Andrea Long Chu on Judith Butler's new book

I stumbled across this from Helen Lewis in the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/trans-youth-transition-andrea-long-chu/677796/

https://archive.ph/f6Mi2 the Atlantic wall?

"I am not sure that ALC understands the meaning of the word infantilise when applied to legally minor children. But then ALC’s understanding of biology isn’t that strong either."
I'm frightened that ALC and co understand the consequences of what they're asking for (that children not be treated as if they are children) perfectly well.

ALC is really coming out of the closet in that article. Gender affirmation, it appears, is not enough now. Gender affirmation is so 2010. It’s now all about the right to actually change sex, or as ALC puts it “changing back” to some apparently previous incarnation as the desired sex.

According to ALC since we are already using hormonal treatments in medical situations for some people, it is only fair to extend their use to other people who up until now have been deliberately excluded because of societal prejudice against trans people, and the apparent fear that we will reduce the number of fertile people in the population by giving trans people the opportunity to “ change back”. Apparently, if I read the article correctly, the societal acceptance of menopausal women taking HRT to reduce the physical effects of menopause, or cancer patients taking certain drugs to relieve their cancer symptoms , is exactly the same argument that should be used to justify that otherwise healthily bodied children should be given treatments to alter their sex, which will be the outcome, whatever the bIologists seem to think is impossible..

To deny trans identifying children this opportunity, ALC says, is to infantilise their wishes and personal decisions. I am not sure that ALC understands the meaning of the word infantilise when applied to legally minor children. But then ALC’s understanding of biology isn’t that strong either.

Wow, that list of “demands” quickly descends into a Christmas “I want a Pony” List of utter ridiculousness.

Here’s a helpful bit of advice, really does a cause no good by letting the idiots write the manifesto. Release all trans prisoners?Really? Even the murderers and rapists ? Presumably they would also be in line for “material reparations” for the indignity of being found guilty of the crimes that they committed..

https://archive.is/StCSS

It's archived.

I really wish that Taibbi and Sullivan would publish this stuff without a paywall (or with a limited-time paywall as Jesse Singal sometimes does).

Singal has just got around to this one, but I'm afraid it is paywalled again.

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/andrea-long-chus-new-york-cover-story

I think the recruitment of children is driven by something else - the need to present being trans as something that children can experience as well, that they were just like those so-called trans children, and therefore transsexualism isn't a fetish. It also makes it harder for everyone else to criticise if there are children caught up in it. And it's particularly hard for anyone who has a trans identified child in their family. Children are being used as human shields.

I suppose what I’m getting at is this - dressing as a woman is driven by ALCs sex drive (according to him). Is the need to oppress women and encourage minors to alter their bodies similarly driven by sexual feelings around control? Anyway, enough, time for something more pleasant!

Still displaying a very male attitude though in trying to control what women can and can’t have and what they can and can’t say.

Is it about control/lack of control (including persuading young people damaging their bodies is a meaningful choice)? It’s creepy as hell to me anyway…

I think acually Chu is revealing something I've never spotted before: that trans women like him are dependent on the the loathing young trans men feel towards being female in order to keep forced-fem fantisies tittilating.
It's the abasement associated with being treated as if he is female that heightens Chu's arousal (as someone puts it upthread, being treated as if he is a recepticle). But in order to stoke the fires of tittilation he needs to find girls and women who will reinforce for him that femaleness really is a lack, a humiliation, and girls and young women who identify as trans men do just this.

That postmodern critical theory was coming into the Humanities when I was at Uni (a million years ago 😉) and you’d have English Lit lecturers and tutors telling you things like, 'All readings of a text are valid', and they’d then proceed to make evidence-free statements about books/poems/plays that often bore little relation to what we were actually reading.

My A-level teachers would have been horrified as they were sticklers for students backing up arguments with evidence from the text.

I stuck it out for my foundation year and then moved to a different faculty to study subjects where evidence-based assertions were still required.

I remember tutorials from that year as being stuck in rooms with people who were high on their own ‘cleverness' - students competing with each other to make edgy and incomprehensible statements about the text they were 'critically engaging with'. To me, that’s what Butler and Chu are doing too - spoofing.

I just find it amazing to read these things which are supposedly high level thinking, and they seem like the musings of a 14 year old.

Like, how did that ever get to be seen as university level material? Someone, many someones, must have spotted early on what bollocks it is.

That review was trenchant and cogent in a way that Butler and Chu are incapable of being over the course of entire books.

If anyone wants to read a 1* review for Butler's new firelighter book

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/afraid-gender-judith-butler-review/

https://archive.ph/fZgBu go ahead jump (over the paywall), you might as jump 🎶

Sullivan things there are people who are "really trans". I'm not sure what he means by that, bt I don't think it's just a matter of people he approves of or not. I don't see this as inconsistent, so much as mistaken about the facts. No doubt he'd say the same about me though.

I'm not sure of Tabibi's reasoning. Similar maybe, or possibly he has pragmatic reasons around where he wants to publish.

I think though many see the pronoun issue as a symptom, and see addressing the underlying illness as the real remedy; pronoun arguments are a distraction and muddy the waters.

Ta for that info Tempest.

I think the only thing that I read into Taibbi and Sullivan et cetera using female pronouns for men they approve of, but withholding them from men they disapprove of, is that it’s frustrating as hell that they will get so far as to see that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes but would still prefer to be polite and maintain some level of fiction that the emperor might be dressed rather than be factual about it. Increasingly, I feel that it’s as Kellie-Jay Keen describes it: a very middle-class thing to do.

And this insistence on politeness places restraint on the effectiveness of arguing against queer theory and gender identity because it’s difficult to argue against concepts if you accede to and make use of their terminology, that accession implicitly grants a form of legitimacy to these ideologies and works to limit the effectiveness of any attempt at wholly refuting them. In plainer terms: telling a man that he isn’t a woman but continuing to refer to him using female terms is, to my mind, self-defeating.

I don't know about Tabibi, but you can read that piece by Sullivan by signing up for the unpaid version of The Weekly Dish.

I don't think that I'd read too much into Tabibi using one set of pronouns or the other, tbh.

I really wish that Taibbi and Sullivan would publish this stuff without a paywall (or with a limited-time paywall as Jesse Singal sometimes does). I know they want to make money from their articles but trenchant critiques of Chu and Butler don’t do much good to counter the TRA narrative if they’re kept isolated behind paywalls. It’s a huge disappointment that magazines will pay Chu et al for nonsense but not pay for anyone to write in rebuttal. There’s a lack of balance in the discourse because of this.

I think I see and understand your perspective, but my experience says that this is a simplification. I come from a left of centre but fairly socially conservative background; it took me several years to accept that women were somewhat oppressed even in the kind, respectful circles I knew best. So I had to rethink many of my assumptions about how men and women should relate to each other, particularly within a heterosexual marriage. This was in some ways a relief, as I am not a born leader. I am very happy that my wife no longer expects me to make decisions that I am ill-equipped to make, and that I can defer to her where she has more expertise or her character is better suited to a particular role.

There are many other people like us, still living in a quite conservative and conventional way, but having learned a great deal from feminism. (I still tend to talk over her, but she points it out and has ways of getting herself heard!). So there are not just the two extremes of “conservative” and “feminist”, and I wonder if it’s more a case of one front with two wings and plenty of us somewhere in the wishy-washy middle. I, and I think my wife, neither want men to dominate women nor are particularly involved in fighting the domination, or only in a quiet way. We are much more concerned about the effect of GI ideology on our family, and the medical scandal affecting children and vulnerable adults.

I listened to Rebecca Lee’s recent interview of Kara Dansky and Stella O’Malley yesterday, and found the discussion very interesting. KD and SO’M have different objectives and ally themselves (to some extent in each case) with different people. Each is criticised for who they are prepared to talk to and work with. In my opinion the crossover between their viewpoints is large and most of their work is mutually reinforcing. But it is always difficult when differing objectives lead to strategies which conflict, even if the area of conflict is small.

But why, I wonder, when he seems to have finally become peaked enough to write such a compelling critique of Chu (and GI theory in general), is Taibbi still doing the pronoun nonsense for Chu? I find it mystifying

Another piece on it - Andrew Sullivan this time:

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-transqueers-take-the-mask-off

Paywalled again, but full text on Ovarit again, here.

Unlike Taibbi he's not doing the pronoun nonsense, but he's still at the "true trans" stage...

Which brings me to New York Magazine’s “moral case” for allowing children “regardless of age” with no parental consent, to change their sex, simply because they want to. The sub-hed — “The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies”— undersells the piece: it’s actually a case for letting any kid for any reason undergo sex reassignment. It’s not a “moral case” because simply stating a want and demanding it be realized is not an act of morality; it’s an act of unmediated will. And the implications of this demand are immense. In good queer-theory fashion, Chu destroys any and all distinctions between being a child and being an adult. And he does so with aplomb, as if expecting a wave of snapping fingers in response.

(A word about pronouns. I always respect the pronouns of actual trans people, so won’t in this case. Chu has never “always wanted” to be a woman; he has said rather that “sissy porn did make me trans”; he defines womanhood in grotesquely misogynistic terms (“Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”). He is as much a woman as Dylan Mulvaney is, which is to say he is no such thing. He is just a seriously depressed careerist with a new orifice: “Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound.” A decade ago, he declared: “I am straight. I am male. I am white (mostly). I am comfortably middle-class.” He still is all those things — but those things, even when declared in self-hatred, don’t get you a Pulitzer. Hence the current piece of performance shock-art. I see no reason to cooperate in this bullshit. It’s an abuse of good faith interlocutors. And it’s a fucking insult to actual trans people, a mockery of the challenges they face.)