"Tipping point" - What will it look like? (Trigger warning for suicide)

[WitchyWitcherson]

Inspired by a poster on the Henning Wehn post regarding a "tipping point" (and the feeling that we're perpetually creeping closer, but never seem to get there), what do you think the tipping point for the demise of gender ideology will be and look like?

On the positive side, I think there will be a mass sigh of relief that we can finally talk about this publicly without fear, that being Gender Critical will be recognised as rational thought, that young people identifying as trans will get proper help and support. I hope for sex segregated spaces and a sensible approach to people identifying as trans; with their own individual needs met across the board (from their own sports categories to bathrooms).

On the negative side, akin to dying cults, I fear that the vulnerable members of the trans community will will truly believe that life isn't worth living any more, and that activists will use their deaths as a tactic to keep their ideology alive.

The false links that TRAs have already put out there between people "not being able to live their best lives" (i.e. being denied any therapy that isn't affirmative) and suicide have already been put out there dressed as facts; "TERFs" are "literally killing trans people" with our words etc. etc. I think this is dangerous and something we need to look out for when we do reach the tipping point - how do we support these vulnerable people?

Has anyone had any similar thoughts about what a tipping point will look like? I'm hoping in many ways for a quiet fade-out with a minimal number of casualties along the way, but when legislation starts to change, that might cause things to snowball.

I agree with the comments saying we are nowhere near a tipping point. This craze is going to get bigger and more mainstream first, and sadly I don't think it'll "tip" in our generation's lifetime.

I think this because I work in a school and I can see that the kids are fully immersed in this ideology. It's in the language they use. It's become so normal. Only a minority of kids call it out as "wokery" but these fall into an Andrew Tate/Donald Trump sort of camp and aren't listened to.

That generation, our current teens, will grow and be in positions of power and influence and see it all as utterly normal. It'll be the generation below them, currently babies, that might turn this all around.

That's my (pessimistic) view.

I don't think the future will look like the past.

I'm afraid that gender identity actually could be the crowbar that cracks open and breaks the NHS. I date the rise of GI from an American change, the 2015 approval of gender medicine for insurance payments in the US, giving commercialised lifestyle medicine incentives to promote gender-based approaches, supported by research journals that increasingly fund themselves by authors paying to publish less and less rigorous studies.

The clash of publicly funded medicine and lifestyle medicine has other crunch points as well, but this is a huge one. Increasingly in this country it is normal to go private for stuff you want but the NHS can't or won't provide, but that you regard as essential. Nobody thought breast enlargements were anything other than commercial sexist shite exploiting women in the past. But somehow now my 20 year old cousin should have been able to get a mastectomy on the NHS, and it's wrong that she had to go private.

Oh come on now, just be honest for once. If you were were a dairy cow you'd identify as non binary too! Now where can I buy an udder binder? My daisy's having a they day.

😂 what programme was this?

I think it will be more of a slow change as other issues come to the fore, and hopefully it will become unfashionable. Could easily take another 10 or more years though.

I wouldn't be quite so pessimistic on that score. I used to teach, and 'trans' just wasn't a thing then ( 12 years ago) - but now my daughter is teaching and being GC she is always trying to subvert the agenda of the more woke activist teachers. She finds that many pupils have an ironic, 'roll their eyes' perspective on the whole matter - even as it has become part of the linguistic currency for their generation.

I hope that the kids captured by this ideology (whether trans identifying or not) will change their minds once they reach maturity and start being a bit more critical in their thought processes, and I think having children themselves will change a lot of minds. With the way the workplace works these days, you're more likely to have kids before you reach any position of power and influence (unless the power and influence is on the internet, unfortunately...!).

I know my world view is a million miles away from the one I held at 14, 18, 21... it's even different from when I was 30 (had a child at 32 and that fully peaked me 😂)

I'm afraid that gender identity actually could be the crowbar that cracks open and breaks the NHS. I date the rise of GI from an American change, the 2015 approval of gender medicine for insurance payments in the US, giving commercialised lifestyle medicine incentives to promote gender-based approaches, supported by research journals that increasingly fund themselves by authors paying to publish less and less rigorous studies.

I think you've found the smoking gun.

I've long been puzzled at the rapid rise of trans identities, but this seems fundamental. I've only recently realised the extent to which the profitability of drug-based interventions for mental illness was reliant on the willingness of insurance companies to fund them. This dates back to the 1980s and the publication of DSM III, which listed specific diagnostic criteria for different mental illnesses, making it easy to develop drugs that could be prescribed for particular conditions.

It makes absolute sense that once insurance companies were willing to pay for drug treatments for gender dysphoria that pharma companies would start pushing those drugs and funding academics to conduct those studies.

It seems like the rise of trans is the result of a plan. The infiltration of govt bodies didn’t happen my accident happen

I think there have been posters on FWR detecting turning tides, signs of a new dawn etc. since about 2017. Something always comes along to show how captured our institutions are and how long it will take to extirpate this (decades).

The sustained assault on women's rights will continue.

I don't think the studies are necessarily pharma funded. They don't have to be. The rise of open journals, which I see as a good thing in some ways, means a lot of journals ask the researchers to pay to publish. You request that funding as part of your research grants.

Im not one for believing in big plans or conspiracies, and I believe most people most of the time mean well. However, there can be consequences that I profoundly disagree with. Clearly if you're someone who has found transition to be positive for your life - and I don't think we should ever discount that lots of people do - you want it to be financially available to as many people as possible. That isn't sinister imo.

I don't think the studies are necessarily pharma funded. They don't have to be. The rise of open journals, which I see as a good thing in some ways, means a lot of journals ask the researchers to pay to publish. You request that funding as part of your research grants.

A lot of drug trial are pharma-funded though. There is quite an extraordinary degree of manipulation going on by pharma companies, in terms of paying academics to run trials, using ghost writers to write up the study, only publishing positive results, signing up renowned academics to put their names to the published study and so on. A lot of this is documented in Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma, but this is a notorious example from a few years ago (the academics concerned got away with a slap on the wrist):

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/harvard-docs-punished-for-undisclosed-pharma-ties

I think a lot of what's going on in so-called gender affirming care is driven purely by financial motives - by greedy surgeons and pharma companies.

What we need is the government to declare that Gender Identity is a social construct and is not real. And stop the NHS from providing gender affirming care, putting it clearly under the heading of cosmetic care. Women have been self funding cosmetic surgery for years. Time to put gender affirming surgery under the cosmetic surgery category. If people have to pay for things themselves it might make them think twice about. And start to stop the trans gravy train.

Really interesting thread.

I think the volume of de-transitioners will be the tipping point. There will be thousands and government will have to start funding support groups.

@PermanentTemporary

Im not one for believing in big plans or conspiracies, and I believe most people most of the time mean well. However, there can be consequences that I profoundly disagree with. Clearly if you're someone who has found transition to be positive for your life - and I don't think we should ever discount that lots of people do - you want it to be financially available to as many people as possible. That isn't sinister imo.

Fair point, but of course people that think they have a moral cause can then act in undemocratic ways to try to impose their agenda, thinking that they know better than the people.

There is also the risk of ideological blindness which can cause people to support harmful things.

So people may not be "outright evil", but still fall into it and be morally blameworthy.

Hmm, I'm not convinced it's part of a specific 'plan' - I think it's snowballed as many organisations and people gain to benefit (financial and otherwise) from it at the expense of women and children; big pharma, immoral/unethical medical practitioners, those seeking to trample sexual/moral boundaries, those seeking to erode women's rights, formula companies (only heard that one the other day!), social media influencers and narcissists, mediocre sportsmen and their team sponsors, politicians wanting sympathy/woke votes.... the list goes on.

Children have no real voice, and thanks to 'the patriarchy' for want of a better word, women have been silenced and cancelled using claims of "transphobe!". I do think that the silencing techniques are wearing off though, as more people are starting to see who is benefitting from the trans movement (it sure ain't 'true' trans people, or trans youth!).

Agree, it’s women and children’s voices counting for less than men’s voices. It’s only now that men are speaking out that they being listened to rather than being vilified.
a joke….
Q. How do you tell the difference between a woman and a trans woman?
A. People listen to trans women.

This will be owed: it will be on the government's hands that they sat wibbling about not wanting to look nasty or old fashioned while children were galloped down this path, and we may well have significant numbers of those too ill and disabled and distraught to be able to earn a living.

I worry though that it will be like when M.E. and chronic fatigue started to be diagnosed, and the govt and successive ones worked hard to make it a condition that benefits/PIP etc couldn't qualify for because just too many people were in the group for it to be economically viable to support them. Lots of funding was tactically given to researchers and programmes that focused on it being a psychological thing that people could get over if they tried and were pushed firmly enough. Things have improved somewhat in the past few years through heavy campaigning, but this is where the 'it's not a mental health thing' is going to bite so many on the bum. And we all know it won't be the current rich and influential lobby that got these kids into this position who do the campaigning and setting up of the resources. Detransitioners are another bit of reality that the lobby work hard and quite angrily on erasing as throwing shadow on their happy place.

I think it'll take several decades of propaganda to radicalise the general population against trans people but that tipping point could definitely be accelerated by carefully manipulating the reporting of a few key inciting incidents.

It will be hard to put the genie back into the bottle completely, though. Even when services are completely defunded and public discussion banned, you'll still have a middle-aged cohort who remember what will come to be known as the turbulent golden era of the 20's and it will be hard to completely discredit them no matter how many times they are framed as predators and narcissists. You can bet that even if they are driven from public life and deplatformed as they used to be, they won't be silenced completely and it will be difficult to block international criticism without introducing internet filtering.

Perhaps the money saved from denying trans people healthcare through the NHS will be able to fund a small portion of the cost of constructing nationwide segregated 'third spaces', though demand for mental health services is likely to skyrocket as a result so it might actually prove more expensive overall. Seems a worthy price to pay, though, to no longer have to piss in a toilet cubicle next door to a trans woman.

And stepping around that shower of totally missed points and alternative realities, and moving on.

But the nhs does fund cosmetic surgery for mh issues. My friend was an A cup and had a boob job to C on the nhs after counselling. I know 2 people who had nose jobs. So this would have to stop too?

I really thought the Andrew Miller story might have been a bit of a tipping point for the public in the same way Adam Graham was on the prison issue - a bona fide "trans woman" under the modern definition (in that he'd been "living as a woman" for many years, unlike Graham), using his womanlyness to kidnap and rape a child. Really thought it could have triggered a realisation in the UK that these are fetishistic and potentially dangerous men rather than some downtrodden vulnerable group. I have no doubt that the Question Time episode that Ella Whelan and India Willoughby were on opened a few eyes and I'd have loved a repeat.

Unfortunately he was sentenced just as the situation in Gaza was escalating and it went completely under the radar.

I think historians looking back will view Maya Forstater's case as the tipping point. It has laid the foundations for everything else that hasn't happened yet.

@Boomboom22 I bloody well hope so. I think your friend is unusual.

RebelliousCow · 11/12/2023 13:18

I don't think there will be one tipping point; rather an accumulation of events along with the passage of time. I've always estimated it would take a couple of decades to fully unravel - given the extent of generational and institutional capture.

I am hopeful that some pebbles have started rolling and they'll knock some cobbles, which will go on to knock boulders and eventually, cause an avalanche. As SapphosRock says, Maya Forstater's case seems to have been instrumental, in setting a precedent for the successful cases since.

I'm under no illusions that it'll be a hard slog, not least because some people have the strange, unreal attitude of " it'll take several decades of propaganda to radicalise the general population against trans people."