Hannah Barnes’ new book, Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, keeps spilling devastating revelations:
It's just literally unbelievable, isn't it? (where "literally" is definitely meant literally!)
Imagine declaring yourself "against capitalism" and then turning right around and unironically blaring a bunch of stupid nonsense about kids "born into the wrong body"—where the only path to acquiring a supposedly 'correct' body runs right along the cutting edge of the pharma and medical tech industries AKA perhaps ••the•• two most hyper-capitalist manufacturing industries in existence. What absolute dolts.
Since they have a whole pet cause of falsifying information on birth certificates, I hope they at least reflect their Twue Awfentic Sewves™ by changing the date of birth to yesterday.
They keep their questions and their head out of it because they have been told that having questions or concerns is literal hate, literally letting people die, literally crossing into dangerous territory. Questioning this is the position of the right, and the right exists only because of racism, hatred, fear, and bigotry. To question is literal taboo. If people like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Walsh, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, JK Rowling, Lauren Boebert, and Tucker Carlson are criticizing it, it’s all they need to know about the safety and validity of those questions. We have become a society of all or nothing, fearful thinking. We can’t sit with the discomfort and lack of perfect certainty that results from someone being wrong about 95% of things but having 5% right. They have to go with their hearts and not their heads to avoid the dissonance and keep the illusion of 0% in common with the “bad people” intact.
I think the mental health profession is full of people who learned from a very young age to blame/fix the individual rather than the system that produced the individual's distress. Many clinicians come from families in which one or both parents had their own struggles with mental health and/or were abusive or neglectful. Often, what draws someone to psychology in the first place is a desire to understand their own pain and heal themselves. They then desire to provide others with the support they never had.
This is also why so many of us (I work in mental health) have huge blind spots when it comes to seeing the root of patients' distress. If we came from families in which our parents struggled to take accountability for their own behavior, we learned to a) stop asking questions that might lead us to conclusions inconvenient for our parents and/or b) locate the problem within ourselves (e.g. "My parents aren't neglecting me, I just have anxiety/depression"). Many of us became adept at placating others as a way of coping with highly distressing circumstances. We may have also developed a belief that asking tough questions is a threat to our safety (if we were, say, rejected or punished in some way for asking tough questions).
All of this gets passed on to the people we work with. The more we accept the idea that the root of distress lies within the individual, the less likely we are to ask questions or see our clients' distress as possibly stemming from something outside themselves. We also develop an emotional investment in NOT SEEING outside factors that can cause distress in individuals.
"All of this gets passed on to the people we work with. The more we accept the idea that the root of distress lies within the individual, the less likely we are to ask questions or see our clients' distress as possibly stemming from something outside themselves. We also develop an emotional investment in NOT SEEING outside factors that can cause distress in individuals."
This is very insightful -- and not something I'd thought about.
This blinkered personalisation of "mental health" -- on an often inappropriate medical model -- by ignoring causative family and social issues, is being marginally replaced by the "power threat" model: which asks not "What's wrong with you?" but "What happened to you?"
In this it's very similar to the existential movement in psychiatry of the 1970s (so-called "anti-psychiatry") started by the maverick anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and developed by dissenting psychiatrists like Esterson and Laing: who did their patients the honour of really listening to them, and figuring out how the world appeared through the patient's eyes.
This included close observation of interactions of patients with other family members, which was often mystifying or invalidating to the patient -- revealing a common pattern of scapegoating of patients as the weakest member of dysfunctional families, for the displacement of family problems. And the patient could then be deemed "ill" or "mad".
In just such a way, the trans industry exploits displacement of parental homophobia (and other forms of dicrimination or abuse) onto potentially gay kids, by convincing both parents and kids they are "trans". And it helps to invalidate autism as worthy of its own respect and appropriate treatment.
Feb 15, 2023·edited Feb 15, 2023Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
[Note: I am having technical problems with my Substack site, which is why there are no articles on it.]
This is very disturbing to read. Curiosity is probably the most important characteristic for any researcher or therapist to have. Each patient represents a puzzle, and unravelling that puzzle should be the therapist's mission. In other words, a therapist is like a detective. To simply accept what any patient is saying is foolhardy at best.
I am not a therapist, but even I'm aware of this. I helped a friend once with a problem, and my deep questioning of her feelings and beliefs helped her to figure out what was going on for her mentally.
An interesting thing just happened. I didn't know what AFAB meant, so I did an internet search, and what I found was this horrible, horrible page:
It's hard to believe that people can be so stupid, and that people with such horrible ideas are giving advice to anyone at all, much less children. The fact that places like this clinic exist is really discouraging to me. Transgender ideology is a bigger monster than I thought it was. It has made more inroads in America than I thought it had.
If you look at the picture of the author of that crap, you'll see that she is a trans man. That at least explains why she is spewing nonsense.
Oh gosh, they've even included the widely distributed lie, that being intersex is a common as having red hair!
When I have read researched accounts by individuals who have properly examined the numbers of people who are 'truly' intersex, this figure is revealed to be 0.02 of the population are actually intersex. Such widespread use of false statistics is completely unethical!
Yes I noticed that too: the difference being between 1:100 (for red hair, if it's even true) and 2:10,000 -- ie 1:5,000 -- for Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD) at 0.02% of the population generally.
The "one in a hundred" figure is an exaggeration by a factor of x 50.
It really is true that trans people are trying to increase their numbers, and I believe they are managing to accomplish that. I have read that when children start the transition process before puberty, there is a higher chance that they will remain trans and not become detransitioners. I'll bet you anything that this horrible trans man, who has chosen the name "Kinsey", is working with very young children, "affirming" them every step of the way.
I've noticed, by the way, that trans people often choose unusual first names for themselves, and this one is no different.
When I was young, Anita Bryant was waging her anti-gay campaign, and had started an organization named "Save Our Children". But besides a few pederasts in the gay community, gays were not targeting children. But trans people are definitely, absolutely targeting children. It's not enough for them to be 1/2 percent of the population; they want to be more. If they target 100 kids and 90 of them become detransitoners, but 10 of them remain trans, the collateral damage may be high, but at least they are getting what they want. That they have no concern for the detransitioners is really quite disgusting.
I predict that young women with baritone voices are going to become quite common, if they aren't already.
I read somewhere that they conflate any slightly non-typical characteristic, eg bicornate uterus, inverted nipples, etc., to come up with this statistic.
The bad-faith 1.7% stat traces back very specifically to a 2000 book called "Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality" by Anne Fausto-Sterling, an Australian professor of .... uh, one of the bio sciences😅 with this nasty little recurring habit of just fucking LYING with statistics.
If you would like to read an in-great-depth treatment of this act of statistical malpractice—which, as the very first major depredation of scientific integrity in intersex-related literature, appears right at the beginning—and of the other main machinations that Got Us Here to the current (as of writing; late 2021) state of intersex 'science', here you go: https://differently-normal.com/2021/10/25/the-invention-of-intersex/
The story specifically on Faust(👀)o-Sterling's bad-faith 1.7% figure is that it comprises ALL nonstandard 'variations of sexual development' i.e. absolutely any outcome whatsoever with chromosome pair 23 ending up other than XX or Xy, and also any condition that causes genitals to develop aberrantly in utero.
The problem is that the vast, vast majority of these are NOT intersex conditions... at least not to those who are still stuck in the quicksand of old-fashioned values like
"Words mean stuff".
Back when words DID, in fact, mean stuff, "intersex conditions" meant those that could (possibly), or even would (definitely), CAUSE DOCTORS IN THE BIRTHING THEATER TO MIS-SEX THE BABY without newfangled and pricey prenatal genetic tests (run on amniotic fluid).
There's a whole gamut of these conditions, from conditions that cause babies to have ambiguous micro-genitalia all the way up to the real gnarly stuff like CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome—which, being more or less exactly what it says on the wrapper, causes a chromosomally MALE (46Xy) baby to be physically, on the outside, completely indistinguishable from an actual Girl. It isn't until a ways into puberty, when it is realized that periods are just never ever gonna happen, that the incredibly weird reality of CAIS dawns on the average individual who has it.
BUT YEAH
there aren't many people with these ACTUAL (as in, not whole-ass lying lies from lying TRA liars) intersex conditions—a fact that is thoroughly grounded in common sense as the huge vast majority of us know exactly zero such people.
0.013 to 0.018 of one percentage point, as it turns out (13-18 of every 100,000 people; idk how this breaks down by sex).
Professor Faust+otherletters, on the other hand, added in all the DSDs/VSDs that are not intersex—i.e., that could not possibly cause any confusion in sexing a baby at birth.
The really big deals here are just 2 conditions that, together, account for the HUGE majority of Faust•-••••••••'s 1.7% of the population. These are Turner's syndrome (just one X chromosome, no pair), and Klinefelter's syndrome (XXy), which you probably saw in your high schol bio book in the section after you did all the Punnett squares for normies.
THESE 2 CONDITIONS ALONE are almost the whole entire 1.7 percent of everybody. And they are NOT intersex—Turner's babies are Female with unambiguously Female (if a bit underdeveloped in perpetuity) outward anatomy, and Klinefelter's are likewise but male.
These individuals therefore do not need any of the support mechanisms (and, possibly, surgical resources) that actual intersex conditions could entail.
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If you've read all the way down here, you may be all "Gurl hold up! The fuck does any of that stuff have to do with trans?"
Nada. Nothing. SFA. Totally unrelated.
The only purpose to which the cult puts ANY of the above ideas is to gaslight the entire world into thinking that intersex identities prove that "sex is a spectrum".
Ladies and gentlement, this idea is just breathtakingly beyond stupid. I have a prosthetic lower right leg, on a stump that was a stump when I was born. How stupid would I have to be to say, "Ha! I myself prove that human beings are not necessarily two-legged!" Saying that sex is a spectrum is the same degree of bolloxified clownwankery.
It also makes TRAs themselves look more like idiots than usual (a high bar), because they're sitting there bloviating about how Sex Is A Spectrum™ but of course ABSOLUTELY NOBODY would ever trans-identify as one of those supposed intermediate points between m and F.
It's almost as though the bullshitters know full well what's bullshit, and the 'spectrum' doesn't actually exist! Or something
It's completely ridiculous: a medical guide to living in a world of delusion. How to make things unnecessarily complicated by misuse of language to support the delusion.
I'm from the Cleveland area originally, and to see that the Cleveland Clinic is now all-in with the anti-human, anti-science transification cult is deeply depressing.
This too but oh so much worse for the equally illustrious-and-well-reputed-until-four-minutes-ago Mayo Clinic, which a few months ago appointed Martin("-e") Rothblatt—one of the prime movers of all this evil, in part because he's an actual cartoon villain medtech oligarch, but also because he is mentally and socially still frozen in prepubescence and understands ✨ N O T H I N G ✨ about actual, normal, fully human people —to its board of directors. To help guide lord only fucking knows whom, in doing god knows what other than that it's nothing good.
When using "trans-identified" (or trans-identifying) it's much better to state "male" or "female" to indicate biological sex -- as "man" or "woman" is already relegated to being a "gender identity" and could therefore indicate either sex.
Yes using "trans-identified male" instead of "trans woman" is still to some extent buying into the "transition" and "gender identity" lies: but only so far as the individuals thus described do so themselves.
It doesn't indicate any such belief on the part of person using these descriptions -- especially as they tend to be used only by "gender critical" people. So they are offensive terms to the people they describe: who not only prefer "trans woman" to "transwoman" (offensive), but want to get rid of the "trans" altogether. And banish all reference to biological sex -- except for body parts (then they have the nerve to accuse GC people of "biological essentialism"! Consistency is not their strong point).
Referring to TiMs and TiFs instead of "transwomen" etc was my first liberation: now I much prefer "men who claim to be women" and "women who claim to be men". Anyone can understand that with no further explanation...
There's a lot to think about. The language warping has been a very successful tool for the trans lobby so I agree with your points. I note that they are currently trying to take 'male' and 'female' as their own as well.
Yes -- but they can't be allowed to capture "male" and "female" too. That's the bottom line. The old feminist distinction between sex (male or female) as a biological given, and gender stereotypes (men and women) as social constructs, still holds good.
How about if we call this Kinsey Kolega person a "male-identifying woman"? I think that's the most accurate. Of course, we can't know for sure. Maybe she identifies as a woman but just likes to wear men's clothing, like that pastel rainbow-colored man's shirt she is wearing.
I still use the terms "trans man" and "trans woman" just because they are generally accepted, and everyone knows that the word "trans" in this case just means "fake".
No, I was wrong. I just read her reviews, and it turns out that she is non-binary -- all her reviewers refer to her as "they".
The problem for me is that I don't accept or use the word "nonbinary". There are only two sexes, and everyone is a combination of masculine and feminine, so in my opinion everyone is "binary". To me, "nonbinary" people are just narcissists.
MarkS, the problem with hewing too closely to linguistic purity here is that you're slicing off and throwing away the potential of communicating effectively to a HUGE proportion of "persuadables" who are currently straddling, or standing uneasily on the wrong side of, the proverbial fence—and confining yourself unnecessarily to preaching to the choir and/or to the already born-again as it were.
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Bad-faith twisters of words WILL twist words in bad faith. That can't be stopped.
As for everybody else, I absolutely trust in people's ability to understand the nouns in "trans woman" and "trans man" in EXACTLY the same way as those in "vegan leather", "decoy duck", "clay pigeon", "Hobson's choice", "Democratic People's Republic (of North Korea) [extra credit for this one because ALL 3 words are precisely the opposite of the truth]", "fool's gold", and.... gurl we already have HUNDREDS of "adj/descriptor + noun X" that literally everybody everywhere fully understands are not actually noun X at all. What's the issue with two more?
Well, I disagree. I don't think there actually is a large group of "persuadables" who would be more persuaded by polite but inaccurate language (that just reinforces the underlying mythology by its very nature: "trans women" are NOT women!), as opposed to sharp clear accurate language that might snap a mind to attention.
I offer JK Rowling as an example of someone who tried to talk as nicely and politely as possible. How did that work out?
I've actually helped to peak a bunch of people, from ages 15 to 97, so persuadables definitely exist (and quite clearly include none of the venom-dripping TRAs screeching at J.K. Rowling).
Part of this is demographics. I am in a skilled manual trade, I literally work with my hands for a living, and I spend the huge vast majority of my time around other blue-collar people—who have not been blasted with the fire hose of TRA propaganda that more extensively "educated" (in the formal sense at least, hah demographics are used to, especially from 4 year college/university campuses dear god.
I encounter multiple people every day who still literally have zero idea of the situation with regard to trans issues. People over 50 in the majority-minority neighborhood where I live, especially, uniformly have zero clue at all of gender ideology, which has not even made a foothold around here yet. (Don't underestimate the degree to which TRA gender stereotypes are very very specifically upper middle class ••White•• standards—this matters very deeply because trans is so consumed with the most superficial aspects of presentation at ALL ages).
In dialogue with the people I've met who have been genuinely open to having their own window moved on these issues (whether they realize it or not!) , I've found that it's been a necessity to use the buzzwords TW and TM ••AT LEAST AT FIRST•• ... absolutely NOT for any remotely politicized reason, but simply because, as people blessed enough to have lived this far mostly unaffected by trans issues, thei would just be really confused by the phrases TIM and TIF (which, given the primany center of gravity of the way ppl talk about this stuff, they would almots certainly misinterpret as TIM = TM and TIF = TW at first).
Furthermore, with people who are still in a position to be persuaded, stuff like "men pretending to me Women—while true—would just alienate them because they do not have anywhere NEAR the base of factual knowledge that's necessary for them to acually grasp the (actually, truly, genuinely SHOCKING) f act that a huge majority of men who currently identify as TW are completely unmedicted, anatomically intact whole-ass MEN.
I feel like younger people (of approximately the same age as the infamously influential, completely insufferable Tumblr class of 2013) tend to understand this to some degree (upper middle class young people have the ••other•• major porbelm here, i.e. having mostly grown up in a bubble of supportive material comfort they have NO IDEA how much danger Women can routinely face from men).
But people over like... some cutoff between 40-50? In general, hard NO. Other than those who have been directly affected (ROGD parents, loved one attacked by a man in a formerly safe space etc etc), people that age of either sex—thanks in no small part to the embargo of trans-related news stories in the mainstream media for at least 8-9 years now (!!!), and for a solid 20 years with regard to Tavistock GIDS—are absolutely still living in a mental conception of the world where most trans-identified people are homozexual male transsexuals, i.e., the world of the early 1970s.
ALL of the current developments—the rapid rise of ROGD, the massive flood of teenage Girls, the totally predatory nature of "trans" "medicine", and the fact that the huge vast majority of today's trans identifying males are just intact men who are sexually predatory opportunists—are COMPLETE unknowns to people whose world has not been personally touched by the borg. I am more than happy to have conversations using the words ••that those people curerntly use••, which are usually "tw" and "tm" because that's what is in the media on a casual basis.
If your goal is to take people you could have at best won over completely and at very worst could have planted some seeds for further thought, and instead just alienate all of them completely and not move a single needle (and maybe even move a couple needles twoard the TRAs by pure reactivity, if they've never met a TRA and they thought you were enough of an asshole), then let me tell you there is absolutely no better way in the world to do that than to pick at, and proselytize on, the words that people use right at the outset.
Picking at terminology early on is an ••absolutely certain•• way to make sure that you will win zero hearts and minds ever, as long as you live, to any cause at all whatsoever.
That whole list of similar phrases in our language that everybudy undurstands correctly (decoy ducks are not ducks; clay pigeons, not pigeons, etc)—no comment at all there?
Nonliteral use of words in line with current societal trends is something most people are actually quite good at.
And moreover, there is not a single soul on earth who GENUINELY BELIEVES that "twaw" (although many will builshit it to their deathbeds for the sake of personal opportunism—a story as old as time itself), making it even likely that society will gather a correct understanding.
Let me re-emphasize absolutely to death how good average people are at understanding which phrases are doublespeak.
Consider the equally intense firehose of propaganda that comes out of the People's Republic of China, and yet there are exactly zero earth humans who genuinely believe that China is a republic run by the "People" and/or anybody who legitimately represents them.
On BBC Radio 4 (which programme?) a couple of days ago I heard exactly the same sentiment expressed by a gay man in an interview, as by the non-thinking gay doctor in this article.
The interviewee's reason for dismissing what he called "conversion therapy" for "trans children" was that (in the UK) we were "hearing exactly the same arguments against trans people as used against the gay community at the time of Section 28".
And that as a member of the LGB community he therefore now had a duty to extend the same protections to the T, as LGB had achieved.
The interviewer mildly objected that while history might seem to be repeating itself with the same arguments, surely exact parallels could not be drawn: because recognition had been achieved for same-sex attraction as a biological fact -- but the trans issue was one of mental health and identity.
I think the interviewer was Evan Davis on "PM" who, speaking as a gay man himself, clearly appreciated the difference between LGB and T issues which outfits like Stonewall have tried so hard to.obscure.
But sadly the interviewer didn't mention the homophobic aspect of the trans movement towards children, by "transing away the gay" under pressure from homophobic parents; or by trans adults' refusal to recognise that gay people are same-sex, not same "gender identity" attracted.
LGB Alliance owes its existence to the aggressive refusal of transactivists to recognise any difference between same-sex attraction and same "gender identity" attraction -- in denial of heterosexual attraction.
It is mystifying how any gay person could fail to be aware of all this: let alone be a gay doctor in the transing trade.
Feb 15, 2023·edited Feb 16, 2023Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
Exactly. But it wasn't so casual... The T takeover of Stonewall in 2015 was following explicit guidance to exploit an existing cause to get public sympathy -- and as disguise of T's real nature -- set out in a 2014 document for transactivists, prepared by international lawyers Dentons, financed by charity Thomson Reuters Foundation, directed by IGLYO (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation).
In 2015 Stonewall had achieved same-sex marriage so it needed new objectives: and it needed a new source of funding. So the T first extracted abject apologies from Stonewall for not having acknowledged the T sooner -- and then dropped the "LGB" from Stonewall's logo.
The Denton strategy for government and institutional capture by transactivists included directives to spring pre-written legislative proposals on unprepared governments, and to keep it out of the press and media so the public wouldn't know what was going on.
Basically it's to remove parental consent for children to legally change gender.
James Kirkup wrote about it in The Spectator in December 2019:
I think that for many trans people, transness is at its core the manifestation of a paraphilia—so in a sense, the T arguably *is* a sexuality. But it's clearly not of a kind with the LGB. Paraphilic transgender people—the autogynephiles and autohomoerotics—more properly belong among the furries and the "littles" and everyone else whose sexual gratification depends on the cultivation of a maladaptive fantasy alter ego.
We need to find ways to distinguish “gay rights” from “trans rights.” Both may be based on feelings but gay people don’t need to permanently modify their bodies or require others to affirm their feelings. Gay people don’t need medication to be gay. Gay people don’t need to look a certain way to be gay. How can we more effectively distinguish “gay” from “trans” so that these are not conflated?
How I wish there was a way for LGBT to split in a two-party fashion. Unfortunately, it is such a mess. Many of trans - id kids actually identify as both gay and trans. (As in hetero girls dating boys and claiming to be "two gay boys". It would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly sad). And many trans-id people actually are gay so I don't know which side they would choose.
There are some LGB not T organizations: LGB Alliance in the UK is the best known, now there is LGB United in the US, which is just getting of the ground; substack here: https://www.thedistancemag.com
If your "authentic self" is actually yourself, and is actually authentic... then you're LGB (or an unusually introspective straight person, of course LOL).
If you're being told that your Twue, Deepwy Fewt Awfentic Sewf™ is NOT your actual self (because you were so very unfortunately Born Into The Wrong Body®—which is AN ADVERTISING SLOGAN, dear people), but is something you can ••BUY•• from the very same pharma and med-tech companies whose nonprofit-funding arms are pouring money into propagating the "wrong body" bullshit, then that's the trans cult.
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It's almost as though there's a conflict of interest in there somewhere!
And maybe a "self" that you have to buy on down payment—and then that'll keep you ponying up a monthly tribute (for the wrong sex HRT) until you either detrans or die, whichever comes first—possibly just perhaps isn't so awfentic™ after all? These words, they mean things.
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All that and I haven't even dug into the main course about how the TRA movement is entirely based on lies that sell reality and self-love down the river.
I went with the stuff above because I've managed to successfully open some eyes with it. Ppl who are undecided on, ignorant about, or beginning to fall into disillusionment with the trans cult are still probably not ready to hear about the lies part yet (... partly because it'll sound like you're calling them suckers. There's really no way around that one at first, since this movement absolutely cultivates an oversensitive victimhood complex that includes taking EVERYTHING personally, along with all the other wonderful things).
On the other hand... The fact that someone is not only slurring them with the "wrong body" advertising pitch (my gawd I would give 🎀 A N Y T H I N G 🎀 to see them try to pitch that one to an audience of people with severe physical disabilities), but is actively trying to convince you that you have to BUY your awfentic sewf™—on an installment plan that you will never, ever, ever, EVER pay off—now THAT is something that, for lord only knows what reason, some people will hear you out on.
The more I think about cross-sex fantasy and the tragedies it has brought upon Western society, the more I am convinced that its ultimate source is our society's unfinished reckoning with homosexuality. Progressives want to prove their bonafides by saying 'trans' acceptance is just like being gay or lesbian, when it's obviously not, but the centrality of 'acceptance' and 'pride' to the left has made rational thought impossible for many. At the same time, many homosexuals themselves feel that just as allies fought for them and their rights, they owe the same loyalty to those who face what is easily mistaken for a similar kind of bigotry. Indeed, you could forgive this mistake given that *homosexuality was itself considered a mental disorder* until very recently. Meanwhile, despite the legal progress on gay rights, there is no doubt that homophobia still exists, and that it can be very hard to be openly homosexual as a young person. It's worth specifying that a lot of this discomfort is related to the notion that being same-sex attracted makes you 'less of a man' or 'not a real woman'. These are very old beliefs and if anything, the idea that you can be 'born in the wrong body' is just an extension of what is ultimately a homophobic notion: that there's something 'not right' about people who are same-sex attracted. And so this unresolved homophobia contributes to an environment where both parents and young people themselves -- ironically bolstered by the relentless, love-bombing 'progressive' pro-trans movement -- prefer the TQ to the LGB.
Unfinished reckoning with homosexuality, yes, but also a reassertion of male supremacy in the face of rising female equality. This may seem paradoxical, but part of the transification ideology is the notion that men who imitate women are BETTER than actual women. See, for example, the nomination by the Univeristy of Pennsylvania of Will Thomas (who would prefer to be called "Lia", but I don't give a fuck about what that asshole "prefers") as NCAA sports "woman of the year".
To me, this seems no different than the religious ignore all other causes of strife in lieu of redemption through Jesus.
It doesn’t matter what abuse and trauma you suffered or why you feel the way you do. All that matters is that you follow the doctrine of Jesus (or the dogma of gender affirming care) and you’ll be saved.
It’s the “path to redemption” narrative that has captured these clinicians and blinds them to the past of their patients. It also blinds them to all the traps and pitfalls that lie along that pathway, in particular the potential pit of hell at its conclusion...
At least in my own country (Canada) the process of medical training selects pretty ruthlessly for conformist workaholics with finely tuned weathervanes for political compasses. In the past few years they have also added political indoctrination sessions as mandatory parts of medical training. In the last year of my residency our yearly academic conference included a 30 minute rant by a medtwitter personality on how doctors needed to work to abolish the police. It became standard at the start of 'indigenous cultural safety' lectures to include a slide telling us that asking for evidence was a form of systemic racist violence.
We knew it would be bad, but never to that extent.
I will buy the book, as I think we all should, but I can’t say I am actively ‘looking forward’ to reading it.
Carlos Fuentes once described ‘Don Quixote’ as the saddest book ever written, because it is the story of a disillusionment.
I imagine this book will be a window into the disillusionment of thousands of children, and a very serious indictment of the medical establishment who let it happen.
I'm one of those weird obsessive WW2-era history enthusiasts. I've read HUNDREDS of accounts of the Holocaust, Unit 731, the Nanjing massacre, and other such—and they're still just as shocking as the very first ones I read. Not even one bit less.
I suspect this stuff will become "one of these", for me at least.
If I should ever roll out of bed one day and find that I've just sorta "gotten used to" these and other very worst doings in human history, then, looking in the mirror is going to be hard.
Gotta differ on Don Quixote, which loses a lot of the emotion it may or may not build up in the reader to sheer fatigue. It's just way, way, WAY too long for a reader to possibly finish it in a mode other than just sorta worn down.
In the original Spanish, DQ is something like 350,000 words long (= something like 400,000 words in typical English translation; if printed in mass-production trade paperback, like novels you buy at an airport convenience store, that's about 1600 pages of the Man of La Mancha.)
Bias admitted here—I'm a short-story sorta Girl all the way—but, still. Still.
i will be buying it too. what is going on here in new zealand is insane. there is absolute silence in the media and in the general population. and all the while our whole way of life is being dismantled in favour of trans ideology. education. health. justice. social welfare. it's nuts.
This book will dovetail well with the testimony of Jamie Reed, the whistle-blower detailing gross medical malpractice in St. Louis, MO, at the Washington University Gender clinic.
Just yesterday, I had disturbing conversation after I brought up my relief that the excesses are finally getting some attention at these clinics. Immediately, the woman I was speaking to, an arts coordinator, launched into an attack (she said about 10 years ago) on a young homosexual couple who showed affection to each other in public in Richmond VA, and one of them ended up bruised and beaten. The immediate pivot into how Gays and Lesbians are attacked in public "below the Mason/Dixon line" was her trope, was her response to my concern over medical malpractice. That was brainwashing, in action! It took real work to remove this pivot and its implications for the indoctrination of the entire Left, from my consciousness. No one should be physically attacked for any reason while going about their personal life, but likewise no one should let doctors do harm to mostly confused, depressed teens.
"I asked why he thought the sex ratio would shift so dramatically". Well, my daughter, God works in mysterious ways. We must have faith and not question His will.
Feb 15, 2023·edited Feb 15, 2023Liked by Eliza Mondegreen
It’s go-to Blame the Victim diagnosis. Can’t be external, has to be internal. None of us had trouble-free, storybook lives but we knew what was going on with each other and just made it work. Maybe that’s what’s changed. We spent time together, unstructured time and talked things through. They’re more like prisoners now, with timed “privileges.” I was initially recommended for Special Ed, turns out I only needed glasses.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair
Dr. Stephen B. Levine Expert testimony, from this year already. I put in reply here to have it near the top. It matters.
https://will-law.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Expert-Affidavit-Stephen-Levine-2023.02.0333.pdf
It's just literally unbelievable, isn't it? (where "literally" is definitely meant literally!)
Imagine declaring yourself "against capitalism" and then turning right around and unironically blaring a bunch of stupid nonsense about kids "born into the wrong body"—where the only path to acquiring a supposedly 'correct' body runs right along the cutting edge of the pharma and medical tech industries AKA perhaps ••the•• two most hyper-capitalist manufacturing industries in existence. What absolute dolts.
Since they have a whole pet cause of falsifying information on birth certificates, I hope they at least reflect their Twue Awfentic Sewves™ by changing the date of birth to yesterday.
Someone created a spam version of my account. Please disregard any weird messages with numbers/links.
Oh my, and I thought you wanted to talk to me personally. I'm hurt! In my world, you're a rock star.
Someone created a spam version of my account. Please disregard any weird messages with numbers/links.
They keep their questions and their head out of it because they have been told that having questions or concerns is literal hate, literally letting people die, literally crossing into dangerous territory. Questioning this is the position of the right, and the right exists only because of racism, hatred, fear, and bigotry. To question is literal taboo. If people like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Walsh, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, JK Rowling, Lauren Boebert, and Tucker Carlson are criticizing it, it’s all they need to know about the safety and validity of those questions. We have become a society of all or nothing, fearful thinking. We can’t sit with the discomfort and lack of perfect certainty that results from someone being wrong about 95% of things but having 5% right. They have to go with their hearts and not their heads to avoid the dissonance and keep the illusion of 0% in common with the “bad people” intact.
I think the mental health profession is full of people who learned from a very young age to blame/fix the individual rather than the system that produced the individual's distress. Many clinicians come from families in which one or both parents had their own struggles with mental health and/or were abusive or neglectful. Often, what draws someone to psychology in the first place is a desire to understand their own pain and heal themselves. They then desire to provide others with the support they never had.
This is also why so many of us (I work in mental health) have huge blind spots when it comes to seeing the root of patients' distress. If we came from families in which our parents struggled to take accountability for their own behavior, we learned to a) stop asking questions that might lead us to conclusions inconvenient for our parents and/or b) locate the problem within ourselves (e.g. "My parents aren't neglecting me, I just have anxiety/depression"). Many of us became adept at placating others as a way of coping with highly distressing circumstances. We may have also developed a belief that asking tough questions is a threat to our safety (if we were, say, rejected or punished in some way for asking tough questions).
All of this gets passed on to the people we work with. The more we accept the idea that the root of distress lies within the individual, the less likely we are to ask questions or see our clients' distress as possibly stemming from something outside themselves. We also develop an emotional investment in NOT SEEING outside factors that can cause distress in individuals.
"All of this gets passed on to the people we work with. The more we accept the idea that the root of distress lies within the individual, the less likely we are to ask questions or see our clients' distress as possibly stemming from something outside themselves. We also develop an emotional investment in NOT SEEING outside factors that can cause distress in individuals."
This is very insightful -- and not something I'd thought about.
This blinkered personalisation of "mental health" -- on an often inappropriate medical model -- by ignoring causative family and social issues, is being marginally replaced by the "power threat" model: which asks not "What's wrong with you?" but "What happened to you?"
In this it's very similar to the existential movement in psychiatry of the 1970s (so-called "anti-psychiatry") started by the maverick anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and developed by dissenting psychiatrists like Esterson and Laing: who did their patients the honour of really listening to them, and figuring out how the world appeared through the patient's eyes.
This included close observation of interactions of patients with other family members, which was often mystifying or invalidating to the patient -- revealing a common pattern of scapegoating of patients as the weakest member of dysfunctional families, for the displacement of family problems. And the patient could then be deemed "ill" or "mad".
In just such a way, the trans industry exploits displacement of parental homophobia (and other forms of dicrimination or abuse) onto potentially gay kids, by convincing both parents and kids they are "trans". And it helps to invalidate autism as worthy of its own respect and appropriate treatment.
[Note: I am having technical problems with my Substack site, which is why there are no articles on it.]
This is very disturbing to read. Curiosity is probably the most important characteristic for any researcher or therapist to have. Each patient represents a puzzle, and unravelling that puzzle should be the therapist's mission. In other words, a therapist is like a detective. To simply accept what any patient is saying is foolhardy at best.
I am not a therapist, but even I'm aware of this. I helped a friend once with a problem, and my deep questioning of her feelings and beliefs helped her to figure out what was going on for her mentally.
An interesting thing just happened. I didn't know what AFAB meant, so I did an internet search, and what I found was this horrible, horrible page:
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/afab-and-amab-meaning/
It's hard to believe that people can be so stupid, and that people with such horrible ideas are giving advice to anyone at all, much less children. The fact that places like this clinic exist is really discouraging to me. Transgender ideology is a bigger monster than I thought it was. It has made more inroads in America than I thought it had.
If you look at the picture of the author of that crap, you'll see that she is a trans man. That at least explains why she is spewing nonsense.
Oh gosh, they've even included the widely distributed lie, that being intersex is a common as having red hair!
When I have read researched accounts by individuals who have properly examined the numbers of people who are 'truly' intersex, this figure is revealed to be 0.02 of the population are actually intersex. Such widespread use of false statistics is completely unethical!
Yes I noticed that too: the difference being between 1:100 (for red hair, if it's even true) and 2:10,000 -- ie 1:5,000 -- for Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD) at 0.02% of the population generally.
The "one in a hundred" figure is an exaggeration by a factor of x 50.
It really is true that trans people are trying to increase their numbers, and I believe they are managing to accomplish that. I have read that when children start the transition process before puberty, there is a higher chance that they will remain trans and not become detransitioners. I'll bet you anything that this horrible trans man, who has chosen the name "Kinsey", is working with very young children, "affirming" them every step of the way.
I've noticed, by the way, that trans people often choose unusual first names for themselves, and this one is no different.
When I was young, Anita Bryant was waging her anti-gay campaign, and had started an organization named "Save Our Children". But besides a few pederasts in the gay community, gays were not targeting children. But trans people are definitely, absolutely targeting children. It's not enough for them to be 1/2 percent of the population; they want to be more. If they target 100 kids and 90 of them become detransitoners, but 10 of them remain trans, the collateral damage may be high, but at least they are getting what they want. That they have no concern for the detransitioners is really quite disgusting.
I predict that young women with baritone voices are going to become quite common, if they aren't already.
I read somewhere that they conflate any slightly non-typical characteristic, eg bicornate uterus, inverted nipples, etc., to come up with this statistic.
Yes, and hypospadias, too.
The bad-faith 1.7% stat traces back very specifically to a 2000 book called "Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality" by Anne Fausto-Sterling, an Australian professor of .... uh, one of the bio sciences😅 with this nasty little recurring habit of just fucking LYING with statistics.
If you would like to read an in-great-depth treatment of this act of statistical malpractice—which, as the very first major depredation of scientific integrity in intersex-related literature, appears right at the beginning—and of the other main machinations that Got Us Here to the current (as of writing; late 2021) state of intersex 'science', here you go: https://differently-normal.com/2021/10/25/the-invention-of-intersex/
The story specifically on Faust(👀)o-Sterling's bad-faith 1.7% figure is that it comprises ALL nonstandard 'variations of sexual development' i.e. absolutely any outcome whatsoever with chromosome pair 23 ending up other than XX or Xy, and also any condition that causes genitals to develop aberrantly in utero.
The problem is that the vast, vast majority of these are NOT intersex conditions... at least not to those who are still stuck in the quicksand of old-fashioned values like
"Words mean stuff".
Back when words DID, in fact, mean stuff, "intersex conditions" meant those that could (possibly), or even would (definitely), CAUSE DOCTORS IN THE BIRTHING THEATER TO MIS-SEX THE BABY without newfangled and pricey prenatal genetic tests (run on amniotic fluid).
There's a whole gamut of these conditions, from conditions that cause babies to have ambiguous micro-genitalia all the way up to the real gnarly stuff like CAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome—which, being more or less exactly what it says on the wrapper, causes a chromosomally MALE (46Xy) baby to be physically, on the outside, completely indistinguishable from an actual Girl. It isn't until a ways into puberty, when it is realized that periods are just never ever gonna happen, that the incredibly weird reality of CAIS dawns on the average individual who has it.
BUT YEAH
there aren't many people with these ACTUAL (as in, not whole-ass lying lies from lying TRA liars) intersex conditions—a fact that is thoroughly grounded in common sense as the huge vast majority of us know exactly zero such people.
0.013 to 0.018 of one percentage point, as it turns out (13-18 of every 100,000 people; idk how this breaks down by sex).
Professor Faust+otherletters, on the other hand, added in all the DSDs/VSDs that are not intersex—i.e., that could not possibly cause any confusion in sexing a baby at birth.
The really big deals here are just 2 conditions that, together, account for the HUGE majority of Faust•-••••••••'s 1.7% of the population. These are Turner's syndrome (just one X chromosome, no pair), and Klinefelter's syndrome (XXy), which you probably saw in your high schol bio book in the section after you did all the Punnett squares for normies.
THESE 2 CONDITIONS ALONE are almost the whole entire 1.7 percent of everybody. And they are NOT intersex—Turner's babies are Female with unambiguously Female (if a bit underdeveloped in perpetuity) outward anatomy, and Klinefelter's are likewise but male.
These individuals therefore do not need any of the support mechanisms (and, possibly, surgical resources) that actual intersex conditions could entail.
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If you've read all the way down here, you may be all "Gurl hold up! The fuck does any of that stuff have to do with trans?"
Nada. Nothing. SFA. Totally unrelated.
The only purpose to which the cult puts ANY of the above ideas is to gaslight the entire world into thinking that intersex identities prove that "sex is a spectrum".
Ladies and gentlement, this idea is just breathtakingly beyond stupid. I have a prosthetic lower right leg, on a stump that was a stump when I was born. How stupid would I have to be to say, "Ha! I myself prove that human beings are not necessarily two-legged!" Saying that sex is a spectrum is the same degree of bolloxified clownwankery.
It also makes TRAs themselves look more like idiots than usual (a high bar), because they're sitting there bloviating about how Sex Is A Spectrum™ but of course ABSOLUTELY NOBODY would ever trans-identify as one of those supposed intermediate points between m and F.
It's almost as though the bullshitters know full well what's bullshit, and the 'spectrum' doesn't actually exist! Or something
That's a totally brilliant comment. Thank you for all the details.
It's completely ridiculous: a medical guide to living in a world of delusion. How to make things unnecessarily complicated by misuse of language to support the delusion.
The Cleveland Clinic has a long and illustrious history: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/about/history
I'm from the Cleveland area originally, and to see that the Cleveland Clinic is now all-in with the anti-human, anti-science transification cult is deeply depressing.
This too but oh so much worse for the equally illustrious-and-well-reputed-until-four-minutes-ago Mayo Clinic, which a few months ago appointed Martin("-e") Rothblatt—one of the prime movers of all this evil, in part because he's an actual cartoon villain medtech oligarch, but also because he is mentally and socially still frozen in prepubescence and understands ✨ N O T H I N G ✨ about actual, normal, fully human people —to its board of directors. To help guide lord only fucking knows whom, in doing god knows what other than that it's nothing good.
Mayo Clinic has been preying on the elderly in Florida and gorging themselves on a steady stream of Medicare payments for decades.
Perry, I suggest to all that we not use phrases like "trans man", which only serve to reinforce the notion that the author is some kind of "man".
She is not.
She is a woman, and always will be a woman, no matter what sorts of disguising and disfiguring drugs and surgery she has had.
I suggest "woman imitating a man", which may be clumsy, but has the beauty of truth.
Trans identifying girl/woman/female (or boy/man/male as appropriate) is steadily gaining traction.
It simply states the truth, maintaining the reference to actual sex.
It also avoids getting into silly discussions about what flavour of trans they are, eg. gender fluid, non binary etc.
Some people say we should only use male / female but I disagree - I'm not giving up 'woman'!
One problem with "trans identifying woman" (and variants) is that it is easily misconstrued as "trans woman", which of course means a man.
Also, I refuse to acknowledge the whole notion of "trans", which is itself a lie: it is not possible to "transition" the sex of a mammal by any means.
So I will continue to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, e.g., "man who falsely believes he is a woman".
I can't argue as I'd rather refer to them as autogynophiles, delusional misogynists, paraphiliacs etc!!!!
When using "trans-identified" (or trans-identifying) it's much better to state "male" or "female" to indicate biological sex -- as "man" or "woman" is already relegated to being a "gender identity" and could therefore indicate either sex.
Yes using "trans-identified male" instead of "trans woman" is still to some extent buying into the "transition" and "gender identity" lies: but only so far as the individuals thus described do so themselves.
It doesn't indicate any such belief on the part of person using these descriptions -- especially as they tend to be used only by "gender critical" people. So they are offensive terms to the people they describe: who not only prefer "trans woman" to "transwoman" (offensive), but want to get rid of the "trans" altogether. And banish all reference to biological sex -- except for body parts (then they have the nerve to accuse GC people of "biological essentialism"! Consistency is not their strong point).
Referring to TiMs and TiFs instead of "transwomen" etc was my first liberation: now I much prefer "men who claim to be women" and "women who claim to be men". Anyone can understand that with no further explanation...
Good points!
There's a lot to think about. The language warping has been a very successful tool for the trans lobby so I agree with your points. I note that they are currently trying to take 'male' and 'female' as their own as well.
Yes -- but they can't be allowed to capture "male" and "female" too. That's the bottom line. The old feminist distinction between sex (male or female) as a biological given, and gender stereotypes (men and women) as social constructs, still holds good.
How about if we call this Kinsey Kolega person a "male-identifying woman"? I think that's the most accurate. Of course, we can't know for sure. Maybe she identifies as a woman but just likes to wear men's clothing, like that pastel rainbow-colored man's shirt she is wearing.
I still use the terms "trans man" and "trans woman" just because they are generally accepted, and everyone knows that the word "trans" in this case just means "fake".
No, I was wrong. I just read her reviews, and it turns out that she is non-binary -- all her reviewers refer to her as "they".
"male-identifying woman" is good. "nonbinary identifying woman" for this person, I guess.
The problem for me is that I don't accept or use the word "nonbinary". There are only two sexes, and everyone is a combination of masculine and feminine, so in my opinion everyone is "binary". To me, "nonbinary" people are just narcissists.
MarkS, the problem with hewing too closely to linguistic purity here is that you're slicing off and throwing away the potential of communicating effectively to a HUGE proportion of "persuadables" who are currently straddling, or standing uneasily on the wrong side of, the proverbial fence—and confining yourself unnecessarily to preaching to the choir and/or to the already born-again as it were.
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Bad-faith twisters of words WILL twist words in bad faith. That can't be stopped.
As for everybody else, I absolutely trust in people's ability to understand the nouns in "trans woman" and "trans man" in EXACTLY the same way as those in "vegan leather", "decoy duck", "clay pigeon", "Hobson's choice", "Democratic People's Republic (of North Korea) [extra credit for this one because ALL 3 words are precisely the opposite of the truth]", "fool's gold", and.... gurl we already have HUNDREDS of "adj/descriptor + noun X" that literally everybody everywhere fully understands are not actually noun X at all. What's the issue with two more?
Well, I disagree. I don't think there actually is a large group of "persuadables" who would be more persuaded by polite but inaccurate language (that just reinforces the underlying mythology by its very nature: "trans women" are NOT women!), as opposed to sharp clear accurate language that might snap a mind to attention.
I offer JK Rowling as an example of someone who tried to talk as nicely and politely as possible. How did that work out?
I've actually helped to peak a bunch of people, from ages 15 to 97, so persuadables definitely exist (and quite clearly include none of the venom-dripping TRAs screeching at J.K. Rowling).
Part of this is demographics. I am in a skilled manual trade, I literally work with my hands for a living, and I spend the huge vast majority of my time around other blue-collar people—who have not been blasted with the fire hose of TRA propaganda that more extensively "educated" (in the formal sense at least, hah demographics are used to, especially from 4 year college/university campuses dear god.
I encounter multiple people every day who still literally have zero idea of the situation with regard to trans issues. People over 50 in the majority-minority neighborhood where I live, especially, uniformly have zero clue at all of gender ideology, which has not even made a foothold around here yet. (Don't underestimate the degree to which TRA gender stereotypes are very very specifically upper middle class ••White•• standards—this matters very deeply because trans is so consumed with the most superficial aspects of presentation at ALL ages).
In dialogue with the people I've met who have been genuinely open to having their own window moved on these issues (whether they realize it or not!) , I've found that it's been a necessity to use the buzzwords TW and TM ••AT LEAST AT FIRST•• ... absolutely NOT for any remotely politicized reason, but simply because, as people blessed enough to have lived this far mostly unaffected by trans issues, thei would just be really confused by the phrases TIM and TIF (which, given the primany center of gravity of the way ppl talk about this stuff, they would almots certainly misinterpret as TIM = TM and TIF = TW at first).
Furthermore, with people who are still in a position to be persuaded, stuff like "men pretending to me Women—while true—would just alienate them because they do not have anywhere NEAR the base of factual knowledge that's necessary for them to acually grasp the (actually, truly, genuinely SHOCKING) f act that a huge majority of men who currently identify as TW are completely unmedicted, anatomically intact whole-ass MEN.
I feel like younger people (of approximately the same age as the infamously influential, completely insufferable Tumblr class of 2013) tend to understand this to some degree (upper middle class young people have the ••other•• major porbelm here, i.e. having mostly grown up in a bubble of supportive material comfort they have NO IDEA how much danger Women can routinely face from men).
But people over like... some cutoff between 40-50? In general, hard NO. Other than those who have been directly affected (ROGD parents, loved one attacked by a man in a formerly safe space etc etc), people that age of either sex—thanks in no small part to the embargo of trans-related news stories in the mainstream media for at least 8-9 years now (!!!), and for a solid 20 years with regard to Tavistock GIDS—are absolutely still living in a mental conception of the world where most trans-identified people are homozexual male transsexuals, i.e., the world of the early 1970s.
ALL of the current developments—the rapid rise of ROGD, the massive flood of teenage Girls, the totally predatory nature of "trans" "medicine", and the fact that the huge vast majority of today's trans identifying males are just intact men who are sexually predatory opportunists—are COMPLETE unknowns to people whose world has not been personally touched by the borg. I am more than happy to have conversations using the words ••that those people curerntly use••, which are usually "tw" and "tm" because that's what is in the media on a casual basis.
If your goal is to take people you could have at best won over completely and at very worst could have planted some seeds for further thought, and instead just alienate all of them completely and not move a single needle (and maybe even move a couple needles twoard the TRAs by pure reactivity, if they've never met a TRA and they thought you were enough of an asshole), then let me tell you there is absolutely no better way in the world to do that than to pick at, and proselytize on, the words that people use right at the outset.
Picking at terminology early on is an ••absolutely certain•• way to make sure that you will win zero hearts and minds ever, as long as you live, to any cause at all whatsoever.
That whole list of similar phrases in our language that everybudy undurstands correctly (decoy ducks are not ducks; clay pigeons, not pigeons, etc)—no comment at all there?
Nonliteral use of words in line with current societal trends is something most people are actually quite good at.
And moreover, there is not a single soul on earth who GENUINELY BELIEVES that "twaw" (although many will builshit it to their deathbeds for the sake of personal opportunism—a story as old as time itself), making it even likely that society will gather a correct understanding.
Let me re-emphasize absolutely to death how good average people are at understanding which phrases are doublespeak.
Consider the equally intense firehose of propaganda that comes out of the People's Republic of China, and yet there are exactly zero earth humans who genuinely believe that China is a republic run by the "People" and/or anybody who legitimately represents them.
You make very good points, thank you.
On BBC Radio 4 (which programme?) a couple of days ago I heard exactly the same sentiment expressed by a gay man in an interview, as by the non-thinking gay doctor in this article.
The interviewee's reason for dismissing what he called "conversion therapy" for "trans children" was that (in the UK) we were "hearing exactly the same arguments against trans people as used against the gay community at the time of Section 28".
And that as a member of the LGB community he therefore now had a duty to extend the same protections to the T, as LGB had achieved.
The interviewer mildly objected that while history might seem to be repeating itself with the same arguments, surely exact parallels could not be drawn: because recognition had been achieved for same-sex attraction as a biological fact -- but the trans issue was one of mental health and identity.
I think the interviewer was Evan Davis on "PM" who, speaking as a gay man himself, clearly appreciated the difference between LGB and T issues which outfits like Stonewall have tried so hard to.obscure.
But sadly the interviewer didn't mention the homophobic aspect of the trans movement towards children, by "transing away the gay" under pressure from homophobic parents; or by trans adults' refusal to recognise that gay people are same-sex, not same "gender identity" attracted.
LGB Alliance owes its existence to the aggressive refusal of transactivists to recognise any difference between same-sex attraction and same "gender identity" attraction -- in denial of heterosexual attraction.
It is mystifying how any gay person could fail to be aware of all this: let alone be a gay doctor in the transing trade.
Exactly. But it wasn't so casual... The T takeover of Stonewall in 2015 was following explicit guidance to exploit an existing cause to get public sympathy -- and as disguise of T's real nature -- set out in a 2014 document for transactivists, prepared by international lawyers Dentons, financed by charity Thomson Reuters Foundation, directed by IGLYO (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation).
In 2015 Stonewall had achieved same-sex marriage so it needed new objectives: and it needed a new source of funding. So the T first extracted abject apologies from Stonewall for not having acknowledged the T sooner -- and then dropped the "LGB" from Stonewall's logo.
The Denton strategy for government and institutional capture by transactivists included directives to spring pre-written legislative proposals on unprepared governments, and to keep it out of the press and media so the public wouldn't know what was going on.
Basically it's to remove parental consent for children to legally change gender.
James Kirkup wrote about it in The Spectator in December 2019:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists/
I think that for many trans people, transness is at its core the manifestation of a paraphilia—so in a sense, the T arguably *is* a sexuality. But it's clearly not of a kind with the LGB. Paraphilic transgender people—the autogynephiles and autohomoerotics—more properly belong among the furries and the "littles" and everyone else whose sexual gratification depends on the cultivation of a maladaptive fantasy alter ego.
We need to find ways to distinguish “gay rights” from “trans rights.” Both may be based on feelings but gay people don’t need to permanently modify their bodies or require others to affirm their feelings. Gay people don’t need medication to be gay. Gay people don’t need to look a certain way to be gay. How can we more effectively distinguish “gay” from “trans” so that these are not conflated?
How I wish there was a way for LGBT to split in a two-party fashion. Unfortunately, it is such a mess. Many of trans - id kids actually identify as both gay and trans. (As in hetero girls dating boys and claiming to be "two gay boys". It would be funny if it wasn't so incredibly sad). And many trans-id people actually are gay so I don't know which side they would choose.
There are some LGB not T organizations: LGB Alliance in the UK is the best known, now there is LGB United in the US, which is just getting of the ground; substack here: https://www.thedistancemag.com
If your "authentic self" is actually yourself, and is actually authentic... then you're LGB (or an unusually introspective straight person, of course LOL).
If you're being told that your Twue, Deepwy Fewt Awfentic Sewf™ is NOT your actual self (because you were so very unfortunately Born Into The Wrong Body®—which is AN ADVERTISING SLOGAN, dear people), but is something you can ••BUY•• from the very same pharma and med-tech companies whose nonprofit-funding arms are pouring money into propagating the "wrong body" bullshit, then that's the trans cult.
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It's almost as though there's a conflict of interest in there somewhere!
And maybe a "self" that you have to buy on down payment—and then that'll keep you ponying up a monthly tribute (for the wrong sex HRT) until you either detrans or die, whichever comes first—possibly just perhaps isn't so awfentic™ after all? These words, they mean things.
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All that and I haven't even dug into the main course about how the TRA movement is entirely based on lies that sell reality and self-love down the river.
I went with the stuff above because I've managed to successfully open some eyes with it. Ppl who are undecided on, ignorant about, or beginning to fall into disillusionment with the trans cult are still probably not ready to hear about the lies part yet (... partly because it'll sound like you're calling them suckers. There's really no way around that one at first, since this movement absolutely cultivates an oversensitive victimhood complex that includes taking EVERYTHING personally, along with all the other wonderful things).
On the other hand... The fact that someone is not only slurring them with the "wrong body" advertising pitch (my gawd I would give 🎀 A N Y T H I N G 🎀 to see them try to pitch that one to an audience of people with severe physical disabilities), but is actively trying to convince you that you have to BUY your awfentic sewf™—on an installment plan that you will never, ever, ever, EVER pay off—now THAT is something that, for lord only knows what reason, some people will hear you out on.
The more I think about cross-sex fantasy and the tragedies it has brought upon Western society, the more I am convinced that its ultimate source is our society's unfinished reckoning with homosexuality. Progressives want to prove their bonafides by saying 'trans' acceptance is just like being gay or lesbian, when it's obviously not, but the centrality of 'acceptance' and 'pride' to the left has made rational thought impossible for many. At the same time, many homosexuals themselves feel that just as allies fought for them and their rights, they owe the same loyalty to those who face what is easily mistaken for a similar kind of bigotry. Indeed, you could forgive this mistake given that *homosexuality was itself considered a mental disorder* until very recently. Meanwhile, despite the legal progress on gay rights, there is no doubt that homophobia still exists, and that it can be very hard to be openly homosexual as a young person. It's worth specifying that a lot of this discomfort is related to the notion that being same-sex attracted makes you 'less of a man' or 'not a real woman'. These are very old beliefs and if anything, the idea that you can be 'born in the wrong body' is just an extension of what is ultimately a homophobic notion: that there's something 'not right' about people who are same-sex attracted. And so this unresolved homophobia contributes to an environment where both parents and young people themselves -- ironically bolstered by the relentless, love-bombing 'progressive' pro-trans movement -- prefer the TQ to the LGB.
Unfinished reckoning with homosexuality, yes, but also a reassertion of male supremacy in the face of rising female equality. This may seem paradoxical, but part of the transification ideology is the notion that men who imitate women are BETTER than actual women. See, for example, the nomination by the Univeristy of Pennsylvania of Will Thomas (who would prefer to be called "Lia", but I don't give a fuck about what that asshole "prefers") as NCAA sports "woman of the year".
Official UPenn Athletics page on Will:
https://pennathletics.com/sports/mens-swimming-and-diving/roster/will-thomas/14590
To me, this seems no different than the religious ignore all other causes of strife in lieu of redemption through Jesus.
It doesn’t matter what abuse and trauma you suffered or why you feel the way you do. All that matters is that you follow the doctrine of Jesus (or the dogma of gender affirming care) and you’ll be saved.
It’s the “path to redemption” narrative that has captured these clinicians and blinds them to the past of their patients. It also blinds them to all the traps and pitfalls that lie along that pathway, in particular the potential pit of hell at its conclusion...
At least in my own country (Canada) the process of medical training selects pretty ruthlessly for conformist workaholics with finely tuned weathervanes for political compasses. In the past few years they have also added political indoctrination sessions as mandatory parts of medical training. In the last year of my residency our yearly academic conference included a 30 minute rant by a medtwitter personality on how doctors needed to work to abolish the police. It became standard at the start of 'indigenous cultural safety' lectures to include a slide telling us that asking for evidence was a form of systemic racist violence.
I share your shock.
We knew it would be bad, but never to that extent.
I will buy the book, as I think we all should, but I can’t say I am actively ‘looking forward’ to reading it.
Carlos Fuentes once described ‘Don Quixote’ as the saddest book ever written, because it is the story of a disillusionment.
I imagine this book will be a window into the disillusionment of thousands of children, and a very serious indictment of the medical establishment who let it happen.
I'm actually kinda suprised at all the shock going on around here. Honestly, what did you all expect? I am seeing pretty much exactly what I expected.
I'm one of those weird obsessive WW2-era history enthusiasts. I've read HUNDREDS of accounts of the Holocaust, Unit 731, the Nanjing massacre, and other such—and they're still just as shocking as the very first ones I read. Not even one bit less.
I suspect this stuff will become "one of these", for me at least.
If I should ever roll out of bed one day and find that I've just sorta "gotten used to" these and other very worst doings in human history, then, looking in the mirror is going to be hard.
I guess I would call this being appalled rather than shocked, and I am most definitely appalled.
Gotta differ on Don Quixote, which loses a lot of the emotion it may or may not build up in the reader to sheer fatigue. It's just way, way, WAY too long for a reader to possibly finish it in a mode other than just sorta worn down.
In the original Spanish, DQ is something like 350,000 words long (= something like 400,000 words in typical English translation; if printed in mass-production trade paperback, like novels you buy at an airport convenience store, that's about 1600 pages of the Man of La Mancha.)
Bias admitted here—I'm a short-story sorta Girl all the way—but, still. Still.
i will be buying it too. what is going on here in new zealand is insane. there is absolute silence in the media and in the general population. and all the while our whole way of life is being dismantled in favour of trans ideology. education. health. justice. social welfare. it's nuts.
This book will dovetail well with the testimony of Jamie Reed, the whistle-blower detailing gross medical malpractice in St. Louis, MO, at the Washington University Gender clinic.
Just yesterday, I had disturbing conversation after I brought up my relief that the excesses are finally getting some attention at these clinics. Immediately, the woman I was speaking to, an arts coordinator, launched into an attack (she said about 10 years ago) on a young homosexual couple who showed affection to each other in public in Richmond VA, and one of them ended up bruised and beaten. The immediate pivot into how Gays and Lesbians are attacked in public "below the Mason/Dixon line" was her trope, was her response to my concern over medical malpractice. That was brainwashing, in action! It took real work to remove this pivot and its implications for the indoctrination of the entire Left, from my consciousness. No one should be physically attacked for any reason while going about their personal life, but likewise no one should let doctors do harm to mostly confused, depressed teens.
"I asked why he thought the sex ratio would shift so dramatically". Well, my daughter, God works in mysterious ways. We must have faith and not question His will.
It’s go-to Blame the Victim diagnosis. Can’t be external, has to be internal. None of us had trouble-free, storybook lives but we knew what was going on with each other and just made it work. Maybe that’s what’s changed. We spent time together, unstructured time and talked things through. They’re more like prisoners now, with timed “privileges.” I was initially recommended for Special Ed, turns out I only needed glasses.
Found this 2018 Scientific American article just yesterday about the lack of curiosity in smart people, seems to relate to this puzzle.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-smart-people-are-vulnerable-to-putting-tribe-before-truth/
or
https://archive.ph/ZPECq
Definitely part of the problem, though I think SA went all woke and "gender affirming" a while back, which was really disappointing.
They did. My late father would have been appalled. He subscribed to SA for as long as I can remember.
"Appalled" is pretty much my waking (and sleeping, honestly, I *dream* about this insanity) state nowadays... :-(
Spectral evidence!