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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.
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.
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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