The new World Professional Association for Transgender Health standards of care include this helpful appendix, listing a wide range of “gender-affirming” surgical procedures: The thing about transition is that you can never change your sex—only approximate the appearance of the opposite sex—and that means there’s no end to the procedures you can pursue. You’ll never become, but you can keep trying!
The emotionality and medicalization of the "gender debate" has obscured its consumerism. At the end of the day, children, teens, and adults seeking out gender surgeries are seen as "markets" and the messaging used with each one is just marketing. "Increasing acceptance" and "decreasing stigma" aren't just humanitarian goals, they're also marketing strategies. Legislation, also framed as a humanitarian effort, also affects consumerism. Playing off of people's emotions is also a marketing strategy and yet, our inculcation into the consumer mindset is so thorough that anyone advocating against consumption is labeled as trying to take away your "freedom" (to consume), biased or hateful (against consumption), or a conspiracy theorist. I find the conspiracy theorist label kind of funny because pharmaceuticals and surgery are multi billion dollar industries that absolutely require strategy, conferences, and a lack of transparency about what they're doing and why they're doing it. I don't know that anyone has to MAKE UP conspiracies so much as point out that these industries are CONSTANTLY strategizing about how to get your money.
This "affirming video", if applied to Eliza's very apropos example of an anorexic, would be akin to Hostess, McD, or other big food entities...creating an online spot, touting the glory and power of purging. It is a show of your strength and your truth. It's your inner skinny beautiful person rejecting the food that is keeping you imprisoned, in your oppressive body. And then they would sell designer regurgitation wands and vomit troughs.
We truly have to ask, besides the monetary Trojan horse this movement represents, what is the deeper goal...the 30,000' perspective? Ask why, this is being targeted at children. How the societal norm shift, on this baser level, affects EVERY other part of society. These groomed kids, will be exposed to the glamor of trans, through these types of commercial campaigns and take up the cause, during their journey to adult hood. Of course, the trans cause is tucked under the leftist umbrella, that covers ALL other societal destroying agendas. So if you're for one, you're for all of them. They are ideologically homogenous.
Add to the equation, institutional activism...medical, educational, governmental, corporations, parents...and this looks very much like a long term subversion campaign...that has reached it's momentum nexus and been given the signal to go open/mainstream.
Another really good article. The whole things makes me sick: Too many medical doctors have forgotten their commitment to "do no harm". To mutilate children to make a good living is truly monstrous. But the trans people are also at fault (although less so in the case of children).
I especially like these lines: "We call it by all kinds of false names, speaking of 'true selves' that can only be unlocked by cosmetic surgery. But it’s the same impossible pursuit." There are a lot of good lines in your article, but you zero in on the central irony -- that people are seeking to transform perfectly healthy bodies to release a true inner self when there is nothing that is holding them back from being themselves. What ever happened to accepting yourself as you are? Now, I could understand that a person with deformities might feel that way, since no one wants to look ugly. But I have seen pictures of men far more attractive than I was in my youth who want to become a woman, meaning that they are giving up looks that I would have loved to have in order to become an odd-looking woman (and yes, most of them look odd).
One thing that really angers me are the parents who don't love their children enough to say, "This isn't a good idea." It's bad enough that there are doctors who want to mutilate their perfectly normal children (to make money), without the parents signing on to the atrocity.
Let me talk about Douglas/Diana Goetsch, a poet that I have been critical of for a very long time. He was a middle-aged man, good-looking. He was straight. Yet, he felt inhibited and wasn't able to express his inner self as a man, so he "transitioned" -- getting all the operations, including facial feminization. So here he is, today, a heterosexual man with a fake vagina, a vagina which isn't even useful as a receptacle for semen because Goetsch is still attracted to women. But just as I would know the difference between a fake penis and a real penis (being a gay man), I wonder how much success he is having with lesbians now.
All the information that I have given here about Goetsch is public knowledge, since he published a detailed diary during his transition. Goetsch, in telling his story publicly, has contributed to the false impression that people have that transitioning is fairly simple and is a cure for personal problems. I just refuse to believe that Goetsch couldn't have learned to accept himself as he was.
South Park had a great episode where one of the new kids at the school turned out to be an advertisement. Is the transgender movement a massive advertisement for pharmaceutical and surgical corporations?
I think you touch on an important element underpinning this ideology. The idea of the 'true self' seems to be an attempt to give a sense of legitimacy to modifications that are unavoidably artificial and imitative in design. It's a consumer capitalist brand of authenticity that inevitably brings the patient-customer's identity into increasing conflict with the material authenticity of those they are comparing themselves against.
That is so disgusting! Performing all those surgeries, on patients as young as possible, because "they will get better results" (translation: 'we will get more satisfied clients with fewer efforts'). Capitalism has been a dead end for a couple of decades at least. What do we do next? We have to stop Dr. Frankenstein's like Ms. 'Yeet the Teets' and horrible parents like the Queen of Thailand, Susie Green.
Thanks for these details--Jon Stewart and his ilk on our willful mainstream media don't want to know. Combined with the lack of standards and methods in the studies cited as "expert" validation of this cosmetic surgery boom, we have widespread medical malpractice in plain sight. The over-sexualization of childhood and the demonization of anyone supporting the family are part and parcel of this movement. Below, links to 6 critiques of the sloppy "research" commonly used to justify this butchery.
This is a great essay, thank you. Your opening point is the crux of the whole matter. That's why so many individuals act like caricatures of what they want to become… You can never know what it's like to be something else or actually become someone else...you can only pretend as best you can: I tried to make this point in a lighthearted way:
The emotionality and medicalization of the "gender debate" has obscured its consumerism. At the end of the day, children, teens, and adults seeking out gender surgeries are seen as "markets" and the messaging used with each one is just marketing. "Increasing acceptance" and "decreasing stigma" aren't just humanitarian goals, they're also marketing strategies. Legislation, also framed as a humanitarian effort, also affects consumerism. Playing off of people's emotions is also a marketing strategy and yet, our inculcation into the consumer mindset is so thorough that anyone advocating against consumption is labeled as trying to take away your "freedom" (to consume), biased or hateful (against consumption), or a conspiracy theorist. I find the conspiracy theorist label kind of funny because pharmaceuticals and surgery are multi billion dollar industries that absolutely require strategy, conferences, and a lack of transparency about what they're doing and why they're doing it. I don't know that anyone has to MAKE UP conspiracies so much as point out that these industries are CONSTANTLY strategizing about how to get your money.
Great Piece Eliza...and well stated IW!
To your point about the consumerism, I submit the ludicrous video below, from Ulta, pushing and celebrating this mental illness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=h1Z_xPQctgE&feature=emb_title
This "affirming video", if applied to Eliza's very apropos example of an anorexic, would be akin to Hostess, McD, or other big food entities...creating an online spot, touting the glory and power of purging. It is a show of your strength and your truth. It's your inner skinny beautiful person rejecting the food that is keeping you imprisoned, in your oppressive body. And then they would sell designer regurgitation wands and vomit troughs.
We truly have to ask, besides the monetary Trojan horse this movement represents, what is the deeper goal...the 30,000' perspective? Ask why, this is being targeted at children. How the societal norm shift, on this baser level, affects EVERY other part of society. These groomed kids, will be exposed to the glamor of trans, through these types of commercial campaigns and take up the cause, during their journey to adult hood. Of course, the trans cause is tucked under the leftist umbrella, that covers ALL other societal destroying agendas. So if you're for one, you're for all of them. They are ideologically homogenous.
Add to the equation, institutional activism...medical, educational, governmental, corporations, parents...and this looks very much like a long term subversion campaign...that has reached it's momentum nexus and been given the signal to go open/mainstream.
Another really good article. The whole things makes me sick: Too many medical doctors have forgotten their commitment to "do no harm". To mutilate children to make a good living is truly monstrous. But the trans people are also at fault (although less so in the case of children).
I especially like these lines: "We call it by all kinds of false names, speaking of 'true selves' that can only be unlocked by cosmetic surgery. But it’s the same impossible pursuit." There are a lot of good lines in your article, but you zero in on the central irony -- that people are seeking to transform perfectly healthy bodies to release a true inner self when there is nothing that is holding them back from being themselves. What ever happened to accepting yourself as you are? Now, I could understand that a person with deformities might feel that way, since no one wants to look ugly. But I have seen pictures of men far more attractive than I was in my youth who want to become a woman, meaning that they are giving up looks that I would have loved to have in order to become an odd-looking woman (and yes, most of them look odd).
One thing that really angers me are the parents who don't love their children enough to say, "This isn't a good idea." It's bad enough that there are doctors who want to mutilate their perfectly normal children (to make money), without the parents signing on to the atrocity.
Let me talk about Douglas/Diana Goetsch, a poet that I have been critical of for a very long time. He was a middle-aged man, good-looking. He was straight. Yet, he felt inhibited and wasn't able to express his inner self as a man, so he "transitioned" -- getting all the operations, including facial feminization. So here he is, today, a heterosexual man with a fake vagina, a vagina which isn't even useful as a receptacle for semen because Goetsch is still attracted to women. But just as I would know the difference between a fake penis and a real penis (being a gay man), I wonder how much success he is having with lesbians now.
All the information that I have given here about Goetsch is public knowledge, since he published a detailed diary during his transition. Goetsch, in telling his story publicly, has contributed to the false impression that people have that transitioning is fairly simple and is a cure for personal problems. I just refuse to believe that Goetsch couldn't have learned to accept himself as he was.
South Park had a great episode where one of the new kids at the school turned out to be an advertisement. Is the transgender movement a massive advertisement for pharmaceutical and surgical corporations?
100% NAILED IT.
I think you touch on an important element underpinning this ideology. The idea of the 'true self' seems to be an attempt to give a sense of legitimacy to modifications that are unavoidably artificial and imitative in design. It's a consumer capitalist brand of authenticity that inevitably brings the patient-customer's identity into increasing conflict with the material authenticity of those they are comparing themselves against.
That is so disgusting! Performing all those surgeries, on patients as young as possible, because "they will get better results" (translation: 'we will get more satisfied clients with fewer efforts'). Capitalism has been a dead end for a couple of decades at least. What do we do next? We have to stop Dr. Frankenstein's like Ms. 'Yeet the Teets' and horrible parents like the Queen of Thailand, Susie Green.
Thanks for these details--Jon Stewart and his ilk on our willful mainstream media don't want to know. Combined with the lack of standards and methods in the studies cited as "expert" validation of this cosmetic surgery boom, we have widespread medical malpractice in plain sight. The over-sexualization of childhood and the demonization of anyone supporting the family are part and parcel of this movement. Below, links to 6 critiques of the sloppy "research" commonly used to justify this butchery.
https://wordpress.com/post/uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com/4879
Brilliant as usual
This is a great essay, thank you. Your opening point is the crux of the whole matter. That's why so many individuals act like caricatures of what they want to become… You can never know what it's like to be something else or actually become someone else...you can only pretend as best you can: I tried to make this point in a lighthearted way:
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/whats-a-woman-whats-a-man-whats-an
I appreciate you making the point directly… Thank you again for great essay, Frederick