Thread by @RoisinMichaux

Heather Brunskell-Evans (@brunskellevans) is here to talk about "the transgender child" on @genspect day 3. She was in the academy in the 90s when queer theory emerged as dominant. Intersectional feminists called her a "biologicial essentialist", the "TERF" of its day 1/

I was first introduced to the transgender child in 2015 in a personal context, she says, when a friend's daughter who came out as a boy. The woman was petrified and ready to support her child in the lie, (because suicide) #GenspectBiggerPicture 2/

@brunskellevans wondered about the clinical-sounding gender dysphoria - I wasn't convinced that the transgender child had any real verifiable existence - rather that @wpath and GIDS and the activists were helping to shape and construct the child. 3/
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She put together a collection of essays. Her own essay called the trans child a fabrication - they were brought into being and then harmed. 4/#GenspectBiggerPicture

Starts getting into Foucault. Dangerous territory in this room, everyone laughs. #GenspectBiggerPicture 5/

She says, for example "the nymphomaniac", was invented into being by the medical profession. In her school, there was a girl being abused by boys and was called a nymphomaniac. She remembers thinking: "Musn't be like that girl. It helped police girls." 6/
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@brunskellevans brings up @andrewdoyle_com, who says Foucault is wrong about homosexuality. It's a radical misunderstanding of Foucault, she says. He's saying it *always* existed but it was viewed differently throughout history. " 7/

"Homosexual" arrived added to medical lexicon in 1890s. While the transgender child is a wholly constructed medical figure, very unhappy young people confused about gender and who refused its constraints have no doubt existed throughout history but took different forms. 8/

So the medical construction of transgender is experienced as viscerally real to those people. Individuals flock to it, declare themselves trans. Children flock to the Tavistock or trans women experiencing any critique of transgenderism as genocide. 9/ #GenspectBiggerPicture

The identity is felt as so real. When @IndiaWilloughby declared there was a genocide of trans people recently, he really probably feels that is true. 10/

But transness is iatrogenic - so puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones cannot relieve the kids of their distress because it adds to the construction of the identity is real, which is the source of the problem.11/
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Defends Foucault. Resents the throwing away fo the conceptual tools he provided to help understand how politics and medicine relate. Brings up @Docstockk who holds him responsible for gender identity and negates biological realities. 12/

Foucault urged the application of reason to the human sciences, says @brunskellevans. To understand where unreason exists and call it out. He does not negate the body - she mentions critics like @HelenPluckrose and @ConceptualJames 13/ #GenspectBiggerPicture

@wpath is pathologising sexual dimorphism. It needs to be shut down. That sounds so unlikely, but so did closing the Tavistock, says @brunskellevans 14/
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(Badly worded, Foucault is the one who is claimed to have negated biology)