I find it interesting and notable that the connections between pornography exposure and this confusion are not brought up in court. It's clearly difficult for the detransitioners who testify about the misleading path of what's euphemistically called "affirmative care" to tell how they were lured into sissy hypno porn through smart phones and friend groups, but the psychologists now treating these unfortunate patients should be bringing this up. Why? Because it is an outside influence and obviously contradicts the trope of "wrong body since birth." I'm also stumped as to why no one is talking about the long accepted Piaget stages of child development, which also contradict this mythical early awareness of "wrong body." Toddlers in the age 3-6 phase, Pre-Operational in Piaget terms, do not have the language or cognition to express this clearly. Adults are interpreting and indoctrinating.
Exactly right. There could theoretically be some placebo effect from any of the social, chemical or surgical interventions being employed as part of "transition." That would not justify any of it.
The idea that anyone is born with the necessity to chemically and/or surgically alter their body to appear the opposite sex, or the necessity to be referred and treated as if one is the opposite sex, to have any semblance of happiness or avoid torment and suicide is religious in nature, as it cannot be proven and is also unfalsifiable.
I, for one, am not willing to lie to children or, more importantly, to both lie to pre-teens and teenagers and to chemically and surgically drastically alter their bodies in permanent ways that have serious health consequences based purely upon a religious notion that requires blind faith - and, frankly, goes against my gut feelings as well as being contrary to logic, reason and medical science.
Further, nobody has a "male brain" in a "female body" (or vice versa), any more than someone can have a male kidney in a female body or a male heart in a female body. This idea is simply nonsensical and illogical.
Thus, in addition to noting the total lack of proof - after years and years of trying to get it - that these medical interventions (or social interventions) have any overall benefit to psychological functioning, we must be clear that the entire premise upon which "transition" is based is lacking in logic or reason.
10-15 years ago, few people would be shy about saying that a movement which encourages kids to use breast binders, penis packers and penis tucking--let alone drugs and surgeries --is psychologically and physically abusive. Would we encourage kids to think they are born with the wrong face and tell them to put a paper bag over their heads?
This may be the right time to resurrect the term “pervert”. Trans is a made-up word, while pervert has a definitional meaning. Men who keep their dicks and then have the balls to call themselves women meet the definition of “pervert”. What they demand is “pervert privilege”.
It is perverse to tell children they may be born in the wrong body.
It is a perversion to mutilate healthy body parts of adolescents.
From the Cambridge Dictionary…..Pervert..“a person whose sexual behavior is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable”. We need to make it unacceptable once again.
I've seen some institutional backtracking (and reframing) but I suspect that many of these ideas will not shift until the status rewards turn around, or until the financial resources are cut off. As long as peer groups, credentiallers, graduates programs, and nonprofit employers still parrot this nonsense their members will too.
"Ideologies do not admit error, even if people do. They are unwieldly tools with which to understand the world and they should be assiduously avoided. Anyone who tells you that some value (safety, kindness, social justice, equity) is above ‘truth’ is not your friend."
Excellent point! We cede ground and effectively validate the gender identity movement when we argue only about outcomes. Thank you for fighting this important battle!
Spot on Colin, thank you. I can’t remember: did you write anything about the UK’s decision to fund a new trial for puberty blockers? This decision seems to cut sharply against reason and good, ethical science.
I mentioned some of what you say here in my fight against the transmafia in the NYC schools last night, particularly how MUTILATION is what the medical-pharma industry is pushing for. I've cued the Links to where I start speaking and combined, it is a less than 5 minute watch.
My personal email also appears below the Links, in case anyone like-minded would like to reach out:
I’m told my grandfather liked to dress up as a lady and go out. I’m told he wasn’t gay. That he was a man’s man in every way, but that he liked to dress up as a lady. My grandmother told me he stopped when he almost got killed by a bunch of men that figured out that he was not a woman.
I find all that strange. But, I just found out his mom actually named him Lorina because she wanted a girl. I’m gonna wager that she probably dressed him as a girl too.
When he turned eighteen, he changed his name to Luther.
On the flip side. I never really knew him. I met him a couple of times. He seemed like a real fuddy Duddy. Strait as an arrow. Looked down on the rest of the world.
I accidentally stumbled into cross-dressers' convention in Provincetown last century, entertaining & educational, straight family men growing out their combovers to wear sensible flats, knee-length skirts with blouse & jacket, opposite of drag queens or trans. Believe Fierstein wrote about it in Casa Valentina, Catskills period piece. We are a 🌈! Gay couple I was with were weirded out by dudes in skirts.
I read the linked article you co-wrote. I once heard James Cantor speculate that trans could be a version of being "very gay", gay dialed to eleven so to speak. This would apply to the original cohort of people with serious dysphoria, not the accumulation of new candidates for the label, I assume. If so, and it is speculation, it would make it impossible to distinguish same sex attracted trans from gays on scans. I guess the point is that we really don't know what causes a condition that most nations have felt needed serious help. And even if scans at some point reveal a more persuasive singular pattern, who would question the person who did not exhibit it.? So I agree with your, and the apparent Scandinavian position that studies have been bad, ideology has been rampant, and that evidence based research is urgently needed before we even know what's going on.
"if the foundational assumptions used to justify these treatments collapse under scrutiny, the interventions would remain unjustifiable."
this is one of the biggest mysteries of gender belief doctrine. how do the sci fi narratives used to justify these interventions go unchallenged?
looking at gender industry propaganda used to support gender policies, for example any document titled supporting transgender youth, one will find false statements in every third sentence. if one checks the footnotes that are purported to back up these claims, one will find either reports that dont support the claims or docs that misrepresent their findings. in other words, progressives are making policies based on completely fraudulent narratives.
per my understanding, laws that allow men to invade womens spaces or kids to be harmed via gender interventions are based on two falsehoods. one is that these interventions help. they dont. but the other is that identifying as another sex is immutable. however, little evidence suggests gender ID is anything other than voluntary. as such, gender ID should be thought of in the same context as other voluntary activities such as smoking or watching sports. do we normally allow people to play or watch sports in womens restrooms? do we allow kids to smoke at school? of course not. but this is what 100 false premises have tricked progressives into supporting
"Second, it asserts that a person can have a “brain sex”—equated with “gender identity”—that diverges from his body, creating a mismatch that drives gender dysphoria. The goal, then, is to align the body with this purportedly immutable “brain sex” through hormones and surgeries."
I would regard "brain sex" as far more mutable than "body sex," being a software fix rather than one in hardware, the problem is that we don't know how to change it. Well, that's not quite true: if we simply wait it corrects itself in the vast majority of cases. Ken Zucker showed us that, and as a side-effect free (and cost-free) treatment, it seems a far more desirable approach than turning healthy kids into infertile, anorgasmic lifetime recipients of pharmaceutical hormones.
"Centrists Libs will try to use “logic and reason”, or studies showing harm being done by “affirming” children. But that isn’t going to convince their progressive and leftist friends. The “basilisk of history” is always on their minds, they imagine reality as an Oscar-bite historical movie, with two sides of a political topic already deemed as either the good side or bad side of history. Opposing trans inclusion into Women Spots, makes you just like those bigots that protested de-segregation, it didn’t matter if you show a trusted and well researched study, or the basic facts of the biological difference between males and females. The “basilisk of history” has already decided, so your daughter must go ups against a six-foot male if she wants to play sports."
Thoughtful. I strongly support your position, and would give an additional perspective. The history of science is one of corrections. Geocentric solar system model was replaced with Heliocentric, miasmas -> disease, phlogiston -> oxidation, creation -> evolution etc. People are looking for some explanation, a bad one is proposed, and over time, it is replaced. Kuhn and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (63 years old I note).
We don't have an accurate scientific description or explanation of men who have a compulsion to imitate women (my description) which is a behavior found in males of all types of higher animals, except amphibians (sexual mimicry). It's a remarkably simple description and observation - humans are animals after all. It leads to very simple explanation for all observed behaviors by these men, and indeed the entire range of behaviors involving men who don't imitate women.
These men have a compulsion to imitate women to avoid male competition and conflict. At a 'physical' level, they are very successful, as you and others note, men imitating women have half the rate of death by male violence compared to other men.
In relation to women, the behavior generates a series of ways to avoid males to access women and perform stereotypical male actions. These men are attracted to women's prisons to reproduce without male presence, prison rape. These men are attracted to women's restrooms to mark them - urination - as their territory, without men to compete with them. These men are attracted to women's intimate spaces for sexual pleasure, like spas and locker rooms where they can leer at female bodies, without men to interfere. These men are attracted to women's sports where they can (paradoxically) exercise male dominance over female groups, without any competition from other men. These men are very attracted to lesbianism, because it presents sexual opportunities with a guarantee of no men ever. This is only off the top of my head.
What you write about is related to the fragility of the impersonation. It's generally quite easy to see these men are imitating women - they announce it. In order to preserve the impersonation, they have additional tactics. One is to restate the entire schema of biology and reproduction to be about their imitation. It isn not men and women, it's cis-men, and cis-women. It's not mothers, it's pregnant people. The intent is to reduce ordinary language and ideas to a state of ambiguity, where their presentation and behavior could be deemed within the range of women.
The word gender, in relation to humans, has no biological meaning, but it creates ambiguity with the uncountable number of possible "genders". These men then claim in some ambiguous gender to be actually female, or not-male. Gender, in common usage, actually means "ambigous sex", in the way it is used, but intentionally creates ambiguity and uncertainty in biology. There is no way to "affirm" sex uncertainty, it is a meaningless concept.
Likewise the ambiguous feelings (not sex) of boys and girls who are becoming gays or lesbians, are used to assert they are not male or female, to create uncertainty, that they are imitating the opposite sex without knowing it, something to be affirmed.
My opening point was that bad science, the science of gender, cannot just be stated "is false", but must be replace with a real explanation. Everyone want a science of sex, that explains these people - biology states they are sexual mimics like other animals, and that explains all behavior. Likewise, people need to understand why children are unhappy with their sex during adolescence - they are unhappy with feelings, which are new, still quite unusual, and bring them into roles they aren't entirely prepared for. It's called puberty. We need a better science of puberty.
Lesbians and Gays used biology relatively successfully for a long time. Homosexual sex is common in all animals. Humans are animals, there is nothing exceptional about lesbian and gay behaviors, and they harm nobody, as no animals harmed with homosexual behaviors. Penguins, bulls, and apes area all fine. A large number of people eventually responded to the fact that there was nothing psychologically perverse, damaging, or unnatural (the most common term) about the most natural of activities.
For men imitating women, I am sticking to "sexual mimicry" "mimesexuality" "men imitating women" and working on a book for the lay person the next few years, to in my own way replace the entire paradigm of gender, "trans", and entirely natural behaviors with simple scientifically valid descriptions and explanations which have antecedents in the animal world. We don't have to accept the mimicry, because its nature of concealment is what distorts and damages everything which encounters it, but doesn't recognize it. That's the core of the scientific problem.
The current nonsense, non-reality must be replaced, not negated. I don't see any other way to move on, as you rightly demand here.
I'm a bit concerned about the Skrmetti decision, if truth be told. Even if the court decides against the plaintiffs, this won't be the end of gender treatments; indeed, the arguments didn't really focus on the evidence, such as it is. If the Tennessee law is upheld, I worry that the states which protect these dubious procedures will simply double down, leaving us with half the nation on the absolute wrong track.
I'll take victories where I can find them, of course, but I wish we could anticipate something along the lines of the UK decision.
I find it interesting and notable that the connections between pornography exposure and this confusion are not brought up in court. It's clearly difficult for the detransitioners who testify about the misleading path of what's euphemistically called "affirmative care" to tell how they were lured into sissy hypno porn through smart phones and friend groups, but the psychologists now treating these unfortunate patients should be bringing this up. Why? Because it is an outside influence and obviously contradicts the trope of "wrong body since birth." I'm also stumped as to why no one is talking about the long accepted Piaget stages of child development, which also contradict this mythical early awareness of "wrong body." Toddlers in the age 3-6 phase, Pre-Operational in Piaget terms, do not have the language or cognition to express this clearly. Adults are interpreting and indoctrinating.
Exactly right. There could theoretically be some placebo effect from any of the social, chemical or surgical interventions being employed as part of "transition." That would not justify any of it.
The idea that anyone is born with the necessity to chemically and/or surgically alter their body to appear the opposite sex, or the necessity to be referred and treated as if one is the opposite sex, to have any semblance of happiness or avoid torment and suicide is religious in nature, as it cannot be proven and is also unfalsifiable.
I, for one, am not willing to lie to children or, more importantly, to both lie to pre-teens and teenagers and to chemically and surgically drastically alter their bodies in permanent ways that have serious health consequences based purely upon a religious notion that requires blind faith - and, frankly, goes against my gut feelings as well as being contrary to logic, reason and medical science.
Further, nobody has a "male brain" in a "female body" (or vice versa), any more than someone can have a male kidney in a female body or a male heart in a female body. This idea is simply nonsensical and illogical.
Thus, in addition to noting the total lack of proof - after years and years of trying to get it - that these medical interventions (or social interventions) have any overall benefit to psychological functioning, we must be clear that the entire premise upon which "transition" is based is lacking in logic or reason.
10-15 years ago, few people would be shy about saying that a movement which encourages kids to use breast binders, penis packers and penis tucking--let alone drugs and surgeries --is psychologically and physically abusive. Would we encourage kids to think they are born with the wrong face and tell them to put a paper bag over their heads?
This may be the right time to resurrect the term “pervert”. Trans is a made-up word, while pervert has a definitional meaning. Men who keep their dicks and then have the balls to call themselves women meet the definition of “pervert”. What they demand is “pervert privilege”.
It is perverse to tell children they may be born in the wrong body.
It is a perversion to mutilate healthy body parts of adolescents.
From the Cambridge Dictionary…..Pervert..“a person whose sexual behavior is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable”. We need to make it unacceptable once again.
I've seen some institutional backtracking (and reframing) but I suspect that many of these ideas will not shift until the status rewards turn around, or until the financial resources are cut off. As long as peer groups, credentiallers, graduates programs, and nonprofit employers still parrot this nonsense their members will too.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/quietly-correcting
Excellent post!
"Ideologies do not admit error, even if people do. They are unwieldly tools with which to understand the world and they should be assiduously avoided. Anyone who tells you that some value (safety, kindness, social justice, equity) is above ‘truth’ is not your friend."
Clarity. Well done.
Excellent point! We cede ground and effectively validate the gender identity movement when we argue only about outcomes. Thank you for fighting this important battle!
Spot on Colin, thank you. I can’t remember: did you write anything about the UK’s decision to fund a new trial for puberty blockers? This decision seems to cut sharply against reason and good, ethical science.
Thank you, Colin.
I mentioned some of what you say here in my fight against the transmafia in the NYC schools last night, particularly how MUTILATION is what the medical-pharma industry is pushing for. I've cued the Links to where I start speaking and combined, it is a less than 5 minute watch.
My personal email also appears below the Links, in case anyone like-minded would like to reach out:
https://www.youtube.com/live/mzKK2P5HG98?si=c4BWMHtMXGGk839L&t=3380
https://www.youtube.com/live/mzKK2P5HG98?si=VOpoPEknnjgLiKXv&t=10510
MY PERSONAL EMAIL:
JoannaVitalHealth@protonmail.com
I’m told my grandfather liked to dress up as a lady and go out. I’m told he wasn’t gay. That he was a man’s man in every way, but that he liked to dress up as a lady. My grandmother told me he stopped when he almost got killed by a bunch of men that figured out that he was not a woman.
I find all that strange. But, I just found out his mom actually named him Lorina because she wanted a girl. I’m gonna wager that she probably dressed him as a girl too.
When he turned eighteen, he changed his name to Luther.
On the flip side. I never really knew him. I met him a couple of times. He seemed like a real fuddy Duddy. Strait as an arrow. Looked down on the rest of the world.
I’m betting he was a democrat.
I accidentally stumbled into cross-dressers' convention in Provincetown last century, entertaining & educational, straight family men growing out their combovers to wear sensible flats, knee-length skirts with blouse & jacket, opposite of drag queens or trans. Believe Fierstein wrote about it in Casa Valentina, Catskills period piece. We are a 🌈! Gay couple I was with were weirded out by dudes in skirts.
I read the linked article you co-wrote. I once heard James Cantor speculate that trans could be a version of being "very gay", gay dialed to eleven so to speak. This would apply to the original cohort of people with serious dysphoria, not the accumulation of new candidates for the label, I assume. If so, and it is speculation, it would make it impossible to distinguish same sex attracted trans from gays on scans. I guess the point is that we really don't know what causes a condition that most nations have felt needed serious help. And even if scans at some point reveal a more persuasive singular pattern, who would question the person who did not exhibit it.? So I agree with your, and the apparent Scandinavian position that studies have been bad, ideology has been rampant, and that evidence based research is urgently needed before we even know what's going on.
"if the foundational assumptions used to justify these treatments collapse under scrutiny, the interventions would remain unjustifiable."
this is one of the biggest mysteries of gender belief doctrine. how do the sci fi narratives used to justify these interventions go unchallenged?
looking at gender industry propaganda used to support gender policies, for example any document titled supporting transgender youth, one will find false statements in every third sentence. if one checks the footnotes that are purported to back up these claims, one will find either reports that dont support the claims or docs that misrepresent their findings. in other words, progressives are making policies based on completely fraudulent narratives.
per my understanding, laws that allow men to invade womens spaces or kids to be harmed via gender interventions are based on two falsehoods. one is that these interventions help. they dont. but the other is that identifying as another sex is immutable. however, little evidence suggests gender ID is anything other than voluntary. as such, gender ID should be thought of in the same context as other voluntary activities such as smoking or watching sports. do we normally allow people to play or watch sports in womens restrooms? do we allow kids to smoke at school? of course not. but this is what 100 false premises have tricked progressives into supporting
"Second, it asserts that a person can have a “brain sex”—equated with “gender identity”—that diverges from his body, creating a mismatch that drives gender dysphoria. The goal, then, is to align the body with this purportedly immutable “brain sex” through hormones and surgeries."
I would regard "brain sex" as far more mutable than "body sex," being a software fix rather than one in hardware, the problem is that we don't know how to change it. Well, that's not quite true: if we simply wait it corrects itself in the vast majority of cases. Ken Zucker showed us that, and as a side-effect free (and cost-free) treatment, it seems a far more desirable approach than turning healthy kids into infertile, anorgasmic lifetime recipients of pharmaceutical hormones.
"Centrists Libs will try to use “logic and reason”, or studies showing harm being done by “affirming” children. But that isn’t going to convince their progressive and leftist friends. The “basilisk of history” is always on their minds, they imagine reality as an Oscar-bite historical movie, with two sides of a political topic already deemed as either the good side or bad side of history. Opposing trans inclusion into Women Spots, makes you just like those bigots that protested de-segregation, it didn’t matter if you show a trusted and well researched study, or the basic facts of the biological difference between males and females. The “basilisk of history” has already decided, so your daughter must go ups against a six-foot male if she wants to play sports."
https://birbantum.substack.com/p/the-trans-movement-is-here-to-stay
Thoughtful. I strongly support your position, and would give an additional perspective. The history of science is one of corrections. Geocentric solar system model was replaced with Heliocentric, miasmas -> disease, phlogiston -> oxidation, creation -> evolution etc. People are looking for some explanation, a bad one is proposed, and over time, it is replaced. Kuhn and "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (63 years old I note).
We don't have an accurate scientific description or explanation of men who have a compulsion to imitate women (my description) which is a behavior found in males of all types of higher animals, except amphibians (sexual mimicry). It's a remarkably simple description and observation - humans are animals after all. It leads to very simple explanation for all observed behaviors by these men, and indeed the entire range of behaviors involving men who don't imitate women.
These men have a compulsion to imitate women to avoid male competition and conflict. At a 'physical' level, they are very successful, as you and others note, men imitating women have half the rate of death by male violence compared to other men.
In relation to women, the behavior generates a series of ways to avoid males to access women and perform stereotypical male actions. These men are attracted to women's prisons to reproduce without male presence, prison rape. These men are attracted to women's restrooms to mark them - urination - as their territory, without men to compete with them. These men are attracted to women's intimate spaces for sexual pleasure, like spas and locker rooms where they can leer at female bodies, without men to interfere. These men are attracted to women's sports where they can (paradoxically) exercise male dominance over female groups, without any competition from other men. These men are very attracted to lesbianism, because it presents sexual opportunities with a guarantee of no men ever. This is only off the top of my head.
What you write about is related to the fragility of the impersonation. It's generally quite easy to see these men are imitating women - they announce it. In order to preserve the impersonation, they have additional tactics. One is to restate the entire schema of biology and reproduction to be about their imitation. It isn not men and women, it's cis-men, and cis-women. It's not mothers, it's pregnant people. The intent is to reduce ordinary language and ideas to a state of ambiguity, where their presentation and behavior could be deemed within the range of women.
The word gender, in relation to humans, has no biological meaning, but it creates ambiguity with the uncountable number of possible "genders". These men then claim in some ambiguous gender to be actually female, or not-male. Gender, in common usage, actually means "ambigous sex", in the way it is used, but intentionally creates ambiguity and uncertainty in biology. There is no way to "affirm" sex uncertainty, it is a meaningless concept.
Likewise the ambiguous feelings (not sex) of boys and girls who are becoming gays or lesbians, are used to assert they are not male or female, to create uncertainty, that they are imitating the opposite sex without knowing it, something to be affirmed.
My opening point was that bad science, the science of gender, cannot just be stated "is false", but must be replace with a real explanation. Everyone want a science of sex, that explains these people - biology states they are sexual mimics like other animals, and that explains all behavior. Likewise, people need to understand why children are unhappy with their sex during adolescence - they are unhappy with feelings, which are new, still quite unusual, and bring them into roles they aren't entirely prepared for. It's called puberty. We need a better science of puberty.
Lesbians and Gays used biology relatively successfully for a long time. Homosexual sex is common in all animals. Humans are animals, there is nothing exceptional about lesbian and gay behaviors, and they harm nobody, as no animals harmed with homosexual behaviors. Penguins, bulls, and apes area all fine. A large number of people eventually responded to the fact that there was nothing psychologically perverse, damaging, or unnatural (the most common term) about the most natural of activities.
For men imitating women, I am sticking to "sexual mimicry" "mimesexuality" "men imitating women" and working on a book for the lay person the next few years, to in my own way replace the entire paradigm of gender, "trans", and entirely natural behaviors with simple scientifically valid descriptions and explanations which have antecedents in the animal world. We don't have to accept the mimicry, because its nature of concealment is what distorts and damages everything which encounters it, but doesn't recognize it. That's the core of the scientific problem.
The current nonsense, non-reality must be replaced, not negated. I don't see any other way to move on, as you rightly demand here.
I'm a bit concerned about the Skrmetti decision, if truth be told. Even if the court decides against the plaintiffs, this won't be the end of gender treatments; indeed, the arguments didn't really focus on the evidence, such as it is. If the Tennessee law is upheld, I worry that the states which protect these dubious procedures will simply double down, leaving us with half the nation on the absolute wrong track.
I'll take victories where I can find them, of course, but I wish we could anticipate something along the lines of the UK decision.