Andrea Long Chu on Judith Butler's new book

[ArabellaScott]

'Everyone should have the right to change sex'

https://archive.is/N7Rg1

ALC with an interesting, lengthy article. Very readable. Underneath it all, it seems to me to be roughly the more eloquent version of the fantastically insane Action for Trans Health Manifesto -

https://edinburghath.tumblr.com/post/163521055802/trans-health-manifesto/amp?__twitter_impression=true

'We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.'

ALC

I just find it amazing to read these things which are supposedly high level thinking, and they seem like the musings of a 14 year old.

Like, how did that ever get to be seen as university level material? Someone, many someones, must have spotted early on what bollocks it is.

That postmodern critical theory was coming into the Humanities when I was at Uni (a million years ago 😉) and you’d have English Lit lecturers and tutors telling you things like, 'All readings of a text are valid', and they’d then proceed to make evidence-free statements about books/poems/plays that often bore little relation to what we were actually reading.

My A-level teachers would have been horrified as they were sticklers for students backing up arguments with evidence from the text.

I stuck it out for my foundation year and then moved to a different faculty to study subjects where evidence-based assertions were still required.

I remember tutorials from that year as being stuck in rooms with people who were high on their own ‘cleverness' - students competing with each other to make edgy and incomprehensible statements about the text they were 'critically engaging with'. To me, that’s what Butler and Chu are doing too - spoofing.

I think acually Chu is revealing something I've never spotted before: that trans women like him are dependent on the the loathing young trans men feel towards being female in order to keep forced-fem fantisies tittilating.
It's the abasement associated with being treated as if he is female that heightens Chu's arousal (as someone puts it upthread, being treated as if he is a recepticle). But in order to stoke the fires of tittilation he needs to find girls and women who will reinforce for him that femaleness really is a lack, a humiliation, and girls and young women who identify as trans men do just this.

Is it about control/lack of control (including persuading young people damaging their bodies is a meaningful choice)? It’s creepy as hell to me anyway…

“Sissy porn did make me trans"

ALC

Still displaying a very male attitude though in trying to control what women can and can’t have and what they can and can’t say.

I suppose what I’m getting at is this - dressing as a woman is driven by ALCs sex drive (according to him). Is the need to oppress women and encourage minors to alter their bodies similarly driven by sexual feelings around control? Anyway, enough, time for something more pleasant!

I think the recruitment of children is driven by something else - the need to present being trans as something that children can experience as well, that they were just like those so-called trans children, and therefore transsexualism isn't a fetish. It also makes it harder for everyone else to criticise if there are children caught up in it. And it's particularly hard for anyone who has a trans identified child in their family. Children are being used as human shields.

I really wish that Taibbi and Sullivan would publish this stuff without a paywall (or with a limited-time paywall as Jesse Singal sometimes does).

Singal has just got around to this one, but I'm afraid it is paywalled again.

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/andrea-long-chus-new-york-cover-story

It's archived.

https://archive.is/StCSS

Wow, that list of “demands” quickly descends into a Christmas “I want a Pony” List of utter ridiculousness.

Here’s a helpful bit of advice, really does a cause no good by letting the idiots write the manifesto. Release all trans prisoners?Really? Even the murderers and rapists ? Presumably they would also be in line for “material reparations” for the indignity of being found guilty of the crimes that they committed..

ALC is really coming out of the closet in that article. Gender affirmation, it appears, is not enough now. Gender affirmation is so 2010. It’s now all about the right to actually change sex, or as ALC puts it “changing back” to some apparently previous incarnation as the desired sex.

According to ALC since we are already using hormonal treatments in medical situations for some people, it is only fair to extend their use to other people who up until now have been deliberately excluded because of societal prejudice against trans people, and the apparent fear that we will reduce the number of fertile people in the population by giving trans people the opportunity to “ change back”. Apparently, if I read the article correctly, the societal acceptance of menopausal women taking HRT to reduce the physical effects of menopause, or cancer patients taking certain drugs to relieve their cancer symptoms , is exactly the same argument that should be used to justify that otherwise healthily bodied children should be given treatments to alter their sex, which will be the outcome, whatever the bIologists seem to think is impossible..

To deny trans identifying children this opportunity, ALC says, is to infantilise their wishes and personal decisions. I am not sure that ALC understands the meaning of the word infantilise when applied to legally minor children. But then ALC’s understanding of biology isn’t that strong either.

"I am not sure that ALC understands the meaning of the word infantilise when applied to legally minor children. But then ALC’s understanding of biology isn’t that strong either."
I'm frightened that ALC and co understand the consequences of what they're asking for (that children not be treated as if they are children) perfectly well.

Well. We can assume Hanlon's razor applies until proven otherwise, but tbh the evidence is mounting up against it.

I stumbled across this from Helen Lewis in the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/trans-youth-transition-andrea-long-chu/677796/

https://archive.ph/f6Mi2 the Atlantic wall?