I'm troubled by the way the gay rights movement has been hijacked by gender identity theory. I can kinda-sorta see why the two get lumped together--both represent a challenge to traditional views of gendered behavior--but where they part is the make-believe required by gender theory.
The gay rights movement never made a serious attempt to convince Americans that there was no such thing as sexual orientation. We weren't telling straight dudes who once got a long hug from another man that they must be gay and must therefore take this drug or undergo that surgery. In fact, we wanted people to keep their drugs and their reparative therapy and their surgery *away* from us. Our bodies and minds were fine; we just wanted fair access to all of the institutions and opportunities afforded to heterosexuals.
These "genderists", if that's what we're to call them, are a different breed. For them, it's not enough for Americans to support equality for trans people, no. They insist that we accept that trans women are literally female, that there IS no such thing as a male body (thanks for that, Chase Strangio), and that binary sex is just a social construct. These people require that we accept a fantasy version of reality, or else be bigots of the worst order.
Not for me, thanks. I want trans people to have fair access to housing, employment, professional licensure, adoption, and all the rest, and I will vote on that conviction. However, I refuse to check my rationality at the door, no matter what the activists say. The gay rights movement never required a belief in the unbelievable, and neither should anyone else.
Funnily enough, they also consider homosexuality a "genital fetish". In their world, gay means a person with he/him pronouns who is attracted to others with he/him pronouns, and lesbian means she/her pronouns and attracted to others with she/her pronouns. Heterosexual means preferring partners with opposite pronouns.
Lesbians get the worst of that; they're accused of transphobia if they won't date unoperated trans women, penis and all.
Re the way that trans activists demean women: this is an underdiscussed piece of what reveals the trans movement to at base be largely about misogyny. Some of the autogynephile literature, in terms of works written by admitted (at least at the time) autogynephiles and anecdotes from clinicians who have worked with that population, is enough to turn your hair white. The stereotypical mode of dress is over the top even without the shop teacher - how many women do you know who are in heels and full makeup every time they leave the house? And the teen girls who have decided to transition? There are many anecdotal examples, and I hope there will be some academic work done on this, indicating that many of these girls are trying to escape a sexist culture that being a woman seems to mean they have to accept. The life-destroying medical treatments are a big deal, but attention should be paid to the underlying ideology.
Thomas Sowell said “Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important.”
I can only assume this is the explanation of why so many health care professionals have become bewitched by the trans propaganda.
Sowell is an important figure here. He documented the ways elites engineer ideology into educational institutions. I always come back to the successful schools that were basically infilitrated and ruined by social justice warriors demanding race and gender quotas fundamentally change the formula of the schools. So Aviation Charter School, once a beacon of success for black boys, became an opportunity for feminists to demand the school cater to young black girls too. It didn't work. The boys dropped out and they continue to drop out. In order to succeed in such models girls must act more like boys and boys much be androgynized.
I appreciate your thoughts in this essay — particularly the last two paragraphs. I think we forget how impressionable young children are and how much they want to please adults. When they are different or gender non-conforming, and all the grown-ups are telling them they are one thing or another, they will bend towards their will. We need just let childhood be childhood.
I used to wonder how large groups of people could suffer from a delusion simultaneously, as in the case of the people of Fatima claiming to have seen an apparition of Mary, or in the Dancing Plague of 1518 when people danced themselves, often to death, over several weeks. But I am absolutely convinced that the emergence of gender ideology in the 21st century United States--and the fact that it has the support of much (if not most) of the intelligentsia--will be viewed similarly by future historians. I suspect it will be seen as emblematic of the country’s decadence and decline.
Trans activists are hurting gay rights. They piggy-backed onto gay rights, despite having a different agenda.
How are they hurting the gains made by gay rights?
Well, the general public is appalled by the trans rights advocates in several ways, from the medicalization of healthy children to the highly aggressive online tactics and “cancellations”.
But, since folks are afraid to say so, for fear of getting cancelled/fired, etc., they keep quiet. And this suppression and inability to speak up and fight back is creating resentment that is seeping into resenting gays.
Many see gays as having broken a deal they made: let us be, leave us alone, and we’ll stay out of each other’s business. Folks generally agreed to that deal, gays got the right to marry/adopt/have kids, etc.
But, the trans issue has aggressively broken that compact. They did not comply with the “live and let live”. They went after our kids, and they’ve even gone after a person all our kids love: J.K. Rowling. (This would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic).
If the gay rights folks were smart about this, they would clearly and loudly proclaim their unaffiliated status on trans issues.
Because if this continues, who knows how far the backlash will affect gay rights — It may get very ugly if DeSantis is elected and Marjorie Taylor Greene is elevated. Or Trump (god forbid) or any number of rising lunatics. Or the Supreme Court gets nastier.
The Trans’ aggressiveness is giving these revanchists much fuel.
It greatly concerns me the way that the trans have attached themselves to the gay rights movement--they are like snakes that slither into a crowd to try to fit in--and I wish that gays would stand up to this because the trans movement is starkly different. Even Antifa operates as the trans enforcers and beats up gay people who don't toe the line, so they recognize there's a difference even if most gays are too afraid to admit so and fight against the hijacking. As it is, it's a no-win situation for gays which is why they should disengage and divorce themselves from the trans movement.
That said, I very much doubt that DeSantis, MTG or Trump would ever do anything to take away any gay rights. Our society has advanced quite a bit in accepting gay rights such as marriage and allowing child adoption, etc. and I think there would be quite a backlash to changing this. (Even many religious people have given up to focus on more critical issues.) In the event that the Supreme Court turned over gay marriage to the states as was done with abortion, I believe it would be relatively easy to get a federal law passed recognizing gay marriage because it has existed for so long and there are numerous societal benefits to it as well as legal problems if it were not recognized in every state. It's just not the same as the abortion issue, which involves literally life and death issues.
I'll happily admit to being a girly boy in my early years, (I grew up with three sisters and the only other boy in the village only wanted to fight.) My wife was a tomboy in hers. Fortunately for us we grew up in the 60's and 70's - an age when our parents and teachers were quite happy to let us be ourselves.
These days, you would have been told that your "real self" must be a girl because of your "gender-nonconforming" behaviour. "Here, take these puberty blockers before your natural development destroys any chance to become your truest, deepest self which you, as a child, certainly know best (now that we've told you what it is)!"
This is an important essay and documentation. Of course the language is changing to accomodate the ideology but I don't think that is the root cause of the surge. Rather it is an accelerant of the medical transitions. I would like to hear more people talking about trends that primed the markets. Surely the kids would be identifying as trans even if the MDs weren't so on board.
I was noticing academia is entirely dominated by teachers and profs who bought into ideology purporting it was social justice to encourage females to be more like males and males to be more like females. It is a outgrowth of Blank Slatism.
In school and pop culture females are encouraged to be more: assertive, interested in STEM, physically competitive etc. They were told these behaviors were the key to success in life. No longer will females be subjugated to the patriarchy of family life. They need to be independent. Males on the other hand have been taught that "toxic masculinity" and most male behaviors are pathologies that needed to be suppressed by any means necessary, including medicalization.
Wright has writen about Blank Slatism before but it is worth keeping in mind this pernicious science denialism preceded the trans trend and primed the market. We can eventually stop the medical lysenkoism at play here but the underlying ideologies pushed on kids will be much bigger battles.
Of the top of my head I'm drawing from Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Pinker, Sommers, Sowell and other that explore the many ways that gender and racial engineering, quotaism have been top down projects intruding into every crevice of education.
Beyond “tomboys” and “feminine boys”, under these new definitions, aren’t all gays and lesbians, by way of their same-sex expressions and behaviors, acting outside of what is “typically associated” with the “traditional (heterosexual) expectations” of their sex? And so, in their view, are all gays and lesbians “transgender” or how then do they actually try to distinguish between gays and lesbians and those who are “transgender”?
I coined the term, cross sex ideation. It's more accurate. Coupled with the false narrative of suicidal ideation in children, it's a most destructive, alluring narcissism. Exulansic, at her YouTube channel, Isle of Ex, calls "affirmation" a function of placebo effect, meaning the patient feels better because they're "doing something." Desisters, meaning those who tried out social transition but stopped before harming their bodies, have clues for us, as do detransitioners. The entire diagnosis must be questioned.
I find Erica Anderson's comment on the what happened question to be disingenuous. He is a man who did the surgeries and promoted "transition" starting back when it "was so rare." Obviously the pharma money, often going through the Arcus Foundation, is influencing through programs of speakers going into schools and other institutions. We have "the Johns" (Steward and Oliver) causing more misinformation, promulgating all the old tropes, pretending the research from 40 years ago had validity. The path back to mind/body connectedness is mind/body work.
Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)
I'm troubled by the way the gay rights movement has been hijacked by gender identity theory. I can kinda-sorta see why the two get lumped together--both represent a challenge to traditional views of gendered behavior--but where they part is the make-believe required by gender theory.
The gay rights movement never made a serious attempt to convince Americans that there was no such thing as sexual orientation. We weren't telling straight dudes who once got a long hug from another man that they must be gay and must therefore take this drug or undergo that surgery. In fact, we wanted people to keep their drugs and their reparative therapy and their surgery *away* from us. Our bodies and minds were fine; we just wanted fair access to all of the institutions and opportunities afforded to heterosexuals.
These "genderists", if that's what we're to call them, are a different breed. For them, it's not enough for Americans to support equality for trans people, no. They insist that we accept that trans women are literally female, that there IS no such thing as a male body (thanks for that, Chase Strangio), and that binary sex is just a social construct. These people require that we accept a fantasy version of reality, or else be bigots of the worst order.
Not for me, thanks. I want trans people to have fair access to housing, employment, professional licensure, adoption, and all the rest, and I will vote on that conviction. However, I refuse to check my rationality at the door, no matter what the activists say. The gay rights movement never required a belief in the unbelievable, and neither should anyone else.
Funnily enough, they also consider homosexuality a "genital fetish". In their world, gay means a person with he/him pronouns who is attracted to others with he/him pronouns, and lesbian means she/her pronouns and attracted to others with she/her pronouns. Heterosexual means preferring partners with opposite pronouns.
Lesbians get the worst of that; they're accused of transphobia if they won't date unoperated trans women, penis and all.
It’s very troubling, and I think most LGB folk haven’t fully realized what’s happened.
Also, gay men are equally accused of transphobia if they won’t date trans men -- those who remain intact with vaginas, labias, and such.
Re the way that trans activists demean women: this is an underdiscussed piece of what reveals the trans movement to at base be largely about misogyny. Some of the autogynephile literature, in terms of works written by admitted (at least at the time) autogynephiles and anecdotes from clinicians who have worked with that population, is enough to turn your hair white. The stereotypical mode of dress is over the top even without the shop teacher - how many women do you know who are in heels and full makeup every time they leave the house? And the teen girls who have decided to transition? There are many anecdotal examples, and I hope there will be some academic work done on this, indicating that many of these girls are trying to escape a sexist culture that being a woman seems to mean they have to accept. The life-destroying medical treatments are a big deal, but attention should be paid to the underlying ideology.
Thomas Sowell said “Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important.”
I can only assume this is the explanation of why so many health care professionals have become bewitched by the trans propaganda.
Sowell is an important figure here. He documented the ways elites engineer ideology into educational institutions. I always come back to the successful schools that were basically infilitrated and ruined by social justice warriors demanding race and gender quotas fundamentally change the formula of the schools. So Aviation Charter School, once a beacon of success for black boys, became an opportunity for feminists to demand the school cater to young black girls too. It didn't work. The boys dropped out and they continue to drop out. In order to succeed in such models girls must act more like boys and boys much be androgynized.
I appreciate your thoughts in this essay — particularly the last two paragraphs. I think we forget how impressionable young children are and how much they want to please adults. When they are different or gender non-conforming, and all the grown-ups are telling them they are one thing or another, they will bend towards their will. We need just let childhood be childhood.
All doctors who do harm to children must be named, shamed, and punished https://open.substack.com/pub/yuribezmenov/p/how-to-do-no-harm-part-2?r=12n5dp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I used to wonder how large groups of people could suffer from a delusion simultaneously, as in the case of the people of Fatima claiming to have seen an apparition of Mary, or in the Dancing Plague of 1518 when people danced themselves, often to death, over several weeks. But I am absolutely convinced that the emergence of gender ideology in the 21st century United States--and the fact that it has the support of much (if not most) of the intelligentsia--will be viewed similarly by future historians. I suspect it will be seen as emblematic of the country’s decadence and decline.
Trans activists are hurting gay rights. They piggy-backed onto gay rights, despite having a different agenda.
How are they hurting the gains made by gay rights?
Well, the general public is appalled by the trans rights advocates in several ways, from the medicalization of healthy children to the highly aggressive online tactics and “cancellations”.
But, since folks are afraid to say so, for fear of getting cancelled/fired, etc., they keep quiet. And this suppression and inability to speak up and fight back is creating resentment that is seeping into resenting gays.
Many see gays as having broken a deal they made: let us be, leave us alone, and we’ll stay out of each other’s business. Folks generally agreed to that deal, gays got the right to marry/adopt/have kids, etc.
But, the trans issue has aggressively broken that compact. They did not comply with the “live and let live”. They went after our kids, and they’ve even gone after a person all our kids love: J.K. Rowling. (This would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic).
If the gay rights folks were smart about this, they would clearly and loudly proclaim their unaffiliated status on trans issues.
Because if this continues, who knows how far the backlash will affect gay rights — It may get very ugly if DeSantis is elected and Marjorie Taylor Greene is elevated. Or Trump (god forbid) or any number of rising lunatics. Or the Supreme Court gets nastier.
The Trans’ aggressiveness is giving these revanchists much fuel.
I'd like to heart this comment more than once.
It greatly concerns me the way that the trans have attached themselves to the gay rights movement--they are like snakes that slither into a crowd to try to fit in--and I wish that gays would stand up to this because the trans movement is starkly different. Even Antifa operates as the trans enforcers and beats up gay people who don't toe the line, so they recognize there's a difference even if most gays are too afraid to admit so and fight against the hijacking. As it is, it's a no-win situation for gays which is why they should disengage and divorce themselves from the trans movement.
That said, I very much doubt that DeSantis, MTG or Trump would ever do anything to take away any gay rights. Our society has advanced quite a bit in accepting gay rights such as marriage and allowing child adoption, etc. and I think there would be quite a backlash to changing this. (Even many religious people have given up to focus on more critical issues.) In the event that the Supreme Court turned over gay marriage to the states as was done with abortion, I believe it would be relatively easy to get a federal law passed recognizing gay marriage because it has existed for so long and there are numerous societal benefits to it as well as legal problems if it were not recognized in every state. It's just not the same as the abortion issue, which involves literally life and death issues.
I'll happily admit to being a girly boy in my early years, (I grew up with three sisters and the only other boy in the village only wanted to fight.) My wife was a tomboy in hers. Fortunately for us we grew up in the 60's and 70's - an age when our parents and teachers were quite happy to let us be ourselves.
These days, you would have been told that your "real self" must be a girl because of your "gender-nonconforming" behaviour. "Here, take these puberty blockers before your natural development destroys any chance to become your truest, deepest self which you, as a child, certainly know best (now that we've told you what it is)!"
This is an important essay and documentation. Of course the language is changing to accomodate the ideology but I don't think that is the root cause of the surge. Rather it is an accelerant of the medical transitions. I would like to hear more people talking about trends that primed the markets. Surely the kids would be identifying as trans even if the MDs weren't so on board.
I was noticing academia is entirely dominated by teachers and profs who bought into ideology purporting it was social justice to encourage females to be more like males and males to be more like females. It is a outgrowth of Blank Slatism.
In school and pop culture females are encouraged to be more: assertive, interested in STEM, physically competitive etc. They were told these behaviors were the key to success in life. No longer will females be subjugated to the patriarchy of family life. They need to be independent. Males on the other hand have been taught that "toxic masculinity" and most male behaviors are pathologies that needed to be suppressed by any means necessary, including medicalization.
Wright has writen about Blank Slatism before but it is worth keeping in mind this pernicious science denialism preceded the trans trend and primed the market. We can eventually stop the medical lysenkoism at play here but the underlying ideologies pushed on kids will be much bigger battles.
Of the top of my head I'm drawing from Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Pinker, Sommers, Sowell and other that explore the many ways that gender and racial engineering, quotaism have been top down projects intruding into every crevice of education.
Beyond “tomboys” and “feminine boys”, under these new definitions, aren’t all gays and lesbians, by way of their same-sex expressions and behaviors, acting outside of what is “typically associated” with the “traditional (heterosexual) expectations” of their sex? And so, in their view, are all gays and lesbians “transgender” or how then do they actually try to distinguish between gays and lesbians and those who are “transgender”?
I always have and always will identify as a tomboy. No medical intervention needed.
I coined the term, cross sex ideation. It's more accurate. Coupled with the false narrative of suicidal ideation in children, it's a most destructive, alluring narcissism. Exulansic, at her YouTube channel, Isle of Ex, calls "affirmation" a function of placebo effect, meaning the patient feels better because they're "doing something." Desisters, meaning those who tried out social transition but stopped before harming their bodies, have clues for us, as do detransitioners. The entire diagnosis must be questioned.
I find Erica Anderson's comment on the what happened question to be disingenuous. He is a man who did the surgeries and promoted "transition" starting back when it "was so rare." Obviously the pharma money, often going through the Arcus Foundation, is influencing through programs of speakers going into schools and other institutions. We have "the Johns" (Steward and Oliver) causing more misinformation, promulgating all the old tropes, pretending the research from 40 years ago had validity. The path back to mind/body connectedness is mind/body work.
Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)
uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com