"One of the simple enduring images of the day: Kamala Harris’s hair blowing in the wind as she took the oath. No one with longer hair (in other words: a woman) has ever taken the oath of office outside at the Capitol before, because she’s the first woman to ever do it"
Seeing stuff like that from The Atlantic journalist and then ACLU celebrating a 10 year old 'trans child'...
mobile.twitter.com/JuliaDRobertson/status/1351318813653000193
...without any criticism of the mother's homophobia, all I can think is how right Janice Raymond was. It's all about stereotypes and policing 'gender' roles. So depressing.
"She predicted that the handful of gender identity clinics treating adult transsexuals – the first of which opened in 1967 – would become what she calls ‘sex role control centers’ for so-called deviant female and male children. “Such gender identity centers are already being used for the treatment of designated child transsexuals,” she wrote, before arguing that these centres would proliferate.
There are now at least 40 such clinics treating children’s ‘gender dysphoria’ in the United States, and in England there are seven treating adults, and only one at present that specialises in under 18s, but with calls for more. This is in spite of concerns about the effects that such treatment might have on individuals legally considered too young to make most major life decisions.
In 1979, the word gender was understood to be separate from the word sex. Sex was what defined a person biologically; gender was understood to mean the sex-appropriate behaviour that was socially constructed. Today, gender has replaced the word sex in common parlance, as if gender itself were biological.
Raymond foresaw this shift. “As I saw it then and see it now, transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotyping in a role-defined society,” wrote Raymond in her preface to the 1994 reprint of TTE. When I interviewed her recently for this article, she added that “only feminism can challenge the idea of the ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain and notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ being innate”.
Julie Bindel
unherd.com/2019/04/the-transsexual-empire/