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.
Holly: "women are the primary foot soldiers promoting gender ideology these days. .... Plenty of blame to go around! "
Indeed, on both accounts. Though, ICYMI, I've argued here that while we should be more interested in fixing the problem than the blame, there's some justification in obliging those who've contributed most to that problem to make some effort to rectify it:
However, one might reasonably argue that the problem is less "gender ideology" itself -- more generally, gender itself -- than the misperceptions and misuses of the concept. Analogously, quantum mechanics is pretty solid, but too many have made something of a cottage industry out of "quantum woo":
More particularly, while it's maybe commendable that you've apparently "read [James Lindsay's] entire oeuvre" ...😉🙂, I wonder whether you recollect this portion which is rather sympathetic to the concept of gender itself:
"As all this confusing controversy indicates, gender genuinely is a complicated issue that is somehow related to biological sex. The question is how they are related. On the one hand, there seem to be very obvious connections between the two: most men are masculine in various ways and most women are feminine in various ways ..., but that this is the case doesn’t explain why it is. .... Thus, gender being understood as the sets of traits associated with maleness and femaleness is also not controversial, nor is the idea that maleness and femaleness are, indeed, social constructions, that is, ideas about what it means to be male and to be female, which are, in fact, somewhat flexible. ...."
Though that is somewhat surprising given that he has a PhD in mathematics. One would have thought that it would have been natural and easy for him to conclude that sex is basically the "independent variable" whereas each of those traits he referred to are, in effect, the "dependent variables" and refer to different dimensions in a multi-dimensional gender spectrum:
But as I've suggested in the foregoing, there is a great deal of scientific illiteracy on virtually all sides of the transgender clusterfuck which is largely its proximate cause. And which is going to take a lot more intellectual honesty to fix than has heretofore been present ...
Colin and Eva, I apologize for commenting here. I knew that there was a narcissistic sociopath who follows me around substack leaving piles of shit in the form of irrelevant comments, so long that, like this one, the only sensible thing to do is note his name and immediately decline to read it. I have banned him from my own, and set an email filter so that all of his emails are saved in a file where I don't know that they even arrived but are accessible as future evidence, but as we all know, there are some men who just can't take no for an answer from women. Please take it as a compliment that your essay was so powerful that even someone with extensive experience dealing with men who refuse to take no for an answer from women was moved to comment anyway.
Steersman is the Living Embodiment of Dunning-Krueger Inflation of Self-Importance. He knows very little. He understands even less. He is the Donald Rumsfeld 3rd Condition - the unknown unknowns, but him it's most of actual truth.
🙄 You and Holly both are long on empty epithets but rather short on evidence to back them up -- or to refute the arguments I've put on the table.
Seem to recollect that she banned me for arguing that prepubescent kids are sexless which is entirely consistent with the standard biological definitions "promulgated" in the Glossary of a seminal article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
Given her more or less credible chops as a mathematician, one might have thought that she at least would have had some appreciation for the logical consequences of premises ...
In any case, you both might want to get your heads out of your arses and read my attempt to "bring balance to the forces" -- so to speak:
As I put it a comment there -- that was liked by the host:
"Unfortunately, far too many on 'our side' -- more or less those defending Rowling and many of those who follow in her wake -- are exhibiting pretty much the same levels of narrow-mindedness, intolerance, dogmatism, and outright zealotry."
Mate, if you're mad at people on the Internet and keep going on and on at them to make them Be Right you'll get called names. And then passers-by will end up suspecting that they aren't a million miles off. It's generally less reputationally risky to know when to back off.
But "passers-by" who don't do due diligence" are part of the problem: being too quick to follow the tribe, parrot the party line, and bark like trained seals.
Holly's too facile criticism of "gender ideology" was "fair game" -- regardless of her rather gutless post on her own Substack which is, at least relative to The Incident, little more than red herrings and ad hominems on which I'm banned from commenting.
She had grown up in a fundamentalist family, has since apparently repudiated that (rather abusive) upbringing, but seems to still get calls to "return to the fold".
"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."
I cannot help but look at a post that starts with an explication of how there's this tendency to find groups of people who can be held responsible for a thing then blame them for it, and then proceed to do *exactly* that by finding the "disliked" group to hold responsible: postmodernists. I would agree that many of the worst offenders of today's oppression on the left were inspired by postmodern thought, but I would also argue that postmodernism properly understood rejects them because they represent the same ideas postmodernism originally rejects.
I can understand this impulse; many postmodern thinkers have gone all the way from destabilizing unifying myths to destroying virtually all meaning; this seems to be because they are still trapped modernists: they want to believe in objective reality, and the tenets of postmodernism indicate that objective reality is unknowable, and because objective reality is unknowable, nothing objectively means anything. That may be "correct" in some technical sense, but it's profoundly unhelpful. Rather I think a more sane postmodernism should strive to be helpful.
A more sane postmodernism might argue that unifying traditional myths were already unmoored from reality, we simply didn't realize because of how dominant (and how useful!) unifying traditional myths are. Every unifying traditional myth (and every large, very influential narrative that we use to organize ourselves) has its holes, its declared heroes and villains, its oppressive structures and its freedoms. We cannot experience pure objectivity, so we can never *know* anything. All morals *are* relative; the only way out of that bind is to suppose a supernatural force of morality that exists outside the universe. Otherwise, your morals are simply your morals, and ultimately get founded in some assumptions about what "good" means to you. Morality is not objective.
Postmodernism didn't *create* all these various totalitarian and nihilistic ideas. These ideas are taking the situations pointed out by postmodern thinkers to demonstrate how these unifying ideas can be wrong and oppressive and applying them to establishing new "big narratives" that are wrong and oppressive. The postmodern critique of modernism applies *just as much* to the current political and ideological affairs as it did to modernism.
The more sane postmodernism advocates respecting values (or at least the people who hold those values) that are different from your own, even as you disagree with them, because, after all, we may find we are indeed partially wrong, and that partial of wrongness is relevant in various contexts even as it is irrelevant in others. The more sane postmodernism advocates working together to achieve goals without attempting to force our values on other people. This is nearly impossible (perhaps completely impossible) in practice, but we can do a hell of a lot better than we do now. The more sane postmodernism is about finding what works within a context and using that, and adjusting things based on context. If that strikes you as something close to a definition of common sense, well, I would agree.
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.
i completely agree. it's a top down movement and is part of a larger global agenda pushed out and funded by these rich creeps. they hate humanity. they hate love. they hate family. they hate nature. and they particularly loathe women, children and any men who care about women and children. they are determined to trash everything good in this world.
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.
Yes, I was also going to add that GI is a pastiche between pomo and neo-Marxism in that the "oppressed" ppl who are outside the "heteronormative binary" and thus need to be elevated to power over the normies is straight out of the Marxist mindset.
And I wanted to add, POMO also marks the moment when the Left gave up on the proletariat (they stubbornly refused to exchange beliefs in God & Country for the promises of Marx & Marcuse) and replaced them with the "marginalized", and also replaced the redistribution of wages and wealth with the redistribution of stigma and self-esteem.
Thus where it used to be the ownership class that needed to be opposed and defeated, once something called "Gender Theory" was invented, it became "heteronormativity" that was the great oppressor marked for death.
The Permanent Revolution gave up on workers and unions, became about radical professors interrogating language and thought for its crimes against Justice, and their goal was to control as many students' brains as possible (and their bodies now too), all in the name of pursuing their grand cause.
well yes - even 'working class' 'intellectuals' have usually moved out of that class - easy to forget what it's like to struggle daily just to keep food on table, roof over head etc
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?
Good points. Far too many people really do tend to follow the crowd without much thought of where it's going or what its "principles" are.
You may have some interest in a quote from Mark Twain that I'd left on Adam Coleman's Substack which was asking, "Are we becoming the monsters that we are fighting?":
"Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals."
Agreed about paragraphing - but I never thought it would be that long (I just kept typing!). Great quote - about 'group-think," yet another facet of this sick movement.
🙂 I can sympathize -- easy to get lost in the weeds without a framework or an objective in mind. Think I mentioned before the Point-Reason-Example-Summary method though Point-Reason-Example-Point is another term for the idea:
But "group-think" is, somewhat sadly, right on the money. Reminds me of something of a famous quote of Charles MacKay, author of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
I found your comment easy to read and well-structured as a long but coherent paragraph. Your first two sentences clearly state your topic. You then provide supporting evidence in a stream of sentences that all hold together in relation to your topic. Finally, you provide a concluding sentence that brings us back to the topic as set out in your first two sentences. Why break such a perfect paragraph into smaller units?
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:
🙂 Ima helper .... Wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression of me, that there isn't some substance behind what some might, erroneously ..., call my "vitriol" ... 😉🙂
You and Shannon and the other "trans widows" no doubt have some good points to make, though as something of an aside I think Boyce is a bit of a pretentious mumble-mouth ....
But kinda think that you, among far too many others are part of the problem in your rather "obstinate" reluctance, if I'm not mistaken, to accept a definition of gender -- to a first approximation -- as feminine and masculine personalities. Something which even mainstream feminism more or less justifiably accepts:
IF you had accepted "cooking" was a trait or role typical of females, was part of the "feminine gender" THEN you might have been able to say that cooking isn't sufficient to qualify as a female, as a woman, because sex and gender are two entirely different kettles of fish.
Think you and far too many others are shooting yourselves in the feet -- at best -- by refusing to accept more or less common and quite justified labels -- "sex" and "gender" -- for those two different "kettles".
I don't accept behavior as "gender" or "sex." Please consider replying to others instead of me. You really do not have any concept of what I or Tracy Shannon have been through.
No doubt what you trans-widows have "been through" was rather "stressful" to say the least. Though, given your reluctance to accept more or less standard terminology, one might wonder to what extent you're the authors of your own misfortunes ...
But do you "accept" that you can drive on one side of the road and not the other one? Those are the rules of the road. Same thing for the definitions for sex and gender -- you don't get to make up your own definitions; they're generally a matter of consensus, not of imperious assertions by dogmatic ideologues of one stripe or another.
Those for the sexes are pretty solid -- at least among more or less reputable biologists worth their salt. But while those for "gender" are something of a dog's breakfast, there IS a developing consensus -- more or less endorsed by Colin and the British Medical Journal -- that "gender" refers to personalities and personality types typical of human males and females.
How dare you? I am "the author of my own misfortune?" Please do not reply to any more of my posts. I am a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother. A granddaughter, and aunt and a great granddaughter. I do not need your PhD lecture on what is a woman, man.
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.
I don’t think this follows. Drag cultures have existed for eons, and aren’t limited to our western European culture. I think it it would be more valuable to correlate queer and trans to HIV, and the general atmosphere of fear that surrounds sex. We are at an incredible low of people having sex in all contexts. The specific problem of transing children has more to do with people being clueless about gay kids.
I maintain that being gay, for instance, is a hobby. It disconnected from actually having sex around the time of HIV. Attributes of being gay now have more resemblance to bird watching or sailing than it does to liking to suck cock. Much much longer conversation; but the transformation of gay rights from the right to suck cock without going to prison, to the right to get married is a drastic reorientation of the issues at hand, and happened at the same time the trans fantasy erupted. It’s divorcing actually having sex from political views near the subject which is the tripwire.
hmm well ocourse misogyny has existed for the same eons too so not sure that's a valid argument. I grew up with pantomime in uk but the context was they were to be laughed at not taken seriously. And the Principal Boy was a woman. But blokes who claim they actually *are* women is a different thing entirely imho
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.
"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.
You have no idea how happy you've made me by seeing your comment! I have your & Koertge's book within reach on the shelf as I write. Never did I imagine having an opportunity to directly address you! I found it absolutely extraordinary that you both articulated so many issues within the academic realm so early - ie in the early 90s you predicted the corruption of Humanities into a political activism factory. Many more should read your book - but it was actually quite hard to find and very expensive where available.
I agree that efforts of feminists to demolish barriers to women went too far into anti-essentialism - so far that they opened the door to TWAW today. It is hard to have an honest conversation about mistakes of the movement since much criticism toward feminism's gender-ideology precursors is done in bad faith. The movement has to recover its credibility "from within".
"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.
You nailed it, Holly!
Holly: "women are the primary foot soldiers promoting gender ideology these days. .... Plenty of blame to go around! "
Indeed, on both accounts. Though, ICYMI, I've argued here that while we should be more interested in fixing the problem than the blame, there's some justification in obliging those who've contributed most to that problem to make some effort to rectify it:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/who-or-what-is-to-blame-for-gender/comment/13258547
Which might reasonably encompass pretty much all of us as I've argued in that comment -- as Pogo put it, "We have seen the enemy, and he is us":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)
However, one might reasonably argue that the problem is less "gender ideology" itself -- more generally, gender itself -- than the misperceptions and misuses of the concept. Analogously, quantum mechanics is pretty solid, but too many have made something of a cottage industry out of "quantum woo":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism
More particularly, while it's maybe commendable that you've apparently "read [James Lindsay's] entire oeuvre" ...😉🙂, I wonder whether you recollect this portion which is rather sympathetic to the concept of gender itself:
https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/james-lindsay-is-right/comment/12898183
"As all this confusing controversy indicates, gender genuinely is a complicated issue that is somehow related to biological sex. The question is how they are related. On the one hand, there seem to be very obvious connections between the two: most men are masculine in various ways and most women are feminine in various ways ..., but that this is the case doesn’t explain why it is. .... Thus, gender being understood as the sets of traits associated with maleness and femaleness is also not controversial, nor is the idea that maleness and femaleness are, indeed, social constructions, that is, ideas about what it means to be male and to be female, which are, in fact, somewhat flexible. ...."
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-gender/
Though that is somewhat surprising given that he has a PhD in mathematics. One would have thought that it would have been natural and easy for him to conclude that sex is basically the "independent variable" whereas each of those traits he referred to are, in effect, the "dependent variables" and refer to different dimensions in a multi-dimensional gender spectrum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependent_and_independent_variables
Can't really ask "how gender is related to biological sex" if we haven't partitioned those concepts into independent entities.
Something which I elaborated on in some detail in part of my Welcome post:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/i/64264079/rationalized-gender
But as I've suggested in the foregoing, there is a great deal of scientific illiteracy on virtually all sides of the transgender clusterfuck which is largely its proximate cause. And which is going to take a lot more intellectual honesty to fix than has heretofore been present ...
Colin and Eva, I apologize for commenting here. I knew that there was a narcissistic sociopath who follows me around substack leaving piles of shit in the form of irrelevant comments, so long that, like this one, the only sensible thing to do is note his name and immediately decline to read it. I have banned him from my own, and set an email filter so that all of his emails are saved in a file where I don't know that they even arrived but are accessible as future evidence, but as we all know, there are some men who just can't take no for an answer from women. Please take it as a compliment that your essay was so powerful that even someone with extensive experience dealing with men who refuse to take no for an answer from women was moved to comment anyway.
Steersman is the Living Embodiment of Dunning-Krueger Inflation of Self-Importance. He knows very little. He understands even less. He is the Donald Rumsfeld 3rd Condition - the unknown unknowns, but him it's most of actual truth.
🙄 You and Holly both are long on empty epithets but rather short on evidence to back them up -- or to refute the arguments I've put on the table.
Seem to recollect that she banned me for arguing that prepubescent kids are sexless which is entirely consistent with the standard biological definitions "promulgated" in the Glossary of a seminal article in the Journal of Molecular Human Reproduction:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
Given her more or less credible chops as a mathematician, one might have thought that she at least would have had some appreciation for the logical consequences of premises ...
In any case, you both might want to get your heads out of your arses and read my attempt to "bring balance to the forces" -- so to speak:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/binarists-vs-spectrumists
Why are sexless children so frequently caught playing doctor? Many sexless children are incest survivors who don't actually survive.
I have noticed and blocked accordingly.
"narcissistic sociopath" 🙄 If you can't stand the heat then you might want to get out of the kitchen.
And you, and/or others, might want to read a post by Adam Coleman which asks "Are we becoming the monsters that we are fighting?"
https://adambcoleman.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-the-monsters-that
As I put it a comment there -- that was liked by the host:
"Unfortunately, far too many on 'our side' -- more or less those defending Rowling and many of those who follow in her wake -- are exhibiting pretty much the same levels of narrow-mindedness, intolerance, dogmatism, and outright zealotry."
https://adambcoleman.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-the-monsters-that/comment/13196844
At least Josh recognized himself in the "mirror" that Adam had described:
https://adambcoleman.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-the-monsters-that/comment/13196916
Mate, if you're mad at people on the Internet and keep going on and on at them to make them Be Right you'll get called names. And then passers-by will end up suspecting that they aren't a million miles off. It's generally less reputationally risky to know when to back off.
Sticks and stones ...
But "passers-by" who don't do due diligence" are part of the problem: being too quick to follow the tribe, parrot the party line, and bark like trained seals.
Holly's too facile criticism of "gender ideology" was "fair game" -- regardless of her rather gutless post on her own Substack which is, at least relative to The Incident, little more than red herrings and ad hominems on which I'm banned from commenting.
Some heavy sarcasm, I expect.
She had grown up in a fundamentalist family, has since apparently repudiated that (rather abusive) upbringing, but seems to still get calls to "return to the fold".
"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."
This right here. Exactly.
I cannot help but look at a post that starts with an explication of how there's this tendency to find groups of people who can be held responsible for a thing then blame them for it, and then proceed to do *exactly* that by finding the "disliked" group to hold responsible: postmodernists. I would agree that many of the worst offenders of today's oppression on the left were inspired by postmodern thought, but I would also argue that postmodernism properly understood rejects them because they represent the same ideas postmodernism originally rejects.
I can understand this impulse; many postmodern thinkers have gone all the way from destabilizing unifying myths to destroying virtually all meaning; this seems to be because they are still trapped modernists: they want to believe in objective reality, and the tenets of postmodernism indicate that objective reality is unknowable, and because objective reality is unknowable, nothing objectively means anything. That may be "correct" in some technical sense, but it's profoundly unhelpful. Rather I think a more sane postmodernism should strive to be helpful.
A more sane postmodernism might argue that unifying traditional myths were already unmoored from reality, we simply didn't realize because of how dominant (and how useful!) unifying traditional myths are. Every unifying traditional myth (and every large, very influential narrative that we use to organize ourselves) has its holes, its declared heroes and villains, its oppressive structures and its freedoms. We cannot experience pure objectivity, so we can never *know* anything. All morals *are* relative; the only way out of that bind is to suppose a supernatural force of morality that exists outside the universe. Otherwise, your morals are simply your morals, and ultimately get founded in some assumptions about what "good" means to you. Morality is not objective.
Postmodernism didn't *create* all these various totalitarian and nihilistic ideas. These ideas are taking the situations pointed out by postmodern thinkers to demonstrate how these unifying ideas can be wrong and oppressive and applying them to establishing new "big narratives" that are wrong and oppressive. The postmodern critique of modernism applies *just as much* to the current political and ideological affairs as it did to modernism.
The more sane postmodernism advocates respecting values (or at least the people who hold those values) that are different from your own, even as you disagree with them, because, after all, we may find we are indeed partially wrong, and that partial of wrongness is relevant in various contexts even as it is irrelevant in others. The more sane postmodernism advocates working together to achieve goals without attempting to force our values on other people. This is nearly impossible (perhaps completely impossible) in practice, but we can do a hell of a lot better than we do now. The more sane postmodernism is about finding what works within a context and using that, and adjusting things based on context. If that strikes you as something close to a definition of common sense, well, I would agree.
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.
i completely agree. it's a top down movement and is part of a larger global agenda pushed out and funded by these rich creeps. they hate humanity. they hate love. they hate family. they hate nature. and they particularly loathe women, children and any men who care about women and children. they are determined to trash everything good in this world.
Yes. It' top down astroturfing, not a bottom up grass roots movement.
Well said
"Spread their money around like fertilizer," and "a handful of deranged men . .". I could not agree with that more.
I suppose, while it's always about money and power, these are achieved differently within different paradigmatic structures.
I do wonder whether politics flows from culture, or culture flows from politics.
Thank you for this intelligent, clear-eyed analysis. Your cliff metaphor is chillingly apt.
Thank you so much!
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!
Yes, I was also going to add that GI is a pastiche between pomo and neo-Marxism in that the "oppressed" ppl who are outside the "heteronormative binary" and thus need to be elevated to power over the normies is straight out of the Marxist mindset.
Fascinating, cynical, and sad times we are in.
Exactly.
And I wanted to add, POMO also marks the moment when the Left gave up on the proletariat (they stubbornly refused to exchange beliefs in God & Country for the promises of Marx & Marcuse) and replaced them with the "marginalized", and also replaced the redistribution of wages and wealth with the redistribution of stigma and self-esteem.
Thus where it used to be the ownership class that needed to be opposed and defeated, once something called "Gender Theory" was invented, it became "heteronormativity" that was the great oppressor marked for death.
The Permanent Revolution gave up on workers and unions, became about radical professors interrogating language and thought for its crimes against Justice, and their goal was to control as many students' brains as possible (and their bodies now too), all in the name of pursuing their grand cause.
well yes - even 'working class' 'intellectuals' have usually moved out of that class - easy to forget what it's like to struggle daily just to keep food on table, roof over head etc
And the unions themselves have mostly embraced POMO.
yep they are either conning themselves or conning others - or both imho ....
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?
Good points. Far too many people really do tend to follow the crowd without much thought of where it's going or what its "principles" are.
You may have some interest in a quote from Mark Twain that I'd left on Adam Coleman's Substack which was asking, "Are we becoming the monsters that we are fighting?":
"Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals."
http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html
"a mush of mutilated morals" -- quite an indictment.
https://adambcoleman.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-the-monsters-that/comment/13231069
Both his post and Katherine Brodsky's -- which I linked in a previous comment in the thread -- are worth a gander at least.
Somewhat en passant, putting your comments into paragraphs tends to make them a bit more readable ... 😉🙂
Agreed about paragraphing - but I never thought it would be that long (I just kept typing!). Great quote - about 'group-think," yet another facet of this sick movement.
🙂 I can sympathize -- easy to get lost in the weeds without a framework or an objective in mind. Think I mentioned before the Point-Reason-Example-Summary method though Point-Reason-Example-Point is another term for the idea:
https://www.kennethmd.com/the-prep-framework-an-easy-way-to-give-excellent-impromptu-speeches/
But "group-think" is, somewhat sadly, right on the money. Reminds me of something of a famous quote of Charles MacKay, author of "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/289693-men-it-has-been-well-said-think-in-herds-it
Think Douglas Murray has a book with a similar title addressing more recent "delusions".
I found your comment easy to read and well-structured as a long but coherent paragraph. Your first two sentences clearly state your topic. You then provide supporting evidence in a stream of sentences that all hold together in relation to your topic. Finally, you provide a concluding sentence that brings us back to the topic as set out in your first two sentences. Why break such a perfect paragraph into smaller units?
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
Persistence pays off ... 😉🙂
"Tale of a Trans Widow; with Tracy Shannon"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S1qKO03RhQ
Gee, thanks, Steersman
🙂 Ima helper .... Wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression of me, that there isn't some substance behind what some might, erroneously ..., call my "vitriol" ... 😉🙂
You and Shannon and the other "trans widows" no doubt have some good points to make, though as something of an aside I think Boyce is a bit of a pretentious mumble-mouth ....
But kinda think that you, among far too many others are part of the problem in your rather "obstinate" reluctance, if I'm not mistaken, to accept a definition of gender -- to a first approximation -- as feminine and masculine personalities. Something which even mainstream feminism more or less justifiably accepts:
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/feminism-gender/#GenFemMasPer
You had said in an earlier comment that:
"My ex-husband decided 'he's in the wrong body,' because he liked to do the activities his mother favored, such as cooking".
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/my-views-were-cringe-but-i-learned/comment/13220840
IF you had accepted "cooking" was a trait or role typical of females, was part of the "feminine gender" THEN you might have been able to say that cooking isn't sufficient to qualify as a female, as a woman, because sex and gender are two entirely different kettles of fish.
Think you and far too many others are shooting yourselves in the feet -- at best -- by refusing to accept more or less common and quite justified labels -- "sex" and "gender" -- for those two different "kettles".
I don't accept behavior as "gender" or "sex." Please consider replying to others instead of me. You really do not have any concept of what I or Tracy Shannon have been through.
No doubt what you trans-widows have "been through" was rather "stressful" to say the least. Though, given your reluctance to accept more or less standard terminology, one might wonder to what extent you're the authors of your own misfortunes ...
But do you "accept" that you can drive on one side of the road and not the other one? Those are the rules of the road. Same thing for the definitions for sex and gender -- you don't get to make up your own definitions; they're generally a matter of consensus, not of imperious assertions by dogmatic ideologues of one stripe or another.
Those for the sexes are pretty solid -- at least among more or less reputable biologists worth their salt. But while those for "gender" are something of a dog's breakfast, there IS a developing consensus -- more or less endorsed by Colin and the British Medical Journal -- that "gender" refers to personalities and personality types typical of human males and females.
You really might want to try reading both:
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1234040036091236352
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n735
How dare you? I am "the author of my own misfortune?" Please do not reply to any more of my posts. I am a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother. A granddaughter, and aunt and a great granddaughter. I do not need your PhD lecture on what is a woman, man.
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.
I don’t think this follows. Drag cultures have existed for eons, and aren’t limited to our western European culture. I think it it would be more valuable to correlate queer and trans to HIV, and the general atmosphere of fear that surrounds sex. We are at an incredible low of people having sex in all contexts. The specific problem of transing children has more to do with people being clueless about gay kids.
I maintain that being gay, for instance, is a hobby. It disconnected from actually having sex around the time of HIV. Attributes of being gay now have more resemblance to bird watching or sailing than it does to liking to suck cock. Much much longer conversation; but the transformation of gay rights from the right to suck cock without going to prison, to the right to get married is a drastic reorientation of the issues at hand, and happened at the same time the trans fantasy erupted. It’s divorcing actually having sex from political views near the subject which is the tripwire.
hmm well ocourse misogyny has existed for the same eons too so not sure that's a valid argument. I grew up with pantomime in uk but the context was they were to be laughed at not taken seriously. And the Principal Boy was a woman. But blokes who claim they actually *are* women is a different thing entirely imho
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/
"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.
You have no idea how happy you've made me by seeing your comment! I have your & Koertge's book within reach on the shelf as I write. Never did I imagine having an opportunity to directly address you! I found it absolutely extraordinary that you both articulated so many issues within the academic realm so early - ie in the early 90s you predicted the corruption of Humanities into a political activism factory. Many more should read your book - but it was actually quite hard to find and very expensive where available.
I agree that efforts of feminists to demolish barriers to women went too far into anti-essentialism - so far that they opened the door to TWAW today. It is hard to have an honest conversation about mistakes of the movement since much criticism toward feminism's gender-ideology precursors is done in bad faith. The movement has to recover its credibility "from within".
"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.