In plain English, it's wrong to drug, cut up, and sterilize kids
The language of gender ideology lets adherents signal to one another without communicating. Restore language to a tool of communication and the ideology falls apart.
Sometimes, people surprise you. The other day, I had a conversation with one of my wokest classmates. The longer we talked about gender identity and transitioning kids, the more concerns she raised:
Isn't this a lot like anorexia? (Yes.)
Wouldn't it be better for trans people if it were easier to research this? (Yes.)
It didn't really make sense to me why we’d treat this one thing so differently. (Yep, it doesn't really make sense.)
She started out using a lot of the language—talking about “trans boys" (adolescent females) and “gender-affirming care”—and we ended by talking about men, women, boys, girls, mastectomies, sterilization. No qualifiers. In other words, the language came back down to earth.
The language of gender ideology lets adherents signal to one another without communicating. Restore language to a tool of communication and the ideology falls apart. It's near-impossible for sane, compassionate people to stan for double mastectomies on troubled teenage girls if they can't dress this up in the language of rainbows and unicorns and authentic selves. Reconnect language with reality and you'll open people's eyes. I think the aha! moment yesterday was when I said: "You know, I can't think of any other heading under which we'd say a teenage girl could consent to sterilization. Can you?" (Nope.)
Disregard the taboos, drop the language games, and you free other people up to do the same. Speaking from experience, it's a relief to stop performing the 'correct' views (sterilization good because “gender-affirming”). It's a relief to stop pretending.
I had a conversation with another classmate yesterday—ranging from the eugenics movement of the early 20th century to trans 'medicine' today—where I said: We're reviving some of the darkest chapters in the history of medicine and psychiatry. How much does it matter why we tell ourselves we're doing it?
Ultimately—from the safe distance of a hundred years—the why doesn't count for much. But in the moment, it matters greatly: language can't transform reality but it can mask it. The manipulative use of language can lead good people down terribly dark paths.
In the language of gender ideology, it's wrong to deny “trans children” “life-saving” “gender-affirming care.”
In plain English, it's wrong to drug, cut up, and sterilize kids.
It's astonishing (well, nothing is "astonishing" anymore) that clinicians have adopted all of this newspeak: assigned sex at birth, chest surgery, top surgery, bottom surgery… For what other conditions has new, "affirming" terminology been developed? I heard this was because the actual terms were in and of themselves too distressing to hear for trans-identifying young people. How does any of this make sense to anyone? How stable is someone who cannot bear to hear the realities of their procedures? A cancer diagnosis is terrifying. Why don't we have more fun names for chemo?
Indeed. But not just "sterilize kids", but turn them into sexless eunuchs.
On which Helen Joyce had some pithy comments, though Standpoint is defunct and there are some formatting problems:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201113021904/https://standpointmag.co.uk/speaking-up-for-female-eunuchs/
Still, underlines the stark horror of what the odious euphemism of "gender-affirming care" really entails.
Why there's substantially more value in the standard biological definitions for the sexes, as opposed to the risibly anti-scientific "patchwork definitions of the social sciences":
"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences [and by Genspect, & Emma Hilton] is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
No doubt that adults should, presumably, be allowed to do that to themselves - something of a thing during the heyday of Imperial China:
https://www.usrf.org/news/010308-hiddenpower.html
However, dysphoric and autistic children? Crime of the century, Mengele compounded with Tuskegee Syphilis Study.