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Notes -
The New York Times just published an article on a trans study not being published for ideological reasons (Archive)
Has anyone else noticed a clear "vibe shift" on trans issues recently? It would have been unimaginable for this article to be published in the New York Times just a few years ago, but now, it just seems like part of an overall trend away from trans ideologues.
I'm am curious where this trend continues. Is it going to go all the way? Will trans issues be seen as the weird 2010s, early 2020s political project that had ardent supporters, but eventually withered away and died like the desegregation bussing movement? Or will it just settle into a more moderate position of never using any medication on children, but allowing adults to do whatever? Or maybe it is just a temporary setback and the ideologues will eventually win out?
Also of note, trans issues are coming to SCOTUS again. The issue presented is
I recommend reading Alabama's amicus curiae brief for an in depth critique of WPATH. SCOTUS is set to hear oral arguments on this case on the 4th of December, so this is lining up to be an interesting oral argument to listen to. SCOTUS usually releases the big controversial cases at the end of their term, so the opinion on this case will probably be released in the summer of '25.
Cautiously hoping this is a sign this is becoming useless as a political wedge and we can go back to studying what GD is and how to help people that have it instead of wallowing in the hell of using it to destroy social norms at the expense of everyone involved.
Studying GD (gender dysphoria) is not innocent. It also creates GD.
Call it Heisenberg's principle of sexuality.
Sometimes it's better to just let people do their thing without labeling it and making it part of the state religion. The less we talk about it the better.
Look, whatever the name you want to put on the phenomenon it's been with us for a very long time. I balk at the idiocy of presentism all the time, but "rare case of pathological desire to be of the other sex" goes back to the beginning of history.
The constructionist position on this is nonsense, you're not going to get rid of this by removing the concept of sex from reality, because not only is that not possible, it's going to cause insane harm to 99% of people.
The medicalist position has giant flaws, not least of which that it's turning into an industry to extract value out of the misery, but at least it's an attempt do deal with the pragmatic phenomenal reality.
You can't tell people who are confused to death about their own identity to "just do their thing" unless you want marginals that kill themselves. They need some help.
And yes, social contagion is a real issue here, and this is indeed a problem what would benefit from less attention. We can have a solution to the problem that doesn't require integration with the state religion, or at least we could before the state turned total.
I think the real presentist error people make here is treating transgenderism and homosexuality as more distinct phenomena than they actually are. They're separate manifestations of a single underlying ancient pathology, which could have manifested in any number of other ways if our culture had developed differently. When conservatives express tolerance towards homosexuality and disgust towards transgenderism, it's a clear example, IMO, of not being nearly as free from the ideas of the surrounding culture as you think you are. The deviancy of homosexuality is downplayed and the dangers of transgenderism are exaggerated. They're the same basic life-destroying contagious confusion about the binary of sex. If history had played out differently, we easily could have wound up with transgenderism normalized a generation ago and homosexuality being normalized now, and then the same conservatives would be treating the latter as the bridge too far, with very elaborate arguments as to how this set of priorities made perfect sense.
How are homosexuals "confused about the binary of sex?" Maybe I don't know enough homosexuals but -- I get the impression that lesbians don't like transwomen, by and large. It seems to me that the homosexual lobby and the transgender lobby can be at odds with each other. The only way I can consider them similar is through the powerful outgroup homogenizing lens of "they repulse me" and "they are about gender." Was women entering the workforce another manifestation of that pathology?
The only thing I can think is the gender non-conforming behavior of some homosexuals, who perform the gender/sex roles of a sex they're not (studs, femme male homosexuals). I don't know that "confusion" is the right word there. They're not confused like transpeople who claim to be women, they're deliberately non-conforming.
If you remove medicalization the boundaries get much fuzzier, because there's really no sharp dividing line between these things and "trans". They're all just varying levels of gender non-conforming behavior with more or less psychological instability thrown in.
Seriously asking as someone who doesn't pay much attention to LGBT foundation myths:has it been that way historically? A transwoman didn't throw the first brick but does anyone deny that they were part of the same club of non-conformists (along with drag queens and studs and so on) that we now call the "LGBT movement"? I've not seen anyone debate Marsha P.'s membership, just his centrality (or self-identification)
"Confusion" is just what a straight person calls it, because everyone is straight, obviously.
I have never been "confused" about who or what I am (even through the time when most straights 'wake up'- that time being puberty, which must naturally be why most straights believe that time to be "confusing" to them). I find the notion that I ever would be kind of insulting, but I keep that to myself because expressing that is not generally beneficial.
Once you hear that, you have two options- you can accept it and move on (maybe make up some academic-sounding term for people who do that), or you could choose to get turbo butthurt over it, cry to some under-worked authority figure, and take the word the neutral[ish] people used and use it as a weapon because it makes you sound as smart, which automatically makes you better than everyone else.
Which is why that cluster of non-straight behavior belongs together. I figure sexuality is probably made up of a bunch of modules, and sometimes some people do not get the "correct" ones. Personality may then either enhance or corrupt this (or indeed might back-fill sexuality if you either don't have one or are out of a situation where it's relevant); so what might be productive for one group to do might be extremely destructive if another group does it, and vice versa.
Obviously in 2024 a woman who wants to be in the professional workforce is normal and doesn't have a defective brain module. Can the same be said of the woman in 1950? Would people (you, or others) lump the 1950s woman in with queers and call her "confused" because she is non-conformist? Would people not lump her in with queers, because queers gross them out, but she's just a little weird?
The only wrench in my argument is there may not be such a woman in 1950 - or rather, any woman in 1950 that wanted to be in the professional workforce was probably also a butch queer.
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