Andrew Sullivan: the trans activist movement for children is a movement against gays
It also exploits and physically damages or even mutilates many minors with multiple mental health problems. Sullivan is correct on that. Actually, it has been apparent for a long time. In fact, Sullivan is rather late to the game:
What you should want is the press to thoroughly report on this question, airing all sides, giving you all the data points they can. That’s what Emily Bazelon and Katie Baker did…They should be given Pulitzers, not demonized by their peers.
One obvious area for research: why have the sex ratios shifted so radically in the past decade or so — with girls now vastly outstripping boys in the young patients involved? Why the explosion in requests? It’s far more dramatic and skewed to one sex than it would be if merely a function of declining stigma. Yet for woke journalists, it’s all Principal Skinner: “Let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up.”
Something is going on among teen girls more generally. The CDC just issued a frightening new report:
“Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls (57%) said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.” That’s the highest rate in a decade. And 30% said they have seriously considered dying by suicide — a percentage that’s risen by nearly 60% over the past 10 years.”…
The lobby groups and often well-intentioned doctors who have pioneered this massive experiment on children will naturally resist any idea they have been facilitating abuse, or concede any points — because as soon as they confess doubt, the whole house of cards can come tumbling down; and lawsuits alone could end the practice very quickly.
Anyone who questions any of this is branded transphobic and ostracized. That’s just one of the many outrages committed by the left after its ascendance to tremendous power these days. The mental health and medical establishment jettisoned its former protections against such over-treatment and improper treatment, even for minors, so quickly it could make your head spin. No wonder children are depressed – little to nothing protects them from a world that may seem to them to have gone mad.
Speaking of which – the following is a long interview, but it’s worth watching at least some of it. It features a discussion of many of the ways in which what used to be called the sexual revolution has harmed young people growing up without the old restrictions and boundaries:
We can hope that some lawsuits will end this insanity.
Actually, Andrew, it’s a movement against CHILDREN.
Though I would agree that that trans cult is a threat to gays generally…
More generally, it’s a movement against humanity.
File under: What hath turning CIVIL RIGHTS into a fetish wrought…? (AKA sliding down to perdition on the slippery slope…or…the perils of out-of-control rationalizing…)
The rapid onset (pun intended) of the Trans movement/mania left many conservatives (and more than a few non leftist liberals) punch drunk. Think back to just a decade ago: was anything related to trans issues even discussed by Obama or Romney? And yet just four years later, we were seeing acrimonious debates over boys in skirts going into girl’s locker rooms. The mania for “gender affirming care” only excelerated exponentially from there.
What changed? One big thing: Obergefell. With gay marriage proclaimed a constitutional right, the media-academic-entertainment complex was unencumbered in pushing the ‘next big thing’ in the sexual revolution. Still, it was mystifying a quick and well coordinated this push was and is.
The trans movement is crucial and useful to the left for two salient reasons:
1. It is a direct assault on the nuclear family and its autonomy. What better way to increase leftist hegemony than to tell parents they have little to no control over serious and permanent medical decisions regarding their children’s gender; that they must submit to the opinions of ‘experts’
2. It provides a key litmus test for determining loyalty and obedience to leftist power and control. Crucial to any leftist ideology is obedience to the party line, at all costs, even if it contradicts previous party orthodoxy. And that’s what transmania does. A core principle of modern feminism is that women have a unique lived experience as women; it can never be fully understood or experienced by men, and this fact must be respected by the latter. Transmania demands all of the above be jettisoned. If a 60 year-old guy puts a wig on and says he’s a women, you need to accept him (now ‘her’) as a woman just as much as any born female. Indeed, you MUST celebrate it to remain a proper woke progressive in good standing.
We are seeing some pushback on these absurdities, J.K. Rowling being the most prominent. But she has the financial resources to fight back with little cost to her personally. Few liberals do. And so, they toe the party line, even if they have serious doubts. Indeed, they often became angry and argumentative when those of us on the right point out these absurdities.
That’s where the West is at. Until non leftist liberals and moderates publicly resist the trans ideology en masses the descent into madness will continue
The mental health and medical establishment jettisoned its former protections against such over-treatment and improper treatment, even for minors, so quickly it could make your head spin.
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For the mental health establishment, it’s just their latest crime. For the medical establishment, consider the irony.
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Common-and-garden physicians are told by corporate bean counters they can no longer use a dictation service, so they have to spend their time with patients doing data entry on an electronic medical record and hardly interact with them. If they try to actually interview the patient, they’re later told they are not seeing enough patients; well, they’re seeing fewer patients because having men and women with eight years worth of higher education and 16,000 hours of residency training doing data entry is not an optimal use of their time and they can get more done if you just let them use a dictation service. Doctors also denied hard copy records which contain marginalia which are important mnemonics for them, because everything’s just gotta be digital.
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So, we’re putting ordinary physicians in these bean counter’s straightjackets (and also having them spend oodles of time tangling with insurance company employees in lieu of practicing medicine), we’ve left the Mengele wing of American medicine free to poison and mutilate people (with the blessings of the courts and the social workers and the ever criminal mental health trade).
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Oh, and the accrediting agencies with the connivance of medical school deans are implementing a diversitypalooza in medical school admissions. Ever hear what happened to the man who was admitted to one of the UC medical schools in place of Allan Bakke? That’s diversity in medical practice. (His name was Patrick Chavis. His medical license had been suspended at the time he died).
Someone get me back to earth prime
https://nypost.com/2023/02/17/kayla-lemieux-ditches-her-z-size-breasts-outside-the-classroom/
Probably just trying to increase enrollment…
This “transgender” craze is so obviously a case of dangerous social contagion that it is astounding, and frightening, to see MDs going along with it.
Another obvious question for Sullivan to ponder: Where in the Hecubah did “non-binary” come from??
This is what the Left always does. They use the bait-and-switch, or motte and bailey, to sucker a large number of people into agreeing initially with their agenda. First they rolled out the question of adult trans-identified people. Most of us already had some knowledge that a tiny number of people, almost always men, were mentally tortured by dysphoria and fully rejected their male bodies. In many cases these men were pitiable. They were outcast, prone to drug abuse and prostitution and mental illnesses. Activists said, “shouldn’t we put in some legal protections so that these people who find it necessary to appear as the opposite sex don’t get denied basic civil rights because of this affliction? They clearly suffer–many commit suicide and they die on average far before their time.”
Sure, many of us said. And since these people go to such lengths to live as females, we can call our former co-worker Brad by her new name of Brittney and naturally use the pronoun “she.”
After that first “ask” was satisfied, a rain of new concepts were shoved down our throats—and there’s no end in sight. For instance, out of nowhere came the concept of “non-binary.” No one had ever even heard of that, yet suddenly it just appeared as some kind of fait accompli. As though before five minutes ago, there were millions of agonized souls who were being tortured by a society that treated them as the biological sex that they are. As though these (non-gender dysphoria sufferers) were throwing themselves off cliffs like lemmings to suicide rather than have to bear this assault on their true personhood.
There are two tracks in the LGBT… whatever movement. The first is the erasure of women, that is, birthing people or whatever the latest nonsense term is combined with the ridiculous claim that there is no difference between the sexes.
The second track is the validation of all the worst stereotypes of homosexual men as predators. What the Catholic priests did was horrible, but now it’s OK to circulate library books of eight year old boys having oral sex with each other to what purpose?
Trans movement actually builds on the foundational “born that way” lie of the Gay movement. This radical assertion has no biological basis: despite repeated attempts no gay gene or other cause has been found. Mapping the human genome pretty much disproved “born that way” – and it is also contradicted by millennia of experience that indicates human sexuality is polymorphous and fluid.
The mainstreaming of homosexual behavior is a triumph of left wing propaganda over factual observation. And it has very effectively disrupted both the primacy of objective reality and the Judeo-Christian definition of humanity.
Pace Sullivan – the trans and gay movements stand or fall together. You can’t believe gays are “born that way” while rejecting that assertion regarding transexuals.
Once you let the camel’s nose in the tent, get ready to receive the entire camel.
Trans- a state or process of divergence, liberal in principle.
Gender is sex-correlated attributes (e.g. sexual orientation).
Unlike trans/homo, trans/neo/quasi/pseudo/sim is not politically congruent (“=”).
Ironically, gender ideology reduces humans to the sum of their parts. Eyes up here, masculinist, feminist douchebag.
The Rainbow symbol is albinophobic, black and brown excluded.
They’re playing with a double-edged scalpel.
Lose your Pro-choice ethical religion. #HateLovesAbortion
Johns Hopkins concluded that transgender conversion therapy did not mitigate cognitive dissonance and self-abortive intent in the majority of subjects. Science could not predict individuals who suffered from a progressive condition, exacerbated through medical, surgical, or psychiatric corruption. It was probably around this time that it became reasonable to discriminate between classes in the transgender spectrum base on stability. That said, they should wait until after the age of confusion, until the individual reaches the age of majority, and it becomes plausible to make an informed choice. Sex cannot be changed. Gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes) can be simulated, perhaps dictated.
I mostly have pity for people who feel compulsion to change their appearances to mimic a gender they are not. They are suffering from some disorder and whatever it is, it is likely not fun. It is the definition of unnatural.
However, given the rules of the game; it is hard to understand how a man dressing like a woman, wearing a woman’s make-up and adopting a falsetto voice and feminine mannerisms is not akin to a minstrel performance. I hear more people using the term “womanface” to call this out.
That said, they should wait until after the age of confusion,
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No, they should forget about it. Poisoning people with hormones and surgically mutilating them are an abuse of the skills and discretion granted physicians and surgeons. Physicians and surgeons should be told that if they do such things, they will be prosecuted and jailed.
I mostly have pity for people who feel compulsion to change their appearances to mimic a gender they are not.
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Why do you fancy it’s a compulsion?
Kate– It’s the pharmacists now as well as the MDs. There was a brouhaha in the Arkansas State Senate this week when a Republican state senator asked a transgender pharmacist if she has a penis as she testified against a proposed law to ban transition drugs and procedures for minors. “The heated exchange came during a hearing on a bill introduced in the Arkansas State Senate this month that would prohibit physicians from performing transgender surgeries or prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors.”
https://nypost.com/2023/02/18/arkansas-state-senator-matt-mckee-asks-trans-pharmacist-if-she-has-penis/
As usual, people took a very good idea — weakening the social oppression of sexuality and yes, even homo/trans people, and ran straight off the end of the earth with it.
It’s like a large percentage of the population can’t handle the notion of a middle ground, where there is a small measure of disopprobrium, but not a wholehearted endorsement of the formerly oppressed behavior. It’s as if they are stuck on either black or white, with no internal concept of a “grey area” in the middle where the proper behaviors could rest.
@ OBH > IMO, “a large percentage of the population” is perfectly capable of accepting the notion of a middle ground, as well as accepting that there really are a miniscule proportion of people who are genuinely sexually discordant and that there really are a slightly larger proportion of people who are genuinely physically oriented to same-sex attraction BUT the role of the Leftist is to push all those people OUT of the middle.
As Sullivan points out for homosexuals and Rowling for feminists (and women generally), pushing everyone into the trans bucket is one of the ways that middle ground gets hollowed out, and the backlash against the T is going to hit the LGB hard.
Right now the trend seems to be for wholesale (rather than wholehearted) endorsement of the formerly oppressed behaviors, but if the activists keep pushing, they will find that the result is not the former small measure of disopprobrium which modern society had effectively reached, but a return to the prior state of active suppression — because that is the historical precedent and the evolutionary mandate.
A society can function with a reasonable number of people in the tails of the normal distribution of sexual behavior, but not when the curve is flattened in the middle and the tails enlarged to the point the activists are trying to achieve.
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
And never effective for long.
We caught Jordan’s presentation in Spokane the other night. He completely filled the 2600 capacity convention center auditorium. He’s a complete master of his wide-ranging material – also vibrantly thin, thanks to his carnivore diet. His wife Tammy introduced him after sharing compelling personal anecdotes. Many in attendance were men (mostly young) in suits and ties.
Definitely see him if you get the chance.
@ PA Cat > “a Republican state senator asked a transgender pharmacist if she has a penis as she testified against a proposed law to ban transition drugs and procedures for minors.”
Was it because of something like this?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2023/02/Screen-Shot-2023-02-12-at-11.11.06-AM.png
AesopFan–
That site does not allow hot linking, so I have no idea what the screen shot shows.
@ RigelDog > “Another obvious question for Sullivan to ponder: Where in the Hecubah did “non-binary” come from??”
From the woke mind virus.
Glenn Reynolds explains how, why, and what we might be able to do about it.
https://instapundit.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-our-ruling-class-monoculture
Bottom line: clean out the parasites.
PA Cat > I know; sometimes you just have to click the link.
Hint: the keywords are “if she has a penis” — and wears a tight-fitting dress.
It’s from Powerline’s The Week In Pictures.
@ Aesop > “the backlash against the T is going to hit the LGB hard.”
And sometimes the LGB are among the backlashers.
https://quillette.com/2023/02/06/scotlands-gender-meltdown/
Lots of details on the resignation of the Scots First Minister Sturgeon because of her mishandling of new regulations she sponsored for trans-prisoners: men in wigs wanting to be housed in women’s prisons.
Conclusion:
AesopFan–
The Power Line photo makes me wonder what the below-the-waist T-shirt is hiding in the photo of the Canadian transgender teacher who dresses like a man– when he’s not scandalizing his students with huge fake breasts inside the school where he “teaches”: “While parents have raged about transgender teacher Kayla Lemieux being allowed to wear Z-cup prosthetics in front of students, the shop teacher was spotted ditching the controversial fetishistic fashion after work and stepping out in public dressed as a man.”
Photos of Lemieux dressed as the dude he is at the link:
https://nypost.com/2023/02/17/kayla-lemieux-ditches-her-z-size-breasts-outside-the-classroom/
BTW, he teaches shop: somehow I doubt that machine safety is part of his course, although fabrication of objects is obviously a central subject.
Related:
“New Documentary Tells The Stories Of Six Detransitioners”—
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2023/02/18/new-documentary-tells-the-stories-of-six-detransitioners/
Barry Meislin–
Thanks for that link– although I have to say that the clip of JoJo early in the documentary saying that he “sees” transgender kids is sickening. I wonder how many of them have had their hair sniffed by the Pedo-in-Chief.
Sex abuse by priests was rare and manageable until the great wave of gay priests swept into the church starting in the 1970s. Among that wave are today’s bishops and cardinals.
WRT Tavistock Transgender Clinic, the good guys thought they had won a victory there but it turns out that in the meantime, it’s business as usual.
Big business.
“Controversial Tavistock transgender clinic ‘is still treating up to a thousand children with puberty blockers with another 8,000 on waiting list’ despite being told to close by the Spring”—
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11768585/Tavistock-transgender-clinic-treating-children-despite-told-close.html
Gotta feed the monster.
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In re fighting back against the evilness running rampant in our midst.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/amandas-story-walking-children-back-from-the-cliff-of-gender-ideology
It’s behind a subscription wall now, but I read it a couple of weeks ago and it is excellent advice for those whose children have taken the bait from the trans industry (because that is what it is; TikTok is just their voluntary advertising arm).
Exercising rights in America requires a balancing of interests. The uneasy balance many people have struck is that empowering the state to enforce a ban on homosexual behavior is a greater danger to our rights than “tolerance” of same.
That balance, however, is premised on the assumption that homosexual relationships aren’t really *all* that different from most straight relationships. Your mileage may vary on that assumption. But the further you push that assumption (and the related assumptions surrounding trans issues, etc.), the more uneasy the balance becomes.
The left, however, is never content with sharing power (or with anything less than total power, for that matter) so they treat the “balance” as a binary switch: Once you recognize “tolerance” of homosexuality, there’s no limiting principle on ANY sexual behavior. Principles – including the belief in the right of a populace to self-governance, be damned.
Go re-read Obergefell and marvel at the sociopathic contempt for the right of the populace to self-governance. Every last word of that decision is dripping with a psychotic disregard for our rights to govern our lives. The “logic” of Obergefell contains the end of the Republic. It is a literal suicide pill.