This is not a troll, this is not an ironic comment, this is not a criticism of anyone in particular—and so I’m not going to attribute the above quotation; you can find it on your own—but an earnest question that I myself have been thinking about seriously, except from the other direction, as it were:
In the third decade of the 21st century, do you either have to come out as trans or come out as a conservative?
I wrote a novel in 2013 immediately after earning my Ph.D. I wrote it in five months in a visionary trance or frenzy, an almost unwilled outpouring of all that I had been made not say of what I had seen in academe. To the extent that its magical realist element—a drugged-out self-mutilating genderless ascetic avantist communist death-cult menacing the lives of artists—was meant allegorically or parabolically, I wanted to show the noble and ignoble, sympathetic and antipathetic, roots of the avant-garde and the radical left in a longer tradition of spirituality, of world-hating and world-annihilating iconoclasm, to which I wished to counterpose a richer alternative of individual particularity and agency, of aesthetic splendor and surplus. 2013 was the year before “the transgender tipping point.”
I had no conscious thought in my head of transgender identity as topic when I wrote the novel, though I had been aware of the subject since my teens in the 1990s. If you’d asked me then, I suppose I’d have said that my satirical target, to the extent that I aimed to satirize anything, was closer to the second-wave/radical feminists later popularly branded as TERFs, an iconoclastic movement par excellence, and not transgender people, whom I would have then associated, perhaps naively but also as a result of living and working within a largely queer milieu, with individualism and anarchism. (Strangely, I control-F’d the pdf, and the word “gender” does not occur even once in the almost 100,000-word book.)
So why is it that now, when I read the testimony of the detransitioners, do I hear such uncanny echoes of my own characters, of my own imaginary world? Why does it now appear that, nine years ago, narrating a journey—a journey I myself took—into and out of the iconoclast-gnostic avant-garde, I inadvertently wrote a novel of transition and detransition?
And if you hate me for saying so, all I tell you is that I wouldn’t have written it if I hadn’t gone through it, except that “it” has changed enough now that a man about 15 years my junior, in the same position I was in 15 years ago, wonders as I did not quite if he isn’t ethically obligated to become a “woman,” where “woman” signifies gap, lack, wound, and sameness, rather than the bitter masculinity of whatever is so hideously present to experience and consciousness, whatever is irredeemably itself, universally beheld as distinct, there, erect on this sinful earth.
The few escapees who were interviewed by the media tended to converge around the following theory of what motivated the Its: consciousness and individuality were a disease, a disease both causing and worsening the differences between us. Eliminate the differences of language and sex and appearance and skin color and clothing, eliminate even the vanity of existing as a body apart from other bodies, and you will have eliminated our loneliness, a condition not known to the so-called lower lifeforms, though zoologists report that some of the higher primates were already showing symptoms, adopting moldy logs as their own babies, for instance, and so might one day need to form It cults of their own.
I want to make it clear that I do not stand with Lily Cade. Lily Cade’s statement here does not represent my views, or the views of any gender critical person I’ve spoken with. I am disgusted by this.
Well ..it happened, it happens more frequently than you think and women are always right .
“a woman is anyone who says they’re one !”
So by your twisted definition , this crossdresser should be allowed again in women’s public bathrooms because he says he’s a woman
You TRAs know that we’re right and are not exaggerating about the danger of Self ID but since according to you men’s feelings are way more important than women’s safety you choose to frame us as paranoid bigots who are making up assumptions out of thin air.
trons maels weare wombyn skin constum to try & b us cuz thay awant a prussiun point & the trancults ltells them tis ok cuz they have “”””””””””””””fmele broan””””””””””””””””””””” lyk thats not the mots seist malarky i have ever herd but u sll fsll 4 it bevzuse ytong id s uclt
“As philosopher Daniel Dennett commented,“Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.” And if all you’ve got is rhetoric, that is, “interpretations” and “assertions,” as opposed to, say, factual evidence, then the only way, or at least the most tempting way, to conclusively win an argument is through rhetorical manipulations. If you can’t say, “Your opinion is wrong, and here are facts showing your opinion is wrong,” you’re pretty much stuck with, “Your opinion is oppressing me, triggering me, hurting my feelings.” And that’s precisely what we see. And of course we can’t argue back, in part because nobody can verify or falsify your feelings, and in part because by then we’ve already been deplatformed.”
People that call themselves radical feminists telling dysphoric teenagers that they’re ‘mutilating themselves’ and being ‘homophobic’, while trans rights activists tell dysphoric teenagers that their feelings are not uncommon or ‘wrong’ and that there are solutions and that they’ll be supported. No wonder many dysphoric teenagers will start identifying as ‘trans’ and socially and physically transitioning, with an unclear amount of them regretting this later on.
Some of these radical feminists might mean well, but they fail to realize that their tactics only encourage(!) teenagers to transition. And I know this is a thing, because this actually happened to me personally. The condescending choice of words and lack of empathy make that you won’t even consider listening to any of their points.
Don’t pretend you’re ‘fighting against misogyny’, while calling trans men and detransitioned women ‘mutilated’. You are reducing us to our bodies, in an outspokenly degrading way. That’s quite misogynist.
Dysphoric teenagers should know that there’s a lot of people that experience gender dysphoria, and that people deal with this in different ways. Transitioning isn’t always the best solution, even though for some it might be. A lot of different factors contribute to or can even cause dysphoria, such as misogyny, sexism and homophobia. It is possible to internalize these things. As someone who is detransitioning after having used HRT for years and having had surgery, I would recommend trying to work on these views of society you might’ve internalized, before physically transitioning. Make your own, well informed choice. It’s your body.
There’s literally no point in telling teenagers online that gender ‘does not exist’ and therefore their gender is also ‘fake’ and that they /are/ their biological sex. I was there. I was a dysphoric teenager. I did not see how I could possibly not be an FtM; everything fit. Random people online sending me messages about how I was actually ‘just’ a lesbian did not make me change my mind or reconsider things. In fact, it just made me more convinced that I’d have to show everyone what a good guy I could make. And that’s what I did. It worked for quite some years.
Now I’m in my late twenties and I identify as a lesbian; not as an FtM anymore. It hurts to see people approaching those with gender dysphoria the way I was approached, as it doesn’t make anything better. It only made me bitter.
What does help, is to see diversity. Different stories. Know that there are many options. Feeling understood; that you’re not alone.
