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.
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.
Apologies for wrongly sexing Chase Strangio, who is a woman -- I just read a long article doing that.
Despite its flawed framing, the article contains lots of material that will be confounding to the Ezra Kleins and Jon Lovetts of the world.
We need this stuff put on the record in a place where nobody can avoid knowing it, and then draw stronger conclusions from it than the author putting it on the record is able to do. This article performs that useful service. x.com/glennagoldis/s…
We need this stuff put on the record in a place where nobody can avoid knowing it, and then draw stronger conclusions from it than the author putting it on the record is able to do. This article performs that useful service. x.com/glennagoldis/s…
Also did not intend to capitalize "Democratic," as it was meant in the small d way.
The trans movement was the apotheosis of the undemocratic alliance of "professional activists and activist professionals" that drove the Great Awokening -- a self-conscious vanguard occupying the chokepoints of cultural transmission who became drunk on their power to impose new visions of social transformation on the wider public.
It operated with disdain for common opinions and sensibilities and made instant recourse to the instruments of social coercion while seeking the instruments of legal coercion to impose their unconstrained vision of the future.
That the vision is at once incoherent, harmful, and entails the cannibalization of the rights of prior progressive movements (women and gays) only underscores the fundamental debility at the heart of this project: that its foundational premise isn't true and that no amount coercion and repression can ever make it true.
The trans movement was the apotheosis of the undemocratic alliance of "professional activists and activist professionals" that drove the Great Awokening -- a self-conscious vanguard occupying the chokepoints of cultural transmission who became drunk on their power to impose new visions of social transformation on the wider public.
It operated with disdain for common opinions and sensibilities and made instant recourse to the instruments of social coercion while seeking the instruments of legal coercion to impose their unconstrained vision of the future.
That the vision is at once incoherent, harmful, and entails the cannibalization of the rights of prior progressive movements (women and gays) only underscores the fundamental debility at the heart of this project: that its foundational premise isn't true and that no amount coercion and repression can ever make it true.
Signing on to this movement was a ghastly mistake strategically, tactically, substantively, morally, intellectually, pragmatically, politically, and spiritually.
That there is no precedent playbook for withdrawing from the claims that the entire governing and chattering classes of the Western world have been making for a decade was a reason to exercise greater critical scrutiny before entering into it in the first place.
For now there is no withdrawal that will not entail enormous pain inflicted on those to whom impossible promises that can never true were made.
The responsibility for all of that pain rests on those who launched themselves on this mindless crusade.
That there is no precedent playbook for withdrawing from the claims that the entire governing and chattering classes of the Western world have been making for a decade was a reason to exercise greater critical scrutiny before entering into it in the first place.
For now there is no withdrawal that will not entail enormous pain inflicted on those to whom impossible promises that can never true were made.
The responsibility for all of that pain rests on those who launched themselves on this mindless crusade.
The key point is that the crusade was launched without deliberation or debate. It took the form of cancellations within left activist spaces, the vilification of elements within the left activist coalition that saw the fundamental debility of the movement's claims and the inexorable problems of its implementation.
This pathological process of consensus building was then exported to the wider world, where it eventually summoned up wider opposition. And just as the transgender movement claims it is only beginning its fight, so the much belated opposition is only beginning as well.
This pathological process of consensus building was then exported to the wider world, where it eventually summoned up wider opposition. And just as the transgender movement claims it is only beginning its fight, so the much belated opposition is only beginning as well.
Historians in a sane posterity will marvel at the fact that the dominant political party of the world's imperial hegemon at its zenith rallied to this cause with greater unanimity than they did any other.
https://x.com/wesyang/status/1935456301263241586
All that will preempt the arrival of this sane posterity is the exercise of totalitarian power to compel speech and thought that the US civil rights state spend two generations marshalling. Whether they will succeed is up to us.
It's for sure a striking development, but an inevitable one with regard to trans rights, which fundamentally requires restrictions on free conscience to disbelieve transgender dogmas and cannot survive in the absence of coercion
https://x.com/SanchoPanzy/status/1935708625483255815
This "dawning awareness" has not reached any of the Democratic governors or congressmembers tweeting out excruciating cringe today
The piece is a good quick round up of the insanity of the movement's intellectuals that can held normies get up to speed on what those of use paying attention to this issue have known for years.
But remember: none of these contentions held up as indicative of the "radicalization" of the transgender movement is more radical or more insane than the one that the Solicitor General of the United States argued for and that "every major medical organization" claims in unison, without evidence, is medically necessary and life-saving: that we should use an off-label cancer drug to stunt the crucial stage of physical, emotional, and cognitive maturation in young children so taht they become more convincing non-functional, sterilized, anorgasmic simulacra of the opposite sex on a medical leash for life.
x.com/jonkay/status/…
But remember: none of these contentions held up as indicative of the "radicalization" of the transgender movement is more radical or more insane than the one that the Solicitor General of the United States argued for and that "every major medical organization" claims in unison, without evidence, is medically necessary and life-saving: that we should use an off-label cancer drug to stunt the crucial stage of physical, emotional, and cognitive maturation in young children so taht they become more convincing non-functional, sterilized, anorgasmic simulacra of the opposite sex on a medical leash for life.
x.com/jonkay/status/…
Do not allow the emphasis on the insanity of certain factions on the fringes within the movement to create a false contrast with the "sanity" at the core of the movement.
The people who lie that there is evidence that stunting the growth of children is medically necessary are not more sane than the people who are more honest about the fact that experimenting on the bodies of children is about valorizing cultish whims as an expression of human freedom; the latter are both less dishonest and more philosophically consistent
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