One of my New Year’s resolutions is to be more active on Twitter. I understand that this might seem insane (and that it probably is insane), but I have my reasons. One of which is that I want to spend more time talking to people I disagree with. Writing articles is great and all, but given that they’re usually shared with my followers first, there’s always the risk of an echo chamber forming.
Why is it so difficult to be charitable? Women who have been - in my own circumstances -
1) casually groped on a Parisian metro
2) propositioned to be a sex worker because my boobs developed early
3) jerked off in front of me on a 2-seat bus seat
4) knifed in the lung in an attempt to force me off the road for rape
5) cleansed my San Francisco street from the negative vibes of a violent near-death rape of a young women
Do you not understand? You believe your trans identity is the Most Important Thing Ever - well, to women living life every day you are suspect. It takes more than a proclamation to gain our trust. Men like Steve QJ get it - they know what we feel.
Maybe practice a little humility, a little grace. Ask. Don’t demand. The posturing is getting a little too much.
I heard from a friend in the USA about a coworker who monopolized every gathering of two or more people, including meetings, with endless meandering about her "gender identity" and management was too cowed to do anything about it. Yeah, Most Important Thing Ever.
Well the only "sexual dimorphism" I can think in the plant kingdom is cannabis, although maybe there are a few others. ;) But no gender-changing for mammals!
Angiosperms have both pistillate, stamenate, and combined flowers.
Gymnosperms have cones or not.
I was a champion marijuana grower; one of the problems is that since we take out the stamenate ("male") plants, sometimes the pistillates grow a few stamenates and the buds end up with seeds if we aren't vigilant. Plants have sexes, but it's not the same as higher animals.
Some amphibians can change sex, and there are hermaphroditic snakes.
Gender advocates insist that developmental defects prove that "gender is a social construct."
Yeah, cannabis is the only one I've ever heard of referred to as 'male' and 'female'. You defnitely don't want male plans to splooge all over your female plants unless you need more seeds.
I tell the gendernutzis that 100% sexually dimorphic mammals prove that for *all* mammals it's not.
“Because trans women aren't being treated as a woman should be. “
And cats aren’t being treated like dogs should be, because-—the envelope, please!—cats are not dogs. Tortoises aren’t pigeons. Giraffes aren’t elephants.
And “trans” women are not women. They are men impersonating women. The impersonation may be as shallow as hectoring others about pronouns or as committed as surgical mutilation. But the demand that everyone else identify them as women is a nonstarter because it is so contrary to reality as to be insane.
That conversation is so loaded with neologisms and acronyms as be be well nigh unreadable. Niki needs to think about something else for a while.
The trans movement is best understood as a whacked-out religion. They can think whatever they want, no matter how crazy, just as long as they don't try to force their views on others.
Every time I think how absolutely nuts these people are, I remind myself that I was baptized into a belief system that asserts that pieces of bread "transubstantiate" into human flesh and bad wine "transubstantiates" into human blood that we communally cannibalize during mass. Nobody in my entire parish thought that Holy Communion was the slightest bit crazy.
Human beings and delusional thinking just seem to go together like gin and tonic.
"just as long as they don't try to force their views on others."
.This is a joke, right? Forcing their views on others is the apotheosis of this "trans" fad. An educator who slips and uses the pronoun that a student used up to fifteen minutes ago can lose his (<—not gender-neutral) job for "misgendering" or "deadnaming" a student. An academic who researches the long term effects of puberty blockers or post-transition suicide and doesn't come straight to conclusions congruent with "gender ideology" is likely to have his university blasted with enraged emails and threats, and lose his job. Someone who doesn't pulverize English grammar and refers to a coworker in the plural can be escorted out of the building under guard.
Seriously, what the good Christ are you talking about?
The "trans" activists make the MAGA crowd look cripplingly openminded. Someone who is 99% supportive is as much an enemy as someone advocating putting "trans" people on boxcars.
The truly Bizarro World part is how correct the MAGAs are fighting the trans cult too. Granted, cults don't like competition, and they should certainly be addressing their own cult problem. But they're right, if for twisted and sometimes the wrong reasons...and I'd rather people do the right thing for the wrong reasons than vice versa, or the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
Calm down Chris! I never said they didn’t force their views. Just that it wouldn’t matter what they thought if they didn’t. Or in other words having crazy views at odds with reality is actually human default mode it seems.
Pretty much everything on the Loony Left is a whacked-out religion. John McWhorter wrote about the excesses of 'woke antiracism' comparing it to religion; Christina Hoff Summers writes similarly about the excesses feminism; the anti-colonialists are similarly obsessed with colonialism and ascribe it to everyting (a 'woke' friend of mine, with whom we are learning to talk to each other, recently accused me of 'colonialist' thinking because of pronouns.)
'Woke' itself, like all its various 'social (in)justice' movements, is a cult.
I just hate it when people try to patiently explain to me that "they" is perfectly fine when the gender of the reference is unknown, as if I had never heard that horseshit before. Problem is, most uses of the singular they have perfectly defined references:
"if your husband beats you then they should go to jail"
Even writing that gives me a little twinge of headache.
What my mother and aunt used to joke about 50 years ago were the mysterious 'they' trendsetters. "Negronis are what 'they' are drinking in Manhattan now," my aunt would (only my brother and I weren't native New Yorkers). "Who are these 'they'?" my mom would ask with a smile. And they'd have some fun with the unidentified 'they' who were supposedly so much cooler, but no one knew who 'they' were:)
I remember when it began to annoy me, people would talk about government protections from frauds and dangers, "They wouldn't let that happen, would they?"
Who is "they" here?, I would ask. Blank look. "You know, uh, ..."
I learned Russian when I was 13 and I remember drawing a little grid, two columns, singular and plural, three rows, 1st, 2nd, 3rd person. I did the same later for Spanish, German, Italian, etc. Doesn't work in Asian languages like the one I speak here. English was missing one, taken by "y'all" in the south ... that's wrong, "you" is already formal/plural, it's "thou" that's missing, equivalent to ты, du, tu, tous ... the familiar/singular.
Then I noticed the "gender neutral" they. And immediately stopped using it, which didn't matter back then but now the generic "he" is regarded as putting women in leg irons.
Thanks for reasoned debate Steve. I almost said I don't know why I'm so upset about all of this and then thought - I'm a female woman - if transpeople want to be violent to their own bodies and are old enough to make a reasoned decision about it that's okay for them but don't violently assert that you are female like me and I must accept your presence in my spaces. Why do I even have to define myself as a female woman? Female suggests reproductive sex - woman is all kinds of ways of being in all kinds of societies. Is it true that gay men find themselves forced to be trans in order to be who they are/aren't in some religious societies? A supreme irony is that I wrote a story about a man who transitions and I have published it - The White and Black Blues in my short story collection - it is really a story about how all life is about transitions and transitioning I suppose. I could not write it now after women lose their jobs and are threatened with rape and death because they don't want trans women in their spaces - I don't want to follow this craziness up in my first story with another story about Tomi dying as she defends a woman attacked by a trans extremist. I think my character is kind and loving and brave. Never worked out which loo she would go to - another story? What do you think?
"I’m not sure if it’ll last, but there’s been a noticeable shift in the attitudes of trans people I talk to online lately. They’re more reasonable, less dogmatic, more willing to acknowledge facts and the need for compromise."
I doubt very seriously that you are seeing any shift in attitudes. It's much more likely you are seeing the emergence of other voices, more reasonable ones, against whom the extremists will harden their hatred and seek to have expelled. I'd bet a lot of money on this were I open to wagering.
Because this is what happened in the gay community. After all those years of telling heterosexuals how much they were hated, the more pragmatic and goal-oriented began to counter the catharsis-oriented creeps and it was only then that we started to make any progress. Meanwhile, the radicals doubled and tripled down on their belligerence and it was around then that "queer" went from a slur/fightin' word/"hurtful" to the "beautiful and inclusive and reclaimed" word it is today. And the radicals, those who didn't push back on "negative messaging about gay sex" in the AIDS era and got infected and died, are as vehement as ever.
Edit: screw inclusivity. I would rather be part of a mosaic than a melting pot of mud.
I think there's been a shift in the ability of GCs to speak out more; the wheels are falling off the trans bus. I suspect there are more trans supporters of intelligent transitioning than we know because they, too, are afraid of the TRAs, as they should be. The far left has become a brutal, self-destructive phenomenon in which they'd rather left the far right win than the forces of rationalism and intelligence.
We all look like rabid right-wingers to them because that's what everyone who's not One Of Them looks like to extremists.
The push to get into women's bathrooms clearly is about anything other than personal safety for TiMs (I like that, adopting it). If they really were concerned about personal safety, their own bathrooms make the most sense. Claiming 'this targets transpeople as potential rapists and criminals' bears zero difference to segregated bathrooms say today. They're segregated because *some* men are risks to women and we don't know who, and *some* TiMs are too - and even if they don't have their original equipment anymore they're STILL risks with their larger, more powerful bodies (and if they want to rape, they'll use objects as some rapists do now). The fact that they push so hard to get into women's bathrooms & refuse their own point to what a lie Niki tells, and in fact, as you pointed out, she dragged sex into it first. Methinks the fake lady doth protest too much.
As for needing 'acceptance', there's not a single person on the planet, now or ever, who was 'accepted' by *everyone*. Even the Daiai Lama has his haters, detractors, and people who want to kill him (the Chinese government). The TiM desire to be 'accepted' is actually about dominating women and for many of them, forcing us to indulge their various sexual fetishes. It's not about personal safety, although it may have been at the beginning before it became a dad (or mass hysteria, mass psychosis, mass delusion) when there was no support for separate bathrooms.
BTW, I don't believe Nikki's claim he has a vagina. I could be wrong, but most of them don't, and we know how much people lie on social media so....no. The odds are in my favour on this, but even if he does have a vagina, he's still a threat. He's certainly talking like an entitled man...
And based on medical statistics versus self-reports, there is less than 1% chance that Niki is actually dysphoric at all. A thousand times as many claim to be "trans" as medical stats predict. I could believe ten times as many, but a thousand? No way.
Genuine gender dysphoria appears early in childhood; the fad "trans" tends to appear not long after getting on social media. Miserable kids with nothing to believe in (their music stinks on ice, they have no interests, don't read, and have the attention span of goldfish thanks to their Smile Media; plus their parents hate each other, school is a nightmare of babboon competitiveness, etc. etc. etc.). They get on TikTok: Oh "your" miserable and unhappy? You must be "trans." Quick, get sliced before you change your mind! And click like and subscribe.
I can believe that *some* people come to this realization as adults. I read "The Transsexual Scientist" last year, a self-published account of someone born in the 1940s who always knew there was something different about himself but couldn't figure out what, although he was quite interested when Christine Jorgensen came out as the world's first transsexual. He had joined the army, become a neuroscientist and psychologist, and didn't transition until he was in middle age. He seemed pretty genuine and definitely didn't have anything around him to encourage him down this path unlike today's screwed-up kids. And, homosexuality and bisexuality can present later in life, so it's not beyond the ken to me that genuine dysphoria can too. But I mean *genuine*, not opportunists with suspicious agendas. You're right, most of them start to show signs as kids but they need to grow up first as most of them are simply gay rather than truly transsexual.
Homosexuality isn't cool anymore, dude. No one gives a crap if someone 'comes out' about being gay. Now it's much cooler to claim to be 'trans'. or gendercrunchymcnuggets or whatever silly-ass label you care to slap on yourself.
Homosexuality has lost its shock value. It’s like being left-handed, a comparison that runs deep.
There were always gays desperate to be at the center of attention. Nobody cares anymore, so now we have people whose “trans”ness forms the foundation of endless tiresome grievances.
I'm not as close to it as you are, but I don't recall gays as being so endlessly aggrieved. But it was a lot less political; the chronic trans grievance we see isn't about 'transphobia' but traditional entitled (often, but not always white) male grievance about feminism. The 'womanface' is just a costume for the performative 'outrage'.
That this stuff is taking place with children has been discussed here. It comes from a Christian site, but before those of you inclined to immediately reject it because of the source also note that the writer claims to be [queer and married to a trans "man."]
"I think provisions should be made for trans women. I don't support a blanket ban of trans women in female spaces because I think gender dysphoria is obviously real."
Yes dysphoria is real. But even among the dysphoric (biological) males there is a range from little more than cross-dressing to full surgical transition, and among those closer to the former there remains the risk of sexual assault. And all this is vastly complicated by the false dysphoria of "adult onset," which I think I've written about enough.
If a man has surgically transitioned and his male beginnings are far behind him and he is a she, then OK, but even the Minnesota Womyn's Festival doesn't want her. It gets complicated here, and I don't say that as a copout but because I don't want to get into the hairsplitting. But as a first approximation I absolutely don't want TiMs in women's sports, in rape crisis centers, or women's prisons. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.
First of all, your goal is a noble one; only engaging with those who agree on most principles soon leads to flaccid rhetorical and moral muscles (though I would really like to see you circumvent that hackneyed term "echo chamber"). You seek to emulate Daryl Davis in reaching the other side and inspiring reflection. Your heart's in the right place; we agree on the worthiness of this goal but not on its feasibility. The next word is "but."
But. I think you should make your efforts on more fertile ground than Twitter. Twitter is the cloaca of the Internet, as shallow as can be managed by design, beginning with the limit of posts to short paragraphs. Unless you block most of the people you're seeking to reach, you may as well try to row up Niagara. Most people won't read past enough to note that you aren't part of their cult and react as to an enemy. Twitter is no more a forum for honest debate than a children's swimming pool full of yellow water is a drinking fountain.
You are wasting your time on there. And I regard your time as valuable, too valuable to cast pearls before the swine who dominate Twitter.
Go to some more cerebral forum. I don't know the conservative blogosphere, I know it isn't good for my blood pressure and I've spend enough of my life engaged with right wing trolls to know that there is no reaching them and, as you can see on the previous thread, there is just not enough honesty there for engagement.
I'd say National Review but its intellectual foundation, however real it might have once been, has deteriorated to Kevin Williamson level so when it comes to finding someplace better, you're on your own.
But you should not bother with Twitter. Not only will you get nowhere, but it shows a lack of respect for the value of your own time.
And anyway, its days are numbered. Musk fired most of the IT staff and the network is starting to break down. There have been outages and the management is not sane.
I have never been immersed in the "trans" thing but the gay culture I was in until I got disgusted and left in '96 was build atop a foundation of impulsiveness and irresonsibility. Faced with HIV, a lot of gay men heard "just another negative message about gay sex," and went from promiscuous to aggressively promiscuous, practically lived in the bathhouses, and didn't seem to care if they infected people or they died.
Die they did.
But gay politics was, until the workplace moderation, all about confrontational belligerence. The imaginary goal for many was to have heterosexuals strapped into chairs like Alex in Clockwork Orange, forced to listen to how much the radicals hated them.
But the were a minority; most just wanted to have fun.
In the Twitter conversation above you use “asking” inaccurately. The “trans” do not request. They demand, and answer any and all disagreements with accusations of “transphobia,” even to the most supportive people.
A point being lost in "transmedicalism" and "GC" and "TRA" and oh Jesus where is the ibuprofen ....
Just as you won't find "What Is A Woman" on YouTube, you won't find the predecessor of "gender dysphoria," which was "Gender Identity Disorder," in newer medical dictionaries. In both cases the excision was at the demand of "trans" activists who objected to anything differing from their "gender ideology" and then to their affliction being labeled a disorder.
Come, let us take a reality check.
You can't read anything from the "trans" crowd without running into some variation of "which would you rather have, a live son or a dead daughter?" To deny gender support up to transitional surgery is presented as a near guarantee that teens will take their own lives (OTOH you will never read a word about the suicide surge 7-10 years after transitioning). So what we have here is people who are so uncomfortable in their healthy bodies that they can commit suicide to escape the misery. This is but one step from Body Integrity Identity Disorder, whose uh sufferers want healthy limbs amputated or at least paralyzed.
Anyway, we have people so desperate to escape their born sex that they are ready to take their own lives, and we are supposed to accept and endorse that *this is not a disorder*?
"Good faith" be not aboard.
Edit: I just read about a girl with BIID who blinded herself with drain cleaner and waited a half hour before going to the hospital so her eyes were unsalvageable. She says she's happy now. Her family disowned her. She wasn't at peace with her body either.
Why is it so difficult to be charitable? Women who have been - in my own circumstances -
1) casually groped on a Parisian metro
2) propositioned to be a sex worker because my boobs developed early
3) jerked off in front of me on a 2-seat bus seat
4) knifed in the lung in an attempt to force me off the road for rape
5) cleansed my San Francisco street from the negative vibes of a violent near-death rape of a young women
Do you not understand? You believe your trans identity is the Most Important Thing Ever - well, to women living life every day you are suspect. It takes more than a proclamation to gain our trust. Men like Steve QJ get it - they know what we feel.
Maybe practice a little humility, a little grace. Ask. Don’t demand. The posturing is getting a little too much.
I heard from a friend in the USA about a coworker who monopolized every gathering of two or more people, including meetings, with endless meandering about her "gender identity" and management was too cowed to do anything about it. Yeah, Most Important Thing Ever.
The trans movement is the most narcissistic, ever. I mean that literally.
Yeah it's not like there are male and female in the animal and plant kingdoms or anything. /s
Well the only "sexual dimorphism" I can think in the plant kingdom is cannabis, although maybe there are a few others. ;) But no gender-changing for mammals!
Angiosperms have both pistillate, stamenate, and combined flowers.
Gymnosperms have cones or not.
I was a champion marijuana grower; one of the problems is that since we take out the stamenate ("male") plants, sometimes the pistillates grow a few stamenates and the buds end up with seeds if we aren't vigilant. Plants have sexes, but it's not the same as higher animals.
Some amphibians can change sex, and there are hermaphroditic snakes.
Gender advocates insist that developmental defects prove that "gender is a social construct."
Yeah, cannabis is the only one I've ever heard of referred to as 'male' and 'female'. You defnitely don't want male plans to splooge all over your female plants unless you need more seeds.
I tell the gendernutzis that 100% sexually dimorphic mammals prove that for *all* mammals it's not.
“Because trans women aren't being treated as a woman should be. “
And cats aren’t being treated like dogs should be, because-—the envelope, please!—cats are not dogs. Tortoises aren’t pigeons. Giraffes aren’t elephants.
And “trans” women are not women. They are men impersonating women. The impersonation may be as shallow as hectoring others about pronouns or as committed as surgical mutilation. But the demand that everyone else identify them as women is a nonstarter because it is so contrary to reality as to be insane.
That conversation is so loaded with neologisms and acronyms as be be well nigh unreadable. Niki needs to think about something else for a while.
The trans movement is best understood as a whacked-out religion. They can think whatever they want, no matter how crazy, just as long as they don't try to force their views on others.
Every time I think how absolutely nuts these people are, I remind myself that I was baptized into a belief system that asserts that pieces of bread "transubstantiate" into human flesh and bad wine "transubstantiates" into human blood that we communally cannibalize during mass. Nobody in my entire parish thought that Holy Communion was the slightest bit crazy.
Human beings and delusional thinking just seem to go together like gin and tonic.
Everybody say his own Kyrie Eleison...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvhYqeGp_Do
"just as long as they don't try to force their views on others."
.This is a joke, right? Forcing their views on others is the apotheosis of this "trans" fad. An educator who slips and uses the pronoun that a student used up to fifteen minutes ago can lose his (<—not gender-neutral) job for "misgendering" or "deadnaming" a student. An academic who researches the long term effects of puberty blockers or post-transition suicide and doesn't come straight to conclusions congruent with "gender ideology" is likely to have his university blasted with enraged emails and threats, and lose his job. Someone who doesn't pulverize English grammar and refers to a coworker in the plural can be escorted out of the building under guard.
Seriously, what the good Christ are you talking about?
The "trans" activists make the MAGA crowd look cripplingly openminded. Someone who is 99% supportive is as much an enemy as someone advocating putting "trans" people on boxcars.
The truly Bizarro World part is how correct the MAGAs are fighting the trans cult too. Granted, cults don't like competition, and they should certainly be addressing their own cult problem. But they're right, if for twisted and sometimes the wrong reasons...and I'd rather people do the right thing for the wrong reasons than vice versa, or the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
Calm down Chris! I never said they didn’t force their views. Just that it wouldn’t matter what they thought if they didn’t. Or in other words having crazy views at odds with reality is actually human default mode it seems.
I'm good, I'm good (bites knuckle, breathes stertorously)
I was just kinda shocked at the idea that "live and let live" has anything to do with this grotesque movement.
(sorry, that does read kinda harsh)
Pretty much everything on the Loony Left is a whacked-out religion. John McWhorter wrote about the excesses of 'woke antiracism' comparing it to religion; Christina Hoff Summers writes similarly about the excesses feminism; the anti-colonialists are similarly obsessed with colonialism and ascribe it to everyting (a 'woke' friend of mine, with whom we are learning to talk to each other, recently accused me of 'colonialist' thinking because of pronouns.)
'Woke' itself, like all its various 'social (in)justice' movements, is a cult.
I just hate it when people try to patiently explain to me that "they" is perfectly fine when the gender of the reference is unknown, as if I had never heard that horseshit before. Problem is, most uses of the singular they have perfectly defined references:
"if your husband beats you then they should go to jail"
Even writing that gives me a little twinge of headache.
What my mother and aunt used to joke about 50 years ago were the mysterious 'they' trendsetters. "Negronis are what 'they' are drinking in Manhattan now," my aunt would (only my brother and I weren't native New Yorkers). "Who are these 'they'?" my mom would ask with a smile. And they'd have some fun with the unidentified 'they' who were supposedly so much cooler, but no one knew who 'they' were:)
I remember when it began to annoy me, people would talk about government protections from frauds and dangers, "They wouldn't let that happen, would they?"
Who is "they" here?, I would ask. Blank look. "You know, uh, ..."
I learned Russian when I was 13 and I remember drawing a little grid, two columns, singular and plural, three rows, 1st, 2nd, 3rd person. I did the same later for Spanish, German, Italian, etc. Doesn't work in Asian languages like the one I speak here. English was missing one, taken by "y'all" in the south ... that's wrong, "you" is already formal/plural, it's "thou" that's missing, equivalent to ты, du, tu, tous ... the familiar/singular.
Then I noticed the "gender neutral" they. And immediately stopped using it, which didn't matter back then but now the generic "he" is regarded as putting women in leg irons.
Thanks for reasoned debate Steve. I almost said I don't know why I'm so upset about all of this and then thought - I'm a female woman - if transpeople want to be violent to their own bodies and are old enough to make a reasoned decision about it that's okay for them but don't violently assert that you are female like me and I must accept your presence in my spaces. Why do I even have to define myself as a female woman? Female suggests reproductive sex - woman is all kinds of ways of being in all kinds of societies. Is it true that gay men find themselves forced to be trans in order to be who they are/aren't in some religious societies? A supreme irony is that I wrote a story about a man who transitions and I have published it - The White and Black Blues in my short story collection - it is really a story about how all life is about transitions and transitioning I suppose. I could not write it now after women lose their jobs and are threatened with rape and death because they don't want trans women in their spaces - I don't want to follow this craziness up in my first story with another story about Tomi dying as she defends a woman attacked by a trans extremist. I think my character is kind and loving and brave. Never worked out which loo she would go to - another story? What do you think?
"A writer writes. Always" — "Throw Momma From the Train"
"I’m not sure if it’ll last, but there’s been a noticeable shift in the attitudes of trans people I talk to online lately. They’re more reasonable, less dogmatic, more willing to acknowledge facts and the need for compromise."
I doubt very seriously that you are seeing any shift in attitudes. It's much more likely you are seeing the emergence of other voices, more reasonable ones, against whom the extremists will harden their hatred and seek to have expelled. I'd bet a lot of money on this were I open to wagering.
Because this is what happened in the gay community. After all those years of telling heterosexuals how much they were hated, the more pragmatic and goal-oriented began to counter the catharsis-oriented creeps and it was only then that we started to make any progress. Meanwhile, the radicals doubled and tripled down on their belligerence and it was around then that "queer" went from a slur/fightin' word/"hurtful" to the "beautiful and inclusive and reclaimed" word it is today. And the radicals, those who didn't push back on "negative messaging about gay sex" in the AIDS era and got infected and died, are as vehement as ever.
Edit: screw inclusivity. I would rather be part of a mosaic than a melting pot of mud.
I think there's been a shift in the ability of GCs to speak out more; the wheels are falling off the trans bus. I suspect there are more trans supporters of intelligent transitioning than we know because they, too, are afraid of the TRAs, as they should be. The far left has become a brutal, self-destructive phenomenon in which they'd rather left the far right win than the forces of rationalism and intelligence.
We all look like rabid right-wingers to them because that's what everyone who's not One Of Them looks like to extremists.
The push to get into women's bathrooms clearly is about anything other than personal safety for TiMs (I like that, adopting it). If they really were concerned about personal safety, their own bathrooms make the most sense. Claiming 'this targets transpeople as potential rapists and criminals' bears zero difference to segregated bathrooms say today. They're segregated because *some* men are risks to women and we don't know who, and *some* TiMs are too - and even if they don't have their original equipment anymore they're STILL risks with their larger, more powerful bodies (and if they want to rape, they'll use objects as some rapists do now). The fact that they push so hard to get into women's bathrooms & refuse their own point to what a lie Niki tells, and in fact, as you pointed out, she dragged sex into it first. Methinks the fake lady doth protest too much.
As for needing 'acceptance', there's not a single person on the planet, now or ever, who was 'accepted' by *everyone*. Even the Daiai Lama has his haters, detractors, and people who want to kill him (the Chinese government). The TiM desire to be 'accepted' is actually about dominating women and for many of them, forcing us to indulge their various sexual fetishes. It's not about personal safety, although it may have been at the beginning before it became a dad (or mass hysteria, mass psychosis, mass delusion) when there was no support for separate bathrooms.
BTW, I don't believe Nikki's claim he has a vagina. I could be wrong, but most of them don't, and we know how much people lie on social media so....no. The odds are in my favour on this, but even if he does have a vagina, he's still a threat. He's certainly talking like an entitled man...
And based on medical statistics versus self-reports, there is less than 1% chance that Niki is actually dysphoric at all. A thousand times as many claim to be "trans" as medical stats predict. I could believe ten times as many, but a thousand? No way.
Genuine gender dysphoria appears early in childhood; the fad "trans" tends to appear not long after getting on social media. Miserable kids with nothing to believe in (their music stinks on ice, they have no interests, don't read, and have the attention span of goldfish thanks to their Smile Media; plus their parents hate each other, school is a nightmare of babboon competitiveness, etc. etc. etc.). They get on TikTok: Oh "your" miserable and unhappy? You must be "trans." Quick, get sliced before you change your mind! And click like and subscribe.
I can believe that *some* people come to this realization as adults. I read "The Transsexual Scientist" last year, a self-published account of someone born in the 1940s who always knew there was something different about himself but couldn't figure out what, although he was quite interested when Christine Jorgensen came out as the world's first transsexual. He had joined the army, become a neuroscientist and psychologist, and didn't transition until he was in middle age. He seemed pretty genuine and definitely didn't have anything around him to encourage him down this path unlike today's screwed-up kids. And, homosexuality and bisexuality can present later in life, so it's not beyond the ken to me that genuine dysphoria can too. But I mean *genuine*, not opportunists with suspicious agendas. You're right, most of them start to show signs as kids but they need to grow up first as most of them are simply gay rather than truly transsexual.
In my generation we would claim to be bisexual. Now they claim "trans."
Homosexuality isn't cool anymore, dude. No one gives a crap if someone 'comes out' about being gay. Now it's much cooler to claim to be 'trans'. or gendercrunchymcnuggets or whatever silly-ass label you care to slap on yourself.
Homosexuality has lost its shock value. It’s like being left-handed, a comparison that runs deep.
There were always gays desperate to be at the center of attention. Nobody cares anymore, so now we have people whose “trans”ness forms the foundation of endless tiresome grievances.
I'm not as close to it as you are, but I don't recall gays as being so endlessly aggrieved. But it was a lot less political; the chronic trans grievance we see isn't about 'transphobia' but traditional entitled (often, but not always white) male grievance about feminism. The 'womanface' is just a costume for the performative 'outrage'.
That this stuff is taking place with children has been discussed here. It comes from a Christian site, but before those of you inclined to immediately reject it because of the source also note that the writer claims to be [queer and married to a trans "man."]
https://notthebee.com/article/whistleblower-at-a-st-louis-gender-clinic-exposes-harm-done-to-children-through-gender-affirming-care
"I think provisions should be made for trans women. I don't support a blanket ban of trans women in female spaces because I think gender dysphoria is obviously real."
Yes dysphoria is real. But even among the dysphoric (biological) males there is a range from little more than cross-dressing to full surgical transition, and among those closer to the former there remains the risk of sexual assault. And all this is vastly complicated by the false dysphoria of "adult onset," which I think I've written about enough.
If a man has surgically transitioned and his male beginnings are far behind him and he is a she, then OK, but even the Minnesota Womyn's Festival doesn't want her. It gets complicated here, and I don't say that as a copout but because I don't want to get into the hairsplitting. But as a first approximation I absolutely don't want TiMs in women's sports, in rape crisis centers, or women's prisons. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.
Bad move, Steve.
First of all, your goal is a noble one; only engaging with those who agree on most principles soon leads to flaccid rhetorical and moral muscles (though I would really like to see you circumvent that hackneyed term "echo chamber"). You seek to emulate Daryl Davis in reaching the other side and inspiring reflection. Your heart's in the right place; we agree on the worthiness of this goal but not on its feasibility. The next word is "but."
But. I think you should make your efforts on more fertile ground than Twitter. Twitter is the cloaca of the Internet, as shallow as can be managed by design, beginning with the limit of posts to short paragraphs. Unless you block most of the people you're seeking to reach, you may as well try to row up Niagara. Most people won't read past enough to note that you aren't part of their cult and react as to an enemy. Twitter is no more a forum for honest debate than a children's swimming pool full of yellow water is a drinking fountain.
You are wasting your time on there. And I regard your time as valuable, too valuable to cast pearls before the swine who dominate Twitter.
Go to some more cerebral forum. I don't know the conservative blogosphere, I know it isn't good for my blood pressure and I've spend enough of my life engaged with right wing trolls to know that there is no reaching them and, as you can see on the previous thread, there is just not enough honesty there for engagement.
I'd say National Review but its intellectual foundation, however real it might have once been, has deteriorated to Kevin Williamson level so when it comes to finding someplace better, you're on your own.
But you should not bother with Twitter. Not only will you get nowhere, but it shows a lack of respect for the value of your own time.
And anyway, its days are numbered. Musk fired most of the IT staff and the network is starting to break down. There have been outages and the management is not sane.
I have never been immersed in the "trans" thing but the gay culture I was in until I got disgusted and left in '96 was build atop a foundation of impulsiveness and irresonsibility. Faced with HIV, a lot of gay men heard "just another negative message about gay sex," and went from promiscuous to aggressively promiscuous, practically lived in the bathhouses, and didn't seem to care if they infected people or they died.
Die they did.
But gay politics was, until the workplace moderation, all about confrontational belligerence. The imaginary goal for many was to have heterosexuals strapped into chairs like Alex in Clockwork Orange, forced to listen to how much the radicals hated them.
But the were a minority; most just wanted to have fun.
In the Twitter conversation above you use “asking” inaccurately. The “trans” do not request. They demand, and answer any and all disagreements with accusations of “transphobia,” even to the most supportive people.
A point being lost in "transmedicalism" and "GC" and "TRA" and oh Jesus where is the ibuprofen ....
Just as you won't find "What Is A Woman" on YouTube, you won't find the predecessor of "gender dysphoria," which was "Gender Identity Disorder," in newer medical dictionaries. In both cases the excision was at the demand of "trans" activists who objected to anything differing from their "gender ideology" and then to their affliction being labeled a disorder.
Come, let us take a reality check.
You can't read anything from the "trans" crowd without running into some variation of "which would you rather have, a live son or a dead daughter?" To deny gender support up to transitional surgery is presented as a near guarantee that teens will take their own lives (OTOH you will never read a word about the suicide surge 7-10 years after transitioning). So what we have here is people who are so uncomfortable in their healthy bodies that they can commit suicide to escape the misery. This is but one step from Body Integrity Identity Disorder, whose uh sufferers want healthy limbs amputated or at least paralyzed.
Anyway, we have people so desperate to escape their born sex that they are ready to take their own lives, and we are supposed to accept and endorse that *this is not a disorder*?
"Good faith" be not aboard.
Edit: I just read about a girl with BIID who blinded herself with drain cleaner and waited a half hour before going to the hospital so her eyes were unsalvageable. She says she's happy now. Her family disowned her. She wasn't at peace with her body either.
No disorder there.
Horrible!
SICK
The trans people need to understand this harsh reality.
https://youtu.be/krxU5Y9lCS8
Ah, thanks so much for that. I bought that album the week it was released.
That's Al Kooper (yes, THAT Al Kooper) on French horn.
Their peak, if anyone wants my opinion. I saw them do Gimme Shelter live in 1972. It was terrifying.