The greatest shibboleth of all...the "trans child".

[1984Now]

More and more my mind is drawn as to how/why transgender ideology has succeeded. And not just partially, totally. Sure, there may be a re-righting of the ship, but I don't see any return to the pre-2012 (the year that Lionel Schriver identifies as when the ship hit the rocks) liberal consensus.
So many things...trans rights is men's rights, rapid onset gender dysphoria, possible march thru the professions/institutions, the feral power of autogynephilia, suicidal empathy, the birth of a new religion and caste structure, cancel culture freezing criticism, the drive to trans humanism. And many more things.
But things really clarified for me over a year ago when Helen Joyce was asked her opinion on this movement's implacable power. And she mentioned both the impossibility of anyone repenting publicly who'd invested themselves into gender ideology re their own children, or in response to children in their extended family, friends, colleagues, and critically admitting to themselves that they'd something so terrible.
At that point, whether you were typically a very brave person who'd normally speak truth to power, or even someone with a generally well rounded pride in being a truthful honest person happy to speak up...so many shut up.
So many...Schriver knew it was BS, but only started to speak up in 2016, four years after she realized how wrong this all was.
JK Rowling took a lot of time.
Linehan? Maybe he spoke up on day one, but he'd have been an absolute exception.
And if Joyce is right, then societies total capitulating is less to do with my list above, and all to do with the concept of the trans child.
For anyone, anonymous or a billionaire writer, to say "sorry, I'm sympathetic to children's plight, but there's no such thing as a trans child, just body dysmorphia", for anyone to say this to one's child, and critically any child they know, and children at large, would have required such bravery and sheer hard headedness, that I can't think of anyone other than Linehan who could have done it.
Before you know it, 5 years have gone by, we're in the Great Awokening, the midst of social media changing everything, then into COVID and the explosion in trans ideology controlling the discourse.
So, umpteen all very convincing reasons why trans ideology has flown, but what got it up in the air was (and still is) the shibboleth of the trans child.
Once society looked the other way on this concept, medicine, academia, social sciences, schools all locked down the trans child as a concept that couldn't be questioned or even discussed quizzically, let alone disbelieved/dismissed, the die was cast.
I do believe this is a big part as to why so many women have been instrumental in the bye that trans ideology has been given, women's inherent empathy has been weaponised by men in the movement for fetishistic readings (AGPs) or political reasons.
Turn the clock back, society en masse chose not to affirm the trans child as inviolable shibboleth, the world would be very different today.
Can things be righted? You can guess what my answer is as I respond to the thread on Streeting's puberty blocker trial...the trans child remains a total neo-religious icon to the modern left.

No accounting for distressed kids, then as now.

... Suicidal ideation (but not by kids who grow up to realise they've effectively been sterilised)
... (-II-) (but not by girls who grow up to understand they've been viewed as porn fodder throughout their entire youth)

I wasn't stupid when I said to my mum "if I cut my hair short, will I be a boy?" Far from it: I was smart enough at five or six to recognise to recognise a two class social hierarchy in which I was a member of the inferior class.

What is "(-II-)"?

It means "ditto", in this cause to avoid typing suicidal ideation twice.

It means "repeat", at least in musical notation. Sorry.

Thank you for a very apt parallel. How times have changed. Sixty years ago when I was a kid our GP always had a fag on the go in an overflowing ashtray on his desk.

The YP I know is covered with self harm scars and on the list for a mastectomy.

The parade of falsehoods she believes is hard to swallow- she’s a walking leftist jargon machine. I say this despite being left leaning. She has no understanding of tax, economics or business. Her statements can’t be challenged because they are those core beliefs. I’m not expressing it well- we can’t discuss politics because she doesn’t have any understanding, just ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ level.
Obviously if she doesn’t trans herself, she will suicide before 30yrs old. It’s desperately sad.

I was reading about new research in autism that identifies 4 ‘types’ that have different characteristics and causes, and different ages of diagnosis. I wonder if gender dysphoria will turn out to fit in just one of the categories? That may help clarify things further.

EXACTLY THIS!!!! Smoking was a sign of sophistication, long before the term "passive smoking" had been coined. And there was a doctor (in Queen Elizabeth's time, so relatively recently) who tried to point out that smoking was unhealthy, and he was shunned and vilified; in today's parlance, he would have been "cancelled". Remember these lines in Blackadder Goes Forth?
Nurse Mary: A man should smoke. It acts as an expectorant and gives his voice a deep, gravelly, masculine tone.
Blackadder: God, I love nurses. They're so disgustingly clinical.

And yes @OldCrone , from a young age, we're taught to take the word of our teachers and doctors (and politicians, and priests) as the gospel truth. Children in their formative years who hear "you can change sex" and Santa is very, very real have not learned to question authority, yet. It's true that nowadays, it's easier for children to check things independently with the internet than it was in our day, but would it occur to them to do so? And how would they know if the information they get is right or wrong? I'm ashamed to say that I believed everything I read in the newspapers until my mid twenties: I didn't learn to disbelieve the news until much later.

Good analogy. And it hasn’t gone away, either.

Well, yes. This is why extremists enlist the young (Red Guards, Hitler Youth..).

Is 'The Trans Child' just one very specific manifestation of 'The Child Who Has Never Been Told No'?

In the not-too-distant past, a child who struggled with the gender stereotypes associated with their biological sex, would have been 'encouraged' [lovingly supported, if they were lucky] to come to terms with the undeniable and unchangeable reality of their sex.

But now, the idea that any contradiction or constraint or correction of a child is damaging to their emotional wellbeing means that everything around them - family, medical profession, school - will conspire to make them believe that they don't have to struggle with gender stereotypes, they can just declare themselves to be the opposite sex, adopt the gender stereotypes that go with their chosen sex, and everyone will go along with it.

The glaring issue is that the child will never be able to change their sex. It's not #bekind at all to tell them that they can transition into the opposite sex, and 'support them in their trans journey', when the whole concept is based on an impossibility.

'The Trans Child' is being sold a lie, and needs to hear a gentle, loving, understanding, supportive, but firm 'No.'

Quite. The Nazis intentionally used their youngest troops to carry out their worst atrocities. They were easily influenced, easily fired up and believed what they were told, while troops with more life experience, critical thinking and as we now know, more frontal lobe development and executive function skills, said no. And wouldn't do it.

Most AGPs started cross dressing in childhood...hence the apeal " I've always known I was trans" and then on to the concept of 'the trans child'. Also lots of nasacently gay children struggle with the expectations of their sex.

There’s a reason all kinds of ideology understands if you can indoctrinate children you can keep your agenda going.

'word on the street' - well from mums of teenager, to be precise😄- is that younger teenagers are not buying into the trans thing as much as their older siblings did.

Although it is also a wider social phenomenon, there is an element of the teenage urge to embrace the current fad to distinguish yourself from the common herd by making yourself different and edgy and exciting and special -
I remember it well🙄

There is a pincer movement of people like us sticking to the facts, constantly correcting incorrect science like 'sex is a spectrum', and young teenagers turning away in boredom from classmates making themselves out to be 'special' along with...

...hang on, that's a pincer with three pinching bits, but I'll plough on regardless 😄

..along with the legal fights bravely, and often successfully fought by FWS, Sandie, Maya, Sara, Sex Matters, etc etc.
I think that [uniquely tripartite] pincer movement is a source of optimism!

Most AGPs started cross dressing in childhood.

Is there actual evidence of this, other than what they say? I've always thought it's just convenient for them to point to the current cohort of trans-identifying children and claim that they were just like that as children.

They can claim that they're not in the grip of a paraphilia because they are 'just like' the trans-identifying children, and obviously for the children there isn't a sexual motivation.

A few years ago there was a video on youtube of a TIM explaining how useful trans children were to them. The video was taken down when it became obvious that it was undermining their cause.

We know that trans children were really invented by the Dutch team who started medicating children for transgenderism back in the 1990s. The reason for this was because they thought that the poor outcomes for male transsexuals was due to the fact that they didn't pass well enough, and medicating them as teenagers might improve their chances of passing as adults. Obviously the invention of trans children was great news for AGP males who wanted a human shield to hide their sexual motivation for transition.

I thought I'd read that this was the case. What evidence other than personal testimony could there be? Grayson Perry certainly started early in childhood and you do often hear other men such as Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner say the same. This is not the same as 'being trans' from childhood, though.....but it does point to a practice with which a child became emotionally and then sexually fixated.
Children do masturbate, and Grayson Perry talks about how dressing in his mother's clothes gave him 'a stiffy'.

I think I recognised earlier than most that there were several different cohorts within this trans umbrella and they all had very different interests.

I also recognised who had the power and the influence and was lobbying. It was the middle aged men.

The invisibility of any kind of research of the effects of drugs on females, instead using data relating only to males was a HUGE tell and one that has significant implications in my opinion.

We can't get away from the fact that child being labelled as trans legitimises middle aged male transitioners and normalises fetishism. It's impossible. It suited their agenda and we've seen a lot of examples of older men on these internet forums encouraging teens to transition and alienate their families. In other situations we'd be alarmed by the dynamics of power and influence going on, but somehow there's been a lot of blind eyes to this one.

What's fascinating is the issue that something like 90% of the public (YouGov survey last year) don't think under 18s should be medically transitioned. I suspect those numbers are going to decline. The ONLY group that is notably different on those figures is those closest to a trans relative. I've spoken about the pressure and fear of none compliance with cults. Cults don't just evaporate overnight. It takes a long time to deprogramme and to break free from the emotional abuse they carry.

With numbers of children transitioning dropping away because the trend has passed, it opens up a future issue for this group and the older male transitioners who had uses kids as props to legitimise their own transition. This means the potential for a public backlash for an emerging medical scandal is absolutely HUGE.

The only thing currently stopping that is those who have enabled it in schools and the NHS don't want to get caught in that blow back. But the numbers mean I find it hard to believe it won't happen. Instead you'll see a lot of reverse ferrets and denial that they were ever supportive - "they were just following orders".

What we see history with regime change, even extreme regime change, is that the state effectively continues to be run by the same people albeit with some high level scalps to prove that 'everything has changed'. But frankly thats bullshit. To use the example of Nazi Germany (simply because it's the example people know best; the same phenomena occurs throughout the world and throughout history) - there were a huge number of enthusiastic Nazis who suddenly had miraculously 'disappeared' from German society by even the mid 1960s. They hadn't died. They still were around in all levels of German society. They hadn't been replaced by a cool new youth or a progressive underground who had been in hiding during the war. It just was something that wasn't mentioned internally, it's this repressed German guilt (which many argue was passed onto the next generation and was part of Merkel's drive to embrace refugees). So being realistic, I think this is likely what we will see - a whole pile of people effectively getting massively slopey shoulders and saying "well I never REALLY believed that, I just had no choice because otherwise I'd lose my job and wouldn't be able to feed my kids, that's why I promoted the idea, deeply scolded anyone who challenged what I was doing and actively went NC with anyone who was openly GC". We all know it's bullshit, but then we knew that the idea you could change sex was equally bullshit.

The one that's most concerning though is these late transitioning males. They often have come from particularly masculine backgrounds. There is an overrepresentation of ex-servicemen and men from occupations which have been heavily dominated by men and toxic masculinity. There's an argument here that for some it's a manifestation of PTSD - 'being a woman' allows them to show emotions that they've been taught are feminine and told they have to hide as a man. For others it's just more toxic masculinity and incelism. These men are also particularly dangerous for a number of reasons. We know there are higher rates of domestic violence in ex-servicemen and we know that domestic violence is a known early red flag for terrorism. This should be ringing some alarm bells. We know there's a growing problem with incelism and it's about time we all realised that transincelism is real and a threat.

I see that Bash Back are starting to get noticed for all the wrong reasons. The trouble is, without the kids, there adult men run out of arguments to legitimise themselves very quickly.

Here's a thought for future planners - what happens when we've converted all these toilets for the benefit of a new generation of trans children who never materialise? We can already see that numbers are going to fall off a cliff. In ten years time is there going to be the same social pressure to 'be inclusive' of these men when the bottom falls out the children's market, the detransitioners start to speak out and the medical scandal unfolds even more? That's why they know they have to push hard and intimidate now.

Every Sandie Peggie type case doesn't help either. The outcome is either to recognise the batshittery outright or have a backlash which stands up to the batshittery.

There are a lot of people still completing unaware of how much resentment and how much anger has built up due to them trying to uphold lies and holding simplistic black and white and rather ignorant beliefs because they think they are progressive. Their own tone deafness is still a sight to behold and that also worries me, because for many, when the whole thing does collapse under the weight of its own bullshit (and it will) it will be all the more bewildering for them. And I think it will probably collapse quicker than people anticipate but also almost invisibly as people reverse ferret very quickly swearing blind they've always been gender critical. And probably actually also believing what they say, in many cases.

I really didn't need to know that!

"My experience of AGP extends back to my earliest memories. If I was not born with this pervading condition, it had gripped me by age three.
More than 50 years later, I can still picture the scene. I was learning to count beyond 20, and quickly picked up the pattern — 30, 40, 50 — and the repetition. But by the time we got to 60, a chill ran down my spine. We would soon be at 80 — a word sounded similar to “tights”, clothing that I knew was only for girls.
Why this was such a taboo for me, and at such an early age, I don’t know. Clearly I understood the difference between boys and girls; I knew I was a boy, and I knew that we wore different clothes. But I wanted to wear girls’ clothes, something I knew was forbidden. I cannot remember being told such things, but nobody had told me how to breathe either, or know how to feel hungry or thirsty, or go to sleep when I was tired. But every other sexually dimorphic species needs to know the difference between the sexes without being schooled on it. Why should human beings be different?"

Debbie Hayton on how AGP from an early age fuelled his desire 'to transition'

Maybe not, but cross dressing often does start in childhood and shapes the sexual response.

Brilliant post, great analysis thank you RedToothBrush!

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