argument as a question of pure equality". (And there's a conceptual linkage between trans rights and gay and lesbian marriage: if a conservative conceded that people generally ought to live according to their gender rather than their sex, sex-based rationalizations of marriage restrictions would look less robust.)
> That famous and sensible liberal types like J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle have somehow become the new face of "transphobia" for honest and often thoughtful work [...] shows how wild this has become.
Weird, I thought J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle became the new face of transphobia for being celebrities who got chummy with transphobes and wrote a tendentious concern-trolling essay about trans people (Rowling) or declaring themselves "Team TERF" and in agreement with Rowling on stage (Chappelle).
> I was once a big fan of Jon Stewart [...] He can be really funny (still!), but our broken-brained modernity has shown him to be a dim bulb, with no principles or voice of his own. [...] We could use someone like the old Stewart
Pffft. The old Stewart cheerfully read out transphobic jokes — see https://twitter.com/jacyanthis/status/983499974297210882 for an interesting example featuring Dennis Kucinich declaring his willingness to nominate transgender judges to SCOTUS over a "GAY MARRIAGE CONTROVERSY" chyron. I'm glad that THAT Stewart's gone even if the new one's unfunny and dim. I'll do without Stewart, I already wrote him off with his hacky, both-sidesing Rally to Restore Sanity, a mere...12 years ago.
Huh, weird how other people are catching up to me in dismissing Jon Stewart only now he's trying to make up for his transphobic past. Get on my level, I guess?
You are still conflating DSDs (Differences in Sexual Development (examples Klinefelter and androgen insensitivity syndrome)- sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as Intersex) with transgender in your otherwise common sense paragraph about how the left should address this issue.
The people who "don't fit neatly" into male or female are not the people who are "transgender" and medicalizing at new and unheard of rates (also flipped from majority male born to female born recently). See the recent Reuters article about the increases of the last few years.
The issue of DSDs is a separate issue.
The issue of trans identifying people (particularly teens) is mostly people who are 100% one sex, but identify with the "gender identity" of the other sex. They believe altering their body via hormones and/or surgery will help them deal with that congruence. For some it does, and for adults most think they should be allowed to do what they need to do to be happy. But with teens we don't know if that is something they will grow out of, we have started affirming all "questioning" kids which leads to a medicalized path.
Prior to the rise of "affirmation only" of kids who identify as the opposite gender (identity) from their sex, we had a model of "watchful waiting." Under watchful waiting, many teens would desist from the gender incongruance and live in their natal sex. At rates above 80%. I suspect the Arkansas AG was referencing that (not some fabled 98% de-transition rate that you correcty point out is nonsense). When given time and actually going through the puberty of their natal sex many kids will desist. This allows them to live in their healthy body. Currently we can't tell the difference.
See the growing number of actual detransitioners to see that this is true.
We are rushing kids onto this path.
Dems have to take the feet off the gas on this.
Not to mention the plainly insane idea that a male *is* a woman based on Self-ID (simply identifying himself as such). This is the basis for the argument that sports and prisons should be segregated by "gender identity" rather than sex. This is already in place at the highschool sports level all over the country and making its way into higher level sports (obviously the Lia Thomas case, but also see many instances of males winning in women's categories in biking and a male just won a women's surfing competition in Australia, one year after winning the men's). It ridiculous. It completely decimates all good will that most people feel about allowing people to be who they want to be.
Don't make me lie and say a man *is* a woman.
Interestingly - the military did just state trans women, who are born male (redundant, but I guess they had to be clear) must register for the draft and trans men, who are born female, do not.
Meanwhile the same administration supports the aforementioned allowing natal born males into women's sports and prisons based on "gender identity."
Dem's are losing some of us on this. I'm still voting dem, but I can't get myself to give money and knock doors like I used to.
Men might pretend to identify as women to get out of the draft! But they would NEVER pretend to identify as women to get out of going to mens’ prison! 🤪
Perhaps much of what is called "conservative" policy measures is unduly authoritarian and butts in on decision-making territory that usually is best occupied by the patient and his or her physician, but there is now too much evidence that our medical establishment has gone so far down the ideological rabbit hole that a gaping void exists when it comes to The Science. Like our educational institutions, our scientific institutions have become so thoroughly corrupted that the discovery of good quality evidence through open debate between competing theories is not happening . . . Lysenkoism is occurring under an informal regime of "cancel culture," together with the inevitable prioritization of politics above knowledge-creation because the sources of its funding have been over-centralized and placed largely under the control of the state.
If you haven't already, perhaps spend some time listening to experts in their field who will tell you how far the institutions our societies rely on for "the science" have abandoned their founding principles . . . things are bad. Quacks and Zealots are donning white coats and browbeating everyone to "believe in Science," and now too much of the "leadership" in our countries are acting as if they're in a Cargo Cult.
How Gender Activists Dictate "Standards of Care" | with Stella O'Malley
Jeff, you ignored the largest right-wing objection in this, which is the relationship between kids, the parents, and the state.
You might consider some of these teachers simply well-meaning woke people who are trying to help kids find their way. Certainly the left does, and considers counseling kids on their personal transgender questions to be a free speech issue.
The problem is that the other side sees it as a state versus the individual issue, which is made even more stark when legislation permits all of this to be done behind the parents' back. The left's arrogant assumption that their "experts" - i.e. an army of 30 something purple haired single childless women from Vassar - know more about someone's kids than the people that actually raise them rankles people more than the left appreciates. The left truly does not get this.
Maybe this will make more sense with a story.
Little Johnny is a boy who doesn't play sports well. The other boys tend to pick him last for a game of kickball and he feels ignored and depressed. He spends some time playing with the girls, fits in, and then thinks "maybe I should have been a girl." He voices this opinion to the teacher, who encourages it.
Suddenly, little Johnny is a rockstar. Virtue-signaling moms and teachers fall all over themselves to validate little Johnny's new persona. Johnny comes home and tells his parents at dinner that he heard about puberty blockers and wants to take them. Johnny's parents call the principal demanding to know what the fuck are they telling their kid, and the principal tells them that according to state law, this is none of their business.
The double standard is also telling. A 12 year old cannot drink, smoke, get a job, get a tattoo, vote, drive a car, etc because pre-teens don't have that judgement yet. But, according to the left, he can cut off his tallywacker.
Jeff, you are wrong about the Arkansas bill: it is not terrible, it is absolutely essential, and needs to be copied nationwide.
You say "It takes what should be a personal decision between a young person and their parents — advised by medical professionals — and hands the decision-making power to the state. It’s fucked up; nobody should have the state butting into their medical decisions."
First of all, as a general principle, the state butts into medical decisions ALL THE TIME, for the excellent reason of preventing bad and dangerous medicine. For example, your doctor can only prescribe FDA approved medication. And this is almost always a good thing!
In the case of "gender affirmation", the medical community has (very sadly and tragically) gone totally off the rails. "Gender affirmation" is NOT evidence based, as unbiased reviews in other countries have clearly shown.
Matt Osborne at The Distance, substack of LGB United, put it well:
>Hundreds of families were told that their children would kill themselves without “gender affirmation.” This is a lie. It has always been a lie.
>There is no science to back it up and the best long-term study [link in original] shows a manifold INCREASE in suicide risk among the POST-transition population.
>Jazz Jennings has a far greater risk of suicide today than if his body had been left alone.
Thanks for the link to The Distance, I hadn't seen that before.
As that article notes, I don't understand how anyone can believe that failure to socially, hormonally, or surgically transition kids will lead to suicide, when none of those things were available to kids 10-20-30 years ago, and there were virtually no suicides attributed to gender dysphoria (and there are vanishingly few even claimed to be attributable to it today).
I take the boring position (held by about 99% of people 10 years ago) that we should not lie to our children by telling them they can change sex, or that they already are the other sex, we should certainly not enlist others in lying to them, we should absolutely not prevent the normally-timed onset of natal puberty and the irreplaceable developmental benefits it brings, we should not administer cross-sex hormones that quickly produce irreversible body changes and often sterility, and for the love of god we should not be surgically removing healthy body parts or subjecting them to risky and often ineffective cosmetic surgeries. Instead we should be talking to them about how to live with the reality of their bodies as they are, explaining that discomfort with one's body during puberty is common and usually resolves, we should be accepting of a wide range of behavior in both boys and girls, and that same-sex attraction is neither wrong nor a guarantee of an abormal adult life. We should also point out, gently, that whether they are opposite-sex or same-sex attracted, they stand a much better chance of attracting someone themselves if they have an intact body of one sex or the other.
It is not kindness to lie to your children about how the world works, or indulge their most unrealistic wishes. It is kindness to prepare them for it, and help them become comfortable in who they are, while preserving all the gifts of their own body for the point at which they will appreciate them.
Actually medical transition of minors has been happening for 25+ years... But it's been pretty well gate kept and following the Zuckerman watchful waiting practice where consistent insistent persistent was considered... But yeah I know a couple ppl in their late 30s who went on cross sex hormones before 18 (no PBS, no minor surgeries).
They generally are happy with how things turned out, but also happy their parents waited until they were 15 or 16 before starting to put them on cross sex hormones and support pretty strong gatekeeping
Perhaps I should have said it was only very narrowly available - really just a handful of kids in the whole world compared to the many thousands who are showing up today. And yet no large number of suicides attributed to its lack.
Yeah, no, we're totally on the same page. There was a small number of children who experienced gender dysphoria without what appeared to be any external influence, and eyes were kept on them to see if medical intervention could be avoided well maximizing wellness. Often it could be.
'After sex reassignment surgery, one study showed that adult transsexual clients were 4.9 times more likely to have made a suicide attempt and 19.1 times more likely to have died from suicide, after adjusting for prior psychiatric comorbidity [2]. Similarly, an Australian paper [3] notes that many patients have poor outcomes which put them at risk of suicide.
A prominent study [4] claiming that medical transition alleviated suicidality had to be corrected [5], to clarify that it proved “no advantage of surgery” in this regard.
A long-term Swedish study [6] finds that post-operative transgender people have “considerably higher risks” for suicidal behavior."
"There’s sex, and then there’s gender. Sex involves biological attributes — chromosomes, hormone levels, that kind of stuff. There are anomalies in sex such as Klinefelter syndrome (chromosomes are XXY) and androgen insensitivity syndrome (the body makes testosterone but doesn’t respond to it) that make sex not completely binary. Therefore, sex is basically meaningless and can be ignored. Gender is all that matters. Gender refers to socially-constructed gender roles — playing with dolls if you’re a girl, playing with trucks if you’re a boy, that type of thing. A person chooses their gender identity, so when a person identifies with a gender, they ARE that gender, end of story.
I feel that that’s a fair summation of left-wing canon on this issue."
Your feelings, while understandable, are false...or at least not quite accurate. The position you laid out amounts to the genderists' own Intelligent Design argument -- a bunch of watered-down PR-tested pablum meant to sow just enough doubt into the average layperson's mind that they do not see the insipid and broken theology underlying the activists' zeal. It may be the momentary *consensus* among the professional and managerial class who mean well and are terrified of losing their jobs because they said the wrong thing within earshot of a blue-haired weirdo, but it is not the left-wing canon. The left-wing canon, instead, amounts to this:
1. Everyone is born with a gender identity which is something between a soul and a mental faculty, and which is the most central thing about their identity as a human being. Man, woman, male, female, non-binary, and a whole host of other sex-and-gender labels exclusively refer to a person's gender identity, not to the sex of their physical body.
2. This gender identity may correlate to a biological sex, or it may not. When it does, it may correlate to the sex of one's physical body, or to the opposite sex. When it does not, it may be the null gender (commonly known as "agender"), one of an infinite set of "non-binary" genders (which may exist between or orthogonal to the poles of male and female), or a multi-gender which asserts different aspects at different times. Some gender identities have so little to do with a human body that it is difficult to understand how the two concepts could have ever been related, but even in these cases, it remains a vital part of a person's overall identity.
3. A person's gender identity is fixed from conception, and only belatedly discovered. Once discovered, refusal to acknowledge this gender identity causes the individual extreme distress, the only proper treatment for which is to have everyone the person ever meets affirm their gender identity at all times and in all places (e.g., pronouns are not "preferred", they are correct) and to "pause" a prepubescent child's puberty until a doctor can schedule them for a "gender-affirming" surgery.
4. The way someone expresses their gender (i.e., their gender expression) -- in particular their manner of dress, the cadence and depth of their voice, their hobbies and interests, their propensity for wearing makeup or other ornaments, etc. -- is only loosely correlated with their underlying gender identity. Therefore it is impossible to know in advance whether anyone is a man, woman, male, female, both, or neither.
5. Sexual arousal (i.e., what we have only briefly started calling a person's "sexuality") is almost exclusively governed by a combination of gender expression and gender identity, not by a prospective partner's biological sex. In particular, a person's genitalia should have no bearing upon their viability as a sexual partner to another, as long as both parties have compatible sexualities under the umbrella of gender identity -- so two gay men should not have a problem having sex, even if one (or both) of these men has a vagina (mutatis mutandis gay women/penis).
6. Failure to continuously affirm and evince adherence to all of the above is a sign either of gender heresy or gender blasphemy, which are brought under the common label of "transphobia".
There are doubtless other points I have missed, but this is the bare minimum one must acknowledge in order to avoid the stink of transphobia. This is the ideology lurking beneath your later suggestion of "hey sometimes people are born with weird stuff, and sometimes when a girl is a tomboy it REALLY DOES mean she's actually maybe a boy inside, but there should be some kind of line between shuffling every tomboy into a gender clinic and not having gender clinics at all".
You also err in that transgender people (at least in the West) lack protections; in America and Canada and across the entire European Union, transgender people have protections for employment and housing and basic human dignity. What "protection" they do not yet have is the universal right to force everyone to publicly and privately affirm the dogma I laid out, though in some places they have come mightily close to achieving this.
It is a religious dogma, no less potent and no less toxic to the thinking mind than the Abrahamist faiths to which most of us are accustomed. The muddling contradictions and absurdities that obtain from the affirmation of this faith are not its death knell; they are an inevitable consequence of its nature, which is based in the gathering of social power through the enforcement and propagation of a shared belief. The fact that this belief runs counter to reality does not weaken the belief -- it makes expressions of the belief all the more impactful.
" systematic review highlights that 61–98% of children and young people who present with gender dysphoria, without medical intervention, desist (Ristoria and Steensma, 2016). That is, naturally stop opposite sex identification and reconcile themselves to their natal sex. "
That seems to suggest that the diagnostic criteria that are being used to determine whether medical intervention should be offered or not are pretty robust: 61-98% who are denied intervention go on to do OK without, 98% who are granted intervention continue with the intervention.
That was the old system when they did "watchful waiting" and addressed other potential issues in the child's gender dysphoria.
Now the message of the day is "affirmation only" so they aren't given time to desist. They are affirmed in their opposite-sex identity which cements them in. Hormones come next and possible surgery after.
Exactly. It does seem like that was a solid system but it’s going away now thanks to the relentless push of left wing activists to move to an affirmation-only model that ensures that the 60-98% of dysphoric kids who would have grown to accept their healthy bodies will commit to a lifetime of expensive and risky medicalization to maintain artificial alterations to their physiology. The sensible approach of watchful waiting is now being characterized as abusive conversion therapy.
And that characterization of it being "conversion therapy" is all part and parcel of this whole ideology's use of language and re-defining commonly understood concepts.
"That was the old system"? The linked paper was published in December, its oldest reference is from 2016, and most of its references are from last year!
As an atheist I don't see the conservative position on this issue as having anything to do with religion. Occasionally the state gets involved in decisions between a minor and their parents, for example growing up in California I couldn't get a tattoo at 16 even with parental permission. I generally oppose that, but there does seem to be a trend at the moment where general teen angst and body image issues are being pushed as gender dysphoria. And since there seems to be issues with the use of puberty blockers in regards to the effects on future fertility and sexual health it does seem to be a net positive to ban them for minors
The cons are not wrong about the need for heavy safeguards when it comes to gender dysphoria and kids. All the shit coming out about Mermaids in the UK is horrifying. Including an employee in a child protective services org donning rubber and masturbating on camera in the bathroom at work.
Unfortunately you're granting far too much good faith here. Most of the driving force for these changes is to throw up a bunch of sand so that the subset of trans-identified people who are adult males motivated by paraphilic fixation have social cover. I recommend reading the very good & short book by Michael Bailey, "The Man Who Would Be Queen", available here:
or the longer and more recent book "Trans" by Helen Joyce, both of which will probably put some jigsaw puzzle pieces in place.
I am quite sympathetic to that group, at least in theory, because in most cases they seem to have had little choice in developing this paraphilia. Unfortunately, most people are not so sympathetic to the idea in the first place, still less to the thought that their acceptance and cooperation with someone's cross-sex presentation in public is actually to further that person's paraphilic gratification. That is why so much chaff has been put up around it, and "trans kids" are ideal for promoting the idea that cross-sex gender identities can be innate, immutable, and essential, which is great cover. And I am not sympathetic to that angle, at all.
For some honest and interesting first-person insights into what I'm talking about here, read some of the threads on this account: https://twitter.com/RecoveringAGP
On the topic of kids, the desistance rate is extremely high and nobody has any way to predict which kids will desist and which will persist. The protocol of social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries leads almost inevitably to sterility, very high risk of anorgasmia and sexual dysfunction, not to mention the bone and brain development risks of puberty blockers, and the general-health risks of cross-sex hormones. So given that most kids with early-onset gender dysphoria desist and grow up to be comfortable with their bodies (most of them will be gay), subjecting any of them to an unproven treatment with very serious side effects is unethical. And it is in the interest of the state to prevent children from being subjected to unethical or unproven medical procedures, those that carry serious risks and side effects and have not been proven effective by high-quality evidence.
For the late-onset (usually teen) gender dysphoria crowd, predominantly female, they are a new group with virtually no evidence at all as to what interventions will be effective. I find the theory of James Cantor that they are likely suffering from BPD quite plausible. Treating one psychological disorder with the physical interventions claimed to be appropriate for a completely different disorder is, pardon my language, insane. It is like going to the doctor to complain about psychosomatic fatigue caused by depression and having them prescribe you methamphetamines. Even if it was a good treatment for fatigue (probably not), it sure isn't a good treatment for depression. (Though it might make you feel pretty good for a while, something that is also true of testosterone for teenage girls.)
It is a difficult thing to appreciate that this entire construct might be so much horseshit. There might not be any such thing as gender identity. Many of the prominent individuals arguing passionately for their rights might actually be motivated by a private sexual fantasy, not "a woman's brain in a man's body". The entire phenomenon of trans kids might - outside of the very small number of young children who were known to experience serious gender dysphoria - have no more objective reality than the Indigo Children or the satanic abuse panic.
It sucks to think about. For me it especially sucks since my liberal tribe is all-in on this, and in major media only right-wing nutjobs will bring it up. Unfortunately, "I believe the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson says about everything" is not a fully reliable guide to everything in the world.
So much that is frustrating comes down to language policing. There are now two distinct definitions of "woman" in the lexicon - an older, more common definition referring to sex, chromosomes, reproductive organs, etc., and a more recent definition referring to gender identity. Both definitions have their uses, and it nearly always obvious which word people mean from context (nobody sane is confused about which definition is meant by the phrase "pregnant women"). The problem is that instead of celebrating the widespread adoption of the latter, more inclusive definition where applicable, the modern left would like to ban the former definition from all usage, despite it's irreplaceable usefulness in describing the basics of human reproduction and sex drive.
Here is what I think has happened with the gender-affirming care for kids debate. I think there are a number of trans activists who knew they were trans at a young age and were unable to access any kind of care when they were young, and thus had very painful childhood and adolescence experiences. They now see these new treatments, and probably correctly surmise that had they been able to access puberty blockers and the like they would have had a much easier childhood and adolescence. Given that lived experience, of course you are going to push hard to maximize access to these treatments - they know it would have helped them and sincerely believe that denying these treatments to anyone is akin to sentencing kids to the same pain they experienced.
But the problem with lived experience is it is YOUR experience. By definition it cannot tell you if your experience was typical or not. As a corollary, lived experience often sets you up for survivor bias: Imagine LeBron James saying “I don’t know why people stress about picking a career, I just played basketball and it worked out for me!”
Today’s trans activists are, almost by definition, those whose gender dysphoria didn’t desist. But that doesn’t mean that experience will be true for every kid, and indeed there is research that greater than 50% of kids who experience dysphoria do eventually desist, and allowing those kids access to permanent changes to their bodies will likely lead to some terrible regret.
It’s just a difficult, painful issue. It’s horrible that states like Texas and Arkansas are trying to aggressively insert themselves in profoundly unhelpful ways. But it also isn’t helpful to call anyone who thinks we might want to be careful with medical interventions anti-trans bigots.
With respect, today's most vocal trans activists are adult-transitioning autogynephilic males whose interest in cross-sex presentation was parallel with or subsequent to their general sexual interest. That they say they experienced severe gender dysphoria as young children is either unprovable or, often enough, belied by other accounts (contrary to the cases of actually-gender-dysphoric young children, where it is apparent to the parents, in part because very young children are not motivated to lie or conceal it). So it simply is not the case that "they were the persisters" - they never were gender dysphoric as children in the first place. And so they are not reliable guides to the experience of any young kids or teenagers experiencing gender dysphoria. They may wish their male development was not so prominent today, but very often they were quite happy with it earlier in their lives, when it served to attract female partners, father children, or, as with Bruce Jenner, compete in sports. They have no idea what it would be like to have been surgically sterilized as a teenager.
With no respect, "[minority community] is just a sexual fetish" was a bullshit argument when it was used against gay people (alongside "they're converting our kids" and "they're bathroom predators", other homophobic arguments that bigots have exhumed to use against trans people (1)), so anyone invoking the autogynephile argument should be judged to have as much merit as anyone ignorantly claiming gay men were just straight men choosing to live their kink twenty+ years ago.
1) In case anyone has forgotten what those days used to look like, here's an example that hasn't been lost to time:
Whether it reminds you of past smears against gays has nothing to do with whether it is actually true, ample evidence for which is widely available.
I did not say all trans people were motivated by paraphilia. Many are clearly not - they are mostly same-sex attracted. But the loudest and most obnoxious MTF activists clearly are, and since they lie about their motivations for transitioning, you can also believe nothing of what they tell you about their childhood and how it relates to others expressing gender dysphoria.
I’m not even unsympathetic to the autogynephilic transitioners as a group! I think they experience gender dysphoria just as real as that of other trans populations. It sounds like a rough deal, and I think quite a lot of people would be sympathetic if they were open about it. Plenty of people who were disgusted by the idea of gay sex got over it. (Straight sex is pretty weird too.) But gay people didn’t lie about their motivations and behavior.
I recommend talking to some admitted autogynephiles. There’sa bunch on twitter. You will quickly come to understand that this is not a myth, and that the patterns are identical to those of other late-transitioning heterosexual MTFs.
What, exaclty, is horrible about preventing the mutilation and sterilization of children?
No other form of mental distress is treated by body-altering drugs and surgery. This "treatment" is NOT evidence based, and state legislatures are absolutely right to forbid it.
I think in addition to your first paragraph, the problem of puberty for trans people is that puberty leads to changes that can't be undone later. A trans person who goes through the wrong puberty has a permanently different body- for a trans woman that means taller height, broader shoulders, a lower voice - and at best all they can do is try and mitigate it and live with it. If you can prevent trans kids from going through the wrong puberty, then that would mean saving future trans adults from suffering those changes, so it's a high-stakes issue to get right.
I'm skeptical of the desistance research, or at least how it ends up being presented. From my understanding, MOST desistance in general is due to a lack of social support - unsupportive family, bullying, social rejection, being the subject of political attacks - and people who desist usually end up transitioning again later on once they're in a more supportive environment, not because the person changed their mind and realized they were cis.
Either that, or the number of trans kids is being inflated by kids identifying as nonbinary because its trendy and lets them claim oppression points, and they can desist just as easily as they transitioned.
A person does not go through the "wrong" puberty; they either go through puberty according to their physiology or their puberty is arrested through a combination of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. People who take cross-sex hormones after puberty also do not "reverse" their puberty or go through a "second" puberty, either.
Either way, lifelong hormone replacement and supposedly-but-not-really-reversible puberty blockers bring with them a myriad of enhanced endocrine-related health risks and inevitable health conditions. These risks and conditions may be worth taking on for an individual's overall well-being, in the same way any high-risk medication schedule may be worth it for any patient's well-being if the condition being treated warrants such risk, but it is always a delicate balance to strike. These are major, life-long, continuous medical interventions, and perverting the language we use to refer to these interventions will not erase this reality.
In fact, prepubescent boys who want to undergo sex reassignment surgery are often caught in a Sophie's choice -- if they do not go through puberty, they often lack the penile tissue that cosmetic surgeons prefer to use to make a facsimile of a vagina. In these cases, doctors will often resort to sourcing the flesh from the child's colon, which -- aside from being a dangerous procedure that shortens the child's intestine -- often results in the pseudovagina retaining a colonic smell even years after the surgery. Hell, even when sufficient penile and scrotal tissue *is* available, the pseudovagina can grow internal hair that often incubates invasive microbiomes, with little to no inherent countermeasures except an inflammatory immune response. And, in either case, the chances of retaining any capacity for sexual gratification is vanishingly small.
And should the boy decide against cross-sex hormones after a regime of puberty blockers, there is a good chance his body will not initiate or resume the puberty that the blockers interrupted, especially if he took the blockers for years. This can leave the boy's body permanently underdeveloped, undersized, and infertile; even taking synthesised testosterone replacement rarely alleviates the bone-density and fertility issues which often result from taking common puberty blockers. These blockers are, after all, the very same drugs some sex criminals volunteer to take as a measure to avoid recidivism -- and these men often permanently lose their libido after a few years of treatment, along with incurring issues with bone density and other endocrine-related effects.
There are a host of similar problems for girls who take puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. If a girl or young woman takes synthesised testosterone for a non-negligible period of time, her body will also undergo permanent alterations which no amount of synthesised oestrogen will entirely mitigate should she decide to detransition, and if she simply "pauses" her puberty for long enough, she will likely never develop a functioning reproductive system. But she faces a similar dilemma to a boy if she wishes to undergo sex reassignment surgery; pseudopenises are usually constructed from muscle taken from the thigh along with flesh from the clitoris and clitoral hood, which in some cases retains some capacity for sexual gratification. But if puberty is avoided or halted before this tissue can sufficiently develop, there won't be enough of it to retain any sexual gratification at all.
Euphemising these interventions by calling them "cures" for the "wrong puberty", lying (or echoing lies) about the reversible nature of some of these drugs, and downplaying how drastic a course of action this is for children to be encouraged to take does not help anyone, least of all the children currently being encouraged to take said course of action. Such language manipulation is not medicine, it is religious dogma.
That comment's short on citations but long on argument, so I'll limit myself to one question: how many "prepubescent boys" do, in fact, have a pseudovagina made out of their colon?
As far as I know gender-affirming surgery on prepubescent children is rare, and I'd expect colonic-pseudovagina installation in prepubescent boys to be far rarer still. If there's evidence showing I'm mistaken, I'd be interested in seeing it.
In this context, we have to be careful and clear about what "prepubescent" means. I admit I was a bit slipshod and loose when I wrote "...prepubescent boys who want to undergo sex reassignment surgery...". This should probably read "prepubescent boys who want to GO ON TO undergo sex reassignment surgery after a regime of puberty blockers and then hormone replacement therapy..." or similar (with caps here used simply for emphasis).
We have a certain age-range in mind when we hear or use the phrase "prepubescent child", generally being a child up to twelve-ish years, because twelve is about when the average child begins the puberty process. But in the current discussion, such a correlation doesn't really obtain.
I will grant you that, until recently, sex-reassignment on children under 16 was quite rare (and is likely still rare, though hardly unheard-of). Yet what would you call a 17, 18, or 19 year old boy who's spent years on puberty blockers (and possibly synthesised female hormones) explicitly to "pause" his puberty, other than prepubescent? And how would you characterise his then undergoing sex-reassignment as anything other than a prepubescent boy getting a pseudovagina made for himself? Perhaps a better term would be "puberty-arrested" children.
The point stands that if a boy, before the onset of puberty, begins to take puberty blockers whose purpose is to prevent him from developing mature male sexual organs, he will lack the tissue to use during a vaginoplasty. It cannot be otherwise -- that is the Sophie's Choice. He must either allow himself to go through enough of a puberty to use his penile and scrotal tissue to construct a pseudovagina, or a doctor must source this tissue from elsewhere, regardless of how old he is when the surgery occurs. One of the sources of this tissue is the sigmoid colon (it is in fact the first source listed here: https://www.verywellhealth.com/different-types-of-vaginoplasty-4171503, though of course that does not imply it is the most frequent alternative; indeed, it is impossible to find a trustworthy source with hard numbers about the frequency of sigmoid colon vaginoplasty).
These are, in any case, very serious procedures with long-term risks that must be very deliberately considered. Using euphemistic language such as "the wrong puberty" is a rhetorical device meant to glean over these difficulties, and that is a mistake which will and has lead to people undergoing these procedures unnecessarily, with very little recourse once they realised that doing so was a mistake.
I agree that we have to be careful and clear about meanings here, and appreciate your acknowledgment that you were not. I appreciate less that you don't then answer my question. You clear your throat for 2 or 3 paragraphs as if just clarifying the question's terms, then replay a bunch of talking points (and describe, bizarrely, in the middle of your comment about children, 18 and 19 year olds as boys) in lieu of answering it.
You're waffling again! If you can answer my question, please do so. I understand that my question might be ill-posed (though I don't see how); feel free to tweak the question a bit if that's what it takes to make it well-posed. I understand that your answer would probably be inexact; that's fine, I would be happy with an order-of-magnitude BOTEC grounded in cited, credibly reported numbers. But if you're just going to write around the question, using it as a pretext to replay talking points, that'll be a waste of my time and yours.
If you can’t see his point that’s because you’re being purposefully obtuse. I learned not to play your game a while ago. I assume the name “splainer” is ironically chosen?
Necessary and sufficient conditions work great for human-created constructs. Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for a card game to be considered "Go Fish"? Yes!
Naturally occurring phenomena don't lend themselves to necessary and sufficient conditions. Is Pluto a planet? What set of qualities should group animals into a phylum? We like to categorize things, but the best we can do is identify a constellation of characteristics that pick out a planet, a phylum of animals, or a woman or man. As you say, we can generally pick out women and men despite exceptions like people with androgen insensitivity. That's why it chaps my ass that conservative play "gotcha" by demanding necessary and sufficient conditions to define a woman, and it equally bugs me that the left insists that there is no constellation of characteristics that generally allow us to identify a woman or a man.
It's adolescent to insist that everything has to be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. Grownups realize that the world is complicated.
If a trans woman has had genital surgery and has been on HRT for a decade or so and living as a woman full-time, then it's pretty much impossible to tell that she is trans and not cis without a DNA test (or asking her, or checking her medical records). It would seem ridiculous to me to refer to her with masculine pronouns or force her to use the men's toilets. That's what I mean when I say "trans women are women".
There are a bunch of things that we can argue about without trying to claim that trans women aren't women: transition is a process, but we have to have binary divisions in a number of cases - if there are men's and women's toilets or changing rooms, then people have to go to one or the other, and they have to change at some point. The correct point at which they should change is something we can debate - having some widely agreed guidelines would really help a lot of people (including many trans people themselves, who may well not want to change on day one, but would like a hint of when they should).
I think a lot of people are reasonably annoyed at the idea that a man can say "I'm a woman now" and walk into the women's facilities everywhere. But (apart from a small number of assholes), that's not what generally happens. At some point they switch. Lots of them go a few months when they just don't go out for long enough that they need to go, so that when they do start going into the women's, lots of people have started treating them as female.
Exactly how sports should work is something else to be legitimately debated - I tend to the view that a lot of sport exists mostly for the fun of playing and for teamwork, rather than being super-competitive (people are still trying to win, of course) and the sort of relatively minor advantages that trans women have over cis women aren't much different to "doing an extra hour a week in the gym" or something - and since most of the people I'm thinking of aren't necessarily doing a full hour in the gym every week, that's just not enough to care about.
At the élite end, then we do need a better scientific study for those trans women who went through male puberty (those that didn't, ie had access to puberty blockers early on, should clearly be allowed to compete; they can't have had any advantages). The questions should be about things like "how much does performance drop, and how quickly?", "can a trans woman who was in heavy training before transition retain muscle mass by training right through?", "how much do things (like bone density) that don't change really matter?" Perhaps the answer will be to require a trans woman to have had low T levels for a certain period, perhaps she will be required to decondition after dropping to low T so when she reconditions, she will have to build muscle mass slowly (like a cis woman) rather than being able to retain what she had from when she had male hormone levels, perhaps some sports will have to have weight classes for safety reasons (combat sports already do, of course; perhaps some non-combat heavy-contact sports like rugby or American football should anyway), perhaps there are a few sports where women who went through a T-based puberty would have to be excluded (I originally wrote "trans" women and "male" puberty in this, but there are cis women who went through a T-based puberty because they mistakenly thought they were trans men and they will have exactly the same advantages as trans women who transitioned after T-based puberty).
And then there are intermediate levels - especially youth sports where trans athletes have had far fewer opportunities to transition, and where "take three years out" amounts to "never compete at all". While élite sports pose the hardest technical/scientific questions, I think these are the hardest ethical questions: If a trans girl comes out at 17, can she switch from the boy's team to the girl's immediately at high school? If not, when can she, how much physical transition does she have to undergo? How much risk are we prepared to put her on if she's still playing on the boy's team? Remember that her physical abilities will be changing as her body changes. Are we prepared to say to her that she has to choose between her sport and her gender? If she will be allowed to compete in the women's NCAA in two years' time when she's transitioned enough, how is she supposed to compete for a scholarship? Obviously, she has advantages if she only started on hormones a few months ago - but she has disadvantages compared to the boys too. If it's an individual sport competed against the environment (golf, running, swimming, etc), then we can just let her record her times/distances and let the college recruiters sort it out to some degree. But we can't do that if she plays a team sport like basketball. Or even an individual sport like tennis. Which team is she on? Who does she compete against? When does she change?
One of the things I really hate about this is that there are lots of people whose fundamental position is: "everyone is born either male or female, this can never change, in any situation where we separate the sexes, they should always go with how they were born" - which is the basic conservative/anti-trans position - who are determined not to just say that. There are also a noisy but quite small chunk of people who think "the moment you say you are a woman, you are a woman in all respects, and anyone objecting to this in any way is an unredeemable bigot". The combination of these makes it nearly impossible for anyone who holds that trans women *can* be treated entirely as women, but that different aspects of that should be granted at different times to get into the details that can make this work.
Changing your name: whenever you like. Changing your pronouns: ask me and I will. Changing which toilet you use: when you'll create less trouble in the women's than the men's, but you go where you want to; that's a recommendation, not a rule. Changing which team you compete on in sport: when it's fair - and that one *is* a rule. The analogy I like to use is adulthood. There isn't some magical difference between 17 years and 364 days and 18 years and zero days - and a bunch of adult rights aren't granted at 18 anyway (e.g. driving can be as young as 14, drinking is 21, etc). Similarly, someone transitioning will get different things at different stages.
Also, too much of this debate, including much of my posting above, ignores trans men.
And non-binary people are, well, non-binary. They were mostly born male or female (some were born intersex). But they transition to being non-binary. Sometimes that's physical, sometimes it isn't. It's surprising how much someone can change your perceptions of them without any physical changes. I don't have all the answers: non-binary sport? I mean, if you're not physically transitioning, why not compete with your birth sex? Toilets: go where suits you or where you feel most comfortable. Maybe having some unsegregated toilets would be a good idea?
I know I don't have all the answers. But I'd like to have some sort of public space to explore the questions without getting attacked by people who are convinced that every single trans person is a terrifying sexual predator.
There are very few places where there are actually laws prohibiting people from going into the "wrong" toilet - for really obvious reasons (like: have you noticed what happens when there are single-sex or mostly-single-sex events?).
In most cases, a man can say "I'm a man" and walk into the women's facilities.
Obviously these are unlikely to be enforced in most cases, but if there is an allegation of misconduct, being in the opposite-sex bathroom is a bad place to start your defense since you have no right to be there in the first place. For places like changing rooms where actual nudity may occur, indecent exposure is a real possibility, as happened with the charges related to the Wii Spa in LA despite California's laws. Note that at least in California, as I understood it, the definition of indecent exposure is gender- and sex-neutral, instead based on the intent and whether a reasonable person would be upset by it. Logically that is about what kind of junk someone has, not their gender identity, but I suspect this will have to play out in court.
None of this implies that "every single trans person is a terrifying sexual predator", any more than the pre-existing exclusion of men from women's spaces implies that every single man is a terrifying sexual predator. It is a safeguard based on patterns of male sexual offending, but it is also about the right to dignity and privacy from the opposite sex. Even if some man could provide objective proof that he is not a sexual predator, I don't want him in the women's changing room with my daughters. But realistically, the desire to intrude on those spaces is itself a red flag.
Those links gave me ZERO examples of an incarcerated woman being raped by "[m]en in prison who claim (falsely) to be women".
I even watched Tomiekia Johnson's story in the video embedded in both pages, and was astounded. Assuming the video's accurate, she (a former CHP officer) was sentenced to 50(!) years in prison after shooting her abusive husband in a struggle over a gun, and the prison guards housed her with a trans woman (I think? Everyone in the video insists on identifying them as "he" or "him" or "male") who had an abuse history "towards females" "to see how long she [Tomiekia] would last" — and I was on the edge of my seat, waiting to learn what the trans inmate allegedly did to Tomiekia, and...NOTHING.
Even the flagship testimonial doesn't allege that a trans woman did anything to the cis(?) woman with whom she was put away. It made me wonder: if the best the "Women's Liberation Front" can come up with is a NON-example of a female trans inmate attacking a female cis inmate, why are they fixating on that scenario instead of campaigning against, say, judges who lock people up for 50 years for winning a struggle over a gun with their abuser, or guards who think it's wicked funny to try setting inmates against each other?
Another solid base hit - so, thanks! But you may have missed a spot. It might be comically productive to speculate on the potential outcome if more people actually accepted the enlightened new thinking about childhood sexuality and decided to ride that little pony into the future. Since it’s reasonable to assume heteronormative preferences would actually outnumber the brave choices of trailblazing transactivists, we could celebrate the advent of penile enlargement for Pop Warner football players and breast enhancement for Brownies. Sounds great doesn’t it?
Of course it would certainly provide excellent investment opportunities for socially conscious shareholders focussed on healthcare, something that we can expect to extend the arc of history further toward it’s inevitable happy ending.
I know that many conservatives operate in bad faith, but still... why can't anyone just say that a woman is an adult human female? Oh right, saying that would Empower the Cons, and we can't have that.
I haven't followed trans issues as closely as some, but I agree when you say that many progressives mistakenly believe that this fight is exactly like gay marriage and that it's easy. It's not. There's way thornier questions here, the sports question being a good example.
And finally, I don't think J.K. Rowling (who is left wing on many, many things) is a vicious monster. There. I said it.
I’ll go further than that: given what we’re now learning about Mermaid in the UK, Rowling is a brave and prescient hero.
"[W]hy can't anyone just say that a woman is an adult human female?"
There are two parts to the answer to that.
First, a pedantic point about grammar: the normal way of saying that would be "adult female human" (which is what dictionaries usually say).* "Female" is normally an adjective; "human" normally a noun and not a noun-qualifier.
Second, because the whole point is: is a trans woman a woman or is she something like a woman but not really quite all the way there (or is she a man, in which case you're just being fully prejudiced)? If she is a woman and *therefore* she is female, then sure, fine, no issues. But if you want to say that there is a distinction between sex and gender and that she (gender) is male (sex), then "adult human female" excludes her from being a woman. So, if you want to say that a trans woman is a woman, then you either have to accept another definition ... or you have to accept that a trans woman is female. If you don't want to accept that a trans woman is a woman, then saying "adult human female" is a way to do so without it being as obvious that you think she's a man.
Sure, phrases like "a male woman" or "her penis" are unusual and seem a bit odd. But unusual people are going to result in unusual phrases. If you go by the gender/sex division that Jeff advocates, then you have to deal with the gender-word (her, she, woman) and the sex-word (male, female, and various body-parts) not lining up in every single person. Some people seem to be OK with the idea of "a male woman" as a description of a trans woman. But most seem to revolt and end up either saying that trans women are female or saying that trans women are men.
*You can tell the word-order is weird because anti-trans activists get it wrong when it's not the set phrase "adult human female" - there have been several amusing cases of people comparing adult human females to adult human chickens or similar, exactly because you'd expect the species-noun to be the last word of the phrase.
Your attempted pedantry is specious, Mr. Gadsden (if you will forgive me for the thought crime of assuming you will answer to "Mr." based on the hundreds of years your first name has been a man's name and the masculine character of your avatar -- these are scant evidence upon which to base something as consequential and offensive as casually using an unwanted label in a brief exchange).
To the point, "human" is quite often a noun qualifier -- human being, human rights, human sacrifice, and human nature are among the most common phrases in which the word "human" appears, all of which employ it as an adjective. Similarly, "male" and "female" are quite often employed as nouns, from Richard Attenborough documentaries about animals to casual conversation where the participants emphasise the animal nature of human beings (see, there it is again). The phrases "adult human male" and "adult human female" are thus perfectly grammatical, and far more natural to the language than many of the inventions of the language magicians that have taken over the progressive discourse.
Your aside accusing someone of "prejudice" for recognising that a trans woman is a man also misses the mark. It is not prejudice to fail to respect the language norms of a metaphysical belief system to whose tenets you do not adhere. You are not ipso facto prejudiced against Muslims for refusing always to bookend the word "Mohammed" with "the Prophet" and "(peace be upon him)" -- it is simply you exercising your right to use language outside the paradigm set by Muslim theologians. Furthermore, it is not prejudice to openly contest or even deny the tenets of another's belief system, even when they are present; you are not ipso facto prejudiced against Christians if you say you do not believe Jesus was the Son of God, or that you do not acknowledge his human sacrifice (look, another case!) on your behalf, even if you say these things in the company of Christians for whom they are direct contradictions of reality and extreme contraventions of social etiquette.
Gender-critical people do not share the gender theology to which you evidently subscribe. That does not make them bigots or transphobes; it means they do not accept the tenets of your religion as adequate explanations for the physical and social phenomena that occur around sex and gender.
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Funny to see a reply that starts "Your attempted pedantry is specious" and then fails to rebut claims actually made ("Mr. Gadsden" didn't state that "adult human female" was ungrammatical, simply nonstandard).
As for the latter half of your comment...it's basically waffling. Yes, disrespecting a belief system's language norms is not "ipso facto" prejudice. And contesting a tenet of a belief's system is not, in itself, prejudice. But those are trivial points that miss the obvious point that both of those things CAN constitute prejudice depending on the exact situation.
We recognize that Holocaust denial constitutes antisemitic prejudice by default, even though that too is simply disagreeing with a tenet of a particular belief system (orthodox history). If a Holocaust denier wanted to argue that denying the Holocaust doesn't make them a bigot or a Judeophobe, they'd have to make a specific argument to that effect, not just harp on the trivial generic point that factual disagreements in general aren't intrinsically bigoted.
True, Mr. Gadsden did not employ the word "ungrammatical" explicitly. He merely explained that he was making a grammatical point about why a phrase should not be considered part of normal usage (i.e., why "anyone" cannot say the phrase in question), which I believe I effectively rebutted with examples showing the individual elements of the contested phrase to be perfectly ordinary parts of common usage. If you like, you can mentally substitute my word "grammatical" with "normal", and it will not reduce the impact of the provided examples.
As for the rest of your comment, it is...not even wrong. It neither rebuts anything I wrote nor does it capture the essence of Mr. Gadsden's accusations. His remarks, that disagreeing with trans ideology in some (or indeed every) particular makes one "fully prejudiced" (or, in downstream comments, "straightforwardly anti-trans" with "[hostility] to them as people"), very clearly indicate that he believes any deviation from what Mr. Maurer unfortunately labels "the left-wing canon" is, in his own words, prejudiced, anti-trans, and/or hostile towards trans people.
Mr. Gadsden did not qualify this statement; he did not speak of possibilities or exact situations. He is obviously operating under the assumption that any deviation from trans orthodoxy connotes transphobia, in every circumstance, for everyone.
In that, he is mistaken -- just as mistaken as are fundamentalist Christians who insist that failure to follow their norms and espouse their beliefs is anti-Christian bigotry. My response, analogising his metaphysical belief system to the established world religions, was hardly waffling or special pleading or hairsplitting, but rather a straightforward rhetorical point.
With your Holocaust-denier comments, one can assume your implication to be that trans ideology is not an ideology at all -- that it is a science at least in the same way that history is a science, and that disagreeing with its assumptions or its findings is (or at least can be assumed to be) a sign that the disagreer is a bigot comparable to an anti-Semitic denier of the Holocaust. But, given the level of obtuse boorishness and close literal reading your comment evinced, I will not press or respond to this assumption. I am frankly not interested in playing the game you are trying, however wittingly, to set up with it.
Instead I will state plainly, on my own account, that trans ideology is much closer to a religion than it is to a science. To wit,
- The ideology posits an unfalsifiable set of precepts to explain a certain class of observational phenomena.
- These precepts have become the lens through which a significant and growing number of people view the world and their place in it, often with the zeal of the freshly-converted.
- The ideology has arrogated to itself the monopoly of explaining said phenomena; any alternative explanations of the observations, any criticism of the observations themselves, and indeed failure to adhere to any of the ideology's tenets are met with an anathema spelled out by an accusation of transphobia.
- The ideology insists that its precepts elaborate a fundamental truth of the human condition to which every person alive is a party, whether they choose to be or not, which exposes everyone in the world to the threat of being anathematised as soon as they receive the ideology's Good News.
That sounds an awful lot like an evangelical religion espousing a metaphysical belief system to me.
Disagreeing with trans ideology may certainly connote prejudice against people who consider themselves trans in much the same way as disagreeing with Christian or Muslim or Buddhist ideology may connote prejudice against people who consider themselves Christian or Muslim or Buddhist. But it is far from the foregone conclusion that Mr. Gadsden's remarks made it out to be.
I have no interest in talking you out of your religion, much like I have no interest in talking a Christian or Muslim or Buddhist out of theirs. You may hold yourself to whichever language norms or faith tenets you feel like. But you do not get to smuggle your metaphysics into the public square and apply them to me.
Yours is a faith I simply do not share. I bear no ill will towards trans people, nor the vastly greater numbers of converts to the trans religion, but I shall not be bullied into espousing their beliefs.
I don't see that your rebuttal was effective, since (1) RG had already addressed "individual elements of the contested phrase" himself, and (2) the normal meaning of a conjunction of words is not, in general, the conjunction of the normal meanings of the words (recall the "yeah, right" punchline of the famous linguistics joke, or the fact that Grape-Nuts famously includes neither grapes nor nuts).
The rest of my comment was indeed not a rebuttal of what you wrote; I merely wrote that what you wrote was waffling and point-missing, not that what you wrote was incorrect. You defended yourself against RG's accusation of prejudice on generic grounds ("It is not prejudice to fail to respect the language norms of a metaphysical belief system [...] Furthermore, it is not prejudice to openly contest or even deny the tenets of another's belief system"). Those generic grounds are unconvincing since the actual motor of arguments like these is the specific content of concrete claims (hence why, as I wrote, neither of us would be convinced by e.g. a Holocaust denier using a generic argument like yours).
Meanwhile you implicitly analogized belief in, and acknowledgment of, trans identity to religion. Then you explicitly called it a theology. And now you're expounding on that. As before I'm perceiving that as waffling: like, yeh, if you wanna post basically the Internet's billionth variation on Wokeness Is Really A Religion When Ya Think About It, you can, and if you define "religion" broadly enough you won't even be wrong. It's an uncompelling point to score, though, because when "religion" is defined so broadly, most politically weighty complexes of beliefs amount to "religion" and the point diffuses.
Did you notice that TERF/"Gender Critical" ideology ALSO counts as a religion by your 4 bullet points, mutatis mutandis? Insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 MEN 👏👏 is exactly as metaphysical as insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 WOMEN 👏👏.
>Insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 MEN 👏👏 is exactly as metaphysical as insisting that TRANS 👏 WOMEN 👏 ARE 👏 WOMEN 👏👏.
Well, no, because TERFs define the categories of "man" and "woman" based on immutable biological characteristics which can be directly observed, whereas TRAs define them based on a mysterious metaphysical essence which cannot.
I thought his rebuttal was highly effective. But I imagine a devout Christian would also find his rebuttal wanting. Am I wrong? How does one tell if they’re on it? You wouldn’t be persuaded by anything. So your belief is literally unchallengeable. So what’s even the point of a reply? Proselytizing?
And democratically of a billion people (your words) call something a religion. Well. It’s a religion. Of course the members of that religion don’t think they’re a cult.
I assume I’m talking to someone that never was religious and left that religion am I correct?
I don't believe trans women are women. I refer to them as women and use their preferred names and pronouns as a social courtesy, but they are not literally women.
By way of analogy: a man and a woman have a son together. The couple divorce, the man emigrates and never returns, and the woman marries another man. The stepfather and the son form a very close bond, to the point that the son refers to the stepfather as "dad".
As a social matter, the man is the boy's father, and no one has any problem referring to him as such.
As a BIOLOGICAL matter, the man is NOT the boy's father, and it would be erroneous to refer to him as such. It would be an imposition if the stepfather started demanding that everyone treat him like the BIOLOGICAL father rather than the SOCIAL father (e.g. asking people if they can see the [entirely fictitious] facial resemblance between him and the boy).
You sort of gestured at this point without actually making it, but it would be really convenient and save us so much time if we could just collectively agree that the terms "male" and "female" refer exclusively to sex, not gender. I know some trans women feel "excluded" when people point out that they are not female, but we still need a quick and easy way to refer to someone's SEX as distinct from their gender. If we use the same term to refer to gender as well as sex, then the whole concept of being trans collapses into incoherence, as it rests on a mismatch between an individual's sex and their stated gender.
If cis women and trans women are both "female women", that seems tantamount to asking us to believe that there are NO DIFFERENCES AT ALL between the two groups, which is obviously absurd.
> it would be really convenient and save us so much time if we could just collectively agree that the terms "male" and "female" refer exclusively to sex, not gender.
I could just as easily assert that it'd be really convenient and save us so much time if we just agreed that "male" and "female" refer exclusively to gender, not sex. Asserting convenience like that doesn't actually move the ball forward, it's just an expression of personal preference about language use.
> I know some trans women feel "excluded" when people point out that they are not female, but we still need a quick and easy way to refer to someone's SEX as distinct from their gender.
You can...add the word "sex" when you're talking about sex? A 3-letter monosyllable seems "quick and easy" to me.
> If we use the same term to refer to gender as well as sex, then the whole concept of being trans collapses into incoherence
Your fallacy is: non sequitur. One word having two meanings doesn't mean that the two meanings represent the same concept; the terms "male" and "female" referring to sex OR gender depending on context doesn't mean that sex and gender are the same thing. Consider national/ethnic descriptors like "Serbian" and "Japanese" that can refer to formal citizenship OR ancestry/ethnicity. That doesn't collapse "into incoherence" "the whole concept of being" a naturalized immigrant to Serbia or Japan.
So you are being straightforwardly anti-trans. Fine. At least I know where I stand.
There are a bunch of ways of getting to a place where trans women are treated as women. But one of the ways that we treat trans women as women is that we refer to them as "she" and "her". If you won't do that, then you are being straightforwardly hostile to them as people.
This isn't new; the first vaginoplasty was done in Berlin in 1930/1; Dora Richter was murdered by the Nazis in 1933 and they burned the records (which is why we don't know which year her operation was done in). Hormone Replacement Therapy dates back to the same era and was routinised in the 1950s. Transgender men and women were regularly referred to with their correct pronouns right back in the 1950s. Plenty of trans men and trans women have "passed" well enough that people only knew they were trans if they were told so - and have done so since at least the early 1960s. We're talking about a time before the *second* wave of feminism really got going; this is not some 21st century innovation.
Sorry but how do you jump from "pronouns refer to sex" to "anti-trans" and "hostile to them as people"? I can simultaneously believe that trans people are free to live whatever life they want or dress however they like, *and* that "she" refers to a human female, as in XX chromosoms and having a uterus.
I may indulge trans people I meet by using their favorite pronoun as a matter of courtesy, maybe I'll even do it instinctively if (say) a transwoman happens to look like a non-trans woman. One doesn't have to be an ass, much like I don't go into a church and shout "there is no god" even though I'm an atheist. But if trans activists can't make peace with the thought that many people will stick to the biological perspective, I think it says more about them than about me.
You're the exact kind of person who welcomes male rapists identifying into female prisons. And a "transwoman" is a male who identifies as and wishes to live as a female. Now how does calling the heroes who run female-only rape crisis centers "TERFs" improve the trans experience? It doesn't. A woman is an adult human female, and that deserves and demands to be its own protected class. I went back to nursing school in my adulthood and can tell you first hand that women take a dim view at being referred to as "birthing parents" or "cervix havers" or any other such anti-woman nonsense. This argument, from your side, is basically begging for Republican landslide victories, their pure idiocy on Roe nonwithstanding.
I'm tired of reading bad faith arguments from bullying so-called "liberals". And to say that that they're not basically shoving kids with legitimate emotional problems under the "trans" umbrella while ignoring medicine and common sense is pure folly at best and a cynical lie at worst. I support compassionate treatment for anybody who wants to be trans and I support proper evidence-based medicine as well. They're not mutually exclusive. Gaslighting rape victims, detransitioners, and lesbians is the road to nowhere and your argument causes more harm than good.
This may surprise you, but saying people support rapists is not an effective way of communicating with them.
Especially as I don't think that trans women should be allowed into the general population in female prisons unless they've had genital surgery (or, maybe, a thorough safety assessment - and any assessment that doesn't say "no" a lot is not thorough enough for me). They clearly shouldn't be in the general population in male prisons either - even if you take the extreme cases, it's instantly obvious that they would be bullied in male prisons too.
I don't know what the ideal solution is for prisons. But it isn't allowing men to claim to be women and go and rape women, and it isn't allowing trans women to get the shit kicked out of them in men's prisons. And it isn't solitary confinement for all trans women either.
Second, we do not protect classes of people. We protect individuals who are subjected to discrimination because they are believed - by the discriminator - to be members of a class. In anti-discrimination law, it doesn't matter whether you are a woman or not; if you are discriminated against because the person discriminating against you treats you as a woman, then you are protected. That applies to cis men too: if someone attacks a cis man from behind because he has long hair and they think he's a woman, then that was misogyny and you could get a hate crime enhancement on the sentence.
As for the nonsense about "cervix havers", I'd love to see examples of that actually happening outside of shouty idiots on social media. You see "people with cervixes" when talking about cervical smears. But that's because trans men weren't going for their smears - because, funnily enough, when you write to a man and say "women need to have cervical smear tests" they get put off going because they know they're going to be treated like shit. Creating an environment that is welcoming to trans men without putting off cis women is hard. I'm quite sure some people get it wrong the other way. But it's hardly anti-woman to want people to turn up to their smear tests. It's not an anti-woman conspiracy, it's a desperate attempt to stop people dying of cancer.
If you'd settle for "most people use pronouns to refer to apparent biology most of the time", I wouldn't argue at all. Most binary trans people look like they are the sex that they want to be.* Nearly all binary cis people look like the sex they are. We don't go checking beyond a quick glance. There are a few people that we go "oh, she/he looks weird" and we have to work out or ask which one to use. But mostly, guessing by looking works pretty well.
The other bit (the bit you start with "the problem comes") is, I think, legitimate, when it's someone jumping on normal casual speech - and there's certainly a few people who go over the top about "pregnant women". But there are a lot who also go OTT about "pregnant people". I think there's a huge difference between the language that gets used in normal conversations (no-one is ever going to say casually "women and other people with cervixes"), and what should appear on formal medical information ("women and other people with cervixes should have a cervical smear every three years").
Something I notice happens is that a document is put up in a specific context getting publicised as if people were saying that it must be used for everyone. For instance, Brighton in England has a fuck-ton of LGBT+ people and their maternity department has more lesbians and trans men giving birth than anywhere else in the country: they wrote a bunch of guidelines for what you might want to say instead of the normal words when the normal words don't work (things like "birthing parent" and "non-birthing parent" for when "mother" and "father" wouldn't work, e.g. lesbians or trans men). These weren't intended to be used these for everyone, but a guideline to have in mind so their staff wouldn't use a word that is blatantly wrong because they panicked and they can't think of anything else to say. That's where a lot of the things like "chestfeeding" come from - basically, some intern was told "nurses and midwives keep fucking up in front of the patients because we have so many lesbians and trans men having kids here: can you invent some words that won't piss everyone off?" So someone found this and publicised the one page with the two lists of words (without mentioning the previous page that described the context where they were meant to be used) and did a "wokies are trying to replace 'breastfeeding' with 'chestfeeding'"story. Of course, some idiots responded to that by insisting on using that everywhere. Of course they did: have you met people? Lots of them are idiots. But they were, well, nobodies ranting on twitter and the vast majority of pro-trans people think they are exactly that. There wasn't an attempt by a hospital to replace the words with other words, just to suggest some alternatives when the normal words don't work (also, at least half of them were for lesbian couples, not for trans people at all).
Reminds me of "Winterval" (one city in England, once, decided that since they were having a whole bunch of different Winter festivals, they should have one big branding across all of them, starting at Halloween and ending with Chinese New Year - so they called it "Winterval". Christmas was obviously part of it. And someone at a newspaper claimed they were trying to "replace Christmas with Winterval" and no-one has ever been able to shift that incorrect claim)
*Yes, most. It takes a few years, but they mostly get there. One reason this gets confused is that, like any movement, the most noisy and annoying members are people in their early/mid twenties - and trans people in their early/mid twenties are, pretty much by definition, usually very early on in their transition process, which means that they are the most in-need of requiring people to refer to them as being of a sex that they do not appear to be. I know a bunch of people who were very shouty in their early twenties and didn't, at that time, look much like the gender they'd transitioned to. Those same people, now in their forties, are much quieter, not shouty on social media any more, and look a lot more like the gender they have transitioned to. But they've been replaced by another generation of other shouty young people (in fact, that replacement cycle has run at least three or four times).
To slightly nitpick we also sex inanimate objects, ie boats, cars, etc
Yeah but that’s just fucking around and we all know it.
No it's not. Boats have female names "because the rigging costs more than the hull" is the quip you'll hear from a sailor: in other words, there are recognized social conventions connected to that "fucking around," which makes it consequential, and that is what the fuck we're talking about. That's why a trans woman is a woman, not a man, and that's why we make a distinction between sex (which is emphatically not simple) and gender (which is informed but not determined by sex). Because it's consequential.
Plenty of people can "just say that a woman is an adult human female" so your question's plainly bogus. I think you're just stomping your foot about people not adopting your chosen shibboleth.
Anyway, Richard Gadsden's commented on that more politely than me, so I'll focus on J.K. Rowling.
I don't see that Rowling "is left wing on many, many things" — she's a liberalish centrist who'd be outflanked to her left by the entire Bernie wing of the Democrats. She did oppose Brexit, which you could count as a left-leaning position (though one that a lot of centrists and quite a few conservatives were happy with), and she didn't like Trump (though plenty of people didn't, Never Trump Republicans included). She nominally supports abortion and gay marriage, but it's not clear what that support entails beyond an occasional tweet...and Rowling's chummy with homophobes, including on Twitter, so.
Perhaps the easiest way to discern Rowling's ideological tilt is to see where she put her money: she donated $2 million to Britain's Labour Party when it was in its Blairite-Brownite phase, before staunchly opposing Jeremy Corbyn (the Party's only left-wing leader this century).
As for "vicious monster"...well, there's room to argue what "monster" means exactly, but Rowling's pretty vicious. There. I said it. Even if you don't count handing megabucks to a party of government that lied a country into a war of aggression, she's vicious in how she wields SLAPPs against commentary she finds embarrassing or ideologically inconvenient. (Why yes, Rowling does also like to pose as a defender of free speech, including signing that one Harper's letter in 2020. She's certainly a blazing hypocrite even if she's not a monster.) She even threatened a random Scot into withdrawing a tweet that ACCURATELY AND LITERALLY VERBATIM quoted a tweet where she wrote "I've ignored porn tweeted at children".
That great harpers letter you mean?
I mean the mediocre and cowardly Harper's letter that came out during America's biggest wave ever of civil-rights protest, explicitly acknowledged that wave, then didn't say a word about the massive police violence it met — surely the most salient infringement of American "justice and freedom" at that time. You know, the letter that alluded to individual incidents without spelling out which ones it meant ("Editors are fired for running controversial pieces" etc. — which editors, which pieces?) and refused to engage any of their specifics ("Whatever the arguments around each particular incident"). That letter.
our of curiosity how many (your words) "uncle Toms" signed the harpers letter? The one Slate told you to hate. The one you hate because you don't WANT to understand it or the people on it?
Just like jokes it's totally okay to NOT get something. Some people don't GET jokes. And some people don't GET what people are trying to say. But you're right. It would have taken real strength for those people to just fall in line and tow the platform. That would have made them truly honest intellectuals. Why be honest when you can fall in line?
One of us
one of us
Gooble gabba
gooble gabba
one of us.
My words? You're just ignoring what I'm writing to put words in my mouth now. Pointless.
What a joke of a thinker.
You people spent decades not fixing police violence. Much like you people aren’t fixing immigration now.
Just like you people are all of the sudden against censorship. As long as it’s republicans doing it.
But hey I take the people of color speaking out about this who signed the harpers letter seriously and I listen.
What’s your excuse? They go against your religion. The way you make friends?
I'm sorry, "You people"?
I criticized the letter for its actual content. That's what it means to take its signers seriously. What you just did is the opposite of taking "the people of color [...] who signed the harpers letter seriously" — you're deflecting criticisms of the actual letter by gesturing at the race of (some of!) the signers. I'm not the one needing an excuse here.
Have you seen the Matt Walsh documentary "What is A Woman?" It's something that's probably being watched and passed around way, way more than the total silence in the press would lead people to believe. Matt Taibbi, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog were some of the only open-minded liberal types I know of that watched it, reviewed it, and gave it a fair shake. Is Walsh's film a right wing polemic? Mostly yes, but the salient issue about it is that it's not at all crazy, and most sensible people — which is most people, beyond political affiliation — are pretty chilled by what's in it.
Lefty/liberal types (and I'd argue the Hillary Clinton/K-Hive/"Colbert'n'Stewart, who'll kill comedy forever" types are not in any way liberal or left at this point, just bitterly partisan for uber-corporate, technocratic, PMC worship) would have been smart to get ahead of this issue by not totally blackballing/isolating/tarring/libeling/slandering the aforementioned Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog's early work on some of the more sensitive parts of the trans issue. When I saw the Walsh film, I kept thinking that someone not blinded by empty partisanship could have produced a similar documentary with that duo at the helm years ago — who, unlike Walsh, don't ultimately maybe think that any gender care should outlawed altogether. Had that alternate reality version of the film been made, we could have maybe prevented this current morass, which is one of a few issues maybe serious and stupid enough to remove all (formerly) liberal parties from power in the west for a generation, with likely wildly reactionary replacements.
We're in a place where this is in no way related to the gay and lesbian marriage issue. Most sensible people, and even many of the evangelicals deeply opposed to that issue on religious grounds, could at least understand, or even empathize, with the argument as a question of pure equality. The trans issue has become so cultish that it makes Scientology seem radically normal, with a bizarre set of beliefs and language regulations that's making seniors and independents repelled by Trump's behavior rethink voting against him again. If you go deep into Mississippi and talk to religious conservative types (and I sometimes do, and they're mostly very nice and smart people!), most of them will even agree that trans folk should be free to live the way they want to live, without harassment or discriminatory laws, but this argument is totally untethered from the issue of simple "equality" at this point.
That famous and sensible liberal types like J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle have somehow become the new face of "transphobia" for honest and often thoughtful work — that dares to question a bizarre and byzantine belief set that changes its rules daily, like the fundamentalist pseudo-religion on heavy psychedelic drugs that it is — shows how wild this has become. I have a lot of friends in my little corner of NYC that bridge multiple generations, and are life-long professed socialists that worked for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, are discussing how terrifying a lot of this is in private, and how their non-profit work has mostly (as described in that recent Ryan Grim piece) become lengthy Zoom meetings about language policing and pronouns.
It's such a shame. I was once a big fan of Jon Stewart (and the now-dead world of late night comedy in general). He can be really funny (still!), but our broken-brained modernity has shown him to be a dim bulb, with no principles or voice of his own. A typical affliction these days, yes, but it's a shame to see Stewart affected by it. We could use someone like the old Stewart to come at this issue with wisdom and empathy and sharply pointed humor, but that Stewart would probably be banned by Twitter.
I have many disagreements with Matt Walsh (I'm an atheist, feminist, lesbian) but it's striking how he does what liberals *used* to be good at -- challenging elites, pointing out absurdity. The first half of "What is a woman?" is in the style of the old Daily Show field pieces, and it works!
Meanwhile, Jon's gender episode is just cringey and awful. Yeah, he backsassed a conservative politician on camera, but he came off as a smarmy douche throughout the episode. He endorsed very dumb arguments while talking down to the audience.
His coverage of the issue was irresponsible (the evidence for medical transition of minors is weak, with many bad outcomes that people should consider) and it wasn't funny at all.
We've ceded comedy to CONSERVATIVES. I never thought I'd see the day.
Right on. I always argue that comedy isn't ever naturally partisan or political, and that it's chaos interpreting and sending up order. Since "order" is now represented by a party whose apparatchiks are deeply embedded in the ranks of what was once comedy, it's left them open for easy comedic destruction.
Political comedy is good, and necessary, and late night comics always skewered politicians. But they didn't seem like they were parroting political party talking points until very recently. I saw Ice T tweet about how he doesn't trust either party and that the democrats and republicans are "just the same bird" recently. He's undoubtedly right about that, but that "bird" has become the center of the universe. Comedians, who were mostly liberal, used to not be riding one of the wings of that bird, always fighting to be the victorious "wing." Comedians were like the semi-intelligent primates on the ground below throwing rocks at the bird, trying to make it go off course, crash, or just show its true nature. And they had targets besides that bird: they'd get bored and go throw rocks at the fish or the other animals; they created chaos everywhere!
The grand irony about Stewart's fall into partisan dumb-brain and anti-comedy is that no one watches him. He's getting what, 100,000 viewers on his Apple show? Mildly interesting political vloggers with zero experience and zero staff, and a computer and a little homespun honesty (and who are now considered the most dangerous people on earth by PMC types), are easily quadrupling that on YouTube. He's become about as relevant as MoviePass in 2022.
I subscribed simply to like your comment. You are 100% right. I’m an independent -> moderate liberal who was repulsed by Trump, and it has been shocking to watch Democrats double down on what are perhaps the most off-putting and regressive set of ideas I’ve ever seen (and I’m not talking about treating trans identified people with kindness and respect). It absolutely is a cult and one that liberals are seeing first hand when their daughters come home demanding that they be referred to with he/him or they/them pronouns (which is happening across the country). On top of that, the entire Democratic Party up to the President is whole heartedly supporting the medicalization of these young girls who are clearly going through a phase. That’s not even mentioning the sports, bathroom, locker room, and self-is issues that Democrats also support. I really can’t believe all of this is happening.
I'm a lifelong lefty/liberal and I agree that the Democratic Party has embraced some truly bizarre shit that isn't in keeping with left-liberal politics as I remember them in my lifetime. It's become a bitter, paranoid team-sport party, and the newly minted unholy union of the neoliberals and the neoconservatives is telling here. Is there a Iraq War-birthing neocon who hasn't very publicly joined the Democratic Party, and learned to stop worrying and embrace identity politics?
A few interesting, related points:
1. Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky mined near-identical territory that we've discussed in this thread on Breaking Points this Friday; i.e. how the failure of "#resistance" media to even discuss trans issues has ceded that issue totally to the right. Worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EORJzd6ighY
2. Christopher Rufo, who's probably become the most powerful activist on the right was very smart in taking issues that had been being seriously discussed in small "heterodox" corners of the left-liberal sphere and repackaging them, with a heavy dose of fear-mongering, for the right. He honestly scares me (he's said that any controversial books should be removed from libraries paid for by taxpayers), but it was a winning tactic. The arguments about "CRT" can be traced back to a number of things like the World Socialist Web Site's bringing in a who's who of important liberal historians to debunk the ahistorical, and wholly opinion-based sociological "1619 Project," that was (and is) being introduced to many school curricula as legitimate history. Similar to targeted smearing of liberal journalists like Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal's early, thoughtful work on the troubling aspects of trans ideology and medicine, Rufo and his crew saw easy openings on topics that the new Democrats (I refuse to call them "left") consider totally verboten.
3. Tying all this together is what Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira calls the "Fox News Fallacy" (https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/the-fox-news-fallacy) where people living in the Dem-aligned/MSNBC/NPR/NY Times bubble think that any topic covered by Fox News is automatically false, and forced them to axiomatically grasp the opposite idea, even if opposite idea is really, really dumb. Matt Taibbi's book Hate, Inc. (serialized at Taibbi's Substack) should also be mentioned here, the main thesis of which is that MSNBC/CNN took a page from Fox News' successful playbook in the Trump era and rebranded news as partisan-heavy, fact-lite entertainment designed to keep viewers seething with inchoate blood rage at the opposing "team" at all times, and Trump-around-the-clock-mania was the perfect vehicle to deliver these evil dopamine hits ad infinitum.
We're in a wildly complicated and conflicted time, and there are so many things that led to the Democratic Party becoming this idiotic, divisive and angry. (We haven't even discussed how internet/social media addiction is a big part of this). Everyone always tries to apply simplistic ideas and solutions to these problems, and it's beyond annoying. We need people to step away from their partisan bubbles and use their own eyes and brains to view this quagmire, and hopefully use some real human empathy to repair our increasingly broken civilization. And this includes Maurer's old boss John Oliver, who just happened to make a seething, opinion-heavy, fact-lite tirade on trans issues days after this story and this thread. It's almost like he's reading this shit! Mr. Oliver, I think you're very funny, and your show has done some good journalism, but you're not half as clever or as open-minded as you think you are; imagine if you dropped the ultra-partisan routine and approached these issues with a truly critical eye? This world could use someone like that.
The John Oliver segment was infuriating. Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal just recently released an episode of Blocked & Reported that goes through and dismantles all of the arguments made by Stewart & Oliver, but I'm sure the average viewer who is only tangentially familiar with this topic will think that Oliver's arguments are airtight. Of course, it helps that he's able to appeal to the authority of nearly all of the major medical associations in the US and a litany of "scientific" studies that have been given a veneer of legitimacy due to institutional capture in gender medicine.
Yes, I came across the term "Fox News Fallacy" about a year ago, and I've seen nearly all of my Democratic friends engage in this fallacy whenever I discuss certain issues with them. If Tucker Carlson or Hannity have taken a certain position on a topic, Democrats will reflexively assume that position is flawed somehow. Hyper partisanship has made it nearly impossible to have any kind of productive discourse on a handful of sacred issues.
I hope we can pull back from the brink and find some way to reach across the aisle and find some common ground. I think it will require competent leadership with Obama-esque likability who's main objective is to bridge the partisan divide. Unfortunately, I don't see leaders like that currently in the pipeline.
Edit: self-id
> Had that alternate reality version of [Walsh's] film been made, we could have maybe prevented this current morass, which is one of a few issues maybe serious and stupid enough to remove all (formerly) liberal parties from power in the west for a generation, with likely wildly reactionary replacements.
Aha, there's the bit where you threaten those of us to your left with proto-fascists, just because we don't kowtow to reactionaries like Walsh enough for your liking.
> We're in a place where this is in no way related to the gay and lesbian marriage issue. Most sensible people, and even many of the evangelicals deeply opposed to that issue on religious grounds, could at least understand, or even empathize, with the argument as a question of pure equality.
That sounds like rewriting history to me. The tropes wielded against trans people (sick fetishists, bathroom predators, groomers who "recruit" children) echo those wielded against gays and lesbians who demanded their rights, including marriage. And the anti-gay-marriage rhetorical armory included the argument that gays and lesbians were demanding a special right for themselves, since they already had the same right as straights to marry someone of the opposite sex — a transparently obtuse refusal to empathize with (or indeed understand) "the argument as a question of pure equality". (And there's a conceptual linkage between trans rights and gay and lesbian marriage: if a conservative conceded that people generally ought to live according to their gender rather than their sex, sex-based rationalizations of marriage restrictions would look less robust.)
> That famous and sensible liberal types like J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle have somehow become the new face of "transphobia" for honest and often thoughtful work [...] shows how wild this has become.
Weird, I thought J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle became the new face of transphobia for being celebrities who got chummy with transphobes and wrote a tendentious concern-trolling essay about trans people (Rowling) or declaring themselves "Team TERF" and in agreement with Rowling on stage (Chappelle).
> I was once a big fan of Jon Stewart [...] He can be really funny (still!), but our broken-brained modernity has shown him to be a dim bulb, with no principles or voice of his own. [...] We could use someone like the old Stewart
Pffft. The old Stewart cheerfully read out transphobic jokes — see https://twitter.com/jacyanthis/status/983499974297210882 for an interesting example featuring Dennis Kucinich declaring his willingness to nominate transgender judges to SCOTUS over a "GAY MARRIAGE CONTROVERSY" chyron. I'm glad that THAT Stewart's gone even if the new one's unfunny and dim. I'll do without Stewart, I already wrote him off with his hacky, both-sidesing Rally to Restore Sanity, a mere...12 years ago.
Huh, weird how other people are catching up to me in dismissing Jon Stewart only now he's trying to make up for his transphobic past. Get on my level, I guess?
You are still conflating DSDs (Differences in Sexual Development (examples Klinefelter and androgen insensitivity syndrome)- sometimes referred to (incorrectly) as Intersex) with transgender in your otherwise common sense paragraph about how the left should address this issue.
The people who "don't fit neatly" into male or female are not the people who are "transgender" and medicalizing at new and unheard of rates (also flipped from majority male born to female born recently). See the recent Reuters article about the increases of the last few years.
The issue of DSDs is a separate issue.
The issue of trans identifying people (particularly teens) is mostly people who are 100% one sex, but identify with the "gender identity" of the other sex. They believe altering their body via hormones and/or surgery will help them deal with that congruence. For some it does, and for adults most think they should be allowed to do what they need to do to be happy. But with teens we don't know if that is something they will grow out of, we have started affirming all "questioning" kids which leads to a medicalized path.
Prior to the rise of "affirmation only" of kids who identify as the opposite gender (identity) from their sex, we had a model of "watchful waiting." Under watchful waiting, many teens would desist from the gender incongruance and live in their natal sex. At rates above 80%. I suspect the Arkansas AG was referencing that (not some fabled 98% de-transition rate that you correcty point out is nonsense). When given time and actually going through the puberty of their natal sex many kids will desist. This allows them to live in their healthy body. Currently we can't tell the difference.
See the growing number of actual detransitioners to see that this is true.
We are rushing kids onto this path.
Dems have to take the feet off the gas on this.
Not to mention the plainly insane idea that a male *is* a woman based on Self-ID (simply identifying himself as such). This is the basis for the argument that sports and prisons should be segregated by "gender identity" rather than sex. This is already in place at the highschool sports level all over the country and making its way into higher level sports (obviously the Lia Thomas case, but also see many instances of males winning in women's categories in biking and a male just won a women's surfing competition in Australia, one year after winning the men's). It ridiculous. It completely decimates all good will that most people feel about allowing people to be who they want to be.
Don't make me lie and say a man *is* a woman.
Interestingly - the military did just state trans women, who are born male (redundant, but I guess they had to be clear) must register for the draft and trans men, who are born female, do not.
Meanwhile the same administration supports the aforementioned allowing natal born males into women's sports and prisons based on "gender identity."
Dem's are losing some of us on this. I'm still voting dem, but I can't get myself to give money and knock doors like I used to.
Men might pretend to identify as women to get out of the draft! But they would NEVER pretend to identify as women to get out of going to mens’ prison! 🤪
Perhaps much of what is called "conservative" policy measures is unduly authoritarian and butts in on decision-making territory that usually is best occupied by the patient and his or her physician, but there is now too much evidence that our medical establishment has gone so far down the ideological rabbit hole that a gaping void exists when it comes to The Science. Like our educational institutions, our scientific institutions have become so thoroughly corrupted that the discovery of good quality evidence through open debate between competing theories is not happening . . . Lysenkoism is occurring under an informal regime of "cancel culture," together with the inevitable prioritization of politics above knowledge-creation because the sources of its funding have been over-centralized and placed largely under the control of the state.
If you haven't already, perhaps spend some time listening to experts in their field who will tell you how far the institutions our societies rely on for "the science" have abandoned their founding principles . . . things are bad. Quacks and Zealots are donning white coats and browbeating everyone to "believe in Science," and now too much of the "leadership" in our countries are acting as if they're in a Cargo Cult.
How Gender Activists Dictate "Standards of Care" | with Stella O'Malley
https://youtu.be/0G4DDvc23eg
Saving Child Medicine from Gender Ideology | with Julia Mason
https://youtu.be/3iAd6tSzSYE
Interview with Endocrinologist Will Malone on Gender: A Wider Lens:
https://youtu.be/gOD7Nuwltf0
Jeff, you ignored the largest right-wing objection in this, which is the relationship between kids, the parents, and the state.
You might consider some of these teachers simply well-meaning woke people who are trying to help kids find their way. Certainly the left does, and considers counseling kids on their personal transgender questions to be a free speech issue.
The problem is that the other side sees it as a state versus the individual issue, which is made even more stark when legislation permits all of this to be done behind the parents' back. The left's arrogant assumption that their "experts" - i.e. an army of 30 something purple haired single childless women from Vassar - know more about someone's kids than the people that actually raise them rankles people more than the left appreciates. The left truly does not get this.
Maybe this will make more sense with a story.
Little Johnny is a boy who doesn't play sports well. The other boys tend to pick him last for a game of kickball and he feels ignored and depressed. He spends some time playing with the girls, fits in, and then thinks "maybe I should have been a girl." He voices this opinion to the teacher, who encourages it.
Suddenly, little Johnny is a rockstar. Virtue-signaling moms and teachers fall all over themselves to validate little Johnny's new persona. Johnny comes home and tells his parents at dinner that he heard about puberty blockers and wants to take them. Johnny's parents call the principal demanding to know what the fuck are they telling their kid, and the principal tells them that according to state law, this is none of their business.
The double standard is also telling. A 12 year old cannot drink, smoke, get a job, get a tattoo, vote, drive a car, etc because pre-teens don't have that judgement yet. But, according to the left, he can cut off his tallywacker.
This demonstrates one of my pet peeves with the left. Time always begins when "Republicans Pounce."
Everything that caused the pouncing is memory-holed.
Jeff, you are wrong about the Arkansas bill: it is not terrible, it is absolutely essential, and needs to be copied nationwide.
You say "It takes what should be a personal decision between a young person and their parents — advised by medical professionals — and hands the decision-making power to the state. It’s fucked up; nobody should have the state butting into their medical decisions."
First of all, as a general principle, the state butts into medical decisions ALL THE TIME, for the excellent reason of preventing bad and dangerous medicine. For example, your doctor can only prescribe FDA approved medication. And this is almost always a good thing!
In the case of "gender affirmation", the medical community has (very sadly and tragically) gone totally off the rails. "Gender affirmation" is NOT evidence based, as unbiased reviews in other countries have clearly shown.
Matt Osborne at The Distance, substack of LGB United, put it well:
>Hundreds of families were told that their children would kill themselves without “gender affirmation.” This is a lie. It has always been a lie.
>There is no science to back it up and the best long-term study [link in original] shows a manifold INCREASE in suicide risk among the POST-transition population.
>Jazz Jennings has a far greater risk of suicide today than if his body had been left alone.
https://thedistance.substack.com/p/vanderbilt-hospital-cites-parental
And here is a good summary of the current situation by Colin Wright:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/how-to-make-a-trans-kid
Thanks for the link to The Distance, I hadn't seen that before.
As that article notes, I don't understand how anyone can believe that failure to socially, hormonally, or surgically transition kids will lead to suicide, when none of those things were available to kids 10-20-30 years ago, and there were virtually no suicides attributed to gender dysphoria (and there are vanishingly few even claimed to be attributable to it today).
I take the boring position (held by about 99% of people 10 years ago) that we should not lie to our children by telling them they can change sex, or that they already are the other sex, we should certainly not enlist others in lying to them, we should absolutely not prevent the normally-timed onset of natal puberty and the irreplaceable developmental benefits it brings, we should not administer cross-sex hormones that quickly produce irreversible body changes and often sterility, and for the love of god we should not be surgically removing healthy body parts or subjecting them to risky and often ineffective cosmetic surgeries. Instead we should be talking to them about how to live with the reality of their bodies as they are, explaining that discomfort with one's body during puberty is common and usually resolves, we should be accepting of a wide range of behavior in both boys and girls, and that same-sex attraction is neither wrong nor a guarantee of an abormal adult life. We should also point out, gently, that whether they are opposite-sex or same-sex attracted, they stand a much better chance of attracting someone themselves if they have an intact body of one sex or the other.
It is not kindness to lie to your children about how the world works, or indulge their most unrealistic wishes. It is kindness to prepare them for it, and help them become comfortable in who they are, while preserving all the gifts of their own body for the point at which they will appreciate them.
Actually medical transition of minors has been happening for 25+ years... But it's been pretty well gate kept and following the Zuckerman watchful waiting practice where consistent insistent persistent was considered... But yeah I know a couple ppl in their late 30s who went on cross sex hormones before 18 (no PBS, no minor surgeries).
They generally are happy with how things turned out, but also happy their parents waited until they were 15 or 16 before starting to put them on cross sex hormones and support pretty strong gatekeeping
Perhaps I should have said it was only very narrowly available - really just a handful of kids in the whole world compared to the many thousands who are showing up today. And yet no large number of suicides attributed to its lack.
Yeah, no, we're totally on the same page. There was a small number of children who experienced gender dysphoria without what appeared to be any external influence, and eyes were kept on them to see if medical intervention could be avoided well maximizing wellness. Often it could be.
Relevance: suicidiality and transition stars
'After sex reassignment surgery, one study showed that adult transsexual clients were 4.9 times more likely to have made a suicide attempt and 19.1 times more likely to have died from suicide, after adjusting for prior psychiatric comorbidity [2]. Similarly, an Australian paper [3] notes that many patients have poor outcomes which put them at risk of suicide.
A prominent study [4] claiming that medical transition alleviated suicidality had to be corrected [5], to clarify that it proved “no advantage of surgery” in this regard.
A long-term Swedish study [6] finds that post-operative transgender people have “considerably higher risks” for suicidal behavior."
https://www.statsforgender.org/there-is-no-evidence-that-medical-transition-decreases-suicidality/
"There’s sex, and then there’s gender. Sex involves biological attributes — chromosomes, hormone levels, that kind of stuff. There are anomalies in sex such as Klinefelter syndrome (chromosomes are XXY) and androgen insensitivity syndrome (the body makes testosterone but doesn’t respond to it) that make sex not completely binary. Therefore, sex is basically meaningless and can be ignored. Gender is all that matters. Gender refers to socially-constructed gender roles — playing with dolls if you’re a girl, playing with trucks if you’re a boy, that type of thing. A person chooses their gender identity, so when a person identifies with a gender, they ARE that gender, end of story.
I feel that that’s a fair summation of left-wing canon on this issue."
Your feelings, while understandable, are false...or at least not quite accurate. The position you laid out amounts to the genderists' own Intelligent Design argument -- a bunch of watered-down PR-tested pablum meant to sow just enough doubt into the average layperson's mind that they do not see the insipid and broken theology underlying the activists' zeal. It may be the momentary *consensus* among the professional and managerial class who mean well and are terrified of losing their jobs because they said the wrong thing within earshot of a blue-haired weirdo, but it is not the left-wing canon. The left-wing canon, instead, amounts to this:
1. Everyone is born with a gender identity which is something between a soul and a mental faculty, and which is the most central thing about their identity as a human being. Man, woman, male, female, non-binary, and a whole host of other sex-and-gender labels exclusively refer to a person's gender identity, not to the sex of their physical body.
2. This gender identity may correlate to a biological sex, or it may not. When it does, it may correlate to the sex of one's physical body, or to the opposite sex. When it does not, it may be the null gender (commonly known as "agender"), one of an infinite set of "non-binary" genders (which may exist between or orthogonal to the poles of male and female), or a multi-gender which asserts different aspects at different times. Some gender identities have so little to do with a human body that it is difficult to understand how the two concepts could have ever been related, but even in these cases, it remains a vital part of a person's overall identity.
3. A person's gender identity is fixed from conception, and only belatedly discovered. Once discovered, refusal to acknowledge this gender identity causes the individual extreme distress, the only proper treatment for which is to have everyone the person ever meets affirm their gender identity at all times and in all places (e.g., pronouns are not "preferred", they are correct) and to "pause" a prepubescent child's puberty until a doctor can schedule them for a "gender-affirming" surgery.
4. The way someone expresses their gender (i.e., their gender expression) -- in particular their manner of dress, the cadence and depth of their voice, their hobbies and interests, their propensity for wearing makeup or other ornaments, etc. -- is only loosely correlated with their underlying gender identity. Therefore it is impossible to know in advance whether anyone is a man, woman, male, female, both, or neither.
5. Sexual arousal (i.e., what we have only briefly started calling a person's "sexuality") is almost exclusively governed by a combination of gender expression and gender identity, not by a prospective partner's biological sex. In particular, a person's genitalia should have no bearing upon their viability as a sexual partner to another, as long as both parties have compatible sexualities under the umbrella of gender identity -- so two gay men should not have a problem having sex, even if one (or both) of these men has a vagina (mutatis mutandis gay women/penis).
6. Failure to continuously affirm and evince adherence to all of the above is a sign either of gender heresy or gender blasphemy, which are brought under the common label of "transphobia".
There are doubtless other points I have missed, but this is the bare minimum one must acknowledge in order to avoid the stink of transphobia. This is the ideology lurking beneath your later suggestion of "hey sometimes people are born with weird stuff, and sometimes when a girl is a tomboy it REALLY DOES mean she's actually maybe a boy inside, but there should be some kind of line between shuffling every tomboy into a gender clinic and not having gender clinics at all".
You also err in that transgender people (at least in the West) lack protections; in America and Canada and across the entire European Union, transgender people have protections for employment and housing and basic human dignity. What "protection" they do not yet have is the universal right to force everyone to publicly and privately affirm the dogma I laid out, though in some places they have come mightily close to achieving this.
It is a religious dogma, no less potent and no less toxic to the thinking mind than the Abrahamist faiths to which most of us are accustomed. The muddling contradictions and absurdities that obtain from the affirmation of this faith are not its death knell; they are an inevitable consequence of its nature, which is based in the gathering of social power through the enforcement and propagation of a shared belief. The fact that this belief runs counter to reality does not weaken the belief -- it makes expressions of the belief all the more impactful.
Creo, qui absurdum est.
Here's a citation of where the 98% number comes from or at least a place it could come from
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jocn.16164#:~:text=A%20systematic%20review%20highlights%20that,themselves%20to%20their%20natal%20sex
" systematic review highlights that 61–98% of children and young people who present with gender dysphoria, without medical intervention, desist (Ristoria and Steensma, 2016). That is, naturally stop opposite sex identification and reconcile themselves to their natal sex. "
That seems to suggest that the diagnostic criteria that are being used to determine whether medical intervention should be offered or not are pretty robust: 61-98% who are denied intervention go on to do OK without, 98% who are granted intervention continue with the intervention.
Maybe the system is pretty solid, after all?
That was the old system when they did "watchful waiting" and addressed other potential issues in the child's gender dysphoria.
Now the message of the day is "affirmation only" so they aren't given time to desist. They are affirmed in their opposite-sex identity which cements them in. Hormones come next and possible surgery after.
Exactly. It does seem like that was a solid system but it’s going away now thanks to the relentless push of left wing activists to move to an affirmation-only model that ensures that the 60-98% of dysphoric kids who would have grown to accept their healthy bodies will commit to a lifetime of expensive and risky medicalization to maintain artificial alterations to their physiology. The sensible approach of watchful waiting is now being characterized as abusive conversion therapy.
Yes!
And that characterization of it being "conversion therapy" is all part and parcel of this whole ideology's use of language and re-defining commonly understood concepts.
Calling it “conversion therapy” to try keeping one’s body the way it is just shows how bold their big lies have gotten.
Trans kids demanding puberty blockers are literally trying to keep their bodies the way they are.
"That was the old system"? The linked paper was published in December, its oldest reference is from 2016, and most of its references are from last year!
As an atheist I don't see the conservative position on this issue as having anything to do with religion. Occasionally the state gets involved in decisions between a minor and their parents, for example growing up in California I couldn't get a tattoo at 16 even with parental permission. I generally oppose that, but there does seem to be a trend at the moment where general teen angst and body image issues are being pushed as gender dysphoria. And since there seems to be issues with the use of puberty blockers in regards to the effects on future fertility and sexual health it does seem to be a net positive to ban them for minors
The cons are not wrong about the need for heavy safeguards when it comes to gender dysphoria and kids. All the shit coming out about Mermaids in the UK is horrifying. Including an employee in a child protective services org donning rubber and masturbating on camera in the bathroom at work.
Unfortunately you're granting far too much good faith here. Most of the driving force for these changes is to throw up a bunch of sand so that the subset of trans-identified people who are adult males motivated by paraphilic fixation have social cover. I recommend reading the very good & short book by Michael Bailey, "The Man Who Would Be Queen", available here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281747420_The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen
or the longer and more recent book "Trans" by Helen Joyce, both of which will probably put some jigsaw puzzle pieces in place.
I am quite sympathetic to that group, at least in theory, because in most cases they seem to have had little choice in developing this paraphilia. Unfortunately, most people are not so sympathetic to the idea in the first place, still less to the thought that their acceptance and cooperation with someone's cross-sex presentation in public is actually to further that person's paraphilic gratification. That is why so much chaff has been put up around it, and "trans kids" are ideal for promoting the idea that cross-sex gender identities can be innate, immutable, and essential, which is great cover. And I am not sympathetic to that angle, at all.
For some honest and interesting first-person insights into what I'm talking about here, read some of the threads on this account: https://twitter.com/RecoveringAGP
On the topic of kids, the desistance rate is extremely high and nobody has any way to predict which kids will desist and which will persist. The protocol of social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries leads almost inevitably to sterility, very high risk of anorgasmia and sexual dysfunction, not to mention the bone and brain development risks of puberty blockers, and the general-health risks of cross-sex hormones. So given that most kids with early-onset gender dysphoria desist and grow up to be comfortable with their bodies (most of them will be gay), subjecting any of them to an unproven treatment with very serious side effects is unethical. And it is in the interest of the state to prevent children from being subjected to unethical or unproven medical procedures, those that carry serious risks and side effects and have not been proven effective by high-quality evidence.
For the late-onset (usually teen) gender dysphoria crowd, predominantly female, they are a new group with virtually no evidence at all as to what interventions will be effective. I find the theory of James Cantor that they are likely suffering from BPD quite plausible. Treating one psychological disorder with the physical interventions claimed to be appropriate for a completely different disorder is, pardon my language, insane. It is like going to the doctor to complain about psychosomatic fatigue caused by depression and having them prescribe you methamphetamines. Even if it was a good treatment for fatigue (probably not), it sure isn't a good treatment for depression. (Though it might make you feel pretty good for a while, something that is also true of testosterone for teenage girls.)
It is a difficult thing to appreciate that this entire construct might be so much horseshit. There might not be any such thing as gender identity. Many of the prominent individuals arguing passionately for their rights might actually be motivated by a private sexual fantasy, not "a woman's brain in a man's body". The entire phenomenon of trans kids might - outside of the very small number of young children who were known to experience serious gender dysphoria - have no more objective reality than the Indigo Children or the satanic abuse panic.
It sucks to think about. For me it especially sucks since my liberal tribe is all-in on this, and in major media only right-wing nutjobs will bring it up. Unfortunately, "I believe the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson says about everything" is not a fully reliable guide to everything in the world.
So much that is frustrating comes down to language policing. There are now two distinct definitions of "woman" in the lexicon - an older, more common definition referring to sex, chromosomes, reproductive organs, etc., and a more recent definition referring to gender identity. Both definitions have their uses, and it nearly always obvious which word people mean from context (nobody sane is confused about which definition is meant by the phrase "pregnant women"). The problem is that instead of celebrating the widespread adoption of the latter, more inclusive definition where applicable, the modern left would like to ban the former definition from all usage, despite it's irreplaceable usefulness in describing the basics of human reproduction and sex drive.
Here is what I think has happened with the gender-affirming care for kids debate. I think there are a number of trans activists who knew they were trans at a young age and were unable to access any kind of care when they were young, and thus had very painful childhood and adolescence experiences. They now see these new treatments, and probably correctly surmise that had they been able to access puberty blockers and the like they would have had a much easier childhood and adolescence. Given that lived experience, of course you are going to push hard to maximize access to these treatments - they know it would have helped them and sincerely believe that denying these treatments to anyone is akin to sentencing kids to the same pain they experienced.
But the problem with lived experience is it is YOUR experience. By definition it cannot tell you if your experience was typical or not. As a corollary, lived experience often sets you up for survivor bias: Imagine LeBron James saying “I don’t know why people stress about picking a career, I just played basketball and it worked out for me!”
Today’s trans activists are, almost by definition, those whose gender dysphoria didn’t desist. But that doesn’t mean that experience will be true for every kid, and indeed there is research that greater than 50% of kids who experience dysphoria do eventually desist, and allowing those kids access to permanent changes to their bodies will likely lead to some terrible regret.
It’s just a difficult, painful issue. It’s horrible that states like Texas and Arkansas are trying to aggressively insert themselves in profoundly unhelpful ways. But it also isn’t helpful to call anyone who thinks we might want to be careful with medical interventions anti-trans bigots.
With respect, today's most vocal trans activists are adult-transitioning autogynephilic males whose interest in cross-sex presentation was parallel with or subsequent to their general sexual interest. That they say they experienced severe gender dysphoria as young children is either unprovable or, often enough, belied by other accounts (contrary to the cases of actually-gender-dysphoric young children, where it is apparent to the parents, in part because very young children are not motivated to lie or conceal it). So it simply is not the case that "they were the persisters" - they never were gender dysphoric as children in the first place. And so they are not reliable guides to the experience of any young kids or teenagers experiencing gender dysphoria. They may wish their male development was not so prominent today, but very often they were quite happy with it earlier in their lives, when it served to attract female partners, father children, or, as with Bruce Jenner, compete in sports. They have no idea what it would be like to have been surgically sterilized as a teenager.
With no respect, "[minority community] is just a sexual fetish" was a bullshit argument when it was used against gay people (alongside "they're converting our kids" and "they're bathroom predators", other homophobic arguments that bigots have exhumed to use against trans people (1)), so anyone invoking the autogynephile argument should be judged to have as much merit as anyone ignorantly claiming gay men were just straight men choosing to live their kink twenty+ years ago.
1) In case anyone has forgotten what those days used to look like, here's an example that hasn't been lost to time:
https://legiochristi.com/sodomy/
Whether it reminds you of past smears against gays has nothing to do with whether it is actually true, ample evidence for which is widely available.
I did not say all trans people were motivated by paraphilia. Many are clearly not - they are mostly same-sex attracted. But the loudest and most obnoxious MTF activists clearly are, and since they lie about their motivations for transitioning, you can also believe nothing of what they tell you about their childhood and how it relates to others expressing gender dysphoria.
I’m not even unsympathetic to the autogynephilic transitioners as a group! I think they experience gender dysphoria just as real as that of other trans populations. It sounds like a rough deal, and I think quite a lot of people would be sympathetic if they were open about it. Plenty of people who were disgusted by the idea of gay sex got over it. (Straight sex is pretty weird too.) But gay people didn’t lie about their motivations and behavior.
I recommend talking to some admitted autogynephiles. There’sa bunch on twitter. You will quickly come to understand that this is not a myth, and that the patterns are identical to those of other late-transitioning heterosexual MTFs.
What, exaclty, is horrible about preventing the mutilation and sterilization of children?
No other form of mental distress is treated by body-altering drugs and surgery. This "treatment" is NOT evidence based, and state legislatures are absolutely right to forbid it.
I think in addition to your first paragraph, the problem of puberty for trans people is that puberty leads to changes that can't be undone later. A trans person who goes through the wrong puberty has a permanently different body- for a trans woman that means taller height, broader shoulders, a lower voice - and at best all they can do is try and mitigate it and live with it. If you can prevent trans kids from going through the wrong puberty, then that would mean saving future trans adults from suffering those changes, so it's a high-stakes issue to get right.
I'm skeptical of the desistance research, or at least how it ends up being presented. From my understanding, MOST desistance in general is due to a lack of social support - unsupportive family, bullying, social rejection, being the subject of political attacks - and people who desist usually end up transitioning again later on once they're in a more supportive environment, not because the person changed their mind and realized they were cis.
Either that, or the number of trans kids is being inflated by kids identifying as nonbinary because its trendy and lets them claim oppression points, and they can desist just as easily as they transitioned.
A person does not go through the "wrong" puberty; they either go through puberty according to their physiology or their puberty is arrested through a combination of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. People who take cross-sex hormones after puberty also do not "reverse" their puberty or go through a "second" puberty, either.
Either way, lifelong hormone replacement and supposedly-but-not-really-reversible puberty blockers bring with them a myriad of enhanced endocrine-related health risks and inevitable health conditions. These risks and conditions may be worth taking on for an individual's overall well-being, in the same way any high-risk medication schedule may be worth it for any patient's well-being if the condition being treated warrants such risk, but it is always a delicate balance to strike. These are major, life-long, continuous medical interventions, and perverting the language we use to refer to these interventions will not erase this reality.
In fact, prepubescent boys who want to undergo sex reassignment surgery are often caught in a Sophie's choice -- if they do not go through puberty, they often lack the penile tissue that cosmetic surgeons prefer to use to make a facsimile of a vagina. In these cases, doctors will often resort to sourcing the flesh from the child's colon, which -- aside from being a dangerous procedure that shortens the child's intestine -- often results in the pseudovagina retaining a colonic smell even years after the surgery. Hell, even when sufficient penile and scrotal tissue *is* available, the pseudovagina can grow internal hair that often incubates invasive microbiomes, with little to no inherent countermeasures except an inflammatory immune response. And, in either case, the chances of retaining any capacity for sexual gratification is vanishingly small.
And should the boy decide against cross-sex hormones after a regime of puberty blockers, there is a good chance his body will not initiate or resume the puberty that the blockers interrupted, especially if he took the blockers for years. This can leave the boy's body permanently underdeveloped, undersized, and infertile; even taking synthesised testosterone replacement rarely alleviates the bone-density and fertility issues which often result from taking common puberty blockers. These blockers are, after all, the very same drugs some sex criminals volunteer to take as a measure to avoid recidivism -- and these men often permanently lose their libido after a few years of treatment, along with incurring issues with bone density and other endocrine-related effects.
There are a host of similar problems for girls who take puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones. If a girl or young woman takes synthesised testosterone for a non-negligible period of time, her body will also undergo permanent alterations which no amount of synthesised oestrogen will entirely mitigate should she decide to detransition, and if she simply "pauses" her puberty for long enough, she will likely never develop a functioning reproductive system. But she faces a similar dilemma to a boy if she wishes to undergo sex reassignment surgery; pseudopenises are usually constructed from muscle taken from the thigh along with flesh from the clitoris and clitoral hood, which in some cases retains some capacity for sexual gratification. But if puberty is avoided or halted before this tissue can sufficiently develop, there won't be enough of it to retain any sexual gratification at all.
Euphemising these interventions by calling them "cures" for the "wrong puberty", lying (or echoing lies) about the reversible nature of some of these drugs, and downplaying how drastic a course of action this is for children to be encouraged to take does not help anyone, least of all the children currently being encouraged to take said course of action. Such language manipulation is not medicine, it is religious dogma.
That comment's short on citations but long on argument, so I'll limit myself to one question: how many "prepubescent boys" do, in fact, have a pseudovagina made out of their colon?
As far as I know gender-affirming surgery on prepubescent children is rare, and I'd expect colonic-pseudovagina installation in prepubescent boys to be far rarer still. If there's evidence showing I'm mistaken, I'd be interested in seeing it.
In this context, we have to be careful and clear about what "prepubescent" means. I admit I was a bit slipshod and loose when I wrote "...prepubescent boys who want to undergo sex reassignment surgery...". This should probably read "prepubescent boys who want to GO ON TO undergo sex reassignment surgery after a regime of puberty blockers and then hormone replacement therapy..." or similar (with caps here used simply for emphasis).
We have a certain age-range in mind when we hear or use the phrase "prepubescent child", generally being a child up to twelve-ish years, because twelve is about when the average child begins the puberty process. But in the current discussion, such a correlation doesn't really obtain.
I will grant you that, until recently, sex-reassignment on children under 16 was quite rare (and is likely still rare, though hardly unheard-of). Yet what would you call a 17, 18, or 19 year old boy who's spent years on puberty blockers (and possibly synthesised female hormones) explicitly to "pause" his puberty, other than prepubescent? And how would you characterise his then undergoing sex-reassignment as anything other than a prepubescent boy getting a pseudovagina made for himself? Perhaps a better term would be "puberty-arrested" children.
The point stands that if a boy, before the onset of puberty, begins to take puberty blockers whose purpose is to prevent him from developing mature male sexual organs, he will lack the tissue to use during a vaginoplasty. It cannot be otherwise -- that is the Sophie's Choice. He must either allow himself to go through enough of a puberty to use his penile and scrotal tissue to construct a pseudovagina, or a doctor must source this tissue from elsewhere, regardless of how old he is when the surgery occurs. One of the sources of this tissue is the sigmoid colon (it is in fact the first source listed here: https://www.verywellhealth.com/different-types-of-vaginoplasty-4171503, though of course that does not imply it is the most frequent alternative; indeed, it is impossible to find a trustworthy source with hard numbers about the frequency of sigmoid colon vaginoplasty).
These are, in any case, very serious procedures with long-term risks that must be very deliberately considered. Using euphemistic language such as "the wrong puberty" is a rhetorical device meant to glean over these difficulties, and that is a mistake which will and has lead to people undergoing these procedures unnecessarily, with very little recourse once they realised that doing so was a mistake.
I agree that we have to be careful and clear about meanings here, and appreciate your acknowledgment that you were not. I appreciate less that you don't then answer my question. You clear your throat for 2 or 3 paragraphs as if just clarifying the question's terms, then replay a bunch of talking points (and describe, bizarrely, in the middle of your comment about children, 18 and 19 year olds as boys) in lieu of answering it.
You're waffling again! If you can answer my question, please do so. I understand that my question might be ill-posed (though I don't see how); feel free to tweak the question a bit if that's what it takes to make it well-posed. I understand that your answer would probably be inexact; that's fine, I would be happy with an order-of-magnitude BOTEC grounded in cited, credibly reported numbers. But if you're just going to write around the question, using it as a pretext to replay talking points, that'll be a waste of my time and yours.
If you can’t see his point that’s because you’re being purposefully obtuse. I learned not to play your game a while ago. I assume the name “splainer” is ironically chosen?
Necessary and sufficient conditions work great for human-created constructs. Are there necessary and sufficient conditions for a card game to be considered "Go Fish"? Yes!
Naturally occurring phenomena don't lend themselves to necessary and sufficient conditions. Is Pluto a planet? What set of qualities should group animals into a phylum? We like to categorize things, but the best we can do is identify a constellation of characteristics that pick out a planet, a phylum of animals, or a woman or man. As you say, we can generally pick out women and men despite exceptions like people with androgen insensitivity. That's why it chaps my ass that conservative play "gotcha" by demanding necessary and sufficient conditions to define a woman, and it equally bugs me that the left insists that there is no constellation of characteristics that generally allow us to identify a woman or a man.
It's adolescent to insist that everything has to be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. Grownups realize that the world is complicated.
If a trans woman has had genital surgery and has been on HRT for a decade or so and living as a woman full-time, then it's pretty much impossible to tell that she is trans and not cis without a DNA test (or asking her, or checking her medical records). It would seem ridiculous to me to refer to her with masculine pronouns or force her to use the men's toilets. That's what I mean when I say "trans women are women".
There are a bunch of things that we can argue about without trying to claim that trans women aren't women: transition is a process, but we have to have binary divisions in a number of cases - if there are men's and women's toilets or changing rooms, then people have to go to one or the other, and they have to change at some point. The correct point at which they should change is something we can debate - having some widely agreed guidelines would really help a lot of people (including many trans people themselves, who may well not want to change on day one, but would like a hint of when they should).
I think a lot of people are reasonably annoyed at the idea that a man can say "I'm a woman now" and walk into the women's facilities everywhere. But (apart from a small number of assholes), that's not what generally happens. At some point they switch. Lots of them go a few months when they just don't go out for long enough that they need to go, so that when they do start going into the women's, lots of people have started treating them as female.
Exactly how sports should work is something else to be legitimately debated - I tend to the view that a lot of sport exists mostly for the fun of playing and for teamwork, rather than being super-competitive (people are still trying to win, of course) and the sort of relatively minor advantages that trans women have over cis women aren't much different to "doing an extra hour a week in the gym" or something - and since most of the people I'm thinking of aren't necessarily doing a full hour in the gym every week, that's just not enough to care about.
At the élite end, then we do need a better scientific study for those trans women who went through male puberty (those that didn't, ie had access to puberty blockers early on, should clearly be allowed to compete; they can't have had any advantages). The questions should be about things like "how much does performance drop, and how quickly?", "can a trans woman who was in heavy training before transition retain muscle mass by training right through?", "how much do things (like bone density) that don't change really matter?" Perhaps the answer will be to require a trans woman to have had low T levels for a certain period, perhaps she will be required to decondition after dropping to low T so when she reconditions, she will have to build muscle mass slowly (like a cis woman) rather than being able to retain what she had from when she had male hormone levels, perhaps some sports will have to have weight classes for safety reasons (combat sports already do, of course; perhaps some non-combat heavy-contact sports like rugby or American football should anyway), perhaps there are a few sports where women who went through a T-based puberty would have to be excluded (I originally wrote "trans" women and "male" puberty in this, but there are cis women who went through a T-based puberty because they mistakenly thought they were trans men and they will have exactly the same advantages as trans women who transitioned after T-based puberty).
And then there are intermediate levels - especially youth sports where trans athletes have had far fewer opportunities to transition, and where "take three years out" amounts to "never compete at all". While élite sports pose the hardest technical/scientific questions, I think these are the hardest ethical questions: If a trans girl comes out at 17, can she switch from the boy's team to the girl's immediately at high school? If not, when can she, how much physical transition does she have to undergo? How much risk are we prepared to put her on if she's still playing on the boy's team? Remember that her physical abilities will be changing as her body changes. Are we prepared to say to her that she has to choose between her sport and her gender? If she will be allowed to compete in the women's NCAA in two years' time when she's transitioned enough, how is she supposed to compete for a scholarship? Obviously, she has advantages if she only started on hormones a few months ago - but she has disadvantages compared to the boys too. If it's an individual sport competed against the environment (golf, running, swimming, etc), then we can just let her record her times/distances and let the college recruiters sort it out to some degree. But we can't do that if she plays a team sport like basketball. Or even an individual sport like tennis. Which team is she on? Who does she compete against? When does she change?
One of the things I really hate about this is that there are lots of people whose fundamental position is: "everyone is born either male or female, this can never change, in any situation where we separate the sexes, they should always go with how they were born" - which is the basic conservative/anti-trans position - who are determined not to just say that. There are also a noisy but quite small chunk of people who think "the moment you say you are a woman, you are a woman in all respects, and anyone objecting to this in any way is an unredeemable bigot". The combination of these makes it nearly impossible for anyone who holds that trans women *can* be treated entirely as women, but that different aspects of that should be granted at different times to get into the details that can make this work.
Changing your name: whenever you like. Changing your pronouns: ask me and I will. Changing which toilet you use: when you'll create less trouble in the women's than the men's, but you go where you want to; that's a recommendation, not a rule. Changing which team you compete on in sport: when it's fair - and that one *is* a rule. The analogy I like to use is adulthood. There isn't some magical difference between 17 years and 364 days and 18 years and zero days - and a bunch of adult rights aren't granted at 18 anyway (e.g. driving can be as young as 14, drinking is 21, etc). Similarly, someone transitioning will get different things at different stages.
Also, too much of this debate, including much of my posting above, ignores trans men.
And non-binary people are, well, non-binary. They were mostly born male or female (some were born intersex). But they transition to being non-binary. Sometimes that's physical, sometimes it isn't. It's surprising how much someone can change your perceptions of them without any physical changes. I don't have all the answers: non-binary sport? I mean, if you're not physically transitioning, why not compete with your birth sex? Toilets: go where suits you or where you feel most comfortable. Maybe having some unsegregated toilets would be a good idea?
I know I don't have all the answers. But I'd like to have some sort of public space to explore the questions without getting attacked by people who are convinced that every single trans person is a terrifying sexual predator.
"I think a lot of people are reasonably annoyed at the idea that a man can say "I'm a woman now" and walk into the women's facilities everywhere."
That any man can do this is currently the law in most blue states, and would become federal law if the Equality Act is passed.
I am opposed to these laws.
There are very few places where there are actually laws prohibiting people from going into the "wrong" toilet - for really obvious reasons (like: have you noticed what happens when there are single-sex or mostly-single-sex events?).
In most cases, a man can say "I'm a man" and walk into the women's facilities.
A little discussion here FWIW:
https://nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu/is-it-illegal-for-a-man-to-use-the-ladies-room/
Obviously these are unlikely to be enforced in most cases, but if there is an allegation of misconduct, being in the opposite-sex bathroom is a bad place to start your defense since you have no right to be there in the first place. For places like changing rooms where actual nudity may occur, indecent exposure is a real possibility, as happened with the charges related to the Wii Spa in LA despite California's laws. Note that at least in California, as I understood it, the definition of indecent exposure is gender- and sex-neutral, instead based on the intent and whether a reasonable person would be upset by it. Logically that is about what kind of junk someone has, not their gender identity, but I suspect this will have to play out in court.
None of this implies that "every single trans person is a terrifying sexual predator", any more than the pre-existing exclusion of men from women's spaces implies that every single man is a terrifying sexual predator. It is a safeguard based on patterns of male sexual offending, but it is also about the right to dignity and privacy from the opposite sex. Even if some man could provide objective proof that he is not a sexual predator, I don't want him in the women's changing room with my daughters. But realistically, the desire to intrude on those spaces is itself a red flag.
Men in prison who claim (falsely) to be women get housed with women in blue states. Some of the women get raped by some of these men.
https://womensliberationfront.org/womens-prisons
https://womensliberationfront.org/chandler-v-cdcr
Those links gave me ZERO examples of an incarcerated woman being raped by "[m]en in prison who claim (falsely) to be women".
I even watched Tomiekia Johnson's story in the video embedded in both pages, and was astounded. Assuming the video's accurate, she (a former CHP officer) was sentenced to 50(!) years in prison after shooting her abusive husband in a struggle over a gun, and the prison guards housed her with a trans woman (I think? Everyone in the video insists on identifying them as "he" or "him" or "male") who had an abuse history "towards females" "to see how long she [Tomiekia] would last" — and I was on the edge of my seat, waiting to learn what the trans inmate allegedly did to Tomiekia, and...NOTHING.
Even the flagship testimonial doesn't allege that a trans woman did anything to the cis(?) woman with whom she was put away. It made me wonder: if the best the "Women's Liberation Front" can come up with is a NON-example of a female trans inmate attacking a female cis inmate, why are they fixating on that scenario instead of campaigning against, say, judges who lock people up for 50 years for winning a struggle over a gun with their abuser, or guards who think it's wicked funny to try setting inmates against each other?
https://news.wttw.com/2020/02/19/lawsuit-female-prisoner-says-she-was-raped-transgender-inmate
https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets-7-years-for-raping-female-prisoner/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/11/transgender-prisoner-who-sexually-assaulted-inmates-jailed-for-life
https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2021/03/03/transgender-female-prisoner-forced-bunk-rapist-and-got-raped/6894034002/
https://www.yahoo.com/video/transgender-inmate-convicted-raping-female-225931569.html
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-sex-attacks-in-womens-jails-by-transgender-convicts-cx9m8zqpg
Another solid base hit - so, thanks! But you may have missed a spot. It might be comically productive to speculate on the potential outcome if more people actually accepted the enlightened new thinking about childhood sexuality and decided to ride that little pony into the future. Since it’s reasonable to assume heteronormative preferences would actually outnumber the brave choices of trailblazing transactivists, we could celebrate the advent of penile enlargement for Pop Warner football players and breast enhancement for Brownies. Sounds great doesn’t it?
Of course it would certainly provide excellent investment opportunities for socially conscious shareholders focussed on healthcare, something that we can expect to extend the arc of history further toward it’s inevitable happy ending.