So fascinating how a clear delusional disorder can become normalized by those afraid to state the obvious. The power of the fringe to mold supposed intelligent minds to see up as down, wrong is right is indeed through the looking glass in this day and age!
People became accustomed to viewing homosexuality as a normal variant of human sexuality, which it apparently is. The trans activists successfully leveraged this social acceptance of gayness into a more general acceptance of the idea that it is legitimate for people to claim protected minority status based on "an inner sense of who they are." Most well-intentioned liberals fell for this, having already been conditioned to support anyone who claims to be a member of an oppressed minority.
On this topic, Sandra, I agree with you 100%. I've been writing about this for a while, in fact. Being gay is, essentially, a feeling or orientation. Being trans is also a feeling or orientation -- the difference, however, is that medicalization is so harmful to the body. Also, reality has something to say about it, since transitioning is not actually possible. If a trans person can simply allow themselves to have those feelings without acting on them (beyond, say, cross-dressing), then there is no harm done. But that isn't enough for them.
I have had experiences with trans people over the years that made me realize just how intense their feelings are. I once fooled around with another man who was extremely attractive, but all he wanted to do was to make high-pitched sounds in a woman's voice, as if he were trying to embody his female feelings in his voice. Because he was so attractive, I gave him my number. A day or two later he called me and expressed his gratitude that I "understood". I had to tell him that, no, I didn't understand. I was allowing him to do what he wanted to do (vocalizing like a woman) to be polite, but I didn't understand it at all. He then became very angry and aggressive on the phone, asserting that his feelings were perfectly normal, etc.
As a young man, I met Wendy Carlos, previously known as Water Carlos (who released an album of music made with a Moog Synthesizer). He was trans, intensely so. During the time that he was transitioning, he would sometimes go out as a woman, and at other times slap on fake sideburns and go out as a man, depending on what he was doing. But it was very clear that he felt like a woman more than a man. At the time that I met him, they didn't have the technology to "feminize" a man's face, and he looked every bit like a man with a wig on. Despite the fact that he was famous, I felt sorry for him.
Regarding whether homosexuality is normal, I have concluded as a gay man that the answer doesn't matter. We exist in such great numbers that society must deal with us. Personally, I think that having had a cold, unloving father and an aggressive mother had something to do with it in my case.
Gayness is by definition the experience of sexual arousal and romantic feelings/intentions/preoccupations in response to some members of one's own sex. Heterosexual people have exactly the same experiences in response to some members of the opposite sex. Sexual arousal and "falling in love" are psychophysiological processes based on chemistry, and outward manifestations of these involuntary chemical processes are objectively measurable. (Literally so in the case of men especially).
A lot of younger people nowadays are claiming to be gay or "queer" based on some vague inner feeling, even though many of them have never had a gay experience let alone a gay relationship. In contrast, most gay and bisexual people learn about their sexual preferences by observing their sexual and romantic responses, and by trying out sex and relationships with real people. Many people who are uncertain about their preferences for one or the other sex make decisions about this after these exploratory experiences, based on what they observe about their physical and emotional responsiveness.
The so-called "trans" people do not report any objective or bodily based experiences that are similar to the sexual and romantic feelings that gay and heterosexual people report. The "trans" fantasies are not based in physical reality, whereas gayness is, in every respect. Generalizing one's experience of being gay to a so-called "trans" experience of a disembodied "cross sex" identity is not a valid way to understand what "trans" people are talking about. It's apples and oranges, and the oranges are fake.
Being gay is wired into the brain, and testable. Gay men and bisexual men respond to male faces, male equivalents of pheromones fire up the hypothalamus ‘mating center’, and in lesbians and bisexual women they respond to faces and a similar hormone affecting their hypothalamus. A mechanism for gestating males has been found “later sons are gay” effect, with the mother’s antibody’s interfering with the male fetal hormonal environment. Many sources and measurable outcomes. The gay male is attracted to males from an early age and cannot be altered.
Certain trans people dislike their body and sex from an early age, as some people dislike their arms or legs, or having sight or hearing - body dysmorphias, or body identity integrity disorder. They feel like that part of their body doesn’t belong to them, and must be removed. It’s a case of negatives, not wanting their body and not being whole. There is no testable focus for this, and entirely due to their brain’s misperception of their body as not being “them”.
Another issue is the male (rarely female) who becomes sexually aroused as appearing other than male human adults. The appear as a sexualized child, as a woman, as a sex furry, as a sex slave, as a sex servant, as whatever they have connected to.
When it crosses over from wish to “I am” it’s a sexual delusion. Gays and bisexuals aren’t deluded, their body and brain react irresistibly to same-sex attractions. Certain trans have cognitive systems irrevocably identify their body parts as foreign and to be removed. They aren’t necessarily women, but they aren’t men.
Certain other people seem to evolve a fetish which excites them sexually into a delusion that they are the fetish, similar to someone deluded into believing they are Churchill, or Jesus, or a child or a space alien or a woman or a robot, or a police officer or a dog. Delusional people can get violent when the delusion is not confirmed. If the fetish delusion involves sex, it then becomes especially problematic or violent when their sexual partner won’t comply.
Those are the three major divisions from ordinary heterosexual attractions, and ordinary body perceptions I’ve observed in this over 50 years.
A special case is teen years and years approaching olde or elderly status. The body of a teen changes rapidly and thinking systems can suddenly be triggered into anxiety because perception doesn’t match what the child has grown up with. Sex hormones surge, the boys reshapes. Your body changes and you’ve not yet adapted.
Likewise as humans approach old-age, appearance changes, sometimes drastically, as well as function. Skin becomes aged, hair falls out or changes color, sex hormones drop, muscles alter, fat deposits shift.
I find it relevant that at the two stages where the body changes most visually are ones where where trans has been able to establish this anxiety as “trans”, with late middle-aged men suddenly announcing the female fetish, and teenage women not wanting to complete puberty.
You and Sandra must be scientists because you are arguing above my pay grade. I see the world through emotions and karma. I see reincarnational dramas being played out in human society. Although I believe in science, I prefer to argue metaphysics because they go to the heart of what our reality is all about (in my opinion). Classifying the various characteristics of humanity in just the right way isn't important to me. We all have a right to exist (and to our own opinions, something that trans activists don't seem to understand).
Hmm - I take issue with homosexuality being characterised as a "feeling or orientation" unless you extend the same to heterosexuality. As you note in your last paragraph, there are so many homosexuals, found in every society, that there has to be an evolutionary basis for it. I very much doubt that there is a way to be socialised, or react in such a way to trauma, that one would be attracted to a sex other than that inherent in the person. It might, though, explain some bisexuality.
I definitely disagree with trans being characterised the same as sexual orientation - largely on the basis that I do not see any intrinsic basis to it - unless you are going to extend the same to any other delusory process or personality disorder.
I admit that I see heterosexuality as being somehow natural, and homosexuality as somehow unnatural -- not good, given that I am gay.
I think that we anti-trans activists are too willing to see trans people as being delusional and sick. I keep reminding myself that I am against transgender ideology -- that set of very bad ideas -- and not against trans people themselves, though I admit that transgenderism strikes me as weird.
Thanks for your reply - and honesty, Perry. I don't know what it says about us that I'm hetero and regard homosexuality as being as normal as heterosexuality - different only in its lower frequency (which is, of course, one way of describing abnormal!)
I don't count myself as "anti-trans" - at least not in the way trans ideologues mean it. I am very much against the fundamental lack of Enlightenment values of objectivity involved in the whole thing, and the active recruitment of children and young people. The insidious erosion of women speaks to a very dark strand of human behaviour, both in terms of men pretending to be women/girls , and women/girls pretending they aren't, with the continuous attack on lesbianism throwing it all into sharp relief. "Transing away the gay" is repulsive, and since so much of that seems to come from parents who don't want a gay son, I'm really starting to think we (as a society) should not have made it unacceptable to speak about homophobia - the upwelling I have seen recently shows that it never went away, people were just masking it. I do have a great deal of sympathy for the people caught up in this at a young
age - they are very octen victims far more than perpetrators. Not so the older ones, who not only knew what they were doing but flaunt their paraphilia anywhere and everywhere, to the detriment of transsexuals who just want to live a quiet life. However, that isn't to say that I don't think each and every one of the members of those groups has underlying mental health or other psychological problems that should have been dealt with better and differently by healthcare providers. The role of the healthcare profession - medical, surgical and psychiatric - will heed thorough scrutiny one we get to a point where the adults are once again in charge.
Sorry for the log reply - one thing led to another!
This guy is heterosexual, as are most AGPs who use cross dressing as a sexual stimulant. Those who dress up as kids insinuate a pedophilic dimension and should not be encouraged.
Great piece. Like so much in gender ideology, "baby trans" idea may also have been borrowed from earlier lesbian culture (maybe male gay culture too, I don't know). I don't know if it's still used these days, but I recall the phrase "baby dyke" used in lesbian spaces in the past. But from what I observed in people I knew, young newly-out lesbians in their 20s or late teens affectionately referenced to in this way (and who sometimes referred to themselves this way) were not inducted into a cult and were certainly not infantilized. They were just seen as young and unused to being out as lesbians in a mostly-straight world, who probably had things to learn as they sometimes awkwardly entered lesbian spaces and learned new cultural customs and rules. They were not treated as children and did not act like children.
Actually, I also heard a term "baby Christian", used for new (adult) converts. So, it's probably a pretty generic way to refer to new members of a cult or close-knit group.
It's a dreadful - seemingly quite new - terminology. Medical and law students in training are often referred to as "baby doctors/lawyers". Really disrespectful.
In the rest of the article: “Happiness can be found only through submission to the mystery of gender, which one is unfit to judge.” I think this is also how the capture of “allies” occurs - their suspension of disbelief is fortified by submission to this “mystery”. It really is religious, eh?
This article gives an excellent analysis of why many trans identified activists and healthcare providers desperately cling to the idea that children can and should be sent through a medicalized transition instead of normal puberty. Prior to medically transitioning as adults, these people longed to be the other sex. After transitioning, however, they still long for something they cannot have, which is to have transitioned before puberty. The core problem is the resistance against accepting limitations imposed by biology---what they are trying to do is impossible at any age.
I came to this issue indirectly - from 35+ years of the study of government propaganda operations related to illegal wars and foreign policy operations. What strikes me as profoundly important in all this is that we are quite clearly being "gaslighted" by the big boys - by Western oligarchy. I dare say you know you are being "gaslighted" when All of Academia, All of MSM, All the big NGO's, All of the Fortune 500 corporations, All Western governments, most if not All of the various professional organizations and licensing bodies in medicine and helping professions, our civil services, and smaller entities like our school boards and even my local YMCA - are ALL SINGING THE SAME SONG - and that song is irrational, illogical, anti-science, has no standing in material reality, and essentially amounts to a quasi-relious scarification cult that valorizes child sacrifice. That is gaslighting of the highest order no doubt.
The same Western oligarchy that can openly state that willfully bringing about the deaths of a half-a-million Iraqi children was - quote - "worth it" - certainly isn't promoting this agenda because of its concern for the "feelings" of a hodgepodge of autogynephillic males and the increasing numbers of young people struggling with navigating their adolescence in an increasingly mad world.
Yup, there's definitely a lot of gaslighting going on, and a lot of money behind it. What I struggle with is the grey areas where it's hard to tell if someone is a gaslighter or being gaslighted, and a lot of people are both. I'm increasingly convinced it's a cult, and there are going to be knowing cult leaders pouring money into it for nefarious purposes. The problem with lies is they get believed, creating more unwitting liars. Even listening to someone like Judith Butler in interview, I kind of know she must know she's avoiding straight answers (hehe) - so I think she knows she's lying at some level - but she's probably got so used to queer bullshit and lying to herself that maybe it's almost not lying at the same time. It's insanity. And then there are the children and adults who haven't practised critical thinking yet, and just absorb and repeat lies innocently, the entirely gaslighted. Goodness, the names they call you if you try to educate them!
Well said. Jennifer Bilek has done some excellent work in tracking the massive money flows from some mega billionaires who are both trans & trans-humanist in orientation - and who are promoting both movements with their generous "donations" to a variety of organizations and NGOs. Jennifer suspects this is - at the macro level - about creating acceptance for the coming trans-humanist movement - and I believe she makes an excellent case for her perspective.
PS I pretty much assume that Rothblatt is on the autistic spectrum, with high-functioning Asperger's (though this useful name has been discarded from official descriptions of ASD).
Martin(e) Rothblatt's book "From Transgender to Transhuman" makes the aspirations of the international body dissociation industry pretty clear. And quite impressive that Rothblatt retrained as a lawyer to lay out the future shape of the international trans takeover, accomplished mainly at the UN Yogyakarta conference attended entirely by male lawyers -- who somehow managed to forget the existence of women. Rothblatt gets a lot of his inspiration from Ray Kurzweil as an AI genius and dedicated inventor / futurist. But Rothblatt seems peculiarly unable to distinguish between consciousness, and the contents of consciousness: believing that the former (rather than the latter, as memories & habits of thought) can be downloaded to his revived cryogenically frozen body at some point after his death. He's already had a creepy robotic head of his wife made and programmed with her thought patterns and speech habits. But this is hardly "consciousness". I feel his mental conflation of two such different things says something about the capacity to believe that a man "feeling like" a woman thereby IS a woman... Some crucial link missing between mind and body: such that even someone extremely bright and successful at making money can live in la-la land.
Yes, they get incredibly nasty. Most of the time the aggression is completely initiated by them, just because someone stated an idea that is not one of the woke talking points or slogans. Judith Butler is an academic who undoubtedly takes her own philosophy very seriously. There are ways in which she is also unlike the average philosophy professor who wants to teach, to generate ideas and to be understood. People who make up compound jargon words and compound jargon sentences don't want to be understood, in my opinion. In some cases they are trying to cover up an underlying lack of depth or novelty in their thinking. It is bizarre that such odd people are now among the chosen intellectual and cultural leaders of so many previously normal people, or so they appeared.
I have started reading Debbie Hayton's book "Transgender Apostate". The first chapter is a retrospective on her childhood in which she (as a boy) was nearly obsessed with girl's clothing and the idea of being a girl. For some reason, as a boy she was focussed on one item of clothing in particular -- tights -- an item which, true enough, boys and men rarely wear. She believes that she was developing autogynephilia at an early age, but it seems to me that she was too young to be developing what I consider to be a sexual fetish. I would never say this to her, but I don't think she really knows why she had gender dysphoria as a child. However, her book is good evidence that for many children it is a real thing. Among other things, she can't trace her obsession with being a girl to any particular event. As an anti-trans activist who sometimes feels contempt for trans people because of their bad behavior (shaming people who don't agree with them; influencing children to increase their numbers; trying to tell people how to talk; pushing their way into women's spaces; etc.), Hayton's book is a reminder that gender dysphoria is a real thing for a lot of people, and even for children, and that is helping me keep my contempt under control. It reminds me that I am fighting transgender ideology, and not transgender people themselves.
Hayton herself is against transgender ideology. She freely admits that she is a man who feels like a woman, and not an actual woman. She demonstrates for us how mature and well-behaved trans people should be acting, instead of the paranoid and childish people on social media that Eliza describes, or the aggressive demonstrators who try to shut down every lecture or conference on the issue, or who falsely claim that society is trying to erase them.
Gender dysphoria is very much a real thing, and we do not understand why people are becoming more obsessed with wanting to be the other sex. Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder and should be kept as a diagnosis in the DSM and ICD. There is also currently a horde of young women who do not have gender dysphoria but are presenting themselves as having it. The ones who end up in gender clinics mostly do appear to have other psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
None of this, however, implies that there are "real transgender people" in the sense that "transgender is a normal human variant," which is what "trans activists," WHO, and other organizations are claiming.
Yes, I know all of this. I have written similar things on my own Substack blog.
However, the question you raise as to whether being trans is a normal human variant is an interesting one. As a gay person who feels normal in every way, I would say that being trans is indeed another type of normal. I suspect that throughout history there have probably been ½% to 1% of the population that wished they were the opposite sex. That may not be the 8% of the population that is gay (my estimate), but it still means that over tens of thousands of years, trans people have probably numbered in the millions.
My point of view is a spiritual one. I believe in reincarnation. A person who is gay or trans in a lifetime has something spiritual or karmic to learn from the experience. I believe that everything happens for a reason. Of course, I imagine that you don't share my beliefs. My point is that these odd variations in humanity probably have a reason or purpose.
As to the current trans fad, I think that's exactly what it is -- a fad. But because of modern medicalization, it is a very dangerous fad. It's not like being gay -- all you have to do to discover you aren't gay is to have sex with your own gender. I think what's happening for so-called trans kids is that they have received the message that this is ONE AREA of their lives in which their parents can't control them, which makes it very seductive to them. Kids may decide they are trans in order to rebel against their parents, or because they have personal problems they don't understand and they think transitioning (which isn't really possible, of course) will cure those problems, or -- especially in the case of girls -- because they don't like the changes to their bodies that occur in puberty. I also think that the social stigma to being gay is still so great that people would rather transition and pretend they are heterosexual than be gay. That South Park cartoon taught me a lot about today's kids: Today's kids use the word "gay" constantly, and always to mean "stupid".
As a woman I am offended you describe Hayton as a woman. HE is a man and does not share the reality if being either a girl or adult human female, regardless of his claims or feelings.
Firstly, Hayton does not claim to be a real woman. In fact, she is very clear that she is a man who feels like a woman (or at least wants to BE a woman), and nothing more. Hayton is the only trans woman I know who is lacking any intellectual pretense, and I respect her for that.
Secondly, I don't care how offended you are. You can be offended 24 hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year (or in this case sixty-six), and I won't care the slightest bit. I have had this argument before. Out of politeness, and out of respect for Hayton herself, I refer to her as "she/her". Get over it.
Nor do I “care” about your hoity toity rebuttal, rudeness and disrespect toward an actual woman. Its pleasing to have irritated you to the extent you felt the need to trot out a defensive. Be assured I know what David Haytons claims are and that doesn’t t mean he isn’t a also a liar, a delusionary ideologue or a fantasist. Most likely all three in my opinion.
I will not be “getting over it” any time ever. I will keep on challenging mens rights activists like you along with every other woman dismissing snark I come across.
Pearl, I will, out of respect for you, refer to Hayton with male pronouns in this reply, but I also usually refer to him with female ones (I comment on his blog and had email contact a few times). It was a struggle to figure out how to respond to him at first, and I've been fairly challenging. As far as I can tell, some people suffer very badly from gender identity disorder, for decades. I cannot manage to persuade myself that all of them are liars (and I think they are clearly suffering some kind of mental disorder). Some of this suffering is extreme, and some people have tried everything, including psychotherapy, and eventually reach the end of their tether, risking suicide if they don't accept their need to "transition". They therefore, as adults, seek hormonal and surgical fixes for (or just amelioration of) their condition, and they often just want to live as the opposite sex without fanfare or special treatment, and navigate the difficulties of sexed spaces and rights with as little impact on others as possible. Hayton is one such. The usual designation is "transsexual". (I don't mean to sound lecturing, and I imagine you know all this). So I have empathy for them.
Hayton is particularly impressive, in not only having dealt with all that, but also recognising the damage the modern trans ideology is doing, and he is working like mad to understand the situation, analyse it, and criticise the gender ideology, trying to head kids off at the pass and - I imagine - campaigning behind the scenes in various ways, as well as continuing what must be a precarious and challenging position as a teacher in a school.
At first, I couldn't understand - if he has this insight into how unreal "trans" is, why doesn't he cut his hair, wear a suit and take on male pronouns? Even if surgery is a step too far, can't he do that, have a social transition in reverse? I tentatively asked about it, and his answers made me realise I have absolutely no idea how painful that would be for him (nor any damn right to suggest it, to be honest).
Anyway, I didn't intend to write all that. I intended to ask what you'd do if you were invited to a discussion of the trans phenomenon, where you found one or more female transsexuals looking for all the world like men - butch looking with facial hair, adams apple and a deep voice - who were also working to undermine the trans fad, Dave and Pete, say. They, too, might have come to a similar position: big mistakes, or big suffering, even more painful and ridiculous to try to reverse it. Would you try to find their original "girl" name and call them by it, refer to them in the third person as "she"? Would you say you don't care about their "claims or feelings" and call them liars, delusionary ideologues and fantasists?
(To Pearl Red Moon) You are an extremist. Judging from your picture, you are quite old, and that's a shame. Old age should bring moderation and wisdom, not extremism.
I'm proud of who and what I am. I have qualities that are in short supply among humans: Insight, compassion, balance, and a high level of integrity. I am liberal on most issues but have never lost touch with reality. I've been like this all my life. People who scold me for doing nothing wrong -- which is what you are doing -- don't get very far with me.
A "men's rights advocate"! -- just because I show a little respect to a trans woman by calling him "she"? How absurd. If all trans people had Hayton's attitudes and ideas, they would not be an issue in society. She believes children are being exploited by trans activists; she believes trans women should stay out of women's sports; she eschews the special trans vocabulary and pronouns; and she doesn't believe in the nonsense that feeling like a woman makes a man an actual woman. She knows what reality is. Furthermore, she herself is an outcast among trans people, and she is criticized and shamed by them relentless.
One thing I've figured out about trans women is that they eventually realize that they are not women at all, and so they become satisfied to be just "trans" -- i.e., men who feel like women. Having given up on the hope of being real women, they often develop contempt for real women, and it's this contempt that allows them to enter into women's sports and other single-sex spaces, to take social space (positions, achievements) away from real women, and to denigrate women who don't agree with them as "terfs". Hayton doesn't do those things. She seems to really care for women.
But again, I call Debbie Hayton "she" out of respect, not because I think she is in any way a real woman. Hayton, by the way, has admitted her mistakes, most specifically by creating pain and conflict in her family when she transitioned. However, she is still married to her wife, who seems to have accepted the situation.
Why do you even ask such a question, the answer to which you already know?
Hayton had gender dysphoria from a young age, and would be a woman if he could be. Now if he were a jerk and behaved like all the other selfish trans activists, I would probably call him "he", but he is not a jerk. He is a principled person who believes in science and reality and has a genuine concern for women and children -- so, out of respect, I call him "she" because that's what he wants to be.
There, you got me to refer to Hayton as a male -- are you happy?
The childhood memories of wanting to wear girl's clothing? If you are questioning Hayton's memory, then you are questioning her integrity. Remember: Hate the bad ideology, don't hate the trans person. Hayton doesn't support the ideology.
Hayton is a liar and a narcissist. HE is a teacher who forces (not physically but by the virtue of his position of power) his students to lie and refer to him a MS and she. Nothing well-behaved about it.
Woops! You are going to have to give me some evidence of THAT! Do you know one of Hayton's students? Hayton has said publicly that she doesn't care whether people call her a man or woman, or refer to her as she or he.
Trans are desperate to shed the (accurate) image of the ugly, hulking crossdresser trying to lure children to topless pool parties. The best way to do this was to paste the innocent faces of children across the front of the movement, and convince everyone that these fragile young kids will most certainly kill themselves if we don't rush them into medical treatment immediately. Drag story hour lets the despicable ogres pose with their grooming targets as if to say "See? I'm smol, too!".
It's quite challenging reading that Daily Mail piece you linked to. There's no ultimate reason to deny an adult (50-something man with seven kids) deciding he's an eight-year-old girl and moving in with "adoptive parents" who are apparently happy to have him live with them and play with their kids and grandkids, then switching to being six to be the youngest to please one of the new siblings who was seven. Is the golden rule being broken? Not as far as we know. Is mental illness real, or an oppressive social construct? If someone says they're happy doing something that seems insane to us, on what grounds are we to judge them insane? What if someone admits they're insane, but doesn't mind? Do people have the right to their insanity?
Well, yes. The lack of a "right" implies that society has the right to force you not to do something. And in these cases it's hard to see how society could even force someone not to be depressed or schizophrenic if we wanted to (although we've a long history of trying).
I think I might construct an argument for reprisals against the man I was referring to on the grounds that his pretence/fantasy about being a little girl is damaging to wider society, encouraging confusion in others (minors and vulnerable adults) towards similar practices that would damage their future potential, that kind of thing. This is a big part of the whole trans ideology problem, the social contagion. There's also the danger that any adult mingling with children unsupervised poses - he may innocently be playing, but he could also be sexually predatory, so accepting this in a society poses a wider threat in that regard too.
No problem at all, it was easy to take the wrong way and slightly devil's advocate. I'd been reading the comments at the Daily Mail and part of me wanted to agree with all the lambasting and disgust - and I certainly felt queasy seeing the photos. I'm not sure where the line is, but I think he's well over it. I think I'm most annoyed that a couple with children elected to look after him and apparently nobody is challenging him. I'm also concerned that "mommy and daddy" might find it convenient to forget that he's (pretending to be) a child and therefore needs overseeing.
Paranoid schizophrenics tend to be a danger to others; clinically depressed people are often a danger to themselves. A compassionate society will try to protect whoever is at risk of harm: so in the former case it might require restraint (chemical and / or physical). Depressed people can be harder to help.
At present those at risk from predatory sex offenders in any guise, infantile or animalistic, requires first and foremost the restoration of single sex spaces for women and children.
The hallmark of being "insane" is generally to be unaware of this fact. That's what makes insanity so difficult to deal with: insane people cannot usually be reasoned with. Their insanity precludes their ability to be rational or objective.
So fascinating how a clear delusional disorder can become normalized by those afraid to state the obvious. The power of the fringe to mold supposed intelligent minds to see up as down, wrong is right is indeed through the looking glass in this day and age!
People became accustomed to viewing homosexuality as a normal variant of human sexuality, which it apparently is. The trans activists successfully leveraged this social acceptance of gayness into a more general acceptance of the idea that it is legitimate for people to claim protected minority status based on "an inner sense of who they are." Most well-intentioned liberals fell for this, having already been conditioned to support anyone who claims to be a member of an oppressed minority.
On this topic, Sandra, I agree with you 100%. I've been writing about this for a while, in fact. Being gay is, essentially, a feeling or orientation. Being trans is also a feeling or orientation -- the difference, however, is that medicalization is so harmful to the body. Also, reality has something to say about it, since transitioning is not actually possible. If a trans person can simply allow themselves to have those feelings without acting on them (beyond, say, cross-dressing), then there is no harm done. But that isn't enough for them.
I have had experiences with trans people over the years that made me realize just how intense their feelings are. I once fooled around with another man who was extremely attractive, but all he wanted to do was to make high-pitched sounds in a woman's voice, as if he were trying to embody his female feelings in his voice. Because he was so attractive, I gave him my number. A day or two later he called me and expressed his gratitude that I "understood". I had to tell him that, no, I didn't understand. I was allowing him to do what he wanted to do (vocalizing like a woman) to be polite, but I didn't understand it at all. He then became very angry and aggressive on the phone, asserting that his feelings were perfectly normal, etc.
As a young man, I met Wendy Carlos, previously known as Water Carlos (who released an album of music made with a Moog Synthesizer). He was trans, intensely so. During the time that he was transitioning, he would sometimes go out as a woman, and at other times slap on fake sideburns and go out as a man, depending on what he was doing. But it was very clear that he felt like a woman more than a man. At the time that I met him, they didn't have the technology to "feminize" a man's face, and he looked every bit like a man with a wig on. Despite the fact that he was famous, I felt sorry for him.
Regarding whether homosexuality is normal, I have concluded as a gay man that the answer doesn't matter. We exist in such great numbers that society must deal with us. Personally, I think that having had a cold, unloving father and an aggressive mother had something to do with it in my case.
Gayness is by definition the experience of sexual arousal and romantic feelings/intentions/preoccupations in response to some members of one's own sex. Heterosexual people have exactly the same experiences in response to some members of the opposite sex. Sexual arousal and "falling in love" are psychophysiological processes based on chemistry, and outward manifestations of these involuntary chemical processes are objectively measurable. (Literally so in the case of men especially).
A lot of younger people nowadays are claiming to be gay or "queer" based on some vague inner feeling, even though many of them have never had a gay experience let alone a gay relationship. In contrast, most gay and bisexual people learn about their sexual preferences by observing their sexual and romantic responses, and by trying out sex and relationships with real people. Many people who are uncertain about their preferences for one or the other sex make decisions about this after these exploratory experiences, based on what they observe about their physical and emotional responsiveness.
The so-called "trans" people do not report any objective or bodily based experiences that are similar to the sexual and romantic feelings that gay and heterosexual people report. The "trans" fantasies are not based in physical reality, whereas gayness is, in every respect. Generalizing one's experience of being gay to a so-called "trans" experience of a disembodied "cross sex" identity is not a valid way to understand what "trans" people are talking about. It's apples and oranges, and the oranges are fake.
Being gay is wired into the brain, and testable. Gay men and bisexual men respond to male faces, male equivalents of pheromones fire up the hypothalamus ‘mating center’, and in lesbians and bisexual women they respond to faces and a similar hormone affecting their hypothalamus. A mechanism for gestating males has been found “later sons are gay” effect, with the mother’s antibody’s interfering with the male fetal hormonal environment. Many sources and measurable outcomes. The gay male is attracted to males from an early age and cannot be altered.
Certain trans people dislike their body and sex from an early age, as some people dislike their arms or legs, or having sight or hearing - body dysmorphias, or body identity integrity disorder. They feel like that part of their body doesn’t belong to them, and must be removed. It’s a case of negatives, not wanting their body and not being whole. There is no testable focus for this, and entirely due to their brain’s misperception of their body as not being “them”.
Another issue is the male (rarely female) who becomes sexually aroused as appearing other than male human adults. The appear as a sexualized child, as a woman, as a sex furry, as a sex slave, as a sex servant, as whatever they have connected to.
When it crosses over from wish to “I am” it’s a sexual delusion. Gays and bisexuals aren’t deluded, their body and brain react irresistibly to same-sex attractions. Certain trans have cognitive systems irrevocably identify their body parts as foreign and to be removed. They aren’t necessarily women, but they aren’t men.
Certain other people seem to evolve a fetish which excites them sexually into a delusion that they are the fetish, similar to someone deluded into believing they are Churchill, or Jesus, or a child or a space alien or a woman or a robot, or a police officer or a dog. Delusional people can get violent when the delusion is not confirmed. If the fetish delusion involves sex, it then becomes especially problematic or violent when their sexual partner won’t comply.
Those are the three major divisions from ordinary heterosexual attractions, and ordinary body perceptions I’ve observed in this over 50 years.
A special case is teen years and years approaching olde or elderly status. The body of a teen changes rapidly and thinking systems can suddenly be triggered into anxiety because perception doesn’t match what the child has grown up with. Sex hormones surge, the boys reshapes. Your body changes and you’ve not yet adapted.
Likewise as humans approach old-age, appearance changes, sometimes drastically, as well as function. Skin becomes aged, hair falls out or changes color, sex hormones drop, muscles alter, fat deposits shift.
I find it relevant that at the two stages where the body changes most visually are ones where where trans has been able to establish this anxiety as “trans”, with late middle-aged men suddenly announcing the female fetish, and teenage women not wanting to complete puberty.
You and Sandra must be scientists because you are arguing above my pay grade. I see the world through emotions and karma. I see reincarnational dramas being played out in human society. Although I believe in science, I prefer to argue metaphysics because they go to the heart of what our reality is all about (in my opinion). Classifying the various characteristics of humanity in just the right way isn't important to me. We all have a right to exist (and to our own opinions, something that trans activists don't seem to understand).
Hmm - I take issue with homosexuality being characterised as a "feeling or orientation" unless you extend the same to heterosexuality. As you note in your last paragraph, there are so many homosexuals, found in every society, that there has to be an evolutionary basis for it. I very much doubt that there is a way to be socialised, or react in such a way to trauma, that one would be attracted to a sex other than that inherent in the person. It might, though, explain some bisexuality.
I definitely disagree with trans being characterised the same as sexual orientation - largely on the basis that I do not see any intrinsic basis to it - unless you are going to extend the same to any other delusory process or personality disorder.
I admit that I see heterosexuality as being somehow natural, and homosexuality as somehow unnatural -- not good, given that I am gay.
I think that we anti-trans activists are too willing to see trans people as being delusional and sick. I keep reminding myself that I am against transgender ideology -- that set of very bad ideas -- and not against trans people themselves, though I admit that transgenderism strikes me as weird.
Thanks for your reply - and honesty, Perry. I don't know what it says about us that I'm hetero and regard homosexuality as being as normal as heterosexuality - different only in its lower frequency (which is, of course, one way of describing abnormal!)
I don't count myself as "anti-trans" - at least not in the way trans ideologues mean it. I am very much against the fundamental lack of Enlightenment values of objectivity involved in the whole thing, and the active recruitment of children and young people. The insidious erosion of women speaks to a very dark strand of human behaviour, both in terms of men pretending to be women/girls , and women/girls pretending they aren't, with the continuous attack on lesbianism throwing it all into sharp relief. "Transing away the gay" is repulsive, and since so much of that seems to come from parents who don't want a gay son, I'm really starting to think we (as a society) should not have made it unacceptable to speak about homophobia - the upwelling I have seen recently shows that it never went away, people were just masking it. I do have a great deal of sympathy for the people caught up in this at a young
age - they are very octen victims far more than perpetrators. Not so the older ones, who not only knew what they were doing but flaunt their paraphilia anywhere and everywhere, to the detriment of transsexuals who just want to live a quiet life. However, that isn't to say that I don't think each and every one of the members of those groups has underlying mental health or other psychological problems that should have been dealt with better and differently by healthcare providers. The role of the healthcare profession - medical, surgical and psychiatric - will heed thorough scrutiny one we get to a point where the adults are once again in charge.
Sorry for the log reply - one thing led to another!
This guy is heterosexual, as are most AGPs who use cross dressing as a sexual stimulant. Those who dress up as kids insinuate a pedophilic dimension and should not be encouraged.
Spot on!
Great piece. Like so much in gender ideology, "baby trans" idea may also have been borrowed from earlier lesbian culture (maybe male gay culture too, I don't know). I don't know if it's still used these days, but I recall the phrase "baby dyke" used in lesbian spaces in the past. But from what I observed in people I knew, young newly-out lesbians in their 20s or late teens affectionately referenced to in this way (and who sometimes referred to themselves this way) were not inducted into a cult and were certainly not infantilized. They were just seen as young and unused to being out as lesbians in a mostly-straight world, who probably had things to learn as they sometimes awkwardly entered lesbian spaces and learned new cultural customs and rules. They were not treated as children and did not act like children.
Actually, I also heard a term "baby Christian", used for new (adult) converts. So, it's probably a pretty generic way to refer to new members of a cult or close-knit group.
Maybe!
It's a dreadful - seemingly quite new - terminology. Medical and law students in training are often referred to as "baby doctors/lawyers". Really disrespectful.
In the rest of the article: “Happiness can be found only through submission to the mystery of gender, which one is unfit to judge.” I think this is also how the capture of “allies” occurs - their suspension of disbelief is fortified by submission to this “mystery”. It really is religious, eh?
This article gives an excellent analysis of why many trans identified activists and healthcare providers desperately cling to the idea that children can and should be sent through a medicalized transition instead of normal puberty. Prior to medically transitioning as adults, these people longed to be the other sex. After transitioning, however, they still long for something they cannot have, which is to have transitioned before puberty. The core problem is the resistance against accepting limitations imposed by biology---what they are trying to do is impossible at any age.
I came to this issue indirectly - from 35+ years of the study of government propaganda operations related to illegal wars and foreign policy operations. What strikes me as profoundly important in all this is that we are quite clearly being "gaslighted" by the big boys - by Western oligarchy. I dare say you know you are being "gaslighted" when All of Academia, All of MSM, All the big NGO's, All of the Fortune 500 corporations, All Western governments, most if not All of the various professional organizations and licensing bodies in medicine and helping professions, our civil services, and smaller entities like our school boards and even my local YMCA - are ALL SINGING THE SAME SONG - and that song is irrational, illogical, anti-science, has no standing in material reality, and essentially amounts to a quasi-relious scarification cult that valorizes child sacrifice. That is gaslighting of the highest order no doubt.
The same Western oligarchy that can openly state that willfully bringing about the deaths of a half-a-million Iraqi children was - quote - "worth it" - certainly isn't promoting this agenda because of its concern for the "feelings" of a hodgepodge of autogynephillic males and the increasing numbers of young people struggling with navigating their adolescence in an increasingly mad world.
Yup, there's definitely a lot of gaslighting going on, and a lot of money behind it. What I struggle with is the grey areas where it's hard to tell if someone is a gaslighter or being gaslighted, and a lot of people are both. I'm increasingly convinced it's a cult, and there are going to be knowing cult leaders pouring money into it for nefarious purposes. The problem with lies is they get believed, creating more unwitting liars. Even listening to someone like Judith Butler in interview, I kind of know she must know she's avoiding straight answers (hehe) - so I think she knows she's lying at some level - but she's probably got so used to queer bullshit and lying to herself that maybe it's almost not lying at the same time. It's insanity. And then there are the children and adults who haven't practised critical thinking yet, and just absorb and repeat lies innocently, the entirely gaslighted. Goodness, the names they call you if you try to educate them!
Well said. Jennifer Bilek has done some excellent work in tracking the massive money flows from some mega billionaires who are both trans & trans-humanist in orientation - and who are promoting both movements with their generous "donations" to a variety of organizations and NGOs. Jennifer suspects this is - at the macro level - about creating acceptance for the coming trans-humanist movement - and I believe she makes an excellent case for her perspective.
PS I pretty much assume that Rothblatt is on the autistic spectrum, with high-functioning Asperger's (though this useful name has been discarded from official descriptions of ASD).
Martin(e) Rothblatt's book "From Transgender to Transhuman" makes the aspirations of the international body dissociation industry pretty clear. And quite impressive that Rothblatt retrained as a lawyer to lay out the future shape of the international trans takeover, accomplished mainly at the UN Yogyakarta conference attended entirely by male lawyers -- who somehow managed to forget the existence of women. Rothblatt gets a lot of his inspiration from Ray Kurzweil as an AI genius and dedicated inventor / futurist. But Rothblatt seems peculiarly unable to distinguish between consciousness, and the contents of consciousness: believing that the former (rather than the latter, as memories & habits of thought) can be downloaded to his revived cryogenically frozen body at some point after his death. He's already had a creepy robotic head of his wife made and programmed with her thought patterns and speech habits. But this is hardly "consciousness". I feel his mental conflation of two such different things says something about the capacity to believe that a man "feeling like" a woman thereby IS a woman... Some crucial link missing between mind and body: such that even someone extremely bright and successful at making money can live in la-la land.
Yes, they get incredibly nasty. Most of the time the aggression is completely initiated by them, just because someone stated an idea that is not one of the woke talking points or slogans. Judith Butler is an academic who undoubtedly takes her own philosophy very seriously. There are ways in which she is also unlike the average philosophy professor who wants to teach, to generate ideas and to be understood. People who make up compound jargon words and compound jargon sentences don't want to be understood, in my opinion. In some cases they are trying to cover up an underlying lack of depth or novelty in their thinking. It is bizarre that such odd people are now among the chosen intellectual and cultural leaders of so many previously normal people, or so they appeared.
I have started reading Debbie Hayton's book "Transgender Apostate". The first chapter is a retrospective on her childhood in which she (as a boy) was nearly obsessed with girl's clothing and the idea of being a girl. For some reason, as a boy she was focussed on one item of clothing in particular -- tights -- an item which, true enough, boys and men rarely wear. She believes that she was developing autogynephilia at an early age, but it seems to me that she was too young to be developing what I consider to be a sexual fetish. I would never say this to her, but I don't think she really knows why she had gender dysphoria as a child. However, her book is good evidence that for many children it is a real thing. Among other things, she can't trace her obsession with being a girl to any particular event. As an anti-trans activist who sometimes feels contempt for trans people because of their bad behavior (shaming people who don't agree with them; influencing children to increase their numbers; trying to tell people how to talk; pushing their way into women's spaces; etc.), Hayton's book is a reminder that gender dysphoria is a real thing for a lot of people, and even for children, and that is helping me keep my contempt under control. It reminds me that I am fighting transgender ideology, and not transgender people themselves.
Hayton herself is against transgender ideology. She freely admits that she is a man who feels like a woman, and not an actual woman. She demonstrates for us how mature and well-behaved trans people should be acting, instead of the paranoid and childish people on social media that Eliza describes, or the aggressive demonstrators who try to shut down every lecture or conference on the issue, or who falsely claim that society is trying to erase them.
Gender dysphoria is very much a real thing, and we do not understand why people are becoming more obsessed with wanting to be the other sex. Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder and should be kept as a diagnosis in the DSM and ICD. There is also currently a horde of young women who do not have gender dysphoria but are presenting themselves as having it. The ones who end up in gender clinics mostly do appear to have other psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
None of this, however, implies that there are "real transgender people" in the sense that "transgender is a normal human variant," which is what "trans activists," WHO, and other organizations are claiming.
Yes, I know all of this. I have written similar things on my own Substack blog.
However, the question you raise as to whether being trans is a normal human variant is an interesting one. As a gay person who feels normal in every way, I would say that being trans is indeed another type of normal. I suspect that throughout history there have probably been ½% to 1% of the population that wished they were the opposite sex. That may not be the 8% of the population that is gay (my estimate), but it still means that over tens of thousands of years, trans people have probably numbered in the millions.
My point of view is a spiritual one. I believe in reincarnation. A person who is gay or trans in a lifetime has something spiritual or karmic to learn from the experience. I believe that everything happens for a reason. Of course, I imagine that you don't share my beliefs. My point is that these odd variations in humanity probably have a reason or purpose.
As to the current trans fad, I think that's exactly what it is -- a fad. But because of modern medicalization, it is a very dangerous fad. It's not like being gay -- all you have to do to discover you aren't gay is to have sex with your own gender. I think what's happening for so-called trans kids is that they have received the message that this is ONE AREA of their lives in which their parents can't control them, which makes it very seductive to them. Kids may decide they are trans in order to rebel against their parents, or because they have personal problems they don't understand and they think transitioning (which isn't really possible, of course) will cure those problems, or -- especially in the case of girls -- because they don't like the changes to their bodies that occur in puberty. I also think that the social stigma to being gay is still so great that people would rather transition and pretend they are heterosexual than be gay. That South Park cartoon taught me a lot about today's kids: Today's kids use the word "gay" constantly, and always to mean "stupid".
As a woman I am offended you describe Hayton as a woman. HE is a man and does not share the reality if being either a girl or adult human female, regardless of his claims or feelings.
Firstly, Hayton does not claim to be a real woman. In fact, she is very clear that she is a man who feels like a woman (or at least wants to BE a woman), and nothing more. Hayton is the only trans woman I know who is lacking any intellectual pretense, and I respect her for that.
Secondly, I don't care how offended you are. You can be offended 24 hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year (or in this case sixty-six), and I won't care the slightest bit. I have had this argument before. Out of politeness, and out of respect for Hayton herself, I refer to her as "she/her". Get over it.
“I don't care how offended you are.”
Nor do I “care” about your hoity toity rebuttal, rudeness and disrespect toward an actual woman. Its pleasing to have irritated you to the extent you felt the need to trot out a defensive. Be assured I know what David Haytons claims are and that doesn’t t mean he isn’t a also a liar, a delusionary ideologue or a fantasist. Most likely all three in my opinion.
I will not be “getting over it” any time ever. I will keep on challenging mens rights activists like you along with every other woman dismissing snark I come across.
Get over yourself.
Pearl, I will, out of respect for you, refer to Hayton with male pronouns in this reply, but I also usually refer to him with female ones (I comment on his blog and had email contact a few times). It was a struggle to figure out how to respond to him at first, and I've been fairly challenging. As far as I can tell, some people suffer very badly from gender identity disorder, for decades. I cannot manage to persuade myself that all of them are liars (and I think they are clearly suffering some kind of mental disorder). Some of this suffering is extreme, and some people have tried everything, including psychotherapy, and eventually reach the end of their tether, risking suicide if they don't accept their need to "transition". They therefore, as adults, seek hormonal and surgical fixes for (or just amelioration of) their condition, and they often just want to live as the opposite sex without fanfare or special treatment, and navigate the difficulties of sexed spaces and rights with as little impact on others as possible. Hayton is one such. The usual designation is "transsexual". (I don't mean to sound lecturing, and I imagine you know all this). So I have empathy for them.
Hayton is particularly impressive, in not only having dealt with all that, but also recognising the damage the modern trans ideology is doing, and he is working like mad to understand the situation, analyse it, and criticise the gender ideology, trying to head kids off at the pass and - I imagine - campaigning behind the scenes in various ways, as well as continuing what must be a precarious and challenging position as a teacher in a school.
At first, I couldn't understand - if he has this insight into how unreal "trans" is, why doesn't he cut his hair, wear a suit and take on male pronouns? Even if surgery is a step too far, can't he do that, have a social transition in reverse? I tentatively asked about it, and his answers made me realise I have absolutely no idea how painful that would be for him (nor any damn right to suggest it, to be honest).
Anyway, I didn't intend to write all that. I intended to ask what you'd do if you were invited to a discussion of the trans phenomenon, where you found one or more female transsexuals looking for all the world like men - butch looking with facial hair, adams apple and a deep voice - who were also working to undermine the trans fad, Dave and Pete, say. They, too, might have come to a similar position: big mistakes, or big suffering, even more painful and ridiculous to try to reverse it. Would you try to find their original "girl" name and call them by it, refer to them in the third person as "she"? Would you say you don't care about their "claims or feelings" and call them liars, delusionary ideologues and fantasists?
(To Pearl Red Moon) You are an extremist. Judging from your picture, you are quite old, and that's a shame. Old age should bring moderation and wisdom, not extremism.
I'm proud of who and what I am. I have qualities that are in short supply among humans: Insight, compassion, balance, and a high level of integrity. I am liberal on most issues but have never lost touch with reality. I've been like this all my life. People who scold me for doing nothing wrong -- which is what you are doing -- don't get very far with me.
A "men's rights advocate"! -- just because I show a little respect to a trans woman by calling him "she"? How absurd. If all trans people had Hayton's attitudes and ideas, they would not be an issue in society. She believes children are being exploited by trans activists; she believes trans women should stay out of women's sports; she eschews the special trans vocabulary and pronouns; and she doesn't believe in the nonsense that feeling like a woman makes a man an actual woman. She knows what reality is. Furthermore, she herself is an outcast among trans people, and she is criticized and shamed by them relentless.
One thing I've figured out about trans women is that they eventually realize that they are not women at all, and so they become satisfied to be just "trans" -- i.e., men who feel like women. Having given up on the hope of being real women, they often develop contempt for real women, and it's this contempt that allows them to enter into women's sports and other single-sex spaces, to take social space (positions, achievements) away from real women, and to denigrate women who don't agree with them as "terfs". Hayton doesn't do those things. She seems to really care for women.
But again, I call Debbie Hayton "she" out of respect, not because I think she is in any way a real woman. Hayton, by the way, has admitted her mistakes, most specifically by creating pain and conflict in her family when she transitioned. However, she is still married to her wife, who seems to have accepted the situation.
If Hayton himself freely admits he's a man, what's wrong with calling him "he"? It makes calling him "she" even odder.
Why do you even ask such a question, the answer to which you already know?
Hayton had gender dysphoria from a young age, and would be a woman if he could be. Now if he were a jerk and behaved like all the other selfish trans activists, I would probably call him "he", but he is not a jerk. He is a principled person who believes in science and reality and has a genuine concern for women and children -- so, out of respect, I call him "she" because that's what he wants to be.
There, you got me to refer to Hayton as a male -- are you happy?
I wonder why you respect Hayton enough to use a wrong-sex pronoun- but then dismiss PRM's comment here, with no respect at all....?
Perhaps because she was being hostile towards me?
I'm very suspicious of the memories. They are unverifiable and serve only to justify the fetish .
The childhood memories of wanting to wear girl's clothing? If you are questioning Hayton's memory, then you are questioning her integrity. Remember: Hate the bad ideology, don't hate the trans person. Hayton doesn't support the ideology.
What Eliza sent us was just an excerpt. Follow the link to Genspect to read the full article.
Oh, sorry, I didn't notice.
Hayton is a liar and a narcissist. HE is a teacher who forces (not physically but by the virtue of his position of power) his students to lie and refer to him a MS and she. Nothing well-behaved about it.
Woops! You are going to have to give me some evidence of THAT! Do you know one of Hayton's students? Hayton has said publicly that she doesn't care whether people call her a man or woman, or refer to her as she or he.
Trans are desperate to shed the (accurate) image of the ugly, hulking crossdresser trying to lure children to topless pool parties. The best way to do this was to paste the innocent faces of children across the front of the movement, and convince everyone that these fragile young kids will most certainly kill themselves if we don't rush them into medical treatment immediately. Drag story hour lets the despicable ogres pose with their grooming targets as if to say "See? I'm smol, too!".
This is one of your best, in my opinion. We can see exuberant, defiant arrested adolescence all over the culture now, and trans may be its apotheosis.
Thanks so much, very insightful.
It's quite challenging reading that Daily Mail piece you linked to. There's no ultimate reason to deny an adult (50-something man with seven kids) deciding he's an eight-year-old girl and moving in with "adoptive parents" who are apparently happy to have him live with them and play with their kids and grandkids, then switching to being six to be the youngest to please one of the new siblings who was seven. Is the golden rule being broken? Not as far as we know. Is mental illness real, or an oppressive social construct? If someone says they're happy doing something that seems insane to us, on what grounds are we to judge them insane? What if someone admits they're insane, but doesn't mind? Do people have the right to their insanity?
Do paranoid schizophrenics have a right to their insanity? Do people with suicidal levels of depression?
Well, yes. The lack of a "right" implies that society has the right to force you not to do something. And in these cases it's hard to see how society could even force someone not to be depressed or schizophrenic if we wanted to (although we've a long history of trying).
I think I might construct an argument for reprisals against the man I was referring to on the grounds that his pretence/fantasy about being a little girl is damaging to wider society, encouraging confusion in others (minors and vulnerable adults) towards similar practices that would damage their future potential, that kind of thing. This is a big part of the whole trans ideology problem, the social contagion. There's also the danger that any adult mingling with children unsupervised poses - he may innocently be playing, but he could also be sexually predatory, so accepting this in a society poses a wider threat in that regard too.
I think I took your original comment in a way you didn't mean - I apologise. I agree with everything you say in your reply.
No problem at all, it was easy to take the wrong way and slightly devil's advocate. I'd been reading the comments at the Daily Mail and part of me wanted to agree with all the lambasting and disgust - and I certainly felt queasy seeing the photos. I'm not sure where the line is, but I think he's well over it. I think I'm most annoyed that a couple with children elected to look after him and apparently nobody is challenging him. I'm also concerned that "mommy and daddy" might find it convenient to forget that he's (pretending to be) a child and therefore needs overseeing.
Paranoid schizophrenics tend to be a danger to others; clinically depressed people are often a danger to themselves. A compassionate society will try to protect whoever is at risk of harm: so in the former case it might require restraint (chemical and / or physical). Depressed people can be harder to help.
At present those at risk from predatory sex offenders in any guise, infantile or animalistic, requires first and foremost the restoration of single sex spaces for women and children.
The hallmark of being "insane" is generally to be unaware of this fact. That's what makes insanity so difficult to deal with: insane people cannot usually be reasoned with. Their insanity precludes their ability to be rational or objective.