A few days ago, I watched this video entitled, Trans Women Should Be Legally Treated as Women. Three brave souls at UC Berkeley, a student, a man who doesn’t reveal his position at the college, and a molecular geneticist, were asked to choose one of the following options with regard to the above claim:
“Trans” encompasses transsexuals (the aforementioned people with genuine gender dysphoria), but also transvestites, autogynephiles, transgender people, non-binary people, and all the would-be victims who mistake subverting gender norms for a personality.
These people are not all the same."
This hits home. And you have outlined why I can't write "trans" without the sneer-quotes. The removal of -sexual, -gender, and -vestite from trans- seems to be a deliberate attempt to enlarge the ranks that would otherwise be only a few thousand people, those who meet the medical criteria for gender dysphoria.
Urging adolescents who wonder if their misery is explained by having the wrong gender identity, or who are gay and not ready to admit it, to hurry up and get hormones and surgery and cement themselves into those ranks for life ... before they have time to change their minds. I'm sure you're aware of the suicide rate among those who do change their minds.
I came out in Norfolk, VA in 1974 where the entire gay scene was centered on transvestites (a word we are not supposed to use anymore, claim the activists), and I have known a number of authentic transgendered people, the two have nothing to do with each other. Most transvestites in my acquaintance had some sort of character disorder. They stole from friends, almost none of them had jobs, and they only ever had one topic.
"all the would-be victims who mistake subverting gender norms for a personality."
"This hits home. And you have outlined why I can't write "trans" without the sneer-quotes."
Actually it was a conversation with you that got me thinking a bit more deeply about this. "Trans" had always been the term I used, just because it was a commonly understood term, but a while back, you said something along the lines of "trans-what?" when I wrote "trans" and I thought, "hmm, that's a fair point."
I'm trying to figure out a way to talk about trans people which makes this nuance more explicit. I'd like to use the term "transsexual" for people who actually have gender dysphoria, but that's been deemed a slur by the "nouveau-trans" and their allies, so I don't want to get into a bunch of needless bickering about it.
It was not that many years ago when the three terms I mentioned were what they called themselves; I've been told, frostily, that "transvestite" is now regarded as a slur. Well, all three words are still in the medical lexicon and that means more to me than do pronouncements by people who won't honor my request to not be called "queer," so they can f the f off.
Even dysphoria is a replacement for GID, as if the condition is not a disorder. It would seem to me that people who urgently desire what amounts to surgical mutilation have a disorder. OK, not a big deal, the same DSM took homosexuality out of the disorder category in 1974; win some, lose some.
I do hope the backlash you wrote about in Medium (without getting banned, astonishingly) comes to pass real soon now.
Trans-what? has always been there for me. Years ago, before "trans" was a part of my lexicon I knew a Thai Khatoy. He was the hairdresser on our expat compound in Saudi Arabia. I saw him as flaming gay, but he wished to be treated like one of the girls. He enjoyed their company and liked to play Mah Jong with them. I was perfectly fine with socially treating him as he wished, but no doubt you've already noticed that I use the pronoun "him" with respect to him.
In private conversation he told me that he really felt like a woman in a man's body and that he was trying to save money for reassignment surgery. On vacation in Thailand, we bumped into him by chance while he was also on vacation. He was in the company of a man who made no effort to present as a woman, flamed with supernova brightness and tried to hit on me in the presence of my wife. Was he really gender dysphoric or a homosexual transvestite trying to find a comfortable place in a world hostile to homosexuality? I'll never know but in retrospect, he may deserve a she from me.
I wish that people could go thru a discovery process about their own sexuality painlessly. Especially when escape from that pain leads to a medical intervention that was not really right for them or other tragedies.
There are more homosexuals among transvestites than in the general population but I have always read that the majority of them are heterosexual.
Every transvestite I ever trusted stole from me and in the year or I spent in the Norfolk gay scene I heard the word many times; if you let a drag into your house, count the silverware.
But "trans" seems even more decoupled from GID than homosexuality from transvestitism.
Another case of opinions based on a small view of a subset that gets people's attention. The only "trans"-somethings I have known were in a different environment from yours. Different vantage points.
The dishonesty of people impersonating women that you encountered may be a part of your view of "trans" in general although I have no doubt that you, like me, understand the influence of loud subsets beyond their true representation of the mean of a group.
And the transgendered whom I knew were all before the fad. Both the two I dated were going through the rigmarole of qualifying for surgery. The whole "trans"/"non-binary" thing wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eye yet.
Social movements attract extremists, so they become the problem for everyone. It's up to these groups to police their own, which often doesn't happen in the name of being inclusive and not wanting to chase off potential allies.
I saw this twenty years ago when I was on a Usenet group for the childfree-by-choice and the bane of our discussions were the child-haters - the ones who couldn't just leave it at, "I don't like children and I'm not having my own," but really spilled their bile about their fellow young human beings all over. To be fair, we as a group were critical of parents, lax discipline, strollers the size of Sherman tanks, and some bitched about 'stork parking' (spots closer to a store entrance for pregnant mothers) but there was also plenty of folks talking about how much they loved their nieces and nephews. But as the group grew and other CBCs found us the extremists grew, and a friend and I got sick of it. I stuck around for a year long than I should have, but when I found a non-CBC person who'd checked out the group after hearing me talk about it reference something hateful someone said I found I was ashamed to be hanging around with 'those people' and I quietly went away, as did my friend.
Black Lives Matter has to deal with black racists and bigots (I was reading James Baldwin's 1962 New Yorker article over the weekend, "Region of my Mind" in which he breaks bread with Elijah Muhammed and the Nation gang and it's....uh...racist and unscientific :) ), feminism has a misandry problem, and the Regressive Left has a white racism problem (they hate white people).
Last weekend I watched Trans Mission, a documentary someone here had recommended (I think it was here) and it was quite good, about the rush for hormone blockers & surgical procedures for children and young people. And when the Menno video "Y Chromosome" (a hilarious parody of YMCA) trended on Twitter last week, I got to wondering what 'sissy porn/sissy hypno' was and now I'm sorry I asked :(
When the trans movement gets tired enough of the hostility, most of which, I'm convinced, comes discourtesy of their extremists rather than genuine transphobia, they'll do something about it.
Just as civil rights movements need to confront their racists, feminists need to confront their misandrists, and the left needs to get over its fairly bizarre self-racism.
"Just as civil rights movements need to confront their racists, feminists need to confront their misandrists, and the left needs to get over its fairly bizarre self-racism."
Yep, so true. There's a real tendency within all of these movements to close ranks and do the whole "see no/hear no" routine when "one of their own" is doing something obviously wrong. And anybody who does speak up is a "pick me girl" or a "tool of white supremacy" or "truscum" or whatever.
In fact, it's interesting how viciously these groups attack people within them who hold the "wrong opinions." Spending as much time as I do mired in these kinds of debates, I do see trans people speaking up, but it's all too rare. Largely, I suspect, because of how especially vicious trans people are online when they're on the attack.
Bill Maher likes to say the left eats its own and he's largely right. The right doesn't tolerate dissent within its ranks either but it's much better at shutting it down (helps to have all those guns;/) Yes, I think there are plenty of transpeople who want to speak up more but are afraid to; hmmmm, maybe it's time for me to start researching how non-insane transpeople can reclaim their power ;)
I think it's going to take direct pressure, as it took with civil rights. I'm sure you read about Netflix. The "non-binary" must be creating tons of conflict in workplaces; I'd like to see pronouncements like the removal of preferred pronouns from company email ("you're here to work, not to project your gender identity"); let them howl.
And we need a lot more medical pushback. Doctors and counselors are cowed by the "trans" and a lot of people smart and educated enough to know better are playing along with the absurdity that is "non-binary" and the dissociation of dysphoria and "trans" identity.
I wonder what it's going to take. This isn't like bell-bottom jeans or spikey hair.
I think pronouns ARE needed when it's not clear. In fact, I just pulled out an old Medium article & have been reworking it for LinkedIn; it's a very real observation that the people who need to use them the most, don't. That the ones who are clearly male or female use them, but the ones who are questionable are pronoun-less.
Doctors are less cowed by trans than excited about the new permanent, lifelong patients they'll have, assuming they don't kill themselves first because someone pointed out women don't have dicks. I think the lawyers will cure the doctors, eventually. Esp when malpractice insurance skyrockets for any medical professional treating 'transgenderism'.
" That the ones who are clearly male or female use them, but the ones who are questionable are pronoun-less."
Ummm, who are you talking about? A short-haired girl who shared a womb with a male fraternal twin? A long-haired boy with feminine features? I am missing something here. I've probably met fewer than a dozen people in my life whose biological gender was not immediately obvious, one of whom walked past a construction site and got wolf-whistles then took off his shirt and walked past in the other direction. Hilarity, I have no doubt, ensued.
But I reject the entire "nonbinary" thing piecemeal, the claim of intermediate gender, as 100.00% attention-seeking and I offer as evidence that they never shut up about it. Those who would stand outside the polarity of gender altogether I would not consider falling under that word, But I categorically reject gender as a continuum. And if the context is psychology there are as many genders as people.
I'm talking about any one who doesn't 'look' either male or female; at the current moment, we're mostly dressing & looking the way a particular gender is 'expected' to look and I'm not convinced it's all socialization. I don't run into too many non-obvious myself, in person, but I might if I worked in an office still & had to go downtown every day. I've seen more non-binaries, or just genderfluids on the street, and while it was obvious to me which gender they were born, I don't necessarily know what pronouns they might prefer. In my article, which I published yesterday on LinkedIn, I referenced two women, one on LinkedIn, one in a Linkedin training video, who looked like mens (I'd say pretty intentionally) and with female names. And no pronouns. They really need to put them up there. While the video gal didn't need to state her preference in her video, I looked up her LI profile and sure enough, no pronouns.
A friend who'd read my article commented that the pronoun-less might be trying to create intentional discomfort, which is possible, but in my world, I just want drama-free interactions. The genderfluid, like transactivists, seem to think fear and discomfort will make us like and accept them better, or something.
"Social movements attract extremists, so they become the problem for everyone. It's up to these groups to police their own, which often doesn't happen in the name of being inclusive and not wanting to chase off potential allies."
And all of these extremists regard anyone not a member of their enclave as an enemy, no matter how supportive. I made a minor quibble on Medium, I forget what it was, but it was nothing remotely even like "a trans woman is still biologically a man," but the person I was responding to said I was "incredibly transphobic," not just "transphobic" but "incredibly."
On the Washington Post blog where I wrote for so long ... in the last few years before I got off there were three women, one of whom I was friends with, another who missed no opportunity to bait me .. who would turn any topic, no matter how "incredibly" remote, into bitter screeds about how unfair women have it, never with a reference to anything tangible like wages but always attitudes mostly imagined, and the more I or anyone tried to show we were on their side the more we were attacked for not understanding.
I could name a few more instances, but do I need to? At least with the RKBA people there is a range of viewpoints, a few will agree to things like background checks, but it seems like the "trans" crowd is the worst. And probably the most irresponsible.
I think there are just a fuckuva lot of people out there with serious mental illness/ailments and a big pack of them are Millennials & Gen Z, who *have* gotten royally screwed in so many ways...but then again we were in the Reagan era, and the boomers by the Vietnam War before that, so la plus ca change. Yes, they are all incredibly overreactive to everything ;) I pushed back on a now ex-friend who de-friended me on Facebook over being a TERF (i.e., level-headed feminist who knows the diff between boys and girls) when she called me transphobic. "Do you even know that that means?" I asked. "I'm not afraid of transpeople. I criticize them which they often richly deserve. But that doesn't make me transphobic, anymore than my regular criticism of Donald Trump makes me Trumpphobic. I'm not worried about *him* ambushing me in an alley either."
We've really got to start pushing back on the extremism and the language. I've begun mentioning on Twitter sometimes the penchant for overstating harm. Another thing we need to push back on is their obsession with alleged trans suicide. Everything you say or do might make, like, millions of transpeople commit suicide or something. Fact is fucking everyone is suicidal in the US and has been for thirty years; and there's little evidence that turning trans solves that problem, and may in fact make it MORE likely to happen.
At some point ("homophobia?") the suffix came to mean hatred, not fear. Ailurophobia is fear of cats, not hatred of them. Don't succumb to the ridiculous argument that the basis of hatred is fear, that is weak tea.
The correct suffix is -misia, as in homomisia, which I insist on using and which is gaining ground. I don't use "transmisia" much because I don't think it's as prevalent as the former, much though the "trans" people like to (love to) think of themselves as hated and oppressed. The suffix is more familiar as a prefix; misanthropy, misogyny, etc.
I don't think that many people are transmisic so much as sick and tired of what is so obviously a destructive fad. Being hectored over pronouns gets old fast and having to stay atop dozens and dozens of phony subgenders and infragenders is ridiculous.
As for suicide, the ones who react to affirmation pressures by the radicals and screw up their health with hormones or even get pieces they were born with hacked off, then later realize it was just a phase they were going through, have extraordinarily high suicide rates.
Suppose there was a way to commit suicide without cutting one's own flesh or something kinetic like going off a bridge or blowing one's brains out, just take a pill and go to sleep ... we'd have a very steep population drop.
I don't know, not with you on the basis of hatred being fear. 'Phobia' has always meant fear - it comes from the Greek word phobos, from the Greek god of fear and panic, Phobos. But you're right, -phobia has come to mean in SJ circles anyway, to include hatred. And not all dislike of certain aspects is a phobia; my ex thought homosexual sex was 'icky' but didn't have a problem making a gay guy his son's godfather.
As for -misia, I've never heard of it and it sounds too much like the academic jargonbabble beloved by SJWs who love big impressive words because they obscure the fact that they really don't know how they think or feel about their subjects. So maybe I'll wait for that one to become more commonly known.
Many have noted that the way to get rid of Donald Trump is to not pay attention to him - attention is the oxygen supply of the gross narcissist. That's what the trans movement wants - more attention. It would starve their gross narcissism, too.
Well if you've followed my writing on here at all you know of my contempt for jargon-babble and my passion for precision. The latter is at the level of obsession-compulsion and I have to actively repress the urge to make small corrections. The singular they drives me absolutely bonkers.
Admittedly the -misia prefix is not as well-known as -phobia but I never liked "homophobia" because it seems to parody murderous hatred as equivalent to the 50s ad of a woman standing on a chair going "Eeek! A mouse!"
I think that postmodernism sought legitimacy in educated-sounding nonsense and the "trans" movement does the same, and both are equally intellectually barren.
"Phobia" means fear, often irrational (agora- claustro-, ailuri- ...) sometimes not so irrational (arachno-, acro- ...) and in general Greek roots are not as well-known as Latin ones. I've never retreated from resisting "evolving language" BS and I resist wrong use of -phobia. And the SJWs and way too self-policingly conformist to learn "transmisia." All the more reason to use it.
I wish we were all (including me) precise and unambiguous, but we are not. Often purposefully.
A meme floating around social media (How social media works):
Me: I prefer mangos to oranges.
Random person: So basically, what you are saying is that you hate oranges. You also failed to mention pineapples, bananas and grapefruits. Educate yourself. I'm literally shaking.
I had to log on to like your comment for this: “…academic jargonbabble beloved by SJWs who love big impressive words because they obscure the fact that they really don't know how they think or feel about their subjects.” So apt.
The way to get rid of Donald Trump is to re-empower the working class. Like maybe not make them pay for rich people's student loans. Maybe not ship all of their jobs offshore. Stop slanting policy toward the rich in general would be a good idea.
And there is also this (in terms of getting rid of Trump): https://criticaltherapyantidote.org/2022/08/08/freud-explains-cancel-culture/ I know Freud's theories have been discredited but I still thought this article was spot on. Just drop Freud's nomenclature and go with the behavioral dynamics and it works.
Freud's views on how our psychology works is one of many, and none of them tell the 'whole story', they're just different ways of viewing the brain, all of them valid, IMO. Freud's view is very early, arguably a pioneer (although I could make a case for the Buddha as the earliest psychology pioneer). Much of what Freud taught has been discredited, as you point out, but I still keep an open mind on the id/ego/superego piece.
That's a very good article and one I'm going to pass on to a friend I just saw last night after being separated for three years by the pandemic (and life). He got a degree in 'community psychology' which I never heard of before, I wonder if it's a new field, but it seems to be about social justice, which has introduced some 'woke' ideas into him but he's not woke-crazy so far as I can tell.
He sent me an article yesterday he wants me to read, and I will likely send him this one because I pushed back somewhat on his 'woke' views the other night - we got into a private Facebook argument and then he called me to work it out like grownups did back in days of yore before we all got so divided and caught up for two hours and then he came over last night to watch bad movies, drink highballs and enjoy a gummy :) Hey, it's the only way to watch the Giant Spider Invasion (1975) and Sharktopus (2010)!
I ran across an old note to myself on article ideas...putting this one nearer the top on my list of things to write about...how to talk to wokies based on my experience arguing with Christian fundamentalists back when I lived in the States (and was younger and had time for this shit). One thing I learned back in the day was don't argue on their turf (the Bible) which you will never know as well as them. Force them onto yours (scientific/historical evidence) and hold their feet to the fire on the facts.
With the wokies, their Bible is social justice critical theories, and peer-reviewed research and evidence is their weak spot, particularly science. They'll be better-versed on history than Christian fundies but it will still be contaminated by their biases (who knew wokies had biases...:) )
Sadly, people in deep mental trouble will find any disagreement, no matter how polite and logical to be bullying. But then they may be disingenuously claiming that as a defense mechanism which is a form of bullying you into silence.
Mental illness leading to suicide is worse than cancer. You can't treat it with surgery - lobotomies were a horrible attempt. None of us wish to contribute to that, but silence can also be an enabler. The mental health community is now afraid to call it when they see it, so it spreads like a cancer.
This relates to the last commentary and the comments on it. Negative stereotypes and fear if being negatively stereotype where we become "people like you", the ultimate negative expression of a stereotype.
We do take notice of and remember the worst representatives.
Not all liberals are "woke" radical "trans" activists.
Not all Christians are fundamentalist bigots.
And so on.
But yes the tendency is to see groups as represented by their loudest and most extreme members, and this tendency is easily and routinely exploited. Probably one of the best things anyone could do to reduce tensions in our society is to increase awareness of this tendency.
The period of the great divide of the 60s was the time of my formative years. There was more than one kind of war protestor. There were those who sincerely opposed war and wanted it stopped, and those who hated the warriors and gave veterans their warm welcome home. That's what demonization of your "enemy" does. Today there is hate of political enemies the varying depths.
When we went thru the process of adopting our niece we had to deal with various agencies. Quite painful for my wife dredging up her truly horrible childhood. Interviews that actually made her cry. Less painful for me but one unnecessary thing happened. One woman in the process who had our histories on paper and knew that I was a veteran of the war in Vietnam smugly told me that she had been an active war protestor. There was no need for her to put that into the interviews, she was a hater. I felt like I was in the presence of a venomous snake. As is typical for me, I tried to befriend her and get passed it, but it was there.
The haters were a minority of the political left, but they were the face of the political left. On an intellectual level I understand that vocal extremists are not what most of their tribe is like, but on an emotional level they are like a Viet Cong in a friendly village. They make the village suspect, and that is one of their goals. I try my best to not be blindly partisan in politics, but the people who arrogantly speak of my conservative kin as "uneducated" (stupid) bumpkins and racists prevent me from ever seeing the group they make themselves the face of favorably. Demonization is about making members other tribes enemies, rather than rational discussion of ideas. Time tested; it works.
I was in my mid-teens at the peak of the protests. I wore the armbands, marched in the marches, attracted frowns from my high school teachers. Even at that age I had my doubts about the real reasons for the war; the domino theory sounded as plausible as any slippery slope argument. And I will admit that not wanting to get shot at figured in there somewhere. A few of my classmates a year older than me died over there, er, here.
But at no time then nor for years later did I ever hear anything about protestors "spitting on" or otherwise attacking returning soldiers. Not once that I can recall did I ever hear anything but that the Americans engaged in that awful war were just as much victims of anticommunist paranoia as the Vietnamese people. I would have spoken up as shrilly as I could manage had I ever heard anything like that. I've heard from people I have no reason to doubt that such things did happen, but not even hanging out with beret-wearing Galois-smoking protesters did I ever hear such things.
That was my point about small minorities giving us our impressions. Nobody spit on me; I was mostly seen with indifference. It did happen to people I know, but certainly not all returning veterans.
Marines are very tribal. It's not just what we did, but who we are. I'm certain that you've noticed. It does not define us politically. I am a member of several Marine and Vietnam Veteran groups. Some are, "What's this political shit doing here?" and others are as toxically politically divided as the rest of America. We have an image and people have assumptions about us, often not helpful. By the end of my time in Vietnam we were actively asking each other, "Why are we here?" I am as anti-war as you ever were.
The animosity toward veterans was not aimed at you so it was less likely to get your attention. That goes to the heart of my thoughts on the extremists. The negative impressions that they create are largely upon their targets.
Oh I know it wasn't aimed at me, and when my year came the draft had been ended. My lottery number was 13.
I do as always appreciate your candor.
At the remove of all these decades, and knowing so much more than we did in our innocent days about the kind of thinking behind "bear any burden, pay any price," what do you think was the real reason we went over to Vietnam?
I could only speculate about "the" reason, but I think that there were enough ideas floated that people latched onto one, or more. The cold war was in full bloom and the military thinkers didn't want Russia to have access to a year-round fair weather navel port on the coast of Vietnam. America was not a pre-WW2 colonialist in Southeast Asea, that was America's friends, the French and British. We had no historical attachment to the region or the fate of its inhabitants.
It is easy to get people to go fight in them. I came from a long line of military veterans on my mother's side of the family going back to a roster of privates in the Revolutionary War. There was a war going on and young men like me didn't want to miss it. Interestingly I am the last in that long line, there are none in my extended family who followed suit.
If there is a root cause reason, Old Gimlet Eye probably put his finger on it. https://papersourceonline.com/war-is-just-a-racket/ In the longer version of this he described war as something where profits are in dollars and losses are in lives.
Moonfuzz needs to tell the absolutists to back the hell off. They are taking any charity logically extended to fellow humans and politicizing it for maximum negative reaction. Threatening JK Rowling? Jeez.
My dear friend Patricia broke into my early corporate days with her humor, her personality, her essential humanness. Yes, she was cross dressing as she sought to transition after the requisite five years of therapy. Twas earlier times, and she was in her late forties.
Pat told me to see that no-one is purely gay or straight - that’s two sides of the same coin. She literally showed me a quarter and the edge between the two sides. Such a wise person.
But this current frenzy - this is something else and it has to be rejected. It leaves no room for nuance or sympathy. Hard, demanding, intolerant. Why? Why crush the opposition instead of forging common ground? I’m baffled by the stridently and very turned off…
"Moonfuzz needs to tell the absolutists to back the hell off. They are taking any charity logically extended to fellow humans and politicizing it for maximum negative reaction. Threatening JK Rowling? Jeez."
Yep, this is the problem. As I was just saying to Nicole above, most "social justice" movements, but the trans activists in particular, are incredibly vicious to members of the in-group who say the wrong thing.
But trans women in particular, desperately need a few prominent, reasonable voices who dare to speak out. In fact, the only prominent people within the trans community who I can think of who are willing to speak out trans men! Buck Angel and Scott Newgent have been leading the chareg against the exremes of gender ideology for years now.
Edited to add: Actually, Blair White and Miranda Yardley are two trans women who have also been speaking up.
"But this current frenzy - this is something else and it has to be rejected. It leaves no room for nuance or sympathy. Hard, demanding, intolerant. Why? Why crush the opposition instead of forging common ground? I’m baffled by the stridently and very turned off…"
Run by misogynist men and/or sexual fetishists.
The true gender dysphorics are about as uncommon as they always were.
And yet the number of teen girls claiming to be "trans" has risen 4000% since 2006.
I remember when the prerequisites for reassignment surgery were very high; a year living as the other gender, passing a stringent diagnosis, etc.; now I read about adolescents going online and getting an eligibility certificate by ticking a few checkboxes, and a counselor who denies the reality of a "trans" claim can lose his job.
It seems to me that sometime in the late 00s things began to take a bad turn. Some blame "The L-Word" for introducing a character who was a male lesbian (played by Dallas Roberts. Who was perfect in the role) Anyway, it's kind of a problem, always, for fringe communities to go mainstream. We lose our fringe status, for one thing.
Of course the desire is there, for everyone to be treated equally. But we don't understand what we mean by "equal". Because we don't really want that. Not really. What we want is to be treated special. As compensation. Which is totally understandable, but when it's overindulged we wind up with what's happening now in the trans community. Balance is needed.
“Trans” encompasses transsexuals (the aforementioned people with genuine gender dysphoria), but also transvestites, autogynephiles, transgender people, non-binary people, and all the would-be victims who mistake subverting gender norms for a personality.
These people are not all the same."
This hits home. And you have outlined why I can't write "trans" without the sneer-quotes. The removal of -sexual, -gender, and -vestite from trans- seems to be a deliberate attempt to enlarge the ranks that would otherwise be only a few thousand people, those who meet the medical criteria for gender dysphoria.
Urging adolescents who wonder if their misery is explained by having the wrong gender identity, or who are gay and not ready to admit it, to hurry up and get hormones and surgery and cement themselves into those ranks for life ... before they have time to change their minds. I'm sure you're aware of the suicide rate among those who do change their minds.
I came out in Norfolk, VA in 1974 where the entire gay scene was centered on transvestites (a word we are not supposed to use anymore, claim the activists), and I have known a number of authentic transgendered people, the two have nothing to do with each other. Most transvestites in my acquaintance had some sort of character disorder. They stole from friends, almost none of them had jobs, and they only ever had one topic.
"all the would-be victims who mistake subverting gender norms for a personality."
He rings the bell.
"This hits home. And you have outlined why I can't write "trans" without the sneer-quotes."
Actually it was a conversation with you that got me thinking a bit more deeply about this. "Trans" had always been the term I used, just because it was a commonly understood term, but a while back, you said something along the lines of "trans-what?" when I wrote "trans" and I thought, "hmm, that's a fair point."
I'm trying to figure out a way to talk about trans people which makes this nuance more explicit. I'd like to use the term "transsexual" for people who actually have gender dysphoria, but that's been deemed a slur by the "nouveau-trans" and their allies, so I don't want to get into a bunch of needless bickering about it.
We definitely need better terminology though.
It was not that many years ago when the three terms I mentioned were what they called themselves; I've been told, frostily, that "transvestite" is now regarded as a slur. Well, all three words are still in the medical lexicon and that means more to me than do pronouncements by people who won't honor my request to not be called "queer," so they can f the f off.
Even dysphoria is a replacement for GID, as if the condition is not a disorder. It would seem to me that people who urgently desire what amounts to surgical mutilation have a disorder. OK, not a big deal, the same DSM took homosexuality out of the disorder category in 1974; win some, lose some.
I do hope the backlash you wrote about in Medium (without getting banned, astonishingly) comes to pass real soon now.
Trans-what? has always been there for me. Years ago, before "trans" was a part of my lexicon I knew a Thai Khatoy. He was the hairdresser on our expat compound in Saudi Arabia. I saw him as flaming gay, but he wished to be treated like one of the girls. He enjoyed their company and liked to play Mah Jong with them. I was perfectly fine with socially treating him as he wished, but no doubt you've already noticed that I use the pronoun "him" with respect to him.
In private conversation he told me that he really felt like a woman in a man's body and that he was trying to save money for reassignment surgery. On vacation in Thailand, we bumped into him by chance while he was also on vacation. He was in the company of a man who made no effort to present as a woman, flamed with supernova brightness and tried to hit on me in the presence of my wife. Was he really gender dysphoric or a homosexual transvestite trying to find a comfortable place in a world hostile to homosexuality? I'll never know but in retrospect, he may deserve a she from me.
I wish that people could go thru a discovery process about their own sexuality painlessly. Especially when escape from that pain leads to a medical intervention that was not really right for them or other tragedies.
There are more homosexuals among transvestites than in the general population but I have always read that the majority of them are heterosexual.
Every transvestite I ever trusted stole from me and in the year or I spent in the Norfolk gay scene I heard the word many times; if you let a drag into your house, count the silverware.
But "trans" seems even more decoupled from GID than homosexuality from transvestitism.
Another case of opinions based on a small view of a subset that gets people's attention. The only "trans"-somethings I have known were in a different environment from yours. Different vantage points.
The dishonesty of people impersonating women that you encountered may be a part of your view of "trans" in general although I have no doubt that you, like me, understand the influence of loud subsets beyond their true representation of the mean of a group.
And the transgendered whom I knew were all before the fad. Both the two I dated were going through the rigmarole of qualifying for surgery. The whole "trans"/"non-binary" thing wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eye yet.
Social movements attract extremists, so they become the problem for everyone. It's up to these groups to police their own, which often doesn't happen in the name of being inclusive and not wanting to chase off potential allies.
I saw this twenty years ago when I was on a Usenet group for the childfree-by-choice and the bane of our discussions were the child-haters - the ones who couldn't just leave it at, "I don't like children and I'm not having my own," but really spilled their bile about their fellow young human beings all over. To be fair, we as a group were critical of parents, lax discipline, strollers the size of Sherman tanks, and some bitched about 'stork parking' (spots closer to a store entrance for pregnant mothers) but there was also plenty of folks talking about how much they loved their nieces and nephews. But as the group grew and other CBCs found us the extremists grew, and a friend and I got sick of it. I stuck around for a year long than I should have, but when I found a non-CBC person who'd checked out the group after hearing me talk about it reference something hateful someone said I found I was ashamed to be hanging around with 'those people' and I quietly went away, as did my friend.
Black Lives Matter has to deal with black racists and bigots (I was reading James Baldwin's 1962 New Yorker article over the weekend, "Region of my Mind" in which he breaks bread with Elijah Muhammed and the Nation gang and it's....uh...racist and unscientific :) ), feminism has a misandry problem, and the Regressive Left has a white racism problem (they hate white people).
Last weekend I watched Trans Mission, a documentary someone here had recommended (I think it was here) and it was quite good, about the rush for hormone blockers & surgical procedures for children and young people. And when the Menno video "Y Chromosome" (a hilarious parody of YMCA) trended on Twitter last week, I got to wondering what 'sissy porn/sissy hypno' was and now I'm sorry I asked :(
When the trans movement gets tired enough of the hostility, most of which, I'm convinced, comes discourtesy of their extremists rather than genuine transphobia, they'll do something about it.
Just as civil rights movements need to confront their racists, feminists need to confront their misandrists, and the left needs to get over its fairly bizarre self-racism.
"Just as civil rights movements need to confront their racists, feminists need to confront their misandrists, and the left needs to get over its fairly bizarre self-racism."
Yep, so true. There's a real tendency within all of these movements to close ranks and do the whole "see no/hear no" routine when "one of their own" is doing something obviously wrong. And anybody who does speak up is a "pick me girl" or a "tool of white supremacy" or "truscum" or whatever.
In fact, it's interesting how viciously these groups attack people within them who hold the "wrong opinions." Spending as much time as I do mired in these kinds of debates, I do see trans people speaking up, but it's all too rare. Largely, I suspect, because of how especially vicious trans people are online when they're on the attack.
Bill Maher likes to say the left eats its own and he's largely right. The right doesn't tolerate dissent within its ranks either but it's much better at shutting it down (helps to have all those guns;/) Yes, I think there are plenty of transpeople who want to speak up more but are afraid to; hmmmm, maybe it's time for me to start researching how non-insane transpeople can reclaim their power ;)
I think it's going to take direct pressure, as it took with civil rights. I'm sure you read about Netflix. The "non-binary" must be creating tons of conflict in workplaces; I'd like to see pronouncements like the removal of preferred pronouns from company email ("you're here to work, not to project your gender identity"); let them howl.
And we need a lot more medical pushback. Doctors and counselors are cowed by the "trans" and a lot of people smart and educated enough to know better are playing along with the absurdity that is "non-binary" and the dissociation of dysphoria and "trans" identity.
I wonder what it's going to take. This isn't like bell-bottom jeans or spikey hair.
I think pronouns ARE needed when it's not clear. In fact, I just pulled out an old Medium article & have been reworking it for LinkedIn; it's a very real observation that the people who need to use them the most, don't. That the ones who are clearly male or female use them, but the ones who are questionable are pronoun-less.
Doctors are less cowed by trans than excited about the new permanent, lifelong patients they'll have, assuming they don't kill themselves first because someone pointed out women don't have dicks. I think the lawyers will cure the doctors, eventually. Esp when malpractice insurance skyrockets for any medical professional treating 'transgenderism'.
" That the ones who are clearly male or female use them, but the ones who are questionable are pronoun-less."
Ummm, who are you talking about? A short-haired girl who shared a womb with a male fraternal twin? A long-haired boy with feminine features? I am missing something here. I've probably met fewer than a dozen people in my life whose biological gender was not immediately obvious, one of whom walked past a construction site and got wolf-whistles then took off his shirt and walked past in the other direction. Hilarity, I have no doubt, ensued.
But I reject the entire "nonbinary" thing piecemeal, the claim of intermediate gender, as 100.00% attention-seeking and I offer as evidence that they never shut up about it. Those who would stand outside the polarity of gender altogether I would not consider falling under that word, But I categorically reject gender as a continuum. And if the context is psychology there are as many genders as people.
I'm talking about any one who doesn't 'look' either male or female; at the current moment, we're mostly dressing & looking the way a particular gender is 'expected' to look and I'm not convinced it's all socialization. I don't run into too many non-obvious myself, in person, but I might if I worked in an office still & had to go downtown every day. I've seen more non-binaries, or just genderfluids on the street, and while it was obvious to me which gender they were born, I don't necessarily know what pronouns they might prefer. In my article, which I published yesterday on LinkedIn, I referenced two women, one on LinkedIn, one in a Linkedin training video, who looked like mens (I'd say pretty intentionally) and with female names. And no pronouns. They really need to put them up there. While the video gal didn't need to state her preference in her video, I looked up her LI profile and sure enough, no pronouns.
A friend who'd read my article commented that the pronoun-less might be trying to create intentional discomfort, which is possible, but in my world, I just want drama-free interactions. The genderfluid, like transactivists, seem to think fear and discomfort will make us like and accept them better, or something.
"Social movements attract extremists, so they become the problem for everyone. It's up to these groups to police their own, which often doesn't happen in the name of being inclusive and not wanting to chase off potential allies."
And all of these extremists regard anyone not a member of their enclave as an enemy, no matter how supportive. I made a minor quibble on Medium, I forget what it was, but it was nothing remotely even like "a trans woman is still biologically a man," but the person I was responding to said I was "incredibly transphobic," not just "transphobic" but "incredibly."
On the Washington Post blog where I wrote for so long ... in the last few years before I got off there were three women, one of whom I was friends with, another who missed no opportunity to bait me .. who would turn any topic, no matter how "incredibly" remote, into bitter screeds about how unfair women have it, never with a reference to anything tangible like wages but always attitudes mostly imagined, and the more I or anyone tried to show we were on their side the more we were attacked for not understanding.
I could name a few more instances, but do I need to? At least with the RKBA people there is a range of viewpoints, a few will agree to things like background checks, but it seems like the "trans" crowd is the worst. And probably the most irresponsible.
I think there are just a fuckuva lot of people out there with serious mental illness/ailments and a big pack of them are Millennials & Gen Z, who *have* gotten royally screwed in so many ways...but then again we were in the Reagan era, and the boomers by the Vietnam War before that, so la plus ca change. Yes, they are all incredibly overreactive to everything ;) I pushed back on a now ex-friend who de-friended me on Facebook over being a TERF (i.e., level-headed feminist who knows the diff between boys and girls) when she called me transphobic. "Do you even know that that means?" I asked. "I'm not afraid of transpeople. I criticize them which they often richly deserve. But that doesn't make me transphobic, anymore than my regular criticism of Donald Trump makes me Trumpphobic. I'm not worried about *him* ambushing me in an alley either."
We've really got to start pushing back on the extremism and the language. I've begun mentioning on Twitter sometimes the penchant for overstating harm. Another thing we need to push back on is their obsession with alleged trans suicide. Everything you say or do might make, like, millions of transpeople commit suicide or something. Fact is fucking everyone is suicidal in the US and has been for thirty years; and there's little evidence that turning trans solves that problem, and may in fact make it MORE likely to happen.
At some point ("homophobia?") the suffix came to mean hatred, not fear. Ailurophobia is fear of cats, not hatred of them. Don't succumb to the ridiculous argument that the basis of hatred is fear, that is weak tea.
The correct suffix is -misia, as in homomisia, which I insist on using and which is gaining ground. I don't use "transmisia" much because I don't think it's as prevalent as the former, much though the "trans" people like to (love to) think of themselves as hated and oppressed. The suffix is more familiar as a prefix; misanthropy, misogyny, etc.
I don't think that many people are transmisic so much as sick and tired of what is so obviously a destructive fad. Being hectored over pronouns gets old fast and having to stay atop dozens and dozens of phony subgenders and infragenders is ridiculous.
As for suicide, the ones who react to affirmation pressures by the radicals and screw up their health with hormones or even get pieces they were born with hacked off, then later realize it was just a phase they were going through, have extraordinarily high suicide rates.
Suppose there was a way to commit suicide without cutting one's own flesh or something kinetic like going off a bridge or blowing one's brains out, just take a pill and go to sleep ... we'd have a very steep population drop.
I don't know, not with you on the basis of hatred being fear. 'Phobia' has always meant fear - it comes from the Greek word phobos, from the Greek god of fear and panic, Phobos. But you're right, -phobia has come to mean in SJ circles anyway, to include hatred. And not all dislike of certain aspects is a phobia; my ex thought homosexual sex was 'icky' but didn't have a problem making a gay guy his son's godfather.
As for -misia, I've never heard of it and it sounds too much like the academic jargonbabble beloved by SJWs who love big impressive words because they obscure the fact that they really don't know how they think or feel about their subjects. So maybe I'll wait for that one to become more commonly known.
Many have noted that the way to get rid of Donald Trump is to not pay attention to him - attention is the oxygen supply of the gross narcissist. That's what the trans movement wants - more attention. It would starve their gross narcissism, too.
Well if you've followed my writing on here at all you know of my contempt for jargon-babble and my passion for precision. The latter is at the level of obsession-compulsion and I have to actively repress the urge to make small corrections. The singular they drives me absolutely bonkers.
Admittedly the -misia prefix is not as well-known as -phobia but I never liked "homophobia" because it seems to parody murderous hatred as equivalent to the 50s ad of a woman standing on a chair going "Eeek! A mouse!"
I think that postmodernism sought legitimacy in educated-sounding nonsense and the "trans" movement does the same, and both are equally intellectually barren.
"Phobia" means fear, often irrational (agora- claustro-, ailuri- ...) sometimes not so irrational (arachno-, acro- ...) and in general Greek roots are not as well-known as Latin ones. I've never retreated from resisting "evolving language" BS and I resist wrong use of -phobia. And the SJWs and way too self-policingly conformist to learn "transmisia." All the more reason to use it.
I wish we were all (including me) precise and unambiguous, but we are not. Often purposefully.
A meme floating around social media (How social media works):
Me: I prefer mangos to oranges.
Random person: So basically, what you are saying is that you hate oranges. You also failed to mention pineapples, bananas and grapefruits. Educate yourself. I'm literally shaking.
I had to log on to like your comment for this: “…academic jargonbabble beloved by SJWs who love big impressive words because they obscure the fact that they really don't know how they think or feel about their subjects.” So apt.
The way to get rid of Donald Trump is to re-empower the working class. Like maybe not make them pay for rich people's student loans. Maybe not ship all of their jobs offshore. Stop slanting policy toward the rich in general would be a good idea.
And there is also this (in terms of getting rid of Trump): https://criticaltherapyantidote.org/2022/08/08/freud-explains-cancel-culture/ I know Freud's theories have been discredited but I still thought this article was spot on. Just drop Freud's nomenclature and go with the behavioral dynamics and it works.
Freud's views on how our psychology works is one of many, and none of them tell the 'whole story', they're just different ways of viewing the brain, all of them valid, IMO. Freud's view is very early, arguably a pioneer (although I could make a case for the Buddha as the earliest psychology pioneer). Much of what Freud taught has been discredited, as you point out, but I still keep an open mind on the id/ego/superego piece.
That's a very good article and one I'm going to pass on to a friend I just saw last night after being separated for three years by the pandemic (and life). He got a degree in 'community psychology' which I never heard of before, I wonder if it's a new field, but it seems to be about social justice, which has introduced some 'woke' ideas into him but he's not woke-crazy so far as I can tell.
He sent me an article yesterday he wants me to read, and I will likely send him this one because I pushed back somewhat on his 'woke' views the other night - we got into a private Facebook argument and then he called me to work it out like grownups did back in days of yore before we all got so divided and caught up for two hours and then he came over last night to watch bad movies, drink highballs and enjoy a gummy :) Hey, it's the only way to watch the Giant Spider Invasion (1975) and Sharktopus (2010)!
I ran across an old note to myself on article ideas...putting this one nearer the top on my list of things to write about...how to talk to wokies based on my experience arguing with Christian fundamentalists back when I lived in the States (and was younger and had time for this shit). One thing I learned back in the day was don't argue on their turf (the Bible) which you will never know as well as them. Force them onto yours (scientific/historical evidence) and hold their feet to the fire on the facts.
With the wokies, their Bible is social justice critical theories, and peer-reviewed research and evidence is their weak spot, particularly science. They'll be better-versed on history than Christian fundies but it will still be contaminated by their biases (who knew wokies had biases...:) )
Sadly, people in deep mental trouble will find any disagreement, no matter how polite and logical to be bullying. But then they may be disingenuously claiming that as a defense mechanism which is a form of bullying you into silence.
Mental illness leading to suicide is worse than cancer. You can't treat it with surgery - lobotomies were a horrible attempt. None of us wish to contribute to that, but silence can also be an enabler. The mental health community is now afraid to call it when they see it, so it spreads like a cancer.
My comment elsewhere in this commentary could properly go here.
This relates to the last commentary and the comments on it. Negative stereotypes and fear if being negatively stereotype where we become "people like you", the ultimate negative expression of a stereotype.
We do take notice of and remember the worst representatives.
Not all liberals are "woke" radical "trans" activists.
Not all Christians are fundamentalist bigots.
And so on.
But yes the tendency is to see groups as represented by their loudest and most extreme members, and this tendency is easily and routinely exploited. Probably one of the best things anyone could do to reduce tensions in our society is to increase awareness of this tendency.
The period of the great divide of the 60s was the time of my formative years. There was more than one kind of war protestor. There were those who sincerely opposed war and wanted it stopped, and those who hated the warriors and gave veterans their warm welcome home. That's what demonization of your "enemy" does. Today there is hate of political enemies the varying depths.
When we went thru the process of adopting our niece we had to deal with various agencies. Quite painful for my wife dredging up her truly horrible childhood. Interviews that actually made her cry. Less painful for me but one unnecessary thing happened. One woman in the process who had our histories on paper and knew that I was a veteran of the war in Vietnam smugly told me that she had been an active war protestor. There was no need for her to put that into the interviews, she was a hater. I felt like I was in the presence of a venomous snake. As is typical for me, I tried to befriend her and get passed it, but it was there.
The haters were a minority of the political left, but they were the face of the political left. On an intellectual level I understand that vocal extremists are not what most of their tribe is like, but on an emotional level they are like a Viet Cong in a friendly village. They make the village suspect, and that is one of their goals. I try my best to not be blindly partisan in politics, but the people who arrogantly speak of my conservative kin as "uneducated" (stupid) bumpkins and racists prevent me from ever seeing the group they make themselves the face of favorably. Demonization is about making members other tribes enemies, rather than rational discussion of ideas. Time tested; it works.
I was in my mid-teens at the peak of the protests. I wore the armbands, marched in the marches, attracted frowns from my high school teachers. Even at that age I had my doubts about the real reasons for the war; the domino theory sounded as plausible as any slippery slope argument. And I will admit that not wanting to get shot at figured in there somewhere. A few of my classmates a year older than me died over there, er, here.
But at no time then nor for years later did I ever hear anything about protestors "spitting on" or otherwise attacking returning soldiers. Not once that I can recall did I ever hear anything but that the Americans engaged in that awful war were just as much victims of anticommunist paranoia as the Vietnamese people. I would have spoken up as shrilly as I could manage had I ever heard anything like that. I've heard from people I have no reason to doubt that such things did happen, but not even hanging out with beret-wearing Galois-smoking protesters did I ever hear such things.
That was my point about small minorities giving us our impressions. Nobody spit on me; I was mostly seen with indifference. It did happen to people I know, but certainly not all returning veterans.
Marines are very tribal. It's not just what we did, but who we are. I'm certain that you've noticed. It does not define us politically. I am a member of several Marine and Vietnam Veteran groups. Some are, "What's this political shit doing here?" and others are as toxically politically divided as the rest of America. We have an image and people have assumptions about us, often not helpful. By the end of my time in Vietnam we were actively asking each other, "Why are we here?" I am as anti-war as you ever were.
The animosity toward veterans was not aimed at you so it was less likely to get your attention. That goes to the heart of my thoughts on the extremists. The negative impressions that they create are largely upon their targets.
Oh I know it wasn't aimed at me, and when my year came the draft had been ended. My lottery number was 13.
I do as always appreciate your candor.
At the remove of all these decades, and knowing so much more than we did in our innocent days about the kind of thinking behind "bear any burden, pay any price," what do you think was the real reason we went over to Vietnam?
I could only speculate about "the" reason, but I think that there were enough ideas floated that people latched onto one, or more. The cold war was in full bloom and the military thinkers didn't want Russia to have access to a year-round fair weather navel port on the coast of Vietnam. America was not a pre-WW2 colonialist in Southeast Asea, that was America's friends, the French and British. We had no historical attachment to the region or the fate of its inhabitants.
It is easy to get people to go fight in them. I came from a long line of military veterans on my mother's side of the family going back to a roster of privates in the Revolutionary War. There was a war going on and young men like me didn't want to miss it. Interestingly I am the last in that long line, there are none in my extended family who followed suit.
If there is a root cause reason, Old Gimlet Eye probably put his finger on it. https://papersourceonline.com/war-is-just-a-racket/ In the longer version of this he described war as something where profits are in dollars and losses are in lives.
Moonfuzz needs to tell the absolutists to back the hell off. They are taking any charity logically extended to fellow humans and politicizing it for maximum negative reaction. Threatening JK Rowling? Jeez.
My dear friend Patricia broke into my early corporate days with her humor, her personality, her essential humanness. Yes, she was cross dressing as she sought to transition after the requisite five years of therapy. Twas earlier times, and she was in her late forties.
Pat told me to see that no-one is purely gay or straight - that’s two sides of the same coin. She literally showed me a quarter and the edge between the two sides. Such a wise person.
But this current frenzy - this is something else and it has to be rejected. It leaves no room for nuance or sympathy. Hard, demanding, intolerant. Why? Why crush the opposition instead of forging common ground? I’m baffled by the stridently and very turned off…
"Moonfuzz needs to tell the absolutists to back the hell off. They are taking any charity logically extended to fellow humans and politicizing it for maximum negative reaction. Threatening JK Rowling? Jeez."
Yep, this is the problem. As I was just saying to Nicole above, most "social justice" movements, but the trans activists in particular, are incredibly vicious to members of the in-group who say the wrong thing.
But trans women in particular, desperately need a few prominent, reasonable voices who dare to speak out. In fact, the only prominent people within the trans community who I can think of who are willing to speak out trans men! Buck Angel and Scott Newgent have been leading the chareg against the exremes of gender ideology for years now.
Edited to add: Actually, Blair White and Miranda Yardley are two trans women who have also been speaking up.
"But this current frenzy - this is something else and it has to be rejected. It leaves no room for nuance or sympathy. Hard, demanding, intolerant. Why? Why crush the opposition instead of forging common ground? I’m baffled by the stridently and very turned off…"
Run by misogynist men and/or sexual fetishists.
The true gender dysphorics are about as uncommon as they always were.
And yet the number of teen girls claiming to be "trans" has risen 4000% since 2006.
I remember when the prerequisites for reassignment surgery were very high; a year living as the other gender, passing a stringent diagnosis, etc.; now I read about adolescents going online and getting an eligibility certificate by ticking a few checkboxes, and a counselor who denies the reality of a "trans" claim can lose his job.
This is what the activists have wrought.
Stridency -
It seems to me that sometime in the late 00s things began to take a bad turn. Some blame "The L-Word" for introducing a character who was a male lesbian (played by Dallas Roberts. Who was perfect in the role) Anyway, it's kind of a problem, always, for fringe communities to go mainstream. We lose our fringe status, for one thing.
Of course the desire is there, for everyone to be treated equally. But we don't understand what we mean by "equal". Because we don't really want that. Not really. What we want is to be treated special. As compensation. Which is totally understandable, but when it's overindulged we wind up with what's happening now in the trans community. Balance is needed.