Jul 10, 2022·edited Jul 10, 2022Liked by Rudolph Rigger
I've commented before on this topic and risk repeating myself and won't go on but I made a transition socially medically and surgically at the age of 60 because I had to survive, having lived with a profound sex dysphoria discovered at age 4-5 and hidden but I don't claim to be a woman, merely me. Scariest thing I've ever done. Gender is an invented term from some dodgy post WW2 psychiatrists (and borrowed by feminists rather short-sightedly). It can all be explained by the word sex. Gender is just part of the intersectionality language game to have you chasing your tail. It isn't cogent and it isn't meant to be. It's queering to confuse straights. La maison, le monde. That's gender. There are several different populations involved too and there is not a one size explanation. Well done RR for trying to keep this subject on a rational and compassionate basis.
It's such a difficult issue to write about. Gender dysphoria clearly exists. It is also clear that transitioning has helped some people lead a happier and more fulfilled existence. It is also clear that some people have regretted their transition.
It's an unholy mess and we have absolutely no right, as a society, to pretend we have the answers given our current state of knowledge. But that's exactly what the activists are doing - they're claiming a certainty that doesn't exist and trying to force everyone to agree with their imagined certainty.
The idea that a troubled teen, or even a pre-teen, can turn up to some medical establishment and with only the most cursory examination/interview have their gender identity 'affirmed' is crazy. Indeed, it is my understanding that doctors and specialists are not even allowed to question the gender choice in some places. I'm not, of course, suggesting they should be unsympathetic or discriminatory but we simply don't know enough to be so certain in the choice of 'treatment'.
All of the studies that have been done strongly suggest that for the majority the gender dysphoria works itself out. So, for example, a boy who feels he is a girl at some stage will in the majority of cases go on to live a completely happy life as an adult male homosexual. The percentage varies from a small majority to a large majority in the studies.
Those who do not fall within this majority will maybe be happier undergoing some transitioning process.
It's not entirely clear because, as you can imagine, these studies are difficult to do these days and the few historical ones that have been done have fairly small sample sizes.
It is my view that the activists are making things worse for everyone - trans people included. I get the sense that most trans people just want to live their lives as close as they can to their 'chosen' sex and to be accepted and supported in that. I don't find that at all unreasonable and I think we could have accommodated that as a society without all the angst and drama.
But the activists seem to want to go much further than this and are pushing for insane things and turning everything into a freakshow. Honestly, how can we take someone who describes their gender as 'gaseous' seriously? It's absurd. And it's all this kind of 'fringe' stuff that cheapens everything - like the pervy pride month stuff - it's degrading - and it's degrading the message for 'normal' people who want to be good and kind and supportive.
My fear is that there will be a backlash - and unfortunately the people who are going to suffer aren't going to be the activists, but the trans and gay people who just want to be accepted and live a life without discrimination and fear.
The backlash against women has been extraordinary.
Feminism kind of lost it for me when they went all overboard and buzzword bingo with the male privilege, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, rape culture stuff etc - but fundamentally I think the so-called TERFs are right in that one major purpose of all this gender ideology stuff is an attack on women. To be honest, I'm surprised that more women don't appear to understand the threat all of this gender woo-woo poses.
Gender is masculine, feminine, neutral - if you've studied French, you know this - no sociologist does. Sex is male - a person with XY chromosomes - or female - a person with XX chromosomes. Sex is not gender, and sociology should be extirpated, erased in its entirety, shut out from academic discourse except for the locked wards of state hospitals... The "social sciences" are garbage, and extremely costly garbage at that, and no taxpayer money should be used to pay for that nonsense.
Recently, German weekly paper DIE ZEIT devoted a very long article to a young boy's transition - including the technical details of the final transformation of the dangly bits into something else. I have to say, if a young person is really determined to go through all this, maybe their transition is for the better. However, speaking in motte-and-bailey terms, the detailed and emotional reporting in the ZEIT article seems like elaborate construction of a habitable motte to me. I would really like ZEIT to follow up on the case, and check if the building will still be standing in ten years time.
The bailey around such a motte, then, is this bizarre fighting about language, definition, and power.
It is annoying, but we don't know the pressures that have been brought to bear.
It's easy to demand someone else be 'brave', but few are in the position of being "un-cancellable".
So whilst, technically, I kind of agree with you - I also don't feel I can pass harsh judgement here. It seems women who are brave enough to speak out are often put in an invidious position.
The whole purpose, of course, of going after people like Macy Gray so viciously is to deter other women from speaking out.
The answer is for more and more high profile women (and men) to speak out - but the first few who stick their head above the parapet are going to to face the most concentrated fire. I guess what we can do is to like tweets, write articles etc - to let these brave souls see that they have more support than they think.
Thats the problem!! Why is there pressure for someone having a difference in opinion? They shouldn’t be getting pressure for speaking their truth and it’s worse when they have to apologize for doing so. Not standing by one’s morals/values is part of what has gotten us into this mess. Bowing to the lefts ideations that they constantly shove down everyone’s throats does nothing but allow it to permeate. It should be perfectly ok for her to have that opinion. Why should she have to apologize just because it’s different from what they think should be acceptable? I am not judging her. I just wish more people stood by their convictions like the left does. Otherwise, consensus rules!
I am a woman who never wears dresses, and only wears comfortable shoes. Once I made this change, (at about 25 years old) things have been a lot safer and less stupid for me. If a man wants to wear dresses and uncomfortable shoes, or somehow needs to, I am fine with that. But it's still a man in a dress with uncomfortable shoes, and I am telling you it gets stupid if you have to run. So I think we should make sure all the cross dressing men are carrying weapons, besides stilletto heels. It would be a win-win for America /s
Social constructs, subjective truth, felt reality .... The people who live like this, for this and through this opaque lens of an imagined reality have fallen down the rabbit hole of a disturbing wonderland.
If they wish to be an effeminate man, or a tomboy woman, enjoy. But they are still a man OR a woman.
I will never accept, condone or respect their fiction. And any attempt to coerce me into their dreamworld will not be met with kind respect.
I will go on along the path of the real world. They can too, or they can live in their dream matrix, by I will not be made to believe their fallacy.
I was born a male. I still am a male. If someone wants to refer to me as being a female I certainly wouldn't be upset about it because I know I'm a male. I think the anger that some trans people express over being referred to as a gender other than they identify as arises from some sort of internal unsurety.
If someone who is biologically a male wants me to refer to them as being female I will. I do that in the same way I would if someone were to ask me to refer to them as George Washington. It means that I'm honoring their request. It doesn't mean that I actually believe the person is George Washington. I wouldn't discriminate against the person or treat them as less of a person than me.
What's the point of all of the upset? If people know who they themselves are --- male or female -- is that changed by what someone else refers to them as?
To paraphrase --- Me thinks some trans doth protest too much.
I suspect the majority of trans people are not like this and much of the push is coming from the activists who always seem to take it upon themselves to represent the view of an entire community.
I remember the fuss about the white girl who wore a traditional Chinese dress to her prom. She was vigorously denounced. Meanwhile in China, people were absolutely delighted that someone liked their traditional dress enough to wear it to a prom.
Well, I suspect you have a bit of an idea of what it's like to be a woman-- more so, say, than how it feels to be a dog, or a lizard, or a fern. Funny, ain't it, that the feminist discomfort with femininity in women and (especially) masculinity in men has turned into labeling it not just acceptable but indeed heroic in those who ultimately must use drugs, material goods like clothes and makeup, and at its most extreme (but not uncommon when it comes to the top half of the body) surgery to get there.
but really I don't know what it feels like to go through puberty as a woman, or to carry a child in your womb and give birth, or to have to walk through a street at night and worry about being sexually assaulted, or to have to fend off several sexually directed comments every day - to give just a few examples.
I can get some *idea* about these things from reading the writing of women, but I can never really properly get it in that visceral way another woman would.
Great article, thank you. 👍🏽💕 I wish Macy Gray would have stuck to what she knows to be true! Bette Midler came out with a similar tweet, so hopefully these women will get some support from one another.
I have been pondering something similar to gender "vibes". I get how gender roles, gender expression and gender identity are in part cultural constructs (and even countercultural constructs) as well as related to biology.
It's interesting that I can always tell, so far anyway, when someone is a trans person from their "vibes". There's something in the "feeling tone" of a biological man or a woman that other people can feel. By feeling tone I mean the felt sense of a person, kind of in the way you can feel when another is loving, or angry. Even when trans men and women take hormones and have surgeries, they always retain some of the feeling tone of their original biological sex. They never, as far as I can tell, reach the "feeling tone" or "vibe" of the sex they're transitioning to, the vibe of a biological man or woman. I do find this interesting. Last month I saw a video of a trans woman and I could not tell that she was previously a biological man. I thought to myself, okay here finally is a trans person whom I cannot tell the difference between biology and trans, over video anyway. Then she stood up and walked, and it was immediately obvious she was previously a biological man. If one defines gender as this this "feeling tone", it speaks to gender being connected to one's biological sex at birth. When trans men and women pretend this is not so, they are actually erasing their own uniqueness. They could embrace this difference, particularly now that they have their rights protected and they don't have to worry about being denied housing, public single use bathrooms and being fired from jobs. I think this uniqueness is actually quite an interesting and valuable experience. They've had the opportunity to live socially as both sexes, and have insights into the subtle social part of those constructs in a way that other people probably don't.
Transwomen are obviously transwomen and not always so obviously makes. Some can actually pass as the biological sex without any problems. Autogynephiles can’t. But many homosexual transexuals can - however they have no problem admitting that the are biological males. Many Autogynephiles apparently have a big problem admitting that they are biological males.
But they are males. They’re not going to “pass” as the biological sex they’re LARPing as by an archaeologist or an undertaker or a doctor or anyone taking a close look
I've no proper firm understanding of what 'gender' means. My view is that we need to stop talking about it and go back to thinking in terms of sex. So we'd have sex-based roles rather than gender-based roles, for example.
Men get conscripted. Men work the most dangerous, hazardous jobs, always have. Men commit the vast majority of suicides. And murders. And are most often the victims too. Cancer of the prostate is far more common and lethal than breast cancer. Men get harsher and longer sentences for the same crimes women commit.
I can do this all day.
Yet it's not a contest, is it? It only becomes so, instead of human issue, because of feminism injecting its poison in our brains.
Everyone's heard of the witch trials all over Europe? Yet far more men were executed for that crime. Far more men were executed historically, period. Even depending on when and where you look, it's still about ten times the number of women.
What say we instead try to keep such issues as human issues? Someone is born with XXY-chromosomes, and wants correctional plastic surgery and hormonal treatment? Well, it's a purely medical and psychiatrical issue. Keep it clinical, and the prejudice dies out over time. Make it special replete with special pleading and the prejudice just festers and grows, since the special pleading proves there's something to be prejudiced about!
Doesn't matter if its race or sex or gender or who you like to stick it to or get stuck with. Keep it technical, factual, clinical and boring and Bob's the bloke what buggers you auntie. Or uncle. Or Bob's your auntie.
I've commented before on this topic and risk repeating myself and won't go on but I made a transition socially medically and surgically at the age of 60 because I had to survive, having lived with a profound sex dysphoria discovered at age 4-5 and hidden but I don't claim to be a woman, merely me. Scariest thing I've ever done. Gender is an invented term from some dodgy post WW2 psychiatrists (and borrowed by feminists rather short-sightedly). It can all be explained by the word sex. Gender is just part of the intersectionality language game to have you chasing your tail. It isn't cogent and it isn't meant to be. It's queering to confuse straights. La maison, le monde. That's gender. There are several different populations involved too and there is not a one size explanation. Well done RR for trying to keep this subject on a rational and compassionate basis.
Thanks Ataraxian
It's such a difficult issue to write about. Gender dysphoria clearly exists. It is also clear that transitioning has helped some people lead a happier and more fulfilled existence. It is also clear that some people have regretted their transition.
It's an unholy mess and we have absolutely no right, as a society, to pretend we have the answers given our current state of knowledge. But that's exactly what the activists are doing - they're claiming a certainty that doesn't exist and trying to force everyone to agree with their imagined certainty.
The idea that a troubled teen, or even a pre-teen, can turn up to some medical establishment and with only the most cursory examination/interview have their gender identity 'affirmed' is crazy. Indeed, it is my understanding that doctors and specialists are not even allowed to question the gender choice in some places. I'm not, of course, suggesting they should be unsympathetic or discriminatory but we simply don't know enough to be so certain in the choice of 'treatment'.
All of the studies that have been done strongly suggest that for the majority the gender dysphoria works itself out. So, for example, a boy who feels he is a girl at some stage will in the majority of cases go on to live a completely happy life as an adult male homosexual. The percentage varies from a small majority to a large majority in the studies.
Those who do not fall within this majority will maybe be happier undergoing some transitioning process.
It's not entirely clear because, as you can imagine, these studies are difficult to do these days and the few historical ones that have been done have fairly small sample sizes.
It is my view that the activists are making things worse for everyone - trans people included. I get the sense that most trans people just want to live their lives as close as they can to their 'chosen' sex and to be accepted and supported in that. I don't find that at all unreasonable and I think we could have accommodated that as a society without all the angst and drama.
But the activists seem to want to go much further than this and are pushing for insane things and turning everything into a freakshow. Honestly, how can we take someone who describes their gender as 'gaseous' seriously? It's absurd. And it's all this kind of 'fringe' stuff that cheapens everything - like the pervy pride month stuff - it's degrading - and it's degrading the message for 'normal' people who want to be good and kind and supportive.
My fear is that there will be a backlash - and unfortunately the people who are going to suffer aren't going to be the activists, but the trans and gay people who just want to be accepted and live a life without discrimination and fear.
The fastest way to get permabanned from any mainstream social media platform:
1. Be a woman
2. Tell a man he will never be a woman
Remember when Meghan Murphy was permabanned from Twitter in 2017 for referring to a male sex offender as “him”?
The backlash against women has been extraordinary.
Feminism kind of lost it for me when they went all overboard and buzzword bingo with the male privilege, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, rape culture stuff etc - but fundamentally I think the so-called TERFs are right in that one major purpose of all this gender ideology stuff is an attack on women. To be honest, I'm surprised that more women don't appear to understand the threat all of this gender woo-woo poses.
TRAs are vicious and they hate women.
Gender is masculine, feminine, neutral - if you've studied French, you know this - no sociologist does. Sex is male - a person with XY chromosomes - or female - a person with XX chromosomes. Sex is not gender, and sociology should be extirpated, erased in its entirety, shut out from academic discourse except for the locked wards of state hospitals... The "social sciences" are garbage, and extremely costly garbage at that, and no taxpayer money should be used to pay for that nonsense.
Recently, German weekly paper DIE ZEIT devoted a very long article to a young boy's transition - including the technical details of the final transformation of the dangly bits into something else. I have to say, if a young person is really determined to go through all this, maybe their transition is for the better. However, speaking in motte-and-bailey terms, the detailed and emotional reporting in the ZEIT article seems like elaborate construction of a habitable motte to me. I would really like ZEIT to follow up on the case, and check if the building will still be standing in ten years time.
The bailey around such a motte, then, is this bizarre fighting about language, definition, and power.
The problem with this is she apologized for her statement! So don’t feel sorry for her. It’s super annoying!
It is annoying, but we don't know the pressures that have been brought to bear.
It's easy to demand someone else be 'brave', but few are in the position of being "un-cancellable".
So whilst, technically, I kind of agree with you - I also don't feel I can pass harsh judgement here. It seems women who are brave enough to speak out are often put in an invidious position.
The whole purpose, of course, of going after people like Macy Gray so viciously is to deter other women from speaking out.
The answer is for more and more high profile women (and men) to speak out - but the first few who stick their head above the parapet are going to to face the most concentrated fire. I guess what we can do is to like tweets, write articles etc - to let these brave souls see that they have more support than they think.
Thats the problem!! Why is there pressure for someone having a difference in opinion? They shouldn’t be getting pressure for speaking their truth and it’s worse when they have to apologize for doing so. Not standing by one’s morals/values is part of what has gotten us into this mess. Bowing to the lefts ideations that they constantly shove down everyone’s throats does nothing but allow it to permeate. It should be perfectly ok for her to have that opinion. Why should she have to apologize just because it’s different from what they think should be acceptable? I am not judging her. I just wish more people stood by their convictions like the left does. Otherwise, consensus rules!
I am a woman who never wears dresses, and only wears comfortable shoes. Once I made this change, (at about 25 years old) things have been a lot safer and less stupid for me. If a man wants to wear dresses and uncomfortable shoes, or somehow needs to, I am fine with that. But it's still a man in a dress with uncomfortable shoes, and I am telling you it gets stupid if you have to run. So I think we should make sure all the cross dressing men are carrying weapons, besides stilletto heels. It would be a win-win for America /s
Social constructs, subjective truth, felt reality .... The people who live like this, for this and through this opaque lens of an imagined reality have fallen down the rabbit hole of a disturbing wonderland.
If they wish to be an effeminate man, or a tomboy woman, enjoy. But they are still a man OR a woman.
I will never accept, condone or respect their fiction. And any attempt to coerce me into their dreamworld will not be met with kind respect.
I will go on along the path of the real world. They can too, or they can live in their dream matrix, by I will not be made to believe their fallacy.
I think it's this enforcement of a particular viewpoint that is the problem.
"I support anyone's right to be who they want to be. My question is: to what extent do I have to participate in your self-image?" - Dave Chappelle
Postscript: It is, more than a feeling.
I was born a male. I still am a male. If someone wants to refer to me as being a female I certainly wouldn't be upset about it because I know I'm a male. I think the anger that some trans people express over being referred to as a gender other than they identify as arises from some sort of internal unsurety.
If someone who is biologically a male wants me to refer to them as being female I will. I do that in the same way I would if someone were to ask me to refer to them as George Washington. It means that I'm honoring their request. It doesn't mean that I actually believe the person is George Washington. I wouldn't discriminate against the person or treat them as less of a person than me.
What's the point of all of the upset? If people know who they themselves are --- male or female -- is that changed by what someone else refers to them as?
To paraphrase --- Me thinks some trans doth protest too much.
I suspect the majority of trans people are not like this and much of the push is coming from the activists who always seem to take it upon themselves to represent the view of an entire community.
I remember the fuss about the white girl who wore a traditional Chinese dress to her prom. She was vigorously denounced. Meanwhile in China, people were absolutely delighted that someone liked their traditional dress enough to wear it to a prom.
Well, I suspect you have a bit of an idea of what it's like to be a woman-- more so, say, than how it feels to be a dog, or a lizard, or a fern. Funny, ain't it, that the feminist discomfort with femininity in women and (especially) masculinity in men has turned into labeling it not just acceptable but indeed heroic in those who ultimately must use drugs, material goods like clothes and makeup, and at its most extreme (but not uncommon when it comes to the top half of the body) surgery to get there.
haha
yes - perhaps to some extent
but really I don't know what it feels like to go through puberty as a woman, or to carry a child in your womb and give birth, or to have to walk through a street at night and worry about being sexually assaulted, or to have to fend off several sexually directed comments every day - to give just a few examples.
I can get some *idea* about these things from reading the writing of women, but I can never really properly get it in that visceral way another woman would.
I think novelists of both sexes can demonstrably portray the opposite sex in their novels very well so clearly we can have some idea.
Great article, thank you. 👍🏽💕 I wish Macy Gray would have stuck to what she knows to be true! Bette Midler came out with a similar tweet, so hopefully these women will get some support from one another.
I have been pondering something similar to gender "vibes". I get how gender roles, gender expression and gender identity are in part cultural constructs (and even countercultural constructs) as well as related to biology.
It's interesting that I can always tell, so far anyway, when someone is a trans person from their "vibes". There's something in the "feeling tone" of a biological man or a woman that other people can feel. By feeling tone I mean the felt sense of a person, kind of in the way you can feel when another is loving, or angry. Even when trans men and women take hormones and have surgeries, they always retain some of the feeling tone of their original biological sex. They never, as far as I can tell, reach the "feeling tone" or "vibe" of the sex they're transitioning to, the vibe of a biological man or woman. I do find this interesting. Last month I saw a video of a trans woman and I could not tell that she was previously a biological man. I thought to myself, okay here finally is a trans person whom I cannot tell the difference between biology and trans, over video anyway. Then she stood up and walked, and it was immediately obvious she was previously a biological man. If one defines gender as this this "feeling tone", it speaks to gender being connected to one's biological sex at birth. When trans men and women pretend this is not so, they are actually erasing their own uniqueness. They could embrace this difference, particularly now that they have their rights protected and they don't have to worry about being denied housing, public single use bathrooms and being fired from jobs. I think this uniqueness is actually quite an interesting and valuable experience. They've had the opportunity to live socially as both sexes, and have insights into the subtle social part of those constructs in a way that other people probably don't.
Recently, two lesbians wanted a child and later complained they wanted a male.
Funny; it is actually possible to produce a child from two females, but they will always be a female. :)
Gender as defined would mean ‘feminity’ or feminine’ ’ not ‘woman’. Transwomen are transwoman.
Transwomen are males and males are not women
Transwomen are obviously transwomen and not always so obviously makes. Some can actually pass as the biological sex without any problems. Autogynephiles can’t. But many homosexual transexuals can - however they have no problem admitting that the are biological males. Many Autogynephiles apparently have a big problem admitting that they are biological males.
But they are males. They’re not going to “pass” as the biological sex they’re LARPing as by an archaeologist or an undertaker or a doctor or anyone taking a close look
Sure but by ‘pass’ I meant some can walk around in public and people will assume they are women.
I've no proper firm understanding of what 'gender' means. My view is that we need to stop talking about it and go back to thinking in terms of sex. So we'd have sex-based roles rather than gender-based roles, for example.
I don't feel sorry for Macy Gray, and I certainly could not care less about her being attacked for being a coward.
After all, she is a coward.
Men get conscripted. Men work the most dangerous, hazardous jobs, always have. Men commit the vast majority of suicides. And murders. And are most often the victims too. Cancer of the prostate is far more common and lethal than breast cancer. Men get harsher and longer sentences for the same crimes women commit.
I can do this all day.
Yet it's not a contest, is it? It only becomes so, instead of human issue, because of feminism injecting its poison in our brains.
Everyone's heard of the witch trials all over Europe? Yet far more men were executed for that crime. Far more men were executed historically, period. Even depending on when and where you look, it's still about ten times the number of women.
What say we instead try to keep such issues as human issues? Someone is born with XXY-chromosomes, and wants correctional plastic surgery and hormonal treatment? Well, it's a purely medical and psychiatrical issue. Keep it clinical, and the prejudice dies out over time. Make it special replete with special pleading and the prejudice just festers and grows, since the special pleading proves there's something to be prejudiced about!
Doesn't matter if its race or sex or gender or who you like to stick it to or get stuck with. Keep it technical, factual, clinical and boring and Bob's the bloke what buggers you auntie. Or uncle. Or Bob's your auntie.