OK, I'm going to try to keep this level and keep the "nonbinary" crap out of it.
I am gay. For some reason people lump gay and bisexual people in with this ensemble of gender bending trends as though we have something to do with each other. Homosexuality has been a steady 3-5% of human population across continents of culture and millenn…
OK, I'm going to try to keep this level and keep the "nonbinary" crap out of it.
I am gay. For some reason people lump gay and bisexual people in with this ensemble of gender bending trends as though we have something to do with each other. Homosexuality has been a steady 3-5% of human population across continents of culture and millennia of time. While people have become more open, less reluctant to come out, as social acceptance waxed, there has never been a surge to 30% or 50% or 80% of the population. Homosexuality is clearly as much a part of normal human variation as left-handedness, and its concomitant psychological maladies can all be lain at the feet of prejudice.
Suppose the percentage identifying as gay suddenly went up tenfold. My delight at all the new potential sex partners would be completely swamped by puzzlement and suspicion; sexual orientation is a fundamental aspect of identity and a sudden change from its constancy would raise alarms.
Gender identity is a lot more fundamental than sexual orientation; very few gay people wish they could be the opposite sex, and the overlap between the LG and the T is insignificant.
And yet. You mention a 4000% (!) increase in teenage girls identifying with the opposite gender and just breeze along as though this is nothing but a statistic. It is a fuck of a lot more than that. Even a 40% increase should raise alarms.
First of all it is coming at a time when "trans" is trendy, part of a nearly mindless impulse toward a set of ill-conceived social goals mostly inspired by postmodernism, the most intellectually vapid movement in the history of social thought. By stringent medical definition gender dysphoria affects one in 30,000 male births and one in 100,000 female. If we are seeing a forty-fold increase in the latter, we should be looking for explanations a lot more carefully than we rush to encouraging acceptance of what is clearly a dangerously unhealthy trend.
In a stunning turn of events this weird surge is coming at a time of unprecedented personal stress and dissatisfaction, we are living through year after year of Cuban Missile Crisis level anxiety every day as the country enters its second civil war.
The serial killer in Silence of the Lambs was murdering young woman to make a "woman suit" because he had been rejected for reassignment surgery. He hated his life and wanted to be something different. And what could be more different than gender? I see explanations like this as a lot more plausible than believing that, all of a sudden, forty time the usual number of young girls want to change their gender.
Not buying that for a second.
And ... the stridently totalitarian (you know what I mean) rhetoric of this movement is incongruent with true conviction, it is at the level of rhetorical violence, people trying to convince not just others but convince themselves that their preposterous beliefs ("a trans woman is not a man") are true.
Alas, I'm afraid You have the right of it, M. Fox. And Biden being against "conversion therapy?" Outlawing conversion therapy? Let's set the record straight:
Taking kids, most of whom are LG, and socially and medically coercing them to take puberty blockers and hormones and, eventually, mutilating their sex organs? *That* is conversion therapy, right? Trying to convert LG to straight people has *always* been defined as conversion therapy.
And the real sick part of it is that some parents (and the kids) are more comfortable with a trans kid than an LG boy or girl. It's more socially accepted. In fact, all the cool kids are trans, right?
When I was coming out in the 70s it was common to spend a few months claiming to be bisexual as a uh gateway orientation on the way to accepting oneself as gay. I got over it.
Longitudinal studies of so called "trans" (sorry, I hate that word) teens often show that they end up being gay and return to comfort with their biological gender, and now that "trans" is supposed to be trendy an' cool it's a safer temporary accommodation.
Picture a girl who hides behind "trans" for a year or two, then the leading fad switches back to some clothing and hair style e.g. punk or goth, and now she's a lesbian and female except she has no breasts anymore.
Way to go.
We should absolutely not be encouraging this and we should be a lot LOT more skeptical about such claims.
Edit: male bisexuality is really rare. Most are like me, capable of enjoying heterosexual sex but making no claim to being bisexual; most men who do so claim lean very asymmetrically one way or the other and it is almost always gay.
I'm a bit skeptical that bisexuality is so rare (in males). Of course it's conceived of as being a spectrum, with very few in very middle (eg: the range of 49%/51% to 51%/49%), or at the extreme ends. But there seem to be a good number of men who have substantial amounts of attraction towards both sexes, closer to the middle than to the ends of that spectrum.
But I recognize that my assessment is based more on experience than objective statistics. Do you have any source for believing that bisexual men are very rare?
Also, you referenced males. Do you believe that bisexual females are more or less common? And why LG rather than LGB if you are talking about all sexes, not just males?
I've read a lot about bisexuality and all studies say the same thing: 50/50 bi men are exceedingly uncommon. I have never met one. I didn't say there are none.
Most bi men are basically gay men who top and go with a woman once in a while.
With women the attraction is much more about the relationship than visual arousal and I have read that women can choose their orientation a lot more than men; my best friend in the USA is bi and married to a man but based on his health I doubt they have sex.
I last went to a gay public territory in 1996. I was 42 and in great shape but already past the age where I felt like I fit in and I saw men older than I being savagely abused with name-calling. I continued to hook up on the Internet but gay places are for people under 30 who want to ruin their hearing and their lungs.
Maybe it depends on how one defines bisexuality. As I noted, there are very few who are 100/0, 50/50, or 0/100 - or for that matter 90/10 or 36/64. That's way too narrow. a range.
I was suggesting that being closer to the middle than to either end, like "at least 1/4 towards each" as a broader definition. I doubt that is as rare.
Yes, I've heard gay men dismiss male bisexuals as fence sitters, and treat them as being partway along the coming out process. It makes sense, based on their own experience, for many. And I meet bisexuals who figure everybody is really bisexual, some are just too hung up to let it out - again, generalizing from their intuitions or experience.
What I was curious about is any kind of statistics or study.
Yeah that was a common belief in the 70s. It was none other than Saint Lou Reed who put the kibosh on it with "you don't get to call yourself gay unless you suck cock or get fucked."
Yes a lot of gay men were horribly misogynistic, referring to women as "fish." I don't know about lesbians.
But I will just let it out here. While gay people have made disproportionate contributions to society and culture, the gay culture has never produced anything of value and at least back when I was briefly in it was rotten to the core. Rotten with cruelty and shallowness and useless in its disincentives to maturity. Gay men were encouraged to capitulate to every impulse and indulge any whim, to never grow up.
I remember one late morning in 1982 some time after we learned what AIDS really was, that we had to cut way back on the promiscuity. It hit me all of a sudden with one of those hard heart thumps: my life was going to change. I'd been to bathhouses a few times and sometimes it was a blast. That was clearly over, but of course the bathhouses would be closed soon anyway.
They weren't.
A lot of people prudently changed their behavior but many reacted in defiance, almost moving into the bathhouses, refusing to use condoms, aggressively promiscuous and infecting murderously. And the goddamn gay community, steeped in the ethos of postmodernism and long accustomed to resisting negative messages about sex, refused to make the most evident judgments. Yap yap yap "personal responsibility."
Even when infected men were lying about their HIV status and perforating their condoms to deliberately infect others, value judgments were off limits.
It was a sick, ghastly society and if it still exists it almost certainly still is.
Steve and others have noted that I am chillingly comfortable in drawing lines. I do not hesitate to condemn, and if you ever wondered why, now you know.
In terms of the relatively consistent level of homosexuality across culture, I would note that this include even cultures which savagely persecute it. And it exists in at least some other species. I'm quite convinced that it's a natural variation.
I'm rather less convinced regarding trans, at least above the extremely rare level.
OK, I'm going to try to keep this level and keep the "nonbinary" crap out of it.
I am gay. For some reason people lump gay and bisexual people in with this ensemble of gender bending trends as though we have something to do with each other. Homosexuality has been a steady 3-5% of human population across continents of culture and millennia of time. While people have become more open, less reluctant to come out, as social acceptance waxed, there has never been a surge to 30% or 50% or 80% of the population. Homosexuality is clearly as much a part of normal human variation as left-handedness, and its concomitant psychological maladies can all be lain at the feet of prejudice.
Suppose the percentage identifying as gay suddenly went up tenfold. My delight at all the new potential sex partners would be completely swamped by puzzlement and suspicion; sexual orientation is a fundamental aspect of identity and a sudden change from its constancy would raise alarms.
Gender identity is a lot more fundamental than sexual orientation; very few gay people wish they could be the opposite sex, and the overlap between the LG and the T is insignificant.
And yet. You mention a 4000% (!) increase in teenage girls identifying with the opposite gender and just breeze along as though this is nothing but a statistic. It is a fuck of a lot more than that. Even a 40% increase should raise alarms.
First of all it is coming at a time when "trans" is trendy, part of a nearly mindless impulse toward a set of ill-conceived social goals mostly inspired by postmodernism, the most intellectually vapid movement in the history of social thought. By stringent medical definition gender dysphoria affects one in 30,000 male births and one in 100,000 female. If we are seeing a forty-fold increase in the latter, we should be looking for explanations a lot more carefully than we rush to encouraging acceptance of what is clearly a dangerously unhealthy trend.
In a stunning turn of events this weird surge is coming at a time of unprecedented personal stress and dissatisfaction, we are living through year after year of Cuban Missile Crisis level anxiety every day as the country enters its second civil war.
The serial killer in Silence of the Lambs was murdering young woman to make a "woman suit" because he had been rejected for reassignment surgery. He hated his life and wanted to be something different. And what could be more different than gender? I see explanations like this as a lot more plausible than believing that, all of a sudden, forty time the usual number of young girls want to change their gender.
Not buying that for a second.
And ... the stridently totalitarian (you know what I mean) rhetoric of this movement is incongruent with true conviction, it is at the level of rhetorical violence, people trying to convince not just others but convince themselves that their preposterous beliefs ("a trans woman is not a man") are true.
Alas, I'm afraid You have the right of it, M. Fox. And Biden being against "conversion therapy?" Outlawing conversion therapy? Let's set the record straight:
Taking kids, most of whom are LG, and socially and medically coercing them to take puberty blockers and hormones and, eventually, mutilating their sex organs? *That* is conversion therapy, right? Trying to convert LG to straight people has *always* been defined as conversion therapy.
And the real sick part of it is that some parents (and the kids) are more comfortable with a trans kid than an LG boy or girl. It's more socially accepted. In fact, all the cool kids are trans, right?
When I was coming out in the 70s it was common to spend a few months claiming to be bisexual as a uh gateway orientation on the way to accepting oneself as gay. I got over it.
Longitudinal studies of so called "trans" (sorry, I hate that word) teens often show that they end up being gay and return to comfort with their biological gender, and now that "trans" is supposed to be trendy an' cool it's a safer temporary accommodation.
Picture a girl who hides behind "trans" for a year or two, then the leading fad switches back to some clothing and hair style e.g. punk or goth, and now she's a lesbian and female except she has no breasts anymore.
Way to go.
We should absolutely not be encouraging this and we should be a lot LOT more skeptical about such claims.
Edit: male bisexuality is really rare. Most are like me, capable of enjoying heterosexual sex but making no claim to being bisexual; most men who do so claim lean very asymmetrically one way or the other and it is almost always gay.
TY for reply. I agree.
About Your edit: I didn't know that. TY again.
I'm a bit skeptical that bisexuality is so rare (in males). Of course it's conceived of as being a spectrum, with very few in very middle (eg: the range of 49%/51% to 51%/49%), or at the extreme ends. But there seem to be a good number of men who have substantial amounts of attraction towards both sexes, closer to the middle than to the ends of that spectrum.
But I recognize that my assessment is based more on experience than objective statistics. Do you have any source for believing that bisexual men are very rare?
Also, you referenced males. Do you believe that bisexual females are more or less common? And why LG rather than LGB if you are talking about all sexes, not just males?
I've read a lot about bisexuality and all studies say the same thing: 50/50 bi men are exceedingly uncommon. I have never met one. I didn't say there are none.
Most bi men are basically gay men who top and go with a woman once in a while.
With women the attraction is much more about the relationship than visual arousal and I have read that women can choose their orientation a lot more than men; my best friend in the USA is bi and married to a man but based on his health I doubt they have sex.
I last went to a gay public territory in 1996. I was 42 and in great shape but already past the age where I felt like I fit in and I saw men older than I being savagely abused with name-calling. I continued to hook up on the Internet but gay places are for people under 30 who want to ruin their hearing and their lungs.
Maybe it depends on how one defines bisexuality. As I noted, there are very few who are 100/0, 50/50, or 0/100 - or for that matter 90/10 or 36/64. That's way too narrow. a range.
I was suggesting that being closer to the middle than to either end, like "at least 1/4 towards each" as a broader definition. I doubt that is as rare.
Not quibbling over ratios.
I've never met any men I would call bisexual. My three hetero experiences don't make me bi. Anyway it's about attraction, not sex.
Gay men are prejudiced against bisexuality.
Yes, I've heard gay men dismiss male bisexuals as fence sitters, and treat them as being partway along the coming out process. It makes sense, based on their own experience, for many. And I meet bisexuals who figure everybody is really bisexual, some are just too hung up to let it out - again, generalizing from their intuitions or experience.
What I was curious about is any kind of statistics or study.
Yeah that was a common belief in the 70s. It was none other than Saint Lou Reed who put the kibosh on it with "you don't get to call yourself gay unless you suck cock or get fucked."
Yes a lot of gay men were horribly misogynistic, referring to women as "fish." I don't know about lesbians.
But I will just let it out here. While gay people have made disproportionate contributions to society and culture, the gay culture has never produced anything of value and at least back when I was briefly in it was rotten to the core. Rotten with cruelty and shallowness and useless in its disincentives to maturity. Gay men were encouraged to capitulate to every impulse and indulge any whim, to never grow up.
I remember one late morning in 1982 some time after we learned what AIDS really was, that we had to cut way back on the promiscuity. It hit me all of a sudden with one of those hard heart thumps: my life was going to change. I'd been to bathhouses a few times and sometimes it was a blast. That was clearly over, but of course the bathhouses would be closed soon anyway.
They weren't.
A lot of people prudently changed their behavior but many reacted in defiance, almost moving into the bathhouses, refusing to use condoms, aggressively promiscuous and infecting murderously. And the goddamn gay community, steeped in the ethos of postmodernism and long accustomed to resisting negative messages about sex, refused to make the most evident judgments. Yap yap yap "personal responsibility."
Even when infected men were lying about their HIV status and perforating their condoms to deliberately infect others, value judgments were off limits.
It was a sick, ghastly society and if it still exists it almost certainly still is.
Steve and others have noted that I am chillingly comfortable in drawing lines. I do not hesitate to condemn, and if you ever wondered why, now you know.
Well put, Chris.
You covered many of the bases.
In terms of the relatively consistent level of homosexuality across culture, I would note that this include even cultures which savagely persecute it. And it exists in at least some other species. I'm quite convinced that it's a natural variation.
I'm rather less convinced regarding trans, at least above the extremely rare level.