Trans women are not women (Part 8)

[Emily's Cat]

In the case of Texas, it's quite clear that this decision is not supported by the medical community nor even the general public which rejected legislation to this effect. It's clearly a pander to the reactionary right wing base.

Ah yes, those horribly right-wing countries of Sweden and Finland...

 

[Rolfe]

I agree that such "treatments" should be avoided... but I have fairly substantial objections to it being state-imposed prohibitions. I also think that charging the parents with child abuse is a truly horrendous idea. There are a lot of parents out there who are completely ignorant of the risks and side effect, and they've been snowed by "gender professionals" telling them that if they don't support their kids getting these treatments, they'll commit suicide. A lot of the parents feel like they don't have any choice except to support the treatment.

Is there anything you do think should be subject to state-imposed prohibitions? Because this is pretty high up the tree in terms of potential and actual harm done.

As I said, I understand that Texas is going about this in a cack-handed way, which should be no great surprise. But this is a boil that has to be lanced, sooner or later. Parents have been lied to, that's for sure. Is it better to let their children be harmed because the parents sincerely believe that this harm is necessary (although they're mistaken)? I find that a hard position to defend too.

 

[Emily's Cat]

....even if she does get a bit carried away with the rhetoric occasionally.

It provided me a much needed giggle though.

 

[Rolfe]

If I am genuinely causing offence by minimising the horror of what Mengele did, I'll stop with the comparison. But as I said, I believe the difference is merely quantitative, not qualitative.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The problem is a political one. It's not a fallacy to note that the rising tide of extreme right, anti-secular politics that is leading to this assault on trans people's rights is also coinciding with an assault on abortion rights.

At least in the US, the Venn Diagram of transphobes and anti-abortion misogynists is practically a perfect circle. Transphobia is inextricably a plank in the reactionary right platform.

Only in your mind. You keep trying to foist this off, despite having incredibly clear evidence to the contrary right here in this very thread.

Several of the female members of ISF have spoken against self-id and against the unnecessary medicalization of children, and NONE of us are right wing in any rational fashion. The males in this thread who hold those same views are ALSO not right wing.

All you're doing is attempting to intimidate and silence your opposition by ascribing malicious labels to them. But you do it so often that it has no meaning. You can keep repeating it as often as you like, but nobody is fooled by your attempt to vilify people as "right wing".

FFS, we females especially get called significantly and egregiously worse things by gender dysphoric males pretty regularly. Your attempt to paint us as "evil republicans" is barely an annoyance compared to the death and rape threats, the invective, and the downright misogynist slurs thrown at us by the side that fancies itself on the "right side of history".

 

[Rolfe]

He's doing it because he doesn't have any rational argument to support his belief that castration of children is a good thing. He doesn't even like explicit descriptions of exactly what it is he supports.

 

[Emily's Cat]

And yet on this side of the pond the political compass points in the other direction. It's the left-wing women who are organising against the trans juggernaut. It's almost as if the political left and right isn't the way to look at this at all.

It's largely the same here. On your side, you've got strongly liberal females who are leaving the liberal parties due to their blatant misogyny, and sometimes finding themselves on the same side as the tories.

Here you've got a ton of liberal females dropping the Democrats like a hot potato because they're throwing our rights down the drain and stripping us of our right to consent and dignity... and sometimes finding ourselves in alignment with a Republican who is fighting the same enemy for a different reason.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The UK certainly seems to be an entirely different political environment. I make no prognostications about the Cursed Isles.

As far as I can tell, TERFs are largely a non-factor in the US, while in the UK seems like they at least command quite a bit of press attention.

Right wing feminism isn't really a thing here like it is in the UK.

The UK doesn't have "right wing feminism". And a pretty large contingent of females in the us oppose self-id and the medicalization of children as well. The difference is that US media doesn't allow any of it to be covered.

UK is ahead of us on this one - females have made their voices heard far better than we have.

 

[Rolfe]

It's almost as if this issue cuts completely across party lines and the political spectrum.

I'm bored by ST's pathetic attempts to deflect the discussion to a monstering of people he disagrees with as "right wing". I just don't think he has any other arguments. These people think like this and they're right wing, so I oppose it, and anyone else who thinks that way must be right wing too so I don't need to listen to them. Or something like that.

 

[Meadmaker]

The problem is a political one.

I think your interest is primarily a political one. I think trans people are the enemy of your enemy.

 

[theprestige]

At least we all know red states heavily fund their social services. It's not like cases of real abuse or neglect are going to slip through the cracks while Abbott and Paxton use DFPS in a political stunt to shore up their right flank during primary season.

Typical trans-activist dodge. Find some other issue to avoid having to address the issue actually under discussion. What is that called? Changing horses? Gish gallop? Look a squirrel?

 

[Emily's Cat]

It's handy to have a catch-all term like "gender affirming care" for what is a variety of different treatments related to treating transgender patients.

Yes, it's quite handy for you to have handy, obfuscating euphemisms that allow you to sidestep the fact that such "care" sterilizes children who aren't even allowed to sign a contract, and damages their bodies in a permanent fashion.

You give it nice sounding names to obscure the reality of what it is:

Dangerous chemicals that block the production of the hormones necessary for both the physical and cognitive maturation of humans, and which prevent bones from accreting density and put the person at risk for many additional conditions

Synthetic hormones to prompt the development of cross-sex cosmetic looks, while creating atrophy and damage to the child's reproductive tract, and frequently produce sterility

Surgical removal of healthy breast tissue that leaves behind scars and makes it impossible for that female to produce milk for their infant

Castration of healthy testes

Phalloplasty and vaginoplasty, which have very high rates of complications in order to create a non-functional cosmetic facsimile of a sex organ.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Kathleen Stock has started a substack. The content is free for the first year. The first article looks good.

"Even if you don’t particularly care about saving women’s spaces or sports from the incursions of males with female identities, or protecting minors from irrevocable and incapacitating bodily changes they may later regret, you should at least care about how your public institutions were soundlessly infiltrated by special interest groups - and then manipulated, not just into doing those groups’ utterly mad bidding without proper forethought or scrutiny, but also into trying to prohibit open discussion of the entire process. If it happened once - and boy, did it happen, and still is happening - it can happen again"

I saw that this morning. I will be subscribing.

 

[Emily's Cat]

That video was taken down? Trans rights activists simply want to silence debate.

Yes, they do. We've been saying this for a while now.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You seem to understand the situation pretty well. I'm not sure why your head is spinning. Of course, it's handy for the drug companies with the patents on these things that a use has been found for them, isn't it? (I don't think the amount they were selling to me to conduct tests to see whether rescue bitches were already spayed or still intact would have been generating much revenue for them.)

ETA: Last week I watched the latest of these Swedish films exposing the trans industry. That one featured a girl who still seems to be on the path of "becoming a man". She was anonymised and we never saw her face. Her parents had been supportive, because they'd been led to believe that's what they had to do. Affirm, affirm. She was put on puberty blockers aged eleven. At fifteen she had stopped growing and was way under the height she should have reached as a girl. Nobody even mentioned how difficult this would make it for her as a "man", given the difficulties short men face. They were far more concerned by her osteoporosis, or was it osteopenia, and her constant back pain. Spinal x-rays showed the shape of her vertebral bodies changing to wedge-shape and vertebral body fractures looked seriously probable.

Spinning from the blatant propaganda to push a harmful drug on children, and the die-hard supporters who frame it as if people want kids to commit suicide if we oppose this blatant medical malpractice.

 

[Emily's Cat]

A lot of these trans-identifying males who seem reasonable and sympathetic to women's rights are problematic in themselves. They're nearly all AGP too, but not quite so narcissistic as far as I can see. They have however found a neat trick - come out on the gender-critical side and these idiot women who have been raised to be kind will lionise you and platform you and accept you into their space. Which is of course exactly what you want. Don't fall for it.

I still don't want them in my locker room, let alone a female prison! I'll accept a fellow traveler arguing against this ideology... but I will never platform or center males in my feminism, nor will I support males in female-only spaces.

The young people you're talking about are nearly all ROGD.

The three presentations of trans - HSTS, AGP and ROGD - are being conflated and they should not be. We should also be very clear that none of them are benign. HSTS, once past puberty, is as sexualised as AGP, just in a different way - trying to be the ideal submissive "female" for their man. AGP, though, is what's driving all this and when it comes with a large dose of narcissistic personality disorder, as it often does, is absolutely inimical to women's rights.

ROGD is what is experienced by confused adolescents, often autistic, usually girls, but they can also be wildly manilpulative and self-centred. (There's one girl who seriously posted about her jealousy about her mother getting "top surgery" before her - well OK she has cancer, but hey, I'm the trans one around here!)

While it's obviously right that women's groups should welcome and platform young women who once thought they could turn into men, before realising what a terrible mistake they'd been led into, welcoming and platforming AGP men (like Hayton and Harrison) because they say the right things, is seriously problematic.

No disagreement really. I just don't demonize transsexual people on the basis of them being dysphoric. I oppose an ideology that pushes a policy that is harmful to females and children, and that I think presents a barrier to people with legitimate dysphoria receiving the mental health care that they should have access to.

My feminism doesn't include males.

 

[Rolfe]

Everybody should go through normal puberty.

It's the thing that makes you a fertile adult. No puberty, no fertility. It's the thing that plays the biggest role in maturing the brain, in developing judgement and good risk management and so on. Take away puberty and you take away choices the person can never get back.

Of course puberty isn't everything, or maybe it goes on longer than is generally recognised. Males in particular suck at risk management until well after puberty, and we all know why that is a good thing in evolutionary terms. Having a bunch of suicidally brave young men prepared to be killed to defend the community is advantageous. Hopefully enough will survive to impregnate the surviving females, one way or another.

But this sort of mindset is not good in the modern world and outside the armed forces. It's not the mindset that should be engaged when playing with medical and surgical treatments that have lifelong consequences and can have huge risks as regards bone density, cancer, stroke and heart attack risk, and indeed which are known to correlate with poor mental health.

What is the right age to start allowing people to decide for themselves about this issue I don't know. It seems unrealistic to delay until 25, although that's the age generally agreed to be when mature judgement is reached. Eighteen may be a reasonable compromise.

There is plenty time for someone to embark on the process of body modification to attain the facsimile of the opposite sex if they still want to when they really are old enough to know their own minds. I believe Blaire White was in his twenties before he started, and he's vehemently opposed to transing children. (He has also retained his male sexual organs.)

"Puberty blocking" is a monstrosity. It is evil. It denies children their future fertility, their future sexual function and future sexual pleasure. It denies boys exactly what most of the trans-identifying adult men choose, that is to appear feminine to a greater or lesser extent but to retain their (adult, puberty-generated) male sexual organs.

Children are being swept up in a cult that offers them something that can't be delivered, when their minds are too immature to understand the implications and ramifications of these decisions. Children don't care when they're told, you'll never have children of your own. Or, you'll never have an orgasm. Or, you'll never feel sexual desire. (If these "providers" even tell them that.)

It should be an absolute hard line that everyone goes through the puberty their bodies are primed to go through. Right through. Then we'll see. The tiny percentage who persist may moan that they were made to wait, but they'll get what they want in the end - they'll even have a wider choice of how they want to end up.

But it will be a mature choice. And the large majority, who were only confused about their sexuality or escaping from homophobia or caught up in the "stunning and brave" cult will be able to live their adult lives in the way they want to, gay or straight, with their bodies unmutilated.

 

[Emily's Cat]

A while back there was discussion of the Science-Based Medicine fiasco. One of the issues with the pieces written by the activist 'experts' was the number of links to 'evidence' that didn't support or outright contradicted what was claimed. One of the most blatant examples was in this article which stated:

'Studies on brain development have found no significant differences in youth on blockers.'

The statement links to this article which is actually about assembling a panel of experts to establish consensus on the best method for assessing long-term neurodevelopmental effects of puberty suppression, because there is currently no existing evidence. As the article states:

"Taken as a whole, the existing knowledge about puberty and the brain raises the possibility that suppressing sex hormone production during this period could alter neurodevelopment in complex ways—not all of which may be beneficial."

"It is important to note that there has been only one longitudinal report of adult outcomes, and questions remain regarding the potential for both positive and disruptive effects of pubertal suppression on neurodevelopment" and "pubertal suppression may prevent key aspects of development during a sensitive period of brain organization. Neurodevelopmental impacts might emerge over time, akin to the “late effects” cognitive findings associated with certain oncology treatments. The goal of this study was to develop a framework in which these questions could be asked, and ultimately answered".

I pointed this out this misrepresentation in the comments section and nothing was done to correct it.

What I find most baffling about this is that we already know that a lack of hormonal influences during the pubertal window inhibits (and sometimes stalls) cognitive development. There are a handful of medical conditions that present with an interruption or a failure of hormonal puberty. We already know that it prevents bone density accretion and leads to osteopenia or osteoporosis (depending the severity of the interruption). We already know that puberty is a multi-system process that is time-bound. There are already conditions where the adrenal gland works as advertised, but the pituitary or the hypothalamus do not. And if you add exogenous hormones in order to complete puberty - both physically and cognitively - you must do so during the same window of time that the adrenal is firing. If you delay too long, it simply doesn't work. You can still get some of the visual development of secondary sex characteristics... but it doesn't actually trigger a true puberty.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I've come to the conclusion that there's two parts to "social transition". One part is either absolutely sexist and regressive, or else entirely meaningless in a modern social context.

The other part is actually sexual social transition: Passing as the opposite sex to a degree that it arouses sexual attraction in people not otherwise attracted to that sex, and no longer attracted to the transsexual once they see through the ruse.

Social transition is not about wearing a dress because one feels like one fits into society better by wearing a dress. It's about wearing a dress to exploit conventional social signals to help trigger a subconscious sexual response that is at odds with the signaler's actual sex.

"Passing" as opposed to "Trap"

Also, see sexual mimicry

 

[Rolfe]

I still don't want them in my locker room, let alone a female prison! I'll accept a fellow traveler arguing against this ideology... but I will never platform or center males in my feminism, nor will I support males in female-only spaces.

No disagreement really. I just don't demonize transsexual people on the basis of them being dysphoric. I oppose an ideology that pushes a policy that is harmful to females and children, and that I think presents a barrier to people with legitimate dysphoria receiving the mental health care that they should have access to.

My feminism doesn't include males.

I'm not demonising them, but a section of the gender-critical movement has been blindsided by this. A group of AGP males who present quite well as female has managed to achieve exactly what they want, that is acceptance within female spaces, by sucking up to the gender-critical feminists.

It seems the feminism of this section does include males, if they're males who say the right things and write clever articles putting forward the gender-critical point of view. I think they've been suckered. Look at "Debbie" Hayton, relishing his inclusion in this feminist movement, and being given a prominent position in it. (Then look at his wife, who looks as if she's in a hostage video whenever she appears in public. She's a classic trans widow but still standing by her man.)

I think we need to say to these men, we appreciate your support in the same way we appreciate the support of other men, but we don't include you in our community.