This is really excellent; thank you. I get irrationally frustrated by people who think second wave feminism or gay rights inevitably led here. No, my ability to get a car loan in my own name and my own credit is not the reason for this bullshit. No, my gay friends being allowed to make marriage contracts with other consenting adults is not the cause of this nonsense. We are in fact allowed, as a society, to draw lines and insist they be honored. I get occasional emails from people who tell me that my concern about pedophilia normalization can only be solved by my finding Jesus, getting married, and otherwise embracing "traditional values." Finding blame-by-group isn't especially helpful. Looking at Facebook and TikTok and other places where the parents and teachers transing kids discuss these matters, it is clear that women are the primary foot soldiers promoting gender ideology these days. It is just as true that it was male perverts like John Money and Michel Foucault who started it, and wealthy Big Pharma execs are the primary beneficiaries. Plenty of blame to go around! Everyone needs to do everything they can, regardless of identity markers.
"I place the blame for gender ideology at the feet of those who embrace the reality rejection fueled by postmodernism, its subjective lens, and its destabilizing word games. It has unmoored us from objectivity and convinced too many that there is no such thing as objective truth. It is drowning us in obscurantism and nihilism and causing people to throw up their hands in defeat."
An astute observation, but I think you have to go deeper and ask why postmodernism emerged when it did and why it has gained such power. This is a religious question. Nietzsche predicted the rise of nihilism and totalitarianism in the aftermath of the "death of God" in the West. When a culture loses its unifying traditional myths, it becomes unmoored from reality. Postmodernism has just stepped in to fill the spiritual vacuum for us. I think this is why people like Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson (and Carl Jung before them) are so popular: maybe they offer us a glimpse of how to stay true to our founding mythos even if we are not conventionally "religious."
Post modernism as a cause, sure. But that alone would never have set this 'transgender" travesty in motion and take off like a rocket ship. There are many causes, some of which you named, and they're all implicated in this crime against humanity. None of them deserve to get off scott-free.
To me, the biggest culprit is the rise of the autogynephile billionaire class. The Pritzkers, Strykers, and Rothblatts, et al. who spread their money around like fertilizer. A million here, a billion there. It all adds up. And this allows a handful of deranged men to stack the deck and capture every institution in this country. Universities, medical societies, nongovernmental organizations, teacher's associations, the media, political candidates. Money talks. And even people who vehemently oppose the "trans" takeover are afraid to speak out lest they lose their careers, their livelihoods, and their friends.
Postmodernism is a shell game from top to bottom, a nesting doll of lies, that claims on its label to be a refuter of all grand narratives, a potent French brew of acid nihilism guaranteed to destroy any idea or tradition it's poured upon. But when you're dealing with con artists it's important to not focus on their dishonest word clouds, but on their actions.
For the radical French intellectuals of the 20th century (and even 19th century, but most intensely in the 1960s), nothing was more crucial than to display your loathing for the bougeoisie, it was mandatory for anyone who wanted intellectual cred, and much of the French Left project was aimed at the vilification and elimination of anything that could possibly be labeled "bourgeois" (in modern America, the only thing I can think to compare it with is the loathing liberals have for MAGA Deplorables); and by the 1960s Marxism was old but Maoism was what the cool kids were feeling, Sartre & de Beauvoir got a guided tour of China and came back true believers, and the magazine Quel Tel, which featured all the postmodern all-stars (Kristeva and Cixous, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault etc) were hardcore supporters of Mao even after the crimes of his Cultural Revolution were revealed. None of these people could have had the careers they did without some level of Marxist commitment, however cynical and/or performative.
Foucault and Derrida liked to play coy about their politics, they wanted to project an image of being higher-thinking philosophers, but both their ouvres are entirely part of the Marxist tradition, and their endless dishonesty fits right in with the Marxist belief of the ends justifying the means, of any tactic no matter how dishonest or destructive is allowed if it helps the cause aka Revolution.
Foucault, the supposed arch-nihilist, still gave speeches that could have come from the mouth of Lenin: "When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this."
And Derrida in his endless blabbing for publicity even once accidentally told the truth: “Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”
There has never once been a postmodern deconstruction of Marxism or Maoism, of any Left movement or text, and there never will be. The entire program is a Leftist political project disguised as a neutral philosophical tool, with the goal of dismantling and deconstructing our entire cultural and intellectual heritage, to be replaced by a reign of Left commissars and philosopher-kings.
There are so many factors that go into the making of gender ideology. I refer to it as a perfect storm scenario. Post-modernism is definitely a common theme running through many, but not all, of those various factors that went into the making of this nightmarish movement. For instance, there is the money to be made by Big Pharma, medical specialists and companies selling "packers" and "binders," not to mention corporate good will gained by throwing up the LGBTQ flag and claiming to be supportive of this "marginalized" group. There's the desire by so many people to seem "good" that they don't bother to question this ideology. There's those motivated to either validate their own decisions or make others see that their decisions were inevitable - and I'm not just speaking of autogynophilees. Parents who have "transitioned" and medicalized their children from a young age have to believe they did the right thing too. (These motives aren't all conscious.) There's those looking for a "quick fix" for all that ails them, who are attracted to an actual answer to why they are struggling - with their bodies, socially, or both. And society has been over-using drugs to treat their psychological problems for some time now - with so many people taking meds for ADHD, depression, anxiety, so the idea of taking a hormone or having an operation to finally be "happy" makes sense in this society. There's the tendency for many (certainly not all) in the medical community to become arrogant. There are those who still aren't comfortable with being gay or having a gay child (again, much of this is sub-conscious). There's the internet and social media to spread the ideas surrounding gender ideology around, and to allow 20-year-olds to convince 13-year-olds that there's nothing better than your first dose of T or E. There was Covid, to increase the dosage of social media, which just sped things up a bit. There's over-sexualization of very young women, with harsh beauty standards, and an over-enthusiastic "me too" movement that went beyond the good of exposing terrible abuse and sexism, and moved into making many young men with sex drives feel like monsters. There's the embarrassment of being a white middle-class straight "cis" person (aka the "oppressor"). There's the black and white thinking associated with those that have autistic tendencies, and the body-shame suffered by those who have actually been physically abused. And there's the general inability or unwillingness of so many people to think things through - so they can't see the absurdity (true for all of the horrible movements in the world, from the Holocaust, to the Red Scare, to the Salem Witch Trials, etc.) People are blind to the truth and afraid to speak up if they see the truth, lest they suffer the punishment. I'm sure there are more factors than I listed, but the point is that it took a bunch of social phenomena to lead to this. The real question is: how do we get out of it?
I posit that Alfred Kinsey, John Money and Volkmar Sigusch, all "sexologist" researchers, comprise the first level of accountability. They did not, however, have any idea that "transsexuality" as they called it, would become a social contagion. They viewed it within their context of the "sexual repression" of their time. By this I mean, before reliable birth control (which still needs work, in my opinion) and during social pressures on women to be "saintlike" and not have sexual feelings. Then came Blanchard, Cantor, Zucker and Bailey, some of whom have expressed sketchy understandings of the difference between children and adults, in terms of consent. (Early Childhood educator here, children are not capable of consent and statutory rape is what it is) Then came the civil rights struggle to abolish previously outlawed same sex involvements, usually based on Biblical phrases. In my experience, the family came under siege; I was told that I'm a "lesbian" because of my then-husband's claim of female identity. This was the early 1990s, and sorry Colin and everyone, I had no voice. I did mention that Neddy had been beaten by his father as a young boy, that his mother often "fibbed" about the past, but that was brushed aside. BTW, all, trans widow Tracy Shannon was interviewed by Benjamin Boyce, where Eva has appeared. His shocked reactions are worth the cost of the ticket. I put that bee in his bonnet a year ago, when he replied to me that he doesn't interview trans widows. I replied we've had direct contact with the legacy descendants of Money, Kinsey, Sigusch. I guess he heard something. Anyway, here's a clip worth seeing, Dr. Marci/Mark Bowers & Dr. Rachel/Richard Levine are referenced:
Wow, great comments! Certainly plenty of blame to go around. Postmodernism weakened the mortar in the biologic, cultural, and historical foundations of truth and its stabilizing role. Opportunists have parasitized and perverted the language. They parasitized other social "movements" and used them as a vehicle to drive their destructive, selfserving, narcissistic/ sadistic, counterfactual claims. It is a naked power grab that confuses, forces allegiance, demands subjugation, in which the wielders of the new sword deify themselves in the eyes of the captured so they can proceed unchallenged and even defended by the faithful.
Feminists have imbued men with power over women, toxic masculinity, the ability to control others, the freedom from female biologic realities/constraints. Why would we not expect some girls, given the signal that they could buy a ticket and "opt out" of the "lesser sex" and into the male control domain to do just that?
And why would we not expect sadistic, narcissistic, and truely misogynistic men to chose to change labels and join the camp that they always sought to dominate and torture anyway. And then get the full support of many women in the process!!!
Could this be more effing nuts if we tried??!!
Thanks to Colin, Josh, Hollie, the commenter, and growing ranks of the sane for reasserting some real compass bearings, some foundational truths, and helping to keep the ship afloat!
all of that may be true, in a hypothetical sense. but we actually do know what's caused the rapid spread of gender ideology - a well financed PR and lobby campaign designed to remove parents' rights to protect kids from harmful gender care, as described in this article about the Dentons law firm report "only adults?". This set of instructions shows activists worldwide how to implement gender policies - keep public awarness as low as possible and tie gender policies to popular legislation without the public knowing.
why has the public supported any of these polcies at all? theyve been lied to - pure and simple. every gender biz stat and claim is a lie. all based on meaningless online polls run by actvists and bogus low quality short term studys that people now admit dont count as "evidence".
documents describing the idea of a "trans youth" read like a sci fi novel with made up facts in each sentence and overall conclusions completely fraudulant. all of these lies were provided with all the critical facts omitted such as the fact that most kids grow out of gender dysphoria (unless given gender meds), that dysphoria is a manifestation of psych issues, that gender meds dont help dysphoria and that many adults ID as "trans" as a choice, and this choice has nothing in common with immutable characteristics like biological sex, ethnicity or sexuality.
Maybe there's not one cultural group who's solely to blame for the popularization of female impersonation, but any fair assessment of the phenomenon would give a lion's share of responsibility for the trend to drag culture. Would anyone deny that minstrels in blackface weren't the source of the spread of such impersonations?The phenomenon of male rights transgender ideology is not part of a "regressive left". It's an eruption of covert-right misogyny masquerading as left politics. As ground zero for the popularization of men in womanface Drag Culture minstrel shows, and their audiences have long spread this sexist toxin in the body politic. The Drag origins of transgenderism portrays an acting out of extreme hatred of women expressing the male contempt, ridicule and vicious stereotyping of women that these men act-out. Forever, the drag culture, and its devotees have been dehumanizing women by routinely dehumanizing women as b*tches, breeders, breeders and fish, portraying women as petty, venal, sexually insatiable, stupid, envious, and crude. In case anyone missed it, dogs and fish aren't human. This male hatred of women entrenched itself in Women's Studies by infiltrating, distorting, suppressing and erasing Women's Studies with "Gender Studies" robbing half the human race of a home for academic research. Some "feminists" unknowingly colluded in this by claiming women are identical to men because they bought the lie that the qualities admired in men were superior to the characteristics associated with women e.g.: for men aggression equated with courage; for women nurturing equated with weakness, and so forth. This way of devaluing women is actually a form of subconscious misogyny that reflects a quasi-religious rejection of science i.e. biological reality. Those of us who rejected this view, that women didn't have some unique qualities, like Alice Rossi, were frequently attacked and silenced. There certainty areas to find blame for the popularization of of transgenderism and without confronting them the problem of male colonization of women's identity will never be resolved.
"You will remain safely on the cliff’s edge as long as you recognize the reality that the cliff exists and that jumping off it would be a very bad idea—but postmodernism has deconstructed the cliff to the point where some people have been convinced to jump."
I’ve been developing a deep and eerie suspicion that the current trans metastasizing fantasy world is in some ways linked to a generational absence of gay men due to HIV. Older gay men had long served as informal memory and moderation in problems with navigating bullying and managing self-recognition of homosexuality, and a backstop at times for calming people down around sissy boys and butch girls.
I have a crystal clear memory of my childhood in the 60’s and 70’s of bullying, and assuming my feelings of unhappiness would go away if I were “really a girl” as I was “misgendered” and taunted with incessantly. But I also recognized gay adult men I knew who were like myself in writing, television, and film, and I knew I ultimately wasn’t like “Renee Richards”. At puberty, I was eternally grateful that my chubby angelic childlike body that suddenly became hard, muscular and hairy a la “Grizzly Adams”, far more so than other boys. That extinguished a lot of bullying and unhappiness, and beginning to have adult sex with men completely erased any iota of idea of “trans”. I can’t describe the pleasure and degree of “affirmation” having sex the years after I left high school.
For myself and all my gay friends, and generations of gay boys I’ve observed, that’s the pattern. That’s why coming out and talking about it is so important.
Somehow though we’ve arrived at the very same point again, with bullying and taunting of children but this time it’s more lethal. In the last 30 years we’ve lost the retelling of the old story of bullying, taunting and “misgendering” gay men endured as children, and the understanding of the metamorphosis that puberty creates both physically, and emotionally in gay boys, helping them become the gay men they could be and enjoying the sexual pleasures of life with men.
How it ends? As always with knowing living, breathing gay men who come out and talk about their “sissy” childhood, and that we all need to support bullied children. These kids need to recognize that being called a girl isn’t a bad thing - girls and women are peers, and worthy of all the attention and respect males can give. But it also doesn’t mean you should act like or try to become a girl as a consequence either. You should act like what comes natural to your version of being male, while maturing into a man. This truth will always win out when heard often enough.
I’ve begun feeling that the only reaction which will end this nightmare is a revival of societal unconditional, positive, love and acceptance of children as who they are. It’s not enough to say bullying sissy or butch children is bad or transing children is an abomination. That doesn’t help these unhappy kids. We need to find ways to love, support, and comfort the most unhappy, effeminate, sissy gay boys, and the most unhappy, masculine, butch lesbian girls rather than simply being a cacophony of derision against trans.
It doesn’t mean burying one’s head in the sand over the hideous attack that is going on, but we need to ensure that one thing is understood and becomes the measure of help from family, teachers, and physicians: love not affirmation.
There has always been a part of feminism that felt obliged to attack science, and biology in particular. Noretta Koertge and I wrote about this way back in our 1993 book "Professing Feminism." Of course no one consistently embraces such a view; e.g., even feminists take antibiotics. But the need to break down strict divisions between male and female, however understandable, lent itself to blurring many important distinctions. Feminists thus stressed social constructionism over biology at every turn. This led to notions of heterosexuality as "compulsory," a concept that tried to efface the reality of attraction between men and women, while promoting same-sex attraction. Sexual dimorphism itself was denied (see the WMST-L archives from the early 1990s, when I was routinely denounced for daring to insist that biology mattered). I think this contributed enormously to the climate we're in now, when people claim to believe that a male can become a woman by declaring this is how he identifies. No wonder children are confused. But the really interesting question now is why many rational people acquiesce to claims they know are absurd. Last time I looked, we were not (yet) living under Stalinism. But free speech and free thought will not survive if people don't dare exercise them.
"This schism of beliefs boils down to a simple dichotomy: those who acknowledge objective reality, and those who do not, irrespective of any other differences."
I disagree. Everybody, except for a few obscurantist academics, believes in objective reality. Transgender activists are not "denying reality" when they say a male is a woman. Instead, they are disputing what the word "woman" should mean (in the dictionary and in public policy). They want to change the meaning of the word so that it means something other than biological female. Yes, they get themselves twisted into pretzel-like puzzles in order to change the definition, but they are not invoking subjective truth to make their claims.
I suggest looking at Kathleen Stock's book Material Girls. She discusses concepts/words in a philosophical way. Words are arbitrary tools that can signify whatever we choose. The meanings of words are conventions. You can make up any word and meaning that you like. We can have a concept of "woman" that means biological female, or a concept that means something else. Some concepts are useful and others are not. Stock argues that we need that concept of biological female, which "woman" had traditionally played. I agree. But defining a word differently is not a denial of reality.
To be sure, there are people who do "deny reality". But they are denying empirical fact. For example, saying the males do not have physical/sports advantages over females is empirically and demonstrably false. But saying a male is a woman is not that kind of empirical falsehood. That is a claim that "woman" can/should refer to a male. That's a dispute about what a word should mean. (Those who know their 20th century philosophy will recognize this as the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements).
The essay and posted comments have proposed some very thoughtful explanations for the abandonment of objective reality. Every liberation movement has been considered as a cause except the black civil rights movement which originated the problem. Affirmative action required (under penalty of law) that actual differences between people of different races be disregarded to achieve equality of outcomes between people. For example, if black students as a group didn't score high enough on SAT exams, then equity points were added to their scores or testing was abandoned altogether. In time objective standards have been abandoned throughout our society because everyone is supposed to be the same, so objective data has to be wrong. Anyone who suggests a return to meritocracy is branded a "racist." Similarly, transexuals can insist they are actually something they are not and anyone who objects is a "transphobe." This system works because any return to objective standards threatens the preferred status of the many people who unfairly benefit from them. The Supreme Court has the opportunity this summer to overturn race-based affirmative action programs, which would be a step back from the abyss that otherwise awaits us.
This is really excellent; thank you. I get irrationally frustrated by people who think second wave feminism or gay rights inevitably led here. No, my ability to get a car loan in my own name and my own credit is not the reason for this bullshit. No, my gay friends being allowed to make marriage contracts with other consenting adults is not the cause of this nonsense. We are in fact allowed, as a society, to draw lines and insist they be honored. I get occasional emails from people who tell me that my concern about pedophilia normalization can only be solved by my finding Jesus, getting married, and otherwise embracing "traditional values." Finding blame-by-group isn't especially helpful. Looking at Facebook and TikTok and other places where the parents and teachers transing kids discuss these matters, it is clear that women are the primary foot soldiers promoting gender ideology these days. It is just as true that it was male perverts like John Money and Michel Foucault who started it, and wealthy Big Pharma execs are the primary beneficiaries. Plenty of blame to go around! Everyone needs to do everything they can, regardless of identity markers.
"I place the blame for gender ideology at the feet of those who embrace the reality rejection fueled by postmodernism, its subjective lens, and its destabilizing word games. It has unmoored us from objectivity and convinced too many that there is no such thing as objective truth. It is drowning us in obscurantism and nihilism and causing people to throw up their hands in defeat."
An astute observation, but I think you have to go deeper and ask why postmodernism emerged when it did and why it has gained such power. This is a religious question. Nietzsche predicted the rise of nihilism and totalitarianism in the aftermath of the "death of God" in the West. When a culture loses its unifying traditional myths, it becomes unmoored from reality. Postmodernism has just stepped in to fill the spiritual vacuum for us. I think this is why people like Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson (and Carl Jung before them) are so popular: maybe they offer us a glimpse of how to stay true to our founding mythos even if we are not conventionally "religious."
Post modernism as a cause, sure. But that alone would never have set this 'transgender" travesty in motion and take off like a rocket ship. There are many causes, some of which you named, and they're all implicated in this crime against humanity. None of them deserve to get off scott-free.
To me, the biggest culprit is the rise of the autogynephile billionaire class. The Pritzkers, Strykers, and Rothblatts, et al. who spread their money around like fertilizer. A million here, a billion there. It all adds up. And this allows a handful of deranged men to stack the deck and capture every institution in this country. Universities, medical societies, nongovernmental organizations, teacher's associations, the media, political candidates. Money talks. And even people who vehemently oppose the "trans" takeover are afraid to speak out lest they lose their careers, their livelihoods, and their friends.
Postmodernism is a shell game from top to bottom, a nesting doll of lies, that claims on its label to be a refuter of all grand narratives, a potent French brew of acid nihilism guaranteed to destroy any idea or tradition it's poured upon. But when you're dealing with con artists it's important to not focus on their dishonest word clouds, but on their actions.
For the radical French intellectuals of the 20th century (and even 19th century, but most intensely in the 1960s), nothing was more crucial than to display your loathing for the bougeoisie, it was mandatory for anyone who wanted intellectual cred, and much of the French Left project was aimed at the vilification and elimination of anything that could possibly be labeled "bourgeois" (in modern America, the only thing I can think to compare it with is the loathing liberals have for MAGA Deplorables); and by the 1960s Marxism was old but Maoism was what the cool kids were feeling, Sartre & de Beauvoir got a guided tour of China and came back true believers, and the magazine Quel Tel, which featured all the postmodern all-stars (Kristeva and Cixous, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault etc) were hardcore supporters of Mao even after the crimes of his Cultural Revolution were revealed. None of these people could have had the careers they did without some level of Marxist commitment, however cynical and/or performative.
Foucault and Derrida liked to play coy about their politics, they wanted to project an image of being higher-thinking philosophers, but both their ouvres are entirely part of the Marxist tradition, and their endless dishonesty fits right in with the Marxist belief of the ends justifying the means, of any tactic no matter how dishonest or destructive is allowed if it helps the cause aka Revolution.
Foucault, the supposed arch-nihilist, still gave speeches that could have come from the mouth of Lenin: "When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just triumphed, a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one could make to this."
And Derrida in his endless blabbing for publicity even once accidentally told the truth: “Deconstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism.”
There has never once been a postmodern deconstruction of Marxism or Maoism, of any Left movement or text, and there never will be. The entire program is a Leftist political project disguised as a neutral philosophical tool, with the goal of dismantling and deconstructing our entire cultural and intellectual heritage, to be replaced by a reign of Left commissars and philosopher-kings.
Don't believe a word of their lies!
Thank you for this intelligent, clear-eyed analysis. Your cliff metaphor is chillingly apt.
There are so many factors that go into the making of gender ideology. I refer to it as a perfect storm scenario. Post-modernism is definitely a common theme running through many, but not all, of those various factors that went into the making of this nightmarish movement. For instance, there is the money to be made by Big Pharma, medical specialists and companies selling "packers" and "binders," not to mention corporate good will gained by throwing up the LGBTQ flag and claiming to be supportive of this "marginalized" group. There's the desire by so many people to seem "good" that they don't bother to question this ideology. There's those motivated to either validate their own decisions or make others see that their decisions were inevitable - and I'm not just speaking of autogynophilees. Parents who have "transitioned" and medicalized their children from a young age have to believe they did the right thing too. (These motives aren't all conscious.) There's those looking for a "quick fix" for all that ails them, who are attracted to an actual answer to why they are struggling - with their bodies, socially, or both. And society has been over-using drugs to treat their psychological problems for some time now - with so many people taking meds for ADHD, depression, anxiety, so the idea of taking a hormone or having an operation to finally be "happy" makes sense in this society. There's the tendency for many (certainly not all) in the medical community to become arrogant. There are those who still aren't comfortable with being gay or having a gay child (again, much of this is sub-conscious). There's the internet and social media to spread the ideas surrounding gender ideology around, and to allow 20-year-olds to convince 13-year-olds that there's nothing better than your first dose of T or E. There was Covid, to increase the dosage of social media, which just sped things up a bit. There's over-sexualization of very young women, with harsh beauty standards, and an over-enthusiastic "me too" movement that went beyond the good of exposing terrible abuse and sexism, and moved into making many young men with sex drives feel like monsters. There's the embarrassment of being a white middle-class straight "cis" person (aka the "oppressor"). There's the black and white thinking associated with those that have autistic tendencies, and the body-shame suffered by those who have actually been physically abused. And there's the general inability or unwillingness of so many people to think things through - so they can't see the absurdity (true for all of the horrible movements in the world, from the Holocaust, to the Red Scare, to the Salem Witch Trials, etc.) People are blind to the truth and afraid to speak up if they see the truth, lest they suffer the punishment. I'm sure there are more factors than I listed, but the point is that it took a bunch of social phenomena to lead to this. The real question is: how do we get out of it?
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Absolutely spot on.
I posit that Alfred Kinsey, John Money and Volkmar Sigusch, all "sexologist" researchers, comprise the first level of accountability. They did not, however, have any idea that "transsexuality" as they called it, would become a social contagion. They viewed it within their context of the "sexual repression" of their time. By this I mean, before reliable birth control (which still needs work, in my opinion) and during social pressures on women to be "saintlike" and not have sexual feelings. Then came Blanchard, Cantor, Zucker and Bailey, some of whom have expressed sketchy understandings of the difference between children and adults, in terms of consent. (Early Childhood educator here, children are not capable of consent and statutory rape is what it is) Then came the civil rights struggle to abolish previously outlawed same sex involvements, usually based on Biblical phrases. In my experience, the family came under siege; I was told that I'm a "lesbian" because of my then-husband's claim of female identity. This was the early 1990s, and sorry Colin and everyone, I had no voice. I did mention that Neddy had been beaten by his father as a young boy, that his mother often "fibbed" about the past, but that was brushed aside. BTW, all, trans widow Tracy Shannon was interviewed by Benjamin Boyce, where Eva has appeared. His shocked reactions are worth the cost of the ticket. I put that bee in his bonnet a year ago, when he replied to me that he doesn't interview trans widows. I replied we've had direct contact with the legacy descendants of Money, Kinsey, Sigusch. I guess he heard something. Anyway, here's a clip worth seeing, Dr. Marci/Mark Bowers & Dr. Rachel/Richard Levine are referenced:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpMYaq98AV0&t=1s
Wow, great comments! Certainly plenty of blame to go around. Postmodernism weakened the mortar in the biologic, cultural, and historical foundations of truth and its stabilizing role. Opportunists have parasitized and perverted the language. They parasitized other social "movements" and used them as a vehicle to drive their destructive, selfserving, narcissistic/ sadistic, counterfactual claims. It is a naked power grab that confuses, forces allegiance, demands subjugation, in which the wielders of the new sword deify themselves in the eyes of the captured so they can proceed unchallenged and even defended by the faithful.
Feminists have imbued men with power over women, toxic masculinity, the ability to control others, the freedom from female biologic realities/constraints. Why would we not expect some girls, given the signal that they could buy a ticket and "opt out" of the "lesser sex" and into the male control domain to do just that?
And why would we not expect sadistic, narcissistic, and truely misogynistic men to chose to change labels and join the camp that they always sought to dominate and torture anyway. And then get the full support of many women in the process!!!
Could this be more effing nuts if we tried??!!
Thanks to Colin, Josh, Hollie, the commenter, and growing ranks of the sane for reasserting some real compass bearings, some foundational truths, and helping to keep the ship afloat!
all of that may be true, in a hypothetical sense. but we actually do know what's caused the rapid spread of gender ideology - a well financed PR and lobby campaign designed to remove parents' rights to protect kids from harmful gender care, as described in this article about the Dentons law firm report "only adults?". This set of instructions shows activists worldwide how to implement gender policies - keep public awarness as low as possible and tie gender policies to popular legislation without the public knowing.
why has the public supported any of these polcies at all? theyve been lied to - pure and simple. every gender biz stat and claim is a lie. all based on meaningless online polls run by actvists and bogus low quality short term studys that people now admit dont count as "evidence".
documents describing the idea of a "trans youth" read like a sci fi novel with made up facts in each sentence and overall conclusions completely fraudulant. all of these lies were provided with all the critical facts omitted such as the fact that most kids grow out of gender dysphoria (unless given gender meds), that dysphoria is a manifestation of psych issues, that gender meds dont help dysphoria and that many adults ID as "trans" as a choice, and this choice has nothing in common with immutable characteristics like biological sex, ethnicity or sexuality.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists/
Maybe there's not one cultural group who's solely to blame for the popularization of female impersonation, but any fair assessment of the phenomenon would give a lion's share of responsibility for the trend to drag culture. Would anyone deny that minstrels in blackface weren't the source of the spread of such impersonations?The phenomenon of male rights transgender ideology is not part of a "regressive left". It's an eruption of covert-right misogyny masquerading as left politics. As ground zero for the popularization of men in womanface Drag Culture minstrel shows, and their audiences have long spread this sexist toxin in the body politic. The Drag origins of transgenderism portrays an acting out of extreme hatred of women expressing the male contempt, ridicule and vicious stereotyping of women that these men act-out. Forever, the drag culture, and its devotees have been dehumanizing women by routinely dehumanizing women as b*tches, breeders, breeders and fish, portraying women as petty, venal, sexually insatiable, stupid, envious, and crude. In case anyone missed it, dogs and fish aren't human. This male hatred of women entrenched itself in Women's Studies by infiltrating, distorting, suppressing and erasing Women's Studies with "Gender Studies" robbing half the human race of a home for academic research. Some "feminists" unknowingly colluded in this by claiming women are identical to men because they bought the lie that the qualities admired in men were superior to the characteristics associated with women e.g.: for men aggression equated with courage; for women nurturing equated with weakness, and so forth. This way of devaluing women is actually a form of subconscious misogyny that reflects a quasi-religious rejection of science i.e. biological reality. Those of us who rejected this view, that women didn't have some unique qualities, like Alice Rossi, were frequently attacked and silenced. There certainty areas to find blame for the popularization of of transgenderism and without confronting them the problem of male colonization of women's identity will never be resolved.
"You will remain safely on the cliff’s edge as long as you recognize the reality that the cliff exists and that jumping off it would be a very bad idea—but postmodernism has deconstructed the cliff to the point where some people have been convinced to jump."
That's excellent imagery! Thanks, Eva.
I’ve been developing a deep and eerie suspicion that the current trans metastasizing fantasy world is in some ways linked to a generational absence of gay men due to HIV. Older gay men had long served as informal memory and moderation in problems with navigating bullying and managing self-recognition of homosexuality, and a backstop at times for calming people down around sissy boys and butch girls.
I have a crystal clear memory of my childhood in the 60’s and 70’s of bullying, and assuming my feelings of unhappiness would go away if I were “really a girl” as I was “misgendered” and taunted with incessantly. But I also recognized gay adult men I knew who were like myself in writing, television, and film, and I knew I ultimately wasn’t like “Renee Richards”. At puberty, I was eternally grateful that my chubby angelic childlike body that suddenly became hard, muscular and hairy a la “Grizzly Adams”, far more so than other boys. That extinguished a lot of bullying and unhappiness, and beginning to have adult sex with men completely erased any iota of idea of “trans”. I can’t describe the pleasure and degree of “affirmation” having sex the years after I left high school.
For myself and all my gay friends, and generations of gay boys I’ve observed, that’s the pattern. That’s why coming out and talking about it is so important.
Somehow though we’ve arrived at the very same point again, with bullying and taunting of children but this time it’s more lethal. In the last 30 years we’ve lost the retelling of the old story of bullying, taunting and “misgendering” gay men endured as children, and the understanding of the metamorphosis that puberty creates both physically, and emotionally in gay boys, helping them become the gay men they could be and enjoying the sexual pleasures of life with men.
How it ends? As always with knowing living, breathing gay men who come out and talk about their “sissy” childhood, and that we all need to support bullied children. These kids need to recognize that being called a girl isn’t a bad thing - girls and women are peers, and worthy of all the attention and respect males can give. But it also doesn’t mean you should act like or try to become a girl as a consequence either. You should act like what comes natural to your version of being male, while maturing into a man. This truth will always win out when heard often enough.
I’ve begun feeling that the only reaction which will end this nightmare is a revival of societal unconditional, positive, love and acceptance of children as who they are. It’s not enough to say bullying sissy or butch children is bad or transing children is an abomination. That doesn’t help these unhappy kids. We need to find ways to love, support, and comfort the most unhappy, effeminate, sissy gay boys, and the most unhappy, masculine, butch lesbian girls rather than simply being a cacophony of derision against trans.
It doesn’t mean burying one’s head in the sand over the hideous attack that is going on, but we need to ensure that one thing is understood and becomes the measure of help from family, teachers, and physicians: love not affirmation.
There has always been a part of feminism that felt obliged to attack science, and biology in particular. Noretta Koertge and I wrote about this way back in our 1993 book "Professing Feminism." Of course no one consistently embraces such a view; e.g., even feminists take antibiotics. But the need to break down strict divisions between male and female, however understandable, lent itself to blurring many important distinctions. Feminists thus stressed social constructionism over biology at every turn. This led to notions of heterosexuality as "compulsory," a concept that tried to efface the reality of attraction between men and women, while promoting same-sex attraction. Sexual dimorphism itself was denied (see the WMST-L archives from the early 1990s, when I was routinely denounced for daring to insist that biology mattered). I think this contributed enormously to the climate we're in now, when people claim to believe that a male can become a woman by declaring this is how he identifies. No wonder children are confused. But the really interesting question now is why many rational people acquiesce to claims they know are absurd. Last time I looked, we were not (yet) living under Stalinism. But free speech and free thought will not survive if people don't dare exercise them.
"This schism of beliefs boils down to a simple dichotomy: those who acknowledge objective reality, and those who do not, irrespective of any other differences."
I disagree. Everybody, except for a few obscurantist academics, believes in objective reality. Transgender activists are not "denying reality" when they say a male is a woman. Instead, they are disputing what the word "woman" should mean (in the dictionary and in public policy). They want to change the meaning of the word so that it means something other than biological female. Yes, they get themselves twisted into pretzel-like puzzles in order to change the definition, but they are not invoking subjective truth to make their claims.
I suggest looking at Kathleen Stock's book Material Girls. She discusses concepts/words in a philosophical way. Words are arbitrary tools that can signify whatever we choose. The meanings of words are conventions. You can make up any word and meaning that you like. We can have a concept of "woman" that means biological female, or a concept that means something else. Some concepts are useful and others are not. Stock argues that we need that concept of biological female, which "woman" had traditionally played. I agree. But defining a word differently is not a denial of reality.
To be sure, there are people who do "deny reality". But they are denying empirical fact. For example, saying the males do not have physical/sports advantages over females is empirically and demonstrably false. But saying a male is a woman is not that kind of empirical falsehood. That is a claim that "woman" can/should refer to a male. That's a dispute about what a word should mean. (Those who know their 20th century philosophy will recognize this as the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements).
The essay and posted comments have proposed some very thoughtful explanations for the abandonment of objective reality. Every liberation movement has been considered as a cause except the black civil rights movement which originated the problem. Affirmative action required (under penalty of law) that actual differences between people of different races be disregarded to achieve equality of outcomes between people. For example, if black students as a group didn't score high enough on SAT exams, then equity points were added to their scores or testing was abandoned altogether. In time objective standards have been abandoned throughout our society because everyone is supposed to be the same, so objective data has to be wrong. Anyone who suggests a return to meritocracy is branded a "racist." Similarly, transexuals can insist they are actually something they are not and anyone who objects is a "transphobe." This system works because any return to objective standards threatens the preferred status of the many people who unfairly benefit from them. The Supreme Court has the opportunity this summer to overturn race-based affirmative action programs, which would be a step back from the abyss that otherwise awaits us.