There isn't quite as tidy a distinction between "old-school" "medical" transsexuals and new-school "political trans" as you've argued. Social media was indeed behind the recent explosion of the trans phenomenon. But I've been around this movement since the '90s, and things were far from hunky-dory in the tiny old village of transsexual culture long before it exploded into the modern Megalopolis of teens with bespoke pronouns and waves of fully-intact men rushing into women's sports leagues, spas, shelters and anywhere else communal female nudity might be involved.
There was always resistance to "medical gatekeeping" among transsexual males, and there was always a desire to push further into women's spaces than they had so-far achieved. (Females with trans identities were virtually nonexistent until the Internet.) The ultimate political objectives of the trans movement were always, right from the start, total and complete erasure of any distinction whatsoever between males who *wanted badly to be female* and actual females. And the movement always sought to achieve these goals through a combination of both medical and political means.
With dumb luck, as you said ("they won the lottery"), the stars aligned around a number factors (the Obergefell Supreme Court ruling; social media and smartphones; the culture war and tribal polarization in the US; etc) and the trans movement suddenly came into massive political capital incredibly quickly.
But in your framing, it's just the political acceleration that was the problem, not the fundamental objectives. You seem to be arguing that, if the movement had taken its work towards its objectives more slowly, things would have been fine, perhaps even socially good:
"Nearly every prominent social movement of the past few hundred years, from abolitionism to women’s rights to civil rights, spent generations raising awareness, laying groundwork, planting seeds, organizing, and changing hearts and minds before they gained anything like the power the trans movement was gifted. ...[T]he trans movement regarded public opinion, persuasion, civility, incrementalism, and even winning elections as irrelevant."
I would counter that that's because trans *wasn't much of a social justice movement in the first place*.
Trans really is not a legitimate social movement in the sense of a fight for equality for a fundamental, rightful, material category of people. And it should never have been framed as that kind of thing. Your mistake is even comparing it to women's rights and civil rights when it's better off being compared to other categories of things, such as, say, the right for people with anorexia have access to compassionate, proper medical treatment for their condition (with the optimal outcome for all anorexics being *CURING them of it*), or the right of Scientologists to believe whatever cockamamie theories they want *about themselves*, but at the same time recognizing that their religion is cult-like and extreme and not to be taken at face-value in the secular sphere (with, again, the optimal outcome for Sceintologists being for them all to *ESCAPE from it*).
Humans cannot change sex, and the desire to do so is almost entirely rooted in sexual paraphilia, internalized homophobia ("ego-dystonic" homosexuality, or gays & lesbians who badly want to escape the label "homosexual", usually for cultural reasons), and other maladaptive, socially and psychiatrically un-ideal reasons.
Many (though not all) of the movement's fundamental objectives were illiberal and unethical right from their dubious foundations, which lay in a kind of gray area between fantasy and reality, and between appeasing mental health disorders and holistically treating them.
I really do like a lot of your writing on this topic, but I end up posting criticism of it more than praise, simply because I believe you are failing, consistently, to reckon with the deepest, lowest, first-principles problems with trans, with the philosophical, abstract ideas right at the core of it. The behavioural, psychological phenomena that cause it, and the real-world consequences of its demands are never addressed in your writing. That frustrates me as a fellow gay and a fellow North American liberal who is extremely knowledgeable in this subject.
This avoidance of the core, base-level problems with "trans" is a consistent problem I have seen, particularly and acutely in American liberal media circles. The specifically-American psychological concept of progressivism just cannot swallow the hard pill that transgender ideation is a mental disorder for which social awareness and enlightenment campaigns are not the appropriate tools to address it.
It's as if that's a step too far from the Overton-window comfort zone for liberal Americans whose psyches have been battered by decades of polarized red-state/blue-state struggles. But free from the American cognitive mess, it's clear: trans is not the new gay. At all. And I'm frankly tired of the cowardice of the liberal media to talk real, frank talk about this catastrophic wrong turn, espeically when it's the liberal media that's largely responsible for steering progressivism into it.
That said, framing transsexualism differently can bring benefits and balance. Let's look at trans as a medical thing, and *strictly* as a medical thing. Let's see transsexuals as a *medically challenged minority* and not a *socially oppressed* one. Transwomen are *men* with disorders, not *women* who have been socially wronged.
For adult men and women who struggle with sex dysphoria or debilitating autogynephilia or self-hating homosexuality that they just can't shake with therapy, perhaps in limited cases, surgeries might help, as a palliative treatment (which means, it's not a cure but it helps them get on with their lives, and nothing more than that).
But we must always maintain that this doesn't necessitate that the rest of society has any obligation forced upon it, legally or culturally, to pretend not to see their true sex. If a guy wants to get a fake vajayjay, and he's been thoroughly vetted psychiatrically, that's one thing. If women and girls are then told they're obligated to let him shower naked alongside them at the YWCA, that's not remotely the same thing. Not even close. We can all tell the true sex of each others' human bodies, and they affects us all fundamentally. (For those who protest that they don't believe that, to them I say: try having sex with a transwoman or a transman and see if you were really convinced it felt exactly the same as having sex with a true male or female. I'll bet even the thought of doing so gets your mind on the defensive.)
That there, in non-abstract, non-euphemistic terms, but rather with concrete and blunt examples, is the difference between rational, true "old school" trans and the new kind. But I never see you venturing into such blunt, clear, plainspoken territory about it.
I suspect that's because such bluntness about what trans is only serves to highlight that it's not analagous to homosexuality or other civil rights categories, and that makes many dysphoria suffereres themselves not just uncomfortable but combative.
Too bad. That's reality. Liberals need to face the hard truths of reality, now more than ever.
I agree with this. I am basically a coastal elite and I should be a democrat voter as I used to be. Trans extremism is one major issue that made me believe that the democratic party had gone over to the dark side. And I don't believe that because I watch Fox News ( I don't watch it).
In my own community there were THREE drag queen story hour programs for toddlers over a 12 month period. Why for toddlers? A woman I know who was a democratic candidate for office told me that every book her kids in elementary school read during the year was about a trans kid.
Like most Americans, I have absolutely no problem with trans adults. I think they are colorful and interesting. Of course I believe they should not be victims of discrimination and of course they should have full civil rights. Just like hetero ladies with boob jobs, they are adults who should do whatever they wish. Whether they should be a privileged class under DEI, and get favored in certain situations, is another question.
We all are there with you I think. Reasonability. Leave children alone and let them take decisions when they become adults. Let adults do what they want with their bodies, and take responsibility for it, not place blame elsewhere when it turns out not like they thought it would be. Give sensible advice about not self medicating with gender change like not self medicating with drugs, alcohol and addictive activities. Prevent harassment and persecution, but stop taking offence at things not intentionally meant to hurt and especially stop demanding that everybody walk on eggshells around those who have decided they are one gender without taking any effort whatsoever to look like that gender, and stop mobbing and demanding sanctions.
I have two transexual relatives -- they are above 50 and properly diagnosed and they simply want to be the opposite gender, and they have gone great lengths to be seen as the gender they feel they are -- not STATUTORILY seen, actually seen -- and except for family, nobody would ever be able to tell that they are transsexuals. If they wanted to be transvestites or not conforming, they would not have needed to be trans, in most of the West the codes of dress and behaviour are not enforced any more.
The trans activists of the last 20 years have brought the entire LGBT movement's achievements backward 50 or 60 years.
It has been part of the great delirium of our age, I suspect caused by the disconnect from reality generated by one of the downsides of the internet, plus the rise of social media: an imaginary world that superimposes itself on reality and partially replaces it in the minds of people who spend too much time in it... then tragically constraining and distorting reality when too many believe in it. Same as every collective madness that has plagued humanity since recorded time.
It is not over yet, because these things have a terrible pendulum nature. The swings are awful, and the worst demons of our nature (to paraphrase Pinker upside down) take advantage of it: the disease is devastating, and the supposed cure is as devastating.
And we are left to pick up the shards, if we survive.
Come on man. Let's admit it. Trans, other than true medically diagnosed gender dysphoria, is a cross-dressing fetish outlet for people that can be judged as being or feeling low on the attractiveness scale for their biological gender. Also, there are some studies that correlated trans identified people as having a higher incident of existing on the Autism spectrum. People that feel out of the mainstream would tend to be vulnerable for being softly encouraged that they might be in the wrong gender skin. It is immoral to encourage them in this direction, but that is what the left radicals have done and are doing.
Much of the left's radical adoption of Gender ideology, as is the adoption of the theory of climate change, is simply career and money opportunity farming. See Al Gore.
"the ruinous decisions of a small number of activists" is a point on point. The small number of activists that are really socioeconomic malcontents with brains wired for activism and degrees in social and political science and other disciplines that don't advantage careers in the private economy, have pushed woke absurdity as a method to both ensure more government program and NGO spending, while also corrupting private industry with the related DEI absurdity. These are well planned moves by primarily the educated feminists and their matching cohort of feminized males, many of them that end up in academia careers, to reform the entire system to be their more advantageous power and money sandbox.
They really do not care at all about the victims they claim to advocate for. In fact, a great conflict of interest exists for their claimed "progressive" identity in that if they actually make and admit any progress, their economic opportunity in this government funded social justice lane will dry up.
They in fact pushed kids toward claiming they are trans so as to manufacture more victims to exploit. That is the game.
Look at all these people with useless Humanities degrees and $100k in student debt. What are they going to do for a living? AI is destroying many of their private-industry bullshit job alternatives to the shrinking victim advocacy looting industry. It is no wonder why they are doubling down and violently protesting against the decline in economic opportunity.
I have one piece of advice for them... the same that they have been telling all the blue-collar workers displaced by the ruling class pursuit of higher corporate profits from globalism...
LEARN HOW TO CODE!
or
LEARN HOW TO WELD AS TRUMP BRINGS BACK INDUSTRY AND MANUFACTURING JOBS!
There isn't quite as tidy a distinction between "old-school" "medical" transsexuals and new-school "political trans" as you've argued. Social media was indeed behind the recent explosion of the trans phenomenon. But I've been around this movement since the '90s, and things were far from hunky-dory in the tiny old village of transsexual culture long before it exploded into the modern Megalopolis of teens with bespoke pronouns and waves of fully-intact men rushing into women's sports leagues, spas, shelters and anywhere else communal female nudity might be involved.
There was always resistance to "medical gatekeeping" among transsexual males, and there was always a desire to push further into women's spaces than they had so-far achieved. (Females with trans identities were virtually nonexistent until the Internet.) The ultimate political objectives of the trans movement were always, right from the start, total and complete erasure of any distinction whatsoever between males who *wanted badly to be female* and actual females. And the movement always sought to achieve these goals through a combination of both medical and political means.
With dumb luck, as you said ("they won the lottery"), the stars aligned around a number factors (the Obergefell Supreme Court ruling; social media and smartphones; the culture war and tribal polarization in the US; etc) and the trans movement suddenly came into massive political capital incredibly quickly.
But in your framing, it's just the political acceleration that was the problem, not the fundamental objectives. You seem to be arguing that, if the movement had taken its work towards its objectives more slowly, things would have been fine, perhaps even socially good:
"Nearly every prominent social movement of the past few hundred years, from abolitionism to women’s rights to civil rights, spent generations raising awareness, laying groundwork, planting seeds, organizing, and changing hearts and minds before they gained anything like the power the trans movement was gifted. ...[T]he trans movement regarded public opinion, persuasion, civility, incrementalism, and even winning elections as irrelevant."
I would counter that that's because trans *wasn't much of a social justice movement in the first place*.
Trans really is not a legitimate social movement in the sense of a fight for equality for a fundamental, rightful, material category of people. And it should never have been framed as that kind of thing. Your mistake is even comparing it to women's rights and civil rights when it's better off being compared to other categories of things, such as, say, the right for people with anorexia have access to compassionate, proper medical treatment for their condition (with the optimal outcome for all anorexics being *CURING them of it*), or the right of Scientologists to believe whatever cockamamie theories they want *about themselves*, but at the same time recognizing that their religion is cult-like and extreme and not to be taken at face-value in the secular sphere (with, again, the optimal outcome for Sceintologists being for them all to *ESCAPE from it*).
Humans cannot change sex, and the desire to do so is almost entirely rooted in sexual paraphilia, internalized homophobia ("ego-dystonic" homosexuality, or gays & lesbians who badly want to escape the label "homosexual", usually for cultural reasons), and other maladaptive, socially and psychiatrically un-ideal reasons.
Many (though not all) of the movement's fundamental objectives were illiberal and unethical right from their dubious foundations, which lay in a kind of gray area between fantasy and reality, and between appeasing mental health disorders and holistically treating them.
I really do like a lot of your writing on this topic, but I end up posting criticism of it more than praise, simply because I believe you are failing, consistently, to reckon with the deepest, lowest, first-principles problems with trans, with the philosophical, abstract ideas right at the core of it. The behavioural, psychological phenomena that cause it, and the real-world consequences of its demands are never addressed in your writing. That frustrates me as a fellow gay and a fellow North American liberal who is extremely knowledgeable in this subject.
This avoidance of the core, base-level problems with "trans" is a consistent problem I have seen, particularly and acutely in American liberal media circles. The specifically-American psychological concept of progressivism just cannot swallow the hard pill that transgender ideation is a mental disorder for which social awareness and enlightenment campaigns are not the appropriate tools to address it.
It's as if that's a step too far from the Overton-window comfort zone for liberal Americans whose psyches have been battered by decades of polarized red-state/blue-state struggles. But free from the American cognitive mess, it's clear: trans is not the new gay. At all. And I'm frankly tired of the cowardice of the liberal media to talk real, frank talk about this catastrophic wrong turn, espeically when it's the liberal media that's largely responsible for steering progressivism into it.
That said, framing transsexualism differently can bring benefits and balance. Let's look at trans as a medical thing, and *strictly* as a medical thing. Let's see transsexuals as a *medically challenged minority* and not a *socially oppressed* one. Transwomen are *men* with disorders, not *women* who have been socially wronged.
For adult men and women who struggle with sex dysphoria or debilitating autogynephilia or self-hating homosexuality that they just can't shake with therapy, perhaps in limited cases, surgeries might help, as a palliative treatment (which means, it's not a cure but it helps them get on with their lives, and nothing more than that).
But we must always maintain that this doesn't necessitate that the rest of society has any obligation forced upon it, legally or culturally, to pretend not to see their true sex. If a guy wants to get a fake vajayjay, and he's been thoroughly vetted psychiatrically, that's one thing. If women and girls are then told they're obligated to let him shower naked alongside them at the YWCA, that's not remotely the same thing. Not even close. We can all tell the true sex of each others' human bodies, and they affects us all fundamentally. (For those who protest that they don't believe that, to them I say: try having sex with a transwoman or a transman and see if you were really convinced it felt exactly the same as having sex with a true male or female. I'll bet even the thought of doing so gets your mind on the defensive.)
That there, in non-abstract, non-euphemistic terms, but rather with concrete and blunt examples, is the difference between rational, true "old school" trans and the new kind. But I never see you venturing into such blunt, clear, plainspoken territory about it.
I suspect that's because such bluntness about what trans is only serves to highlight that it's not analagous to homosexuality or other civil rights categories, and that makes many dysphoria suffereres themselves not just uncomfortable but combative.
Too bad. That's reality. Liberals need to face the hard truths of reality, now more than ever.
I agree with this. I am basically a coastal elite and I should be a democrat voter as I used to be. Trans extremism is one major issue that made me believe that the democratic party had gone over to the dark side. And I don't believe that because I watch Fox News ( I don't watch it).
In my own community there were THREE drag queen story hour programs for toddlers over a 12 month period. Why for toddlers? A woman I know who was a democratic candidate for office told me that every book her kids in elementary school read during the year was about a trans kid.
Like most Americans, I have absolutely no problem with trans adults. I think they are colorful and interesting. Of course I believe they should not be victims of discrimination and of course they should have full civil rights. Just like hetero ladies with boob jobs, they are adults who should do whatever they wish. Whether they should be a privileged class under DEI, and get favored in certain situations, is another question.
We all are there with you I think. Reasonability. Leave children alone and let them take decisions when they become adults. Let adults do what they want with their bodies, and take responsibility for it, not place blame elsewhere when it turns out not like they thought it would be. Give sensible advice about not self medicating with gender change like not self medicating with drugs, alcohol and addictive activities. Prevent harassment and persecution, but stop taking offence at things not intentionally meant to hurt and especially stop demanding that everybody walk on eggshells around those who have decided they are one gender without taking any effort whatsoever to look like that gender, and stop mobbing and demanding sanctions.
I have two transexual relatives -- they are above 50 and properly diagnosed and they simply want to be the opposite gender, and they have gone great lengths to be seen as the gender they feel they are -- not STATUTORILY seen, actually seen -- and except for family, nobody would ever be able to tell that they are transsexuals. If they wanted to be transvestites or not conforming, they would not have needed to be trans, in most of the West the codes of dress and behaviour are not enforced any more.
The trans activists of the last 20 years have brought the entire LGBT movement's achievements backward 50 or 60 years.
It has been part of the great delirium of our age, I suspect caused by the disconnect from reality generated by one of the downsides of the internet, plus the rise of social media: an imaginary world that superimposes itself on reality and partially replaces it in the minds of people who spend too much time in it... then tragically constraining and distorting reality when too many believe in it. Same as every collective madness that has plagued humanity since recorded time.
It is not over yet, because these things have a terrible pendulum nature. The swings are awful, and the worst demons of our nature (to paraphrase Pinker upside down) take advantage of it: the disease is devastating, and the supposed cure is as devastating.
And we are left to pick up the shards, if we survive.
A hundred thanks to Persuasion for having allowed me to find out that you exist.
Come on man. Let's admit it. Trans, other than true medically diagnosed gender dysphoria, is a cross-dressing fetish outlet for people that can be judged as being or feeling low on the attractiveness scale for their biological gender. Also, there are some studies that correlated trans identified people as having a higher incident of existing on the Autism spectrum. People that feel out of the mainstream would tend to be vulnerable for being softly encouraged that they might be in the wrong gender skin. It is immoral to encourage them in this direction, but that is what the left radicals have done and are doing.
Much of the left's radical adoption of Gender ideology, as is the adoption of the theory of climate change, is simply career and money opportunity farming. See Al Gore.
"the ruinous decisions of a small number of activists" is a point on point. The small number of activists that are really socioeconomic malcontents with brains wired for activism and degrees in social and political science and other disciplines that don't advantage careers in the private economy, have pushed woke absurdity as a method to both ensure more government program and NGO spending, while also corrupting private industry with the related DEI absurdity. These are well planned moves by primarily the educated feminists and their matching cohort of feminized males, many of them that end up in academia careers, to reform the entire system to be their more advantageous power and money sandbox.
They really do not care at all about the victims they claim to advocate for. In fact, a great conflict of interest exists for their claimed "progressive" identity in that if they actually make and admit any progress, their economic opportunity in this government funded social justice lane will dry up.
They in fact pushed kids toward claiming they are trans so as to manufacture more victims to exploit. That is the game.
Look at all these people with useless Humanities degrees and $100k in student debt. What are they going to do for a living? AI is destroying many of their private-industry bullshit job alternatives to the shrinking victim advocacy looting industry. It is no wonder why they are doubling down and violently protesting against the decline in economic opportunity.
I have one piece of advice for them... the same that they have been telling all the blue-collar workers displaced by the ruling class pursuit of higher corporate profits from globalism...
LEARN HOW TO CODE!
or
LEARN HOW TO WELD AS TRUMP BRINGS BACK INDUSTRY AND MANUFACTURING JOBS!
um, don't learn how to code. AI is already eliminating all those jobs.
Yes, you captured by snarky sarcasm.
Robots are also welding.