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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.)
That would make a great deal of sense if, when these exact same kids detransition after a couple years, they didn't say "you were never really trans" when the share the sordid details of how exactly the "gender affirming care" was provided to them.
I don't see the objection; this seems precisely consistent with my claim that trans advocacy in schools is intended to target the "really trans". Those cis kids who give it a go but turn out not to like it in the long run are, indeed, told they were never really trans, and thus only collateral damage of a program which was intended to help those of their classmates who really were trans. You may shudder at the brute-force utilitarianism - I certainly do; it's why I'm opposed to children undergoing medical transition! - but I genuinely don't see where the internal contradiction is supposed to be.
The contradiction is that the program seems to be doing a spectacularly poor job at separating wheat from chaff, and that many of the purported signs and symptoms of "being trans" espoused by trans activists (including primary and secondary school teachers) are so broad and ill-defined that they could apply to literally anyone. A medical test which produces false positives at the same rate as true positives is useless. But when it's pointed out to trans activists that their program is producing false positives at an alarmingly high rate, their response is typically not "oh shit, we need to do better" but some variant on "that isn't happening, and it's good that it is".
Eventually people start wondering what the difference is between sufficiently advanced incompetence and malice. I don't agree that "the purpose of a system is what it does", but when trans activists are so resistant to switch up their system even when its shortcomings have been pointed out to them, it does inevitably make one wonder if their stated goal differs from their revealed one.
Not necessarily. If, for a cohort of 100, a test picks up 90 negatives, 5 real positives, and 5 false positives - and if the positive outcomes of giving the true positives the appropriate treatment outweigh the negative consequences of giving the false positives unnecessary treatment - the test, while not ideal, is far from useless. I think a lot of trans activists would endorse the idea that allowing a trans person to transition produces more utility than causing someone to waste a few years beginning and then reversing an unwanted transition wastes. Which seems sensible to me where adults are concerned, children are where I draw the line.
So, in other words, you agree that these "awareness campaigns" targeting children in primary and secondary school are a bad idea?
Not quite; I think that medical transition for under-16s should be functionally banned in general, thus making awareness campaigns harmless because no irreversible physical damage to minors not yet old enough to weigh the risks responsibly would occur. If the availability of SRS for minors remains constant I concede that cutting back on the awareness campaigns would probably be justified, but that's clearly attacking the problem from the wrong angle IMO, and would be far less successful overall because secondary-school kids have tons of ways to learn about transition even if no word of it is breathed at school.
Chest binders are generally considered a subset of social transition, and yet can cause serious physical damage.
Even then, I'm sure you would agree that a male child who has been wearing female clothes and referred to by female pronouns from the age of 10 onwards is far more likely to seek medical transition than a male child who has not.
As far as I can understand it, we agree on the following:
I don't really see the difference between the above and the conservative framing of "they're trying to trans my child!" It just seems like a Russell conjugation.
Maybe what you object to is the ascription of intent: that trans activists aren't setting out to make non-trans children erroneously believe that they're trans, that that's just an unfortunate byproduct of a well-intended campaign. But given trans activists' reluctance to even acknowledge the false positives, this seems like a rather pedantic objection in the scheme of things.
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