Where did gender identity theory come from?

Tumblr.

It always jolts me when lawmakers recite the creed and give the time of day to principles made popular by teenagers on Tumblr in 2010.

I personally think a lot of it is just a trend and when these people get older they will look back and cringe.

And those public figures and politicians noisily declaring that TWAW but women are 'cis women' will look utterly stupid.

That's good to hear, nightwakingmoon.

Thank you, MN, for reinstating my post (and thanks@OldCrone and @DameHelena for your help). I got an email saying deletion was not warranted (below), which is much appreciated. I think it’s really very important that deletions remain only according to Talk guidelines, and not just because some monitor doesn’t like what’s written. Reality and historical fact are not “hate speech”.

———
Hi there, nightwakingmoon,

We've reinstated your post. It doesn't break guidelines and so didn't warrant deletion. So sorry about that.

Best wishes,
Becky
MNHQ

I've reported this post in order to be able to reiterate your request to MNHQ for their reasons to be published on this thread.

Yup.

You could report your post that I replied to, where you ask them to explain the deletion.

I hadn't noticed that you could no longer report deleted posts.

Ah it seems that’s not possible on this new platform - I can’t report a deleted post, so how on earth do I complain? Am really annoyed about this; and tbh, I really feel at the end of my tether with MN at the moment - it’s downright censorship, and for no reason at all apart from the fact that someone doesn’t like the actual historical truth. Seems MN prefer to do the bidding of propagandists, liars and misogynist censors. And added to that the new platform is still utter shit.

@nightwakingmoon
If you want MNHQ to explain why they have deleted your post, the best way to do this is to report your deleted post and ask them to explain. I have done this a few times and they have always replied fairly promptly. They probably won't see this post of yours because tagging@mnhq doesn't do anything.

It came from the USA in particular California.

Huge investment in plastic surgery futures, surgeons with a god complex, promising the impossible, USA based social media Goliaths preying on normal teen angst for their own gain, casual misogyny, downright hatred of women and our "rights" from American conservatives, transing away the gay homophobic conservatives, the obvious cash cow from gender ideology treatments, it's a total shit show that Europe followed suit it goes to show the power of propaganda and the popularity of misogyny.

I mean I skipped loads, but yes absolutely Heidegger as the predecessor makes the post modernists make a lot more sense (although I admit I’m a Heidegger fan even if he’s wrong).

all of this to say, that the trans agenda has its roots in modern philosophy, and draws extremely heavily (as does our modern culture) from post modern and existential philosophy.

And the problem of the subject/object or noumenal/phenomenal divide ultimately underpins this confusion.

I had noticed you seemed to jump over the existentialists in your post. Which I thought was a glaring omission 🤔 They continued the idea of the constructed self with the notion of 'existence preceding essence' so they need to go in there.

American Drug industry - decades of treatment

I also see that my long post upthread about early twentieth century sexology, Havelock Ellis and the history of the development of transgender surgery in the Johns Hopkins clinic in the fifties has been deleted. @mnhq can you confirm please, ON the thread, why this is? I am an academic historian in the field, and nothing I had written is anything other than completely factual, evidenced information from academic history in the public domain. I would like the post to be reinstated. This was all completely uncontested fact and absolutely nothing in it was in any respect untrue, defamatory, or broke talk guidelines. I did not misgender anyone and nothing about my post was anything other than historical fact, for which I can provide multiple published studies in evidence.

I would really like an explanation, as it looks like you are suppressing actual evidenced history here, in order to further a political agenda that would prefer that actual, FACTUAL history to be erased. That really goes too far.

I would like some detailed comment here explaining why you are deleting uncontroversial posts about historical fact.

@DontLikeCrumpets the Atlantic article is from 2000, so it’s based on the situation at that monent, when “transsexuals” were a smaller group who largely did undertake sex reassignment surgery — that was well before the current situation, in which “transgender” also means what used to be called transvestites, and all of the so-called “trans umbrella” was invented.

The article is a good example of the ways in which it used to be possible to think of “transgender” as something that was medically and socially constructed, rather than innate. It’s the kind of analysis that just isn’t really permitted these days, and it gives you a good sense of the contrast between 2000 (pre the rise of “gender ideology” into the mainstream), and twenty years later (post “gender ideology”). Anything like that article — which suggests that “transgender” might be a form of social contagion — just would not be permitted to be published somewhere like The Atlantic nowadays. It’s a glimpse into how quickly things have changed since then.

@nightwakingmoon

According to the Atlantic article "Fifty years ago the suggestion that tens of thousands of people would someday want their genitals surgically altered so that they could change their sex would have been ludicrous."

I believe that's bollocks because the vast majority of trans are not loping off their genitals,- most simply self id and take hormones. Women are removing breasts but breasts are not genitals.

I take issue with the Atlantic statement because it I believe confuses the general public who are still unaware that most TW keep their dicks.

It's worth reading Helen Joyce's book Trans. In the early chapters she talks about how the concepts of transgenderism and gender identity developed over time by various sexologists and surgeons experimenting on people, mainly men.

not my boy Heidegger! I mean don’t get me wrong he ultimately contributes to this breakdown into subjectivity because he also fails to provide a unified theory of being, because again, Descartes. But being and time is an epic work. He does go off the deep end at the end though…but I really like phenomenology as a philosophical method 🙈

@Hiddenmnetter I'm happy to join you kicking Descartes in the nuts as long as Heidegger gets a slapping as well.

Yeah - I’m on Tumblr for a different hobby, and it’s quite well known that a lot of the current manifestation of this stuff originated there in the 2010s.

It still circulates everywhere there, but cheerfully at least, because like here it’s anonymous, there’s also a fair amount of radical feminism going on (“Radblr”), pushing back against a lot of it.

Tumblr.

by insisting on your own use of language, or insisting that you have access to the reality of that person, you are inflicting upon them your own subjectivity

It's noticeable it only works one way

Well, it’s definitely the case that gender ideology looks like a revived model of religious dualism - but probably more Platonic than Cartesian, since it seems to rely on the idea of an imagined gendered soul as presumably part of the ideal world of the Forms. (Whereas, our bodies remain miserably mired in the degraded material world, longing to be perfected so that they can match our Gender Identities glittering in the eternal realm of the Ideal 🤣)

Historically it is an interesting question. It harks back to the enlightenment, when Descartes asked “but how do we really know?” And when no one gave him a swift kick in the balls and asked “do you know if that hurts?” The problem began.

What came out of Descartes was a shift in philosophy, where the main subject was no longer how is it than things can be, to how do we really know? This leads to (broadly) two schools of thought: rationalism and empiricism.

Then a very very clever fellow called Immanuel Kant (pronounced with ‘u’ not ‘a’ for all those undergrads who have to battle through the critique of pure reason) came up with a shocking conclusion. Thinking that both rationalism and empiricism were wrong, that they should not be at odds with each other (but really was a rationalist) he came up with what is referred to as the “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy.

his revolution was this: always before we have assumed that reality was there, and we have access to it. Instead, what if we don’t? We have instead a manifold of rational faculties that impose categories and criteria on reality that make it intelligible? Space and time are not out there, they’re in your mind man!

So Kant was attempting to come
up with a unified theory of being- that solved the Cartesian problem of knowledge by answering: we know through the structures of rationality (more or less, it’s more complicated than that but w/e).

the problem with this is he had overcome the rationalist/empiricist divide but created another analogous divide: the subject/object.

we are all “noumenal” objects (objects in reality as we are) but can only know other objects through the phenomena (things as they appear). But the interior reality of what things are, their essence, is closed to us. Phenomenology attempts to overcome this by treating the subject as an object we can know noumenally but it has issues.

On the basis of this, you have post Kantian philosophers who argue that reality is constituted in all sorts of ways. Foucault argues that it is in power structures. Derrida in the subjectivity of the person, etc etc.

all of this though comes down to: reality, certainly the reality of others and probably the reality of ourselves is not known, and worse, cannot be known. Therefore the subject cannot be categorised. The subject is constituted in themself. Their authentic self is realised only by the (journey, drugs, w/e bs you like). Which means things like “sex” are arbitrary categories imposed. Worse, as Foucault suggested, (this is called post structuralism) structures of the elite are maintained by control over language. Therefore language is power. It gets weird. The TRA claim that calling a trans woman a man is LITERAL violence suggests to me that at least one of them was a student of post modern philosophy.

this is basically it: by insisting on your own use of language, or insisting that you have access to the reality of that person, you are inflicting upon them your own subjectivity, which is after all no more valid than theirs. Because we can’t know reality. So identity politics is simply the latest incarnation of the same thing.

Someone really needed to kick Descartes in the nuts.