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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.
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.
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.
This is just flat wrong, and brings your supposed expertise about "gender-affirming care" into question.
You may have noticed that female people have no flesh in between their legs which can be used to fashion a crude imitation of a penis. To accomplish this, surgeons (or "chirurgeons" as you insist on calling them, apparently for no better reason than obfuscation and misdirection) must carve out a chunk of tissue from elsewhere on the patient's body, typically the forearm or thigh. It's similar to a skin graft, except that much more flesh is required, meaning the tiny minority of trans-identified females who undergo phalloplasties have telltale scars on their thighs or forearms for months or years afterwards. Wikipedia has some NSFW photos. So much for "correcting the record".
Even if it was the case that the majority of trans people who undergo bottom surgery don't regret doing so, that doesn't tell us anything about how poor the imitation is. Even if 100% of people who get breast implants don't regret doing so, that wouldn't tell us anything about how realistic breast implants are. Satisfaction is not perfectly correlated with realism.
I've heard so many trans activists independently recite this canard, and they never provide a source. Until one is provided, I'm taking this about as seriously as "trans panic laws have enabled people to literally get away with murder!!!1!"
I said that it was to the best of my knowledge. I am not an expert compared to professional chirurgeons, but compared to those who think a vagina is a lack of penis, and imagine the male-to-female operation to be something akin to the work of Lorena Bobbit, I think I'm doing fairly well, much in the same way as, while I do not claim be able to run the U. S. Defense Department better than James Mattis, I am fairly certain I could do a better job than Pete Hegseth.
This is a common misconception held by many men, leading to an epidemic of bed-time headaches among their wives.
'Chirurgeon' is from the Greek 'χείρ' (hand) + '-ουργός' (worker); 'surgeon' is an eroded form of the same.
I am getting just a wee bit tired of the snide insults.
The same applies for cis-men, who were born biologically male in all respects, identify as men, and suffer injuries between their legs. Does this make such a man less male, or is this merely an appeal to disgust?
Well, are we talking a woman whom you never suspected had implants because she went to a chirurgeon who made them look natural, or a woman who chose a doctor whose work was obvious at first sight so that everyone would know that she could afford them?
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/transgender-debate-gender-affirming-surgeries-have-a-regret-rate-of-one-per-cent-or-less-for-knee-replacements-its-17-per-cent-vic-valentine-4258947
D. F. McLaughlin?
Paris Lee?
So, for real, what’s the deal here? I don’t have a dog in this ongoing argument, I’m sincerely curious. I had never even seen this word before skimming through this thread, and a quick google only gives “archaic synonym for surgeon”. To my knowledge it’s not used by any surgeons or even seemingly medical historians. Where did you pick this up? Are you just a super-hellenophile classicist, or something?
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If you're trying to convince anyone here of anything (and not just shit-stirring), this cringeworthy attempt at verbal elitism is really not going to help. We know how to speak English very, very well around here. Feel free to join us.
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And despite not being a professional "chirurgeon", I can do a better job than you. So you were obviously wrong to arrogate to yourself the responsibility of "correcting the record" on bottom surgery. (There's actually a specific Facebook group devoted to cataloguing this kind of behaviour.) If I ask someone if they can drive a car, I want to know if they can actually drive a car. Being able to drive a car better than an amputee who just drank a fifth of vodka is not a high bar to clear.
Har de har har. You knew perfectly well that I meant that female people have no flesh between their legs which could be used to fashion a crude facsimile of a penis. A clitoris (even a massively engorged clitoris) cannot be used to make a neopenis. We both know this. Why do you insist on wasting both our time with crude potty humour?
It's not an appeal to disgust: it's pointing out that you were mistaken. You described a phalloplasty as "the same [as a vaginoplasty] but in the other direction". You were wrong: there was a massive piece of the procedure that you were conspicuously omitting. The appropriate response to this being pointed out to you is to admit your error. The appropriate response is not to throw a strop, bring up a completely irrelevant "analogy" and say "oh whatever, stop trying to make gender-affirming care sound gross!"
I could just as easily make the same argument in the opposite direction: that by failing to accurately describe what a phalloplasty entails, you were either ignorant about what the procedure entails, or you were knowingly trying to make it sound less invasive than it really is. Neither is a great look.
I will happily desist, if you can provide me with a better explanation for why you insist on using antiquated terms that aren't even terms of art in the professions under discussion.
I note that this is an opinion piece, and that Valentine doesn't actually show where they got their figures from:
This paragraph doesn't contain any hyperlinks. I asked you for a source for the claim that knee replacement surgery has a higher regret rate than gender-affirming care, and instead you provided me with an example of someone else making the exact same unevidenced claim as you.
From the source you provided: "The jury acquitted Patnode of second-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree manslaughter".
From the source you provided: "Ward was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in May 2025." I understand a retrial is pending, but Ward certainly hasn't "gotten away with murder" yet.
I suppose technically being convicted of manslaughter rather than murder is "getting away with murder", but I'm not aware of a single person who used the "trans panic" defense and then walked, which is the affirmative claim that dozens of trans activists have independently made to me. Show me an example of that, and we can talk.
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No, I'm sorry, you're doing worse than Pete Hegseth. You don't need to know the fine details of the surgery to know what you're proposing could never work. It's basic anatomy.
If you really actually believe it can be fashioned into a penis, how do you explain doctors carving out huge chunks of forearms during phalloplasties?
Is he wrong though? What's the point of using a form of a word that no one uses when writing in English?
You claimed a vaginoplasty does not involve chopping anything off, and that a phalloplasty is the same process in reverse. He's pointing out how you're completely wrong on the facts, why are you trying to change the subject now?
The only link around these statistics is the word "London", it leads to the "London" tag of the newspaper you just linked to, not a study done in a London clinic.
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