“While activists are insistent in presenting the biology of sex as being so complex as to defy all categorization, and categorization itself as a social evil,“
I beg to differ that most of the activists you cite are insistent that categorization itself is a social evil.
The activist woke left is ALL. ABOUT. IDENTITY. POLITICS. Which of cou…
“While activists are insistent in presenting the biology of sex as being so complex as to defy all categorization, and categorization itself as a social evil,“
I beg to differ that most of the activists you cite are insistent that categorization itself is a social evil.
The activist woke left is ALL. ABOUT. IDENTITY. POLITICS. Which of course itself is ENTIRELY. ABOUT. CATEGORIZATION!
Perhaps all you mean is that one of the arguments these particular trans activists make in trying to win this particular case is to mouth/write the words “categorization itself is evil”, but don’t think for a second that they actually believe this, because almost all of them have demonstrated exactly the opposite.
Would that we were so lucky that the woke left stopped all social categorization…
Exactly. The logical fallacy of stating that sex is ambiguous for everyone, and on a spectrum, and therefore meaningless, and then insisting that teenage girls and boys MUST be chemically and surgically altered in dangerously unhealthy ways to appear as (and “be”) the opposite sex, or the will die of depression, and men whom wish they were women must be treated as women, is too obvious to explain.
Yet somehow, activists argue both of these points as if they are consistent. Either there are males and females, and some people desperately wish they were the opposite sex, but are not the opposite sex, and we can discuss how to deal with those wishes, or there is no such a thing as a “sex” and nobody is really male or female, in which case all categories for male and female have to be gone. No women’s sports or bathrooms or changing rooms - just unisex everything. I don’t think too many trans activists want this. “Trans women” want to be treated as women, not as part of a unisex species. My trans identified daughter wants to be treated as a boy. Thus, these people assume the existence of “men” and “women” and “boys” and “girls.” They don’t believe sex is on a spectrum, but just argue it to muddy the waters and justify the right to claim to be the opposite sex - because sex is unclear. But again, if it’s so unclear, what makes a trans woman a woman or a trans man a man? Aren’t they just part of an ambiguous spectrum? None of it makes sense.
The trans-identified men who began seeking gender surgeries during the Nineties were generally very concrete, conventional thinkers regarding sex and femininity. If they liked feminine clothes and had a history of playing more with girls than with boys, they were inclined to think they must be women. These men were not typically very sophisticated or informed about postmodern ideas, and were in most cases not familiar with feminist theory or queer theory. Queer and trans theory was introduced later by trans activists, who found these ideas to be useful in confusing critics of the trans agenda. The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman in terms of traditional sex role stereotypes.
“The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman…”
Sorry, I disagree profoundly that this is the *fundamental* problem when we *now* see at least an order of magnitude more (especially biological females, but substantially more males as well) claiming gender dysphoria than even just 15 years ago.
The fundamental problem is clearly the miseducation of young people on this topic, combined with the willingness of leftists all over the medical and education professions to “affirm” such pronouncements by youth - and of course reinforced by leftist social media, where being LGBTQ++ is cool, while being straight white heteronormative is vilified.
If you persist in reducing the anti-realism of transgender activism to a left ideological conspiracy alone, then you will be wrong for two reasons. First, not all on the left or pro-IP, indeed many like me are highly critical of it for replacing the politics of redistribution with the politics of identity. Second, IP is completely compatible with consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. It is individualistic "cos you're worth it", taking the knee in sports as a cheap empty moralistic gesture etc., and it deflects attention from economic determinants of social injustice. Look how consumer marketing in divided into identity categories. Look at the funding of transgender activism. The list goes on about following the money. This woke left problem is aligned with US individualism post civil rights protests, and sadly has now infected many on the left in Europe. Many of us though are fighting back. This is both an ideological and an economic challenge, with anti-realism being at its centre. Scepticism about that anti-realism is not the preserve of socially conservative critics.
I am not condemning leftists who are not woke above or here.
And I don’t claim to understand UK/European politics sufficiently well to be sure that there is nothing else but woke leftism behind the denial of biology there.
And I don’t claim that all leftists in the U.S. today are woke, as that is not the case, in particular among older leftists.
But you are fooling yourself or denying the reality if you claim that anything other than woke left activism is the primary thing driving the push on trans issues in the U.S. today.
But none of that changes the reality that wokeism is objectively bad for humanity, nor that wokeism is a dominant force, if not *the* dominant force, in American leftist politics today, and that no one in power on the left today is pushing back against it. Some are actively pushing it, the rest simply don’t resist it and certainly do not denounce it. I defy you to show me *any* major U.S. politicians on the left who are denouncing wokeism.
That there is a bigger pushback against woke by European leftists is encouraging. I certainly have seen/heard it re: trans procedures on minors in the U.K. Bravo!
And I hope you are successful. Because until and unless you are, leftism becomes more and more il-liberal every day. The term “cultural Marxism” fits as label for the activist woke agenda is extremely well.
I think I know what you mean. And yet… some fraction - I know not what part - of these massive reported increases in gender dysphoria are actually experiencing “gender dysphoria” because they have convinced themselves that they are, no?
I think that the majority of adolescent and young adult females and perhaps also most of the young males presenting at gender clinics do not have the condition of gender dysphoria that was presented to gender therapists during the Nineties through more recent time. I think that most of the young gender clinic patients have other developmental and psych issues that are causing their symptoms. Outside of the gender clinics, I think that the young people, mostly girls, who are claiming to be various genders and sexual orientations are suffering from confusion induced by their own woke peer culture and its associated adolescent fads, as well as effects of indoctrination by their school systems, and by online trans influencers.
We are in 100% agreement that the overwhelming majority of females, and at least some of the males, “presenting at gender clinics do not have the condition of gender dysphoria that was presented to gender therapists during the Nineties through more recent time.”
You make my point about woke activism and a portion of its terrible effects precisely when you say this.
I actually don’t have all that strong an opinion about trans adults (except re: participation in women’s sports). But these activists are, at least, consistent.
They are consistent that what matters is being woke. The rights of the oppressed LQBTQ++ to do/have whatever is in *their* interest trump the rights of cishetero people, including girls’ and women’s ability to participate in sports.
More importantly, the “rights” of adults to be trans and be recognized as having rights trumps any sanity/circumspection/whatever in terms of what the proper thing to do is for children, including chemical and surgical alterations. Re: almost every other conceivable issue, children are the leftist justification for all sorts of restrictive laws. But in this case, since woke must triumph, we must do the opposite when it comes to children.
The creation of the trans child had to happen to make it more believable that trans is a thing. Now that there is a concept of a ‘trans child’ you have ‘trans adults’ and all these fetishy, AGP men running the world are getting what they want.
You are correct. The trans child is a reification created by activist clinicians. The Cass review in the UK inter alia drew attention to 'diagnostic over-shadowing' whereby gender questioning children from a wide range of biographical backgrounds (including abuse, autism, depression and being gay but with homophobic parents) are all lumped together in one reified grouping. This assumption flows from gender ideology invented by adults. See Moore, M. and Brunskell -Evans H. (eds) Inventing Transgender Children and Young People.
…if you believe the “rights” of the trans “oppressed” justify any means necessary to overcome their “oppressors”, then sure, it is a very acceptable price to sacrifice the health of children towards the goal.
This is what woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical Race Theory teaches. This is what radicals believe. And this is what most leftists gladly go along with today, whether they understand it and truly believe it or not.
Dr. Wright is correct in saying that critical theory activists have argued that categorization is the source of oppression. I believe that Michel Foucault is the critical theorist who developed this idea. He was a French gay man, postmodern philosopher and psychologist. My understanding of Foucault's argument is that people who had sexual behaviors different from the majority were defined by the heterosexual majority as a different kind of person from themselves. The majority then assigned the sexual minority various labels, which concretized their classification as "different." Humans are often intolerant of people perceived as different, so then they devalued those who engaged in homosexual behaviors and created derogatory terms for them.
There is a lot of support for the above set of ideas in a body of social psychological research known as "attribution theory."
You are of course correct in your observation that woke activists are obsessed with categorization, to the extent that they ignore, deny or obfuscate individual differences among members of the groups they define. I think this behavior is completely contrary to Foucault's position, if I understand him correctly. The term "social justice fundamentalism" that is being used increasingly by critics of the woke activists captures the distortion being imposed on the critical theorists' highly abstract formulations.
'Critical theory' is now very elastic and often used by people who are ignorant of its history. (The term 'woke' also has history unaligned with its current usage.) Foucault's radical social constructivism was idealist in a philosophical sense, whereas those initiating critical theory (the Frankfurt School) were Marxist materialists. Only Axel Honneth in recent times as drifted towards the politics of recognition, and his excesses have been tempered by his mentor Jurgen Habermas. Re Foucault himself you are correct in your cautions about his writings. However, I tend to judge him as well by his actions, such as raping children at night in graveyards in his sex tourism to Morocco. Paedophilia and BDSM in his sexual life shaped his academic writings in part.
Thank you for the very interesting and informative post! I agree that most activists do not know the history of critical theory nor have they examined the component ideas critically. Your point about Foucault's philosophy being idealist and the Frankfurt school Marxist materialists is fascinating.
I wasn't interested in these people during the period when I was an activist (1960's through 1980's), even though the New Left was highly influenced by Marcuse. I am a psychologist and as a student I was very interested in Erich Fromm, who was affiliated with the Frankfurt school. I was also smitten with R.D. Laing, who theorized that schizophrenia was something like a construction by the families of such patients (he didn't use constructivist terminology), an idea that I later rejected.
Habermas's ideas have been incredibly popular among psychoanalysts in recent years, but I don't know much at all about him.
What you write about “critical theory activists” and Michael Foucault’s work is interesting. It might even be technically correct. I am much more familiar with “critical theory” from its use in black-white relations and its now expanded use as justification of all oppressor-oppressed theory and in particular the justification of the use of any means necessary for the oppressed to defeat the “oppressors”.
Dr. Wright didn’t specify only “critical theory” activists. And even if he did, my point still stands ~100%: every activist on this topic (I doubt there is even 1 *activist* who does not, but of course it is theoretically possible) is someone who seeks to divide people into identity groups and use those identity groups as justification for all of their political demands and authoritarian government actions.
The only source of the problem is psychiatry, it’s the only “science” which propagates the myth of trans, and it promotes the concept that removing healthy tissue is a treatment for brain possession of the spirit of the wrong sex, and that follow-on treatment should consists of the rest of the world complying with the patients delusion.
Psychiatry has a terrible track record of surgical intervention for mental illness going back to trepanning, forward to lobotomy. It’s medieval quackery masquerading as seriousness.
“Postmodernism”, trans, queer, wokeism, liberalism, Marxism, no ism maintains the concept of trans and gender, only psychiatry was given the legal and medical responsibility and it has failed abjectly, and measurably.
Actually, pediatricians and surgeons have taken the primary role in medically transitioning people. They used to be very onboard with getting at least 2 letters from mental health professionals before prescribing hormones or performing surgeries, but gender surgeons and gender clinics have been progressively pushing their own mental health staff out of the decision making process. Medicine used to be based on biological and medical science, but obviously in this case the science has been defeated by other influences (ideology and monetary interests).
The diagnosis is psychiatric in origin, not physiological; the term gender identity is psychiatric pseudoscience which has to basis in actual medicine or treatment.
Pediatricians and other physicians relying on the pseudoscience of psychiatric gender and trans just supports my observation that psychiatry is the origin and sustaining force behind all of this. The moment psychiatrists say “we were wrong”, it all stops.
I agree that the diagnoses of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria are psychiatric in origin. "Gender incongruence" appears to have been coined by trans activists and was included in the International Classification of Diseases by WHO. They have listed it among the diagnoses of actual illnesses, but have also said they don't believe that people who are "gender incongruent" are in any way abnormal.
My point is that the psychiatric profession no longer has control over the trajectory of the medicalization of people who say they are "transgendered, nonbinary, gender incongruent," etc. The gender clinic whistleblowers who are mental health professionals have said that they were not listened to when they raised questions about patients' mental health issues and treatment, or more commonly lack thereof. Trans activists have focused a lot of energy on changing medical transitions into a series of aggressive cosmetic processes and procedures, and are succeeding in their efforts to end requirements of undergoing psych evals and psychotherapy prior to hormones and surgeries.
The one major change in which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related pseudoscience a condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
No queer studies group lobbied for that. And I’d psychiatry didn’t support it, it wouldnt be a medical condition.
The delusional shouldn’t define their condition, and the requirement for the world to pretend to recognize the delusion is real. Psychiatrists mandate this.
Astonishing. And, they get paid by insurers to do so!
Yes, you are right about the role of insurance coverage. I didn't know about the role of the ACA coverage---thanks for posting that history! Trans activists made insurance coverage a central goal of their lobbying efforts immediately after the "sexual reassignment surgeries" started achieving good cosmetic outcomes for male patients.
The American Psychiatric Association has been very influenced by radical cultural trends when it revises the DSM, and now the WHO is even more radical. The ongoing revisions in the gender identity diagnoses, now non-diagnoses, are blatantly not based in science.
The classic disaster is R.D. Laings efforts to eliminate psychosis and schizophrenia as illnesses in the 60’s and 70’s dovetailed with the elimination in early 80’s of SRO (single room occupancy) housing for the disturbed via Regan tax break eliminations thus routing hundred of thousands of disturbed people into homelessness over the last 40 years. In his case it was “existential philosophy” and disbelief that the two conditions could be organic (hint: neurotransmitters). Coincidentally he also worked at Tavistock the apparent epicenter of quack psychiatry in the UK.
Currently we can see this in two forms - trans, and autism. Trans is fighting to completely remove the delusion as an issue; autism is fighting to have legitimate autism protected as a condition. Self-diagnosis of autism trivializes a condition which when severe becomes lifelong institutionalization. I recently had a good friend who was autistic commit suicide, I have been attempting to understand him for years.
That delusional people can influence the gatekeepers is evidence that the system is corrupted. As always there a Star Trek episode for that “Whom Gods Destroy”
Laing was a psychoanalyst and advocate of conversation over biomedicalisation. His link with the Tavistock is spurious for recent debates. GIDS, now closed there, was completely out of sync with the rest of the clinic and it was whistleblowers from the older psychoanalytical tradition there that first triggered the story coming out of a clinical scandal. See Hannah Barnes' book 'Time to Think'. Her and Hilary Cass have between them exposed the full story, if those in the US want to track it in detail. Both have been vilified and threatened here in the UK by trans activists but the latter are losing the battle. The Cass recommendations are being implemented and puberty blockers have been banned. by the incoming Labour government. Sadly in the US the Democrats are trans captured so it may take Trump to do the business for your sadly divided country.
I wish that the medical and psychological associations in the U.S. would embrace the Cass Review as the excellent scientific piece of work that it is. Alas, the leadership of our scientific associations here have been absorbed into the anti-realist identitarian movement and may not ever emerge from it.
Interesting that you bring up R. D. Laing, I was interested in his thinking when I was a grad student. I don't recall who the people were who influenced him, but I can easily see now the similarity of his perspective to that of Michel Foucault. And of course Thomas Szasz. The campaign to tear down psych hospitals and turn mentally ill people onto the street was one of the most destructive movements in the 20th century.
I am very sorry to hear about your friend. The loss of a friend through death is deeply painful, and usually even more difficult if the friend died by his own hand.
It is always a pleasure to talk you. I will look forward to future opportunities.
We are of similar age, I read RD Laing as a undergrad at Caltech.
I also had sex with sex researchers from Johns Hopkins and Harvard [that’s my tiresome episodic memory, I can tell you where (behind a bookstore on Santa Monica boulevard called Circus of Books) and how and what happened and how I felt) and later got an interesting lectures in bed on the hideous Dr. Money from a colleague of Money (did you know there are three sexualities? Lust, limerant and attachment, and then intellectual, social, emotional, platonic varieties… of those… then trans and cis and homosexual and heterosexual… variants? These people exist to create endless permutations in an exercise of complicating obvious ideas to see what sticks, then build data to support. Color me unconvinced).
And then there was when I was fucking (pardon vulgarity) the head of UCLA psychiatry in his Bel Air house. He was very sexy professor daddy handsome, you know the type, conservative, just barely out of reach, but tempting and horny, big dick and hairy chest… you know, pure gay version of Danielle Steel carnip. Tweed jackets, honestly. No pipe.
Then he made a fatal error (those characters always do, right?) He gave me an APBN (American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology) exam for fun - board certification that one could practice psychiatry I suppose in California. We’re talking 1983, we were cozy in his home office, we had been to Santa Monica for lunch in his ivory colored Mercedes ( he was inordinately cathected to) I sat at a sort of artificial Louis 15th desk, one Saturday afternoon and took it.
I enjoy taking tests. Especially peculiar verbal ones, “Woman admitted, presenting dissociative identity disorder and incomplete cathexis of death of small pekinese…” (Oh she was of two minds about her dog, it was annoying but she loved it).
1600 SAT, 36 ACT, Merit Scholar. Watson Fellow, it’s fun to test.
I scored sufficiently to be a certified psychiatrist with one exception, I missed a couple of questions on drug names, I only knew brand names (of course I should have known Thorazine was Chlorpromazine - I do now.)
Naturally he was horrified for many reasons, and I through it was inappropriate to do psychiatric assessments at our stage of fucking. I wasn’t even 20.
He probably should have waited past the 10th fuck for psych exams, and be prepared for someone who finds them trivial. I mean he was head of UCLA psych school.
He couldn’t believe someone could simple reward books from childhood and correlate and synthesize sufficient wisdom for the practicum section( as opposed to recall) I have that effect on men.
That’s why I’m negative on psychiatry and offshoots. What’s certified is childishly simple and obvious, I tend to attract psychiatrists and psychologists and learn dark things, and I find them all simply writer-manque.
The current APBN I’m sure has current nonsense on gender. and little on poor adjustment to puberty.
I agree-biomedicalization has been an inter-disciplinary enterprise. In the UK and Holland it has been driven actually by clinical psychology (my profession) and the catastrophe of the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London was led by psychologists not psychiatrists. The discussion here though is broadly in agreement that functional psychiatric diagnoses are all logically flawed and that psychiatry has had it fair share of 'great and desperate cures' (from John Bunyan on medical arrogance) from ECT and psychosurgery to anti-depressants and major tranquillizers.
I accept your point that psychiatry is the *original* source of “the problem” as you describe it, but I respectfully strongly disagree that it is the *only* source of the problem.
DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology that states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors” is a *major* source of the problem.
This immoral ideology is also, e.g. the cause of about 50% of 18-24 year olds in this country (and no doubt a FAR higher percentage on college campuses) choosing “Back Hamas” (even when given 3 choices, including one to stay out of it) in the wake of the baby-decapitating, rapist murder and hostage rampage in Israel Oct 7th - and think themselves “virtuous” in the process.
This ideology is immoral, it is wrong, and it is dangerous. And IMO it very much is contributing to the issues we face here.
All that said, please be clear that I applaud Dr. Wright for the stand he has taken. He is doing important work.
I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? Simply because in some instances the child is and effeminate gay male and the father can’t tolerate it, with full cooperation of medicine.
The moment psychiatry halts the pseudoscience, you can’t get paid to recognize it.
There are no insured treatments: genital mutilation (treatment) becomes genital mutilation (abomination) like circumcision (utterly unnecessary).
That’s because the center of gravity shifts to saying the people _advocating_ the concepts of trans and gender are delusional. Until then, the people who _refuse_ to accept the psychiatric concepts are delusional, since we must accept psychiatry as the last word on human emotional and cognitive health.
The idea that those who oppose are delusional, all others are consistent with “medical best practice”. It’s the classic Catch-22 - only delusional people can say the situation is that of a delusion.
Here’s an example of what I mean: one major change which accelerated the trans this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
It wasn’t a course on critical theory at Columbia, or postmodernism in Berkeley; it wasn’t GLAAD or Queer theory, or even trans activists shouting down women.
It was simply a lobby which introduced the idea that trans was a legitimate condition, gender treatment was a legitimate _billable_ concept and there you go.
“I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? ”
Of course I do, as I’ve made clear.
The difference between us is that you seem certain that this - problem and solution - is solely about psychiatry, with a little bit about Obamacare laws, while I believe whatever the initial cause, it is now primarily about activist woke leftist politics.
Consider that psychiatric texts where taught “gender identity” throughout the US and Canada for decades - even after the principal pedagogical exponent Dr. John Money he was exposed as a scientific fraud in 2000, who committed surgical and psychological atrocities on children.
Decades of psychiatrists and other medical doctors are taught that gender is a real concept, that one can alter the sex of a child surgically and it will hold through life through based on a fraudulent “twin study” and “other studies” originated by at least one delusional physician.
All psychiatry has to do is
repudiate the concept of “gender identity” as a pseudoscience lacking any basis in reality
repudiate that sex can be changed surgically
Repudiate that children’s gendered behaviors can be altered through surgery or chemical castration
Repudiate that sex delusions can be treated by requiring that all other people globally accommodate the delusion
Repudiate the idea that surgical removal of sex organs for people who hate their organs is a legitimate treatment
That’s all.
Psychiatry hasn’t even unequivocally stated (well, meaningful American psychiatric groups) that homosexual sex behaviors cannot be extirpated.
Psychiatry going back 100 years or more preferred to “treat” homosexuals through castration and emasculation for them to “live as a woman”, and that was preferable to existing as a homosexual. Psychiatry in Nazi Germany, contemporary Iran, and those supporting “mermaids” and “Jazz Jennings” is fairly united.
The moment psychiatry grasps that the last 24 years have falsified the entire basis of their concepts suddenly the tide turns.
Delusional activists can howl all they want, but they don’t make medical diagnoses, treatments, and set laws.
Psychiatry lost all control when half the country’s states forbade psychiatric atrocities.
They can either get with the program or fold shop.
Again just for historical clarity, psychiatrists began the gatekeeping function for transsexualism in the 1970s but compassionate tolerance for the latter was mainly promoted initially in the 1960s by the sexologist and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin. His name went on the precursor of the WPATH guidelines. He was not a psychiatrist. Today the gate keeping role in the UK is ambiguous: it was from GPs and social workers but it keep shifting presumably it may vary from state to state in the USA. If you go on the CAN-SG website (a group I am member of) it contains many psychiatrists who are gender critical. I am glad that people on this blog are offering views on history, and in particular epistemology in its historical context. But to get that history correct the facts claimed need to be persuasive.
During the Nineties through about 2015 I worked with adult males who presented "gender" issues. (Most were on the transvestic fetishist spectrum). I followed the Harry Benjamin standard of care for the few of these clients who ultimately decided they wanted to transition.
The majority of people who requested my psychological services were trying to get approval letters for hormones and surgeries. They would tell the clinicians anything they thought would help them to get these documents. I stopped working with people whose request for my services was based on "gender issues," because I didn't want to work with the letter seekers and couldn't figure our how to help the fetishists.
Critical Theory defines all categorization as a social construct. The idea of an objective physical category is completely rejected.
Queer Theory generally works to dismantle ANY category of "normal." Ironically, this is why they've gotten so homophobic lately: it's now normal and unremarkable to be in a same sex relationship.
Any "marginalized" category, of course, is sacred.
I use AIs to write books and one I came up with was the emergence of Satyrs and Maenads who celebrate pleasures of the flesh within their groups. A craze that spreads in the US and world.
The Maenads had to go underground because during the frenzied madness of their ecstatic journey they tended to rent the flesh and limbs off men to protect themselves. The Bacchae of Euripides.
Last few chapters are in the oven, one is a harvest festival in Sonoma, a naked Ted Talk, and a book tour by the founder.
Satyr and Maenad freedom!
Both were vigorously opposed by the rainies, the sad rainbow people who wished to sterilize everyone and deny everyone pleasure of the flesh, they wish to conform.
I sympathise with your frustration but for accuracy, identity politics is not only about the woke left. Many on the left are defying the absurdities of anti-realism and the ever elastic politics of recognition. For example most of the resistance to transgender ideology in the UK has come from second wave feminists and scientific realists who are left wing. Also the right expresses its own form of IP (Trumpism, Hindu nationalism, xenophobic Brexiteers etc). I have explored this ambiguity about the political spectrum presence of IP in my book 'Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?'. Also note that key critics of the woke distortions on the left like Andrew Doyle still uphold values of the left. Nancy Fraser is another example from the USA.
“identity politics is not only about the woke left.”
As I am no expert about Europe, I will accept your assertion that THERE identity politics, and in particular what is going on re: trans “rights”, is not about the woke left. But your assertion is simply NOT true in the U.S.
Separately, Trumpism is NOT identity politics. I defy you to name the “identity” that is analogous to race, gender, religion, LGBTQ++ status to which it supposedly applies. You cannot do it. It is NOT. AT. ALL the same thing. And as you well know, a part of it - but only a part - is an explicit reaction to woke policies that seek to divide and create a spoils system based on identity.
And I do know enough about Europe to know that while there is zero doubt that *some* of the Brexiteers are just xenophobic white nationalists, most are not. So if your claim is that Brexiteers are an identity group (unclear from your comment, but very strongly implied), then I am forced to conclude that even for Europe your assertion is wrong, as there are very many Brexiteers who value freedom and are not white nationalists.
Re: your last point, yes there are indeed a precious few who identify as left (almost exclusively older people, most of whom either do not realize that they are voting for il-liberals when they continue to vote for the leftist Dem Party in the U.S., or do and undercut much of their own criticism when they do) who criticize woke. Bill Maher is another one. But their voices have been completely drowned out in the U.S., and in particular have zero influence in Dem party policy today.
“While activists are insistent in presenting the biology of sex as being so complex as to defy all categorization, and categorization itself as a social evil,“
I beg to differ that most of the activists you cite are insistent that categorization itself is a social evil.
The activist woke left is ALL. ABOUT. IDENTITY. POLITICS. Which of course itself is ENTIRELY. ABOUT. CATEGORIZATION!
Perhaps all you mean is that one of the arguments these particular trans activists make in trying to win this particular case is to mouth/write the words “categorization itself is evil”, but don’t think for a second that they actually believe this, because almost all of them have demonstrated exactly the opposite.
Would that we were so lucky that the woke left stopped all social categorization…
Exactly. The logical fallacy of stating that sex is ambiguous for everyone, and on a spectrum, and therefore meaningless, and then insisting that teenage girls and boys MUST be chemically and surgically altered in dangerously unhealthy ways to appear as (and “be”) the opposite sex, or the will die of depression, and men whom wish they were women must be treated as women, is too obvious to explain.
Yet somehow, activists argue both of these points as if they are consistent. Either there are males and females, and some people desperately wish they were the opposite sex, but are not the opposite sex, and we can discuss how to deal with those wishes, or there is no such a thing as a “sex” and nobody is really male or female, in which case all categories for male and female have to be gone. No women’s sports or bathrooms or changing rooms - just unisex everything. I don’t think too many trans activists want this. “Trans women” want to be treated as women, not as part of a unisex species. My trans identified daughter wants to be treated as a boy. Thus, these people assume the existence of “men” and “women” and “boys” and “girls.” They don’t believe sex is on a spectrum, but just argue it to muddy the waters and justify the right to claim to be the opposite sex - because sex is unclear. But again, if it’s so unclear, what makes a trans woman a woman or a trans man a man? Aren’t they just part of an ambiguous spectrum? None of it makes sense.
The trans-identified men who began seeking gender surgeries during the Nineties were generally very concrete, conventional thinkers regarding sex and femininity. If they liked feminine clothes and had a history of playing more with girls than with boys, they were inclined to think they must be women. These men were not typically very sophisticated or informed about postmodern ideas, and were in most cases not familiar with feminist theory or queer theory. Queer and trans theory was introduced later by trans activists, who found these ideas to be useful in confusing critics of the trans agenda. The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman in terms of traditional sex role stereotypes.
“The fundamental problem of gender dysphoric people, however, continues to be concrete, rigidly binary, conventional conceptions about what it means to be a man or woman…”
Sorry, I disagree profoundly that this is the *fundamental* problem when we *now* see at least an order of magnitude more (especially biological females, but substantially more males as well) claiming gender dysphoria than even just 15 years ago.
The fundamental problem is clearly the miseducation of young people on this topic, combined with the willingness of leftists all over the medical and education professions to “affirm” such pronouncements by youth - and of course reinforced by leftist social media, where being LGBTQ++ is cool, while being straight white heteronormative is vilified.
If you persist in reducing the anti-realism of transgender activism to a left ideological conspiracy alone, then you will be wrong for two reasons. First, not all on the left or pro-IP, indeed many like me are highly critical of it for replacing the politics of redistribution with the politics of identity. Second, IP is completely compatible with consumer capitalism and neoliberalism. It is individualistic "cos you're worth it", taking the knee in sports as a cheap empty moralistic gesture etc., and it deflects attention from economic determinants of social injustice. Look how consumer marketing in divided into identity categories. Look at the funding of transgender activism. The list goes on about following the money. This woke left problem is aligned with US individualism post civil rights protests, and sadly has now infected many on the left in Europe. Many of us though are fighting back. This is both an ideological and an economic challenge, with anti-realism being at its centre. Scepticism about that anti-realism is not the preserve of socially conservative critics.
Feel free to be a leftist.
I am not condemning leftists who are not woke above or here.
And I don’t claim to understand UK/European politics sufficiently well to be sure that there is nothing else but woke leftism behind the denial of biology there.
And I don’t claim that all leftists in the U.S. today are woke, as that is not the case, in particular among older leftists.
But you are fooling yourself or denying the reality if you claim that anything other than woke left activism is the primary thing driving the push on trans issues in the U.S. today.
But none of that changes the reality that wokeism is objectively bad for humanity, nor that wokeism is a dominant force, if not *the* dominant force, in American leftist politics today, and that no one in power on the left today is pushing back against it. Some are actively pushing it, the rest simply don’t resist it and certainly do not denounce it. I defy you to show me *any* major U.S. politicians on the left who are denouncing wokeism.
That there is a bigger pushback against woke by European leftists is encouraging. I certainly have seen/heard it re: trans procedures on minors in the U.K. Bravo!
And I hope you are successful. Because until and unless you are, leftism becomes more and more il-liberal every day. The term “cultural Marxism” fits as label for the activist woke agenda is extremely well.
My comment was in regard to people who are actually experiencing gender dysphoria.
I think I know what you mean. And yet… some fraction - I know not what part - of these massive reported increases in gender dysphoria are actually experiencing “gender dysphoria” because they have convinced themselves that they are, no?
I think that the majority of adolescent and young adult females and perhaps also most of the young males presenting at gender clinics do not have the condition of gender dysphoria that was presented to gender therapists during the Nineties through more recent time. I think that most of the young gender clinic patients have other developmental and psych issues that are causing their symptoms. Outside of the gender clinics, I think that the young people, mostly girls, who are claiming to be various genders and sexual orientations are suffering from confusion induced by their own woke peer culture and its associated adolescent fads, as well as effects of indoctrination by their school systems, and by online trans influencers.
We are in 100% agreement that the overwhelming majority of females, and at least some of the males, “presenting at gender clinics do not have the condition of gender dysphoria that was presented to gender therapists during the Nineties through more recent time.”
You make my point about woke activism and a portion of its terrible effects precisely when you say this.
I actually don’t have all that strong an opinion about trans adults (except re: participation in women’s sports). But these activists are, at least, consistent.
They are consistent that what matters is being woke. The rights of the oppressed LQBTQ++ to do/have whatever is in *their* interest trump the rights of cishetero people, including girls’ and women’s ability to participate in sports.
More importantly, the “rights” of adults to be trans and be recognized as having rights trumps any sanity/circumspection/whatever in terms of what the proper thing to do is for children, including chemical and surgical alterations. Re: almost every other conceivable issue, children are the leftist justification for all sorts of restrictive laws. But in this case, since woke must triumph, we must do the opposite when it comes to children.
The creation of the trans child had to happen to make it more believable that trans is a thing. Now that there is a concept of a ‘trans child’ you have ‘trans adults’ and all these fetishy, AGP men running the world are getting what they want.
You are correct. The trans child is a reification created by activist clinicians. The Cass review in the UK inter alia drew attention to 'diagnostic over-shadowing' whereby gender questioning children from a wide range of biographical backgrounds (including abuse, autism, depression and being gay but with homophobic parents) are all lumped together in one reified grouping. This assumption flows from gender ideology invented by adults. See Moore, M. and Brunskell -Evans H. (eds) Inventing Transgender Children and Young People.
…if you believe the “rights” of the trans “oppressed” justify any means necessary to overcome their “oppressors”, then sure, it is a very acceptable price to sacrifice the health of children towards the goal.
This is what woke / DEI / intersectionality / Critical Race Theory teaches. This is what radicals believe. And this is what most leftists gladly go along with today, whether they understand it and truly believe it or not.
Dr. Wright is correct in saying that critical theory activists have argued that categorization is the source of oppression. I believe that Michel Foucault is the critical theorist who developed this idea. He was a French gay man, postmodern philosopher and psychologist. My understanding of Foucault's argument is that people who had sexual behaviors different from the majority were defined by the heterosexual majority as a different kind of person from themselves. The majority then assigned the sexual minority various labels, which concretized their classification as "different." Humans are often intolerant of people perceived as different, so then they devalued those who engaged in homosexual behaviors and created derogatory terms for them.
There is a lot of support for the above set of ideas in a body of social psychological research known as "attribution theory."
You are of course correct in your observation that woke activists are obsessed with categorization, to the extent that they ignore, deny or obfuscate individual differences among members of the groups they define. I think this behavior is completely contrary to Foucault's position, if I understand him correctly. The term "social justice fundamentalism" that is being used increasingly by critics of the woke activists captures the distortion being imposed on the critical theorists' highly abstract formulations.
'Critical theory' is now very elastic and often used by people who are ignorant of its history. (The term 'woke' also has history unaligned with its current usage.) Foucault's radical social constructivism was idealist in a philosophical sense, whereas those initiating critical theory (the Frankfurt School) were Marxist materialists. Only Axel Honneth in recent times as drifted towards the politics of recognition, and his excesses have been tempered by his mentor Jurgen Habermas. Re Foucault himself you are correct in your cautions about his writings. However, I tend to judge him as well by his actions, such as raping children at night in graveyards in his sex tourism to Morocco. Paedophilia and BDSM in his sexual life shaped his academic writings in part.
Ps Tunisia not Morocco See interview with Guy Sorman in the Sunday Times March 2021
Thank you for the very interesting and informative post! I agree that most activists do not know the history of critical theory nor have they examined the component ideas critically. Your point about Foucault's philosophy being idealist and the Frankfurt school Marxist materialists is fascinating.
I wasn't interested in these people during the period when I was an activist (1960's through 1980's), even though the New Left was highly influenced by Marcuse. I am a psychologist and as a student I was very interested in Erich Fromm, who was affiliated with the Frankfurt school. I was also smitten with R.D. Laing, who theorized that schizophrenia was something like a construction by the families of such patients (he didn't use constructivist terminology), an idea that I later rejected.
Habermas's ideas have been incredibly popular among psychoanalysts in recent years, but I don't know much at all about him.
What you write about “critical theory activists” and Michael Foucault’s work is interesting. It might even be technically correct. I am much more familiar with “critical theory” from its use in black-white relations and its now expanded use as justification of all oppressor-oppressed theory and in particular the justification of the use of any means necessary for the oppressed to defeat the “oppressors”.
Dr. Wright didn’t specify only “critical theory” activists. And even if he did, my point still stands ~100%: every activist on this topic (I doubt there is even 1 *activist* who does not, but of course it is theoretically possible) is someone who seeks to divide people into identity groups and use those identity groups as justification for all of their political demands and authoritarian government actions.
Completely agree with your second paragraph.
The only source of the problem is psychiatry, it’s the only “science” which propagates the myth of trans, and it promotes the concept that removing healthy tissue is a treatment for brain possession of the spirit of the wrong sex, and that follow-on treatment should consists of the rest of the world complying with the patients delusion.
Psychiatry has a terrible track record of surgical intervention for mental illness going back to trepanning, forward to lobotomy. It’s medieval quackery masquerading as seriousness.
“Postmodernism”, trans, queer, wokeism, liberalism, Marxism, no ism maintains the concept of trans and gender, only psychiatry was given the legal and medical responsibility and it has failed abjectly, and measurably.
Actually, pediatricians and surgeons have taken the primary role in medically transitioning people. They used to be very onboard with getting at least 2 letters from mental health professionals before prescribing hormones or performing surgeries, but gender surgeons and gender clinics have been progressively pushing their own mental health staff out of the decision making process. Medicine used to be based on biological and medical science, but obviously in this case the science has been defeated by other influences (ideology and monetary interests).
The diagnosis is psychiatric in origin, not physiological; the term gender identity is psychiatric pseudoscience which has to basis in actual medicine or treatment.
Pediatricians and other physicians relying on the pseudoscience of psychiatric gender and trans just supports my observation that psychiatry is the origin and sustaining force behind all of this. The moment psychiatrists say “we were wrong”, it all stops.
I agree that the diagnoses of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria are psychiatric in origin. "Gender incongruence" appears to have been coined by trans activists and was included in the International Classification of Diseases by WHO. They have listed it among the diagnoses of actual illnesses, but have also said they don't believe that people who are "gender incongruent" are in any way abnormal.
My point is that the psychiatric profession no longer has control over the trajectory of the medicalization of people who say they are "transgendered, nonbinary, gender incongruent," etc. The gender clinic whistleblowers who are mental health professionals have said that they were not listened to when they raised questions about patients' mental health issues and treatment, or more commonly lack thereof. Trans activists have focused a lot of energy on changing medical transitions into a series of aggressive cosmetic processes and procedures, and are succeeding in their efforts to end requirements of undergoing psych evals and psychotherapy prior to hormones and surgeries.
The one major change in which accelerated this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related pseudoscience a condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
No queer studies group lobbied for that. And I’d psychiatry didn’t support it, it wouldnt be a medical condition.
The delusional shouldn’t define their condition, and the requirement for the world to pretend to recognize the delusion is real. Psychiatrists mandate this.
Astonishing. And, they get paid by insurers to do so!
Yes, you are right about the role of insurance coverage. I didn't know about the role of the ACA coverage---thanks for posting that history! Trans activists made insurance coverage a central goal of their lobbying efforts immediately after the "sexual reassignment surgeries" started achieving good cosmetic outcomes for male patients.
The American Psychiatric Association has been very influenced by radical cultural trends when it revises the DSM, and now the WHO is even more radical. The ongoing revisions in the gender identity diagnoses, now non-diagnoses, are blatantly not based in science.
You’re spot on.
The classic disaster is R.D. Laings efforts to eliminate psychosis and schizophrenia as illnesses in the 60’s and 70’s dovetailed with the elimination in early 80’s of SRO (single room occupancy) housing for the disturbed via Regan tax break eliminations thus routing hundred of thousands of disturbed people into homelessness over the last 40 years. In his case it was “existential philosophy” and disbelief that the two conditions could be organic (hint: neurotransmitters). Coincidentally he also worked at Tavistock the apparent epicenter of quack psychiatry in the UK.
Currently we can see this in two forms - trans, and autism. Trans is fighting to completely remove the delusion as an issue; autism is fighting to have legitimate autism protected as a condition. Self-diagnosis of autism trivializes a condition which when severe becomes lifelong institutionalization. I recently had a good friend who was autistic commit suicide, I have been attempting to understand him for years.
That delusional people can influence the gatekeepers is evidence that the system is corrupted. As always there a Star Trek episode for that “Whom Gods Destroy”
Good conversation thank you.
Laing was a psychoanalyst and advocate of conversation over biomedicalisation. His link with the Tavistock is spurious for recent debates. GIDS, now closed there, was completely out of sync with the rest of the clinic and it was whistleblowers from the older psychoanalytical tradition there that first triggered the story coming out of a clinical scandal. See Hannah Barnes' book 'Time to Think'. Her and Hilary Cass have between them exposed the full story, if those in the US want to track it in detail. Both have been vilified and threatened here in the UK by trans activists but the latter are losing the battle. The Cass recommendations are being implemented and puberty blockers have been banned. by the incoming Labour government. Sadly in the US the Democrats are trans captured so it may take Trump to do the business for your sadly divided country.
I wish that the medical and psychological associations in the U.S. would embrace the Cass Review as the excellent scientific piece of work that it is. Alas, the leadership of our scientific associations here have been absorbed into the anti-realist identitarian movement and may not ever emerge from it.
Interesting that you bring up R. D. Laing, I was interested in his thinking when I was a grad student. I don't recall who the people were who influenced him, but I can easily see now the similarity of his perspective to that of Michel Foucault. And of course Thomas Szasz. The campaign to tear down psych hospitals and turn mentally ill people onto the street was one of the most destructive movements in the 20th century.
I am very sorry to hear about your friend. The loss of a friend through death is deeply painful, and usually even more difficult if the friend died by his own hand.
It is always a pleasure to talk you. I will look forward to future opportunities.
We are of similar age, I read RD Laing as a undergrad at Caltech.
I also had sex with sex researchers from Johns Hopkins and Harvard [that’s my tiresome episodic memory, I can tell you where (behind a bookstore on Santa Monica boulevard called Circus of Books) and how and what happened and how I felt) and later got an interesting lectures in bed on the hideous Dr. Money from a colleague of Money (did you know there are three sexualities? Lust, limerant and attachment, and then intellectual, social, emotional, platonic varieties… of those… then trans and cis and homosexual and heterosexual… variants? These people exist to create endless permutations in an exercise of complicating obvious ideas to see what sticks, then build data to support. Color me unconvinced).
And then there was when I was fucking (pardon vulgarity) the head of UCLA psychiatry in his Bel Air house. He was very sexy professor daddy handsome, you know the type, conservative, just barely out of reach, but tempting and horny, big dick and hairy chest… you know, pure gay version of Danielle Steel carnip. Tweed jackets, honestly. No pipe.
Then he made a fatal error (those characters always do, right?) He gave me an APBN (American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology) exam for fun - board certification that one could practice psychiatry I suppose in California. We’re talking 1983, we were cozy in his home office, we had been to Santa Monica for lunch in his ivory colored Mercedes ( he was inordinately cathected to) I sat at a sort of artificial Louis 15th desk, one Saturday afternoon and took it.
I enjoy taking tests. Especially peculiar verbal ones, “Woman admitted, presenting dissociative identity disorder and incomplete cathexis of death of small pekinese…” (Oh she was of two minds about her dog, it was annoying but she loved it).
1600 SAT, 36 ACT, Merit Scholar. Watson Fellow, it’s fun to test.
I scored sufficiently to be a certified psychiatrist with one exception, I missed a couple of questions on drug names, I only knew brand names (of course I should have known Thorazine was Chlorpromazine - I do now.)
Naturally he was horrified for many reasons, and I through it was inappropriate to do psychiatric assessments at our stage of fucking. I wasn’t even 20.
He probably should have waited past the 10th fuck for psych exams, and be prepared for someone who finds them trivial. I mean he was head of UCLA psych school.
He couldn’t believe someone could simple reward books from childhood and correlate and synthesize sufficient wisdom for the practicum section( as opposed to recall) I have that effect on men.
That’s why I’m negative on psychiatry and offshoots. What’s certified is childishly simple and obvious, I tend to attract psychiatrists and psychologists and learn dark things, and I find them all simply writer-manque.
The current APBN I’m sure has current nonsense on gender. and little on poor adjustment to puberty.
As always, Sufeitzy, you are very amusing and erudite. I'm sure you are a delightful guest at any dinner party.
I agree-biomedicalization has been an inter-disciplinary enterprise. In the UK and Holland it has been driven actually by clinical psychology (my profession) and the catastrophe of the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London was led by psychologists not psychiatrists. The discussion here though is broadly in agreement that functional psychiatric diagnoses are all logically flawed and that psychiatry has had it fair share of 'great and desperate cures' (from John Bunyan on medical arrogance) from ECT and psychosurgery to anti-depressants and major tranquillizers.
I accept your point that psychiatry is the *original* source of “the problem” as you describe it, but I respectfully strongly disagree that it is the *only* source of the problem.
DEI / intersectionality / woke / Critical race theory oppressor-oppressed ideology that states that evil rich male Christian (and Jewish, where applicable) white capitalists are responsible for all evil - and little good - in the world, and that the BiPoC and/or LGBTQ+++ “oppressed” are justified in using *any* means at all to overthrow their “oppressors” is a *major* source of the problem.
This immoral ideology is also, e.g. the cause of about 50% of 18-24 year olds in this country (and no doubt a FAR higher percentage on college campuses) choosing “Back Hamas” (even when given 3 choices, including one to stay out of it) in the wake of the baby-decapitating, rapist murder and hostage rampage in Israel Oct 7th - and think themselves “virtuous” in the process.
This ideology is immoral, it is wrong, and it is dangerous. And IMO it very much is contributing to the issues we face here.
All that said, please be clear that I applaud Dr. Wright for the stand he has taken. He is doing important work.
I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? Simply because in some instances the child is and effeminate gay male and the father can’t tolerate it, with full cooperation of medicine.
The moment psychiatry halts the pseudoscience, you can’t get paid to recognize it.
There are no insured treatments: genital mutilation (treatment) becomes genital mutilation (abomination) like circumcision (utterly unnecessary).
That’s because the center of gravity shifts to saying the people _advocating_ the concepts of trans and gender are delusional. Until then, the people who _refuse_ to accept the psychiatric concepts are delusional, since we must accept psychiatry as the last word on human emotional and cognitive health.
The idea that those who oppose are delusional, all others are consistent with “medical best practice”. It’s the classic Catch-22 - only delusional people can say the situation is that of a delusion.
Here’s an example of what I mean: one major change which accelerated the trans this phenomenon in the US in 2010 was not the iPhone or social media but but was the Affordable Care Act,
Section 1557 which made paying for the diagnosis and treatment of gender-related condition of being able to offer insurance in the US.
It wasn’t a course on critical theory at Columbia, or postmodernism in Berkeley; it wasn’t GLAAD or Queer theory, or even trans activists shouting down women.
It was simply a lobby which introduced the idea that trans was a legitimate condition, gender treatment was a legitimate _billable_ concept and there you go.
“I view it as a problem when a pseudoscience captures children and surgically and chemically extirpates their sexual organs. Don’t you? ”
Of course I do, as I’ve made clear.
The difference between us is that you seem certain that this - problem and solution - is solely about psychiatry, with a little bit about Obamacare laws, while I believe whatever the initial cause, it is now primarily about activist woke leftist politics.
Psychiatry is the gatekeeping function.
Consider that psychiatric texts where taught “gender identity” throughout the US and Canada for decades - even after the principal pedagogical exponent Dr. John Money he was exposed as a scientific fraud in 2000, who committed surgical and psychological atrocities on children.
Decades of psychiatrists and other medical doctors are taught that gender is a real concept, that one can alter the sex of a child surgically and it will hold through life through based on a fraudulent “twin study” and “other studies” originated by at least one delusional physician.
All psychiatry has to do is
repudiate the concept of “gender identity” as a pseudoscience lacking any basis in reality
repudiate that sex can be changed surgically
Repudiate that children’s gendered behaviors can be altered through surgery or chemical castration
Repudiate that sex delusions can be treated by requiring that all other people globally accommodate the delusion
Repudiate the idea that surgical removal of sex organs for people who hate their organs is a legitimate treatment
That’s all.
Psychiatry hasn’t even unequivocally stated (well, meaningful American psychiatric groups) that homosexual sex behaviors cannot be extirpated.
Psychiatry going back 100 years or more preferred to “treat” homosexuals through castration and emasculation for them to “live as a woman”, and that was preferable to existing as a homosexual. Psychiatry in Nazi Germany, contemporary Iran, and those supporting “mermaids” and “Jazz Jennings” is fairly united.
The moment psychiatry grasps that the last 24 years have falsified the entire basis of their concepts suddenly the tide turns.
Delusional activists can howl all they want, but they don’t make medical diagnoses, treatments, and set laws.
Psychiatry lost all control when half the country’s states forbade psychiatric atrocities.
They can either get with the program or fold shop.
Again just for historical clarity, psychiatrists began the gatekeeping function for transsexualism in the 1970s but compassionate tolerance for the latter was mainly promoted initially in the 1960s by the sexologist and endocrinologist Harry Benjamin. His name went on the precursor of the WPATH guidelines. He was not a psychiatrist. Today the gate keeping role in the UK is ambiguous: it was from GPs and social workers but it keep shifting presumably it may vary from state to state in the USA. If you go on the CAN-SG website (a group I am member of) it contains many psychiatrists who are gender critical. I am glad that people on this blog are offering views on history, and in particular epistemology in its historical context. But to get that history correct the facts claimed need to be persuasive.
During the Nineties through about 2015 I worked with adult males who presented "gender" issues. (Most were on the transvestic fetishist spectrum). I followed the Harry Benjamin standard of care for the few of these clients who ultimately decided they wanted to transition.
The majority of people who requested my psychological services were trying to get approval letters for hormones and surgeries. They would tell the clinicians anything they thought would help them to get these documents. I stopped working with people whose request for my services was based on "gender issues," because I didn't want to work with the letter seekers and couldn't figure our how to help the fetishists.
Critical Theory defines all categorization as a social construct. The idea of an objective physical category is completely rejected.
Queer Theory generally works to dismantle ANY category of "normal." Ironically, this is why they've gotten so homophobic lately: it's now normal and unremarkable to be in a same sex relationship.
Any "marginalized" category, of course, is sacred.
Fair enough. It is of course very convenient for the now authoritarian bullying left to get to not have anything be objective.
…including whether categorization is categorization 😏
But leftists and only leftists get to define who is “marginalized”.
Yup, and it's constantly shifting!
I use AIs to write books and one I came up with was the emergence of Satyrs and Maenads who celebrate pleasures of the flesh within their groups. A craze that spreads in the US and world.
The Maenads had to go underground because during the frenzied madness of their ecstatic journey they tended to rent the flesh and limbs off men to protect themselves. The Bacchae of Euripides.
Last few chapters are in the oven, one is a harvest festival in Sonoma, a naked Ted Talk, and a book tour by the founder.
Satyr and Maenad freedom!
Both were vigorously opposed by the rainies, the sad rainbow people who wished to sterilize everyone and deny everyone pleasure of the flesh, they wish to conform.
I sympathise with your frustration but for accuracy, identity politics is not only about the woke left. Many on the left are defying the absurdities of anti-realism and the ever elastic politics of recognition. For example most of the resistance to transgender ideology in the UK has come from second wave feminists and scientific realists who are left wing. Also the right expresses its own form of IP (Trumpism, Hindu nationalism, xenophobic Brexiteers etc). I have explored this ambiguity about the political spectrum presence of IP in my book 'Identity Politics: Where Did It All Go Wrong?'. Also note that key critics of the woke distortions on the left like Andrew Doyle still uphold values of the left. Nancy Fraser is another example from the USA.
“identity politics is not only about the woke left.”
As I am no expert about Europe, I will accept your assertion that THERE identity politics, and in particular what is going on re: trans “rights”, is not about the woke left. But your assertion is simply NOT true in the U.S.
Separately, Trumpism is NOT identity politics. I defy you to name the “identity” that is analogous to race, gender, religion, LGBTQ++ status to which it supposedly applies. You cannot do it. It is NOT. AT. ALL the same thing. And as you well know, a part of it - but only a part - is an explicit reaction to woke policies that seek to divide and create a spoils system based on identity.
And I do know enough about Europe to know that while there is zero doubt that *some* of the Brexiteers are just xenophobic white nationalists, most are not. So if your claim is that Brexiteers are an identity group (unclear from your comment, but very strongly implied), then I am forced to conclude that even for Europe your assertion is wrong, as there are very many Brexiteers who value freedom and are not white nationalists.
Re: your last point, yes there are indeed a precious few who identify as left (almost exclusively older people, most of whom either do not realize that they are voting for il-liberals when they continue to vote for the leftist Dem Party in the U.S., or do and undercut much of their own criticism when they do) who criticize woke. Bill Maher is another one. But their voices have been completely drowned out in the U.S., and in particular have zero influence in Dem party policy today.