I suppose to me personally that the additional tragedy with regard to so-called “trans kids” is the absolutely unyielding and rigid characterization of tastes and preferences as being specifically either male or female. This tragedy is aside from the aspect of irreversible chemical and surgical mutilation of otherwise normal body parts attached to troubled teenagers and gaslighted small children, but the whole rigid concept of personal traits, tastes and enthusiasts all being locked into the notion of being ‘male’ or ‘female’ and that if a child displays one or another of that set or tastes or behaviors antithetical to his or her biologically-determined gender … well, then that child must therefore be chemically and surgically altered to conform.
Hysterical urging that such a non-conforming child must be chemically/surgically mutilated at a very early age, in order to conform to that particularly rigid stereotype is, as used to be said in the warped 1960s, indicative of a ‘sickie on a power trip’. I am convinced of this, absolutely. It is no difference to me where such urgings originate; on the part of a fashion-addled parent entranced with the approval of their peers (which is another sort of sickness of itself), or a teacher similarly inclined, an activist with an ax to grind, or a medical provider scenting profit for the lifetime of that unfortunate child. Oh, those much-lamented and condemned Victorians you should be alive in his century! But in reality, the general range of 19th-century Americans and Western Europeans were a bit more relaxed, indulgent even, regarding gender nonconformists. Examples too many to list them here but trust me, there were men and women in the 19th century who freely romped and trampled all over contemporary stereotypes with the greatest enthusiasm when it came to what was supposed to be normal behavior. This is not the aim of this post.
Which is basically to point out in this horrible new century and under the aegis of our new gender-conforming warriors, how little wiggle room this leaves for eccentric tastes and interests on the part of children. What space is there for a little boy entranced with ballet, or the touch of fashion fabrics, or a liking for caring for baby dolls? What wriggle room for a girl who likes trucks and trains, loves to read of adventure and war, wants to climb trees and solve mysteries? There is no room, in this horrible new formulation for eccentricity, for kids with a taste for outside-the-box interests.
And that is the awful, damaging aspect of the whole new gender conformity standard. Comment as you wish.
Remember the Good Old Days when the bleeding edge was homosexuality? Then, quite recently, it moved further out to transgenderism. Now the edge is at pediatric transgenderism.
This is happening against the background that every developed country on the planet is already failing to produce enough children to ensure sustainability of its population. Countries like Japan which are loathe to allow massive (generally illegal) immigration are already declining in population. Surgically altering some of the few children that are being born will only accelerate this trend of declining population.
It is almost like someone has a plan to do whatever is necessary to cut the human population. Maybe they find us humans to be simply unlikeable?
“if a child displays one or another of that set or tastes or behaviors antithetical to his or her biologically-determined gender…”
ITYM “generally associated with the other…” I’m not sure what tastes or behaviors are antithetical to masculinity or feminity. Most “gender non-conformity” is relatively innocuous stuff like women who are interested in machinery.
Such unusual tastes or behaviors have nothing to do with gender identity, which is a fixed neural condition. I once met an MTF trans who had long hair, wore makeup and nail polish, and had rebuilt a Lamborghini for fun.Those who have GID don’t have to be persuaded of it; they know. At most they may need encouragement to “come out”, as peer and parental reaction is generally negative.
The dangerous fools who are overdiagnosing GID are indeed pushing “gender conformity”.
One amusing data point on gender (and gender-orientation) stereotypes and exceptions to them:
The only person in my freshman class in college 51 years who didn’t seem to ever listen to any kind of pop music, but was quite knowledgeable about a wide range of classical music, including opera, was a distinctly heterosexual man a few years older than most of us, who had just gotten back from serving in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. (He was also the fastest sprinter on campus 3 years out of 4, despite his age and his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit – Camels or roll-your-owns. Granted, it was quite a small college.)
A combat veteran, I assume, and not just because of his unit. If his girlfriend needed to wake him up, she made sure to poke him gently with a very long stick. He did not respond well to being awakened by surprise.
Anyway, not someone a kneejerk stereotyper would ever have guessed would be an opera aficionado.
People only learn various types of socialism are bad after piles of corpses and limbs and organs. That’s true of national socialism, international socialism, and it’s true of gender socialism and environmental socialism.
“Seen one, seen ’em all” never seems to apply to socialisms.
Things certainly escalated quickly. When Oberfell was announced the LGBT movement shifted on a dime and became the lgbT (with the accent on the T) movement. At first we were told that sex was biological while gender is a social construct and trans people were ones who simply did not fit into a rigid two-gender construct.
That only lasted a few weeks, or maybe a few months. Now we’re told that sex and gender are the same and are innate but may not be reflected by such things as being born with a penis or a vagina.
People are “assigned” a sex at birth but that can be wrong. Adults need to be vigilant and watch for any signs that a child’s behavior does not match gender norms. A non-conforming child was probably assigned the wrong gender at birth and needs medical treatment to align the child’s body and gender.
And it’s irrelevant that the child will be sterilized and may never have a normal sex life. All that matters is that the child’s outward appearance match its behavior.
I often thank the Lord above that I was born when I was [in the early 60s] though it sometimes flows the other way due to technological advances (what is available now for kids to get involved in / access to). On the other hand, were I my then [pre-teen] self today I am positive I would have been one of those singled out for pre-teen transitioning. I was a bit of an introvert, loved to read [anything], enjoyed needle-point, cross-stich, other various arts and crafts but also loved to take things apart and put them back together again. I was fairly effeminate. I was quite awkward in my skin. I can image a “modern” school counselor eagerly pushing me into this type of box. Back then with this not on anyone’s radar my folks quietly wondered if I were gay [not that there is anything wrong with that].
Even today I am much still the nerdy type and have spend a lifetime in the computer field. I have been in the service, still love to take things apart and put them back together again, and have been very happily married to a wonderful woman for 36+ years.
I just can NOT understand how the left went from “let everyone be themselves” to such rigid
gender boxes. How can they say both that gender is just a construct so be whom ever you want AND if you do X or Y or Z you need to change your body to match a physical woman or physical man PERMINENTLY. It is double-think cubed and I pray the world out grows this madness soon!
Remember when Obama accused doctors of doing lots of unnecessary surgeries for profit as part of his sales pitch for Obamacare?
Who could have guessed that 10 years later, the Left would be demanding incessant surgeries for profit?
Yeah… I’ve been sometimes calling it the War on Tomboys. Can’t let ’em go their own way and grow up into strong, independent, relatable women.
Had the new standards been in effect when my wife was a little girl, she would have been tagged as transgender and pressured to undergo surgical transmogrification, long before she understood what sex even was.
And I’ve been trying to figure out what my sexual orientation is under the new rules. If my wife is defined to be transmale (and I am attracted to women who are a bit on the masculine side), does that make me trans-gay? Or, since I have various non-masculine personality markers (no interest in sportsball, not wired for one-night stands, etc.), does that make me transfemale, and thus double-trans-reverse-straight? And where does that put me on the intersectionality scale?
Gender Identity has purposely been conflated with gender characteristics. We are being bamboozled into believing that male and female are the same as masculine and feminine. You are either male or female. You can be a masculine female, you can be a feminine male. But you are male or female.
“or the touch of fashion fabrics…”
My folks grew up with Roy Frowick in high school 1947-52. They knew about Halston’s preferences even then.. For drawing women’s clothing, and, er, other things…
I noticed several years ago a very liberal friend who claimed to have advanced GAYDAR (of the kind that could figure out if a person was not just ‘in the closet’ but in deep denial of their homosexuality) was simply applying the grossest stereotypes of gay behaviors such as fashion sense, fine features, etc in a way that would have elicited howls of protest if a conservative applied them in the same way.
This trans movement is actually a war on gays. Many of these kids will become homosexual later as they grow up and figure things out. I am not a big fan of homosexuality. I had quite a few friends and patients die of AIDS in the 80s. The promiscuity of “gay life” was the killer. Bathhouses were the indicator. Part of my practice was in Laguna Beach. One of the toughest things I had to do was tell someone that he had AIDS. That was before the anti-viral drugs and it was a death sentence.
Now, I think the gays are figuring out that the trans movement is no friend. The whole thing is bizarre. These kids are being sterilized at a young age. This bullshit of “men can get pregnant” is propaganda with no purpose I can see except to mislead.
The main thing to know about leftist reasoning is that the truth is any assertion or narrative that serves the party or movement leadership at the moment. Truth is an expression of power rather than of logical or historical validity (see: Darkness at Noon).
Thus the truth changes, even becomes the logical or historical opposite of what it was until a moment ago, as the needs of the party or movement leadership change. The public debate about what is now called transgenderism fits this pattern.
It is futile to attempt to convince leftists on logical or historical grounds that their arguments are invalid. The best that can be done in an open society is to try to engage the naïve supporters of the Left, and apathetic voters. Some people in these categories are already becoming engaged as they come to see transgenderism as a threat to their children.
“Seen one, seen ’em all” is ALWAYS a faulty generalization.
However, ‘seen one, might as well have seen them all, since the standard deviation is very small’ is always available, and very likely true. Moreover, is scans and rhymes!
As was pointed out by Theodore Dalrymple, noted cultural critic and physician, the purpose of Communist propaganda was not to inform, nor to deceive, nor even to manipulate the citizenry; its purpose was humiliation. The Communists alleged “facts” that were ridiculously untrue, yet no one was allowed to deny them. The power of the State enforced the “facts”.
The citizens knew the State’s ideas were false, but were forced to say they were true. The Soviets called this “hyperrealism”. In George Orwell’s book “1984” the Party could insist that “2+2=5”, and all were forced to say it was true; dissenters could be hauled to the Ministry of Truth and disappeared.
We see this today in the Democrat Party’s insistence that “Transwomen are Women”. In the many interviews shown in the film “What Is A Woman” by Matt Walsh, one can see the same lies at work. Interviewees held that gender is fluid, a social construct, that biology had nothing to do with gender, that a man could get pregnant or have an abortion, that a woman could have a penis, although none could provide a definition of what a woman is.
In the machinations of their minds, though, even as they spouted the Democrat Party propaganda, one can see, deep down, they couldn’t really believe the Big Lie. But so committed were they to the Party propaganda, and so fearful were they of being canceled by their peers – today’s version of the Ministry of Truth – that they repeated the falsehoods.
Look, fifty years ago, if a 12-year-old boy preferred to play with Barbie dolls rather than baseball the neighbors would snicker and say, “That boy is a sissy.” Thirty years ago, if a 12-year-old boy preferred to play with Barbie dolls rather than baseball his classmates would whisper, “That boy is gonna be gay.” Today, if a 12-year-old boy prefers to play with Barbie dolls rather than baseball the Progressives will scream, “That boy must be a girl! Let’s pump him full of chemicals and cut off his dick!” How is that Progress?!?
Let’s be clear. A man can go through years of psychotherapy, take huge quantities of body-altering drugs, and undergo massive reconstructive surgery, but, in the end, none of that matters. He cannot lactate, he cannot menstruate, he cannot carry a child in a womb, for the simple fact that every cell in his body carries a Y chromosome. It is Basic Biology, it is Simple Science, and no amount of wishful thinking can change it.
Life is not a Harry Potter movie; one cannot snap ones fingers and change form. You can haul me off to the Ministry of Truth, and lock me up in Room 101, but two plus two will never equal five, and a man can never become a woman.
I remember a few years ago starting to see articles about body dysmorphia. In these cases, the patient was convinced that all their problems would be solved if only they could get shut of that arm or leg or other body part that was causing them. At that time, they conceived that the main impediment to their deliverance was the stubborn refusal of medical professionals to amputate perfectly healthy limbs on demand. I don’t remember seeing any of these lately, could it be because the proles might see a parallel between these and the supposedly sexually confused and draw the conclusion that the common denominator is mental health or rather the lack of same?
As a response to Weevil, classical music is no indicator of sexual tendencies.
SHOWTOONS! Showtoons is(are?) the key!
(snicker)
Truth, suppressed, tends, psychologically, to express itself in weird ways. Progressive, feminists, Democrats have asserted for decades there is no difference between the sexes, except differences they assert are trivial, e.g., which hole to use for sexual gratification.
They know this isn’t so. That LGBTPQR+ are contrary to nature, and now they mutilate children and themselves because they subconsciously know that male and female are immutable characteristics of the mind. And the body must be surgically sculpted to match the mind.
The alternative, that men have periods and women have penises, is equally ridiculous.
Caught refuted on both options by reality, they are quickly becoming insane, spending time, money, and flesh to make their crazed dreams real.
Once almost hesitates to point out the similarity with LGBTQPR+ socialism and crazed socialism of Stalinist-Lysenkois biology (“society shapes man”), existentialism (“man has no nature”), and Nazism.
Some day people will learn. But not today.
Erisguy,
Yeah, well, it seems to me the truth, being true, and mother nature, being what she is, will always win out in the end. Twisting them, though, twists us.
Certainly a lot of this seems to be pressure to lobotomize our society – the distinction between biological sexuality and cultural gender roles and individual (not necessarily sex-related) interests & abilities requires a minimal ability to distinguish, beginning with sensible definitions. This also requires the rudiments of logic as distinctions always do.
In a civilized society, it also requires some ability to understand what is rigid and what isn’t (the rarity of true hermaphrodites, for instance) while about any man or woman has interests, tendencies, strengths and weaknesses that are more characteristic of the other sex. I agree this encouraging of muddy thinking is characteristic of communism and is true of any cult, etc. (Otherwise the reality of its inevitable failure registers earlier.) Adherents accept the “master’s” (dare we say “experts”) pronouncements, as oppositional as they may be to what they said yesterday or to what can be seen with one’s own eyes (is all this all that unlike the television announcer standing in front of a burning building and a large lawless mob saying that the George Floyd riots were mostly peaceful?)
There is a lot of messy thinking today and it dates back to the romantics and up through post modernism that believes that “my truth” is relevant and “the truth” is not. How often after a fake “hate” message has been found to be written by the theoretical victims themselves, has some administrator or the “victim” said that this is a “wake-up call” and a sign that more “education” needs to be done?
That is why teenagers are sometimes strengthened by Jordan Peterson – his argument that the first step is to trying (and he acknowledges the difficulty) to not lie must be welcoming to teenagers who feel confused in a world in which conversations become fuzzy and subjective. The old values of truth and duty and loyalty were sturdy ones that were helpful in exploring the world and being sure in your relationships.
Perhaps it is that old tempter pride that is behind this – it is prideful to force others to lie and betray what they really know. It is certainly prideful to think that you know enough abut biology and what life will have in store to narrow other’s life choices as narrowly as this mutilation does – I thought that we’d long ago gone beyond the place where we saw sterilization of the “other” as appropriate. (Isn’t this yet another way of devaluing childbearing, the core of any culture, hat survives and thrives – that great “yes” to life, to the future?
It is prideful to think that “your truth” is of any interest or importance, except perhaps in a psychiatrist’s office or when trying to explain obscure feelings in an intimate conversation with someone to whom your feelings are actually important – and that circle is surely the most intimate of ones.
And then there is the left’s inability to accept reality, change, diversity – all of which they claim to accept and conservatives don’t. Sweeping away the entire past and knocking down statues of men who were by any normal standard great can hardly be called tolerant let alone intelligent. People fear the open markets – beliefs, ideas, products, inventions, speech, press – because we all fear the unknown. American conservatism is widely accepting – admiring what is to be admired about the past, admiring of what is distinctive, admiring of what is universal, while distinguishing what works and what doesn’t, what loosens human potential and what supports it.
Sgt Mom has it right about raising children – it always seemed to me that a difficult but interesting part of child raising was discovering what was true to them. Even three girls have different intersts. (Two – to the great disappointment of their grandmother, one was more like their father – who didn’t have deep training but did have strengths). If they hadn’t taken lessons, one wouldn’t have blossomed and it didn’t hurt the others to read music, though they had other interests.. If they had been boys and I had believed what one friend (who had had a pretty dysfunctional first marriage to a pianist) who claimed that all male pianists were gay, I might have paused. (Probably not, I thought that was crazy then and certainly I’ve known many gays who led rich and resonant – and sometimes musical lives.)
In his “On Human Nature,” published in 1978 and basically a repetition of what Chicago boy Robert Ardrey had written more than 15 years earlier, E. O. Wilson wrote, “The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior – like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it – is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.”
In spite of Wilson’s calls for “consilience,” philosophers have spent the intervening decades either studiously ignoring or denying this fundamental truth. Supposing one believes in an objective morality that “tracks” evolved human behavioral traits, it follows that nothing can possibly be more immoral than mutilating and poisoning a child, depriving it of the ability to reproduce in the process. The same logic applies if one believes, like me, that there are no such ghostly “morality objects” out there. Either way, the contention that mutilating children is somehow “good” is reduced to an absurdity.
The sudden crush of children “wanting” gender-reassignment looks like the same impulses to “act out” I had as a bright, bored kid. But 40 years ago adults knew what it was about.
“He just wants attention.”
That always stopped me and eventually made me understand my motives and whether there was a better way to behave.
Now children are smothered and choked with attention (rich, mostly white chikdren, at least) so getting THE MOST ATTENTION is the new chase, and crossing seems the most outrageous and celebrated.
Any doctor who sells this horses**t is an evil mercenary, it is a cabal of profiteering health care interests who are also pushing this.
But of course, much like the “opiod crisis”, doctors, those all-knowing godlike saints, will never, ever be sanctioned when this madness finally ends, after x00,000 kids are destroyed.
BRetty
I’m a brony. That doesn’t make me “a woman trapped in a man’s body”.