Can't believe Good Housekeeping

[BiologyIsReal]

Reading the June copy in the hairdressers today. It's problem shared page has a 'what to do' page about a 17 year old girl who wants to be a boy.

Who does regular writer Professor Tanya Byron suggest they talk to? Mermaids. So, if the poor girl wasn't screwed up before she will be afterwards.

Byron did suggest other sources as well, to be fair, but fancy a middle England conventional, sensible mag like Good Housekeeping promoting an organisation such as Mermaids. Still, if even the police can fall for bollocks stuff I suppose no one is immune.

I don't subscribe to GH but if there are subscribers here they might like to express some views about that to the magazine.

It's just bizarre how rapidly transness has been mainstreamed. This from the same type of publications who couldn't face racism for decades, for whom feminism is still about choosing an empowering lipstick.

It's been dawning on me as I puzzle over it that maybe it's not an accident, or some sudden lightning strike of tolerance that just happened to appear at this moment in time.

If you give transness full support, you're also fully supporting essential differences between masculine and feminine souls (because, really, that's how ineffable the quintessence insisted on in some trans philosophizing seems to be).

That plops you back right in the center of the tried and untrue patriarchy and you can forget all that human potential stuff the feminists have been waving around disturbingly.

Am I nuts? Is the appeal of supporting transness the return to patriarchy without the icky traditionalism? You get to be edgy and progressive and comfortable in a familiar box. Does this make sense to anyone else?

She probably googled trans charitable organisations and Mermaids came up. She probably knows nothing about the insidious, wicked nature of the group...like most people.

If you give transness full support, you're also fully supporting essential differences between masculine and feminine souls ...

That plops you back right in the center of the ... patriarchy

That seems to me spot on, quixote9. Thanks for putting it so clearly.

That sort of 'essential difference' is a requirement for sexist (patriarchal) hierarchy in exactly the same way as, for instance, 'essential diffence' between members of ethnic groups ('races') is a requirement for racist (colonial, imperial) hierarchy.

This ideology underlying sexism requires to be challenged if sexism itself is to be challenged. That transgender ideology, by its nature and at a fundamental level, denies the possibility of such a challenge, is one of its most dangerous aspects.

To be honest, I do believe there are psychological differences between men and women. Crudely put, men have fights and fancy women. Except, of course, when they don't. But a) that wouldn't mean a man with a female-type brain was a woman b)I'm not convinced that trans women generally have female-type brains. Quite a lot of them seem to have fights and fancy women. It's a free country.