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Notes -
#”We’re coming for your children.”
The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.
The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme
The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.
As chronicled by NBC News:
In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.
But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.
Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”
“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”
The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.
Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.
“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”
This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.
Controversial, but I suspect that sissy hypno porn etc viewed by terminally online males is responsible for more MtF conversions than what middle aged LGBTQ activists are advocating in schools.
The former has a direct pipeline to transition (along with programming, nerdy pursuits, being an incel etc). The latter doesn’t seem to, it seems unlikely that some fuddy duddy old teacher interrupting the usual sex ed lessons students don’t pay attention to anyway in order to talk about whatever trans activists want them to somehow leads to large numbers of otherwise completely normal boys deciding they’re transwomen.
The material responsible for the huge uptick in trans identification isn’t taught in class, it’s available freely online in huge volumes and dealing with it is much more difficult than banning kids from attending drag performances.
TL;DR: Autogynephilia isn’t caused by cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom lol.
Autogynephilia is also not nearly as important. The MTFs are mascots for the 'T' of LGBT because they are the meanest, most aggressive, and most visually provacative. Don't you find it odd that almost all the important mascots/members of the trans community are MTF? Jenner, the Admiral Biden promoted, Dylan Mulvaney, etc, when, stats show its the teenage girls who are most afflicted by this social contagion? Well the reason is that those girls, Ellen Page being the only famous one I can recall, end up turning into very meek, depressed, sterile persons that kinda pass as a not very masculine boy. The MTFs are all just visually men wearing a get up. And this is important. They are forcing the potentially on the fence people to pick a side. Those liberal ladies that found Rue Paul amusing and a bit funny? They now are forced to decide between admitting they've been enjoying some insane thing (instead of a comedy show), or siding with a Republican.
I think it's also simple demographics: FtMs are mostly anxious/depressed teenage girls, while MtFs are a mix of terminally online losers and older men with successful careers (Kaitlin Jenner is a prime example of the latter, arguably Rachel Levine too).
So for someone like Joe Biden, if you want to promote an openly transgender but still qualified person, you probably have much more MtF than FtM options.
Also I've noticed that a lot of passing FtMs, like Buck Angel for example, actually seem critical of a lot of ideas the trans movement is pushing (e.g. Angel opposes giving MtFs free access to women's bathrooms, arguing for unisex toilets instead). It's probably because as women they understand that women don't want to compete against Lia Thomas, don't want to be locked in a cell with Karen White, don't want to wax Yessica Yaniv's balls, and don't want their six-year-old daughter exposed to male genitalia in a women-only spa.
It's probably quite hard to find mature FtMs who are willing to fight for the right of MtFs to invade women's spaces, and that's the front of the battle currently.
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There's something to be said for low-hanging fruit.
Like, we know the internet is a cesspool and will always wrestle with that. Parents shouldn't have to fight a two-front war because the supposed reasonable adults acting in loco parentis in Grassland are teaching...controversial things.
We can use the progressives' own retort to "what about black crime?": it's different when it's being done with the authority and force of the government.
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No, not directly but it's crowd cover and encouragement to take your paraphilia public / evolve it into an identity. No, I highly doubt that anything put on by the school is ever a spark for a kid to trans (except actual groomery grooming), but it's definitely gasoline, and a firepit.
For a lot of paraphilias including agp, the exhibitionism and humiliation is part of the excitement and can eventually sublimate into association.
A teen in the 90s who got turned on by putting on his sister's dress, would still not be caught dead coming to school like that. So it's ability and context to grow is stunted, and in many cased desisted, subsumed into hetero-erotic exploration with women, or maybe remains a mild kink. But when the teacher and school is encouraging it, and more importantly you are given examples of other people doing it and seemingly getting away with it, you now have a context to dive all in and let it consume you, and receive the positive social feedback.
Finally, returning to your initial TL;DR, again no I doubt it's causing anything outright, but certainly someone with some mild curiousity can get tickled by the idea and it's a great way to grow into an earworm.
As a guy I can tell you there are a lot of random little slightly 'strange' fleeting experiences that I can still trace certain shapes of my adult sexual-psyche back to today. Even if you want to make an argument that in every scenario, the spark was already there, I'm saying that something as ridiculous as a teacher reading a book that makes you feel weird can really feed that spark.
I’ve never personally been worried about that sort of grooming. To me, the part that’s especially grooming-ish isn’t that. It’s the schools encouraging kids to experiment with sex-related ideas at school with the school not only teaching kids to keep sexual secrets from their parents, but helping keep it a secret from their parents. They do things like having “trans clothing closets” so your son can wear a dress at school, will call your child by a different name at school, including using different pronouns and will hide all of this information from you.
This to me is the grooming. Teaching kids that parents are not to be informed of some things means that, should another adult decide that he or she would like a sexual relationship with your child, he no longer has to work that hard to convince that child to not tell. The child’s school has made it clear that if the child would be embarrassed telling his parents, or if he just plain doesn’t want to, the child doesn’t tell. Add in that we’re having kids as young as 5 being exposed to very adult sexual ideas, and it’s thus much easier to convince a kid who’s already used to thinking and talking about sex that going farther is okay.
And to add to this- the idea that institutions keep meaningful secrets about a child from that child’s parents flies in the face of literally every piece of wisdom about protecting children that has ever been realized.
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At least this explanation comports with "homosexuals reproduce through child abuse," in that sexually deviant exposure affects sexual development. It also reinforces the social contagion theory.
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Regarding trans children at least, I don't know how many parents take their cues on child-rearing from online porn. I think there's a general heuristic that the internet is a crazy place, and whatever hot new fad or kink that is expressed from online spaces is just "that weird meme crap my kid ocassionally references that I don't understand or feel like understanding, because the 'net is crazy". It's hard to separate it from "The Grimace Millshake Challenge" or whatever bizarre FOMO meme is being reported on, and you can see your Mom's face screw up in judgmental confusion as you attempt to explain it.
If this is just crazy internet shit, you can hold onto the hope (somewhat reliably) that the fad will pass and all you need to do is hold down the fort as the storm moves past you. Codifying it into education sanewashes and perpetuates the phenomenon, because you can't so easily dismiss an army of smart-sounding educators who supposedly knows what's best for your child and are 'experts' on teaching kids - since you're just some dummy that has the humility to understand some things are beyond your understanding and intellect, so might as well to defer to your betters even if it makes you uncomfortable
I think many people are wising up to the idea that this trusted dynamic has been utterly abused. And resisiting the trans push into education is 'holding down the fort'.
The idea is that the child will take a lot of cues from online porn, and considering the child is the one who might transition, that's more relevant than whatever the parent thinks. Consider teenage socialists - are they getting that socialism from their middle or high school teachers? Their parents? No. Either their friends or the internet!
I think the number of kids who would want to transition is within 1% of where it would be if schools didn't mention trans issues at all, and political incentives to get parents (potential R voters) riled up plus whatever caused the moral panics about satanic child abuse explain the focus on trans in schools.
They aren't? It seems to me that over the last 15-20 years there has been a massive influx of teacher-activists whose entire raison-d'etre is to turn their students into activists for progressive causes, with LGBTQ+++ only the current fad. A key part of the Left's slow march through the institutions over the last 70 years has been through the education pipeline, trickling down from academia to grade school (and younger), and that the current credentialing system for emerging teachers is essentially a factory line for producing good little socialists. This is not, IME, dissimilar from how higher education has done the same to journalism programs, leading to the current situation with a media that is 90+% ideologically captured. Control the narratives through school and TV, and even the kids who aren't political will grow up with the socially approved understanding of the world. By the time the teenagers are being riled into activism by their cool young green-haired teachers (at my kids' charter school a few years back, they all worked on a class project to obstruct drilling at Standing Rock, even though we are thousands of miles away) they've already been primed with 8 years of socialist righteousness.
Go back to the 1990s and you will find socialist-driven environmental messaging seeping into every pore of the public grade school experience. A bit farther back, at my large suburban American high school in the late 1980s, the advanced history class used as its primary textbook Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. This isn't new; on the contrary, it's just so normal it's hard to notice.
I said that from personal experience with teenage socialists over the past decade. The specific far-left tropes and sayings they repeat do not come from their teachers, they come from places like twitter or discord, or youtube, or possibly their classmates who got them from the internet. I agree that there are left-wing teachers, but they are not the direct cause here.
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This was almost completely absent from my education in the 2000s.
Since I didn’t take AP enviro science, I got more environmentalist messaging from Magic School Bus than from actual school. Honestly, I find it kind of odd to label that as socialist rather than just…left-wing.
Government was a civic religion class with a focus on judicial review. Same for US history. Even world history spent far more time on the ancients than on anything post-Marx. The closest to endorsing socialism was probably the AP Econ admiration for Keynes.
Wait. South Carolina state history was openly apologist for the South, both for the John C. Calhoun and Strom Thurmond periods. That’s as political as I remember it getting.
I don’t think I’m just putting my head in the sand here.
Well, maybe location matters. I'm in Oregon, part of the "left coast," to be sure. And the 1980s -- when I was in high school -- and through the 1990s there was a massive influx of Californians looking to escape the results of hard-left politics while recreating them somewhere else. I imagine the American South was quite different.
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And my point is that assuming children's gender identities or sexual orientations are being shaped by exposure to online porn, then we are from and away from 'born this way', and parents may feel they have a duty to restrict and deny access to such material, its relatives, and all their associated theorycrafting if they they deem it ultimately harmful for their offspring - without having to deal with a decentralized mass of sneering 'betters' who repeatedly/fraudulently cite The Science as being on their side, and who will utilize any mass of power they've accrued to culturally coerce you into behaving differently, up to calling CPS (and why believe it would stop there, left undeterred?).
Parents are often reliant on the integrity and validity of our institutions so they know what to expect, preempt, encourage, or ameliorate when it comes to the acculturation of their children. Instinct can probably get you far, but in a complex society with layers of social/economic/political abstractions, parents are looking for a consensus guard rail that reinforces their beliefs, gently reminding them "Yes, encourage that!" and "No, do what you can to curb that!". Validating the trans phenomenon as 'just some other way of being' after saying something that layman's ears might interpret as "The porn is mind controlling your kid and nobody should be concerned because #Pride" is seriously messing with the credibility of that rail, and the more it is emedded and officiated, the more concerned parents will be left out to dry, because...
"...Holy shit, I can't believe you disagree with the doctors and the teachers and about 75% of politicians (see, this is a totally non-partisan thing!) about the utility of teaching gender fluidity in Kindergarten! You still think it's a memetic contagion run amok? That is soooo 2023. Jordan Peterson is calling, and he wants you to clean your room! Haha."
I'm not sure if the above counts as uncharitable or inflammatory. But I was compelled to write it out and illustrate my point because these are very real conversations I've had too many times to count. I'm not too keen on the consequences of that dismissive disregard getting heavier.
nobody is calling CPS over parents preventing their kids from watching porn. there is no culture war over parents preventing their children from watching online porn. This is because 'kids and sexuality' is a taboo pressure point for almost everyone in the US. Which is why conservatives try to associate trans with child + sex (grooming!). The culture war issues are all about trans in schools, drag queen story hour, etc.
If your concern is that schools or institutions embrace trans, then ... they embrace trans because everyone does, so we circle back to the original 'is trans real and good' debate, 'society as a whole' isn't going to suppress something most people think is good. If your concern is your kid becoming trans, then said institutions have basically no causal role in an individual kid deciding they are trans (other than 'not explicitly opposing it it', which brings us back to the first point). Nowhere does it make sense to specifically attack schools. The entire 'trans in schools' issue is based on a bunch of false premises that spread because they rile up disconnected but concerned parents.
I think they embrace trans because they want to, and they have Bostock vs Clayton County gave them a fig leaf to push through in every space they could.
Everyone certainly does not embrace trans.
This is only true if it is not a social contagion. I think it is a social contagion, much like suicide or anorexia, so I think schools are actively making more children trans just via exposure.
My proposed alternative was 'Schools? no. Their parents? No. Either their friends or the internet', which is as if not more compatible with social contagion than teachers.
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The entire thrust of my post wasn't a concern over the porn, but how we expect society to react to it and its attendant psychologies. You do not need to put some bizarre scenario in my mouth about 'CPS being called because the parents don't show porn to their kids'. You can ready my post again, notice that the 'CPS' comment was in reference to the generic 'coerce you into behaving differently' (which does, can, or may soon include affirming your child's stated gender and using their preferred pronouns at home, depending on where you are) - and since you are a regular poster here, you could probably reasonably assume that's what I was referring to, instead of inserting an absurd caricature of my statement.
The existence of leather fetish porn does not necessitate a Grade School level understanding of fetishism and sexuality for young children, nor does it require some passive acceptance and validation of every strange, oddball choice or behavior a child may exhibit. It's not that I want children who are soon-to-be fetishists to be locked out of any understanding of themselves. But if social contagion is real and the teachers are installing 'Leather Week' on the calendar where they dress up and make the whole thing a fun game and are way too interested in preemptively identifying their student candidates and absentmindedly 'nudging them along the path', I don't think it's a worthwhile tradeoff. Consider that reality, and then compare it to another one where every PTA or school faculty member might say "Hey, your 6 year old probably doesn't know what they're doing, but it might best if he doesn't wear the Kink Boots/Dog Mask/Ass Chaps he steals from your closet to school every week". If you are concerned that the internet is leading your kid astray (and quite likely is), it is of no help to you when all your institutions shrug their shoulders and ask what the big deal is.
And of course, I consider this whole thing to be an element of a multi-part problem. Candidly, I think a world where everybody is 'OK with trans' is a world where huge swathes of the population (if not a majority) have been so buried under propaganda and deprived of sound critical arguments (that do exist); to such a degree that they have to delude themselves and preempt serious argument to maintain their views, or are too brow-beaten and self-preserving to argue against it. I say that based on what I see today as extremely flimsy evidence with a disproportionate level of dismissiveness of counter-arguments and emotional blackmail ("If you don't affirm, your kid will commit suicide"). Now, should these people be catered to any way? Maybe so! That is certainly a valid possibility! But 'the majority decides what's right and just' is so boring and obvious. I am interested in separating good ideas from bad ideas, to the best of my ability. And if society wants to gorge itself on a bellyful of bad ideas, I can't stop it, but I can record it.
My point is that the state is not preventing you from taking the kinds of action that might actually prevent a child from wanting to transition, they are doing things like 'sometimes awarding the pro-trans parent the child in custody disputes'. So the entire character of the oturage over this just doesn't make sense. And I am not sure if 'not giving a child gender-affirming care who wants one in an otherwise normal household' is/will be a legal reason for CPS/similar to take a child away in any US state? If it is, I'd appreciate a link, I couldn't find anything with a quick google. If not, then with the only similar thing I'm aware of, I don't think 'taking your child away because they are trans' is a particularly useful way to represent 'considering trans acceptance in custody disputes'. Even if I disagree with that, it's much less obviously EVIL than weighing evidence in a custody dispute, where there are two parents' 'natural rights' in conflict as opposed to a clear violation of one parent's 'natural rights'
This is like worrying about getting covid from surfaces and ritually washing your hands. I'm sure one person got covid from a surface, but it was much less common than airborne transmission by like 1000x. Leather week (does that exist in a school? I'd be surprised, leather is a very bdsm-adjacent/kinky queer subculture) isn't, causally, anything if every child is watching porn by age 12 and has seen /r/egg_irl a few times by age 14.
No, what I'm saying is if most people, including those in power, believe something, and are acting on it, the only argument of interest is 'convincing them otherwise'. Side-arguments like ' is in our schools and brainwashing our children' don't really help you, because the people in the schools and most of the parents in the schools authentically believe being trans is vaguely good and think said brainwashing is probably fine as a result. You can't not brainwash a child who will just mimetically absorb whatever they see.
California here I come, right back where I started from:
The bill hasn't passed yet and they are still adding and deleting parts, but in general Scott "Leather Man" Weiner is co-sponsoring this little gem:
"Existing law governs the determination of child custody and visitation in contested proceedings and requires the court, for purposes of deciding custody, to determine the best interests of the child based on certain factors, including, among other things, the health, safety, and welfare of the child.
This bill, for purposes of this provision, would include a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child."
"SECTION 1. Section 3011 of the Family Code is amended to read:
(1) (A) The health, safety, and welfare of the child.
(B) As used in this paragraph, the health, safety, and welfare of the child includes a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity."
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Everyone does not embrace trans. Even pro-trans people spend a lot of time denying that the trans things that are happening, are happening, which would indicate lack of support.
How do you know that? I've heard stories of troubled kids that were more neglected by the school system, and the moment they came out as trans, they got full support of all the adults in the school. Do you think that sort of behavior plays no role?
There's also the small issue of hiding it from parents, which a lot of schools are doing.
Everyone was flippant, most people are vaguely pro-trans, especially most 'elite' people. As a result, the 'cultural background' is vaguely pro-trans. I don't understand how not supporting fake penis surgery for 15yos makes one anti-trans in the context of 'a cultural background of being pro-trans' that leads to schools supporting it.
This doesn't even allege the school played a role in the student coming out as trans, which was (presumably) related to the influence of the internet or their friends? The same goes for hiding it from the parents - note that the child is already intentionally hiding it from their parents, and the school is just continuing that.
I dunno, I would think that myself, but all the pro-trans people seem to be attacking anyone who's criticizing penis-surgery for 15yos, and calling them transphobic. I'm taking their word for it.
You said what the school has zero impact on the kids decision. I'm saying, maybe Tumblr put the thought in their head, but the response they're getting from their immediate environment, including the school staff, can indeed contribute to them taking the step.
Same for the school hiding it from the parents.
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But the problem is it's not "dumb old teacher droning on to fourteen year old boys who aren't paying attention anyway", it's Drag Queen Story Hour for three and four year olds upwards. Teachers online bragging of the Pride flags in their classroom. How to make maths class more inclusive of trans and non-binary identities. Guest speakers invited to school who say there can be as many as 72 genders and teachers taking kids outside for a 'quiet word' if they don't accept that:
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"Responsible" is a weird thing to say. I don't think it has zero contribution, but I think it's pretty far downstream. The causal chain all starts with the idea that it's possible to do any of this and like it. This is what causes people to make the sissy hypno porn, and what causes people to watch the sissy hypno porn.
"Social Contagion" has some implications of negative affect because it implies a disease. I think reasonable people can disagree on whether queerness is a disease based on what they've experienced. (though I think... people are wrong if they think it's innately bad, because my experiences indicate that it doesn't have to be.) But the property of ideas spreading and causing the people who see them to consider them as possibilities? That's just memetics and culture. I think reasonable people should agree that queerness is subject to those forces.
So I do think, "cringe story books in which Jimmy has a trans mom and a cis mom" are enough to move the idea of transness from 'unthinkable' to 'thinkable'. And that's part of the process. It does have an effect. Obviously trans people need their existence to be 'thinkable' and not 'unthinkable', so it's completely understandable why they would be for that. But if you really think of transness as a memetic disease- then it's understandable why you would want it to remain 'unthinkable' for as long as possible and then dissuaded.
Oh, I completely agree with you. It’s part of it, but I think it’s the lesser part of it. The bigger part of it is young people becoming disaffected with their romantic and personal lives and pursuing transition as a result, and in my opinion porn and porn culture is part of it. Maybe I’m too much of a TERF to see past that, though!
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True, although in fairness we have several terms for the concept of "coming to believe X because people around you believe X" and none of them as far as I'm aware have positive affect. TRAs would hardly react more positively if the spike in FTMs was attributed to "peer pressure", "groupthink" or "radicalization". Everyone wants to think of himself as the master of his own destiny and beliefs, and reacts with understandable offense when someone says otherwise (even if they're right; even if the beliefs he's arrived at are harmless, good or pro-social ones).
Some of them do have a positive affect. "Becoming Cultured" is an example. "Learning Manners" is an example. "Education" is an example.
Of course we have reasons why we think the things we're transmitting are good and not 'just' peer pressure, but so do the TRAs obviously.
I think "learning", "becoming" and "education" are describing a directed process in which the subject is an active participant, which make them therefore distinct concepts from the other terms, which portray the subject as weak and impressionable for falling victim to it. This may just be a matter of emphasis (or even a Russell conjugation). I take your point.
I can see the connotation you're pointing at but I don't think it alone makes for a fine line that really cleaves reality at the joints. You can 'just say no' to drugs in the prototypical peer pressure case. Doing a cigarette with your friends requires you to take the cigarette and ask your friend how you smoke it. (Or watch and learn.) You can't always 'just say no' to education. Most children end up in school whether they want to be or not. So Peer Pressure is also Learning, Education is also Indoctrination.
I think the affect is actually doing a lot more work than that. 'Kids are smoking cigarettes because of peer pressure' is literal, but you wouldn't say 'education is indoctrination' unless you're being edgy, because the affect is also shorthand. In this case a shorthand for- 'we shouldn't let kids smoke cigarettes but they are, and its spreading.'
I think how we use affect in 2 dimensional ways really can be quite important, because its holding information. In order to figure out whether we should let kids smoke you have to think about a whole bunch of questions. "Is the person wise enough to discern the good from the bad? Are they being exploited? Will this actually help them? Is this actually necessary to society? Will they retroactively endorse it after they're done? Does the fact that they want to do it matter?"
But you don't need to do all that math every time smoking comes up, you can cache the optimal policy result dynamic programming style as a single affect bit. Letting kids smoke=bad.
And this saves a ton of processing power.
... I feel like I've dipped a toe into a whole other world of implications just now, where thinking through your beliefs can be a cost and asking you to examine your beliefs can be enemy action. It's a tangential insight that just occurred to me that I need to think about so I don't want to go off on it but... this model feels like it sticks to a lot of things that happen in human culture war.
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So the argument is that since "sissy hypno porn etc." is available online, then there is no need to be worried that it is pushed in school as it does not do that much harm?
Good, so given that terminally online people have access to gore and snuff videos or ISIL radical propaganda or holocaust denial bullshit, let's move it into schools maybe in slightly sanitized form. It cannot harm anybody to have teachers handing out books written by Nick Fuentes, right? Kids who don't like it will not read it anyway and even if they do, it will not do that much harm.
It’s not slightly sanitized. The point is that sissy hypno stuff seems to trigger autogynephilia in some males, and plenty of very online transwomen on Reddit, 4Chan etc have admitted it played a role in their growing feelings of dysphoria. The porn makes being trans seem attractive, it triggers the autogynephilic feelings in some men that can eventually lead to transition. By what mechanism does garden variety activist trans acceptance make men sexually attracted to the idea of themselves as a woman? I don’t see it.
Nick Fuentes, to make the point clear, is more like the porn in this example than he is like the school book. Fuentes is extremely good with memes, has a great shock jock persona, hammers home the same message consistently, and most importantly makes having his views seem cool, edgy and counterculture to his viewers.
Something like this:
School holds a function celebrating Trans people as exemplary and people against Trans as bigots.
Kids who don't want to be called bigots outdo each other with effusive praising of trans people. This is a feedback loop of increasing intensity.
Puberty-adjacent kid with low self-esteem who gets no affirmations at home see affirmations of trans people, and at his age the desire to be cool/affirmed is more powerful than his sexual desire, so he wants to be Trans.
After a year or two of getting teachers and fellow students and parents to celebrate him as a her, once the real sexual desires kick in, it would be immortally embarrassing to make a 180-degree turn. The desire to not be embarrassed socially is more powerful than seuxal desire, so he sticks with it.
Likely, once the kid announced as Trans they digested a ton of Trans-confirming sexual messaging online and from peers which assimilates into their sexual development. Maybe at the point it's hard to tell what is organic sexual attraction and what has been formed by other influences.
My nephew is older, but his story goes something like this:
Socially awkward young man with a speech impediment from a religious family (dad is a reverend) gets a job as a software engineer and spends a lot of time remote-working from his dark apartment. Makes a lot of money but gets depressed and quasi-suicidal.
Goes to therapy -- provided by his work, I believe. Therapist suggests that social awkwardness could be gender-related, tells him that transitioning genders will alleviate suicidal ideation.
Transitions, comes to some family parties in dresses and apparent top surgery, has a new name. Everyone is polite to him (except for some of the young children who refer to him as "that weird boy"). Is also the only one wearing a Covid mask. It's like a case study of a misfit making extra effort to not fit in to affirm's one's identity as a misfit.
Year later complains to therapist that it didn't work and that he is still suicidal.
His parents reach out to him, but he tells them that their dead to him and if he kills himself it's their fault.
Turns the most sympathetic family members against other family members for not being effusive in their praise of something that looks like a mental health trainwreck.
No one wants to know what his actual sexual feelings are, and I would doubt even he knows at this point. At least he hasn't killed himself yet, but I won't be surprised when the call comes in.
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Are you familiar with the research demonstrating a huge uptick in trans-identified female teenagers in the last couple of decades? If they watch sissy hypno porn, that's news to me.
Transmen are a separate issue but nobody seems to care much about them. 95%++ of the culture war around trans people is about transwomen, from sports to bud light to prisons to women’s shelters and from JK Rowling to Caitlyn Jenner. Almost every prominent trans person is a transwoman. The vast majority of trans activists who are themselves trans are transwomen. Transmen are essentially written off; they’re mostly just butch lesbians who consoomed some bad memes.
Trans women are, by nature of the transition much more visible. A man wearing women’s clothing is obvious and easily clocked as trans. A woman wearing men’s clothing simply looks like a short man without a beard. Elliot Paige doesn’t look that far off from a 16-year old man, put her in an average high school and she’d be seen as perhaps a weak man, but a man. Put Dylan Mulvaney anywhere in public and he’s a man in a dress and heels. If you’re looking for a spokesperson for a social group, it seems like you’d want people who are obviously part of that group. A very light white passing black person isn’t a good choice for a black rights activist simply because they don’t appear black and thus the public can’t see this person as an aspirational black person.
My sister’s best friend is a trans man as of quite recently. I knew her as a girl and she was a blue hair, tumblr type, I suspect into Yaoi. Now he’s a twinkish bottom with a thin beard addicted to Grindr hookups. Still, you wouldn’t clock him as a woman, and he seems to be having a great time. Honestly, he’s probably one of the very happiest people I know.
I confess I find this strange, and I hope (truly) that he doesn’t regret his transition eventually, but it is less grating to me than MtF. I think it’s aesthetic, as you suggest. There is an Emperor’s New Clothes phenomenon to MtF that doesn’t exist with FtM.
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A lot of the culture war about grooming seems like it’s about trans men.
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Agreed on all points, but it would still suck to undergo a mastectomy and sterilize yourself only to realise too late that you'd made a huge mistake (just ask Keira Bell). I don't necessarily disagree with your claim that most MTFs are autogynephiliacs, but that doesn't address the rising proportion of trans people who are FTMs, nor the possibility that they arrived at the conclusion they were trans men as a result of their education.
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Not quite. The anti-trans side is very concerned with trans men. Almost every prominent trans person is a trans woman, but statistically the majority of young trans people (and due to the exponential increase in referrals to gender clinics in recent years, most likely the majority of trans people overall, but I haven't checked) are trans men. As a result all talk of detransitioners is overwhelmingly focused on women to the point that guys who fell victim to the trans trend are barely more than an afterthought. The two things are mirror images of each other, and come from quite classical views of each sex (men are scary and women are harmless, hence the reaction to trans women and lack of reaction to trans men - women are to be protected and men are disposable, hence the reaction to detrans women and lack of reaction to detrans men).
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Even though I was just arguing with people further downthread that you can't rely on "men and women are just different" as an explanation... men and women are different, and MTF transsexualism is a pretty distinct phenomenon from FTM transsexualism. MTF has a stronger sexual/fetishistic component and is more likely to be subjectively experienced as an innate need. FTM is better analyzed through the lens of social contagion / social status and has a similar structure to e.g. cutting or bulimia considered as social epidemics. Of course there will always be individual cases that run counter to these general patterns.
(That being said I don't think you can draw a simple causal link from sissy porn -> transition. But FTMs aren't really relevant to the behavior of MTFs in this case.)
I get you. My point was that, even if most MTFs are autegynophiliacs who consumed too much sissy hypno, it's still possible that school textbooks and educational programs could be contributing factors to the spike in MTF identification. I don't know if this is the case, but it could be.
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