I don't agree that "conservatism" as a political position has been a contributor at all to the rise of the trans activists. I also don't agree that Second Wave Feminism has been a primary contributor.
I am a clinical psychologist and I have extensive experience working with trans identified clients of the "original type," i.e., many were males with histories of transvestic fetishism. I also have experience working with women who transitioned after living for years as butch lesbians. (Some of these women explicitly identified as butch and some did not). I started working with people with "gender" issues during the 1990's, and the youngest trans (or questioning) clients I saw over the next few decades were born before 1985.
I live in Portland, where conservatives and conservatism have been driven close to extinction. All of the trans identified people I have worked with were liberal Democrats, but most of the men were not highly politically involved. The women were more likely to have been exposed to radical ideas and activism within the lesbian community, but many were not directly involved in feminist or lesbian politics.
Interestingly, the men I worked with were commonly employed in male dominated fields such as high tech or blue collar industrial trades, and some had histories of professional military service. They typically identified as heterosexual and were married to women. A smaller number of the trans identified men had been involved in occupations regarded as feminine, such as hair styling, and those men were more likely to have had histories of gay relationships and to identify as bisexual.
None of the people I worked with from any of the above male groups told me that feminism was an influence in the evolution of their trans identities. Many of the men reported that autogynephilia had developed along with sexualized cross dressing, and that their gender dysphoria increased after that. Shame and fear of being caught cross dressing by their wives or other people caused these men to be isolated within their cross-sex experiences. They generally did not talk to anyone about what they were doing or feeling and were not connected to any of the trans support systems that began to appear near the end of the last century.
The same was not, of course, true for the women who were living as "butch" or some related identifier within the lesbian community. Most of these people dressed in men's clothes for years while in gay settings and some of them dressed in men's clothes all the time. Butch lesbians had been living like this prior to the onset of the feminist Second Wave. During the 1970's and 1980's they were not particularly supported by the new wave of women who joined the lesbian community as university-based feminist activists. Feminism aggressively criticized butch/femme roles as patriarchal. Butch/femme roles did come back into popularity a few decades later, and masculine women began exploring a wide variety of individually labeled sexual identities. This trend was happening among Millennials by the early 2000's, and it appears to have been the predecessor of the current proliferation of sexual and gender identities within Gen Z.
The trans-identified males I saw in my practice mostly had very conventional ideas about feminine and masculine roles. They would talk about their sense of being female as a vague feeling they had, but would support their sense of being female by references to how they preferred to play with girls when they were children, preferred girls over boys' games and so forth. They did not seem to see any conflict with the fact that they chose and excelled at male dominated careers, nor did they change careers when they transitioned. The trans identified females tended to be scornful and phobic about feminine roles and appearance, like teenage boys insecure about their masculinity. So, I would say that most but not all of the trans people I met supported traditional, polarized sex roles without necessarily having a conscious philosophy that favored this position.
All of the trans identified people I saw had a specific image of what they wanted to look like as a member of their preferred sex. The men nearly all cherished a stereotypically bombshell image, such as Dolly Parton. The trans identified women did not necessarily want to be stereotypical he-men, but many of them did want a particular type of male physique.
In summary, both the trans identified males and trans identified females, prior to the recent wave of Gen Z people, generally embraced traditional stereotypic masculine and feminine roles and wanted to look and function as members of the other sex within the traditional set up. The primary effect of feminism that I saw was mostly on the university-based lesbian communities, where the traditional sex roles were for a couple decades at least strongly rejected as a model to emulate.
I have recently been hearing that most of the younger masculine women who previously identified as "butch" or some variant thereof are now medically transitioning, to the dismay of the lesbian femmes who prefer them as partners. One interpretation of the mass transition is that those women did endorse the stereotypic roles (as their butch behavior did convey), and that most of them would choose to be biological males in traditional masculine roles if that were possible.
I think that both the women's movement and the gay liberation movement inspired some trans identified people to want the same kind of movement for themselves, and some trans people chose to become trans activists. The gay and lesbian communities offered an accepting environment for trans identified people as long as they identified themselves as gay. Now that these people have come out as trans it turns out that some of them were actually heterosexual or bi, and have not changed their sexual preference.
The Second Wave feminist movement contributed to the current woke movement its tyrannical emphasis on moralistic political correctness, with the accompanying speech policing and forced conformity to radical ideals. This became a source of horrible divisiveness within the feminist movement as early as the 1970's, and spread to the university-based lesbian communities, where it has flourished until the present day. The elaboration of many named sexual identities also developed within both the lesbian subculture and the gay men's subculture within the past couple of decades, leading to the Gen Z identity spectrum.
So, in my opinion, the evolving feminist, lesbian and gay rights movements were the incubators that enabled the trans movement to arise in its present form. But feminists and gay/lesbian activists generally were not planning on that development. Trans activism emerged organically when trans identified people gained access to medical transition technologies and opportunities to gather together and organize as a demographic with common goals. Trans activists eventually gained enough power to take over both the gay and lesbian communities, such that Gay Pride Day has morphed into (Trans) Pride Month.
Get thee to a publisher! Your historical approach to the evolution of today's gender ideology is indispensable as a means of dispelling misconceptions and filling in previously uncharted areas.
I would love to hear how you view the phenomenon known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which predominantly affects teen girls. What is it about men or masculinity that appeals to them? Or is it that they are primarily running away from puberty and womanhood? Have they absorbed fanciful ideas about gay men on social media and from their peers that make the idea of being a gay man attractive to them?
I do work with adolescents as well as adults and have for a few years been seeing or hearing about Gen Z girls and young women suddenly announcing they are "transgender" or more recently "non-binary." They lack a history of trans-identification, but often they have talked openly for some time previously about maybe being "gay" or some other trendy sexual orientation, such as "pan, "kink,""poly" or something else from an extensive list. The teens and young 20's women who say these things have in my experience all been very familiar with critical social justice theory and activism and generally embrace the assumption that woke gender ideology is "the way things are."
I have not seen young female clients in the past who presented similar sudden adoption of new self-identities in the area of biological sex. It has always been common, on the other hand, for female teens in U.S. culture to change their call names, try on new looks, or in some cases, think about whether they are gay. It appears to me that girls are now drawn to the promise that they can cast off their bodies and throw on new ones in the same way American girls switch out their wardrobe to something more in the fashion of the moment.
The "trans" image is obviously enormously attractive and "cool" in the subculture of Gen Z girls, but they already appear to be shifting toward the "nonbinary" identifier. This is not what is seen clinically when there is a stable sense of identification with a cross sex image and a stable desire for a body of the other sex, and is more fluid than what I have seen go on with the adult male trans questioning people I have met.
In addition to the teenage fad element of the trans epidemic there are, unfortunately, also significant psychiatric and neurodevelopmental issues going on with adolescents who present themselves at gender clinics. Based on information we are getting from research and whistleblowers, the patients have elevated rates of depression, anxiety, intentional self-harm without suicidal intent, self-reported "suicide attempts," eating disorders, as well as their obvious identity confusion. The adolescents being evaluated at gender clinics also reportedly include high percentages of children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders or ADHD.
This is a complicated situation involving kids and families whose paths to the gender clinic are variable. What appears to be true generally is that a significant percentage of teens and young women who are active on social media and who idealize "transgender" individuals have started wanting to be viewed as "transgender" or "nonbinary" themselves. Young people who have risk factors such as severely low self-esteem, greater than average instability or confusion in identity, and major psychiatric symptoms like suicidality may be more vulnerable than the average adolescent to programs that promise a physical, emotional and spiritual transformation.
We don't know enough about the population of adolescents, mostly female, who present ROGD. It certainly appears that they have significant rates of psychiatric symptoms and disorders, so there is a high need to provide appropriate evaluations and treatment for them. People with psychiatric problems usually need psychotherapy and/or psychiatric medications when indicated. In the instance of ROGD, unfortunately, there is currently strong resistance to conducting evaluation and treatment in accordance with established practice and evidence. There is also the continuing pathogenic influence of social media and the trans cult that draws in young women who are particularly vulnerable.
Many young trans-identifying people actively resist efforts of outsiders, including their parents, to take away the solution they believe will solve their problems. Medical transitions are presented as metamorphoses that release a kind of spiritual identity with a transformed appearance. Cosmetic surgeries have always held out hope for a magical cure to people who can afford them. So what is to us a procedure that must be prevented, is to the patients their best chance of ridding themselves of their primary problem.
This circumstance reduces the patients' motivation for more appropriate treatments, even though psychotherapy could have enabled them to find other solutions to their problems. It is the same situation that we had during the eating disorder epidemic of the Eighties and Nineties. The mostly young female patients put up stiff resistance against efforts by families and by healthcare professionals to turn them away from their self-destructive eating habits. I think that the current cohort of young females claiming to be "trans" or whatever are very similar in many ways to the eating disordered patients. In fact, eating disorders are reportedly common among the patients seeking gender treatment.
We need to learn more about the young women I am discussing if we are to help them. Like everything else now, their stories are being buried under a typical critical social justice "narrative" about them that ignores their individuality. We need competent, unbiased reporting from mental health providers who work with these adolescents and young women, and we need a lot more research. There is too little that I can say specifically about them, because we have not yet done enough to find out who they all are.
Thank you for your well informed, detailed and thoughtful insights about this vexing phenomenon! This is the sort of information that policymakers, legislators, educators, medical and mental health professionals, editorial boards, op-ed writers and the general public need as an antidote to the one-sided talking points of trans rights advocates.
One of my fears is that legislatures in states controlled by Democrats where progressives have considerable influence will enact measures prohibiting so-called conversion therapy that make it impossible for mental health professionals to consider significant psychiatric and neurodevelopmental problems when working with young clients with gender identity issues. In an ideal world, the licensing organizations would oppose such restrictions on the exercise of professional judgment, but today it's entirely likely that they would go along with it in order to "protect" trans youth.
Here in Oregon it has been illegal since 2015 for healthcare professionals to use so-called "conversion therapy" with minors to try to change their "gender identities." The law does not define "conversion therapy" specifically enough to protect healthcare professionals who are conducting therapy as usual. Licensing boards are state bureaucracies that generally enforce state laws. They aren't a resource as much as they are part of the enforcement apparatus of the Democratic political systems in states controlled by that party.
There's no contradiction between (a) the argument that feminist theoreticians didn't directly or explicitly promote transgenderism and (b) the argument that feminist theoreticians nonetheless played a necessary role in making transgenderism possible.
Egalitarian feminists did indeed argue that men and women were interchangeable (for all purposes except gestation), because that argument allowed them to oppose discrimination against women in the workplace and elsewhere. To make that argument, they had in addition to argue that any apparent differences between the sexes (apart from gestation) were illusory--that is, or due to gender differences and therefore to culture (a.k.a. "social constructions") instead of nature. Those feminists simply did not foresee a later generation taking that very argument to its logical conclusion by denying any importance at all to nature and advocating the "transition" from one sex to the other either medically or socially.
Yes, I can agree with the points you are making. I recall a time when feminists argued that men and women have equal abilities in all mental and emotional tasks. There wasn't much emphasis placed on tasks involving physical strength and abilities that women generally have less of than men. The mental emphasis might have been due to the fact that the Second Wave feminists were mostly college students aiming for knowledge-based careers. I think that many feminists have been resistant to information that the far upper levels of STEM ability belong to a small group of mostly male people. When it comes to blue collar jobs like firefighting very few women have the physical strength to meet the job requirements, and they are generally lifelong athletes.
When people have been historically excluded from participation in some area of life they don't necessarily have a clear view of how interested or capable they will be in those endeavors. The women I knew in the feminist movement were focused on equality of opportunity. We needed to be, because opportunities for women outside of domestic roles and a few careers like nursing and elementary school teaching were limited to very poorly paid occupations.
My class of grad students (entered 1969) was the first at my alma mater to include almost as many female as male admissions in the clinical psychology program. Prior to that very few women were admitted, and the faculty reflected that history. When I worked at the university counseling center there were 45 doctoral psychologists employed there, with less than a half dozen being women. When women had the opportunity to enter that field it turned out to be an area in which women excel and have a strong interest, so that they now dominate the field. That was not at all what was predicted by the faculty who resisted increasing rates of admission for female applicants.
Female applicants had to argue very strongly against the relentless accusations that we would drop out of grad school to start families or that we wouldn't be capable of doing the work. Applicants were put in the position of having to prove that these arguments were false in advance of being admitted to the school rather than being given the same opportunities that were freely handed out to men to find out through experience how far they could go in a career. Women in some circumstances still feel a lot of pressure to prove over and over that they are as capable of men in their line of work. If this level of sexist opposition to women's ambitions had not existed, perhaps women would not have felt that they had to voice so much confidence in their ability to perform as equals to men in every endeavor.
With respect to the trans phenomenon, I don't believe for a minute that any trans activist thinks there is no difference between men and women. Their entire problem is that they are obsessed with sex differences, are envious and jealous of the other sex, and feel like they have to have what the other sex has instead of what they were born with. For all the talk about "socially constructed genders," people who "identify as transgender" can't wait to see a surgeon who will take away the indicators of their actual sex and replace them with a new set. Trans people are probably among the most conventional and concrete thinkers when it comes to concrete and binary perspectives on the differences between women and men. The postmodern philosophical ideas that the trans activists have adopted are actually incompatible with the old-fashioned beliefs about sex differences that gender dysphoric people actually live by.
Thank you so much, Sandra, for your non-ideological interest in this discussion.
Katherine Young and I spent thirty years doing research on the attitudes toward men in both elite culture (academic feminism) and popular culture. Our work has been published in four volumes, which are available on Amazon. When we began, in the 1980s, many feminists argued against research on sex differences, probably because they believed that any research of this kind would reveal ways in which men were innately superior to women (even though no scholars with any intellectual integrity would devote years, let alone tax dollars, to demonstrate what they already assume). By the early 1990s, however, they were going into reverse: actually promoting or even demanding research on sex differences, probably because they had by now come to believe that research of this kind would reveal ways in which women were innately superior to men. As you know, there are some ways in which both are true but also that the evidence applies only at the collective (general) level, not the individual (personal) one.
It's true that people tend to overcompensate for perceived inadequacies. Evidence indicates that men have experienced, historically and cross-culturally, the same problem that women have experienced in modern societies. This has been due, of course, to the obvious fact that only women can give birth to, and nourish, new life. As a result, early men found ways of attributing abilities of equal importance to themselves. And the most obvious ones included the superior muscular strength and mobility of (most) male bodies to hunt big-game animals on land or sea and to protect the community from predatory animals (although women and even children sometimes helped them by setting traps or by making enough noise to scare the animals away). The trouble was that this division of labor associated women with life and men with death, which caused men to envy women and compensate, or overcompensate, for the negativity. Later, after the advent of horticulture and settled communities, (most) men were better suited than (most) women at raiding the stored food supplies or provisions of neighboring communities and defending their own. The advent of agriculture (along with the rise of specialization, hierarchies city-states and empires) gave men two new functions: pulling iron ploughs in the fields and serving as conscripts for labor and war.
In one of our books, Katherine and I considered the history of the male body--that is cultural attitudes toward it. We found that a series of technological revolutions (agricultural, military, industrial, and so on) have gradually undermined the ability of men to establish a healthy collective identity specifically as men. Everyone needs a healthy identity, by which we mean the ability to make at least one contribution to society that is (a) distinctive, (b) necessary and (c) publicly valued. Otherwise, people are likely to assume that even an unhealthy, or negative, identity is better than no identity at all. For modern men, this has become a huge problem. Women can now do everything that men can do, either on their own or with help from the state (although the reverse is not true). Even fatherhood no longer serves well as a source of masculine identity, because most people assume that fathers are assistant mothers at best and potential molesters at worst (even though fatherless children, especially boys, are at far great risk than other children of every social pathology). Statistics show that men are increasingly dropping out school (or even entering college), dropping out of society (through crime, for instance, or drugs) and dropping out of life itself (through reckless behavior and suicide).
I agree with you about transgenderism. (And it is an "ism" like any other ideology.) There is an element of envy in it and therefore knowledge of innate sex differences (along with learned gender differences). I hear a lot about the "misogyny" of trans women (born men), and that's surely true of those who use their claim to take advantage of women or even to rape them. But for many others, perhaps most, the key factor is not hatred (the sine qua non of worldviews that promote persecution) but envy.
I should add here, Sandra, that I haven't come to any of these conclusions willingly. I'm gay. I spent my entire childhood as the victim of bullies, both male and female. The only just solution, it seemed to me, was the abolition of (what I now call) gender. With that in mind, I was an eager supporter of early feminism and began to read about it. If women could challenge their gendered expectations, after all, then so could men. That was in the 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1980s, I found that many feminists were supporting sex and gender egalitarianism in name only. And by the 1990s, I found that some feminists were openly promoting not only female superiority but also misandry (the sexist counterpart of misogyny). What horrifies me now is the possibility someone like my earlier self--a boy who disliked being a boy, was afraid of becoming a man (but never thought of himself as a girl becoming a woman) might now be hormonally or surgically mutilated, without consent from his parents, in the name of an aggressive ideology that denounces empirical evidence and even common sense.
Paul, thank you for your detailed and interesting comment! I am interested in learning more about your work and your perspectives. I am on the first day of a 2 week break from work, so I am in the sleeping and recovering phase as opposed to celebrating a vacation. Will get back to you in a few days with a more detailed response to your post.
Brilliantly articulated but missing a critical element: the economic model within which feminism arose. Because women did not have reproductive freedom and could not provide for themselves and their many children (staying at home as a mother was a luxury not available to the working class), and fathers often abandoned their families leaving them destitute. Or fathers/husbands abused their wives and children and treated them as chattel or slaves as they, themselves, were treated by the more powerful men above them. Therefore, suffragettes fought for political power to change the material circumstances of their lives. They fought for the vote, for financial independence, for freedom from abuse and exploitation.
Matt Walsh, for all the excellent work he's done bringing awareness to the public about the harms of gender ideology, is extremely naive at best, cruelly ignorant at worst. Blaming all of feminism, a movement which does not and cannot represent half the global population, is ludicrous. It's convenient and simple for the traditionalist conservative men who pine for a return to 'old-fashioned values' where men were men and women knew their place. It's seductive to think we can go back there, but it's impossible to expect that.
If anything, it's pornography and the male fetishists with billions of dollars who are trying to dismantle the notion of sexual dimorphism in order to usher in transhumanism and medicalize all human beings as if we're a collection of interchangeable body parts. Women's bodies, in particular, are seen as commodities, for sex, as baby factories, as servants.
Unless/until men start seeing women as fully human, whether or not they choose to be homemakers or career women, we'll never evolve as a species. It's endlessly frustrating to see that patriarchy serves NOBODY - neither men nor women. It serves only the powerful, the oligarchs, the rulers.
This is exactly what I think, too. Thanks, 'SignMeUpPlease'. I would add, that males tend not to see details about children's needs that women see, and women tend to be less likely to unconsciously offer help to a man than vice-versa. Women neither commit as many or as horrific crimes as men nor are women as good at fight horrific crime and heinous criminals. When men silence women, the problem isn't that women do t need men (collectively, in the groups that comprise human civilization), but rather that men need women to tell them what they don't see, don't notice, some of what women want help with, and some of what simply must get done.
Even other species communicate for vital reasons. Males and females have vital roles and different blindspots. I've noticed that in reality shows, males who trans to womanhood have the blindspots of men; woman maintain the blindspots of women even when they trans, too. The superficial sandwich making, pottery making, weaving, is absurdly arbitrary. The notion of different tendencies and motivations is not arbitrary.
It's like addiction genes, they don't make one specifically addicted to an exact substance or behavior, but rather, more likely to become addicted to something, more generally.
People need to see and think about how animals that look identical, with the same types of eyes, teeth, claws, Andrew coats, can have different behaviors oriented toward the the young of their species.
This is a very serious matter. Males of various mammalian species are much more likely to lose patience and stomp on a toddler, rape an infant, or eat the young of another male. Females do eat young sometimes, but for completely different reasons. The rational or instinct matters.
You are completely correct about Matt Walsh. There is a powerful strain of fascism running through Roman Catholicism, such as we saw in Italy in the 1930s and with Patrick Buchannan in the US these last 50 years — and it also features a powerful liberationist spirit (see Dorothy Day and Frances Kissling, for examples). It is not coincidental that the prominent players on the two opposing sides are of different sexes. The Vatican (an all-male establishment) has been harassing and investigating various orders of nuns for spending too much time on “social justice” issues and direct ministry to the poor instead of focusing on anti-abortion and anti-gay activism. Considering what has happened to children in Catholic orphanages — and the significant amount of surreptitious homosexuality in the priesthood — this situation is especially galling. (For an interesting read about the beleaguered nuns, see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-vatican-nuns-idUSBRE83J1B720120420: “Vatican crackdown on U.S. nuns a long time brewing” by Stephanie Simon.) It is completely foolhardy to imagine that proto-fascists like Matt Walsh can be enlisted in the movement to protect gay children from medicalization and to preserve women’s sex-based rights. Doing so is like getting rid of the termites in your house by setting the place on fire.
Sadly, he is unable to handle the complexity of trans ideology or he would seek out and expose the pharmaceutical billionaire fetishist men who dress in women's clothing for sexual gratification and who are fast-tracking humanity's transition to transhumanism where we're all propagandized into thinking our bodies are all just interchangeable parts. The hatred for the natural world, for women and men as a sexually dimorphic species and for our cultural heritage with all its knowledge and wisdom truly beggars the imagination. Contempt for everyone but the obscenely wealthy oozes from their disgusting hairy, smelly bodies. I imagine that at night they despise themselves but cannot help but project their self-hatred onto others. Same goes for all the other obscenely wealthy men who drink the blood of infants and rape little boys and girls. They're all diabolical monsters who are beyond forgiveness or redemption.
Porn and academic gender studies have created some kind of nightmare that makes me want to take just a few lived ones and run for the hills. I have lost two close friends to them saying things such as "other ways of knowing." One of these friends has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. I feel an earthquake from Hell under my feet. Where can I go? Political refugees who came here are scratching their heads right now and wondering, "Where to now?" My mom is one them; a Chinese friend is another. I thought of Trans Lysenkoism before an article about it was published by anyone. It's just common sense.
Joyce is 1000% correct about 1000% of everything lately, including this. yes, feminists as a group are a favorite punching bag of conservative entertainers in the US, like Walsh. i suspect he may go out of his way to trash feminists just to show fellow conservatives that hes still a conservative, despite his focus on gender ideology, an issue they may see as a "gay" issue.
but all of this sort of doesnt matter. US conservatives live in their own bubble. in many ways theyre detached from reality. but theyre also the only group in the US that has done anything to oppose gender ideology. the democrats have abandoned us. no one is comming to save us. except Matt Walsh. for that he gets much credit. he couldnt care less about anyone across the pond, neither does his audience. he doesnt care about being correct. at least not about anything as far away from him and his audience as "feminism". does anyone remember Trump? every day all day he blathered 100% hot air with a 5 gallon bucket of pure lies. it didnt mater.
Walsh is rasing awareness about gender ideology, which is the best way to counter it. hes getting US conservatives engaged in an issue they normally would sprint away from. for that hes a hero. maybe Joyce and Walsh can just agree to disagree.
btw, its not feminists or conservatives who are to blame for gender ideology. its billionaire agp's like Martine Rothblatt. These rich fetishists cooked up gender ideology in their basement surrounded by piles of porn while wearing womens underwear. they grouped with rich attorneys who saw how easily US public institutions incorporated diversity laws and monitoring intended to help historically disadvantaged groups. they used these laws to the advantage of rich white males at the expense of historically disadvantaged groups, like kids, women, gays and people with mental illness. they financed a massive misinformation campaign that tricked gullible people and dummies who are bad at math.
Yes. Billionaires like Martine Rothblatt and also Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the $10 Trillion pension investment company that pushes "transgenderism" through all our institutions.
"It is my firm conviction that "trans" has no foundation in GID, that essentially none of the "trans" have GID, but rather are attention-seekers of the worst sort. And that what we are seeing is a human expression of the same sort of biological reaction to overpopulation that makes lionesses stop ovulating when there are too many lions, regardless of the abundance of prey."
Bingo! Like "queer," "trans" today is largely an urban youth scene. The following analogy isn't mine originally, but it's worth offering here. Trans is like Goth, except Goth wasn't being aided and abetted by teachers, doctors, mental health professionals, "allies" and progressives at the summits of society's principal institutions.
The second part of your argument reminds me of the world of "A Clockwork Orange," where Malthusian pressures were causing the government to promote homosexuality, including with the slogan: "It's sapiens to be homo."
thanks for your comment. numbers reported in the past dont predict future populations becuase now the population net has been cast so wide it can include almost anyone. in 2021, 43000 kids aged 7 to 17 reported gender dysphoria in the US. as per dei policies that are in place in much of rhe US, any kid who reports this is now "trans". these same polcies mandate reporting persons to receive harmdul gender meds. this is significant becuase without these meds most kids grow out of their dysphoria and ID as their birth gender with puberty. but once kids take puberty blockers, 98% go onto harmful hormones and their dysphoria and opposite sex ID continues.
dei policies are causing ever increasing numbers of persons who report this. schools teach kids that puberty is optional while omitting all the negative affects of gender meds. theyre not told that gender meds result in permanent loss of sexual function, permanent sterility, twice the odds of early death, 20x the odds of suicide. kids also arent told that gender meds actually dont help anything. thats what every gov review done anywhere in the world has found. instead kids are lied to, the meds are promoted tricking kids into a severe health hazard and causing an exponential increase in affected and IDing person, with numbers that are impossible to quantify due to reporting that is non centralized, ad hoc and low quality.
A thorough and interesting analysis. However, I don't see how dissecting or debating the origins of transgender ideology furthers our efforts to mount a constructive response/opposition with the necessary urgency. It's already well-established that we're politically a coalition of odd bedfellows who otherwise don't agree on much.
I totally agree! I support peoples' interest in debating for debating's sake, but I want to participate in activism that counteracts woke cult efforts to limit the freedoms of U.S. citizens and to indoctrinate people into the woke ideology.
Some reason to argue that knowing the causes of a disease is the first step in curing it. No doubt there's plenty of blame to go around -- arguably, enough for virtually everyone -- but feminism, in general, seems to "deserve" a large portion of it.
ICYMI, something of a solid, if somewhat overwrought, argument on Helen Dale's Substack by guest poster Lorenzo Warby that the "transcult is the bastard child of feminism":
Nice that Walsh has started the ball rolling by throwing a few stones at feminism -- even if his position is less than solid itself -- though I don't see many feminists stepping up to the plate to take much responsibility for that state of affairs. Though Meghan Murphy might be an early exception:
I'll check it out; thanks. I've been reading Robert Jay Lifton's "Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry." He posits that people susceptible to that kind of brainwashing (and I do think of gender ideology as a cult) have been made thus by particular childhood experiences that make them crave the certainty and belonging cults offer. That feels so true to me. So I think there are many factors -- personal as well as societal -- that come together in some perfectly awful storm to create situations such as trans ideology. If one were missing, or the timing were different ...
Interesting phenomenon in many ways, though rather more than just academic for too many. But certainly some justification to see "gender ideology as a cult", though, as you say, many reasons for them, for why some turn into "perfect storms".
Reminds me of Arthur Koestler's autobiography, "Arrow in the Blue", largely about his experiences in the communist party of the 30s. Been more than a few decades since I read it 🙂, but seem to recollect it spoke to the sense of purpose communism gave to many people of that time.
However, I think part of the problem is that the concept of gender has some utility and value -- notably in drawing attention to significant levels of sexual dimorphism in personalities. Unfortunately that has become adulterated with some rather questionable woo and profoundly unscientific claptrap -- the merging of magic, religion, and science as cultural anthropologist Sahar Sadjadi put it:
I think we will have to discard the term "gender," as it has no consistent meaning that differentiates it from biological sex. "Masculinity/femininity" isn't the greatest set of terms either.
Definitely an "evolving" concept, a work in progress. 🙂
However, while I see that you're a "clinical psychologist and ... have extensive experience working with trans identified clients" -- good on ya 👍 🙂 -- I wonder whether you would prefer to see "gender" DEFINED as "masculine & feminine personality traits" or as "the merging of magic, religion, and science" as I had quoted Sahar Sadjadi saying above.
I expect you probably have a pretty solid grasp of personalities in general, and I certainly don't want to be "Teaching grandmother to suck eggs" -- as an old colloquialism put it (1707):
However, I also wonder whether you took a look at the evidence that Abigail Reed tabled that gives some weight to the idea that there ARE significant personality differences, on average, between men and women:
AR: "When researchers looked at 21,567 subjects and categorized them across 15 dimensions of personality (warmth, emotional stability, assertiveness, gregariousness, dutifulness, friendliness, sensitivity, distrust, imagination, reserve, anxiety, complexity, introversion, orderliness, and emotionality), they found that while there was significant overlap (about 30 percent) between sexes on individual dimensions, the overall overlap was just about 7 percent."
Her source, "Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset":
"It is undeniably true that men and women are more similar than different genetically, physically and psychologically. Even so, important gender differences in personality exist that likely stem, at least in part, from evolved psychological adaptations."
Seems offhand that when many people -- including Helen Joyce -- talk about "gender non-conforming" kids, they're talking about those who have personality traits that are atypical of their sex, and more typical of the other one. Seems that defining "gender" as those personality traits provides something of a handle, even if an imperfect one, on the phenomenon that may help to forestall claims that those kids were "born in the wrong body" -- along with all of the odious consequences that follow from the "science, magic, and religion" definitions.
In addition to which, personalities -- i.e., psychology -- are clearly differentiated from sex -- i.e., "having gonads of past, present, or future functionality", at least according to biologist Emma Hilton's rationalization of folk-biology:
On top of which, such definitions -- for both sex and gender -- more or less cut Walsh and others of his tribe off at the knees for their rather risible insistence that various personality traits -- often less than flattering or even particularly accurate ones -- are intrinsic parts of what it means to be male or female. Which, of course, many women, many feminists quite reasonably object to. Win-win! 🙂
Bit of a murky issue, but seems that DEFINING "gender" as more or less synonymous with personalities and personality types is the best or most effective way of clarifying it.
Note that feminism has NOT been consistently based on the premise that all sex differences are socially constructed, or that men are "just like women." During the 1980's-1990's a network of influential feminist academic psychologists at Harvard (Carol Gilligan) and Wellesley (Jean Baker Miller and colleagues) developed a theory of women's psychology that emphasized differences between men and women. Gilligan argued that women prioritize a different set of moral principles ("care and responsibility for others") from those prioritized by men ("rights and justice"). Like Gilligan, Baker also argued for the existence of sex differences. Both of these psychologists and their colleagues emphasized the "relational" nature of women's psychology as opposed to what they viewed as a more individual focus in men's. All the scholars in this group valorized the sex differences they postulated in a direction that favored women, i.e., "Women care about other peoples' welfare and sustain relationships."
I haven't thoroughly reviewed the research literature on these theories, but I know that some studies have not confirmed the presence of significant differences between male and female Americans on values around individual rights versus caring for others. On the other hand, most people agree that the "care and responsibility ethic" operates in an obvious way in many (but not all) women. The care and responsibility ethic also appears to be the value system underlying the woke movements' public claims about wanting "safety" and their emphasis on the needs of the downtrodden. In contrast, however, Carol Gilligan, did not argue for subordinating oneself in deference to others' needs, but instead advocated including oneself in the circle of people who are to receive care. She said that "empathy from a position of subordination" was a primary problem for women, related to sexism in the valuation of women and their contributions to relationships.
Chris Rufo and others have recently argued that the salience of victim/rescuer/abuser themes in woke ideology are related to the increasing dominance of women in some sectors of our society. This argument is consistent with the theory that women more than men prioritize taking responsibility for other people over advancing their own interests. I think it is reasonable to make this connection, but the argument tends towards sexism in its implications that the excesses of woke ideology and and behavior are "the fault of women" and that the rise in women's public power has been "a bad thing." My understanding is that Rufo does not intend to convey these value judgments, but the implication is easily drawn and amplified by people who want to read him that way.
"Bit of a murky issue, but seems that DEFINING "gender" as more or less synonymous with personalities and personality types is the best or most effective way of clarifying it."
When we use the mean or median of a distribution of personality traits, it is possible to conclude that bio sex and "gender" are strongly linked. The current (and past) concept of gender is something different, however. The concept is more clear if we stick to images of how people within the same sex present different genders. The following images include examples of women who lived and performed gender identities at the upper end of "masculinity" within my bio sex.
The first two examples are historical and the third is a current understanding of gender from within the lesbian culture.
Radclyffe Hall was probably what is today called "transgender," and masculine pronouns are probably appropriate to use, as he completed what is today called a "social transition" in public. "Radclyffe" was his father's name, which he adopted as his own, and "John" was the call name he used within the lesbian subculture of his time.
When we look at personality traits and interests, Alice B. Toklas's autobiography does not portray Gertrude Stein as consistently "more dominant" in their relationship or any such "masculine" trait. Toklas described Stein as hanging our with the guys during their Salon gatherings, but many of the guys were gay artists, so what does that mean exactly in terms of "gender"?
My understanding is that "gender" until recently described a combination of innate personality tendencies, elements of intentional "performance," and elements of identification with males (usually family members) that resulted in automatic masculine walk, gestures, and so on.
I find that most people who rage against feminism and who scapegoat feminists for various social problems are also usually against equal rights for women in the real world. In other words, they are sexist. Women who engage in this kind of behavior usually seem to have quite a head of anger against feminists because they think that feminists will deprive them of "being dependent on men" or "feeling like a woman" or some other conventional feminine role behavior. On the other hand, they generally are quite willing to enjoy the expanded rights, freedoms and opportunities that the feminist movement has fought for and won.
Don't think you can fault Meghan Murphy for not being a "true feminist" yet she recognizes the writing on the wall:
MM: "Now, I love criticizing feminists as much as the next guy. I have also done my best to admit to areas in which feminism failed and may have indeed contributed to the current 'confusion' around the difference between men and women."
AR: "That said, Joyce would be mistaken to assert—and she has now clarified in writing that she does not believe—that feminism is entirely blameless. .... There is a critical distinction between those [feminists] who champion equal rights and opportunities for women based on an ethical argument versus those who promote women’s rights based on the argument that men and women are materially indistinguishable."
How about Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, co-authors of "Professing Feminism"? From a review of their book:
FC: "The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
No doubt that "feminism" -- in general -- has no shortage of justified grievances. However, a great deal of rot in the whole corpus that tends to vitiate the best efforts of the many battling it out in the trenches. Kind of think the last word, for now at least, should go to Kathleen Stock -- doubt you would seriously want to challenge her "true feminist" bona fides, though her arguments aren't without a wart or two:
KS: "Effectively, the stupid story [basically, transgenderism] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
Well done, Ms. Reed. The way to 'square the circle' between traditional and feminist understandings of the difference between the sexes is with the discussion of the individual elements of femininity and masculinity and their characterization as overlapping bell curves. There is no trait typical of masculinity for which one cannot identify a woman who is more "masculine" than the typical male, and vice versa - men are bolder, but there are very bold women; women are more nurturing, but there are very nurturing men. Gender non-conforming people - women who are mathematicians, men who are caregivers - deserve to be treated well and permitted to pursue what is best for them. Yet what began as concern for the equality and opportunity of the outliers quickly became an obsession with the outliers. The social pressure for girls to grow up to be supportive wives has now flipped entirely to the opposite, and that doesn't serve girls any better. Now kids come up in schools where they are ridiculed for being "basic," and are encouraged to seek - or invent - peculiarity within themselves. Malleability to social pressure is itself a trait more typical of the female sex, and thus girls are more susceptible to this pressure, where boys are more alienated by it.
A very level headed and precise analysis of the situation. It is important to recognize that acknowledging behavioral differences between the sexes does not necessarily lead to prescriptive gender roles. We can understand that average differences between the sexes exist and still treat everyone equally and as individuals.
A teenage girl would rather “chop her tits off” than make sandwiches for a man? What planet does this woman live on??? And the language is horrifyingly callous.
Modern feminism (in my mind this is post 2000) as a principle may not be bad. But neither is socialism, as a principle. Or capitalism.
The unintended consequences however are still consequences, and they weren't entirely unforeseen.
At the crux of the issue is something you touched upon which is the idea (that is popular to to hold and is evident in almost all modern writing) that men and women are scarcely different. This idea will admit that biological functions and maybe other obvious characteristics are different, but then proposes that otherwise men and women are basically the same.
So policy is structured around that idea. For policy purposes, it's functional in most cases and ethical. Female firefighters are all good and well, provided they can pass the *same* physical requirements, for example, to not risk losing rescue capacity while on the job relative to men. This seems sensible enough. Equality of opportunity is an ideal state. But the idea that the sexes are barely different has huge knock-on effects.
If sexes they are scarcely different, and they are basically the same, this is what opens the door to gender ideology.
When social/cultural pressures from policy or social norms lessen, biological pressures rise to the top.
Then the differences become painfully apparent, and if someone is 100% committed to the gender ideology, the biological differences become an impediment to this ideal. This gender crowd has noticed this, and is now at war with the last real barrier between the sexes. After all, the sexes are the same except for purely biological reasons related to reproduction only, right? Or so goes the popular argument that I've seen relayed countless times in Hollywood writing, TV, music, and major cultural institutions.
The gender crowd believes that anyone can be anything, and they seem to hate that biology gets in the way. And this is how we end up with gross denial of biological reality.
I've never heard the argument the sexes are barely different or are the same except for reproduction purposes, except from the trans cult. Most males are going to be more likely to meet the requirements for extremely physical jobs that requires moving and lifting heavy gear, like firefighting, but there are some women out there very capable. But then there's medicine, law, math, nursing, etc. It seems the separation by sex in some of these areas has in the past been tied to the level of compensation. Nursing was a "female" occupation while medical school was for males. Both require extensive working hours taking care of patients. Today more males have entered nursing as the pay has risen, and now half of medical students are women. Should both get back to their "proper" gender roles? Ironically, I would say nursing is a much more physical occupation than doctoring, as nurses are moving and turning patients, or even sometimes assaulted by patients. Maybe nursing should be designated a male profession and doctors a female profession.
The argument that the sexes are barely different save for the obvious (reproduction, strength, that stuff) is almost the only version that I've heard growing up and in the schools I've been to. I can only speak for myself here, but that argument seems very popular.
As for jobs, I don't care who does what role? As long as they're competent and can meet certain standards relevant to their specific profession, I really don't care.
Going beyond the obvious differences you listed is difficult as everyone has their own ideas about inborn vs learned traits of males and females. In my mind, there are plenty of other differences, but my view is probably different from your view. That's ok, as long as both men and women have the same rights and protections under the law and also have the same opportunities to prove competence.
"I've never heard the argument the sexes are barely different or are the same except for reproduction purposes, except from the trans cult."
I think it's a generational thing. Many men believed well into the third quarter of the 20th century (as do some today) that women were or are unfit for, incapable of performing well in, too emotional for or otherwise unsuited to a wide number of male dominated professions. In some fields, such as firefighting, women's lack strength, real or perceived, was the disqualifying factor.
As we who live in 2023 know, such attitudes had little or no empirical basis and were instead rooted in prejudice and ignorance. At the time, though, feminists quite understandably argued that men and women were equally capable of performing the same job. Since the contested vocational fields were mainly ones where intellect mattered more than muscles, the unspoken argument was that women were as intellectually capable of being, say, lawyers or engineers, as men.
I understand that as I'm a 1960 female baby. If I dug around enough, I could find a few token older radicals that say the 2 sexes are barely different, but the trans cult has mainstreamed that ideology. I agree with the points you made and I'll add another; men have also been mostly excluded from some spheres that were considered "female." Our youngest went to Montessori Kindergarten His teacher was a male and he was outstanding and much better than the females, but I always perceived the female teachers were actively hostile towards him, as if he was invading their space. There will always be fewer women compared to men in very physical jobs, but the only job exclusive to women will be gestating and nursing infants. That bothers some.
I know what you mean. When I was laid off in the late 90s I thought I'd move from the field of regulatory compliance in banking into HR, which has some similarities. I discovered that HR was a female domain that did not welcome men. The only male HR manager with whom I had an informational interview came right out and said that as a man I'd be an "odd duck" in HR, and wouldn't I prefer to go back to an earlier vocation, the practice of law? In the end I found myself back in bank compliance.
I visited Norway several times in the teens. I was delighted when I saw men working in day care. More than once, when I came across a day care class on an outing where the kids were walking along in pairs, there was a man among adults who were looking after them. Good on them! When couples were out with their babies in strollers, it was always the man who was pushing the stroller. I don't want to read too much into that, but seeing men working with tots was a welcome surprise.
kmick: "I've never heard the argument the sexes are barely different or are the same except for reproduction purposes, except from the trans cult."
Meghan Murphy certainly alludes to the existence of various "feminists" who apparently did precisely that:
MM: "Now, I love criticizing feminists as much as the next guy. I have also done my best to admit to areas in which feminism failed and may have indeed contributed to the current 'confusion' around the difference between men and women. I do think feminism fought too hard to say that women and men were equally as capable in every arena, and to argue that those who denied total and literal equality between the sexes were guilty of — shrieks — 'sexism!' "
Methinks it's not just a bit of hyperbole for Helen Dale and her guest poster, Lorenzo Warby, to argue that the "transcult is the bastard child of feminism":
Well gee SM, I've heard more than a few and various men say "she asked for it." I have done my best to admit to areas where (some) men failed and may have indeed contributed to the current backlash and Trans cult, fighting too hard to keep women in whatever closet they decide to shove them in. I think (some) men tried too hard to then argue all problems in history were caused by - shrieks - THE FEMINISTS. Noah and the floods, The crucifixion of Christ, The fall of Rome, Ivan the Terrible, The terror of Genghis Kahn, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot, Rwanda, Hitler, Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Every single one was started by a FEMINIST hiding under the bed. The trans cult is the child sprouted from the hatred of female, and it's some males (and their adoring handmaidens) enraged at discovering females have brains and they can participate in all aspects of society, including the area where men aren't capable - gestation and nursing. This is driving them hysterically to create the Frankenstein uterus and nipple fluid, something in women that men can't control, except by brute force.
And I've likewise taken more than a few shots at Walsh and Company. For example, from the latter comment, my opening salvo which also wound up in a Note:
"But Walsh, in effect, mashes all of those personality traits – the 15 dimensions (and counting) of them that you described -- into the definitions for male and female; he is basically saying that “sex” and “gender” are synonymous. Rather bizarre at best since his view implies that if an adult human male isn’t out raping and pillaging then he’s clearly letting down the team."
But seems the whole point of Reed's post was to emphasize, quite reasonably, some serious flaws on both sides of the fence. They say that no one complains until it is their own ox being gored, but if everyone gets in a huff and refuses to take any responsibility then I doubt the general problem is going to get fixed.
I agree with you and it doesn't help when a broad group of people are lumped together, or when those outside the foxhole being attacked can't see a problem until a bomb lands on their own foxhole, or as you put it, their ox gets gored. We'll keep going back and forth like a teeter-totter as each "side" backlashes against the other. I was making a point to another reader about the tendency of way too many people to lump women (or blacks) together. For instance, I've never in my 62 years heard someone say "He makes men look bad" when speaking of a white male. But I've heard a zillion times "She makes women look bad" or "He makes blacks look bad." The other reader disputed me but couldn't come up with even one example to disprove me. The very next news article I read was about a hoax kidnapping in Alabama. One of the comments stated "She makes black women look bad." No person of either sex or any color makes the rest of humanity that share their superficial characteristics "look bad." This woman only made herself look bad. https://listverse.com/2019/01/09/10-people-who-faked-their-own-kidnappings/
kmick: "... it doesn't help when a broad group of people are lumped together ..."
Agreed. Maybe I and Helen Dale should have said that the "transcult is the bastard child of some sects of feminism". 😉🙂 But there are some seriously "problematic" aspects to many of them -- some 20 in total at least according to Wikipedia:
I sure don't have much of a handle on all of them, but not sure that women in general have been all that well-served by them. One thing I have read is at least the review of "Professing Feminism" by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge which presumably gives some indication of the rot in many of those sects. An illustrative quote from that review:
FC: "The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
Not to say that there aren't similar problems on the Walsh side of the equation. Kaeley Harms of "Honest To Goodness" seems to have a couple of solid articles thereon:
Going to take some effort to get both sides to consider their "failings", to get more people to take a serious look at what is being peddled by our so-called "leaders" and "experts". Somewhat apropos of which, I wonder where you stand on what seems to be the most sensible and common view that sex and gender are two entirely different kettles of fish. On the view that "gender" is most usefully defined as masculine and feminine personalities, one of the more useful if not brilliant insights to come out of feminism:
Good point. Wonder whether it's partly due to the size of the subgroup, the extent to which members of them are attached to or identify with that group. Kind of amusing though illuminating case of that in an old bit from black comedian Reginald D. Hunter @13:00 to about @20:00 :
He starts off at about the 10 minute mark on racism but then goes into a routine where he asks, "Are you ever embarrassed by your own people sometimes?" And then he answers with a vignette about hearing on the six o’clock news in Georgia, “Robbery and shooting at local bank; details at 11” which he follows up with “Please god, don’t let it be a black guy!” 🙂
Seems we all have an entirely natural tendency to empathize with “our own people”, and to see an attack on any one of that group as an attack on ourselves: “my tribe, right or wrong”, "four legs good, two legs bad" – the cause of no end of grief and difficulties.
What? I have no idea what 'socialism' is since it's been used a million different ways by a million different people, but at least in the Marxist sense it is absolutely evil in principle.
I'm thinking of the socialism-lite version that's used in England or France. Not the murderous mainstream version. Think of it like what people think socialism is ("free" healthcare, etc) vs. what it has historically been.
Right, but it wasn't just the murderousness that was wrong with it. It was wrong in theory too. I'll link something that I wrote before since it's easier that rewriting the same thing over and over: https://sjtucker.substack.com/p/ecocentrism-chapter-2
I'm afraid I have to lay the blame mostly at the feet of third-wave feminism. The problem with blaming conservatives is that no one who is involved in the trans agenda pays any attention to conservatives, but they do pay a lot of attention to feminists.
It seems the eye of the trans hurricane is composed of perverted men in tons of makeup and dresses, with worshipping female acolytes and their pedestal and a few men in black ready to attack any female who doesn't genuflect to these perverts. This is not caused by conservatism, classic liberalism, or females who believe in being full citizens under the law (feminists). Part of the problem with getting to the roots of this fungus is the labeling of an activist ideology as "feminist" just because they call themselves that and are composed of females. It's similar to those who call themselves Christian, but by their actions they demonstrate they have zero faith. The tendency of humans is to try and simplify things. If we can blame the entire dirty contents of the kitchen sink on "feminists," then there's an easy fix; get rid of feminism. Before there were women fighting for equal rights and opportunities under the law, before there were "feminists," I expect it must have been utopia. These male perverts have always been around, and they've always had these nasty females swirling around them to protect them and attack any female who gets out of line, while actual Feminists were working for equality and opportunity under the law. An actual feminist fights for both men and women. We're either equal under the law or we're not.
Thanks for this. Trying to be objective and fair on this subject is harder than balancing on a razor’s edge.
Yes, Matt Walsh is a bigot and a religious nutcase but happens to be right on biology and evolutionary traits.
Yes, Helen Joyce is brilliant but she sounds deranged when she claims that a normal teenage girl would rather cut her tits off than serve a sandwich to man. And how is it that so many women feminists support this and yet feminism is not to be blamed ?
Also, don’t forget:
There is a huge profit motive at work here, both from pharma players and medical professionals
Politicians are pandering whores. How did opposition to mutilation of children get bunched together with gay conversion therapy ?
Postmodernist philosophy contributes as well by rejecting the idea of objective truth (which includes biology)
That was an excellent post and mirrors my thoughts. I am tired of the vilification of the word "feminist," and it's use as an umbrella word to mock any woman with an independent thought. I'm also tired of those who call themselves feminists and then proceed to vilify males. One cannot be a feminist, imo, if one is vilifying males, like those who believe males accused of rape should not be given due process on a college campus. I would also argue one must dislike our Constitution, and the equal protections and rights guaranteed to all, if one is constantly attacking those who don't conform to narrow gender stereotypes.
“A flawed argument presented by Walsh, in response to Joyce’s podcast interview, claims that the emergence of transgender ideology directly following third-wave feminism serves as evidence that feminism—not longstanding conservative values—caused gender ideology to explode.”
The trans phenomenon in terms of a psychological propensity to fantasize about being a woman may exist independently of trans ideology but only the existence of a trans ideology can provide the intellectual basis from which to conclude that trans women are really women, etc. And that aspect of the ideology owes a great deal to feminism. Also, Walsh’s point about traditional sex roles never having led to trans people in the past, is a devastating point against Joyce.
I lay the problem at the feet of the US Declaration of Independence since this is all about random stabs at explaining an especially corrosive version of the 15-year androgyny cycle (I’m old enough to remember glam rock, unisex, and other versions). In it (Declaration) we read the frankly scary “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” - OMFG! planted in the minds of unsuspecting Americans for hundreds of years. That’s what created “trans women are women”.
Thank you for this summary. In her book, as I recall, Helen Joyce quotes the therapist Sasha Ayad saying that her teen girl patients were trying "not to be girls" more than they were seeking to be boys. I think that Joyce is trying to reflect that aspect of teen girl transition, when she quips about teen girls and sandwiches. As for her language choices, I think she is sincere is her anger at teen transition and the risks and loses that come with it. For me, strong language is called for here. The alternative is the euphemism "top surgery" - and all the other misuses of language (like "gender-affirming") that have harmed so many.
Matt Walsh. Is this the same Matt Walsh who has recently been tweeting that feminism is responsible for more deaths than communism, fascism and something something? It isn't fair to Helen Joyce to pair her against a bomb thrower such as Walsh. Surely there must be a more credible advocate for "conservatism," which, by the way, in the context of this essay seems to be a caricature of stereotypical male attitudes and behavior concerning sex and sex roles.
I don't agree that "conservatism" as a political position has been a contributor at all to the rise of the trans activists. I also don't agree that Second Wave Feminism has been a primary contributor.
I am a clinical psychologist and I have extensive experience working with trans identified clients of the "original type," i.e., many were males with histories of transvestic fetishism. I also have experience working with women who transitioned after living for years as butch lesbians. (Some of these women explicitly identified as butch and some did not). I started working with people with "gender" issues during the 1990's, and the youngest trans (or questioning) clients I saw over the next few decades were born before 1985.
I live in Portland, where conservatives and conservatism have been driven close to extinction. All of the trans identified people I have worked with were liberal Democrats, but most of the men were not highly politically involved. The women were more likely to have been exposed to radical ideas and activism within the lesbian community, but many were not directly involved in feminist or lesbian politics.
Interestingly, the men I worked with were commonly employed in male dominated fields such as high tech or blue collar industrial trades, and some had histories of professional military service. They typically identified as heterosexual and were married to women. A smaller number of the trans identified men had been involved in occupations regarded as feminine, such as hair styling, and those men were more likely to have had histories of gay relationships and to identify as bisexual.
None of the people I worked with from any of the above male groups told me that feminism was an influence in the evolution of their trans identities. Many of the men reported that autogynephilia had developed along with sexualized cross dressing, and that their gender dysphoria increased after that. Shame and fear of being caught cross dressing by their wives or other people caused these men to be isolated within their cross-sex experiences. They generally did not talk to anyone about what they were doing or feeling and were not connected to any of the trans support systems that began to appear near the end of the last century.
The same was not, of course, true for the women who were living as "butch" or some related identifier within the lesbian community. Most of these people dressed in men's clothes for years while in gay settings and some of them dressed in men's clothes all the time. Butch lesbians had been living like this prior to the onset of the feminist Second Wave. During the 1970's and 1980's they were not particularly supported by the new wave of women who joined the lesbian community as university-based feminist activists. Feminism aggressively criticized butch/femme roles as patriarchal. Butch/femme roles did come back into popularity a few decades later, and masculine women began exploring a wide variety of individually labeled sexual identities. This trend was happening among Millennials by the early 2000's, and it appears to have been the predecessor of the current proliferation of sexual and gender identities within Gen Z.
The trans-identified males I saw in my practice mostly had very conventional ideas about feminine and masculine roles. They would talk about their sense of being female as a vague feeling they had, but would support their sense of being female by references to how they preferred to play with girls when they were children, preferred girls over boys' games and so forth. They did not seem to see any conflict with the fact that they chose and excelled at male dominated careers, nor did they change careers when they transitioned. The trans identified females tended to be scornful and phobic about feminine roles and appearance, like teenage boys insecure about their masculinity. So, I would say that most but not all of the trans people I met supported traditional, polarized sex roles without necessarily having a conscious philosophy that favored this position.
All of the trans identified people I saw had a specific image of what they wanted to look like as a member of their preferred sex. The men nearly all cherished a stereotypically bombshell image, such as Dolly Parton. The trans identified women did not necessarily want to be stereotypical he-men, but many of them did want a particular type of male physique.
In summary, both the trans identified males and trans identified females, prior to the recent wave of Gen Z people, generally embraced traditional stereotypic masculine and feminine roles and wanted to look and function as members of the other sex within the traditional set up. The primary effect of feminism that I saw was mostly on the university-based lesbian communities, where the traditional sex roles were for a couple decades at least strongly rejected as a model to emulate.
I have recently been hearing that most of the younger masculine women who previously identified as "butch" or some variant thereof are now medically transitioning, to the dismay of the lesbian femmes who prefer them as partners. One interpretation of the mass transition is that those women did endorse the stereotypic roles (as their butch behavior did convey), and that most of them would choose to be biological males in traditional masculine roles if that were possible.
I think that both the women's movement and the gay liberation movement inspired some trans identified people to want the same kind of movement for themselves, and some trans people chose to become trans activists. The gay and lesbian communities offered an accepting environment for trans identified people as long as they identified themselves as gay. Now that these people have come out as trans it turns out that some of them were actually heterosexual or bi, and have not changed their sexual preference.
The Second Wave feminist movement contributed to the current woke movement its tyrannical emphasis on moralistic political correctness, with the accompanying speech policing and forced conformity to radical ideals. This became a source of horrible divisiveness within the feminist movement as early as the 1970's, and spread to the university-based lesbian communities, where it has flourished until the present day. The elaboration of many named sexual identities also developed within both the lesbian subculture and the gay men's subculture within the past couple of decades, leading to the Gen Z identity spectrum.
So, in my opinion, the evolving feminist, lesbian and gay rights movements were the incubators that enabled the trans movement to arise in its present form. But feminists and gay/lesbian activists generally were not planning on that development. Trans activism emerged organically when trans identified people gained access to medical transition technologies and opportunities to gather together and organize as a demographic with common goals. Trans activists eventually gained enough power to take over both the gay and lesbian communities, such that Gay Pride Day has morphed into (Trans) Pride Month.
Get thee to a publisher! Your historical approach to the evolution of today's gender ideology is indispensable as a means of dispelling misconceptions and filling in previously uncharted areas.
I would love to hear how you view the phenomenon known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which predominantly affects teen girls. What is it about men or masculinity that appeals to them? Or is it that they are primarily running away from puberty and womanhood? Have they absorbed fanciful ideas about gay men on social media and from their peers that make the idea of being a gay man attractive to them?
I do work with adolescents as well as adults and have for a few years been seeing or hearing about Gen Z girls and young women suddenly announcing they are "transgender" or more recently "non-binary." They lack a history of trans-identification, but often they have talked openly for some time previously about maybe being "gay" or some other trendy sexual orientation, such as "pan, "kink,""poly" or something else from an extensive list. The teens and young 20's women who say these things have in my experience all been very familiar with critical social justice theory and activism and generally embrace the assumption that woke gender ideology is "the way things are."
I have not seen young female clients in the past who presented similar sudden adoption of new self-identities in the area of biological sex. It has always been common, on the other hand, for female teens in U.S. culture to change their call names, try on new looks, or in some cases, think about whether they are gay. It appears to me that girls are now drawn to the promise that they can cast off their bodies and throw on new ones in the same way American girls switch out their wardrobe to something more in the fashion of the moment.
The "trans" image is obviously enormously attractive and "cool" in the subculture of Gen Z girls, but they already appear to be shifting toward the "nonbinary" identifier. This is not what is seen clinically when there is a stable sense of identification with a cross sex image and a stable desire for a body of the other sex, and is more fluid than what I have seen go on with the adult male trans questioning people I have met.
In addition to the teenage fad element of the trans epidemic there are, unfortunately, also significant psychiatric and neurodevelopmental issues going on with adolescents who present themselves at gender clinics. Based on information we are getting from research and whistleblowers, the patients have elevated rates of depression, anxiety, intentional self-harm without suicidal intent, self-reported "suicide attempts," eating disorders, as well as their obvious identity confusion. The adolescents being evaluated at gender clinics also reportedly include high percentages of children who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders or ADHD.
This is a complicated situation involving kids and families whose paths to the gender clinic are variable. What appears to be true generally is that a significant percentage of teens and young women who are active on social media and who idealize "transgender" individuals have started wanting to be viewed as "transgender" or "nonbinary" themselves. Young people who have risk factors such as severely low self-esteem, greater than average instability or confusion in identity, and major psychiatric symptoms like suicidality may be more vulnerable than the average adolescent to programs that promise a physical, emotional and spiritual transformation.
We don't know enough about the population of adolescents, mostly female, who present ROGD. It certainly appears that they have significant rates of psychiatric symptoms and disorders, so there is a high need to provide appropriate evaluations and treatment for them. People with psychiatric problems usually need psychotherapy and/or psychiatric medications when indicated. In the instance of ROGD, unfortunately, there is currently strong resistance to conducting evaluation and treatment in accordance with established practice and evidence. There is also the continuing pathogenic influence of social media and the trans cult that draws in young women who are particularly vulnerable.
Many young trans-identifying people actively resist efforts of outsiders, including their parents, to take away the solution they believe will solve their problems. Medical transitions are presented as metamorphoses that release a kind of spiritual identity with a transformed appearance. Cosmetic surgeries have always held out hope for a magical cure to people who can afford them. So what is to us a procedure that must be prevented, is to the patients their best chance of ridding themselves of their primary problem.
This circumstance reduces the patients' motivation for more appropriate treatments, even though psychotherapy could have enabled them to find other solutions to their problems. It is the same situation that we had during the eating disorder epidemic of the Eighties and Nineties. The mostly young female patients put up stiff resistance against efforts by families and by healthcare professionals to turn them away from their self-destructive eating habits. I think that the current cohort of young females claiming to be "trans" or whatever are very similar in many ways to the eating disordered patients. In fact, eating disorders are reportedly common among the patients seeking gender treatment.
We need to learn more about the young women I am discussing if we are to help them. Like everything else now, their stories are being buried under a typical critical social justice "narrative" about them that ignores their individuality. We need competent, unbiased reporting from mental health providers who work with these adolescents and young women, and we need a lot more research. There is too little that I can say specifically about them, because we have not yet done enough to find out who they all are.
Thank you for your well informed, detailed and thoughtful insights about this vexing phenomenon! This is the sort of information that policymakers, legislators, educators, medical and mental health professionals, editorial boards, op-ed writers and the general public need as an antidote to the one-sided talking points of trans rights advocates.
One of my fears is that legislatures in states controlled by Democrats where progressives have considerable influence will enact measures prohibiting so-called conversion therapy that make it impossible for mental health professionals to consider significant psychiatric and neurodevelopmental problems when working with young clients with gender identity issues. In an ideal world, the licensing organizations would oppose such restrictions on the exercise of professional judgment, but today it's entirely likely that they would go along with it in order to "protect" trans youth.
Here in Oregon it has been illegal since 2015 for healthcare professionals to use so-called "conversion therapy" with minors to try to change their "gender identities." The law does not define "conversion therapy" specifically enough to protect healthcare professionals who are conducting therapy as usual. Licensing boards are state bureaucracies that generally enforce state laws. They aren't a resource as much as they are part of the enforcement apparatus of the Democratic political systems in states controlled by that party.
There's no contradiction between (a) the argument that feminist theoreticians didn't directly or explicitly promote transgenderism and (b) the argument that feminist theoreticians nonetheless played a necessary role in making transgenderism possible.
Egalitarian feminists did indeed argue that men and women were interchangeable (for all purposes except gestation), because that argument allowed them to oppose discrimination against women in the workplace and elsewhere. To make that argument, they had in addition to argue that any apparent differences between the sexes (apart from gestation) were illusory--that is, or due to gender differences and therefore to culture (a.k.a. "social constructions") instead of nature. Those feminists simply did not foresee a later generation taking that very argument to its logical conclusion by denying any importance at all to nature and advocating the "transition" from one sex to the other either medically or socially.
Yes, I can agree with the points you are making. I recall a time when feminists argued that men and women have equal abilities in all mental and emotional tasks. There wasn't much emphasis placed on tasks involving physical strength and abilities that women generally have less of than men. The mental emphasis might have been due to the fact that the Second Wave feminists were mostly college students aiming for knowledge-based careers. I think that many feminists have been resistant to information that the far upper levels of STEM ability belong to a small group of mostly male people. When it comes to blue collar jobs like firefighting very few women have the physical strength to meet the job requirements, and they are generally lifelong athletes.
When people have been historically excluded from participation in some area of life they don't necessarily have a clear view of how interested or capable they will be in those endeavors. The women I knew in the feminist movement were focused on equality of opportunity. We needed to be, because opportunities for women outside of domestic roles and a few careers like nursing and elementary school teaching were limited to very poorly paid occupations.
My class of grad students (entered 1969) was the first at my alma mater to include almost as many female as male admissions in the clinical psychology program. Prior to that very few women were admitted, and the faculty reflected that history. When I worked at the university counseling center there were 45 doctoral psychologists employed there, with less than a half dozen being women. When women had the opportunity to enter that field it turned out to be an area in which women excel and have a strong interest, so that they now dominate the field. That was not at all what was predicted by the faculty who resisted increasing rates of admission for female applicants.
Female applicants had to argue very strongly against the relentless accusations that we would drop out of grad school to start families or that we wouldn't be capable of doing the work. Applicants were put in the position of having to prove that these arguments were false in advance of being admitted to the school rather than being given the same opportunities that were freely handed out to men to find out through experience how far they could go in a career. Women in some circumstances still feel a lot of pressure to prove over and over that they are as capable of men in their line of work. If this level of sexist opposition to women's ambitions had not existed, perhaps women would not have felt that they had to voice so much confidence in their ability to perform as equals to men in every endeavor.
With respect to the trans phenomenon, I don't believe for a minute that any trans activist thinks there is no difference between men and women. Their entire problem is that they are obsessed with sex differences, are envious and jealous of the other sex, and feel like they have to have what the other sex has instead of what they were born with. For all the talk about "socially constructed genders," people who "identify as transgender" can't wait to see a surgeon who will take away the indicators of their actual sex and replace them with a new set. Trans people are probably among the most conventional and concrete thinkers when it comes to concrete and binary perspectives on the differences between women and men. The postmodern philosophical ideas that the trans activists have adopted are actually incompatible with the old-fashioned beliefs about sex differences that gender dysphoric people actually live by.
Thank you so much, Sandra, for your non-ideological interest in this discussion.
Katherine Young and I spent thirty years doing research on the attitudes toward men in both elite culture (academic feminism) and popular culture. Our work has been published in four volumes, which are available on Amazon. When we began, in the 1980s, many feminists argued against research on sex differences, probably because they believed that any research of this kind would reveal ways in which men were innately superior to women (even though no scholars with any intellectual integrity would devote years, let alone tax dollars, to demonstrate what they already assume). By the early 1990s, however, they were going into reverse: actually promoting or even demanding research on sex differences, probably because they had by now come to believe that research of this kind would reveal ways in which women were innately superior to men. As you know, there are some ways in which both are true but also that the evidence applies only at the collective (general) level, not the individual (personal) one.
It's true that people tend to overcompensate for perceived inadequacies. Evidence indicates that men have experienced, historically and cross-culturally, the same problem that women have experienced in modern societies. This has been due, of course, to the obvious fact that only women can give birth to, and nourish, new life. As a result, early men found ways of attributing abilities of equal importance to themselves. And the most obvious ones included the superior muscular strength and mobility of (most) male bodies to hunt big-game animals on land or sea and to protect the community from predatory animals (although women and even children sometimes helped them by setting traps or by making enough noise to scare the animals away). The trouble was that this division of labor associated women with life and men with death, which caused men to envy women and compensate, or overcompensate, for the negativity. Later, after the advent of horticulture and settled communities, (most) men were better suited than (most) women at raiding the stored food supplies or provisions of neighboring communities and defending their own. The advent of agriculture (along with the rise of specialization, hierarchies city-states and empires) gave men two new functions: pulling iron ploughs in the fields and serving as conscripts for labor and war.
In one of our books, Katherine and I considered the history of the male body--that is cultural attitudes toward it. We found that a series of technological revolutions (agricultural, military, industrial, and so on) have gradually undermined the ability of men to establish a healthy collective identity specifically as men. Everyone needs a healthy identity, by which we mean the ability to make at least one contribution to society that is (a) distinctive, (b) necessary and (c) publicly valued. Otherwise, people are likely to assume that even an unhealthy, or negative, identity is better than no identity at all. For modern men, this has become a huge problem. Women can now do everything that men can do, either on their own or with help from the state (although the reverse is not true). Even fatherhood no longer serves well as a source of masculine identity, because most people assume that fathers are assistant mothers at best and potential molesters at worst (even though fatherless children, especially boys, are at far great risk than other children of every social pathology). Statistics show that men are increasingly dropping out school (or even entering college), dropping out of society (through crime, for instance, or drugs) and dropping out of life itself (through reckless behavior and suicide).
I agree with you about transgenderism. (And it is an "ism" like any other ideology.) There is an element of envy in it and therefore knowledge of innate sex differences (along with learned gender differences). I hear a lot about the "misogyny" of trans women (born men), and that's surely true of those who use their claim to take advantage of women or even to rape them. But for many others, perhaps most, the key factor is not hatred (the sine qua non of worldviews that promote persecution) but envy.
I should add here, Sandra, that I haven't come to any of these conclusions willingly. I'm gay. I spent my entire childhood as the victim of bullies, both male and female. The only just solution, it seemed to me, was the abolition of (what I now call) gender. With that in mind, I was an eager supporter of early feminism and began to read about it. If women could challenge their gendered expectations, after all, then so could men. That was in the 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1980s, I found that many feminists were supporting sex and gender egalitarianism in name only. And by the 1990s, I found that some feminists were openly promoting not only female superiority but also misandry (the sexist counterpart of misogyny). What horrifies me now is the possibility someone like my earlier self--a boy who disliked being a boy, was afraid of becoming a man (but never thought of himself as a girl becoming a woman) might now be hormonally or surgically mutilated, without consent from his parents, in the name of an aggressive ideology that denounces empirical evidence and even common sense.
Paul, thank you for your detailed and interesting comment! I am interested in learning more about your work and your perspectives. I am on the first day of a 2 week break from work, so I am in the sleeping and recovering phase as opposed to celebrating a vacation. Will get back to you in a few days with a more detailed response to your post.
Thank you!
Brilliantly articulated but missing a critical element: the economic model within which feminism arose. Because women did not have reproductive freedom and could not provide for themselves and their many children (staying at home as a mother was a luxury not available to the working class), and fathers often abandoned their families leaving them destitute. Or fathers/husbands abused their wives and children and treated them as chattel or slaves as they, themselves, were treated by the more powerful men above them. Therefore, suffragettes fought for political power to change the material circumstances of their lives. They fought for the vote, for financial independence, for freedom from abuse and exploitation.
Matt Walsh, for all the excellent work he's done bringing awareness to the public about the harms of gender ideology, is extremely naive at best, cruelly ignorant at worst. Blaming all of feminism, a movement which does not and cannot represent half the global population, is ludicrous. It's convenient and simple for the traditionalist conservative men who pine for a return to 'old-fashioned values' where men were men and women knew their place. It's seductive to think we can go back there, but it's impossible to expect that.
If anything, it's pornography and the male fetishists with billions of dollars who are trying to dismantle the notion of sexual dimorphism in order to usher in transhumanism and medicalize all human beings as if we're a collection of interchangeable body parts. Women's bodies, in particular, are seen as commodities, for sex, as baby factories, as servants.
Unless/until men start seeing women as fully human, whether or not they choose to be homemakers or career women, we'll never evolve as a species. It's endlessly frustrating to see that patriarchy serves NOBODY - neither men nor women. It serves only the powerful, the oligarchs, the rulers.
This is exactly what I think, too. Thanks, 'SignMeUpPlease'. I would add, that males tend not to see details about children's needs that women see, and women tend to be less likely to unconsciously offer help to a man than vice-versa. Women neither commit as many or as horrific crimes as men nor are women as good at fight horrific crime and heinous criminals. When men silence women, the problem isn't that women do t need men (collectively, in the groups that comprise human civilization), but rather that men need women to tell them what they don't see, don't notice, some of what women want help with, and some of what simply must get done.
Even other species communicate for vital reasons. Males and females have vital roles and different blindspots. I've noticed that in reality shows, males who trans to womanhood have the blindspots of men; woman maintain the blindspots of women even when they trans, too. The superficial sandwich making, pottery making, weaving, is absurdly arbitrary. The notion of different tendencies and motivations is not arbitrary.
It's like addiction genes, they don't make one specifically addicted to an exact substance or behavior, but rather, more likely to become addicted to something, more generally.
People need to see and think about how animals that look identical, with the same types of eyes, teeth, claws, Andrew coats, can have different behaviors oriented toward the the young of their species.
This is a very serious matter. Males of various mammalian species are much more likely to lose patience and stomp on a toddler, rape an infant, or eat the young of another male. Females do eat young sometimes, but for completely different reasons. The rational or instinct matters.
You are completely correct about Matt Walsh. There is a powerful strain of fascism running through Roman Catholicism, such as we saw in Italy in the 1930s and with Patrick Buchannan in the US these last 50 years — and it also features a powerful liberationist spirit (see Dorothy Day and Frances Kissling, for examples). It is not coincidental that the prominent players on the two opposing sides are of different sexes. The Vatican (an all-male establishment) has been harassing and investigating various orders of nuns for spending too much time on “social justice” issues and direct ministry to the poor instead of focusing on anti-abortion and anti-gay activism. Considering what has happened to children in Catholic orphanages — and the significant amount of surreptitious homosexuality in the priesthood — this situation is especially galling. (For an interesting read about the beleaguered nuns, see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-vatican-nuns-idUSBRE83J1B720120420: “Vatican crackdown on U.S. nuns a long time brewing” by Stephanie Simon.) It is completely foolhardy to imagine that proto-fascists like Matt Walsh can be enlisted in the movement to protect gay children from medicalization and to preserve women’s sex-based rights. Doing so is like getting rid of the termites in your house by setting the place on fire.
Sorry, the link seems broken, but if you Google the title/author, the article will be easily found.
Sadly, he is unable to handle the complexity of trans ideology or he would seek out and expose the pharmaceutical billionaire fetishist men who dress in women's clothing for sexual gratification and who are fast-tracking humanity's transition to transhumanism where we're all propagandized into thinking our bodies are all just interchangeable parts. The hatred for the natural world, for women and men as a sexually dimorphic species and for our cultural heritage with all its knowledge and wisdom truly beggars the imagination. Contempt for everyone but the obscenely wealthy oozes from their disgusting hairy, smelly bodies. I imagine that at night they despise themselves but cannot help but project their self-hatred onto others. Same goes for all the other obscenely wealthy men who drink the blood of infants and rape little boys and girls. They're all diabolical monsters who are beyond forgiveness or redemption.
Porn and academic gender studies have created some kind of nightmare that makes me want to take just a few lived ones and run for the hills. I have lost two close friends to them saying things such as "other ways of knowing." One of these friends has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. I feel an earthquake from Hell under my feet. Where can I go? Political refugees who came here are scratching their heads right now and wondering, "Where to now?" My mom is one them; a Chinese friend is another. I thought of Trans Lysenkoism before an article about it was published by anyone. It's just common sense.
Unfortunately, "trans" madness has infected much of the world.
Where? 5 years😳
JFC
What does JFC stand for?
Joyce is 1000% correct about 1000% of everything lately, including this. yes, feminists as a group are a favorite punching bag of conservative entertainers in the US, like Walsh. i suspect he may go out of his way to trash feminists just to show fellow conservatives that hes still a conservative, despite his focus on gender ideology, an issue they may see as a "gay" issue.
but all of this sort of doesnt matter. US conservatives live in their own bubble. in many ways theyre detached from reality. but theyre also the only group in the US that has done anything to oppose gender ideology. the democrats have abandoned us. no one is comming to save us. except Matt Walsh. for that he gets much credit. he couldnt care less about anyone across the pond, neither does his audience. he doesnt care about being correct. at least not about anything as far away from him and his audience as "feminism". does anyone remember Trump? every day all day he blathered 100% hot air with a 5 gallon bucket of pure lies. it didnt mater.
Walsh is rasing awareness about gender ideology, which is the best way to counter it. hes getting US conservatives engaged in an issue they normally would sprint away from. for that hes a hero. maybe Joyce and Walsh can just agree to disagree.
btw, its not feminists or conservatives who are to blame for gender ideology. its billionaire agp's like Martine Rothblatt. These rich fetishists cooked up gender ideology in their basement surrounded by piles of porn while wearing womens underwear. they grouped with rich attorneys who saw how easily US public institutions incorporated diversity laws and monitoring intended to help historically disadvantaged groups. they used these laws to the advantage of rich white males at the expense of historically disadvantaged groups, like kids, women, gays and people with mental illness. they financed a massive misinformation campaign that tricked gullible people and dummies who are bad at math.
https://uncommongroundmedia.com/martine-rothblatt-a-founding-father-of-the-transgender-empire/?expand_article=1
Yes. Billionaires like Martine Rothblatt and also Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the $10 Trillion pension investment company that pushes "transgenderism" through all our institutions.
"It is my firm conviction that "trans" has no foundation in GID, that essentially none of the "trans" have GID, but rather are attention-seekers of the worst sort. And that what we are seeing is a human expression of the same sort of biological reaction to overpopulation that makes lionesses stop ovulating when there are too many lions, regardless of the abundance of prey."
Bingo! Like "queer," "trans" today is largely an urban youth scene. The following analogy isn't mine originally, but it's worth offering here. Trans is like Goth, except Goth wasn't being aided and abetted by teachers, doctors, mental health professionals, "allies" and progressives at the summits of society's principal institutions.
The second part of your argument reminds me of the world of "A Clockwork Orange," where Malthusian pressures were causing the government to promote homosexuality, including with the slogan: "It's sapiens to be homo."
thanks for your comment. numbers reported in the past dont predict future populations becuase now the population net has been cast so wide it can include almost anyone. in 2021, 43000 kids aged 7 to 17 reported gender dysphoria in the US. as per dei policies that are in place in much of rhe US, any kid who reports this is now "trans". these same polcies mandate reporting persons to receive harmdul gender meds. this is significant becuase without these meds most kids grow out of their dysphoria and ID as their birth gender with puberty. but once kids take puberty blockers, 98% go onto harmful hormones and their dysphoria and opposite sex ID continues.
dei policies are causing ever increasing numbers of persons who report this. schools teach kids that puberty is optional while omitting all the negative affects of gender meds. theyre not told that gender meds result in permanent loss of sexual function, permanent sterility, twice the odds of early death, 20x the odds of suicide. kids also arent told that gender meds actually dont help anything. thats what every gov review done anywhere in the world has found. instead kids are lied to, the meds are promoted tricking kids into a severe health hazard and causing an exponential increase in affected and IDing person, with numbers that are impossible to quantify due to reporting that is non centralized, ad hoc and low quality.
A thorough and interesting analysis. However, I don't see how dissecting or debating the origins of transgender ideology furthers our efforts to mount a constructive response/opposition with the necessary urgency. It's already well-established that we're politically a coalition of odd bedfellows who otherwise don't agree on much.
I totally agree! I support peoples' interest in debating for debating's sake, but I want to participate in activism that counteracts woke cult efforts to limit the freedoms of U.S. citizens and to indoctrinate people into the woke ideology.
Some reason to argue that knowing the causes of a disease is the first step in curing it. No doubt there's plenty of blame to go around -- arguably, enough for virtually everyone -- but feminism, in general, seems to "deserve" a large portion of it.
ICYMI, something of a solid, if somewhat overwrought, argument on Helen Dale's Substack by guest poster Lorenzo Warby that the "transcult is the bastard child of feminism":
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-transcult-ii
Nice that Walsh has started the ball rolling by throwing a few stones at feminism -- even if his position is less than solid itself -- though I don't see many feminists stepping up to the plate to take much responsibility for that state of affairs. Though Meghan Murphy might be an early exception:
https://www.meghanmurphy.ca/p/matt-walsh-is-wrong-about-feminism
I'll check it out; thanks. I've been reading Robert Jay Lifton's "Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry." He posits that people susceptible to that kind of brainwashing (and I do think of gender ideology as a cult) have been made thus by particular childhood experiences that make them crave the certainty and belonging cults offer. That feels so true to me. So I think there are many factors -- personal as well as societal -- that come together in some perfectly awful storm to create situations such as trans ideology. If one were missing, or the timing were different ...
Lifton is outstanding! It is amazing how closely his descriptions of Chinese thought reform match the mind control strategies of woke cultists.
Yes; it's been an interesting read! I'm only sad that that book was published too early to specifically critique the rise of gender ideology.
James Lindsay applies Lifton’s ideas to the woke cult in general. See his New Discourses site if you haven’t already done so.
Thanks!
Interesting phenomenon in many ways, though rather more than just academic for too many. But certainly some justification to see "gender ideology as a cult", though, as you say, many reasons for them, for why some turn into "perfect storms".
Reminds me of Arthur Koestler's autobiography, "Arrow in the Blue", largely about his experiences in the communist party of the 30s. Been more than a few decades since I read it 🙂, but seem to recollect it spoke to the sense of purpose communism gave to many people of that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_in_the_Blue
However, I think part of the problem is that the concept of gender has some utility and value -- notably in drawing attention to significant levels of sexual dimorphism in personalities. Unfortunately that has become adulterated with some rather questionable woo and profoundly unscientific claptrap -- the merging of magic, religion, and science as cultural anthropologist Sahar Sadjadi put it:
https://www.mcgill.ca/ssom/staff/sahar-sadjadi
https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/3728/430
Bit of a challenge to separate wheat and chaff. You might have some interest in my preliminary efforts to do so 🙂:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/i/64264079/rationalized-gender
I think we will have to discard the term "gender," as it has no consistent meaning that differentiates it from biological sex. "Masculinity/femininity" isn't the greatest set of terms either.
Definitely an "evolving" concept, a work in progress. 🙂
However, while I see that you're a "clinical psychologist and ... have extensive experience working with trans identified clients" -- good on ya 👍 🙂 -- I wonder whether you would prefer to see "gender" DEFINED as "masculine & feminine personality traits" or as "the merging of magic, religion, and science" as I had quoted Sahar Sadjadi saying above.
I expect you probably have a pretty solid grasp of personalities in general, and I certainly don't want to be "Teaching grandmother to suck eggs" -- as an old colloquialism put it (1707):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_eggs
However, I also wonder whether you took a look at the evidence that Abigail Reed tabled that gives some weight to the idea that there ARE significant personality differences, on average, between men and women:
AR: "When researchers looked at 21,567 subjects and categorized them across 15 dimensions of personality (warmth, emotional stability, assertiveness, gregariousness, dutifulness, friendliness, sensitivity, distrust, imagination, reserve, anxiety, complexity, introversion, orderliness, and emotionality), they found that while there was significant overlap (about 30 percent) between sexes on individual dimensions, the overall overlap was just about 7 percent."
Her source, "Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset":
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12500
An earlier one, "Personality and gender differences in global perspective":
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12265
From the latter:
"It is undeniably true that men and women are more similar than different genetically, physically and psychologically. Even so, important gender differences in personality exist that likely stem, at least in part, from evolved psychological adaptations."
Seems offhand that when many people -- including Helen Joyce -- talk about "gender non-conforming" kids, they're talking about those who have personality traits that are atypical of their sex, and more typical of the other one. Seems that defining "gender" as those personality traits provides something of a handle, even if an imperfect one, on the phenomenon that may help to forestall claims that those kids were "born in the wrong body" -- along with all of the odious consequences that follow from the "science, magic, and religion" definitions.
In addition to which, personalities -- i.e., psychology -- are clearly differentiated from sex -- i.e., "having gonads of past, present, or future functionality", at least according to biologist Emma Hilton's rationalization of folk-biology:
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
On top of which, such definitions -- for both sex and gender -- more or less cut Walsh and others of his tribe off at the knees for their rather risible insistence that various personality traits -- often less than flattering or even particularly accurate ones -- are intrinsic parts of what it means to be male or female. Which, of course, many women, many feminists quite reasonably object to. Win-win! 🙂
Bit of a murky issue, but seems that DEFINING "gender" as more or less synonymous with personalities and personality types is the best or most effective way of clarifying it.
Note that feminism has NOT been consistently based on the premise that all sex differences are socially constructed, or that men are "just like women." During the 1980's-1990's a network of influential feminist academic psychologists at Harvard (Carol Gilligan) and Wellesley (Jean Baker Miller and colleagues) developed a theory of women's psychology that emphasized differences between men and women. Gilligan argued that women prioritize a different set of moral principles ("care and responsibility for others") from those prioritized by men ("rights and justice"). Like Gilligan, Baker also argued for the existence of sex differences. Both of these psychologists and their colleagues emphasized the "relational" nature of women's psychology as opposed to what they viewed as a more individual focus in men's. All the scholars in this group valorized the sex differences they postulated in a direction that favored women, i.e., "Women care about other peoples' welfare and sustain relationships."
I haven't thoroughly reviewed the research literature on these theories, but I know that some studies have not confirmed the presence of significant differences between male and female Americans on values around individual rights versus caring for others. On the other hand, most people agree that the "care and responsibility ethic" operates in an obvious way in many (but not all) women. The care and responsibility ethic also appears to be the value system underlying the woke movements' public claims about wanting "safety" and their emphasis on the needs of the downtrodden. In contrast, however, Carol Gilligan, did not argue for subordinating oneself in deference to others' needs, but instead advocated including oneself in the circle of people who are to receive care. She said that "empathy from a position of subordination" was a primary problem for women, related to sexism in the valuation of women and their contributions to relationships.
Chris Rufo and others have recently argued that the salience of victim/rescuer/abuser themes in woke ideology are related to the increasing dominance of women in some sectors of our society. This argument is consistent with the theory that women more than men prioritize taking responsibility for other people over advancing their own interests. I think it is reasonable to make this connection, but the argument tends towards sexism in its implications that the excesses of woke ideology and and behavior are "the fault of women" and that the rise in women's public power has been "a bad thing." My understanding is that Rufo does not intend to convey these value judgments, but the implication is easily drawn and amplified by people who want to read him that way.
"Bit of a murky issue, but seems that DEFINING "gender" as more or less synonymous with personalities and personality types is the best or most effective way of clarifying it."
When we use the mean or median of a distribution of personality traits, it is possible to conclude that bio sex and "gender" are strongly linked. The current (and past) concept of gender is something different, however. The concept is more clear if we stick to images of how people within the same sex present different genders. The following images include examples of women who lived and performed gender identities at the upper end of "masculinity" within my bio sex.
The first two examples are historical and the third is a current understanding of gender from within the lesbian culture.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/08/12/all-the-misfits-of-this-world-are-lonely/
Radclyffe Hall was probably what is today called "transgender," and masculine pronouns are probably appropriate to use, as he completed what is today called a "social transition" in public. "Radclyffe" was his father's name, which he adopted as his own, and "John" was the call name he used within the lesbian subculture of his time.
https://www.thoughtco.com/gertrude-stein-1874-1946-3529142
When we look at personality traits and interests, Alice B. Toklas's autobiography does not portray Gertrude Stein as consistently "more dominant" in their relationship or any such "masculine" trait. Toklas described Stein as hanging our with the guys during their Salon gatherings, but many of the guys were gay artists, so what does that mean exactly in terms of "gender"?
https://www.queerevents.ca/queer-culture/posts/lesbian-subcultures
My understanding is that "gender" until recently described a combination of innate personality tendencies, elements of intentional "performance," and elements of identification with males (usually family members) that resulted in automatic masculine walk, gestures, and so on.
I find that most people who rage against feminism and who scapegoat feminists for various social problems are also usually against equal rights for women in the real world. In other words, they are sexist. Women who engage in this kind of behavior usually seem to have quite a head of anger against feminists because they think that feminists will deprive them of "being dependent on men" or "feeling like a woman" or some other conventional feminine role behavior. On the other hand, they generally are quite willing to enjoy the expanded rights, freedoms and opportunities that the feminist movement has fought for and won.
Don't think you can fault Meghan Murphy for not being a "true feminist" yet she recognizes the writing on the wall:
MM: "Now, I love criticizing feminists as much as the next guy. I have also done my best to admit to areas in which feminism failed and may have indeed contributed to the current 'confusion' around the difference between men and women."
https://www.meghanmurphy.ca/p/matt-walsh-is-wrong-about-feminism
Same for Abigail Reed:
AR: "That said, Joyce would be mistaken to assert—and she has now clarified in writing that she does not believe—that feminism is entirely blameless. .... There is a critical distinction between those [feminists] who champion equal rights and opportunities for women based on an ethical argument versus those who promote women’s rights based on the argument that men and women are materially indistinguishable."
How about Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, co-authors of "Professing Feminism"? From a review of their book:
FC: "The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
https://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/07/27/professing-feminism-noh/
No doubt that "feminism" -- in general -- has no shortage of justified grievances. However, a great deal of rot in the whole corpus that tends to vitiate the best efforts of the many battling it out in the trenches. Kind of think the last word, for now at least, should go to Kathleen Stock -- doubt you would seriously want to challenge her "true feminist" bona fides, though her arguments aren't without a wart or two:
KS: "Effectively, the stupid story [basically, transgenderism] functions, for mainstream feminism, as a reductio ad absurdum: it reduces most of contemporary feminism to risible absurdity, necessitating urgent reflection on the tenability of prior commitments to explain how the absurdity ever got such a firm grip."
https://kathleenstock.substack.com/p/feminist-reboot-camp
Well done, Ms. Reed. The way to 'square the circle' between traditional and feminist understandings of the difference between the sexes is with the discussion of the individual elements of femininity and masculinity and their characterization as overlapping bell curves. There is no trait typical of masculinity for which one cannot identify a woman who is more "masculine" than the typical male, and vice versa - men are bolder, but there are very bold women; women are more nurturing, but there are very nurturing men. Gender non-conforming people - women who are mathematicians, men who are caregivers - deserve to be treated well and permitted to pursue what is best for them. Yet what began as concern for the equality and opportunity of the outliers quickly became an obsession with the outliers. The social pressure for girls to grow up to be supportive wives has now flipped entirely to the opposite, and that doesn't serve girls any better. Now kids come up in schools where they are ridiculed for being "basic," and are encouraged to seek - or invent - peculiarity within themselves. Malleability to social pressure is itself a trait more typical of the female sex, and thus girls are more susceptible to this pressure, where boys are more alienated by it.
A very level headed and precise analysis of the situation. It is important to recognize that acknowledging behavioral differences between the sexes does not necessarily lead to prescriptive gender roles. We can understand that average differences between the sexes exist and still treat everyone equally and as individuals.
A teenage girl would rather “chop her tits off” than make sandwiches for a man? What planet does this woman live on??? And the language is horrifyingly callous.
Julie, I agree with you. Helen Joyce doesn't know what she's talking about when it comes to "average teenage girls."
Modern feminism (in my mind this is post 2000) as a principle may not be bad. But neither is socialism, as a principle. Or capitalism.
The unintended consequences however are still consequences, and they weren't entirely unforeseen.
At the crux of the issue is something you touched upon which is the idea (that is popular to to hold and is evident in almost all modern writing) that men and women are scarcely different. This idea will admit that biological functions and maybe other obvious characteristics are different, but then proposes that otherwise men and women are basically the same.
So policy is structured around that idea. For policy purposes, it's functional in most cases and ethical. Female firefighters are all good and well, provided they can pass the *same* physical requirements, for example, to not risk losing rescue capacity while on the job relative to men. This seems sensible enough. Equality of opportunity is an ideal state. But the idea that the sexes are barely different has huge knock-on effects.
If sexes they are scarcely different, and they are basically the same, this is what opens the door to gender ideology.
When social/cultural pressures from policy or social norms lessen, biological pressures rise to the top.
Then the differences become painfully apparent, and if someone is 100% committed to the gender ideology, the biological differences become an impediment to this ideal. This gender crowd has noticed this, and is now at war with the last real barrier between the sexes. After all, the sexes are the same except for purely biological reasons related to reproduction only, right? Or so goes the popular argument that I've seen relayed countless times in Hollywood writing, TV, music, and major cultural institutions.
The gender crowd believes that anyone can be anything, and they seem to hate that biology gets in the way. And this is how we end up with gross denial of biological reality.
I've never heard the argument the sexes are barely different or are the same except for reproduction purposes, except from the trans cult. Most males are going to be more likely to meet the requirements for extremely physical jobs that requires moving and lifting heavy gear, like firefighting, but there are some women out there very capable. But then there's medicine, law, math, nursing, etc. It seems the separation by sex in some of these areas has in the past been tied to the level of compensation. Nursing was a "female" occupation while medical school was for males. Both require extensive working hours taking care of patients. Today more males have entered nursing as the pay has risen, and now half of medical students are women. Should both get back to their "proper" gender roles? Ironically, I would say nursing is a much more physical occupation than doctoring, as nurses are moving and turning patients, or even sometimes assaulted by patients. Maybe nursing should be designated a male profession and doctors a female profession.
The argument that the sexes are barely different save for the obvious (reproduction, strength, that stuff) is almost the only version that I've heard growing up and in the schools I've been to. I can only speak for myself here, but that argument seems very popular.
As for jobs, I don't care who does what role? As long as they're competent and can meet certain standards relevant to their specific profession, I really don't care.
Going beyond the obvious differences you listed is difficult as everyone has their own ideas about inborn vs learned traits of males and females. In my mind, there are plenty of other differences, but my view is probably different from your view. That's ok, as long as both men and women have the same rights and protections under the law and also have the same opportunities to prove competence.
"I've never heard the argument the sexes are barely different or are the same except for reproduction purposes, except from the trans cult."
I think it's a generational thing. Many men believed well into the third quarter of the 20th century (as do some today) that women were or are unfit for, incapable of performing well in, too emotional for or otherwise unsuited to a wide number of male dominated professions. In some fields, such as firefighting, women's lack strength, real or perceived, was the disqualifying factor.
As we who live in 2023 know, such attitudes had little or no empirical basis and were instead rooted in prejudice and ignorance. At the time, though, feminists quite understandably argued that men and women were equally capable of performing the same job. Since the contested vocational fields were mainly ones where intellect mattered more than muscles, the unspoken argument was that women were as intellectually capable of being, say, lawyers or engineers, as men.
I understand that as I'm a 1960 female baby. If I dug around enough, I could find a few token older radicals that say the 2 sexes are barely different, but the trans cult has mainstreamed that ideology. I agree with the points you made and I'll add another; men have also been mostly excluded from some spheres that were considered "female." Our youngest went to Montessori Kindergarten His teacher was a male and he was outstanding and much better than the females, but I always perceived the female teachers were actively hostile towards him, as if he was invading their space. There will always be fewer women compared to men in very physical jobs, but the only job exclusive to women will be gestating and nursing infants. That bothers some.
I know what you mean. When I was laid off in the late 90s I thought I'd move from the field of regulatory compliance in banking into HR, which has some similarities. I discovered that HR was a female domain that did not welcome men. The only male HR manager with whom I had an informational interview came right out and said that as a man I'd be an "odd duck" in HR, and wouldn't I prefer to go back to an earlier vocation, the practice of law? In the end I found myself back in bank compliance.
I visited Norway several times in the teens. I was delighted when I saw men working in day care. More than once, when I came across a day care class on an outing where the kids were walking along in pairs, there was a man among adults who were looking after them. Good on them! When couples were out with their babies in strollers, it was always the man who was pushing the stroller. I don't want to read too much into that, but seeing men working with tots was a welcome surprise.
Exactly!
kmick: "I've never heard the argument the sexes are barely different or are the same except for reproduction purposes, except from the trans cult."
Meghan Murphy certainly alludes to the existence of various "feminists" who apparently did precisely that:
MM: "Now, I love criticizing feminists as much as the next guy. I have also done my best to admit to areas in which feminism failed and may have indeed contributed to the current 'confusion' around the difference between men and women. I do think feminism fought too hard to say that women and men were equally as capable in every arena, and to argue that those who denied total and literal equality between the sexes were guilty of — shrieks — 'sexism!' "
https://www.meghanmurphy.ca/p/matt-walsh-is-wrong-about-feminism
Methinks it's not just a bit of hyperbole for Helen Dale and her guest poster, Lorenzo Warby, to argue that the "transcult is the bastard child of feminism":
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/a-common-humanity-or-bust
Well gee SM, I've heard more than a few and various men say "she asked for it." I have done my best to admit to areas where (some) men failed and may have indeed contributed to the current backlash and Trans cult, fighting too hard to keep women in whatever closet they decide to shove them in. I think (some) men tried too hard to then argue all problems in history were caused by - shrieks - THE FEMINISTS. Noah and the floods, The crucifixion of Christ, The fall of Rome, Ivan the Terrible, The terror of Genghis Kahn, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot, Rwanda, Hitler, Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Every single one was started by a FEMINIST hiding under the bed. The trans cult is the child sprouted from the hatred of female, and it's some males (and their adoring handmaidens) enraged at discovering females have brains and they can participate in all aspects of society, including the area where men aren't capable - gestation and nursing. This is driving them hysterically to create the Frankenstein uterus and nipple fluid, something in women that men can't control, except by brute force.
kmick: "... Rwanda, Hitler, Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Every single one was started by a FEMINIST hiding under the bed."
Glad we can agree on that as a starting point ... 😉🙂 But seems a bit of a sore point for you.
Think I've been pretty clear -- multiple times, dozens of times -- in acknowledging "feminism" has more than a few justified grievances; see:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/feminism-or-conservatism-which-is/comment/21825823
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/feminism-or-conservatism-which-is/comment/21666913
And I've likewise taken more than a few shots at Walsh and Company. For example, from the latter comment, my opening salvo which also wound up in a Note:
"But Walsh, in effect, mashes all of those personality traits – the 15 dimensions (and counting) of them that you described -- into the definitions for male and female; he is basically saying that “sex” and “gender” are synonymous. Rather bizarre at best since his view implies that if an adult human male isn’t out raping and pillaging then he’s clearly letting down the team."
Further elaborations on that latter theme here:
https://kaeleytrillerharms.substack.com/p/i-dont-really-want-to-talk-about/comment/18411953
But seems the whole point of Reed's post was to emphasize, quite reasonably, some serious flaws on both sides of the fence. They say that no one complains until it is their own ox being gored, but if everyone gets in a huff and refuses to take any responsibility then I doubt the general problem is going to get fixed.
I agree with you and it doesn't help when a broad group of people are lumped together, or when those outside the foxhole being attacked can't see a problem until a bomb lands on their own foxhole, or as you put it, their ox gets gored. We'll keep going back and forth like a teeter-totter as each "side" backlashes against the other. I was making a point to another reader about the tendency of way too many people to lump women (or blacks) together. For instance, I've never in my 62 years heard someone say "He makes men look bad" when speaking of a white male. But I've heard a zillion times "She makes women look bad" or "He makes blacks look bad." The other reader disputed me but couldn't come up with even one example to disprove me. The very next news article I read was about a hoax kidnapping in Alabama. One of the comments stated "She makes black women look bad." No person of either sex or any color makes the rest of humanity that share their superficial characteristics "look bad." This woman only made herself look bad. https://listverse.com/2019/01/09/10-people-who-faked-their-own-kidnappings/
kmick: "... it doesn't help when a broad group of people are lumped together ..."
Agreed. Maybe I and Helen Dale should have said that the "transcult is the bastard child of some sects of feminism". 😉🙂 But there are some seriously "problematic" aspects to many of them -- some 20 in total at least according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_movements_and_ideologies
I sure don't have much of a handle on all of them, but not sure that women in general have been all that well-served by them. One thing I have read is at least the review of "Professing Feminism" by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge which presumably gives some indication of the rot in many of those sects. An illustrative quote from that review:
FC: "The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
https://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/07/27/professing-feminism-noh/
Not to say that there aren't similar problems on the Walsh side of the equation. Kaeley Harms of "Honest To Goodness" seems to have a couple of solid articles thereon:
https://kaeleytrillerharms.substack.com/p/christian-patriarchy-is-not-the-solution
Going to take some effort to get both sides to consider their "failings", to get more people to take a serious look at what is being peddled by our so-called "leaders" and "experts". Somewhat apropos of which, I wonder where you stand on what seems to be the most sensible and common view that sex and gender are two entirely different kettles of fish. On the view that "gender" is most usefully defined as masculine and feminine personalities, one of the more useful if not brilliant insights to come out of feminism:
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/feminism-gender/#GenFemMasPer
kmick: "... keep going back and forth like a teeter-totter as each 'side' backlashes against the other ..."
Indeed. Until that "teeter-totter" breaks and we're all back at square one. If we're "lucky":
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/nachtgedanken
kmick: "... 'He makes blacks look bad.' ..."
Good point. Wonder whether it's partly due to the size of the subgroup, the extent to which members of them are attached to or identify with that group. Kind of amusing though illuminating case of that in an old bit from black comedian Reginald D. Hunter @13:00 to about @20:00 :
https://youtu.be/QCCUCVAosJU?t=783
He starts off at about the 10 minute mark on racism but then goes into a routine where he asks, "Are you ever embarrassed by your own people sometimes?" And then he answers with a vignette about hearing on the six o’clock news in Georgia, “Robbery and shooting at local bank; details at 11” which he follows up with “Please god, don’t let it be a black guy!” 🙂
Seems we all have an entirely natural tendency to empathize with “our own people”, and to see an attack on any one of that group as an attack on ourselves: “my tribe, right or wrong”, "four legs good, two legs bad" – the cause of no end of grief and difficulties.
What? I have no idea what 'socialism' is since it's been used a million different ways by a million different people, but at least in the Marxist sense it is absolutely evil in principle.
I'm thinking of the socialism-lite version that's used in England or France. Not the murderous mainstream version. Think of it like what people think socialism is ("free" healthcare, etc) vs. what it has historically been.
Right, but it wasn't just the murderousness that was wrong with it. It was wrong in theory too. I'll link something that I wrote before since it's easier that rewriting the same thing over and over: https://sjtucker.substack.com/p/ecocentrism-chapter-2
I'm afraid I have to lay the blame mostly at the feet of third-wave feminism. The problem with blaming conservatives is that no one who is involved in the trans agenda pays any attention to conservatives, but they do pay a lot of attention to feminists.
It seems the eye of the trans hurricane is composed of perverted men in tons of makeup and dresses, with worshipping female acolytes and their pedestal and a few men in black ready to attack any female who doesn't genuflect to these perverts. This is not caused by conservatism, classic liberalism, or females who believe in being full citizens under the law (feminists). Part of the problem with getting to the roots of this fungus is the labeling of an activist ideology as "feminist" just because they call themselves that and are composed of females. It's similar to those who call themselves Christian, but by their actions they demonstrate they have zero faith. The tendency of humans is to try and simplify things. If we can blame the entire dirty contents of the kitchen sink on "feminists," then there's an easy fix; get rid of feminism. Before there were women fighting for equal rights and opportunities under the law, before there were "feminists," I expect it must have been utopia. These male perverts have always been around, and they've always had these nasty females swirling around them to protect them and attack any female who gets out of line, while actual Feminists were working for equality and opportunity under the law. An actual feminist fights for both men and women. We're either equal under the law or we're not.
Thanks for this. Trying to be objective and fair on this subject is harder than balancing on a razor’s edge.
Yes, Matt Walsh is a bigot and a religious nutcase but happens to be right on biology and evolutionary traits.
Yes, Helen Joyce is brilliant but she sounds deranged when she claims that a normal teenage girl would rather cut her tits off than serve a sandwich to man. And how is it that so many women feminists support this and yet feminism is not to be blamed ?
Also, don’t forget:
There is a huge profit motive at work here, both from pharma players and medical professionals
Politicians are pandering whores. How did opposition to mutilation of children get bunched together with gay conversion therapy ?
Postmodernist philosophy contributes as well by rejecting the idea of objective truth (which includes biology)
So much to work with it makes you dizzy...
That was an excellent post and mirrors my thoughts. I am tired of the vilification of the word "feminist," and it's use as an umbrella word to mock any woman with an independent thought. I'm also tired of those who call themselves feminists and then proceed to vilify males. One cannot be a feminist, imo, if one is vilifying males, like those who believe males accused of rape should not be given due process on a college campus. I would also argue one must dislike our Constitution, and the equal protections and rights guaranteed to all, if one is constantly attacking those who don't conform to narrow gender stereotypes.
THIS! 👆👆👆👆👆
“A flawed argument presented by Walsh, in response to Joyce’s podcast interview, claims that the emergence of transgender ideology directly following third-wave feminism serves as evidence that feminism—not longstanding conservative values—caused gender ideology to explode.”
The trans phenomenon in terms of a psychological propensity to fantasize about being a woman may exist independently of trans ideology but only the existence of a trans ideology can provide the intellectual basis from which to conclude that trans women are really women, etc. And that aspect of the ideology owes a great deal to feminism. Also, Walsh’s point about traditional sex roles never having led to trans people in the past, is a devastating point against Joyce.
I lay the problem at the feet of the US Declaration of Independence since this is all about random stabs at explaining an especially corrosive version of the 15-year androgyny cycle (I’m old enough to remember glam rock, unisex, and other versions). In it (Declaration) we read the frankly scary “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” - OMFG! planted in the minds of unsuspecting Americans for hundreds of years. That’s what created “trans women are women”.
Or not.
Thank you for this summary. In her book, as I recall, Helen Joyce quotes the therapist Sasha Ayad saying that her teen girl patients were trying "not to be girls" more than they were seeking to be boys. I think that Joyce is trying to reflect that aspect of teen girl transition, when she quips about teen girls and sandwiches. As for her language choices, I think she is sincere is her anger at teen transition and the risks and loses that come with it. For me, strong language is called for here. The alternative is the euphemism "top surgery" - and all the other misuses of language (like "gender-affirming") that have harmed so many.
Matt Walsh. Is this the same Matt Walsh who has recently been tweeting that feminism is responsible for more deaths than communism, fascism and something something? It isn't fair to Helen Joyce to pair her against a bomb thrower such as Walsh. Surely there must be a more credible advocate for "conservatism," which, by the way, in the context of this essay seems to be a caricature of stereotypical male attitudes and behavior concerning sex and sex roles.
Abortion