Jolyon jumps the shark - is trans a cult?

I know it's been said here before by wiser heads than me but it's interesting how transmen ie young women are nearly always excluded from the debate...it's the middle aged transwomen's so-called rights that generate the most heat. Which tells you it's a movement for and by middle aged men.

That said, I do find it creepy how trans children are sort of fetishised as almost...pure and holy? As if they're sacrifical totems in a sort of old-timey pagan religion. They're viewed almost as more pure and precious than 'normal' children. You see it in the hallowed tones in which they're discussed and talked about in the media. Joe Biden for example giving a speech a few years ago in which he told trans children they were precious and loved....children as a whole never get talked about in that way.

I don't know why that is. Skeeves me out tho.

This all day long. 👏👏

A movement that has relentlessly targeted vulnerable girls, imposing on them brutal medication and surgery in the futile attempt to "change sex" in order to free them from their women's bodies. It's unforgivable.

YY @Catsmere

It's the ultimate DARVO. A male supremacist movement, completely misogynist, homophobic, and authoritarian, one that pushes the most depraved of fetishes, has managed to claim it's the opposite of all those things.

Me too. I was brought up to believe that "no-one likes a feminist" - after all, who wants to hear women being shrill?! Greer was held up as the epitome of man-hating ranters. Even more recently when there were efforts to no-platform her in 2015 I remember thinking "Do you really need to be so hardline and uncompromising? Can't we just be kind?"

Germaine, you were absolutely fucking right. I'm sorry it took me so long to see it.

Well said @DrBlackbird on LGB teaming, and @OldCrone on 'trans kids'. If only we saw the same clarity of thought when these issues are debated on TV, or, indeed, the HoC.

I also owe her an apology. And this is not something that gets said enough in any of these debates.

Exactly!

And the other thing I've noticed TRAs, especially in the US, do....is that they tend to refer to 'trans youth' rather than 'trans children'.

I think they employ these weasel words to try to obfuscate the fact that it is actual children who are being socially transitioned, put on damaging drugs and getting experimental surgeries.

Also, by employing the word 'youth' (which implies late teens early 20s) rather than 'children', they are attempting to sidestep the even less savoury implications of involving actual children in a world where sex organs and sexual activity is openly discussed.

Yes, and when questioned about how they managed to end up married to a woman and fathering several children, they say they were trying to be the 'real men' they were expected to be, as though their wives and children existed merely to support them in their struggles with reality.

Yes. And trans identified men will often retcon their own life story to make it seem like they felt in the wrong body from childhood - all in the name of justifying an adult fetish.

Yes, I don't think we should underestimate the importance of the invention of 'trans children' in all of this.

If 'trans people' were still largely middle-aged males like autogynephile Debbie Hayton, extreme porn advocate Jane Fae, domestic abuser Kellie Maloney and rapist Karen White, we wouldn't be where we are now.

Now we have the 'trans child in my constituency' wheeled out by Nadia Whittome and Lisa Nandy. Most people with school-age children know of 'trans children' in their children's school or their own children are trans-identifying. People are sympathetic to the struggles of these children in a way that they are not sympathetic to men who suddenly discover a trans identity in middle age.

It's now all about the children, but somehow politicians and the wider public need to be made aware that 'trans children' were only invented as cover for middle-aged males with a fetish.

It's also noticeable that politicians (and transactivists - even on here) swerve answering direct questions about children by talking about trans adults / folk / people. They do it all the time - anything to avoid explaining why they're supporting unevidenced medical experimentation on children.

It's noticeable that when politicians mention their constituents, it's a story of 'a trans child', not a middle-aged chap with a dodgy history.

I think that the teaming with LGB is a key part of the story but another significant part, which wasn't expected/planned for, was social contagion in children. That partly came from the LGB teaming but had other inputs as well.

This provided an amazingly effective human shield. Just look at Maugham's antics to see it in action.

"They genuinely seem to think that claiming to be a woman is so utterly awful and humiliating that only a man suffering deep deep genuine distress about his sex assigned at birth would ever do it. It's yet another of the underlying misogynies of the ideology - that for a man to identify as a woman is so debasing.... "

This is the conclusion I've come to aswell. Depressing. And my younger self owes Germaine Greer an apology.

The other forced teaming they do is with Black Women. I often have seen expressed on social media, that if transwomen don't look like/aren't proper women, then neither are Black Women. The underlying theory to this is a deeply racist and eugeniscist one drawn from the justifications used in the antebellum South, namely that Black Women are less feminine and more manly than beautiful delicate white women (this was then used as justification for overseers to force pregnant and postpartum enslaved women to keep working. Also used as a justification for rape).

it is a deeply deeply racist thought pattern and yet I see it trotted out by TRAs again and again - including on MN.

One only has to spend a few minutes on sites such as Lipstick Alley - the US forum by Black Women, for Black Women - to see how little credence actual Black Women give to this TRA talking point - and how utterly offended and disgusted they are by it.

The secret of TRAs success was right from the beginning to team it with LGB and then to influence any liberal ‘progressive’ institution. Such that people with liberal progressive values (as in supporting social justice) came to see the trans demands as the same as LGB demands for equal rights (the right to marry etc) or racial justice demands (to be free from discrimination). Those demands were right to be supported so trans rights must be too. We’re seeing forced teaming with people with disabilities play out now with the new progress flag.

All of these are false comparisons but the strategy has worked. It has been an incredibly effective strategy. We see it in how time after time posters come on these threads to accuse women who want to safeguard women’s rights of being homophobic and racist. Literally Nazis.

So it is no wonder that TRAs have also influenced universities and staff members. There is senior support in large part thanks to SW’s diversity champion campaign and filters throughout thanks to TRAs being the ones to offer training or create slick videos that misinterpret the EA, which becomes required training and the multitude of EDI events. Colleagues of course know that a man cannot ‘become’ a woman but they are willing to concede to treat them as such to be kind and welcoming. It’s easy enough to do in a lecture theatre.

Plus, they think men with bad intentions toward women who would also willingly choose to claim to be women when they are not trans are incredibly rare.

Another problem is that the reports of when this happens tend to be in the DM or GB News. Maybe occasionally the Telegraph or Times, but liberal academics read The Graun, which up to not so long ago was a respected paper. It is another example of a progressive institution that was captured early on and as we know any women who objected got driven out.

All of this started from entitled angry men (with a fetish) and men more widely / the patriarchy who from the beginning have trained women to think of themselves as service humans.

Nadia Whittome?

I mean 'a major figure' probably isn't that major.

I think it's very clear there's an underlying belief in society, held by both men and women and across all political leanings, that it's acceptable even moral for women to sacrifice for the greater good.

Oh hell yes. It starts on a family level where we are expected to carry the domestic organisation and mental load for our menfolk. And then extrapolates out to wider society.

It's the old cliche of women in the communist movement being told to make cups of tea for the men and keep quiet about feminism because the men were planning the REVOLUTION which is far more important and womens rights can wait.

That absolutely did happen and still probably does in those circles.

So yes the latest sacrifice we are expected to make is trans.

Well, they're not highly intelligent then. I'm sorry and I'm not insulting your colleagues but I honestly cannot see how a person can be deemed 'highly intelligent' by society and yet fail to do very basic due diligence on settled and proven evolutionary biology, that's even before we get to the safeguarding implications of letting men into women's spaces, especially working class and vulnerable incarcerated women, I'd have thought any intellectual with even a passing knowledge of material dialectics or feminist history or just HISTORY would be able to see this.

I bet these people are higher earners too and well respected in society. The kind of people who get into media and government advisory positions and tell us proles what to think so as not to be gammon bigots.

Pffff. I find it funny, when it doesn't make me angry as hell.

Indeed - if these men were women the movement would never have had the official support it does.

think it's very clear there's an underlying belief in society, held by both men and women and across all political leanings, that it's acceptable even moral for women to sacrifice for the greater good.

The 'greater good' so often translates to things men want, things men consider important and things that generally makes men's lives more pleasant in a way of their choosing.

Transactivism is just part of that as it can apply to all kinds of things. I think it's so deeply ingrained a lot of people don't even realise they think this. Look how happy that man is with his spinny skirt and 1st place women's cycling trophy. What sort of monster would deny him that joy?

In vain do we point out that if these men were actually women no one would care about their feelings.

Yes, the theme, overt or covert, throughout history has been that women and girls are service humans at best, more often barely-sentient (let alone sapient) creatures to be controlled, used and punished. Only men are human and deserving of rights and consideration.

I think it's very clear there's an underlying belief in society, held by both men and women and across all political leanings, that it's acceptable even moral for women to sacrifice for the greater good.

The 'greater good' so often translates to things men want, things men consider important and things that generally makes men's lives more pleasant in a way of their choosing.

Transactivism is just part of that as it can apply to all kinds of things. I think it's so deeply ingrained a lot of people don't even realise they think this. Look how happy that man is with his spinny skirt and 1st place women's cycling trophy. What sort of monster would deny him that joy?

They can't even contemplate the disappointment and anguish of the woman it was stolen from or the woman who didn't even make the team because of the man. Women have routinely sacrificed or been passed over for a millennia so men can have big careers and other pursuits that bring reward and joy. Why would this be any different?

It's why on this board we often end up in the n+1 argument trying to pin people down on exactly how many women and girls are acceptable collateral damage before they decide perhaps it's a bit much. We rarely get an answer because the notion of 'a bit much' is abstract and not easily grasped by so many because women are just meant to be kind.

@CantDealwithChristmas and @GiveMeSpanakopita it is a paradox and is unfathomable to me but there you go. Normally highly intelligent people that do not carry their thinking beyond being kind combined with a lack of what you might call common sense and/or lack of awareness of ‘it’ll never happen’ happening more and more. I don’t get it either. At best what I see is how people (colleagues) who are attracted to supporting liberal and ‘progressive’ issues have been caught up in hearing only one side of so called trans rights and no, did no further research on the matter.