"The loneliness of the long distance gender critical"

[1984Now]

I'm sure we all have our own takes on this, that's why we collect here to share this angst.
I recall when trans ideology first came across my radar 12 years ago, I was seriously triggered by the phenomenon in and of itself, men in women's sport, then prisons etc.
Then the awareness of a whole ecosystem of trans allies, at best obsequious, at worst downright violent and dangerous.
Then the Qs as to how scientists etc could accept this.
Then the attacks on free speech, the cancelations, the attacks on JKR, Glinner etc.
Then the "iconic" individuals, from Lia Thomas to Adam Bryson and Barbie Kardashian in Scottish and Irish women's jails, Imane Khelif at the Olympics, the males in female nurses changing rooms that went to court.
Then seeming cracks in the facade, the takedowns on Tavistock, Cass Report, and what should have been the final bulldozer moment, the SC For Women Scotland ruling.
I've spent the last year somewhat coming up for air, with a tenuous confidence the SC ruling would right this ship, or at least be the cover for a moral imperative to regain reality and truth and honesty.
But this isn't happening. Sure, the guardrails look more fit for purpose (the law is the law), but I know two women close to me who are harassed daily by TIMs who revel in their power to use their toilets and verbally insult them mercilessly, both changed by their experiences.
And I'm more and more reading Róisín Michaux's experience in Brussels as to how entrenched the rot is, how despite massive setbacks (Finnish clinical reveals on the failure en masse of medicalization to help those young dysmorphics), the claws and tendrils of trans ideology and it's useful idiot helpers are more and more turning institutions their way, the EU as a whole is now lost, as is Amnesty, the UN, WHO etc.
So few reasons to feel good about being British right now, but TERF Island in a West of trans ideology captured nations and institutions, is the only positive right now.
Atm I feel like I'm being drawn back into all the bad feelings I thought I could let go a year ago, but now the stage on the "loneliness of the long distance gender critical" for me personally is an almost existentially depressing one, a feeling I can't shift, that our high trust model of society replicated across the West has been irrevocably corrupted, not by the sorts of nefarious agents that you'd initially thought would look to injure us (Putin, Xi etc), but our very own most intelligent classes, the gatekeepers to intellectual policy making, our scientists, administrators, philosophers, politicians, charities, doctors.
For me, this may be a final frontier in my personal lonely long distance race, the fact that the people we all relied on to run society for the good of us all, have succumbed to rot and anti liberalism, I'm left with feelings the world has changed for the worse, the people I'd least expect to do this are totally to blame.

It's a weird and uncomfortable feeling, which as far as I can see no TRA is ever troubled with, to wonder "am I the baddies?".

I have a degree in Anatomy awarded by the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine and I'm getting gaslit on social media with trite easily debunked nonsense, posted by those for for whom scientific enquiry is something that happens to other people.

Very unsettling to discover that my alma mater, wherein much of the modern foundations of human biology and medicine were labouriously laid down by my academic forebears, is now a bastion of junk science and anti-intellectual thought-terminating clichée.

OP that’s a beautifully written post and I agree with everything you say. Personally I also have a teenage daughter who is completely captured (and so won’t countenance any other reason for her suffering other than she must be a gay man) and I feel huge pain.
I am a fan of hope but it’s bloody hard work to keep hoping, and I wish I were free to spend my energy and my time in other ways.

I don't have a degree in medicine, although I'm in a medically-related field, and I can't always argue online with the facts at my fingertips, but the number of "scientists, doctors" etc who calmly inform me there is more and more evidence for laydee brains is boggling my non-laydee brain.
Yes, the evidence is mounting because, I fucking kid you not, so many more people who were AMAB feel comfortable doing...housework, cooking etc.
Yes, science will.soon reveal that they'll find a divergence in AMAB types that is measurable/observable, accounting for AMABs being clean and tidy, and loving their Le Creuset sets...and thus being not only women IDd, but biologically women.
My tiny male observed and recorded at birth brain cannot comprehend that modern science and medicine has effectively co-opted the Little Britain view on biological science and reality.

Gosh, my heart goes out to you, and so many others.
About 5-7 years ago, my wife's nephew (now out and proud as gay) had a long term female close friend/GF adjacent (complicated) who IDd as a man inside (beyond complicated).
In today's inside out world, that confirms the nephew IS gay (which he is, anyway) and she's a gay male (which, um, she isn't).
Nobel Prize for Biology coming in soon with the irrefutable brain scans to show this is all correct, and society must bend itself out of shape accommodating.

Even when (when, not if) we win the 'trans war', we will still be living in a misogynistic patriarchy.

almost existentially depressing [...]our very own most intelligent classes, the gatekeepers to intellectual policy making, our scientists, administrators, philosophers, politicians, charities, doctors.

Because most of them are men, and they quite like living in a patriarchy. Even the women are blind to the patriarchy, blinded by their liberal ideology.

This trans crap comes from misogyny and patriarchy. It is one small episode in a multi-century fight for women's rights.

Maybe I'm a little bit of an outlier, but I made a conscious decision to ditch a fair amount of misogynist attitudes I had when growing up. I'm still a male, I suspect one can never get it totally right.
But I'm sure my total aversion to trans ideology and it's effects on women is somewhat borne out of who I became, not who I was.
What I never lost was my aversion to groupthink and magical attitudes, this fuels the other half of me seeing TRA as a toxin in the bloodstream of the liberal West.

Just as some women are misogynistic, not all men are misogyistic.

Well I was not a little homophobic as well. I basically grew up and learnt to look at people differently. I'm sure this partly fuels my feelings of anger that women, and gays, are being hung out to dry by this wrinkle in the state of the liberal West.
That bookends the other huge cognitive dissonance, the loss of critical thinking by the elite class and the awareness that a niche has captured the mainstream.

I see it as a quasi-religious belief system.

It will not be possible to deprogram the believers.

Based on survey evidence, the believers make up maybe 20% of the UK population, but disproportionately occupy positions of influence.

The interests of believers and non-believers should be balanced, as they are for other religions in a secular pluralist society. This has not happened.

The GRA purports to force non-believers to behave as if they were believers (Article 9 breach) and should be revoked.

Both belief and non-belief are potentially protected characteristics, but there are limits.

Any belief system which includes the requirement that non-believers must be forced to feign belief is, obviously, not Grainger-compliant and therefore cannot be protected belief.

Also, minority metaphysical beliefs should not be taught as fact to our children.

ETA I'm finding this all rather fascinating# in a horrible way, because it's virtually unprecedented. Communism perhaps came the closest. Other religions less so, because they were mostly in conflict with each other, rather than with non-belief.

(# As in 'I can't believe I'm living in these weird times')

a niche has captured the mainstream

But that niche was only able to do so because they are men (transwomen), and the mainstream (patriarchy) prioritises men over women.
Note that transmen (women) just don't feature in all this, except as attempted 'gotchas'.

You see it as a 'wrinkle in the state of the liberal west'. I see it as men prioritising a group of men.
Most humans don't use critical thinking much at all. We are herd animals, going along with the crowd, easily led by a few charismatic individuals. I never believed in the specialness or virtue of the critical thinking liberal West.

Wonderful post OP!! (very apt title too, reminds me of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.)

@theilltemperedmonster You are right that it is a quasi-religious belief system.
It is part of the belief in "Progress" as a quasi-religion, that it is the natural and true path of humanity, on a march ever onward.

The left has (mostly) given up on old-fashioned Marxist-adjacent belief in economic progress and the re-distribution of wealth, so instead they adopted 'social progress' meaning emphasis on group identities and over-focus on justice for minority identities. This enables them to continue feeling like the good guys whilst keeping their wealth and avoiding taxation.

But...but...I thought Call Me Andy was dispensing with "the last 40 years of failure" to embrace his inner 70s. Is he gonna "dispense with" this shit as well?

In a sense 'thinking' isn't really about building a defensible argument and marshalling evidence. It's about showing that you're aligned with the right kind of people.

As an example, I saw a book proposal in a field I'm interested in which had been submitted to a publisher, as well as the reviewers reports on it. That's how things often work with academic publishing - prospective authors submit proposals and then the publisher sends these out to reviewers for comment, in order to help decide whether to give the authors a contract to write the book. One reviewer said the proposed book should cover 'the attacks on trans healthcare'.

This sort of attitude runs so deep that even to ask whether any of these 'treatments' are any good positions one as an attacker. Yet, as has been discussed extensively on here, there's precious little evidence that all the drugs and surgeries are any good, and ample reason to suspect that the side effects are significant. Yet even entertaining this thought is impossible in polite intellectual society. Certainly not while there are all these terrible 'attacks on trans health care'.

That's just a small example from my own little corner of the universe. It's as if Cass, the leak of the WPATH files, the Supreme Court Judgement et al never happened.

Ta, that's why I chose it.
I like to make an effort on MN, lol.

I think that the whole idea of changing sex had a sort of shiny Sci-fi allure at one time. Some maybe overestimated how much the medical technology could achieve, whilst others (most of us!) didn't think enough about what this was all going to mean in practice. Norman Tebbit pointed out the problems, and was traduced as a bigot. Plus ça change.....

You're very right. I recall reading a blog where the feminist writer said ignore the term Trans Rights Activism, and think of it as Men's Rights Activism, plain and simple.
One in a very long line of tactics to step on women.
That was a lightbulb moment for me.
Easy to see in retrospect. Easy to be fooled when you can't see the wood for the trees.

a niche has captured the mainstream

Because it's being taught in schools/Uni's as an established fact. We're seen as having the 'radical' views because they've spent 30 years normalising it through higher education.

Yes but why was it so readily taught in schools and uni's?

For the very reasons I just said in my previous posts. Leftie/liberal types wanting to see themselves as the good guys.

I've made a recent political 180. What's interesting is that in the decade I cultivated supporting this person, I could feel part of me shrink inside, yet some adrenaline generated by that support fully compensated. That's not to say I was an enthusiastic supporter, more tying my colors to his mast. And despite my moving strongly away now, I don't support the opposite of their politics.
I mention this because it became easier and easier to do, and gave me a little bit of arrogant moral high ground feeling. That's felt great.
Yet on wholesale moving away, I can feel an almost chemical reaction as all my previous compromises curdle inside me.
It's why I know it's so easy to join a team, take up a cause, feed on the adrenaline of "being right".
And I'm sure this makes up the majority of trans allyship or simple desire to be kind and oppose horrid people like TERFs.
However, it's the hardcore at the top of institutions who'll never reflect who are the real danger.

The whole thing will only come tumbling down when large swathes of men suffer dire effects of medical intervention.

That doesn't seem likely as most of the medicalisation is carried out on young women (who don't really matter), and the activism is mostly by older men wearing dresses.

That's a brilliant point, and only highlights even more the sheer damage of this movement, from women and girls currently altered by it, a flow of new females, and a cadre of men orchestrating everything, not in shadowy cults or hidden on the dark web, but in clear sight within all our institutions.
You couldn't create more toxicity if you tried.

Read a very interesting piece that a critical catalyst to where we are today, was a double reclassification of transvestisism, from paraphilia to mental health category/dysphoria, thence to sexual health category.
Ie from an extreme sexual fetish/deviancy to a more mundane mental health issue to something more akin to HIV/STD sufferer.
It's effectively been sanitized and normalized.
So, what would have been an extreme cause to champion (men in frocks in the 70s) is now a thing that marks you as cruel if you don't portray sympathy and allyship.
We recall the days when AIDS sufferers were castigated, taking the likes of Diana to humanize them. Noone today makes public fun of anyone suffering a sexual health diagnosis, as we did in the past. No-one can mock men in frocks.
Look at how Harriet Harman trod very thin ice when she publically attempted to normalize PIE, an out and out group of paraphyliacs. That was the 70s, when paedophilia and transvestisism were paraphilias beyond the pale.
And as paedophilia remains a paraphylia still, almost no-one prominent is public in defending this. Tatchell has tried, but he remains a lone voice.
Transvestisism would have stayed a niche interest group had the medical classification kept it as a paraphilia. But once it normalized and glided into a category that in the modern day demands sympathy (as do HIV sufferers), it's broken thru into mainstream support.
However at its core, transvestisism is still a paraphylia, and in so many sufferers a dangerous one. But those men de facto have been normalized.
When you add the modem hyper liberal period we're living in where so many are so open in their preferences, and queer as a genre busting movement has prevailed, you combine that new zero boundary world with paraphylia converted to sympathy cases, and you have major social taboos totally broken down. In less than 50 years.
And now running amok in society.
Looked at this way, I can more and more see why polite society, the elites, the credentialised classes, have taken up this cause with endless energy.
Throw in the last trump card, the creation of the transgender child, and you have the perfect storm. Policy makers seeing a group of men sad in their wrong sex ID, to be helped to be happy, and children, sad in their wrong sex bodies, to be helped to find their true potential.
A perfect storm as our ruling classes have been fooled and misled, and seek to impose their naivity on the rest of us.

Every Empire in history has been brought down by the stupidity of its own population.

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups” – George Carlin

Xi and Putin can't believe their luck.