i'm trans, and i'm annoyed with both sides of the trans "issue" these days.
for years the trans movement argued something like:
1. gender is an essential real thing
2. your gender is whatever you say it is
3. the law should force everyone to accept your stated gender in all contexts
people on the right like to call 1-3 "gender ideology." this ideology is absurd for a few reasons. (1) and (2) are obviously in tension, if not outright contradictory. (3) is draconian and creates opportunities for serious abuse, especially when combined with (2).
trans people should instead stop talking about gender as an essentially real category. we're not "women/men trapped in a man/woman's body." rather, we just want to live our lives differently from the average person born with our sex chromosomes. please be courteous and try to respect that, within reason. make a good faith effort to use our preferred pronouns. conversely, we shouldn't expect people to use "neopronouns" like ze/zir or similar. and we should be humble and recognize the ways in which we're biologically different from cis people, in areas like sports.
unfortunately, the backlash to gender ideology has not been reasonable or empathic toward trans people. take
@jordanbpeterson for example. he started out criticizing (3), rightly insisting that the law should not force him to use certain pronouns for nonbinary people. but now he seems to have become radicalized against transgenderism more broadly, claiming that gender affirming surgery is tantamount to murder
nitter.app/jordanbpeterson/status…. he egregiously misreads the cited study, suggesting that surgery increases the suicide rate for trans people by 12x, while it actually was comparing people who got the surgery to "control" groups of overwhelmingly non-trans people. so it basically just shows that trans people have higher suicide rates than the general population, which we already knew.
there has also been an unusual focus on gender affirming surgery for children. as far as I can tell it has always been quite rare for trans people under 18 to undergo surgery. any reasonable trans activist should not support this. a much better solution is to put trans kids on puberty blockers, which are reversible, until they are 18 when they can make up their mind about surgery. but it has now become fashionable to oppose blockers as well, and the "left-wing" Labour government in the UK has recently banned them
the-independent.com/news/hea…
obviously puberty blockers, just like any medication, have side effects. but we have to consider the cost-benefit tradeoff here. blockers can prevent a lot of psychological suffering. puberty itself is largely "irreversible"— we still don't have surgeries that can reliably reverse testosterone's effect on the voice, height, or rib cage volume for example. I get the sense that a lot of the opposition to blockers is borne out of a general sense of spite and disgust for trans people, rather than empathy and rational cost-benefit analysis.
we should approach anything irreversible with great caution. taking testosterone has more dramatic, irreversible effects than estrogen does, and therefore should be treated with more care. there are too many young women taking T and detransitioning later. trans activists should recognize that this is a problem rather than shoving it under the rug.
thanks for taking the time to read this. unfortunately I have not seen many people publicly taking a rational, moderate stand on this issue that recognizes the points from both sides, so I felt the need to make this long post.
12x the suicide rate post "gender affirming" surgery
The butchers and liars were murderously wrong
The Cass report indicated this
Canada and the US are still enabling this
That's you
@POTUS and
@JustinTrudeau and it is utterly barbarous and inexcusable
Putting children to the knife
"Follow the science," gentlemen.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3869…