Andrew Neil has discovered Detrans kids - he is not happy

Here’s Aleksander’s channel:

https://m.youtube.com/@alexanderl9721

I’ve seen a couple of the Norwegian man’s videos on YouTube. He seems sensitive, thoughtful and (reluctantly!) brave.

I agree with this. I don’t think it has to do much with fuckability or not- but numbers.

Also, what price there is to pay to go public with your story.
One young-ish man (30 yrs now) went public that he had the operation when he was 20.
This was in a main Scandinavian tabloid.
That is publically stating that he volunteered to be castrated and become a eunuch. That takes a lot of courage, because the kneejerk reaction to many (men) will be «serves you right you eejit».
He went out with full name and picture.

Here’s the link in Norwegian:
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/3E78we/det-siste-aleksander-tenkte-foer-narkosen-fikk-ham-til-aa-slukne-var-hjelp-meg-jeg-vil-ikke-gjoere-dette

Anyway, thanks for the great link to Dawkins talking to Joyce. Great, as always.

That's not what I've heard! To say the least.

More importantly he lost everything, and i mean everything, to make take stand for women and didn't slink away when the pack were devouring him.

I'm halfway through it right now and living every calm, cool, clear word.

Particularly enjoying the way Dawkins ACTUALLY LISTENS. He's made a few statements about being kind, recognising the who 'put in the effort' by having the surgery, but has been immediately and politely cut down by HJ and acknowledges her point. It's so refreshing.

I think the reasons why teenage girls transition and then detransition are more palatable to public discourse, and therefore easier to cover in the media, than some of the male transitioners.

I think there's a simpler explanation than that. There are massively more young women than men identifying as the opposite sex, and of those, a far greater proportion are having surgery - typically a double mastectomy. Men identifying as female tend to be older, and the vast majority choose not to have surgery. A lot of them don't even bother with hormones. But huge numbers of young women (particularly) in the US are choosing to have their breasts removed and take testosterone.

Thanks for the link, I could listen to Helen Joyce all day long.

TBF the 20 years younger wife he eventually married is spectacularly clever as well as beautiful (and extremely successful in her own right):

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/19359092/who-andrew-neils-wife-susan-nilsson/amp/

Imo Susan Nilsson is definitely ‘dating down’ by all possible yardsticks!

I think the reasons why teenage girls transition and then detransition are more palatable to public discourse, and therefore easier to cover in the media, than some of the male transitioners

Plus society is OK with women going to drastic lengths to alter themselves physically and probably regards transitioning for teenage girls as just another from of that.

I think in AN’s case in particular, this is likely to be at least partially true. He’s known for his fondness for young, attractive women (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that). Hence Private Eye’s long running joke about him.

But Miller got it totally wrong. Her bank expressly forbade an account for a political party. And she then turned her perfectly fine personal account into one that was, um, a political party.

Agreed Farage is right to share the limelight with her, all publicity is good publicity. In truth, she fouled up.

@NicCageisnotNickCave Pretty damned smart of Farage to come out in support of Miller, IMO.

I think the reasons why teenage girls transition and then detransition are more palatable to public discourse, and therefore easier to cover in the media, than some of the male transitioners.

I’ve only seen two male detransitioners stories and for both the reason for their transition was heavily intertwined with their sexuality - in a way which was both complex and important, but not easy to condense into a paragraph or a sound bite.

Whereas: ‘I had a difficult childhood, was suffering mental anguish, hated my body, and this explanation for my distress seemed the answer’ is easy to communicate and easy for the public to understand and sympathise with.

I wish he would interview Helen Joyce. Helen Joyce speaks in a way that makes men listen. She just does in a way that many of the brilliant GC women cannot do. It’s infuriating that many wonderful clear women’s voices are shouting into the void but the forensic Helen Joyce, and possibly Maya Forstater, are the van guard that we need.

Andrew Neil is well into his 70s now, it's not surprising he wasn't particularly quick on the uptake on how important this is. Most people are long retired by his age. He has clearly been GC all along, but I suspect he thought it was a peripheral issue until now.
Glad he is shouting loudly now though. Can't wait for the interviews

Excellent thoughts. As a man, I came to this about 7-10 years as my ears pricked up on what I was subliminally aware of from the whole ManOSphere/incel/AGP world. It triggered me because the dissonance of polite society shunning more typical misogyny was somehow put aside for this New Misogyny.

My brain, honed on a few decades of New Atheist thinking, just would not accept the inconsistencies being not only put to me, but demanding my acceptance.

Early on, maybe day one, I chose not to accept. And in some ways, that's a terrible decision because it forces you to keep looking, and thus to keep your head exploding.

When the arguments on rejecting magical thinking and battening down the hatches on free speech then took a toxic turn into viewing the unfolding medical scandals and full on assault on women's rights, I realised I'd lost my antipathy I had to Greer/Bindel/Moore feminism that I had as a younger man, and I was onboard fully with women's rights, and I had a cause to believe in.

That was 2015-2019. It's only gone up a few gears since then, culminating in me taking a year of therapy to regulate my emotions and personal strategies.

And here we are in 2023, the year the levee broke. Time to welcome every new convert to the GC cause, and every TRA type moving to sanity (we hear you, Lisa Nandy).

The revelation that both arch Brexiteer Farage AND Remainer-in-Chief Gina Miller have had accounts closed has been enlightening!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12350607/amp/Brexit-architect-Nigel-Farage-stands-shoulder-shoulder-vocal-Remainer-Gina-Miller-political-partys-bank-account-shut.html

This makes a lot of sense to me.

Countering the "unfuckable"/misogynist angle, many of the female detransitioners looked androgynous before their transition. Many look more masculine following their transition. I'm not sure there will be many men looking past all of that to lament the lost fuckability of someone. I think it's just genuine horror when people - men and women - realise what someone has done to themselves, supposedly of their own volition, under the guidance of the medical profession while either still a child/adolescent or as a vulnerable adult.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/29/in-deserted-courtroom-grim-details-of-nice-atrocity-go-mostly-unnoticed

Only tangentially relevant but adding the link for completeness.

to bring it back somewhat on track Robert McLiam Wilson of Charlie Hebdo did a podcast with Brendan O’Neill for Spiked recently and mentioned Kathleen Stock, who McLiam Wilson affectionately referred to as ‘Stocky’, which I thought was rather lovely.

Now that the banks are behaving like arseholes to people all over the political spectrum, the rainbow smoke screen the big corps have been hiding behind is becoming very noticeable.

I think banks has triggered a lot of people. The ones who are thinking beyond 'Farage? couldn't happen to a nicer bloke' are joining the dots and realising that could be them next if their bank thinks they've stepped out of line

I do wonder if the male detransers are harder to think about?

People in general really struggle with thinking about tragedy and looking into the eyes of someone who suffered it - there is an excellent piece by one of the Charlie Hebdo staff about Nice that talks about this as a phenomenon - and it’s something I experienced when my child had cancer related illness.

The majority of the female detrans have only gone as far as top surgery whereas many of the males have had genital surgery. The young women mostly have at least the the possibilIty of regaining fertility and sexual pleasure whereas the young men have had theirs amputated,
often leaving them incontinent as well as infertile.

Many of these young men are gay (and sorry for the crude stereotyping!) so much of a young gay man’s life is sexually focussed that it feels tragic in a way that mastectomy does not (plenty of women are living full lives post mastectomy for cancer or cancer prevention)

I know men that recoil in horror when you mention castrating a pet puppy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they cannot bare to think about a young man having an unnecessary orchiectomy at 18, let alone a penectomy.

I don’t doubt their is the ‘some doctor made this young lady unfuckable, what a waste’ thing going on as well, I just think it’s probably two phenomena in tandem.

Plus the girls/young women have automatic champions amongst terves and other GC people, so their voices are being raised up by many, making their stories harder to miss.

I also think male detransers are more ashamed of their transgender experiences (seeing as male transition is often much more sexual in it’s origin than ROGD in girls or even in the old style ultra butch lesbian > female transsexual pathway) ) and thus they more likely to remain in the shadows.

(imo in the younger and/or autistic chaps much of that shameful sexuality has been imprinted on them by older males and they have no obligation to carry the feeling of shame forward with them but this is FWR and maybe not the place to talk about the detrans boys/men)

Sorry, it;s not linked upthread, I found it on the same page as a twitter link in the OP.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1685390378554527744

This makes sense. I'm watching the dawkins/ joyce discussion linked upthread at the moment. Dawkins is stunned by what Joyce is saying despite the fact that he has been in the loop for a very long time. Dawkins, I believe, came into this issue through his antipathy to postmodernism and irrational cults, but it's still surprising that he's still being astonished. I think for many men it IS a sideshow because there are other, more egregious things, which take their attention. We literally have not been paying attention.

The same thing happened to me. I was aware of the issue, but thought of it as a peripheral issue which came along with, but wasn't so pressing, as the cultishness, the irrationality, the puritanism, the bullying and the gaslighting I was getting from a progressive movement that I have had a lifetime's love/ hate relationship with. Decades of it.

What peaked me was JKR's essay three years ago. Actually, not the essay itself, but my son's reaction to it which was "Yes, she is clearly transphobic, but that doesn't mean she's a bad person". I was astonished, because this is my intelligent, capable, literate, rational, competent, wise son. I asked him what he meant, and would he please point me to the clearly transphobic bits in the essay because I couldn't see them. He didn't. He just started talking about other things, because this was just not an issue for him. And that's when I started actually listening to the women.

Yes, men haven't been listening to the women, but then, I found, neither have lots of women. It's been an extraordinary few years.

I actually think you could add another rule to Bewilderness's list:

'Women's value to society is directly related to their fuckability score'