Wrong side of history

[LyraPotter]

Here is something I know to be true: those campaigning against trans rights will fail. Your money will be raised and spent and wasted. Your legal challenges will not succeed. Your relentless attempts to do injustice will fail. You are on the wrong side of history. Your children will grow up knowing better than you. You cannot stop progress. Your efforts are in vain.

And every time I'm proven right - every time a court judgment goes against you and every time a law protecting trans men and women is passed and every time equality is further enshrined in the laws of this country I am going to return to this thread for the pure and petty purpose of telling you I TOLD YOU SO.

Just read the article and it is about women being hardier in times of famine and disease. So it's not about physical strength.

Yes it's only good in the abstract if you're thinking of the concept of strength.

In terms of oppression, it's meaningless.

It was Hobbs or Hume that had a concept that men and women are fundamentally equal because they are both capable of killing each other. Problem is that men are slightly more capable and MUCH more willing. Statistically, in case of NAMALT!

This is partly because they have bought into a "package deal" view of left wing politics - that the correct ideology comes as an indivisible whole and to reject any part of it is to reject of it.

Yes, this is very well put. I know a few women like this - “there’s us and there’s the Daily Mail, you’re either on one side or the other #nodebate” (Men in my experience have always been much more willing to opt out of left-wing beliefs as and when it suits, like e.g. the oppression of women as a class, but then men tend to be the ones who get to decide what the package deal is.)

I think this is pertinent to where we are today in the discussion.

thebewilderness

Excellent vid. Totally believable.

Yes it's only good in the abstract if you're thinking of the concept of strength.

In terms of oppression, it's meaningless.

I sort of disagree with that last bit. how we define 'strength' (or any word) and what attributes are considered important by society do have an impact on the way different classes treat each other.
Because some attributes are venerated and others denigrated - there is no natural order to this - it's all man made. And surprise surprise it's the male attributes that get venerated whilst the female ones get denigrated.
Women and girls are raised to not view themselves as 'strong' - to the point that 'strong female characters' are a a separate and spoken about category of fiction, in a way that 'strong male characters' just aren't.
How different might the world have been if women's physical endurance and ability to survive famines had been venerated as well as men's superior heavy lifting abilities? How might women as a class have fared if they had been raised to believe they were strong because of all these amazing feats of survival their bodies can perform? Instead we rarely hear about them.
And if women believed themselves to be - and were accepted to be- physically strong in their own way - might they have been allowed to be emotionally strong and resilient as well, instead of hysterical and unfit for education/politics/ making their own decisions? Women's 'mental inferiority' was always put down to our 'physical infirmity.' If women had had their own physical strengths recognised and rewarded - might they not have been given equal opportunities?
But men decided 'strong' only meant the lifting heavy objects variety - women were obviously not as good at that, and therefore were 'weak.' This allowed everything else to happen. Women's 'weakness' was the justification for the oppression. And men love to think they're nice guys - they need to be able to justify their actions, to themselves, at least.

I think ideas can oppress just as much as physical power can. Physical power is the blunt tool - the idea is more insidious but much longer lasting - and can survive well after the blunt tool has been removed. (just look at all the handmaidens championing men's rights above women's!) So our concept of 'strength' that it is the male attribute of heavy lifting, and not the female attribute of endurance and pain tolerance and famine survival, and the veneration of the male attribute - is as much a part of the oppression as their fists.

Do you know what the best bit of "wrong side of history" is? It suggests that at some point in the future we will have moved out of the current fug of thinking to a point where we are able to look back on the debate happening right now and bring some critical analysis to bear.

And I know that mutilating children will never, ever be the "right side of history". We will surely look back on "gender reassignment surgery" and puberty blockers and breast binders in the same way that we now view trepanning and electroshock therapy

And I know that mutilating children will never, ever be the "right side of history". We will surely look back on "gender reassignment surgery" and puberty blockers and breast binders in the same way that we now view trepanning and electroshock therapy

Indeed.

Icantreachthepretzels

I agree with your post. I suppose it's necessary to twist attributes and weaknesses in such a way to make oppression justifiable.

It would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine women as they physically stronger sex and how that would change all the rest of the language.

We will surely look back on "gender reassignment surgery" and puberty blockers and breast binders in the same way that we now view trepanning and electroshock therapy

I hope we look back on it as much worse! After all trepanning goes all the way back to the stone age - for millenia people didn't know better or have better. It was the best they could do.
The people mutilating children, or stuffing them full of dangerous and untested puberty blockers do not have that excuse. They know that, as with all mental health disorders, therapy is necessary and affirmation is dangerous. They go down this route for the money and the money alone.
I hope they are viewed with the same kind of horror that we view Dr. Mengele with.

I just hope that puberty blockers don't have a long-term effect that stops these children from being able to speak out further down the line.

I'm thinking of Jazz Jennings and how the drugs seem to have stunted not just his physicality, but his mental maturity.

Will they not realise what has been done to them? In his case, he doesn't know what he's missing (his libido, for instance).

I just hope that puberty blockers don't have a long-term effect that stops these children from being able to speak out further down the line.

I'd not thought of that. If they're stuck forever in a form of cognitive pre adolescence then they will never have a voice - the way children don't. Only, they won't have people speaking out on their behalf the way children do.
Plus - the only way they will know they are missing vital parts of adulthood is by observing other adults - but they may not have the fully developed cognition skills to recognise it. Nor will they have the lived experience of 'normalcy' to compare it against.
Truly terrifying - creating victims that will never be able to speak out, or even understand what has been taken from them - all for the money that the trans juggernaut brings in.

I know it's been mentioned on these threads before, but I think Martin Amis' novel The Alteration should be compulsory reading! Not about trans issues, it's an "alternative present" type of sci-fi book in which the reformation never happened and the Catholic church runs things - and about the life of a choirboy (aged about ten) who is faced with being turned into a castrato. There's a very poignant bit where he's trying to get his older brother to tell him what sex feels like ("playing with your willy while eating the nicest ice cream ever, but much much better than that", seems to be the best description the brother can come up with).

I can't think of anywhere where modifying children's bodies stands up to scrutiny. Foot binding and FGM are definitely a bad thing, circumcision is frowned upon and only practiced amongst religious groups. Corsets were replaced by Liberty bodices. We don't even routinely pin back boys' ears (now they do not have to have short back and sides - I love a good pair of ears ) and even routine tonsillectomy is off the cards. So why have we suddenly started sterilising and modifying young people, and why is it so universally acceptable?

Just read the article and it is about women being hardier in times of famine and disease. So it's not about physical strength.

I wonder how that plays back into the thread a little while ago about women being habitually deprived of food in favour of the men of the house? Is it a form of natural selection? That it's more important for women to stay alive as they can only make one baby at a time (broadly speaking)?

Because of the manipulation and falsification of suicide stats, Terry. The public are fed this line of "better a trans child than a dead child", and also "puberty blockers are safe and reversible, they can change their minds later". Glossing over the horrendous side effects of puberty blockers, the problem that because they block puberty, they also block the jump in cognitive development that goes with puberty, the fact that once children are on puberty blockers they almost never turn back. And continually saying "well, actual surgery isn't allowed until 18", ignoring the fact that because of the blockers, the competence to make decisions may be impaired, and in any case we now know that the pre-frontal cortex, the bit of the brain responsible for impulse control and decision making, isn't fully developed until the early to mid twenties. Add into that an obfusticating dose of waffle about Gillick competence (which is meant to protect girls from the life-long consequences of getting pregnant under age, not allow them to opt into the life-long consequences of mutilating surgery) and you have a perfect storm of confusion among adults supporting children, the very adults who should know better.

i Martin Amis' novel The Alteration

It's actually Kingsley Amis- who was a bot of an old git but could certainly write.

And the discussion about women's strength reminds me of the famous Sojourner Truth quote;

i That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And arn’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted , and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And arn’t I woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And arn’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And aren’t I a woman?

Only certain women - generally white and/ or upper class- can be seen as weak. And only in certain circumstances.

The thing that's been bugging me recently about puberty blockers and mental age of a prepubescent child is that it messes with the age of sexual consent. If a 16 yo has not gone through puberty, they are no more mentally capable of consenting to sex than a 9 year old. And then does that pave the way for the resurgence of PIE type organisations... ("well if that 16 yo can legally consent, then so can this 9yo...").
Very scary.

Plus - the only way they will know they are missing vital parts of adulthood is by observing other adults - but they may not have the fully developed cognition skills to recognise

This also plays in to the situation where we have so many men being oblivious of just how women have to navigate life.

See the reaction to #metoo. The disbelief. The dismissal. The whataboutery. Purely because they have NO experience of it.

They Just Don't Get It.

It's a chilling parallel to imagine children growing up confined to the trans community, and not realising exactly what they have not experienced.

Particularly with all the fake affirmation that goes on in the community. The conflict, should arise, would be mind blowing. But it has to arise first.

Doh, of course Jessica, it was Kingsley! (That Sojourner Truth quotation is marvellous, thanks for reminding me of it.)

I asked this on another thread and think it worth asking here as well.
Can you mandate belief?
Can you codify into law the idea that some people can mind over matter themselves out of material reality and into the opposite sex and must be treated accordingly?
It is like transubstantiation. A belief that no one actually believes.
Will you allow people to drug and mutilate children based on this belief that no one believes?

The difference between the lobotomy scandal, and the current horror, is that there isn't a doctor, parent, mp or transactivist who will be able to claim "we didn't know of the harms, nobody told us, we didn't know better."

Because it's 2018. And we have the Internet. And EVERY doctor, parent, mp or transactivist will have to answer how it was that they ENGAGED with every argument for NOT transing kids, and dismissed all the evidence, called people Terfs. They are choosing this awful path, eyes wide open, knowing all the evidence and arguments for not doing it are being dismissed.

The Internet takes receipts.

I wouldn't be Maria Miller or Suzy Mermaids in ten years for all the tea in China.

Beyondww that's what struck me when I read some if the blogs. Puberty blockers on boys (plus other surgery) gives them the fem looking body and the genitals of a little boy in someone who is now over the age of consent (without dev cog ability). A paedo's wet dream? My blood ran cold when I read some of Jezz Jennings accounts. She isn't someone who should be going in the mens.

thebewilderness you're absolutely right and I read this what CBB can teach us about gender politics blog post yesterday which basically says that.