A Tipping Point?

40 thoughts on “A Tipping Point?”

1. The other day I was looking up songs from the Musical Chicago — don’t ask. I think I wanted to hit one of my blog commenters with “he had it coming” for a truly horrible pun — and stumbled on Chicago Backwards or something like, in which the female parts were played by males. They were singing the “isn’t it wonderful nowadays” song, and when the guy sang about how things would change, I got a hint as though of premonition.
   I think it is all coming to an end. And some of it is good. Like the backlash against mutilating kids. When you have strange idiots saying the baby knows when it’s born that it’s in the wrong body…. it’s way way way past too far.
   But unfortunately it’s also going to hit decent people — and no, I don’t want to hear it, yes, the activists are horrible, but there ARE decent gay guys and decent married couples — who are going to get lumped in with the freak show.
   And I think even the so called “female liberation” might very well get rewound too far, where someone like you or even I would have trouble living the lives we’ve lived.
   It’s not the world I wanted. But the more the crazy, horrendous excesses are allowed, the greater the backlash will be.
   And we’re on the hinge of a great turning. I’m not the only one who senses it. I suspect I’ll go from extreme right (which I never was) to extreme left (which I never will be) without changing a single opinion, over the course of a few months.
   Hold on to the sides of the boat. The water is about to get really rough.

2. I am hoping that the left will get hit with the full brunt of the whirlwind that they have been sowing.

3. I think you’re being naive. They’ll never stop, they might pause, but I don’t see enough will in our institutions to push them back, mostly because they’ve already been captured by commies.

4. Future historians may well choose the transgender craze as the climax of idiocy in a truly idiotic era. The leftists who peddle this nonsense always pique themselves as being on the side of science. No matter that they imposed the Blank Slate orthodoxy on the behavioral sciences for more than half a century, perhaps the greatest scientific debacle of all time, or that their “scientific” opposition to nuclear power has cost the lives of thousands, or that their “scientific” knowledge of climate change amounts to a collection of fairy tales, as documented by Steve Koonin in his “Unsettled.” Well, if they are such fans of science, they should at least have some respect for Darwin. Like the rest of the ideological snake oil they peddle, they base their promotion of transgenderism on “morality.” Here’s what Darwin had to say about morality:

   “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probably – namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.”

   and,

   “If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless the bee, or any other social animal, would in our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience. . . . In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed: the one would have been right and the other wrong.”

   Consider the above in the light of Darwin’s greatest work, his theory of evolution by natural selection. If morality exists by virtue of natural selection, and I happen to agree with Darwin that it does, then it must have promoted the survival and reproduction of our species. Otherwise, it would not exist. It follows that nothing can possibly be more immoral than such acts as poisoning and mutilating children in order to “transgender” them, thereby destroying their ability to have children of their own.

   Leftists have run rings around conservatives, defeating them at every turn, and taking control of the media, entertainment industry, schools, etc., by virtue of their skill in manipulating the moral emotions Darwin explained to us, pretending that their ideologically induced fantasies represent the epitome of moral righteousness. Isn’t it time we asked them to tell us the source of legitimacy and authority for this high morality of theirs? In fact, they have none. They have no legitimate basis whatever for their moral claims, including the “righteousness” of transgenderism. Their “high morality” is floating about in a vacuum, but they will continue to hold the “moral high ground” until conservatives finally understand this.

5. There was a bloody massacre in Florida yesterday where scads of woke school board members were taken out and shot.

6. Does anyone remember that in the 90s there was a brief movement to say that if a man didn’t achieve “affirmative consent” at every step of an interaction with a woman, he could be liable for assault? It was laughed out of the room because it’s completely absurd. But it gradually was put into campus rules, then in the “Me Too” era it came back and basically overnight was legally codified in several states. They’re never going to stop. The ratchet only moves one way, never backwards.

7. Another M-to-F : Dierdre (ne Donald) McCloskey the economist.

   Helian makes very good points. Regimes of Virtue (which is the claim of the Left) depend on unexamined premises, and the surest way to start the reversal is not to accept their premises. (To paraphrase George Will before he went soft in the brain, the Left are for everyone’s full rights, all the time, and then some.)

   Brian, it’s actually worse–or better depending on your POV–than you describe. “Affirmative Consent” remains in place for icky guys who like girls, but guys who say they think they are girls can get away with a lot, apparently–and even be defended by the bien-pensant.

   Contradictions and paradoxes abound as the cultural and political tides ebb and flow, but incoherent ideologies only last so long before reality reasserts itself.

8. Just saw this:
   https://nypost.com/2022/08/24/woman-sues-psychiatrist-for-approving-gender-transition/

   Short version: Shrink decided in one visit that the person suing him for malpractice should go on male hormones and shortly thereafter for the full surgical “treatment”.

   Hate the idea that treatment is decided by insurance companies but the medical societies aren’t doing their job.

9. In a normal society, things might eventually go back to their normal equilibrium. But there is a nihilistic cadre at work in some of this, consciously using it to destroy Western culture. We have to somehow deal with them as well.

   A short-term solution would be a total blanket ban on body modification of any type, including pharmaceutical, for everyone under 18, predicated on the notion that children are too young to fully grasp the long-term consequences. This would also extend to tattoos. The only exception would be for one pair of earlobe piercings, for earrings. After age 18, knock your socks off.

10. }}} Yes, there have been a few, Wendy Carlos and Jan Morris come immediately to my mind. M-to-F, as was most often the case, historically. Both appear, in images discoverable on the internet, to present convincingly as female the last time anyone paid attention.

    I’ll go you a step farther on that one, Caroline/Tula-nee-Barry Cossey, who transitioned and was a Bond Girl, (s)he was that much female looking. Not sure how much of it was surgery, but when you look at pictures of the adult Barry, you can understand that most of it was already there. (s)he did not need much help to be a female, other than the genitalia.

    I gather she has done alright for herself, she has been married since 1992 to the same guy. She did have an earlier marriage, annulled because at that time the UK government refused to recognize she was female, and did not allow same-sex marriages.

    I dunno, frankly — I just don’t see how anyone can argue that s/he is female, at least on looks (clearly, cannot judge from personal interaction). I’m perfectly ok with using the “she” for her (my usage of s/he has been to ack overall context)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Cossey

    Face Shot:
    https://typeset-beta.imgix.net/lovelace/uploads/982/e401f670-fc00-0132-4518-0a2ca390b447.jpg

    Body Shot:
    https://cdn-ami-wordpress.heartyhosting.com/www.nationalenquirer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/caroline-cossey-tula-transgender-celebrities.jpg?ssl=1

    Sorry, I defy anyone to be shown those pix without foreknowledge of the history and say, “Hey, nice lookin’ GUY!!” :-D

11. Short version: Shrink decided in one visit that the person suing him for malpractice should go on male hormones and shortly thereafter for the full surgical “treatment”.

    This is how the “recovered memories” thing ended. A father named Gary Ramona sued the psychiatrists who had convinced his daughter, and her mother, that he had molested her.

    The American Psychological Society had been running n”workshops” on how to recover memories in patients. The malpractice insurers ended coverage for this stuff and it vanished overnight.

    The “Satanic Ritual” parents were not as fortunate and some were still in prison years later.

    The “Little Rascals case” was my first exposure to this pathology. Then came McMartin Preschool. Those went on for years and I blame much of this on Al Gore who got a bill passed funding prosecution of child abuse.

12. }}} Future historians may well choose the transgender craze as the climax of idiocy in a truly idiotic era.

    As I recall, Heinlein set his “Crazy Years” in the 1970s. I think he was about 3-4 decades early, but, as usual, he saw secondary and tertiary social stuff long before anyone else.

13. Cossey had a chromosomal abnormality, not a mental disorder.

    My understanding is that the reason the trans nonsense has been resisted much harder in the UK is because there is zero interest in having the NIH pay for such idiocy, as well as the fact that they’re in massive financial difficulties already, so don’t anyone say socialized medicine isn’t good for anything…

14. Occasional: “A short-term solution would be a total blanket ban on body modification of any type, including pharmaceutical, for everyone under 18, predicated on the notion that children are too young to fully grasp the long-term consequences.”

    Mike K: “Al Gore who got a bill passed funding prosecution of child abuse.”

    Yes, we keep getting back to “It’s for the children” … except when it is not.

    But we all know what the real problem is with children — there are not enough of them. Korea & Japan may be leading the way, but all of the First World is in the same state — not enough babies being born to maintain the population.

    And it gets worse. Especially in the West, too many of the inadequate number of children who are born are born to single mothers, living on welfare with a succession of short-term boyfriends. Those children don’t get a good start in life and are unlikely to grow up to be productive citizens with balanced lives, as can be seen from the phenomenon of multi-generational welfare mothers.

    Gender reassignment for children is a fairly extreme case — but there is a much broader issue about the cavalier way in which our societies treat the existential issue of producing a viable next generation.

15. }}} If morality exists by virtue of natural selection, and I happen to agree with Darwin that it does, then it must have promoted the survival and reproduction of our species

    I think you misspelled “Dawkins”. :-D (not really, but… poetic license for the joke)

    I’m more with Axelrod on this one.

    I think that there is a Creator, and He designed the system so that morality and ethics arose from the need/benefits of cooperation.

    I assert that part of this is inherent in the fact that the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, applied to computers, shows the odd flip-flop of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

    By itself, the PD says you are better off screwing people over. But the IPD shows two things:
    1 — that you are not better off screwing people over (an odd result, certainly unexpected)
    2 — that the best approach we currently know of for the general case was pretty much that detailed by a pair of rabbis (regardless of their inspiration and nature) 3000 and 2000 years ago: The Jewish “An Eye for An Eye” tempered by Christian Forgiveness (to break off endless chains of tit-for-tat once begun).

    Somehow the 10 Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount pretty much detailed the optimal approach to the challenges of life 2000 years before we could define the problem in a technical manner, much less develop the optimal approach. I find that coincidence one of those “Things that make you go, ‘Hmmm…'”, when it comes to reasons for Faith in God.

    }}} It follows that nothing can possibly be more immoral than such acts as poisoning and mutilating children in order to “transgender” them, thereby destroying their ability to have children of their own.

    Well, to that end,
    1 — it does fit with/follow from the idiotic self-loathing notion that humanity is a pox on the planet, and should be eliminated. And since it’s mostly white people who really fall for this crap, it also reduces the significance of the White Man Gene, which, “of course”, is the worst part of humanity**.
    2 — Thankfully, it, along with unrestricted and encouraged abortion, has and will for the near future substantially reduce the prevalence of the genes of those most prone to liberal idiocy.

    ====
    ** Being, mind you, the only group that actually decided that slavery was wrong, and had the power to enforce it, as well as provide an alternative. Puuuure Evil, n’est-ce pas?

16. }}} The ratchet only moves one way, never backwards.

    Sometimes the ratchet gets busted with the revolutionary hammer tool, when it gets too far out of whack… it gets whacked.

17. What I leaned living in San Francisco for many years is that genuine hermaphrodites (pretty rare) are usually fairly well adjusted people but all male trannies and it seems most female ones too (although its often hard to tell them from bull dykes) are seriously mentally ill. They are always wide spectrum, have a very high rate of institutionalization, and have very high suicide rates. We are talking 10x / 20x general population. And are some of the most unpleasant people I have ever met as almost all seem to sociopaths / psychopaths or some kind or other.

    TV’s on the other hand are pretty harmless although I must say dress standards have really slipped the last few decades. In previous decades the only really elegantly dressed women in SF used to be Japanese women, the TV’s and the occasional French woman. TV’s were never as slovenly dressed as Drag Queens. Who were rarely TV’s.

    The other thing I learned is that there is very serious money in the Gay Lobbying Industry. Very serious money. So once the Gay Lobby Industry had achieved all the Gay Lib political goals of the 1970’s and 1980’s (and some) they were looking around for a new cause to keep the donations flowing in. And that cause was trannies.

    So follow the money. As always.

18. One of the main awfulnesses to the trans fad – and one that I didn’t have the space to get into – was how rigid the defining characteristics for male and female are, in the trans-world. Don’t conform to the strict stereotype for male, or female tastes and behavior, to the last little detail – well, then you aren’t really male or female – you must be the opposite gender, so take those hormones and go under the knife, soonest! Be a girl who likes outdoor stuff and messing around with hammer and nails, and hate dressing up – you’re not a tomboy, you really must be a boy! Be a boy who likes reading, and appreciates art and dressing well — then, oooh! You must really be a girl. It leave no room for a boy or a girl to be eccentric, an individual, to be a nonconformist.

19. I think it is pretty well accepted (outside tranny world) that most kids with severe gender dysphoria end up as gay or the birth sex type. There are, of course, suicides but I am not sure if there are more or less in those undergoing “transition.” I have read several books by “Dierdre” McCloskey and he/she acknowledges that he has battled depression since his transition. He wrote a book about it. “Crossing: A Memoir” His children do not speak to him.

20. “how rigid the defining characteristics for male and female are, in the trans-world”
    What’s so bizarre to me is that literally just a decade ago places like California were passing laws banning stores from having separate aisles for “boys toys” from “girls toys”–now a boy who plays with dolls once is clearly actually a girl. Try reconciling those two positions. I’m pretty sure the whiplash is the point, you’re supposed to be confused about what the rules are, so you can’t get your bearings and resist their campaign for cultural annihilation.

21. }}} I think that there is a Creator, and He designed the system so that morality and ethics arose from the need/benefits of cooperation.

    In this case the argument against the transgender lunacy stands in either case. Francis Hutcheson was a Christian clergyman who, IMHO, demonstrated more convincingly even than Hume that morality can’t possibly be derived via pure logic and must originate in an innate moral sense. The only difference between him and Darwin in this respect is that he thought the moral sense was God-given, whereas Darwin found its source in natural selection. In the Bible we find, “Be fruitful and multiply,” as a divine directive, whereas in “The Origin of Species” the somewhat similar lesson is, “Be fruitful and multiply or go extinct.” In the former case, transgenderism violates the divine will. In the latter its result is a biological dead end.

    I might note in passing that Christians can at least point to God as the source of moral authority and legitimacy. To the extent that they were ever sitting on that limb, leftist sawed it off long ago. Their rapidly mutating morality now just floats out there in the luminiferous aether, supported by nothing at all. Their moral hegemony is supported by nothing more substantial than a superior ability to manipulate human moral emotions, which, whether God-given or evolved, are extremely powerful in either case. For the last half century and more, conservatives have been limping along behind, frantically attempting to prove that they are more obedient to whatever novel “moral law” the leftists have just concocted even better than the leftists themselves. It must be obvious at this point that it’s a losing game.

22. I like My Little Pony, multiple generations. That does NOT make me “a woman trapped in a man’s body”.

23. The typical process for America to decide questions of this nature is via elections. That is, elections happen, and the winners write laws. Comity is maintained, and no one gets mad enough to start shooting.

    I think this process has broken down. It isn’t only that there is rather obviously a vast amount of vote fraud happening in every election, but also because the supposed opposition party to the left will not actually oppose, even when it wins elections.

    Bluntly, who do I vote for to oppose this sort of nonsense? Of course this isn’t just a question for the trans insanity, but a swarm of other issues as well.

    I think Sarah Hoyt is correct. We’re going to overreact badly, because we’re not merely facing a tipping point- we’re facing what happens when that proverbial tipping point is held back for years, lawlessly and unjustly.

    Many years ago, when Coke came in glass bottles, I’d put one in the freezer, wait, take a drink- then watch the rest of it freeze solid in a few seconds. It was cooled below the freezing point and it only took a minor disturbance to cause it to completely change state.

    That’s the American electorate, right now. We’ve had no one really willing or able to fight against the left- with the partial exception of Donald Trump- and hence the left keeps getting more and more extreme. Eventually, there’s going to be a reaction, even if Yertle the Senate Turtle doesn’t like it.

    That belief is why I expect yet more violence is coming to America, alas.

24. “A short-term solution would be a total blanket ban on body modification of any type, including pharmaceutical, for everyone under 18, predicated on the notion that children are too young to fully grasp the long-term consequences. This would also extend to tattoos. The only exception would be for one pair of earlobe piercings, for earrings.”

    1. This would ban circumcision. I’d argue that “including pharmaceutical” would mean banning vaccinations as well.

    2. The earlobe piercing exception reeks of special pleading.

25. “One of the main awfulnesses to the trans fad – and one that I didn’t have the space to get into – was how rigid the defining characteristics for male and female are, in the trans-world.”

    Not just in trans-world, but in leftist-world more generally. Prior to the trans fad it involved pronouns and “if you are not a girl, ISO-standard, one each, or a boy, ISO-standard, one each, then you must be one of the other 57 Heinz gender varieties.”

26. Sometimes the ratchet gets busted with the revolutionary hammer tool

    No right-wing revolution has yet to reverse socialism.

    Does this mean something new is coming? An anti-socialist revolution that treats class socialism (international socialism or communism), race socialism (nazism) and gender socialism (LGBTPQ+) the same way socialists treated monarchists?

    Then let the bodies of Democrats, RINOs, academics, influences, psychiatrists and psychologists and sociologists, union leaders fill the mass graves for a least century. That’s actually less than what socialists have done thus far. Think 50 million dead will be enough to reverse Leftism?

27. Xennady, above: “That belief is why I expect yet more violence is coming to America, alas.”

    “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
    John Fitzgerald Kennedy, March 13, 1962

    SAH has been warning of The Coming Turmoil and Unrest for some time, and the wise among us have been preparing for it as best we can, for when it arrives it will be epic. There are a number of tipping points precariously balanced on the cliff edge, and when the preference cascade arrives they will all go over at once.

    For the moment, the insults are, individually, perhaps not so egregious as to provoke a hard response, but collectively they cannot be ignored; as their total mass approaches criticality something will have to give. The Left will not back down because they are deeply, deeply convinced they are on A Mission of the Righteous, and Newton’s First Law is at work – The Mission will continue until acted upon by an external force, and “desire to simply be left alone” is one of the universe’s weakest forces, certainly inadequate to overcome a Mission of Righteousness.

    Many of us have made minor changes: Target’s sales dropped after they announced “universal genderization” of their store bathrooms, indicating a certain amount of “voting with one’s wallet”; the Wokeism dominating the education industry has contributed to a very noticeable reduction in higher ed student applications, leading to substantial financial difficulties on some campuses, and a very visible campaign-and-voting change for local school boards; the list goes on.

    Such “nibbling at the edges” will not suffice to impede such A Righteous Mission, nor will it appease all who suffer The Mission’s injustices; the proverbial Irrestible Force is due to meet the equally proverbial Immovable Object at some point and there’s great likelihood of it producing an uncontrollable chain reaction.

    Living together in peaceful coexistence is not possible and a steadily increasing percentage is becoming aware of it. Were that adjustments could be made to make that achievable, but I fear not; human nature, and obsessiveness over The Mission will not permit it.

28. It really pains me to witness the unthinking pairing of sex and gender. Those who opt for body modification are transSEXUAL, ie. changing (or making the physical attempt) to the opposite bodily sex. There are still only two, by the way.

    For years, when it was considered inappropriate to use the word ‘sex’ (I recall our Phoenix, AZ newspaper’s modification of an advertisement to, “??? and the Single Girl”), the word ‘gender’ crept in as a polite substitute. This is absolutely wrong. Sex is NOT gender, period.

    To make a way-too-simple illustration, Sex is between your legs; gender is between your ears. The problem is that when there is a misalignment between the two, trans folk leap to the conclusion that if we cannot change the brain, we must therefore change the body. It is CULTURE’S demand which generates an oversimplified quest for acceptance and therefore the surgeries to ‘fix’.

    Sadly, transsexuals will soon discover that, despite their newly manufactured appearance, these individuals grew up as boys/men, never absorbing the experiences that evolve a girl into a woman. Thus, many TS’s (a term from within the trans community) are disappointed that they are not instantly received as a woman – because they are faux-women at best. They lack the ‘programming’ that young girls receive naturally (boys do the same, by the way) and are therefore rejected as phonies. Not to mention broad shoulders and deep voices. They often cannot find employment, face resistance in seeking a partner, and may turn to one of the few perceived income streams still available: prostitution. Never a winning solution. Not to mention the anger a male may develop when, after kissing and fondling and – perhaps – being mouth-serviced by the supposed female, he reaches under the skirt and voila! Male egos are as fragile as others and we get Transie murder. Not to justify, simply to explain.

    Then there are the drag queens. Sigh. Almost universally gay, these folks put on an exaggerated depiction of femininity (‘breasts’ like traffic cones, huge hair, overdone ‘pouty’ lips) originally for comic or entertainment purposes. Yes, drag queens are the clowns of the GLB world. And yet the public continually mistakes transgender and transsexual with DQs who, after all, are often the most visible (and outrageous).

    The largest component of the transgender community are heterosexual crossdressers who simply want to dress to express. Their greatest mistake was aligning with the GLB folk. In case you hadn’t noticed, GLB is all about sex; who you sleep with and how you do it. Whereas transgender is about how one wishes to express inner personality traits. We may not like it or fully understand, but most transgender males dressing as female are harmless, simply seeking validation (or at the least, tolerance). They are not after your children, are never tempted to ‘groom’ anyone, and simply want to be left alone. After all, it’s only clothing. You will not find them marching in parades for ‘gay rights’ because they are not gay.

    So it would probably enhance understanding if we stopped conflating ‘transsexual’ with ‘transgender’ and actually view the two as separate entities. Yeah, like that will happen.

29. Lee: You’re right. Gender is made up. Apparently mostly in order to destroy undeniable sex differences. We should never speak of the G-word again.

30. There is one point being glossed over in the story of the upper-caste all-girls school. Not only were they planning to welcome males who identified as female, they were also planning to expel current students who announced that they identified as males. If the headlines for their proposed new rule had been “All Girls School Plans to Expel Students Who Identify As Male” (and then buried somewhere in the story the part about accepting certain biological males), this would have played out far differently in social media.

31. “I have read several books by “Dierdre” McCloskey and he/she acknowledges that he has battled depression since his transition. He wrote a book about it. “Crossing: A Memoir” His children do not speak to him.”

    I knew McCloskey (slightly) before the transition. He had obvious social anxiety issues and a pronounced stutter. I admired his writing greatly and still do — he/she is one of the best non-mathematical economists writing for a general audience working today. But it would seem that transitioning did not solve pre-existing issues.

32. In 2009, there was a very nice young man whom you might remember, from the local college (UTSA) and active in the Tea Party. Even helped usher folks when Glen Beck did his fundraising luncheon for us. “He” is now living as a “She” (don’t know if surgery has been involved). Strange times.

33. The “recovered memory/Satanic ritual” analogy is a good one.Bear in mind that there have been real cases of covert child abuse (Marion Zimmer Bradley; Jimmy Savile; Denny Hastert; Dr. Larry Nassar). Unfortunately, it seems that when a society discovers a hammer, some people see nails everywhere.

    Intractable gender dysphoria is an extremely rare but real condition. Traditional people generally react to it with disbelief and disgust; even, occasionally, violence. In such a case, “cultural” progressives get to champion a more-or-less genuine victim against actual reactionary bigotry. That makes them feel good. So they want more such cases, which leads to the current situation where gender dysphoria is enormously overdiagnosed and all resistance to such diagnoses and consequent interventions is characterized as “transphobia”. The more “transgressive” the case, and the louder the resistance, the more virtuous the progressives feel.

34. My understanding is that the reason the trans nonsense has been resisted much harder in the UK is because there is zero interest in having the NIH …
    (ITYM NHS.)
    …pay for such idiocy…
    The NHS Gender Identity Development Service (Tavistock Clinic “diagnoses” thousands of alleged transgender children each year. Subsequent medical interventions are provided free. There have been several resignations from the clinic by doctors alleging an internal culture that overdiagnoses, and law suits over misconduct by the Clinic. (One was by a young woman who was pushed to “transition”, and now has a beard and no breasts.)

35. ObloodyHell – August 24, 2022 at 2:36 pm
    I’ll go you a step farther on that one, Caroline/Tula-nee-Barry Cossey…
    Cossey is XXXY, i.e. physiologically intersexed. She developed female characteristics before any medical intervention, despite having male genitals. XXXY hits about 1/50,000 male births. Cossey was lucky: most XXXY cases are mentally handicapped and have other issues.

36. There is a mental illness which causes people to believe that they are dead- I remember it as Cotard’s Delusion although it has other names.

    It seems to me that treating people who believe that are the opposite sex with expensive surgery makes about as much sense as a treating people with Cotard’s Delusion by killing them.

    That is, none at all.

    I hasten to add that I’m not a doctor and I presume that I’m wrong in at least a few cases.

    But there is also no way I believe that some large fraction of young people today somehow have managed to be born with the wrong body. The problem lies elsewhere.

37. Living together in peaceful coexistence is not possible and a steadily increasing percentage is becoming aware of it.

    True statement, alas.

38. I’ll offer David Reimer as a cautionary tale, as documented in John Colapinto’s book, As Nature Made Him.

    I saw a comment elsewhere that resonated with me. Someone said she was glad that she grew up before the trans craze, because she felt that she would have been diagnosed trans if that had been a thing when she was growing up.

    As someone who was smaller than average, bookish, and shy as a young boy (I’m no longer small), I have to wonder about that myself. I grew up even earlier, when the only trans person known was Christine Jorgensen.

39. Oh, Wheels, so am I glad, too. I played and scrapped with my brother and his friends, I hated the girly-girl stuff (abominated Barbie!), loved trains and building blocks and adventure! Fortunately, my parents were sane, but sometimes I still wonder …
    How sad is this all for girls who once would have been indulged as tomboys.

40. wheels – August 25, 2022 at 6:23 pm
    I’ll offer David Reimer as a cautionary tale…
    The Reimer case is clear disproof of the claim that gender can be fluid or remade at will.

    However, it is also clear evidence that gender exists in the brain, independently of the body. “Brenda” Reimer completely lacked male sexual characteristics (because the child’s already-damaged genitals had been surgically removed), but vehemently insisted “she” was a boy, starting when only a few years old.

    The same situation can apparently arise congenitally, due to some extremely rare glitch in neurological development; the result is gender dysphoria. It can be real – but extremely rare – and it is not the same as preference, even strong preference, for gender-atypical activities. (I know of a fully M-to-F transexual who rebuilt a Lamborghini as a hobby.)

    The “counselors” who assert the latter are IMHO as criminally wrong as the doctors who rejected Semmelweiss’s evidence on the transmission of puerperal fever.

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