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Notes -
An interesting "false flag" in the transgender culture war: a mystery group is impersonating a transgender group and sending texts and flyers to the wrong people:
https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/texans-receive-texts-impersonating-transgender-advocacy-group/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/trans-student-mailers-hit-texas-210015782.html
As far as I can tell, of course, the transgender groups in question have no disagreement with the contents in these messages, but they have been sent to the wrong people. They want this content to stay on the down low and for parents not to know about it. As on twitter poster put it "The trans people wouldn’t be stupid enough to send this out right before midterms unless they thought you were trans" (emphasis added). The pages on the websites that the pamphlets and texts linked to have been taken down, though archive links show they had content on them previously: https://web.archive.org/web/20261005063417/https://transtexas.org/trans-texas-takeover-tour/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260807023304/https://transtexas.org/resources/ which is a very interesting thing to do for a group that presumably wants people to attend their tour and have access to some resources.
This does reinforce the idea that the trans project is both unpopular and/or secretly transing kids without their parents knowing, as they reacting with horror that parents are being exposed to their message.
This hiding behavior is certainly not standard among all groups. Most groups would be thrilled to get free publicity pointed to their website, even if the messages are coming from an anonymous benefactor (assuming it doesn't get them on a spam shitlist or something). Nevertheless, it does seem like democrat ideology mandates that they support the maximalist trans movement, and their solution is to distance from it.
There is a longstanding mutual incomprehension on this question between activists and gender-criticals. Most activists would not deny that they are interested in helping children transition; they may downplay it during election season but it's not some great shameful secret, "Protect trans kids" is a widespread slogan. The reason "they're trying to trans your kids!" gets denounced as right-wing conspiracy-mongering is that active verb "transing". As the activists view it, they aren't transing anybody: they're trying to reach out to kids who are, in fact, already trans, and help them express their true selves. The implied accusation that they have some sort of program to brainwash cis kids into wanting to transition feels offensive and absurd - the only kids they're trying to reach out to really are trans, it's just that you can't tell who's in the closet, so obviously you have to shower everyone with "it's okay to come out, it'd be so brave, so life-changing" to ferret them out.
The problem is that to the typical trans activist, for a kid to "really be trans" basically means "this kid, if they knew transitioning was an option and faced no external pressure against doing so, would choose to transition" - anyone whose ideal self-actualized future self, given perfect information and absolute freedom, would transition, is ontologically trans. (Some theorists take this definition as-is, but the Blue Tribe activist on the street is more likely to hold some notion that if your idealized unconstrained future self would transition, this is evidence that you have in fact had the opposite gender written on your soul since birth.) So obviously, raising awareness of the possibility of transition will only serve to help kids who are, deep down, already trans - completely different from manipulatively "transing" cis kids. Whereas GCs, to the limited degree that they recognize the idea of kids "really being trans" - which wouldn't actually mean recognizing those kids' genders, of course, just acknowledging that they are of a kind with the population of "trans" adults in some deeper sense than parroting buzzwords they've been taught - would think that a "trans kid" must be a kid who already displays gender dysphoria and an active, persistent desire to be the opposite sex. So, of course, any intervention designed to raise awareness of transition among gender-conforming kids does literally constitute an effort to "make" them trans. And so the activists go on loudly and sincerely decrying accusations that they're transing kids while visibly and openly doing what their enemies mean by "transing kids".
On one hand, in the activists' defense, mainstream consensus has largely accepted that "encouraging closeted people to come out as gay" is not the same thing as "making them gay"; many Rowling-type moderate-left GCs would never endorse that conflation, yet take it absolutely for granted where trans is concerned. But on the other hand, in the GCs' defense, the trans activists' definition of "being trans" is obviously so confusing, radical, and esoteric that their continued misunderstanding of what their opponents mean by "transing kids" can only be some mixture of willful ignorance and unfathomable insularity, depending on individual levels of sincerity. Whoever you want to blame most, it's doing the state of the discourse no favors, and some people on both sides clearly like it that way.
(On the third hand, the right-wing discourse around "transing kids" is also riddled with motte-and-bailey rhetoric surrounding the spicier phrasing that trans activists are grooming kids - where, although it can always be claimed that they are simply using the word "grooming" to mean "manipulating impressionable youths" without connotations of literal pedophilia, this is often genuinely a cover for a veiled accusation that the activists are only telling kids to transition because they get some perverse sexual thrill from doing so, or even because they want to physically molest the kids they initiate. There, I think the anti-trans side are clearly at fault, and the activists are justified in rejecting the label even if the innocuous "motte" meaning of grooming is a defensible description of their behavior. I mention this because this reply turned into a bit of an effortpost, and an overview of the topic would not be complete otherwise; but I think the basic, less one-sided conflict outlined above would be with us with or without the "grooming" buzzword in the mix.)
I think an insurmountable gap here is that it's easy to accept that gay people exist. Sodomy and homoeroticism has been documented since biblical times and even some animals do it. Meanwhile people wanting to chop off their own oragans and pump themselves full of hormones is a modern world.
Average people can also easily understand how it's possible to achieve sexual pleasure throug homosexual activity even if they do not personally want to participate. Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation. Therefore they can only conclude that it must be the result of either mental illness or brainwashing.
In the 70's conservative activists opposed laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring because it would permit gay teachers in public school. The logic behind the "Save Our Children" campaign headlined by Anita Bryant was that gay people could not reproduce biologically so they must "recruit" children into being gay and therefore could not be trusted to be teachers. I don't think the average person who opposed gay teachers intuitively understood "gay people exist" I think they were concerned about "brainwashing" or "recruiting" the way people now are concerned about kids being "transed".
The broader framework of "we're concerned sexual minorities are recruiting children" vs. "there's no recruitment people are just born a certain way" isn't at all new. There are other features of the debate, like the consequences of medical treatment differing from sexual experimentation being different, that are new. But, I don't think it's all accurate to say that people in the past intuitively grasped that gay people existed and were not concerned about children being brainwashed.
Were they wrong?
With the rise of gay identifying it’s obvious people can be gayed. And then there are lavender marriages which produced children meaning most men can still get off to women. And honestly I think most gays are happier in lavender marriages where they get all the benefits of being a father and their children get a mother (plus not having to do childcare etc).
The rise in LGB self-identification is driven women who only date men identifying as bisexual. They haven't been gayed, they are claiming an oppressed identity for clout. The much smaller risk in gay male self-ID is entirely consistent with less closeting over time.
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I'm not interested in doing "social contagion" vs. "inherent predisposition towards behavior previously repressed by social sanction" round 237 with someone who throws out wild speculation like "honestly I think most gays are happier in lavender marriages" without supporting evidence.
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It's certainly unclear whether it was just activists making that claim versus it being widely accepted in the anti-gay community. I find it more likely that people hated the gays first (while understanding their existence) and came up with rationalizations second.
I think there's also a nuance in the understanding in that they can believe that someone can be brainwashed into actually being gay, and actually legitimately enjoying the feeling of guzzling cock. But anti-trans will believe that nobody can be trans. Their claim is that trans people literally cannot exist and trans identifying people are simply brainwashed into participating in self mutilation. That trans identifying people won't be happy about it, but won't be able to speak up while being imprisoned by ideology and a destroyed body.
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I agree that's probably a factor, but I think there's more to it than that. Humans are pretty good at guessing the sex of other people. A lot of the time when I meet a trans-identifying-man, my subconscious brain instantly says "man" even if the person is wearing lipstick, makeup, and a dress. So it feels like I am being asked to believe a lie. Of course it doesn't help that a lot of these trans-identifying-men seem to derive personal benefits from being treated as women such as an advantage in sports or easy access to women's changing facilities.
I think my reaction is pretty typical: "No, that's a dude pretending to be a chick" says my monkey brain. "This seems like a scam" says my frontal cortex. "Ewwww" says my lizard brain.
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I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.
If someone could wish for all these things, then why couldn’t they wish to be the opposite gender as well? Is it so much of a stretch?
And if you can accept the comprehensibility of that sort of wish, then I don’t think the comprehensibility of SRS is too much of a stretch, although I absolutely understand why many people would evaluate that the drawbacks are not worth the benefits, and that it might be considered odd or disconcerting for that reason.
It's not about attainability but relatability. Nearly everyone in the world would want 1 million dollars if you offered it to them. Moving to germany is a bit more situational but most people can acknowledge that germany has pretty good sausage, kraut, beer, and fast cars. But ask a random person what's in it for someone who wants to be a woman and he'd likely be at a loss.
And it's not just that they want to be a woman. They want it so bad they'll chop off their dicks and pump their bodies full of chemicals to make a poor imitation of this.
I mean, let me just ask: do you really think that there's so little to recommend in the lives of half of all humanity, approximately 4 billion people, that no rational actor, under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, could ever want to be one of them?
If you do believe that to be the case, then the logical corollary is that you should become the most ardent of committed feminist activists. Alleviating their suffering would surely be the most pressing of political issues.
(I'm intentionally being a bit glib, but, what you said could be interpreted in that way.)
I'm sure there will be many people who can answer this. And they will probably be more sympathetic to the trans cause. But to the average person's point of view the trans person's pov is so alien as to be indistinguishable from insanity.
Well now I'm kinda curious. Do you think being a woman is that much worse than being a man? (I don't want to draw you into a long obnoxious argument, I just want to make sure I'm properly understanding you.)
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That is not the first time that bottom chirurgery has been characterised in such a way on this forum, and I would like to correct the record:
To the best of my knowledge, vaginoplasty (male-to-female) does not involve 'chopping off' anything. The male genitals in their entirety are rearranged into female genitals, with the penis becoming the clitoris and the scrotum becoming the labia; phalloplasty (female-to-male) is the same but in the other direction.
Also, the methods used are very similar to those used in within-sex reconstructive chirurgery in cisgender patients who have suffered genital injuries.
My brother in Christ, what do you think the endocrine system does?
It may have been a 'poor imitation' a century ago, but much progress has been made; the regret rate for transgender operations is less than that for knee replacements.
To the average person, what you describe and "chopping off" are basically the same thing and repugnant for basically the same reasons. If it isn't literally "chopping off", that's a technicality, like "the burger doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like excrement, so you're wrong when you say it tastes like sewage!".
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You're gerrymandering because these are all harmless as desires. Consider another example: I understand why people might want another roll at the die of high school. This is normal, in the sense that people often have regrets.
It's not normal, nor does it make sense to me, to actually make this into a life project. In fact, it would be very alarming and I would not trust the person who sincerely attempts to redo their high school experience (at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and medical procedures with non-trivial effects) to have a good view of what would fulfill them since they seem mentally imbalanced/lacking basic prudence and social insight to explain why this is a very bad thing to try to impose on people (the mental health comorbidities make it even harder with trans).
In any case, it would not suffice as a justification to let them pull a Steve Buscemi even if they could convince me they'd be happier. High school doesn't exist for the pleasure of adults.
You’re conflating two things that I never conflated. There are two separate questions:
Whether the desire for SRS (or being trans in general) is coherent and understandable, outside of being a product of “mental illness or brainwashing”.
Whether society should rearrange itself to accommodate the desires of trans people.
I was only addressing (1). Personally, I answer yes to (1) and no to (2).
I don’t believe that, at our current level of medical technology, men can become women. If you’re born a man then you’ll stay a man. And as a corollary, I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men) should be given access to women’s spaces, nor should they expect to be recognized as women by other people. But, in line with my general libertarian priors, I think that consenting adults should mostly be free to dress how they want and get whatever medical procedures they want, and I understand why some people would opt for SRS for psychological comfort, even though it can’t actually at the end of the day fully realize their desires.
I'm not sure that there ought to be separate men's and women's spaces, if their existence leads to things like a trans woman dying of cancer because she isn't allowed in the women's ward, and also isn't allowed in the men's ward.
Bro I'm gonna be deadass honest with you, there are a lot of freaks who are just gonna hang out in the bathroom and listen to women fart and piss if we don't have separate bathrooms. But if women are cool with that then sure, tear down those walls.
As a resident of a PNW city with a large trans population I'd say the way things are going is many newly constructed spaces have only a gender neutral single shared room with sinks and a mirror and then a series of stalls that have full floor to ceiling walls and wooden locking doors. This is certainly more expensive than "two rooms with plastic dividers around stalls" but it would be difficult to hear anyone fart or pee through the doors (which honestly I appreciate for entirely non gender issues reasons).
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If a person desires to have a limb amputated (which does happen) we accurately assess this to be mental illness.
If they desire to become the different gender, we say that is valid and give them the medical option to pursue it.
I really can't see a space morally between allowing a doctor to amputate someone's arm and allowing them to amputate someone's genitals. I can see why someone might want it. But I can't see why it should be allowed under our current system of medical ethics. Although, as a libertarian, perhaps you are okay with both surgeries, which would be a logically consistent position.
Yes.
I'm actually mostly ok with saying that transsexuality is a mental illness. On the one hand, from a certain perspective that's literally what it is: it's an abnormal neurological development that causes adverse health effects, most notably to the reproductive system. On the other hand, I want to stress that it's not merely a mental illness. An individual's reasons for wanting to transition, or wanting to be the opposite gender, can be very complex and multifaceted, and they can go beyond a simple "my body just doesn't feel right". The "wrong body map" theory is a convenient and digestible PR narrative that the trans community can use to explain the phenomenon to normies and make it more medically legitimate, but it only covers a small portion of people's actual experiences.
I do think that the neuroscience underlying transsexuality differs in crucial ways from the neuroscience underlying other types of body dysmorphia, but I don't know the current state of research in this area and I have no way of directly proving it, and at any rate it's a largely academic question.
Regarding the references to amputation, I feel compelled to note, contra Freud, that a vagina is not the mere absence of a penis; it is its own organ, it's just as much of a positive presence as a penis is. The ideal for MTFs is not to engage in a simple act of self-destruction, but to trade one functioning sexual organ for another (current surgical techniques, of course, cannot actually achieve this, but can only provide a facsimile of it).
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I just feel like the metaphor obviously doesn't work. If a trans woman gets SRS and has a functional neovagina that she can have sex and orgasm with then she still has genitals that do most of what people use genitals for. Whereas if someone gets their arm chopped off they don't have a different appendage that does most of what an arm does, they just don't have an arm anymore.
Also if you're for example, a trans woman, your penis is not often "usable" sexually either because of psychological issues with using it, or because of long term atrophy from hormones, or because you're straight and wouldn't be using it anyway. In such cases using the tissue to construct a neovagina allows for functionality where previously none existed.
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Another nuance here is that wanting to be the opposite sex and viscerally yearning for SRS are different things. I think @Primaprimaprima was talking about e.g. sad young men who wish that they'd been born as women in a daydreamy, intellectual kind of way but don't have the dysphoric "ick, ick, ick, get that thing off of me" reaction to their penises that pattern-matches to the arm thing, and who, if they attempt a surgical transition, would only do so in an attempt to make the dream come true. I think it's true that that sort of trans desire is no more pathological, and no more difficult for normies to grok, than yearning to have been born to different life circumstances in some other way.
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I think it still runs into the category issue under contest, namely, "what is gender", in ways that "Six-foot-five", "has a million dollars", and "lives in Germany" don't. What makes them normal and comprehensible is that the categories involved and adjudicating membership in them are agreed-upon.
The procedures to make someone 6'5", a millionaire, or a resident of Germany are similarly straightforwardly understood as to what they entail and what constitutes a successful intervention. Gender is different: under the GC definition of gender, no amount of intervention will ever be sufficient to move from membership in one category to another. Conversely, and somewhat confusingly, under the trans-activist definition of gender, no amount of intervention is ever required to move membership from one category to another. Many (most?) people seem to have a mushy concept of gender and see current SRS and hormonal interventions as insufficient to move membership from one category to another but are unsure about whether this will always be true and what a sufficient intervention would entail.
To be clear, I personally believe that the criteria for membership in a gender category is relatively straightforward, and I believe that most other people believe this too, even if they claim not to. A man is an adult human male with XY chromosomes that produces sperm. A woman is an adult human female with XX chromosomes that produces eggs. A few edge cases don’t impugn the general validity of the definition. Everyone knows this, including trans activists, probably.
I don’t believe that SRS as it currently exists is capable of changing someone from one gender to the other. But, given that these matters are so deeply intertwined with matters of personal identity, I can understand why some people would opt for the “next best thing”, even if it’s not perfect.
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