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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The first screenshot is Manhattan Institute federal budget expert "Jessica" Riedl, a middle-aged man who knew he was a girl on the inside at the age of four and went on to marry a woman and father two children, citing "brain studies" as evidence that he was actually "born trans."
The second screenshot is three researchers employed by the Manhattan Institute nothing that these studies are fatally flawed and do nothing to support the claim that anybody is "born trans."
Here is Riedl linking to his "coming out" blog post and triumphantly brandishing a series of links to the "dense scientific studies" on the "real biology of transgenderism."
Follow the links and find tweet threads, blog posts, one of the most laughable Scientific American posts ever published that was part of the general descent into inanity that led to the firing of its editor, and a handful of peer-reviewed articles that prove zilch, the most important of which was dismantled by his MI colleagues above.
Ten-year old fears he's going to be murdered on the street, is desperate for assurance that he will have access to "my medicine" (an off-label cancer drug used to chemically castrate adult sex offenders and never approved for keeping ten year old boys frozen in prepubescence to look more like a girl.)
If you watch this and aren't horrified on the boy's behalf because of what his parents have done to him but are instead horrified by efforts to protect him from maniacs drugging him at age of ten, you have lost your moorings.
People who've had their minds warped by delusion to this degree (and this is the default position of every Democratic official elected and unelected at every level of government) cannot be reasoned with -- they just have to be ousted from influence and kept from power for all time.
Corey Booker and Elizabeth Warren and Tim Walz and AOC all see things exactly as the delusional anon rando above does. All severed themselves from their humanity to inflict this mania on society.
The main takeaways of the NYT story on Skrmetti are:
— the claims of the transgender lobby are false
— the claims of the transgender lobby’s critics are true
— the behavior of the transgender lobby was profoundly unethical
— the dominant figures in the transgender lobby are insane
I'm not as certain of victory as @feelsdesperate, but within one minor but important domain -- what we are allowed to say at dinner parties in New York and San Francisco -- the NYT piece is an unqualified victory.
Coddled begins with a vigorous short recap of what we've been saying every day for the past three years on Twitter, which is what any sane and well-informed person who has not joined a cult understood:
The NYT Magazine has written a thorough account of the fiasco of pediatric gender medicine. The author frames Skrmetti as having set back the cause of trans rights by a generation.
It frames Skrmetti as a strategic error by the ACLU driven by the impetuousness of its lead trans rights litigator, Chase Strangio, and its Executive Director, Anthony Romero, who backed him fully as the organization drifted toward the iceberg.
The criticism is well-deserved as far as it goes. The tactical and strategic errors the story documents are indeed enormous.
But the fiasco of the trans rights movement cannot be cured by better messaging, strategy, or tactics.
In fact, the trans rights movement in itself illustrates that we have reached the end of the age of emancipation.
The giant apparatus we constructed to launch new civil crusades had no one left to liberate and thus set about manufacturing a new subpopulation of the marginalized by chemically castrating children at the crucial stage of physical, emotional, and cognitive development.
This was an experiment in the overt, self-conscious, institutionally-directed reconstruction of social reality. And in the process, we reached the limit of how far-reaching such projects can go in a society that remains pluralistic, liberal, Democratic, and free.
Her developing reputation as a brilliant outlier willing to upset rightists and leftists alike in order to say the truth will serve her in good stead here -- and be served by this determination
As a mother of seven enveloped in Christian piety and the kindness valorized by that piety , she had every reason to defect to a maudlin view of the marginalized trans person -- but she also has a lawyer's insistence on defining terms