The New Homophobia
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Meanwhile the remaining 90% of us are under the attitude of "equal rights for all, do and/or call yourself whatever you want as long as it brings no personal harm to others".
Personally, for every gender non-binary person I've encountered (there have been multiple), when I incorrectly use the wrong pronoun, I get gently/nicely corrected and the conversation moves on without anyone caring further.
In the article the author laments "At the time, I was exhausting so much mental energy memorizing my coworkers' pronouns and all of the new progressive dogmas out of fear that I would be fiercely condemned if I slipped up"
My question is, does this really happen as described? Or only at the extreme end? And I'm being totally non-facetious here.
Again, I've called non-binary people "her" before and you know what happened? They said "Hey actually, I prefer 'they' just FYI", I responded with "ah, sorry, got it!", and we moved on. That was it.
The only ongoing drama I can see being credibly interpreted as a human rights issue is the stuff with very young children.
I came out ten years ago, and I didn't get to learn about transness until that process started. If you came up in the nineties you'd see The Crying Game in your early teens and not know the difference between a trans woman and a "hermaphrodite" (intersex person) until your twenties. Nowadays, kids develop alternative lives on the internet much earlier than my cohort did, and they learn not just that trans people exist, but what it means to transition and what leads people to transition, before they get to middle school in many cases.
The pushback on that, post-bathroom-hysteria, has largely been to try to reclaim some of parents' ability to know what's going on and to control their child's level of exposure to information—much like with sex and drugs in the teen years, it's import for younger children to explore their identities in a way that allows their parents to mentor them and help them interpret what they're feeling. I don't think this is a human rights issue—I think we've misplaced our wariness of abusive parenting and allowed it develop into a skepticism of nuclear-family parenting in general.
Much of the nonsense is initiated by the right, yes—bathrooms and ID laws and whatever else—but what everyone's talking about _right now_ has to do with a change in our understanding of The Family, initiated by the left, that I expect will play out in increasingly interesting ways over the next 20-30 years.
thing is though: Texas, Florida, Idaho, couple others, have declared that child abuse.
For those unaware, "social gender transition", in addition to changing their pronouns and name, would be things like a trans girl switching to wearing dresses or growing out her hair, or a trans boy cutting his hair or wearing boy's clothes, or engaging in gender-stereotyped interests like dolls, or any other sort of action the kid finds gender-affirming. It does not include any medical procedures. There is no conceivable benefit to the child of preventing this, and it could prevent them from doing many actions that in cisgender children would be seen as ordinary nonconformance to gender stereotypes.
That it is included alongside a ban on puberty blockers and hormones and a ban on gender reassignment surgery, and an exception to that for intersex people (which intersex advocates oppose, because some doctors will perform unnecessary and risky surgeries on intersex babies to "correct" their genitals before they can consent), shows that all of these have the same goal: enforcing gender conformity.
[0] https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1516773653391806464
to be fair i don't think i've seen any policy regime, in effect or proposed, that feels quite right to me. in florida's case i would change the language to allow that sort of prescription subject to parental consent whether it's social or hormonal.
on the blockers though, it's not the end of the world that i grow hair on my face and have a little more muscle mass than most women. dysphoria peaks when you first acknowledge it, then slowly subsides over a few years once you're Living Your Truth. i am more than my annoying body
> and an exception to that for intersex people
this has been an intersex rights issue for much longer than what's in the spotlight right now, and should be considered separately imo. one thing i learned from the intersex people in my life is they don't like intersex concerns being lumped in with trans concerns, even if many do grow up to be, or present as, trans.
if we have to consider both at the same time, i would say "leave bodies as they were born until the person inhabiting them is old enough to know what's best for themself"
> enforcing gender conformity.
elsewhere in this thread i voiced my opinion that contemporary queer ideology has eroded the usefulness of identity markers. to build on that, i also think most liberals (i.e. people who believe "progress" is both real and virtuous) have a pretty narrow idea of how gender nonconformity can present itself
While simultaneously saying they should provided social support by peers and family and seek counseling from a licensed provider, which kinda means support and counseling have can't take the form of allowing social transition.
More generally you keep saying things like "from what I've read"... what have you been reading? The actual texts have all clearly usurped parental rights. Fucking Idaho made it a crime to leave the state to get your kid affirmative care. Who has been splitting what hairs to make any of these seem like they're securing parents' rights?
that's a very expansive reading of "treatment". a health department doesn't have the sort of authority you suggest. and if they think they do, best of luck to their legal teams in defining the threshold between treatment and ordinary child-rearing. like i said earlier, this should get pretty wacky over the next 20-30 years
> "from what I've read"... what have you been reading?
the link that shovel sent me to read.
> Fucking Idaho made it a crime to leave the state to get your kid affirmative care. Who has been splitting what hairs to make any of these seem like they're securing parents' rights?
settle down, i can tell you're provoked without the profanity. idk if you're trans too, but i've outright stated i've been out as a trans woman for a decade, and on top of that i want kids and have friends with kids, so i'd ask that you at least approach what i'm saying in good faith—i've been around, at least wrt this.
remember i said "The pushback on that, post-bathroom-hysteria, has largely been to try to reclaim some of parents' ability to know what's going on and to control their child's level of exposure to information", and you projected that i was talking about legislation/regulation when i was really referring to social movements. for what it's worth, i voiced some criticism of the florida memo when shovel linked me to it.
the comment box is a pretty depersonalized medium, it encourages misunderstanding and hostility, maybe you need a break.
but even aside from that distinction, we've seen this same shit with abortion for the last 50 years, do some obvious bullshit, 10 wait for a court opinion, do some new bullshit carefully written to avoid the precise court opinion, GOTO 10.
You won't get an answer to this question. These op-eds usually exhibit a glaring lack of humane, sharply observed, or life-like storytelling. Everyone seems to be a prop standing in for a different coalition's ideology... if there are any specific humans at all in the story.
They're a yawn no matter what side they come from.
I agree with you that this hyper-focus and polarization on the topic is driven by some extremely opinionated media personas, and unfortunately when looking at my parents’ usual YouTube feed it’s apparent that the influence of this niche is far-reaching. I just wish people would get along.
Crikey. Anecdote, for sure, but I’m 47 and can’t think of a single person I interact with in my age group (and that’s the majority of my colleagues and friends) who acts or opines as you describe.
Well, I'm 51. I don't think a man who takes hormones and gets operated on is actually a woman, and I'd rather not be forced to be complicit in a lie by referring to him as "she". By normalizing transgenderism society is encouraging a lot of young people to irreversibly damage themselves.
The far left has tried to take possession of the conversation to show sensitivity and contrast. Which is unfortunate. It shouldn't be political.
Still, we use gender in plenty of places where it doesn't really matter, and I'm good with eliminating it or broadening the classifications. It's a no-brainer. Beyond that, why not just call people what they want to be called? It's just respectful.
In my experience, most people in general are certainly chill if they're in a sexual or gender minority. I won't get pissed if you assume I have/want a girlfriend or wife. It's really not an issue if no insult is intended.
But:
Does anyone else feel like the recent focus on gender identity/pronouns/trans is being totally driven by the extreme 5% on both sides (left and right)?
I don't really feel this way, to be honest. I think this is a cliché culture war issue that is driven primarily by one "side", and that's the conservative one. I don't doubt for a second that there are terrible people who'll describe themselves as "progressive" trying to insert themselves into this discussion – these people are indeed the dumb extremes. But they're also not the group driving the conversation or enacting the laws, and ascribing a kind of "both sides" responsibility is not correct in my view.
The thing is, I remember personally experiencing exactly the same shit as a gay man growing up in the 90s, and it's alarmingly familiar. This was a result of the UK moving to repeal "Section 28" – a law similar in intent to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation.
I remember exactly the same tactics being used – the talking heads and the campaigns and the billboards and the newspaper articles talking about the danger of predatory gay men who were pushing a "pervert's agenda", hoping to worm their way into schools so they could find children to abuse. Scare stories about paedophiles waiting in the wings, getting ready to groom children into homosexuality – and the same tactic of spotlighting extremist views at the fringes of that movement and claiming them as mainstream.
It was a shitty tactic then and it's shitty now. The thing that angers me most is to see so many people fall for exactly the same playbook this time around.
Lia Thomas’ acceptance by the officials in charge as a woman swimmer has harmed an entire generation of actual female swimmers. Calling him “she” contributes to the pretense that he’s a woman, and helps to legitimize the injustice against these athletes.
It's hard to talk about this for myself as a trans woman, and especially for cis gays, as liberal queer ideology has taken over the discourse, but it's worth having more queer people speak up about it so we can develop a language for it that leaves things open to good-faith debate.
I'm not against blockers to delay puberty until someone is old enough to develop an informed understanding of themselves, but it's definitely the case that kids are overexposed to a monolithic queer culture that puts frivolous acts of expression on the same level as life-altering changes to your social and physical self. A decade ago things were pretty different—you'd seek out an online community and read a lot of Q&A, stories, and _advice on psychoanalyzing yourself responsibly_, which I don't see much of anymore in trans spaces.
It's not just cis gays, but many trans folks as well, who are seen as regressive for having opinions divergent from what you see on progressive new media, Twitter, etc. Talking about something like this, or defending pronouns as something defined by others that can't be "wrong", or even something as milquetoast as signaling my disinterest in being invited to orgies, will get me at least a confused look from your typical urbanite queer, and possibly get me called a transmisogynist. For a gay man's perspective, Tim Dillon has spoken about this a lot, and folks like him are much more common than you might think.
One thing I definitely disagree with the author on is the idea that the current wave is about abolishing gender, in contrast to previous waves focused on sexual liberation—for one I don't get a "sexual liberation" vibe from the era of gay marriage legalization, and for another I see the present movements more as sexual-accelerationist, i.e. exploring sex and gender with such fervor that they're eroding its social utility and finding new ways to preclude healthy development of relationships and communities. Younger trans folks I've been with are so sexually liberated that it turns into narcissistic hedonism and you can't even be sure they're in the room with you when you're having sex.
Sex used to(?) mean something. People were exposed to each other, vulnerable, sharing themselves. It was even intensely powerful, in the sense that new life might actually spring out of it.
But this is basically treating another unique, unrepeatable human person as a toy, and not even an exceptional one.
I can't help but think we've lost something important and are that much the poorer for it.
Is the liberation to live one's life in pursuit of the next orgasm really worth it if we have to lose what sex was to get there?
> Activists who favor medical intervention often ask these parents a morbid question: "Would you rather have a trans daughter or a dead son?" But the real question should be, "Would you rather have a trans daughter or an effeminate gay son?"
This is a question we know the answer to, though, based on how many trans people have stories of how their parents asked them "why couldn't you just be gay?" Plus, the point of the original question is that parents don't get to choose whether they have a trans kid or not, they only have the choice between supporting their child and neglecting them.
> Speaking recently about these issues with a LGBT mental health specialist—one among many who have serious concerns about the hastiness of medical transition for youth in the U.S.
There are lots of people with "concerns" about medical transition being given out hastily without proper assessment, but never any evidence that such a thing is happening. I see lots of complaints about how difficult and time-consuming it is to get hormone therapy, including drugs that can be gotten in one appointment for non-gender-related purposes. As for wait times for appointments, I found this nice little tidbit on the UK's Gender Identity Clinic website: "We are currently offering first appointment to people who were referred in: December 2017" [ https://gic.nhs.uk/appointments/waiting-times/ ]
> activists who push a regressive, anti-liberal agenda that reifies gender stereotypes
This is just a lie. A blatant, obvious lie. Any statement like this immediately discredits the one making it. The transgender community is inherently accepting of all gender expressions and experiences. I'm kind of having trouble expressing how wrong this is. There was a post a little while back that went through some LGBT-accepting spaces about a man who started growing out his hair, taking hormones, growing breasts, eventually looking to any stranger like a fully gender-conforming woman, who still confidently saw himself as a man. The comments were nothing but respect and acceptance (and awe at his "chad energy"). That's what the community is like.
My understanding was that attempting to get hormones or other medications to help with transitioning in the US was so damn difficult the accepted solution was to buy them from sketchy Russian sources!
It's just the same scare tactics as "But there's women using abortion as birth control!". Like, maybe there's some women so horrible that they are willing to endure the misery, often-shame, cost, and physical pain required for an abortion for the occasional times they get pregnant, but that sounds to me like they are already being punished.
People are too complex to be reduced like this, or by race, or age, or whatever disability they have.
We are all one, we are all life.
There must always be freedom for thought. There must always be freedom for speech. There must always be freedom for life. But there most not be freedom for abuse. Do something against life, then forfeit yours. Do something against speech, then forfeit yours. Do something against thought, then forfeit yours.
The author would probably take issue with people assuming that his spouse is female. He wouldn't entertain for a second that it creates a burdon on other people to not assume he is straight as if such a thing is upending society's established paradigms of gender and sexuality. So why do we accuse trans people of being such a burden on us when they simply want to be considered by their self-identified gender?
Gender identity is intentionally murky & vague. For instance, how many genders are there? How does one transition to/from genders that aren't male/female? I can't even find a coherent and consistent definition of genders. So at this point, it sounds like the new definition of gender is just...personality? So for most people there is nothing else to do than recognize it as such, and dismiss it as mostly nonsense.