This footnote by Amia Srinivasan, taken from her book, the Right to Sex, poses the question in a useful way. It is a hard question that is part of the psychosexual pre-history of our times. I will feel I have satisfied my purpose as I writer when I have answered it.
What I like about the framing is the way at looks at two pieces by the same author and uses it as a lens to look at the way the world change. Here are two of my favorites: salon.com/2005/09/20/kun…
The story told in Srinivasan's sequence is in a way the same story told in mine. This is the story that hasn't quite been told, merely acted out by the culture industries.
The question is not hard in itself, it just becomes hard because of all the ways the culture has become involuted, but the work of writing is to master those involutions in such a manner as to make them straight them again
The rhetoric of the prior tweet is sure to be parsed as illustrative. And it is!
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In this bizarre exchange, a California Superior Court Judge presiding over a custody hearing asks the father of a trans-identified child if he would be willing to affirm his son in the delusion that he was Queen of England if doing so would help his son avoid psychological harm.
That is to say that the judge was using a reductio ad absurdum of gender affirmation in support of gender affirmation. This moment illustrates a culture that has passed through the eye of a needle.
The judge stripped the father, Edward Hudacko, of custody of his eldest son.
As a condition of the custody agreement, which vested virtually all parental rights solely with the child's mother who was affirming his son as a girl, Hudacko retained a prohibition on any gender identity related surgery on his son while he remained a minor without his prior consent or a court order.
Gender clinicians at UCSF installed a puberty blocking implant in his son's arm in defiance of that condition.
Today, Hudacko's attorneys appear before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals appealing a prior dismissal of his lawsuit seeking to vindicate his constitutional right to direct the medical care of his son that was preserved in his custody agreement and violated by gender doctors who acted in defiance of the terms of that agreement.
Establishing the harms of this specific narrow harm to one father's constitutional rights would create a judicial venue -- the first ever -- to put the entire field of pediatric gender medicalization on trial for the self-conscious acts of serial medical and scientific fraud that were central to its widespread propagation, all of which were exhaustively documented by the bad actors themselves in correspondence that has made its way into the public record in prior court proceedings.
The below link connects to the livestream of the session that starts at 9:30 PDT. The case is sixth on the docket, but the first 4 cases have already been submitted on briefs. I'll update this thread when the case begins. ca9.uscourts.gov/media/live-ora…
I don't like right-wing influencers who constantly repeat the refrain "they want you dead."
But if neither Democratic party leadership nor its electorate sees this sociopathy from the Democratic party's favored candidate to win the state Attorney General race in VA as disqualifying, the refrain is literally true.
I heard that phalloplasty doctors at the most recent WPATH conference admitted that the procedure has a 100 percent complication rate.
Of course. How could it be otherwise? Sewing a tube of flesh torn off a forearm between a woman's leg to affirm a delusion that can never be true is pure complication.
It was a third-hand account -- someone telling me what someone who had attended WPATH told her. But it's reliable account because the person who told me is reliable and the person who told her is reliable -- but above all because it cannot be otherwise.
I didn’t say it was journalism. I said what it was. But I also know that all anyone looking at the literature can say is “nun-uh! It’s ackshually 75 percent!”
But let’s be real, it’s not possible to strip off a hunk of flesh from an arm and refashion it into a meat tube and attach it to a vagina withered by exogenous testosterone without endless complications!
This is why the Klein-TNC "debate" was mere kayfabe. Klein's investment is in the electoral fortunes of the Democratic party, which is a mere cutout for the sprawling network of institutions that profit off of racial conflict and the manufacture of new classes of the oppressed. Jeff Bezos' ex-wife's $20 billion bequest insures that these institutions are the dominant power in this relationship.
Klein's pitch to those institutions and the vast army of white collar rent seekers whose livelihoods the institutions sustain is: the Democratic party has to win power to be able to use the power of the state to enrich you even further. Please allow us to make moderate-sounding noises in order to win back that power and continuing to reward you even more richly. Please allow us to sustain the illusion of open dialogue and debate in order to preserve the appearance of democracy rather than making explicit that a whole class of rent-seekers and political hobbyists live off of Live Action Historical Re-enactments that move inexorably toward violence.
But those institutions only want to rule under their own favored terms that they define and can continue to dominate non-electoral power in America whether or not their cutout is in power. They have no reason to concede anything for mere electoral victory under any terms other the terms they set. While they will feast on the public purse when they can, they are perfectly plump and contented when it's not in their possession. This marks a contrast with the party and politicians.
Abundance was an attempt to give the party something to talk about other than identitarian conflict and the minting of new classes of the oppressed while evading an intra-party conflict that it lacks the power to win. The murder of Charlie Kirk seemed like a moment that could be leveraged on behalf of this project.
The ongoing Dungeons and Dragon re-enactment of 1877, the surreal recasting of a 6'4" white male exposing his intact male genitals in the girls room en route to winning an NCAA women's swimming championship as the new Rosa Parks: surely the Democratic party doesn't want to keep fighting a holy war over these fake causes? Now that the impetus to murder enemies in supposed self-defense that all the lists of hate organizations and hate speakers that the NGO Borg sustains was enacted by an otherwise pretty normal seeming college student, perhaps we could take that moment to draw back from the brink.
This was Klein's appeal. They brought back TNC out of retirement to set him straight. Lia Thomas is the new Rosa Parks. Girls that don't want to share a changing room with a 6'4" untransitioned male were hateful bigots whose voices should not be heard. And all Ezra could do was affirm that yes, the girls and those agree with them are "fundamentally and morally wrong," -- but we live in a democracy and we have to live alongside this rabble of backward trash, and they have a right to vote and thus we need to seek ways to placate them with half-truths and evasions and open lies so we can obtain the power to finish the job of suppressing them with state power. Please let us tell them.
And TNC said, fuck no, what is wrong with you man, and a whole class of tens of millions of white collar rent-seekers who are the core constituency of the Democratic party had their hearts uplifted and were assured that the Democratic party would not allow any daylight between itself and their burning will.
Yes it’s meant to be ambiguous in this way. I sometimes think it’s the latter and all the woke assume it is. But when you see the flash of righteous conviction in his eyes when he says the person who uses sex based pronouns is “an asshole” or pronounces such a person “fundamentally and morally wrong,” it’s clear that he is an honest advocate for lying
Obama "evolved" away from opposition to gay marriage to full throated support as the polls shift toward it.
Nobody knows how to evolve away from full-throated support of male rapists and murderers in women's prison, propagandizing every child that any of them can change sex, chemically castrating confused children caught up in an online social contagion, allowing men to punch women in the face in boxing rings, prohibiting any woman or girl from drawing a boundary between herself and any man who says he is a woman in intimate spaces, and punishing people who refuse to falsify reality as the polls shift away from it.
Nobody knows how to say "So yeah, remember that Civil Rights Movement of the 21st Century we announced in 2019? Yeah, we're not doing that. Never mind."
We have no precedent for such an evolution.
He has changed nothing and will change nothing but this is the kind of rhetoric that will be used to enact such a pivot:
And whatever Democrats at the national level end up doing, Democrats in secure Blue states and cities are doing the maximal trans agenda with no brakes. Democrats are the national level must be held accountable for what their state and municipal officials are doing. There must be no toleration of any effort to decouple these things.
Here's the propaganda children's book written while Jazz was still a child, years before he would go on to chemically castrated, dosed with estrogen, and have his penis inverted on national TV at 17.
It grooms feminine boys to yearn to be dismembered.