Every now and then, I check in on Room of One's Own bookstore in Madison, WI, which was a chill feminist bookstore until it sold a few years ago to someone going through a gender meltdown and everything went completely off the deep end. They've still got a (righteously enforced) mask mandate. "Don't want to wear mask? That's okay, you just can't come in."

It turns out that Reed and I agree about one thing! If you acknowledge that male rapists with prison-onset gender dysphoria* shouldn’t be housed with female prisoners and therefore aren’t really women, you’ve acknowledged that self-identification has limits.

*I didn't coin this but it's 👌

My takeaways from the WPATH conference so far: We regret to inform you that the positive outcomes data we promised would rescue our embattled field took a wrong turn & will not be arriving to save the day.

We will henceforth be shifting to a more “vibes-based” evaluation model, under the guise of “centering trans voices."

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.

https://twitter.com/LeorSapir/status/1743036071359697312

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."

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.

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.

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.

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?

"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 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.

So I went undercover to last week's meeting of the European Professional Association for Transgender Health. Here's what I saw... 🧵 Compared to WPATH, EPATH looks almost reasonable. But WPATH—which celebrates eunuchs and wants to 'help' patients who claim to have multiple personalities decide which irreversible surgeries to get, when those ‘personalities’ disagree—is hard to top.

Something that's on my mind for heart-wrenching personal reasons:

Having a trans-identified person in your life is meant to bind you to a certain perspective on trans issues. If you have a loved one who identifies as trans, then you must agree that sterilizing gender-confused kids is great & men in women's sports is great & Dylan Mulvaney has been a woman for 365+ days and counting, & anything else—no matter your reasons—is a heinous betrayal.

A friend of mine is visiting Madison and I feel so intensely homesick for it. I lived there for so long and then moved away with next to no notice (last minute academic contract for my partner at the time) and no real goodbye.

One of my goals in writing about gender is to bring context back. Over 90% of cosmetic surgeries performed in the US in 2019 were performed on women. That's context for all the double mastectomies sought in the name of gender 'authenticity.' Mental health of adolescent girls tanked starting around 2013. That's context for the spike in trans identity among adolescent girls starting around 2013.

I would put it more provocatively and say this is one of the places language like "gestator" and "uterus-haver" was always leading: the dissolution of human bonds and invisibilization of human trafficking of women and children.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/… "Gestator," "vulva-owner," "menstruator": these are all transactional terms that slice the female body into markets. A "menstruator" is anyone who buys certain sanitary products. A "vulva-owner" is type of sexual experience, a porn category.

There's been a push—within progressive circles in particular—to listen and demonstrate empathy while withholding judgment, with the result that conversations about how our society should be sometime sound more like marriage counseling: "I understand why you feel that way." Like so many questionable things, I think this comes from a good place. But civic life *isn't* marriage counseling. It's supposed to be a process for working out what's true and false and what to do based on what we know.

The Natalie segment is hard to listen to because of the falsetto and manipulativeness. The Noah segment is heartbreaking because this kid is exactly who Rowling is talking about: a sensitive, bright kid who needed real help and understanding, not gender.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cha… "Part of my journey with self mutilation was that I hated my body and wanted to punished my body..." so Noah got 'top surgery' at 16. That fixed it, right?

So, Dublin. Is it as great as it is €€€€€€€€€? Let's stipulate that one is not a nightlife person at all unless "nightlife" is reading a book in bed.

Aaaaaaaand now @wesyang is locked out of Twitter for the next 12 hours for posting that I was locked out of Twitter this morning for posting about a flyer advertising a Trans Day of Vengeance...

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1640748244434055172

"And ten bucks says we’re not going to have the usual “oh boo hoo his mental health” conversation circle endlessly in media like we do with every school shooter. Despite it being another standard case of 'disgruntled man thinks killing someone will help.'" reddit.com/r/ftm/comments… "I am so fucking angry at the shooter. For taking the lives of six innocent people including three children which is beyond fucked up but also completely torpedoing the reputation of trans people at a time that we are fighting for basic dignity and respect..."