I think you'll all find this interesting!

[Funkaccino]

www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/archives/male-and-female-created-he-them-transexual.html

Not so current article on the very current situation.

Clicky link www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/archives/male-and-female-created-he-them-transexual.html

I found it quite chilling, that, then, evolved into, now.

Thanks for the clicky link. Isn't it strange to see the exact same discussion 40 years earlier? From women's sports to people being called bigot for questioning the prevailing narrative. It's worth a read of his wiki page too.

So interesting. "The transexual empire" indeed.

Blimey! That could have been written yesterday.

From the linked article by THOMAS SZASZ

Like much of the medical‐psychiatric mendacity characteristic of our day, the official definition “transsexualism” as a disease comes down to the strategic abuse of language — epitomized by confusing and equating biological phenomena with social roles (in the present case, chromosomal sexual identity with acting as a man or a woman).

This was from 1979?

Some parts of it seem like they could be written today, don't they? Every trans person I've known has loathed The Transsexual Empire; I've never read it but it still gets referred to.

Yes I'll definitely be picking up a copy of Transsexual Empire now

Slight aside here but I just went to Amazon to see if Transexual Empire is available, and this is the dropdown that pops up with the most commonly searched terms.... bodysuit, breasts, dvd, clothing, underwear, toys.... yeah no evidence of fetish there.

(For those who haven’t heard of the ‘bodysuits’ thing before, and if you have the brain bleach handy, they are literally silicone suits with fake breasts/genitals that men can wear to inhabit a female body www.myroyalmask.com/silicone-bodysuit)

Anyway back to the NYT article - that is jaw dropping isn’t it, so bang on where we are now, have we just gone round in a massive circle?

This penultimate paragraph has it down IMO:
Still, why should anyone (especially feminist women) object to men wanting to become women? Isn't imitation the highest form of flattery? Precisely herein lies the “liberal” sexologists’ betrayal of human dignity and integrity: They support the (male) transsexual's claim that he wants to be a woman — when, in fact, what he wants is to be a caricature of the male definition of “femininity.” What makes transsexual surgery a male‐supremacist obscenity is the fact that transsexing surgeons do not perform the operation on all clients (just for the money) but insist that the client prove that he can “pass” as a woman. That is as if Catholic priests were willing to convert only those Jews who could prove their Christianity by socially appropriate acts of antiSemitism. Janice Raymond's analysis is bitterly correct. The very existence of the “transsexual empire” is evidence of the persistence of our deep‐seated religious and cultural preju‐dices against woman.

Thank you very much for this. I had never heard of the Transexual Empire but managed to get a pdf download here

www.pdfdrive.com/the-transsexual-empire-d18829545.html

You might also be interested in Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good by James Davies. It shows how most categories of mental ill health in the DSM are nothing but constructs and how drugs companies have deliberately created outbreaks of psychiatric illness by manipulating these constructs in different cultures. The drugs companies noticed how psychological epidemics may be created according to how different behavioural patterns are framed in the media, promoted by state structures and actors and so on. Davies describes how this came about with anorexia in Hong Kong. Similar mechanisms were then used by drugs companies to sell anti-depressants in Argentina and then Japan. Using slick jobbing academics in suits (often anthropologists and psychologists) the companies discovered how to pathologise and force the mental and emotional experiences of people in different cultures into the western medical model and then sell them drugs for their "ailments". For instance in Japan there was no real concept of mild to moderate depression - this was just part of the normal emotional mood range of being alive. GlaxoSmithKline worked really hard to promote the idea of "depression" in Japan until people began to see themselves as being ill thus opening up a huge market for the company. What's even worse, Davies also shows how most studies on anti-depressants show that they are no better than placebo - most doctors know this but placebo is in itself a huge (poorly understood) healing mechanism so doctors continue to use the drugs.

Psychiatry is a hugely political discipline and the whole trans catastrophe is just part of this wider tragedy.

If you're looking for fundamental texts to read, from the 1970s to now, you could do worse than look at the books and articles cited in
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics

The wiki article itself is in a constant state of flux, with multiple archived talkpages full of back-and-forth essays, but at least it lists most of the key academics and activists. In the English-speaking world at least - goodness knows what French or Brazilian or Thai people would say about their situation.