In addition to questions about trans, mental illness, and violence, which are -- as Leor points out -- delicate and tricky to unpick, there are serious concerns about trans as a *subculture* and violence.
Online trans spaces are soaked in violent imagery and rhetoric. This glorification of violence is justified by wildly exaggerated stories about trans persecution, mostly notably the wholly invented claim that we're currently living through a "trans genocide."
I've written about this before, including for @UnHerd: "The truth is that the subculture that has grown up around trans identities too often excuses, legitimises, and even glorifies violence..." unherd.com/thepost/the-vi…
"That includes violence directed at the self — where self-harm and suicide demonstrate sincerity and commitment to trans identity in the face of adversity — and violence directed outward at perceived enemies." elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/resilience-o…
"This goes hand-in-hand with a toxic dynamic called phobia indoctrination: the attempt to instill irrational fears in members of a high-control group in order to manipulate them." elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/phobia-indoc…
Supposedly responsible 'grownups' and advocacy orgs traffic in phobia indoctrination, too. Rather than reassuring kids that "it gets better" when others don't accept your identity or you have to wait to 18 to transition, far too many adults favor apocalyptic & militant rhetoric.
What's happening here isn't trans genocide: it's trans radicalization. The warning signs are everywhere: grimacing skulls that promise “DEATH BEFORE DETRANSITION,” baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, torrents of rape and death threats, calls to stomp/mace/kill terfs...
Kids in trans spaces are indoctrinated into irrational fears. For some, these irrational fears isolate them and make them afraid of the outside world.
For others, phobia indoctrination inspires dreams of vengeance.
Research into violent radicalization among Quebec college students found that transgender and gender-diverse youth were at the *highest risk of support for violent radicalization.*
Communities that mythologize martyrs recruit martyrs. Communities that glorify vengeance and violence inspire it.
You also get migration between violent subcultures, like the weirdly well-traveled neo-Nazi-to-trans-activist pipeline. Forget 'genderfluid.' Think 'extremism-fluid.' elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/fanaticism-f…
No sane, responsible community looks or acts like this. We don't know enough yet to say anything useful about what happened today in Iowa. But we know plenty to say that the trans community as a whole has serious radicalization problems. unherd.com/thepost/the-vi…
@the_midwits I'd be shocked if AGP wasn't an exacerbating factor: it supplies an extra dose of aggrieved entitlement and makes social life an endless string of opportunities to be offended.
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Have definitely suspected this was a motivator: "I've always been chubby and I think a lot of my dysphoria and desire to be masc has been just because I didnt think I could pass as a pretty feminine person because of being chubby." reddit.com/r/actual_detra…
There's also the use of the language of "passing" applied not just to "passing" as the opposite sex but passing as an 'acceptable' member of your own sex. The implied equivalence is interesting and gets at the way femininity feels like a performance or affectation for many girls.
For many girls, "passing" as an acceptable member of your own sex class still means being thin enough, pretty enough, feminine enough. The band of 'acceptable' femininity is perilously narrow, and the equation of femininity with *being female* is pushing girls toward transition.
Very often, the suggestion is that if you are the kind of made-up person trans activists call "cisgender," then little is being asked of you -- certainly nothing you should hesitate to part with. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There's no recognition that if 2 people disagree about trans issues, the disagreement matters deeply to both parties. It is not "weird" or suspect to care about what's being asked in the name of trans activism, which is no less than the erasure of sex and embrace of illiberalism.
Everybody gets to care about this issue because it does not affect only people who identify as trans: it affects everybody. It seeps into every setting where sex matters. It affects the fabric of civic life, the content and tenor of politics, the legitimacy of institutions.
I've been thinking about accepting the things we cannot change and what happens when the things we *can* change changes... 🧵
I was a late bloomer. I was stuck as a child while I watched my entire class hit puberty before me. And then, somehow, the same thing happened to me.
I wasn't a fan.
I missed the invisibility of childhood. I hated my terrible periods, which knocked me out of school two days every month and which once humiliated me by bleeding through my jeans halfway through English class.
Would it ever be possible to find and follow up some of the 41 young Dutch patients who were cleared by clinicians to join the first cohort but their parents didn't consent and so they weren't started on puberty blockers?
Do the Dutch researchers have the information and ethics-approval to do this if they chose to do so? If not, could they get it? If so, can pressure be brought to bear on them to follow up?
These kids would be in their 30s now. They had well-documented cross-sex ideation. Then, unlike their peers in the first cohort, they were allowed to grow up, free from puberty suppression and the lies that go along with it. How did they turn out?
"In a recent conflict over whether women were allowed to state 'women only' on their dating site profiles someone representing an offended man was blathering on in response about how 'transwomen should be allowed to use the service'..." ovarit.com/o/Radfemmery/3…
"... and I was thinking 'no one's stopping them from using the service'...until I realised that access to unwilling and unconsenting women WAS THE SERVICE."
The allure of women-only spaces is *access to women*, whether those are dating apps, sporting leagues, locker rooms, you name it.
The shift from 'gender dysphoria' to 'gender incongruence' seemed to me at first to be primarily about normalizing an ever-widening range of body modifications... 🧵
But watching the discouraging data about patient mental health outcomes—data that researchers and clinicians refuse to translate into evidence that transition works or doesn't work—roll in, it occurs to me that incongruence triumphed over dysphoria for other reasons.
Incongruence's flexibility is attractive, of course. But incongruence also makes no promises that transition will improve mental health, whereas treatments for gender *dysphoria* really ought to improve patients' quality of life overall.