I don't agree that "conservatism" as a political position has been a contributor at all to the rise of the trans activists. I also don't agree that Second Wave Feminism has been a primary contributor.
I am a clinical psychologist and I have extensive experience working with trans identified clients of the "original type," i.e., many were males with histories of transvestic fetishism. I also have experience working with women who transitioned after living for years as butch lesbians. (Some of these women explicitly identified as butch and some did not). I started working with people with "gender" issues during the 1990's, and the youngest trans (or questioning) clients I saw over the next few decades were born before 1985.
I live in Portland, where conservatives and conservatism have been driven close to extinction. All of the trans identified people I have worked with were liberal Democrats, but most of the men were not highly politically involved. The women were more likely to have been exposed to radical ideas and activism within the lesbian community, but many were not directly involved in feminist or lesbian politics.
Interestingly, the men I worked with were commonly employed in male dominated fields such as high tech or blue collar industrial trades, and some had histories of professional military service. They typically identified as heterosexual and were married to women. A smaller number of the trans identified men had been involved in occupations regarded as feminine, such as hair styling, and those men were more likely to have had histories of gay relationships and to identify as bisexual.
None of the people I worked with from any of the above male groups told me that feminism was an influence in the evolution of their trans identities. Many of the men reported that autogynephilia had developed along with sexualized cross dressing, and that their gender dysphoria increased after that. Shame and fear of being caught cross dressing by their wives or other people caused these men to be isolated within their cross-sex experiences. They generally did not talk to anyone about what they were doing or feeling and were not connected to any of the trans support systems that began to appear near the end of the last century.
The same was not, of course, true for the women who were living as "butch" or some related identifier within the lesbian community. Most of these people dressed in men's clothes for years while in gay settings and some of them dressed in men's clothes all the time. Butch lesbians had been living like this prior to the onset of the feminist Second Wave. During the 1970's and 1980's they were not particularly supported by the new wave of women who joined the lesbian community as university-based feminist activists. Feminism aggressively criticized butch/femme roles as patriarchal. Butch/femme roles did come back into popularity a few decades later, and masculine women began exploring a wide variety of individually labeled sexual identities. This trend was happening among Millennials by the early 2000's, and it appears to have been the predecessor of the current proliferation of sexual and gender identities within Gen Z.
The trans-identified males I saw in my practice mostly had very conventional ideas about feminine and masculine roles. They would talk about their sense of being female as a vague feeling they had, but would support their sense of being female by references to how they preferred to play with girls when they were children, preferred girls over boys' games and so forth. They did not seem to see any conflict with the fact that they chose and excelled at male dominated careers, nor did they change careers when they transitioned. The trans identified females tended to be scornful and phobic about feminine roles and appearance, like teenage boys insecure about their masculinity. So, I would say that most but not all of the trans people I met supported traditional, polarized sex roles without necessarily having a conscious philosophy that favored this position.
All of the trans identified people I saw had a specific image of what they wanted to look like as a member of their preferred sex. The men nearly all cherished a stereotypically bombshell image, such as Dolly Parton. The trans identified women did not necessarily want to be stereotypical he-men, but many of them did want a particular type of male physique.
In summary, both the trans identified males and trans identified females, prior to the recent wave of Gen Z people, generally embraced traditional stereotypic masculine and feminine roles and wanted to look and function as members of the other sex within the traditional set up. The primary effect of feminism that I saw was mostly on the university-based lesbian communities, where the traditional sex roles were for a couple decades at least strongly rejected as a model to emulate.
I have recently been hearing that most of the younger masculine women who previously identified as "butch" or some variant thereof are now medically transitioning, to the dismay of the lesbian femmes who prefer them as partners. One interpretation of the mass transition is that those women did endorse the stereotypic roles (as their butch behavior did convey), and that most of them would choose to be biological males in traditional masculine roles if that were possible.
I think that both the women's movement and the gay liberation movement inspired some trans identified people to want the same kind of movement for themselves, and some trans people chose to become trans activists. The gay and lesbian communities offered an accepting environment for trans identified people as long as they identified themselves as gay. Now that these people have come out as trans it turns out that some of them were actually heterosexual or bi, and have not changed their sexual preference.
The Second Wave feminist movement contributed to the current woke movement its tyrannical emphasis on moralistic political correctness, with the accompanying speech policing and forced conformity to radical ideals. This became a source of horrible divisiveness within the feminist movement as early as the 1970's, and spread to the university-based lesbian communities, where it has flourished until the present day. The elaboration of many named sexual identities also developed within both the lesbian subculture and the gay men's subculture within the past couple of decades, leading to the Gen Z identity spectrum.
So, in my opinion, the evolving feminist, lesbian and gay rights movements were the incubators that enabled the trans movement to arise in its present form. But feminists and gay/lesbian activists generally were not planning on that development. Trans activism emerged organically when trans identified people gained access to medical transition technologies and opportunities to gather together and organize as a demographic with common goals. Trans activists eventually gained enough power to take over both the gay and lesbian communities, such that Gay Pride Day has morphed into (Trans) Pride Month.
Brilliantly articulated but missing a critical element: the economic model within which feminism arose. Because women did not have reproductive freedom and could not provide for themselves and their many children (staying at home as a mother was a luxury not available to the working class), and fathers often abandoned their families leaving them destitute. Or fathers/husbands abused their wives and children and treated them as chattel or slaves as they, themselves, were treated by the more powerful men above them. Therefore, suffragettes fought for political power to change the material circumstances of their lives. They fought for the vote, for financial independence, for freedom from abuse and exploitation.
Matt Walsh, for all the excellent work he's done bringing awareness to the public about the harms of gender ideology, is extremely naive at best, cruelly ignorant at worst. Blaming all of feminism, a movement which does not and cannot represent half the global population, is ludicrous. It's convenient and simple for the traditionalist conservative men who pine for a return to 'old-fashioned values' where men were men and women knew their place. It's seductive to think we can go back there, but it's impossible to expect that.
If anything, it's pornography and the male fetishists with billions of dollars who are trying to dismantle the notion of sexual dimorphism in order to usher in transhumanism and medicalize all human beings as if we're a collection of interchangeable body parts. Women's bodies, in particular, are seen as commodities, for sex, as baby factories, as servants.
Unless/until men start seeing women as fully human, whether or not they choose to be homemakers or career women, we'll never evolve as a species. It's endlessly frustrating to see that patriarchy serves NOBODY - neither men nor women. It serves only the powerful, the oligarchs, the rulers.
Porn and academic gender studies have created some kind of nightmare that makes me want to take just a few lived ones and run for the hills. I have lost two close friends to them saying things such as "other ways of knowing." One of these friends has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. I feel an earthquake from Hell under my feet. Where can I go? Political refugees who came here are scratching their heads right now and wondering, "Where to now?" My mom is one them; a Chinese friend is another. I thought of Trans Lysenkoism before an article about it was published by anyone. It's just common sense.
Joyce is 1000% correct about 1000% of everything lately, including this. yes, feminists as a group are a favorite punching bag of conservative entertainers in the US, like Walsh. i suspect he may go out of his way to trash feminists just to show fellow conservatives that hes still a conservative, despite his focus on gender ideology, an issue they may see as a "gay" issue.
but all of this sort of doesnt matter. US conservatives live in their own bubble. in many ways theyre detached from reality. but theyre also the only group in the US that has done anything to oppose gender ideology. the democrats have abandoned us. no one is comming to save us. except Matt Walsh. for that he gets much credit. he couldnt care less about anyone across the pond, neither does his audience. he doesnt care about being correct. at least not about anything as far away from him and his audience as "feminism". does anyone remember Trump? every day all day he blathered 100% hot air with a 5 gallon bucket of pure lies. it didnt mater.
Walsh is rasing awareness about gender ideology, which is the best way to counter it. hes getting US conservatives engaged in an issue they normally would sprint away from. for that hes a hero. maybe Joyce and Walsh can just agree to disagree.
btw, its not feminists or conservatives who are to blame for gender ideology. its billionaire agp's like Martine Rothblatt. These rich fetishists cooked up gender ideology in their basement surrounded by piles of porn while wearing womens underwear. they grouped with rich attorneys who saw how easily US public institutions incorporated diversity laws and monitoring intended to help historically disadvantaged groups. they used these laws to the advantage of rich white males at the expense of historically disadvantaged groups, like kids, women, gays and people with mental illness. they financed a massive misinformation campaign that tricked gullible people and dummies who are bad at math.
A thorough and interesting analysis. However, I don't see how dissecting or debating the origins of transgender ideology furthers our efforts to mount a constructive response/opposition with the necessary urgency. It's already well-established that we're politically a coalition of odd bedfellows who otherwise don't agree on much.
Well done, Ms. Reed. The way to 'square the circle' between traditional and feminist understandings of the difference between the sexes is with the discussion of the individual elements of femininity and masculinity and their characterization as overlapping bell curves. There is no trait typical of masculinity for which one cannot identify a woman who is more "masculine" than the typical male, and vice versa - men are bolder, but there are very bold women; women are more nurturing, but there are very nurturing men. Gender non-conforming people - women who are mathematicians, men who are caregivers - deserve to be treated well and permitted to pursue what is best for them. Yet what began as concern for the equality and opportunity of the outliers quickly became an obsession with the outliers. The social pressure for girls to grow up to be supportive wives has now flipped entirely to the opposite, and that doesn't serve girls any better. Now kids come up in schools where they are ridiculed for being "basic," and are encouraged to seek - or invent - peculiarity within themselves. Malleability to social pressure is itself a trait more typical of the female sex, and thus girls are more susceptible to this pressure, where boys are more alienated by it.
A very level headed and precise analysis of the situation. It is important to recognize that acknowledging behavioral differences between the sexes does not necessarily lead to prescriptive gender roles. We can understand that average differences between the sexes exist and still treat everyone equally and as individuals.
A teenage girl would rather “chop her tits off” than make sandwiches for a man? What planet does this woman live on??? And the language is horrifyingly callous.
Modern feminism (in my mind this is post 2000) as a principle may not be bad. But neither is socialism, as a principle. Or capitalism.
The unintended consequences however are still consequences, and they weren't entirely unforeseen.
At the crux of the issue is something you touched upon which is the idea (that is popular to to hold and is evident in almost all modern writing) that men and women are scarcely different. This idea will admit that biological functions and maybe other obvious characteristics are different, but then proposes that otherwise men and women are basically the same.
So policy is structured around that idea. For policy purposes, it's functional in most cases and ethical. Female firefighters are all good and well, provided they can pass the *same* physical requirements, for example, to not risk losing rescue capacity while on the job relative to men. This seems sensible enough. Equality of opportunity is an ideal state. But the idea that the sexes are barely different has huge knock-on effects.
If sexes they are scarcely different, and they are basically the same, this is what opens the door to gender ideology.
When social/cultural pressures from policy or social norms lessen, biological pressures rise to the top.
Then the differences become painfully apparent, and if someone is 100% committed to the gender ideology, the biological differences become an impediment to this ideal. This gender crowd has noticed this, and is now at war with the last real barrier between the sexes. After all, the sexes are the same except for purely biological reasons related to reproduction only, right? Or so goes the popular argument that I've seen relayed countless times in Hollywood writing, TV, music, and major cultural institutions.
The gender crowd believes that anyone can be anything, and they seem to hate that biology gets in the way. And this is how we end up with gross denial of biological reality.
I'm afraid I have to lay the blame mostly at the feet of third-wave feminism. The problem with blaming conservatives is that no one who is involved in the trans agenda pays any attention to conservatives, but they do pay a lot of attention to feminists.
Thanks for this. Trying to be objective and fair on this subject is harder than balancing on a razor’s edge.
Yes, Matt Walsh is a bigot and a religious nutcase but happens to be right on biology and evolutionary traits.
Yes, Helen Joyce is brilliant but she sounds deranged when she claims that a normal teenage girl would rather cut her tits off than serve a sandwich to man. And how is it that so many women feminists support this and yet feminism is not to be blamed ?
Also, don’t forget:
There is a huge profit motive at work here, both from pharma players and medical professionals
Politicians are pandering whores. How did opposition to mutilation of children get bunched together with gay conversion therapy ?
Postmodernist philosophy contributes as well by rejecting the idea of objective truth (which includes biology)
That was an excellent post and mirrors my thoughts. I am tired of the vilification of the word "feminist," and it's use as an umbrella word to mock any woman with an independent thought. I'm also tired of those who call themselves feminists and then proceed to vilify males. One cannot be a feminist, imo, if one is vilifying males, like those who believe males accused of rape should not be given due process on a college campus. I would also argue one must dislike our Constitution, and the equal protections and rights guaranteed to all, if one is constantly attacking those who don't conform to narrow gender stereotypes.
“A flawed argument presented by Walsh, in response to Joyce’s podcast interview, claims that the emergence of transgender ideology directly following third-wave feminism serves as evidence that feminism—not longstanding conservative values—caused gender ideology to explode.”
The trans phenomenon in terms of a psychological propensity to fantasize about being a woman may exist independently of trans ideology but only the existence of a trans ideology can provide the intellectual basis from which to conclude that trans women are really women, etc. And that aspect of the ideology owes a great deal to feminism. Also, Walsh’s point about traditional sex roles never having led to trans people in the past, is a devastating point against Joyce.
I lay the problem at the feet of the US Declaration of Independence since this is all about random stabs at explaining an especially corrosive version of the 15-year androgyny cycle (I’m old enough to remember glam rock, unisex, and other versions). In it (Declaration) we read the frankly scary “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” - OMFG! planted in the minds of unsuspecting Americans for hundreds of years. That’s what created “trans women are women”.
Thank you for this summary. In her book, as I recall, Helen Joyce quotes the therapist Sasha Ayad saying that her teen girl patients were trying "not to be girls" more than they were seeking to be boys. I think that Joyce is trying to reflect that aspect of teen girl transition, when she quips about teen girls and sandwiches. As for her language choices, I think she is sincere is her anger at teen transition and the risks and loses that come with it. For me, strong language is called for here. The alternative is the euphemism "top surgery" - and all the other misuses of language (like "gender-affirming") that have harmed so many.
Matt Walsh. Is this the same Matt Walsh who has recently been tweeting that feminism is responsible for more deaths than communism, fascism and something something? It isn't fair to Helen Joyce to pair her against a bomb thrower such as Walsh. Surely there must be a more credible advocate for "conservatism," which, by the way, in the context of this essay seems to be a caricature of stereotypical male attitudes and behavior concerning sex and sex roles.
I don't agree that "conservatism" as a political position has been a contributor at all to the rise of the trans activists. I also don't agree that Second Wave Feminism has been a primary contributor.
I am a clinical psychologist and I have extensive experience working with trans identified clients of the "original type," i.e., many were males with histories of transvestic fetishism. I also have experience working with women who transitioned after living for years as butch lesbians. (Some of these women explicitly identified as butch and some did not). I started working with people with "gender" issues during the 1990's, and the youngest trans (or questioning) clients I saw over the next few decades were born before 1985.
I live in Portland, where conservatives and conservatism have been driven close to extinction. All of the trans identified people I have worked with were liberal Democrats, but most of the men were not highly politically involved. The women were more likely to have been exposed to radical ideas and activism within the lesbian community, but many were not directly involved in feminist or lesbian politics.
Interestingly, the men I worked with were commonly employed in male dominated fields such as high tech or blue collar industrial trades, and some had histories of professional military service. They typically identified as heterosexual and were married to women. A smaller number of the trans identified men had been involved in occupations regarded as feminine, such as hair styling, and those men were more likely to have had histories of gay relationships and to identify as bisexual.
None of the people I worked with from any of the above male groups told me that feminism was an influence in the evolution of their trans identities. Many of the men reported that autogynephilia had developed along with sexualized cross dressing, and that their gender dysphoria increased after that. Shame and fear of being caught cross dressing by their wives or other people caused these men to be isolated within their cross-sex experiences. They generally did not talk to anyone about what they were doing or feeling and were not connected to any of the trans support systems that began to appear near the end of the last century.
The same was not, of course, true for the women who were living as "butch" or some related identifier within the lesbian community. Most of these people dressed in men's clothes for years while in gay settings and some of them dressed in men's clothes all the time. Butch lesbians had been living like this prior to the onset of the feminist Second Wave. During the 1970's and 1980's they were not particularly supported by the new wave of women who joined the lesbian community as university-based feminist activists. Feminism aggressively criticized butch/femme roles as patriarchal. Butch/femme roles did come back into popularity a few decades later, and masculine women began exploring a wide variety of individually labeled sexual identities. This trend was happening among Millennials by the early 2000's, and it appears to have been the predecessor of the current proliferation of sexual and gender identities within Gen Z.
The trans-identified males I saw in my practice mostly had very conventional ideas about feminine and masculine roles. They would talk about their sense of being female as a vague feeling they had, but would support their sense of being female by references to how they preferred to play with girls when they were children, preferred girls over boys' games and so forth. They did not seem to see any conflict with the fact that they chose and excelled at male dominated careers, nor did they change careers when they transitioned. The trans identified females tended to be scornful and phobic about feminine roles and appearance, like teenage boys insecure about their masculinity. So, I would say that most but not all of the trans people I met supported traditional, polarized sex roles without necessarily having a conscious philosophy that favored this position.
All of the trans identified people I saw had a specific image of what they wanted to look like as a member of their preferred sex. The men nearly all cherished a stereotypically bombshell image, such as Dolly Parton. The trans identified women did not necessarily want to be stereotypical he-men, but many of them did want a particular type of male physique.
In summary, both the trans identified males and trans identified females, prior to the recent wave of Gen Z people, generally embraced traditional stereotypic masculine and feminine roles and wanted to look and function as members of the other sex within the traditional set up. The primary effect of feminism that I saw was mostly on the university-based lesbian communities, where the traditional sex roles were for a couple decades at least strongly rejected as a model to emulate.
I have recently been hearing that most of the younger masculine women who previously identified as "butch" or some variant thereof are now medically transitioning, to the dismay of the lesbian femmes who prefer them as partners. One interpretation of the mass transition is that those women did endorse the stereotypic roles (as their butch behavior did convey), and that most of them would choose to be biological males in traditional masculine roles if that were possible.
I think that both the women's movement and the gay liberation movement inspired some trans identified people to want the same kind of movement for themselves, and some trans people chose to become trans activists. The gay and lesbian communities offered an accepting environment for trans identified people as long as they identified themselves as gay. Now that these people have come out as trans it turns out that some of them were actually heterosexual or bi, and have not changed their sexual preference.
The Second Wave feminist movement contributed to the current woke movement its tyrannical emphasis on moralistic political correctness, with the accompanying speech policing and forced conformity to radical ideals. This became a source of horrible divisiveness within the feminist movement as early as the 1970's, and spread to the university-based lesbian communities, where it has flourished until the present day. The elaboration of many named sexual identities also developed within both the lesbian subculture and the gay men's subculture within the past couple of decades, leading to the Gen Z identity spectrum.
So, in my opinion, the evolving feminist, lesbian and gay rights movements were the incubators that enabled the trans movement to arise in its present form. But feminists and gay/lesbian activists generally were not planning on that development. Trans activism emerged organically when trans identified people gained access to medical transition technologies and opportunities to gather together and organize as a demographic with common goals. Trans activists eventually gained enough power to take over both the gay and lesbian communities, such that Gay Pride Day has morphed into (Trans) Pride Month.
Brilliantly articulated but missing a critical element: the economic model within which feminism arose. Because women did not have reproductive freedom and could not provide for themselves and their many children (staying at home as a mother was a luxury not available to the working class), and fathers often abandoned their families leaving them destitute. Or fathers/husbands abused their wives and children and treated them as chattel or slaves as they, themselves, were treated by the more powerful men above them. Therefore, suffragettes fought for political power to change the material circumstances of their lives. They fought for the vote, for financial independence, for freedom from abuse and exploitation.
Matt Walsh, for all the excellent work he's done bringing awareness to the public about the harms of gender ideology, is extremely naive at best, cruelly ignorant at worst. Blaming all of feminism, a movement which does not and cannot represent half the global population, is ludicrous. It's convenient and simple for the traditionalist conservative men who pine for a return to 'old-fashioned values' where men were men and women knew their place. It's seductive to think we can go back there, but it's impossible to expect that.
If anything, it's pornography and the male fetishists with billions of dollars who are trying to dismantle the notion of sexual dimorphism in order to usher in transhumanism and medicalize all human beings as if we're a collection of interchangeable body parts. Women's bodies, in particular, are seen as commodities, for sex, as baby factories, as servants.
Unless/until men start seeing women as fully human, whether or not they choose to be homemakers or career women, we'll never evolve as a species. It's endlessly frustrating to see that patriarchy serves NOBODY - neither men nor women. It serves only the powerful, the oligarchs, the rulers.
Porn and academic gender studies have created some kind of nightmare that makes me want to take just a few lived ones and run for the hills. I have lost two close friends to them saying things such as "other ways of knowing." One of these friends has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. I feel an earthquake from Hell under my feet. Where can I go? Political refugees who came here are scratching their heads right now and wondering, "Where to now?" My mom is one them; a Chinese friend is another. I thought of Trans Lysenkoism before an article about it was published by anyone. It's just common sense.
Joyce is 1000% correct about 1000% of everything lately, including this. yes, feminists as a group are a favorite punching bag of conservative entertainers in the US, like Walsh. i suspect he may go out of his way to trash feminists just to show fellow conservatives that hes still a conservative, despite his focus on gender ideology, an issue they may see as a "gay" issue.
but all of this sort of doesnt matter. US conservatives live in their own bubble. in many ways theyre detached from reality. but theyre also the only group in the US that has done anything to oppose gender ideology. the democrats have abandoned us. no one is comming to save us. except Matt Walsh. for that he gets much credit. he couldnt care less about anyone across the pond, neither does his audience. he doesnt care about being correct. at least not about anything as far away from him and his audience as "feminism". does anyone remember Trump? every day all day he blathered 100% hot air with a 5 gallon bucket of pure lies. it didnt mater.
Walsh is rasing awareness about gender ideology, which is the best way to counter it. hes getting US conservatives engaged in an issue they normally would sprint away from. for that hes a hero. maybe Joyce and Walsh can just agree to disagree.
btw, its not feminists or conservatives who are to blame for gender ideology. its billionaire agp's like Martine Rothblatt. These rich fetishists cooked up gender ideology in their basement surrounded by piles of porn while wearing womens underwear. they grouped with rich attorneys who saw how easily US public institutions incorporated diversity laws and monitoring intended to help historically disadvantaged groups. they used these laws to the advantage of rich white males at the expense of historically disadvantaged groups, like kids, women, gays and people with mental illness. they financed a massive misinformation campaign that tricked gullible people and dummies who are bad at math.
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/martine-rothblatt-a-founding-father-of-the-transgender-empire/?expand_article=1
A thorough and interesting analysis. However, I don't see how dissecting or debating the origins of transgender ideology furthers our efforts to mount a constructive response/opposition with the necessary urgency. It's already well-established that we're politically a coalition of odd bedfellows who otherwise don't agree on much.
Well done, Ms. Reed. The way to 'square the circle' between traditional and feminist understandings of the difference between the sexes is with the discussion of the individual elements of femininity and masculinity and their characterization as overlapping bell curves. There is no trait typical of masculinity for which one cannot identify a woman who is more "masculine" than the typical male, and vice versa - men are bolder, but there are very bold women; women are more nurturing, but there are very nurturing men. Gender non-conforming people - women who are mathematicians, men who are caregivers - deserve to be treated well and permitted to pursue what is best for them. Yet what began as concern for the equality and opportunity of the outliers quickly became an obsession with the outliers. The social pressure for girls to grow up to be supportive wives has now flipped entirely to the opposite, and that doesn't serve girls any better. Now kids come up in schools where they are ridiculed for being "basic," and are encouraged to seek - or invent - peculiarity within themselves. Malleability to social pressure is itself a trait more typical of the female sex, and thus girls are more susceptible to this pressure, where boys are more alienated by it.
A very level headed and precise analysis of the situation. It is important to recognize that acknowledging behavioral differences between the sexes does not necessarily lead to prescriptive gender roles. We can understand that average differences between the sexes exist and still treat everyone equally and as individuals.
A teenage girl would rather “chop her tits off” than make sandwiches for a man? What planet does this woman live on??? And the language is horrifyingly callous.
Modern feminism (in my mind this is post 2000) as a principle may not be bad. But neither is socialism, as a principle. Or capitalism.
The unintended consequences however are still consequences, and they weren't entirely unforeseen.
At the crux of the issue is something you touched upon which is the idea (that is popular to to hold and is evident in almost all modern writing) that men and women are scarcely different. This idea will admit that biological functions and maybe other obvious characteristics are different, but then proposes that otherwise men and women are basically the same.
So policy is structured around that idea. For policy purposes, it's functional in most cases and ethical. Female firefighters are all good and well, provided they can pass the *same* physical requirements, for example, to not risk losing rescue capacity while on the job relative to men. This seems sensible enough. Equality of opportunity is an ideal state. But the idea that the sexes are barely different has huge knock-on effects.
If sexes they are scarcely different, and they are basically the same, this is what opens the door to gender ideology.
When social/cultural pressures from policy or social norms lessen, biological pressures rise to the top.
Then the differences become painfully apparent, and if someone is 100% committed to the gender ideology, the biological differences become an impediment to this ideal. This gender crowd has noticed this, and is now at war with the last real barrier between the sexes. After all, the sexes are the same except for purely biological reasons related to reproduction only, right? Or so goes the popular argument that I've seen relayed countless times in Hollywood writing, TV, music, and major cultural institutions.
The gender crowd believes that anyone can be anything, and they seem to hate that biology gets in the way. And this is how we end up with gross denial of biological reality.
I'm afraid I have to lay the blame mostly at the feet of third-wave feminism. The problem with blaming conservatives is that no one who is involved in the trans agenda pays any attention to conservatives, but they do pay a lot of attention to feminists.
Thanks for this. Trying to be objective and fair on this subject is harder than balancing on a razor’s edge.
Yes, Matt Walsh is a bigot and a religious nutcase but happens to be right on biology and evolutionary traits.
Yes, Helen Joyce is brilliant but she sounds deranged when she claims that a normal teenage girl would rather cut her tits off than serve a sandwich to man. And how is it that so many women feminists support this and yet feminism is not to be blamed ?
Also, don’t forget:
There is a huge profit motive at work here, both from pharma players and medical professionals
Politicians are pandering whores. How did opposition to mutilation of children get bunched together with gay conversion therapy ?
Postmodernist philosophy contributes as well by rejecting the idea of objective truth (which includes biology)
So much to work with it makes you dizzy...
That was an excellent post and mirrors my thoughts. I am tired of the vilification of the word "feminist," and it's use as an umbrella word to mock any woman with an independent thought. I'm also tired of those who call themselves feminists and then proceed to vilify males. One cannot be a feminist, imo, if one is vilifying males, like those who believe males accused of rape should not be given due process on a college campus. I would also argue one must dislike our Constitution, and the equal protections and rights guaranteed to all, if one is constantly attacking those who don't conform to narrow gender stereotypes.
“A flawed argument presented by Walsh, in response to Joyce’s podcast interview, claims that the emergence of transgender ideology directly following third-wave feminism serves as evidence that feminism—not longstanding conservative values—caused gender ideology to explode.”
The trans phenomenon in terms of a psychological propensity to fantasize about being a woman may exist independently of trans ideology but only the existence of a trans ideology can provide the intellectual basis from which to conclude that trans women are really women, etc. And that aspect of the ideology owes a great deal to feminism. Also, Walsh’s point about traditional sex roles never having led to trans people in the past, is a devastating point against Joyce.
I lay the problem at the feet of the US Declaration of Independence since this is all about random stabs at explaining an especially corrosive version of the 15-year androgyny cycle (I’m old enough to remember glam rock, unisex, and other versions). In it (Declaration) we read the frankly scary “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” - OMFG! planted in the minds of unsuspecting Americans for hundreds of years. That’s what created “trans women are women”.
Or not.
Thank you for this summary. In her book, as I recall, Helen Joyce quotes the therapist Sasha Ayad saying that her teen girl patients were trying "not to be girls" more than they were seeking to be boys. I think that Joyce is trying to reflect that aspect of teen girl transition, when she quips about teen girls and sandwiches. As for her language choices, I think she is sincere is her anger at teen transition and the risks and loses that come with it. For me, strong language is called for here. The alternative is the euphemism "top surgery" - and all the other misuses of language (like "gender-affirming") that have harmed so many.
Matt Walsh. Is this the same Matt Walsh who has recently been tweeting that feminism is responsible for more deaths than communism, fascism and something something? It isn't fair to Helen Joyce to pair her against a bomb thrower such as Walsh. Surely there must be a more credible advocate for "conservatism," which, by the way, in the context of this essay seems to be a caricature of stereotypical male attitudes and behavior concerning sex and sex roles.