"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.

George Carlin also said “When your identity is your ideology, congratulations, you’ve officially screwed yourself. Because now it’s not just an idea, it’s you. When the idea gets challenged you don’t hear disagreement, you hear an attack.”

Wow. What a quote!

Who's immune to this. I'm not sure I am.
During my new atheist days, I saw plenty of non believers who took attacks from Christians pretty poorly.
Very few people don't ally belief structures and natural allyships with who they are/their core identity.

I would say yes, you’re right, but so is Carlin. People do it - perhaps it’s inbuilt, the need to identify with the group - but it does have a tendency to make one blinkered and defensive.

Fine balance to be made.

Reading about Jennifer Melle previously, and the new thread here covering her DM interview is just another toxic puzzle piece of this long distance loss of trust in institutions.
It's as if the most extreme and egregious cases (in Jennifer's case, her being expected to kowtow to a pedophile TIM) don't even begin to cause the institutional capture to jump the rails or pause for thought.

Nail on head. All these rainbow lanyards and exotic pronouns are mere baubles , consolation prizes for our failure to improve the material conditions of the working class - however defined.

An interesting thing I read (on here, natch'), was terming these the lanyard classes, aka professional managerial classes, credentialised classes.
The last term is my favourite, best sums up the fact that the most so-called intelligent people are often the most stupid. But of course, they have their sociology, gender studies or anthropology degree certificate to wave at you.
Alongside this, the discussion whether it's a class or caste.
A self-selected cadre who literally cast gender criticals (and anyone else doubting or skeptical that gender should trump biological sex) as Untouchables.
Magical thinking with heaps of snobbism to boot.

@1984Now · Yesterday 09:19
"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."

Could you post a link to that article/book, please? I am collecting publications with historical explanations and other background info that could help me with. my arguments.

I'll do my best to try.

I've just done a little AI search. I may be only half right (or what instead half right).
It looks like transvestic disorder, where the subject is in maximum distress, and is compelled to dress and act as a woman, is still classed as a paraphylia, especially in the US.
But the further classifications of milder transvestisism and transsexualism, have been separated to be seen more as dysphorias.
I'm not an expert, I'm just trying to understand the gist of this.
My suspicion is that as we moved into the more enlightened (?) 80s, psychiatrists and psychologists would have lowered the seriousness of classification on those transsexuals who didn't display the extreme traits of transvestic disorder, but were still hugely unhappy people.
I believe it was this phase where medical diagnosis was normalized, thence the category becoming more of sexual health.
It was at this point that policy would have been to encourage society to be more understanding, less judgemental, and more inclusive.
Children then entered the Dutch Protocol, and the inexorable arrow of fate was to move from medical diagnosis to sociological category, and society as a whole helping with normalizing these people.
For that, read women accommodating men, and adolescents given medical treatments for their developmental struggles.
If the medical world has chosen to normalize the category, who are women to disagree?
Culture is then downstream from this, as we've seen in the last 20-30 years.

You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast has a recent episode interviewing Roisin Mishaux who talks about this issue:

https://www.sometherapist.com

“Róisín walks me through how a 2019 reclassification in the International Classification of Diseases — moving gender identity out of mental health and into sexual health in order to “depathologize” it — created a conundrum: how do you get hormones and surgeries reimbursed for a condition that’s no longer a condition? That question, she argues, is the thread that connects the WHO’s guideline development group to a much larger story about HIV funding, the Global Fund, Open Society Foundations money, and decades of AIDS-elimination targets.”

For me it is not so much about being " lonely" as being witness to the ebbs and flows of social trends and movements - which is, by nature, a more objective and reflective pursuit or attunement. I have every confidence that "this too shall pass" - leaving its inevitable mark on the sum total of human knowledege and social/cultural history.

Haha, that was the article.
Her Substack is quite the chamber of horrors.
I think I'm gonna subscribe, lol.

It's very difficult to deal with mass delusion. Especially when so many organisations and institutions have been ideologically captured with such apparent ease. That said, it's frustratingly obvious the majority would rather dodge the debate altogether. For fear of retribution.

My grown up kid and I are simpatico on practically everything politically. Apart from this. So we don't discuss it.

You should try a couple of other platforms. There are TRAs out there saying that men can have transplanted wombs because wombs have been successfully transplanted (into women) and then when this happens they will be able to give birth by caesarian section and will thus be women. They are lunatics. Dangerous ones because they are revealing the transhuman and anti-woman ideology behind their beliefs. This is what they want.

The hardcore acolytes are absolutely scary. But I'm somehow more afraid of the more mainstream credentialised classes that will find any explanation and any motivation to push the ideology.
Like those scientists talking male and female brains and wrong sex individuals.

They're not just dodging it for fear of retribution.
For so many it's because it's too unbelievable and so remains incomprehensible.
For others it's just not a priority, it's 20th out of a list of 20 things they worry about in the world.
Activists know they have a mighty advantage with a world peoples who are either not at the races, or too scared to say anything at the races.
If Róisín Michaux is right, and activist pressure results in transgenderism...for adults AND adolescents...being reclassified as a sexual health category, I'm struggling to see any centrist govt, right or left, pushing back.
I feel this is full circle to the major pathology of transvestic disorder over time being subdivided into milder diagnoses of transsexualism, the emphasis being on depathologising men's mania, making it a dysphoria and now a mundane sexual health complaint that even the practice nurse can treat.

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.

My little laydee brain also struggles to comprehend this. Perhaps you and I are equal in our inferiority (hooray! Equality!) and the doctors who support the new knowledge of biology know something we don't? 🙃

Maybe Francis Aaron was wrong, and actually human beings are clownfish?

Here's his suggestion that they aren't* ⬇️

*I love this YouTube video and have unashamedly found a way to share it again on this thread. I really don't think it can be shared too often.

Putting aside the AGP/cissy porn people...

I read on here something from a long-serving teacher that she had noticed the girls she used to see expressing themselves as goth/emo/tomboys seemed to have disappeared lately. A personal anecdote that stood out to me more than the missing autistic girls statistics.

A couple of days ago I saw a newish group 'save the tomboys'

9 years ago before I really read much about trans issues I met a man in Brighton who was really upset about his daughter who now said she was trans. His anecdote was that '5 years back she would have been a butch lesbian and now she barely speaks to me and wants surgery.

I find it a little difficulty putting the rise of genderism on patriarchy when, according to my observations, it comes directly out of women's-turned-gender-studies departments in universities. They were very strenuously pushing the basic ideas of genderism 30 years ago when I was a student, well before it was accepted institutionally as it is now.

And while some of the transwomen TRAs are active and even violent, it's largely women who are the gatekeepers on this, and it's female dominated institutions like schools and libraries and health that are the most entrenched.

In the spirit of follow the money, I think it has to be considered that maybe there is something more to that then they are all silly handmaidens who don't get it. Maybe, in fact, they are the matriarchy asserting their power, particularly over lower status women but also lower status men.

I think there were and are two things going on (in addition to the activism of groups who actually have skin in the game) :

"Patriarchy" comes into it in the form of a society that has made some legal and attitudinal advances towards equal rights for women, but still has a deep subsoil of sexism with many pockets of outright misogyny. It doesn't initiate gender ideology or transactivism, but responds to them with (at best) a tendency not to think about women's needs at all without prompting, and (at worst) actively seizing on and promoting anything that will roll back women's rights. (We've seen a lot of the laissez-faire sexism end of it in some of the employment tribunals.)

Feminism comes into it, because I think some would-be feminists have taken a Victorian approach to the problem of sex, i.e. "If you don't let people talk about it, they won't think about it and it will go away". The Victorians were concerned about sexual immorality and tabooed visible bodies and talk of the act; the feminists were concerned about sexual inequality and tabooed focussing on bodily reality in favour of promoting gender. But the approach is the same (make sex unmentionable in polite society).
And the results are the same: sex doesn't go away, it simply becomes harder to talk about the problems and abuses. In both cases, the most numerous victims of this have been women, though it hasn't done gay people much good, either.

You make a good point, there's definitely more female energy powering this shit show than male. It's going unnoticed because as usual the men are dominating the show.
I think women have always been their own worst enemies, and women are not all things nice, some woman are more than capable of screwing up people and situations.
The Queen Bee concept is not made up, it might be exaggerated for effect in films, but it's still true, some woman will bully, sabotage and step all over other women if it gets them the power they want.

The Queen Bee concept is not made up, it might be exaggerated for effect in films, but it's still true, some woman will bully, sabotage and step all over other women if it gets them the power they want.

I've never heard it described like this before, but that does sound like a thing.

When I read this article the other day, one part that leapt out to me within it was just how much this woman enjoyed being in charge in the house as a child, because of the status she'd been afforded. She had found a way to make the abhorrent sexism of the situation work for herself.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2k445y9dro

The two things that surprised me about it were that a) the family let her get away with it (given they knew her sex) and b) there is nothing to indicate that she looks back on this part with shame or embarrassment. There's a selfishness in it but there's also an active embracement of keeping other women down in order to achieve what she wanted for herself.

Too late for the edit.... That first paragraph should have been in bold as it was a quote from Theywontleme's post.

Isn't the concept of 'equality' one of the foundational stones of transgenderism, though? The idea that there are no differences between the sexes apart from their body/biological function. A kind of philosophy of self which totally detaches the person from their body and biology - but at the same time acknowledging that that there are social and cultural differences in how the sexes are perceived.

Also an approach in which women have resented their own biology and focus on talk about the oppressive nature of being female in a world run by and for men. A difficulty accepting that there might well be foundational/essential differences between the sexes - which arise through our different biologies - and which can lead to different behaviours and different choices in life.

Ultimately an attempt to escape from the implications of our sexed bodies in order to be a free individual who can do and be whatever they please. A lot of these women are elite or priveleged - in that they have 'ascended' into a career focused world ( and may have benefitted from sex based quotas or 'equity' measures) or have benefitted from a university education.

It is easy to forget ,or suppress the knowledge and awareness, that men still tend to be bigger and stronger, more prone to violence and to sexual paraphilias. This subliminal knowledge only makes itself known by the continual campaigns to address 'male violence against women and girls'. And this tendency towards violence has been re-framed as 'patriarchy' - and is seen as something that not only women suffer from, but anyone who is a minority or in anyway non-conforming.

'Feminism' is now for anyone who is 'oppressed by the patriarchy' and is no longer a movement which is purely centred on the female experience. 'Woman' has been re-defined as anyone who is oppressed.