Credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz / Barcroft Media / Getty
Sometimes you get the sense that a particular claim is reaching its limits. That the mainstream won’t let it go any further. It feels that, in recent years, almost everything to do with the ‘trans’ issue has teetered around this point.
As I lay out in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, there may be plausible claims made within the trans debate. And of course, most liberal-minded people (in the true sense of the term) generally agree that other adults should be free to do what they want and live as they like. But this can only be the case if the choice of behaviour does not severely and negatively affect the lives of others.
In this regard, however, trans campaigners have at least four highly vulnerable points.
The first is their demand to change the language. The great pronoun wars of recent years have few upsides (other than a reversal in the decline of young people who know what a pronoun is). But they have highlighted an interesting limitation, the extent to which people are willing, or otherwise, to fit around somebody else’s sense of themselves.
The second vulnerability is the extent to which trans demands may insult, offend or harm the rights of women. As these claims have become more and more assertive, so there has been an increasing worry about the extent to which trans rights may run counter to women’s rights as they were understood for least the last half century or so.
A third is the fact that — as with the case of women — elements of the trans argument run considerably against assertions about gay rights. These are hard-fought rights which have come to be accepted by wider society for the last several decades.
But it is the final vulnerability which is probably the most serious — the extent to which the trans issue stumbles when it comes to the welfare of children. Once again, in a liberal society, consenting adults may be allowed to do almost anything they like in private (and to some extent in public); but this does not assume that the general population will nod through irreversible medical experimentation on minors. While trans rights are important, they do not trump the welfare of children.
In recent weeks each of these vulnerabilities have come to the fore.
The issue of language was once again a matter of public debate with the decision of YouTube to remove an interview with the activist Posie Parker for the podcast Triggernometry. Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, the two comedians who present the show, did not allow Parker to speak without any pushback; on the contrary, when she restated her view that men who transition to female are still men, they questioned her and held her views up to scrutiny. Nevertheless YouTube removed the content.
Their action is striking not because it shows the strength of the trans case on language — but its weakness. Parker is not a very prominent public figure, nor is she somebody who is in any way calling for violence against anyone. She is simply a private citizen holding to a refusal to use opposite-sex pronouns. That this can be portrayed as hate speech is not a demonstration of argumentative strength. Given that what Parker is suggesting (that we should call people by the pronouns of their sex at birth) was commonplace until very recently this clamping down on her own right to speech looks like an absence of real argument.
Parker herself appears to be motivated by a belief that the trans argument is, among other things, disappearing natural born women. Her argument, though very interesting, is one which trans activists strenuously deny. But it is striking how many women are becoming aware – and increasingly vocal – about the extent to which trans demands appear to be treading all over the feminist advances of recent decades.
Take the example of Andrea Long Chu. Last November, this male to female transsexual wrote a piece in the New York Times with the memorable title “My new vagina won’t make me happy. And it shouldn’t have to“. Earlier this month – to coincide with the publication of her new book Females – Chu was interviewed by what remains of The New Republic. The interview, headlined, ‘We are all female now’, contained some remarkable assertions, many of which will raise eyebrows.
One is her claim that “femaleness” is the urge to be “a vessel for another’s desire”, and that gender is “a mechanism for getting the right people to desire you“. These claims – among others – run so completely counter to the advances of first and second wave feminism that it is surprising how little public push-back there has been (although perhaps it has been censored online, as YouTube and Facebook removes even moderate content in this area). However, Chu’s arguments have not gone unnoticed by campaigners for women’s rights.
In the realm of the LG and B without the T, there has recently been a number of striking developments, all caused by the rise of T demands. In the UK, a number of prominent gay rights campaigners, including founders of the group Stonewall, have publicly split from that group in its current incarnation. There has also been the formation of the “LGB Alliance” which is “asserting the right of lesbians, bisexuals and gay men to define themselves as same-sex attracted“.
This is a demand that would not have been remotely controversial in the gay rights movements of the last half century. Indeed, it is only now, as an increasing number of gay men and women find themselves accused of “transphobia” for being attracted to members of their own sex, that such a reassertion of basic facts would have to be made.
And finally, the children. Such as the seven-year-old child in Texas whose parents are in court fighting over what sex the child is. The child’s mother claims she has a girl. The father says they have a son. The mother is intent on “transitioning” the child, something the father is trying to prevent.
Whatever else, the Texas case serves as a stark warning that such arguments — both in and out of the courthouse — are going to become increasingly common, and that wherever they happen they will throw up the same basic concerns. As polling carried out by UnHerd this week shows, the British public is by no means certain that an adolescent child should be allowed to make their own decisions about their gender identity.
But if the question asked was whether children who identify as the opposite sex from the one they were born as should be able to medically transition (or take life-altering drugs) during childhood, then I would expect the answer to be clearer — and not in favour of the answer trans campaigners are pushing for.
Of course YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms will continue to try to censor this discussion and stop parents, women, gay men and many others from discussing the issues. But they are attempting to close an un-closeable door. An overdue and properly nuanced discussion is surely now impossible to stop.
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SubscribeAfter reading the linked article describing female as a vessel to be filled with someone else’s desires I have to say that I have rarely read such sexist, malecentric bullsh#t in my life- and having read upwards of 60k works/books/articles that is saying something. That there has been little outcry from the feminist or the lbg communities is very telling of the censorship being exercised by those in charge of publishing content.
Your article is very well written and touches on four important points. However I believe you’ve missed one which underlies the entirety of the transgender movement and ideology. It is the absolute refusal to acknowledge the patriarchal influence and mysogynist message which is at the core of the movement. Advancing the belief that there are male and female brains and that by behaving in either a feminine or masculine fashion somehow indicates with which brain a person was born. This is intrinsically malecentric thinking and is based on ideals of behaviour demanded by males. There is no demand for men to accept other men who do not conform to traditional male behaviours. There are no biological females claiming to be trans men housed in facilities such as prisons. There is no acknowledgement that male athletics will suffer due to biological females competing against them, there are no financial or reputational based losses experienced by males due to females making claims or application. The only group facing infringement or loss is natal females. This is a clear undeniable reflection of the mysogynist core of the transgender movement. It demands that women are a club, a feeling or an identity which can be donned at will. It in no way reflects the actual lived and experienced reality of being a female in a malecentric world. It is at its core a frightening and disturbing expression of hatred towards women, with an expressed goal of reconfiguring that which is female into a caricature or costume which can be donned or removed at will. That this has not been noted and recognized is a reflection of the success the modern workings of mysogyny have enjoyed.
A thoughtful and, largely, non-controversial discussion about a very public and strident airing of what is, and should be, a private subject. Similar, I think, to a public claim to having a large p***s. It is more inclined to be attention seeking than informative. Witness the historical use of cross-dressing in the theater. It goes back at least to Aristophanes in The Birds, and forward to such as David Bowie and Queen parading around in androgynous appearance, for entertainment, to make a statement, or some other reason. At bottom (no pun intended) much of such behavior is merely attention seeking.
Such “discussion” serves to distract attention from what is certain to be the very painful experience of sexual dysphoria, common enough to take note of and address by trained experts, but not extending to elementary school teachers or relatively uninformed school guidance counselors.
This isn’t a vulnerability. It’s a strength of the trans ideology. It requires external change from outgroups and reinforces their political message. It also gives particularly aggression hungry activists something to chew on when someone makes a mistake.
A large part of the success of trans activism is getting people to respect their pronouns. It gives people who aren’t trans people a simple, easy message to reinforce again and again, and an easy way of showing their support – they offer their pronouns.
Trans rights have yet to infringe on the rights of a single living woman. What people demand on the internet may as well be fairy dust – right now around 30% of America is demanding a recount on an election won by the other guy, so I think the world has bigger issues.
When people ask me what my biggest problem with this situation is, it’s mainly this point. For decades, gay rights activists on behalf of people like myself have reinforced the message “born this way”. Honestly, I was. However modern left wing thought has the world as fluid, even though in reality very few of them have experienced what happens when fluidity hits reality quite like I have.
That is not to say there isn’t a degree of social effect on the number of self identifying gay people – a large part of the gay community is spent overcoming shame and a good half of the clientele of gay saunas is ‘straight’. However I doubt mere social pressure can turn a gay man straight any more than it can turn a straight man gay.
Oh come on Douglas, you can do better than to quote Helen Lovejoy.