standpointmag.co.uk/issues/februar… "As has become usual when women in Britain meet to talk about issues that affect them as a sex, the location has been kept secret until an email shortly beforehand. Such meetings routinely attract protests; harassment sometimes leads to a change of venue."
"a new ideology has upended the way people think about what it means to be a man or woman..it is the identity that is understood to be the true self. The body is something to be moulded accordingly. Many adherents of this ideology treat detransitioners as apostates"
"The Tavistock Centre is an NHS mental-health and wellbeing clinic which, among other things, treats young people with gender dysphoria. A decade ago it saw fewer than 100 under-18s annually. Last year it saw nearly 2,600. Its work has become a battleground."
"Every study of pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria has found that the great majority become comfortable with their birth sex before reaching adulthood. Many turn out to be gay. Now, however, clinicians regard their condition as signalling a cross-sex identity."
"Almost every child who has ever taken such “puberty blockers” has progressed to cross-sex hormones, with lifelong consequences. Even if a child grows up into a contented transgender adult, skipping natal puberty may permanently harm brain development..brittle bones..sterility"
"Standard medical practice has been abandoned under pressure from trans activists, the Manchester panellists said. No one is tracking children who have transitioned to see if they grow up healthy and happy—or if they end up regretting what they have done."
"“I regret it all,”..She is one of eight young detransitioners from several European countries here in Manchester. All are lesbian..“Transition has been presented as so progressive, but the only thing I see is it reinforcing gender stereotypes,”"
“If there is a ‘gay conversion therapy’ of our times, it’s this,”
"Meeting other detransitioners was a revelation, she says. “Where have these women been all my life? . . . It was just so normal to be a lesbian and a masculine woman and I’ve never felt that, ever.”"
"In gender therapists’ telling, they say, transition was their salvation. “There’s a very strong narrative that if you don’t transition you are going to kill yourself,” says Satan Herself. “I genuinely thought it was the only option.”...
...As the event ends, a woman in the audience says in a curiously expressionless voice: “Those surgeons should be in prison.”"
"No clinic is researching what distinguishes children who persist in cross-sex identities from those who desist. None are seeking other reasons why they might feel uncomfortable in their sexed bodies. Detransitioners’ testimony suggests plenty of possibilities: eating disorders..
..past sexual abuse; rejection of same-sex orientation; or autistic spectrum disorders, which cause rigid categorical thinking. No clinic is researching less drastic treatment protocols...
...Anyone who ventures onto such forbidden territory risks being accused of transphobia; their reputation, even their livelihood, can be on the line."
"Before the rise of gender ideology, the surpassingly rare men who sought a “sex change” were understood to have widely varying motives. (Women almost never sought to transition, and nobody would have dreamed of a child doing so.)...
... In the 1980s and 1990s, Ray Blanchard, a sexologist at Toronto University, classified these men into two broad groups, according to their sexual orientation. The homosexual ones had generally been feminine in behaviour and appearance from a young age...
...The heterosexual ones were far more numerous. They had generally been conventionally masculine, often married with children, and transitioned in middle age. Most had cross-dressed in private since puberty..fantasising about mundane or stereotypical aspects of being female...
...Blanchard hypothesised that they experienced an “erotic target location error” that he dubbed “autogynephilia”: sexual desire for themselves in the form of a woman..Blanchard’s work is anathema to modern trans activists and rarely mentioned any more by gender clinicians."
"In Galileo’s Middle Finger, a book about activists who seek to discredit evidence-based research, Alice Dreger..points out that even to refer to autogynephilia risks bringing the fantasy crashing down...
...“The ultimate eroticism of autogynephilia lies in the idea of really becoming or being a woman, not in being a natal male who desires to be a woman,” she writes. She describes the condition as “a love that would really rather we didn’t speak its name”."
"This determination to deny any sexual motive for transitioning is central to understanding why activists are so wedded to the gender-identity narrative...
... It is also, a new book argues, why gender-dysphoric children are being transitioned, despite strong evidence that they are far more likely to grow up gay than transgender...
...The thesis of Inventing Transgender Children and Young People..is that gender-dysphoric children are interpreted as trans in order to prop up the insistence of trans adults that they are motivated by an innate gender identity that does not match their body...
...For there to be trans adults in this sense, there must be trans children. In Brunskell-Evans’s words, they are gender ideology’s “necessary victims”."
"The main institutional force behind trans activism is the big, established civil- and gay-rights groups such as Stonewall in Britain, and the ACLU, GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in America...
...Once same-sex marriage became law, they needed a new cause—and a new reason why donors should continue to be open-handed. They found it in “gender self-identification”, lobbying to replacing biological sex in law and practice with gender identity as the basis for inclusion"
"This lack of scrutiny means that, when it comes to gender ideology, public policy is very far from public opinion. In the popular imagination, trans people are a tiny minority who suffer great mental anguish and have invariably undergone a “sex change”..as a last resort...
...Few understand the far-reaching implications of gender-identity doctrine: that anyone who says they are a woman, or man, must be believed..backed up by..fragments from various civil-rights movements woven into an incoherent but superficially compelling narrative"
"Women’s public toilets and changing rooms meant freedom to use public facilities, from shops to pubs to swimming pools. Domestic-violence refuges and rape-crisis centres provided female-only spaces to recover from male violence...
...Women’s sporting competitions meant the achievements of exceptional female bodies were recognised as on a par with those of male ones. All this is now falling to trans activism...
...According to Stonewall’s glossary of terms, the term “trans” refers to anyone whose “gender is not the same as, or does not sit comfortably with, the sex they were assigned at birth”—within which are included part-time cross-dressers...
...Few of those people will ever undergo any sort of gender surgery. Many neither suffer from gender dysphoria nor make any effort to “pass” as members of the opposite sex...
...Drummond, a bearded, middle-aged male who wears lipstick and sometimes a skirt, advises Stonewall on lesbian issues..In 2018 Bunce, who self-describes as “gender-fluid” rather than as a trans woman, accepted a Financial Times award for “female champions” of women in business"
"Gender self-ID is becoming the norm in all formerly sex-segregated spaces, not just public toilets. That includes prisons—even though almost all violent or sexual offenders are male; and despite significant disparities between the sexes in strength and aggression."
"Males were first permitted to compete in women’s Olympic events in 2004,provided they had transitioned surgically. That..never made much sense: most of..male sporting advantage is due not to the testosterone produced every day by the testicles, but to the legacy of male puberty"
"the small number of people who undergo transition surgery, and the fact that until recently it was usually sought in middle age, meant that male athletes did not enter women’s elite sports in noticeable numbers.
That is starting to change...
That is starting to change...
...That is starting to change. Since 2015 male athletes have needed merely to take medication that lowers their testosterone levels for 12 months (to a level still far higher than seen in women) in order to compete in the Olympics as women"
"Tokyo 2020 will put the consequences of gender ideology in front of a global audience of billions. The sight of larger, stronger males on podiums flanked by the females they have defeated will highlight the reality of sexual dimorphism in a way that revolts..fair play...
...Women who complain about males in their sporting events are often criticised for being “unkind”—or worse; last year Martina Navratilová was dropped by her sponsors when she said males should not be allowed to compete in women’s events"
"This year will also see an escalating legal fightback against the campaign to push gender self-ID onto the statute book in Britain. The most salient issue is that of children...
...As growing numbers of detransitioners speak out—and some perhaps seek to sue their doctors—it will become harder to overlook the malign consequences of replacing objective sex categories with subjective gender identity in law, society and medicine....
...The real question is how much more damage will be done before public opinion finally turns."
