Birth of a Resistance
Last Sunday, 60 Minutes aired a segment on “transgender health”. As reported by interviewees the original intention was to do an hour long story on young people who regret altering their body in their attempt to achieve the goal of changing their sex. Trans activists objected heavily to this story about detransitioners claiming it would endanger the lives of trans people. So the program was cut to 14 minutes and more was added from the pro-trans side to give it “balance”.
Yet a story about a young person happy with their transition cannot compete with those who regret theirs. Regret being one of the most compelling human conditions especially when the stakes are so high as to involve cutting off body parts that give you biological function and sexual pleasure.
Thus the add-on scenes seem scripted and the explanations by a trans therapist do nothing to clarify what this is even about, and why so many are going down this path. The guidelines cited for transitioning are too vague and the timelines too short before medical treatment is given is the only conclusion to be had. And when a medical doctor claims that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are not an experimental treatment no studies are offered. (I have already posted the statement from the original Dutch researchers pleading for more research on puberty blockers because they themselves knew their work was experimental.)
To ignore these detransitioner cases of regret and harm is to appear heartless to the tragic turn these lives took. But an industry that has decided to affirm and escort into medical treatment anyone who decides that their problems stem from being the wrong sex cannot afford to be wrong.
Entire mental health institutions have set aside a hundred and sixty years of developmental psychology to bow down to the concept that humans have a soul that is gendered and those with body dysphoria must be rescued from their physical body. As if their whole body were one big birth defect for which, if not treated, the only outcome is suicide. To question this ideology is to be called transphobic and bigoted. Researchers and institutions unused to such accusations have stayed silenced.
Framing and manipulation of language by the trans ideology has kept the public confused. Defeat has been a master teacher as women from all manner of backgrounds bond over this issue, sharing information on how this is affecting so many. Medical students are being taught to negate biological sex through correct trans ideological language whereby they are told that there are women with penises (and men with vaginas) for instance. Never mind that men and women are biologically subjected to different medical issues and that this should never be overlooked as in the case of the transman who didn't know "he" was pregnant so no medical personnel at the ER thought to check this possibility in diagnosing "him" resulting in the loss of the baby.
To deny that detransitioners exist is foolhardy. Trans activists will hang themselves by their own rope in their attempt to cry foul on these detransitioning stories. 60 Minutes was unable to do much of an investigation given the politicizing of this issue, but even in the truncated time offered with only two of the four shown allowed to speak (30 actually interviewed) all the components of how this phenomenon arose are there in the details of these compelling stories. Along with their revelations about gender stereotyping. These young people who are seeking to give meaning to their messed up lives have nowhere to go, but out into the open with their stories.
In light of the recent four hour documentary on the opiate industry by HBO it is an easy leap to imagine that the opiate crisis was hardly the exception, but rather the ruling strategy when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry pushing a product. The microdosing of cross sex hormones is a concept now being marketed to lesbians suggesting that masculine-presenting women should want to use testosterone to erase their female bodies.
Given the relentless overreach of transgender ideology especially in schools ever more information is being launched blog-by-blog in classic grassroots fashion. Transgender Trend in the UK was one of the first to aid parents with science-based information devoid of gender identity ideology. Individuals (some with their identities carefully hidden for fear of being called transphobic and losing their jobs) are posting compelling information they have researched. One reveals the educational material used in schools where children are being taught gender ideology. The story books for children are so creepy I could hardly watch more than a few minutes at a time. So much did the narrative suggest that children should view their body as a disassociated entity as though it could be traded in like an appliance if it didn't satisfy them. Not to mention changing one's sex as a journey of self realization as described in fairy tale fashion in the book I Am Jazz (about YouTube child star Jazz Jennings).
Recently I reviewed a parenting book focused on advising blind sided parents faced with the harrowing journey of a child suddenly announcing they are trans. The title Desist, Detrans, & Detox: Getting Your Child Out Of The Gender Cult caught my attention. It was such a statement of resistance. The author and her team also have a website offering information challenging gender ideology in the context of developmental psychology. They kindly published my review.
Over the last year I have been fascinated to watch women learn that outrage must be replaced by carefully thought-out language on such a meta level that it feels like feminism and womanhood are being freshly discovered. The farther this ideology reaches and the closer it gets to thought control the more people will be drawn to question it. Discussions of psychology, philosophy, what knowledge-based learning means and what women’s experience consists of are becoming so basic that the collective discussions become a mass educational process as if the world were just being born. Movements like this become a review of the entire society. A much needed cultural audit it may be too carrying with it a great deal of energy and excitement as we realize what is at stake.
Labels: culture, identity, LGBTQ, politics, transgender, women
1 Comments:
I came to learn about this blog because I'm a gardener/compostist interested in humanure and I found your explorations of bokashi for fast humanure to be very interesting. I picked up on some of your political sensibilities in your writing and then learned you're lesbian when I continued reading, and I thought to myself, wow this person is rad! I'm lesbian, I'm an anarchist, and ...
it hurt when I jumped to your recent articles and saw that you're "gender critical" & repeatedly, intentionally misgender trans people in your writing. I think that the stories of folks who detransition are important and should not be erased. At the same time, I have a feeling that detransition wouldn't have to feel like such a big deal, like being betrayed by a community, if trans people didn't have to reduce their experience of gender into a simple and static narrative in order to be accepted by cisgender folks in the first place. Ya dig? I've dealt with some seriously hateful shit from "gender critical" people and I understand that my trans-friendly vernacular can trigger folks into thinking that I'm calling them bigoted, taking conversation or empathy off the table, but I just want to offer you a story. It's a beautifully written article (kinda prose?) about the question of "womyn's only spaces" that choose to explicitly exclude transgender women, as a writer I think you'll enjoy the piece: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/transmissions-from-camp-trans-2003
-kiki
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