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The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
Among normies who are aware of the problem, I think most suffer from Jessie Singal syndrome. Jessie Singal has been covering the trans-insanity beat for a long, long time from the left. He has correctly identified much that is ethically horrifying about the current trans movement. He has correctly identified institutional problems that need to be stopped. But he's so locked into "Republicans bad, Democrats good", that when Republicans literally stop the things he has written extensively about, he is horrified that Republicans are "making the problem worse". He's convinced that if Republicans would just lay off, now, after 10 years of his side ignoring him and actively promoting all the problems he complains about, he could convince them to reverse course. But those darned evil, bigoted Republicans just won't stop making his side crazy.
The institutional sterilization and mutilation of children is a crime against humanity, the scale of which is difficult for the average normie to honestly contemplate. And especially the average normie Democrat. My extremely normie MSNBC consuming in laws just straight up disbelieve it. There side only does good things, and the way we describe it sounds like a bad thing, therefore it's not happening. It's right wing misinformation. We must have heard it from Fox News, always the boogie man, despite the fact that we don't even have cable. When we describe the things happening in our own state, they just mutter "Well I never heard about that." It doesn't help that the whole debate is shrouded in euphemisms like "trans healthcare", and lies about it being "fully reversible".
Among the true believers, charitably you have trans activist who mistakenly view every child through the lens of their own experiences growing up. Uncharitably, they've been horribly mutilated with no way back, and the only way to justify what was done to them is to perpetuate it. Otherwise they'd have to face the stark reality that their entire miserable existence was based on a lie. It's no wonder so many kill themselves.
And then you have the child castration fetishist in the medical community who write the standards of care.
Yes I remember Jesse advocating the 'in the middle' political compromise of 'let's only treat the true-trans using the Dutch protocol.' Those initial experimental studies have been shown to have serious methodological flaws and so ceased to be the centrist bargaining chip. No, it's probably apparent to even Jesse that there actually is no true-trans but that some children, for a range of contingent factors, including whether they are autistic or grew up in a foster home, are put on a medical conveyer belt.
Yes, I've seen that - I wonder if that kind of epistemological narcissism, also known as lacking humility, is related to their trans identity?
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"Epistemic closure" is a superweapon.
("Epistemic closure" meaning the political term in which one's belief system includes the tenet that any information contradicting one's belief system is wrong, not the technical term from philosophy)
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Like circumcision, except they don’t stop at the tip. If you have your daughter’s genitals mutilated because of your weird-ass sexual beliefs, you’re either the worst most cruel backwards reactionary or a brave progressive fighter against that same oppression.
I am glad that you bring up circumcision because, while it probably does not cause as much damage to the individual as full-on transitioning, it also affects vastly more people. Yet I rarely see anyone here inveigh against it. Not sure why. Is it just because it has been around for so long that people are used to it?
Circumcision is an interesting example of a practice that would be viewed as horrifying by probably most of society if it came out of nowhere and suddenly started to become popular. But because it has been around for thousands of years, it gets a pass. In one way it is actually much worse than the trans kids thing. Infant circumcision is done without any consent at all from the person that it is done to, whereas kids who transition are significantly older and often the motivation to transition at least in part comes from the kids themselves, rather than entirely from the parents.
The effects from circumcision are ‘my underwear is slightly less comfortable and there may or may not be some reduction in sexual pleasure, I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, but there’s still quite a lot of it, in exchange for hygiene being slightly easier. I can’t totally go back on my parents decision but if it bothers me enough I can regrow some of the skin’.
Notably this is massively different from transition, like not even in the same wheelhouse, even if I think it’s a bad thing(and to be clear, my sons will not be circumcised absent clear medical indications or them deciding to get it done, and paying for it, themselves. But I say that as someone who thinks that being circumcised is not worth whining about).
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This framing is kind of pants-on-head, just so you know -- source: am circumcised, and am not convinced that there's any significant ill-effects, much less within orders of magnitude of lifetime sterilization and pharma dependency. (plus whatever surgical and social side-effects)
The problem that always comes up in this debate is that very few people are actually qualified to comment on what difference it makes to sexual pleasure or whatnot, but have strong opinions on it anyways for reasons that are unclear to me.
There has actually been the odd adult-circumcisee wander into these conversations; mostly on the reddit site IIRC. My recollection is inconclusive, but what I remember was one guy who said 'pretty much no difference', another who agreed, and one who chimed in to say 'somewhat worse'.
I personally can't know how much better sex might be if I weren't circumcised -- but, like -- it's pretty great? I'm not exactly some coomer connoisseur, but I struggle to think of a situation in which I've felt like *more *sensitivity would have been helpful? BJs with a condom on are lame I guess, but I'm not sure circumcision is the main problem there.
In short, to me this is like you are comparing tonsillectomies to kidney harvesting or something -- can you say what makes you think that the two things are even in the same ballpark?
Well, I figure that the people who deeply regret having transitioned as teenagers are balanced out by the people who are happy with it. On the other hand, almost no-one is actually made happy by having been circumcised, most people just feel neutral about it and a significant though small minority is unhappy about it.
My statistics could be off, though.
Something to consider I guess is that this is an irreversible procedure taking place in and around puberty -- a time when many people are unhappy regardless. So the set one should be interested in is not 'people who are happy with their trans interventions' rather 'people who would have been happy anyways, and without the burdens associated with the interventions'.
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You just might not be paying enough attention. Whenever circumcision is brought up here, I see a fair share of people speaking out against it. It's just that it's almost never brought up due to not being a CW issue, since, as you allude to, one side of the "war" has had complete victory for as long as anyone can remember.
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There’s enough mra-adjacent types like me here that circumcision is sometimes denounced, but it is true that it is also often defended under the aegis of ‘religious freedom’ , the ‘value of tradition’, and what I view as a more legitimate justification, parental authority (though even granting total parental authority rights, it does not excuse their moral fault). That’s why I brought it up, two birds one stone.
And there’s an extra problem for trans supporters: They deny parental authority, so that justification collapses. It’s bad enough if your neighbours mutilate their children, but here the trans claim the right to mutilate yours (for their own good, of course).
As to the consent justification, children are somehow incapable of consenting to using their genitals once, but capable of consenting to destroying them for their whole life?
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You know, when my wife and I were expecting our first kid, we had a conversation about this. I basically didn't want it done if we had a boy, for a host of reasons. She, at the time, had a more normie perspective, but no strong feelings one way or the other.
I think it is slowly falling out of favor in the US? I haven't checked rates or anything, but anecdotally I see more people questioning it and saying they won't do it to their children.
But it doesn't come up here because there is no culture war flashpoint over it. Weirdo's who control institutions aren't trying to get it done behind parent's backs. In so far as it's a "problem", it follows the usual pluralistic principles of it being nobody else's business what someone does with their kids.
We decided against it when we had our son. I couldn't come up with a good reason to remove part of a perfectly healthy baby. Circumcision rates may be falling, but some of that could simply be due to demographic shifts.
An underrated reason it’s probably falling is cost-savings in government provided care- the number of states covering it under Medicare seems to be dropping slowly over time.
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So, caveat, this was told to me in a Global Ethics class circa 2004. But supposedly the biggest proponents of female genital mutilation in the middle east are the older women who had it done to them. They are deeply invested in continuing the practice, because their entire identities are subtly intertwined in valorizing how it was done to them. To walk that back undermines everything they understand about themselves.
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It's not only that, they also know their community will turn on them and rip them to shreds. Sure, they might be welcomed on the conservative side, or on /r/detrans, but you'd be uprooting your entire identity.
Well, you know what they say - death before detransition!
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