I have a new piece up at Colin Wright’s Substack.
(Incidentally, the comic Christina Buttons and Colin designed to accompany this article got him suspended from Twitter for hate speech… and I came back from a walk only to learn that my writing had become the “acceptable face of genocide,” so, it’s been rather more eventful than your typical Substack post…)
What we have now is a trans movement that has adopted radical ideologies about biology and, in doing so, now seeks to erase sex in law and society. This has given rise to an absurd and dystopian reality where men are granted access to women’s prisons, sports, and other protected spaces, and where gender-nonconforming children have become the target of unregulated medical experiments that involve puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and extreme surgeries.
It wasn’t necessary to put the trans movement on a collision course with reality, fairness, common sense, medical ethics, toleration for difference, freedom of speech and conscience, and the basic recognition that sex matters to achieve the movement’s stated goals. Rather, it’s the trans lobby’s unstated goals that put us on this dark path. We can make a case for certain reasonable accommodations for people who are uncomfortable with their sex. Reasonable claims and demands can withstand scrutiny. Unreasonable claims and demands require a different approach. It’s impossible to make the case for putting male rapists in women’s prisons if you have to use plain language. It’s impossible to justify indoctrinating and then sterilizing confused children. You can only advance such goals if you’re willing to break the language, keep the public in the dark, and punish anyone who tries to drag your antics into the light. (In other words, you have to follow the Denton’s playbook.)
That trans activism took this form tells us something about what’s driving the movement and what’s not.
Another good one. I just finished writing something about how so many labels and diagnoses seem to be used to garner compassion and understanding from others and "trans" is certainly among those. I focused on the individuals seeking out labels and diagnoses but I also think it's important to focus our scrutiny on the people at the top. I just finished doing some "light" reading on the eugenics movement in California which is a sobering example of harm perpetrated under the guise of a social good. Eugenics was promoted by rich philanthropists who had ties with the University system. Far from being unpopular, it received bipartisan support in the legislature at the time and was considered a progressive issue.
It makes me wonder how the very human need for compassion is being exploited by people who lost touch with their own humanity a long time ago. The rhetoric is "be kind/compassionate", the tone is "these demands are so reasonable, who would question them?", but the reality is complete erosion of women's human rights and sterilization of gay kids. Unquestioning support and promotion by powerful players (celebrities, government, doctors) and the framing of "trans rights" as a humanitarian cause are blinding people to harm.
Why do T people need a separate flag now, if their rights and activism coincide with LGB people, as the LGBTQ+ hodgepodge of letters suggests? Who is represented by +?