Trans activists have become so dishonest and hyperbolic that they're becoming their own worst enemies. I also don't think they realize how much they are turning off otherwise left-leaning voters. A politician's support for child transition treatment is a deal-breaker for many at the voting booth.
> One would hope, but there may be some wishful thinking on that point.
"I also don't think they realize how much they are turning off otherwise left-leaning voters."
> I've heard anecdotal accounts but haven't seen hard evidence of this. Can anyone point me to some? I have in mind that an Eric Wempel may have taken on the trans-fascistas, but as today's Singal-minded post indicates, his account doesn't seem to have gained much traction elsewhere.
I’m one of those suburban moms, living right outside a big city. I have always voted for Dems. But the Dems stance on this issue has me not wanting to vote for them anymore.
I'm a British voter and a mum and I can't vote for a political party that supports the social transitioning of vulnerable children. It's happening in our schools in the same way as in the USA and parents are expected to go along. Our Labour Party is, like your Democrats, mostly captured by gender identity ideology, but the leadership has started making a cautious retreat from the most extreme positions - regarding self-identification involving children, the placement of male offenders in female prisons, and the need for female-only "safe spaces" (they have not explained however what these spaces are) We will see what they actually say at election time.
Polling seems to be shifting, and not in a small way - https://www.societystandpoint.com/p/the-tide-is-turning-on-trans-ideology -but whether it's a deciding issue for very many voters remains to be seen. There aren't many Democrats at all who are critical of transgenderism, so we won't be able to judge from primaries, where such a difference could become a focus as healthcare policy did in the last few cycles. We'll have to gauge from general election results, but that's hard, because there are many more differences between R and D that can affect voter choices.
Personally I think if the alternative is Trump, even most trans-critical people would vote for Biden. If the Republican isn't named Trump, but rather named Tim Scott for example, I think that could change.
I think there are a lot of people with that view, and I think it behooves every single one of them to register R so they can vote in the Republican primary. Really I think it behooves even people who would vote for Biden no matter what - getting Trump out of the race is a way bigger deal than any primary on the Democratic side.
The question is how to decide on *which* of the any-other-Republicans a person with such a position should vote for. Tim Scott seems best to me - what clearer break could there be than to go from thrice-divorced real estate impresario Trump to successful Allstate agent & franchisee Tim Scott, who's still waiting for "the one"?
Re "There aren't many Democrats at all who are critical of transgenderism..."
On what do you base this assertion? I, a Democrat, know many, many fellow Democrats who, like me, like Jesse Singal, like Lisa Selin Davis, like Stella O'Malley and countless other smart, generally liberal people, am deeply and vocally skeptical of the trans-mania we're experiencing.
So I'd like to see some data to back up your assertion. Thanks.
Thank you Spiky. I've also been pointed toward a Pew poll which shows the same general trend. I'm gaining some hope. (also, just read today that Denmark is joining the club of countries moving toward more rational policies).
Interesting to note that the biggest swing by far is among the youngest generation (z), who went from a solid majority in agreement with "there are more than two genders" to a solid majority in disagreement - that's not a question about T per se, but it's a pretty clear movement against indulging novel Q+ concepts, from the generation most likely to have encountered neo- & nonbinary-identifiers.
And to report a few words on the street, just today right by the ramp to the Holland Tunnel I heard a business guy about my age grumble to his ladyfriend, "People have the right to dress however they want, but if I look at you and I see a dude and I call you a dude, you don't have the right to come at me about pronouns."
A few Saturdays ago I was on a subway pretty late, and I was half listening to two gay guys (confirmed as such by their conversation) next to me. They were talking for a while about gay couples they know who'd adopted kids, and then one said "trannies are so annoying" and the other said said "oh my god whenever someone starts on that tranny, pronoun, whatever business I'm just nope, out of there." [sic...]
Support for protections from discrimination has grown, but at the same time, the majority of Americans who agree that gender is determined by birth sex has also grown (up to 60% now), and 15% of Dems think "society has gone too far" on transgender rights. At the very least, we can say there is a sizeable and growing percentage of Americans who both believe that transgender people should be protected from housing and job discrimination, but also believe the law needs to account for the reality of sex. So that gives me hope.
As a personal anecdote, I've never voted for a Republican, but at this point I don't know how I can bring myself to vote for a Democrat who is openly promising to dismantle my sex-based rights, help Big Pharma exploit vulnerable kids, and gleefully attack me and my community because, hey, we're just #$*%& TERFs. I can't do it. It's become a litmus test for me just as much as abortion rights.
I think the general public is also beginning to understand more about the issues. I can't remember where I saw it, but a recent survey found that about a third of people thought that a trans woman was a female who identified as a man and vice versa for trans man. Then of course when you ask people should a trans women (that they think is female) should use a women's bathroom or play in women't sports, they say yes. Other surveys have shown that when you break it down for people (do you support male bodied people in women's bathrooms), they say 'no of course not'.
Also, a lot of people think that trans women have had their penises removed, but actually most trans women keep their penises. I don't blame them, the surgeries are horrific and often have very poor outcomes.
In the UK, the picture of 'Isla' Bryson, a convicted rapist, in tight fitting pink leggings which showed that he still had a penis, on his way to a women't prison peaked a hell of a lot of people. Then you had politicians that still couldn't say that he was a man which showed how insane the whole thing is.
If politicians don't know what a woman is, they are either lying or very stupid. Nether of those traits make me want to vote for them.
Yes, but the bizarre fantasy that there is a huge "War on Trans" throughout the American landscape is so ingrained in even mildly liberal reporting / writing that their main battle against rationality is mostly over and won by the loons. Grrrr...
“While the segment does include an interview with Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, his voice is mostly used to represent the “other side” in the classically superficial style of subpar journalism everywhere — the producers make no independent effort to really get at the truth, and they clearly default to the stance that the open letter authors’ claims are true as written, with just about every editorial choice, big and small, pointing in that direction.”
I apologize for the long quote, but Jake Silverstein’s name is something of a trigger for me.
Silverstein was the NYT magazine editor when Nikole Hannah-Jones published her ‘1619 Project’ essay claiming, among other things, that England was deeply conflicted about slavery at the time of the American revolution. This is incontrovertibly false.
(The only people speaking out against slavery at the time in England, then the most powerful nation on earth, were Quakers and it would be decades before they were allowed in either Parliament or England’s elite universities. They were literally a marginalized minority. The Quakers wouldn’t even began to form the basics of the abolitionist movement until the 1780s. A host of things would have to happen, including the emergence of William Wilberforce and a mass evangelical movement amongst prominent, affluent non-Quaker women in the 19th century, before there was even a hope of making slavery an issue in England. Decades later.)
Silverstein was told by the historian they’d hired to fact-check that these claims weren’t true. He overruled her.
Post-publication he was told by respectful and sympathetic historians in an open letter that they weren’t true. He and Hannah-Jones snidely questioned their motives.
Jake Sillverstein is a sad reflection on the NYT. He has played a real part in fostering the culture of dishonesty and misguided activism in media that this letter (and the subsequent coverage of it) exemplifies.
What the "1619" project, and most contemporary liberals, refuse to understand is that slavery was NOT considered "morally wrong" until about 1850. In the period of 1840-1860, England outlawed it, Hungary freed the serfs (slaves light), Russia freed its serfs, and the US ended slavery. Before this time, slaves were considered to be unfortunate victims of fortune, or in most cases, persons who were to blame for their own misfortune.
Before that, slavery was widespread. It has been a part of pretty much every society in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, since time immemorial. Half the population of Athens were slaves. Sparta kept all of its neighbors in a slave state for several hundred years. Rome had more slaves than free. The Ottoman Empire ran a large part of its infrastructure using forced conscripts from Christian households. Slavery is the actual oldest institution in the world.
The NYTimes has done a terrible thing to actual history with the 1619 project.
The US was an Enlightenment project and there were thinkers in the 18th century, often influenced by French thought (as well as the occasional conservative like Samuel Johnson), who recognized slavery as a great evil.
The situation in the Caribbean was so brutal and sadistic that there are instances of white people being exposed to it who then devoted the rest of their lives to its abolition. The father of the great British Whig historian Thomas Macaulay being one. He went to Jamaica to begin his career and was so shocked and horrified that he instead became an adamant abolitionist. (Thomas Macualay viewed his father as essentially a somewhat embarrassing hippie and the Quakers as a bizarre, possibly dangerous cult.) The Quakers were, in fact, phenomenal on this issue. Their efforts should be much, much better known.
But, indeed, these people were all in a tiny minority. And they had no sway in 1770s England. They were unknown or viewed as crazies or, at best, eccentrics.
Gradually an abolition movement did grow. The slave trade was abolished in the British empire in the very early 1800s. Slavery itself in 1833. The British navy even stopped the Atlantic slave trade, an incredible achievement. (On a purely logistic level, it would be like if the “war on drugs” had been decisively won and no more drugs were available.)
A great force behind much of this were the efforts of upper-middle-class and affluent British women. Women who made it, in essence, their professional career (though, of course, they were paid nothing). This, too, should be better known.
Instead, we have Nikole Hannah-Jones just making shit up, including (but not limited to) giving the British Empire credit for turning on slavery decades before it did.
Jake Silverstein’s role in this ludicrous travesty should not be forgotten.
Absolutely individuals, a small number, were opposed to slavery and considered it a moral evil. But, until the time period I noted, these were a minority. I believe that the Prince Consort of Queen Victoria, Albert, made an important speech about the evil of slavery.
In the US, the Quakers, Unitarians, and some others on the religious left opposed slavery.
The "1619 project" which attempts to make the slavery situation in the US to be one of particular heinousness is distorting history.
I don't think we are much in disagreement on the main points.
Although we “lost” the Reconstruction, the US fought a Civil War with the Union cause being the abolition of slavery. Lincoln could have let the confederate states go without much damage to the health and wealth of the nation. An ancestor of mine immigrated from Germany and was part of a German-speaking regiment during the Civil War because he viewed slavery as an evil to be abolished.
Yes, I agree. The sentiment at the time of the Civil War was, in the North, strongly against slavery. In the South, there was both a pro-slavery sentiment, and a sentiment of "keep yer damn Yankee noses out of our business".
As to the Germans, the German immigrants were refugees escaping the "conservative backlash" to the Revolution of 1848. Most of the immigrants were from the St Louis area under Fritz Siegal. "I served mit Siegal" was the call.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but my belief is that slavery, throughout human history, existed in every society which had the ability to enslave people.
Can you name one other that was constructed around a principle like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?
Lesser point: very few of them were as totally reliant on slavery as the American south. Though Rome was.
I have no problem with a liberal newspaper arguing that America’s history is irrevocably stained & diminished by slavery. And I have no problem with a conservative publication arguing that, as evil as slavery was, that’s not entirely fair as there’s a need for historical context, etc.
I may lean more one way than the other, but once the inherent evil is conceded, I can recognize a good faith argument. Even if I don’t agree with it.
What none of us should tolerate is outright brazen lies.
Jake Silverstein promoted outright lies. He defended them. He patronizingly dismissed historians who respectfully tried to correct the record.
This is the culture in which the trans coverage letter to the NYT took place. People claim moral authority and lie and slander honest, dedicated, competent journalists, scientists and historians. Other media then covers the story in a dishonest way, rather than call out liars.
Polls for gay marriage support showed it consistently and steadily going up and up. The same can’t be said for trans support, which has seen a sharp downturn over the past few years. Trans activists are sinking public support of the cause via trying to impose it on everyone else and mass censorship. The NYT did nothing wrong on trans but the activists (like the person who runs TransgenderMap) display levels of zeal the most fanatical Christian couldn’t even match.
Support for L G B is declining, in point of fact. Recent polls have shown gay marriage support down 10 pts.
The reason is that LGB support TQ. The TQ support for "drag queen pervert hour" is completely repellent to normal people. The Big Gay organizations like the Human Rights Campaign still actively promote TQ. So, although SOME LGB are distancing from the perverse delusion of trans, there is institutional support.
So long as LGB are supporting TQ, they will go down with it.
Yes, "forced teaming" is the common term used to describe the coercion that T and later Q used to get into the same "victim category" with LGB.
However, the time has come for Big Gay to forcibly reject TQ, but they are not doing that. Big Gay is doubling down on "drag pervert promotion", on the Genderbread Man, on the victim status of trannies.
As L’s see 12–year-old possible L’s being converted to T’s, they’re increasingly joining the drop-T movement. Remains to be seen whether they’ll be joined by many G’s. I wouldn’t be shocked to see an eventual divorce of L and G. It seems to be a marriage of convenience and common perceived enemies more than of love and affection.
"The Gays"have been incredibly patient with the Trans tying their looniness to the broader Gay and Lesbian community. I suggest the time for patience is well over...
The notion of "decades of puberty blockers" is a complete fabrication. The use of puberty blockers was first proposed in 1996 in the "Dutch protocol". The method was VERY SPARINGLY used until about 2015. Since 2015 and the advent of the ROGD tidal wave of trans deluded children, more have been put on this EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH WHICH HAS NO EVIDENTIARY SUPPORT. The entire rotten enterprise of "gender-affirming care" is experimental. Even today, in August 2023, more side-effects are coming out - these include osteoperosis at 22, heart aspects, retinal damage, and so forth.
Almost all studies have been on VERY small groups. ALL longitudinal studies have unacceptable loss-to-follow-up. The research is TERRIBLE. There is DELIBERATE and ACKNOWLEDGED DATA MANIPULATION.
If a person goes on a hormone that is not appropriate for the SEX THEY ARE AT SINCE CONCEPTION, there are dire and life-long debilitating consequences. If you decide to do this, you are part of a huge experiment. Good luck!! At least you won't have children who will be forced to support your damaged carcass into old age.
There is no doubt that Transmania is the Big Lie of our era, a combo of frontal lobotomy, Satanic panic and Mao's Thought Reform. That this has been sold as "the great civil rights struggle of our time" will live on as the perfect symbol of American decline (intellectual, moral and political), a grotesquerie on par with Roman gladiator shows and Aztec human sacrifice.
And as "Gender Theory" and all its works have no scientfic foundation and are rooted in the deranged idea that the mammalian sex binary is an oppressive political imposition that needs to be destroyed, its proponents have no choice but to rely on every possibe underhanded tactic: hounding and attacking opponents and dissenters (like Jesse), victim wallowing ("Your questions are literal genocide!"), intense moral blackmail and emotional bullying, brazen lying and gaslighting, plus the lowest form of argument ever crafted: do you want a dead son or a living daughter!?
The upscale progressive media class has painted themselves into quite a corner here: the Science is settled! (even though new studies are done constantly), they screech, and then they present the 2 options that all zealots in the grip of a fundamentalist mania give: either join our cult and bow down and worship our sacred idol (the Holy Trans child) or else be cast beyond the moral pale and smeared as a "hate group".
This has become a Manichaean moral crusade for them, and what used to be called "journalism" no longer applies. Our progressive media have abandoned journalism (and rationality) to become narrative-enforcement agents and Defenders of the One True Faith.
“Do you think she is more or less angry than the Swedish teenager facing severe spinal damage because of what puberty blockers did to their skeleton, or that kid’s parents?”
I love the rare occasions when Jesse relaxes his grip a bit and releases some venom.
"But that doesn’t mean you have to accept what they say. In fact, if you do accept what they say in a mindless or parrotlike fashion, you’re no longer performing journalism. You should probably leave this field, in fact, and go work for one of the many rights organizations that could use the PR assistance. You’ll be better paid there, and ideally the slot you vacate will be filled by one of the perhaps tens of thousands of competent, principled journalists who have been laid off during our industry’s implosion."
About left-handedness--when I look at those charts, it seems to have gone up from 2% to 12% over a period of **40 years.**
Number of people presenting at GIDS: 51 in 2009 and 1766 in 2016. A factor of 34 in **seven** years.
There’s also not an army of “experts” constantly hammering kids with the message “Are you depressed? Do you hate something about yourself? It might be because you are actually left handed!”
To be fair to the lefthanded-ness argument. If lefthanded-ness were significantly MORE suppressed earlier(the way being trans was), it would also have shown a larger spike. The fact that this spike is larger doesn't mean it can't work as an example.
I take the lefthanded-ness argument as "here is an example of a plausible reason why you would see a spike that was _not_ the result of social contagion".
Taking it as "this _proves_ it is not the result of social contagion" is obviously taking it too far - but saying "this spike is bigger than lefthandedness so it can't be that" isn't definitely true _either_.
The comparison with left-handedness would be inane even if the curves were similar. After all, affirming left-handedness requires doing nothing, whereas affirming gender requires a lifetime of serious hormonal and surgical interventions. Not hard to see why one is making parents (and outsiders) more worried.
I'm currently reading Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children, by Hannah Barnes. I warmly recommend it to anyone interested in the youth gender medicine debate.
I remember seeing a longer version of the left handedness chart and it went back three hundred years or do and saw a steady state, then a big dip starting around the Industrial Revolution and eventually coming back up.
These folks style themselves as the proud adversaries of transphobes, but they see their true enemy as anyone who introduces nuance into the discussion. This is because they're not in competition with actual transphobes, as almost no one in that rightwing audience is persuadable, nor are trans allies going to be led astray by the bile.
But there are many fair-minded people on the left who are intrigued by compelling, nuanced arguments and would come to realize how unreasonable the ideology of the hardliners is if the well weren't poisoned. Obviously the activists can't scare them away from listening by explicitly saying, "Don't listen to nuanced points of view!" So instead they just cry transphobia and a lot of good-hearted people think, "Oh, Jesse Singal is a transphobe? Yikes, I don't want any part of that."
This tactic is, of course, is not at all unique to this particular issue. Where would Scientology (or any other successful cult) be if, instead of vilifying their critics, they said to their dupes: "By all means, listen to the counter-arguments and we're sure you'll come back to us more faithful than ever."
I happened across that interview on the radio by accident (my hobby is timing how long it'll take in an NPR story to bring up race--relevant or not)--and found myself as frustrated as you.
What's of central interest to me now is how the trans-activist movement (or whomever) has so effectively silenced any questioning or debate on this entire topic. Why is this topic given a pass, every. single. time?
What in our institutions happened at a fundamental level with this topic that extinguished all curiosity, and silenced all inquiry? Why elevate "gender identity"--this subjective, internal "sense"--to such dizzying heights and paramount importance (over all that we can see, touch, experience externally)?
And the "or whomever" parenthetical addition here is also of supreme interest--where did this come from (Judith Butler, etc., I guess), but who were the seminal (pun not intended) people in politics, medicine, legislation, social influence that proliferated this so thoroughly unquestioningly and then made it absolute dogma?
There's an amazing book in those topics, somewhere.
If you want answers to these questions, you need to look at the research Jennifer Bilek has done about the ultra wealthy men who have built their life purpose around their autogynophilia and are pouring money into the trans cause. These include John Stryker, Martine Rothblatt, and Jennifer Pritzker, "sister" of Illinois Governor Pritzker. There is some extremely big money behind this. Bilek's research is indispensable.
Anyone have the link to the original--possibly back from 2016 or prior? All links I find are to a more recent 2021 (apparently) one, and the other links are dead.
What remains strange and ominous is the way lesbians and gays have allowed themselves to be exploited and (one assumes) shame-silenced into a facsimile of unwavering support for radical trans activism. We know it's not so, and that the portrayal of LGBTQetc. as a lock-step, homogenous community is a fraud. Lesbians and gays need to find their voice and speak out on this. Some have, but not nearly enough. Like others, they've been cowed into silence.
Trans activists have become so dishonest and hyperbolic that they're becoming their own worst enemies. I also don't think they realize how much they are turning off otherwise left-leaning voters. A politician's support for child transition treatment is a deal-breaker for many at the voting booth.
"they're becoming their own worst enemies."
> One would hope, but there may be some wishful thinking on that point.
"I also don't think they realize how much they are turning off otherwise left-leaning voters."
> I've heard anecdotal accounts but haven't seen hard evidence of this. Can anyone point me to some? I have in mind that an Eric Wempel may have taken on the trans-fascistas, but as today's Singal-minded post indicates, his account doesn't seem to have gained much traction elsewhere.
I’m one of those suburban moms, living right outside a big city. I have always voted for Dems. But the Dems stance on this issue has me not wanting to vote for them anymore.
Funny you should say that....I am in the same position as you and have decided to make a litmus test out of these issues when I vote.
I'm a British voter and a mum and I can't vote for a political party that supports the social transitioning of vulnerable children. It's happening in our schools in the same way as in the USA and parents are expected to go along. Our Labour Party is, like your Democrats, mostly captured by gender identity ideology, but the leadership has started making a cautious retreat from the most extreme positions - regarding self-identification involving children, the placement of male offenders in female prisons, and the need for female-only "safe spaces" (they have not explained however what these spaces are) We will see what they actually say at election time.
Polling seems to be shifting, and not in a small way - https://www.societystandpoint.com/p/the-tide-is-turning-on-trans-ideology -but whether it's a deciding issue for very many voters remains to be seen. There aren't many Democrats at all who are critical of transgenderism, so we won't be able to judge from primaries, where such a difference could become a focus as healthcare policy did in the last few cycles. We'll have to gauge from general election results, but that's hard, because there are many more differences between R and D that can affect voter choices.
Personally I think if the alternative is Trump, even most trans-critical people would vote for Biden. If the Republican isn't named Trump, but rather named Tim Scott for example, I think that could change.
I may have to vote for Biden if Trump is the other choice. But any other Republican? That’s who I’d vote for.
I think there are a lot of people with that view, and I think it behooves every single one of them to register R so they can vote in the Republican primary. Really I think it behooves even people who would vote for Biden no matter what - getting Trump out of the race is a way bigger deal than any primary on the Democratic side.
The question is how to decide on *which* of the any-other-Republicans a person with such a position should vote for. Tim Scott seems best to me - what clearer break could there be than to go from thrice-divorced real estate impresario Trump to successful Allstate agent & franchisee Tim Scott, who's still waiting for "the one"?
Re "There aren't many Democrats at all who are critical of transgenderism..."
On what do you base this assertion? I, a Democrat, know many, many fellow Democrats who, like me, like Jesse Singal, like Lisa Selin Davis, like Stella O'Malley and countless other smart, generally liberal people, am deeply and vocally skeptical of the trans-mania we're experiencing.
So I'd like to see some data to back up your assertion. Thanks.
They're referring to Democratic politicians, not Democratic voters.
Thank you Spiky. I've also been pointed toward a Pew poll which shows the same general trend. I'm gaining some hope. (also, just read today that Denmark is joining the club of countries moving toward more rational policies).
Interesting to note that the biggest swing by far is among the youngest generation (z), who went from a solid majority in agreement with "there are more than two genders" to a solid majority in disagreement - that's not a question about T per se, but it's a pretty clear movement against indulging novel Q+ concepts, from the generation most likely to have encountered neo- & nonbinary-identifiers.
And to report a few words on the street, just today right by the ramp to the Holland Tunnel I heard a business guy about my age grumble to his ladyfriend, "People have the right to dress however they want, but if I look at you and I see a dude and I call you a dude, you don't have the right to come at me about pronouns."
A few Saturdays ago I was on a subway pretty late, and I was half listening to two gay guys (confirmed as such by their conversation) next to me. They were talking for a while about gay couples they know who'd adopted kids, and then one said "trannies are so annoying" and the other said said "oh my god whenever someone starts on that tranny, pronoun, whatever business I'm just nope, out of there." [sic...]
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
Support for protections from discrimination has grown, but at the same time, the majority of Americans who agree that gender is determined by birth sex has also grown (up to 60% now), and 15% of Dems think "society has gone too far" on transgender rights. At the very least, we can say there is a sizeable and growing percentage of Americans who both believe that transgender people should be protected from housing and job discrimination, but also believe the law needs to account for the reality of sex. So that gives me hope.
As a personal anecdote, I've never voted for a Republican, but at this point I don't know how I can bring myself to vote for a Democrat who is openly promising to dismantle my sex-based rights, help Big Pharma exploit vulnerable kids, and gleefully attack me and my community because, hey, we're just #$*%& TERFs. I can't do it. It's become a litmus test for me just as much as abortion rights.
Thank you, Sten. I appreciate the information. I also now have a tiny bit of hope.
I think the general public is also beginning to understand more about the issues. I can't remember where I saw it, but a recent survey found that about a third of people thought that a trans woman was a female who identified as a man and vice versa for trans man. Then of course when you ask people should a trans women (that they think is female) should use a women's bathroom or play in women't sports, they say yes. Other surveys have shown that when you break it down for people (do you support male bodied people in women's bathrooms), they say 'no of course not'.
Also, a lot of people think that trans women have had their penises removed, but actually most trans women keep their penises. I don't blame them, the surgeries are horrific and often have very poor outcomes.
In the UK, the picture of 'Isla' Bryson, a convicted rapist, in tight fitting pink leggings which showed that he still had a penis, on his way to a women't prison peaked a hell of a lot of people. Then you had politicians that still couldn't say that he was a man which showed how insane the whole thing is.
If politicians don't know what a woman is, they are either lying or very stupid. Nether of those traits make me want to vote for them.
Yes, but the bizarre fantasy that there is a huge "War on Trans" throughout the American landscape is so ingrained in even mildly liberal reporting / writing that their main battle against rationality is mostly over and won by the loons. Grrrr...
“While the segment does include an interview with Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, his voice is mostly used to represent the “other side” in the classically superficial style of subpar journalism everywhere — the producers make no independent effort to really get at the truth, and they clearly default to the stance that the open letter authors’ claims are true as written, with just about every editorial choice, big and small, pointing in that direction.”
I apologize for the long quote, but Jake Silverstein’s name is something of a trigger for me.
Silverstein was the NYT magazine editor when Nikole Hannah-Jones published her ‘1619 Project’ essay claiming, among other things, that England was deeply conflicted about slavery at the time of the American revolution. This is incontrovertibly false.
(The only people speaking out against slavery at the time in England, then the most powerful nation on earth, were Quakers and it would be decades before they were allowed in either Parliament or England’s elite universities. They were literally a marginalized minority. The Quakers wouldn’t even began to form the basics of the abolitionist movement until the 1780s. A host of things would have to happen, including the emergence of William Wilberforce and a mass evangelical movement amongst prominent, affluent non-Quaker women in the 19th century, before there was even a hope of making slavery an issue in England. Decades later.)
Silverstein was told by the historian they’d hired to fact-check that these claims weren’t true. He overruled her.
Post-publication he was told by respectful and sympathetic historians in an open letter that they weren’t true. He and Hannah-Jones snidely questioned their motives.
Jake Sillverstein is a sad reflection on the NYT. He has played a real part in fostering the culture of dishonesty and misguided activism in media that this letter (and the subsequent coverage of it) exemplifies.
What the "1619" project, and most contemporary liberals, refuse to understand is that slavery was NOT considered "morally wrong" until about 1850. In the period of 1840-1860, England outlawed it, Hungary freed the serfs (slaves light), Russia freed its serfs, and the US ended slavery. Before this time, slaves were considered to be unfortunate victims of fortune, or in most cases, persons who were to blame for their own misfortune.
Before that, slavery was widespread. It has been a part of pretty much every society in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, since time immemorial. Half the population of Athens were slaves. Sparta kept all of its neighbors in a slave state for several hundred years. Rome had more slaves than free. The Ottoman Empire ran a large part of its infrastructure using forced conscripts from Christian households. Slavery is the actual oldest institution in the world.
The NYTimes has done a terrible thing to actual history with the 1619 project.
The US was an Enlightenment project and there were thinkers in the 18th century, often influenced by French thought (as well as the occasional conservative like Samuel Johnson), who recognized slavery as a great evil.
The situation in the Caribbean was so brutal and sadistic that there are instances of white people being exposed to it who then devoted the rest of their lives to its abolition. The father of the great British Whig historian Thomas Macaulay being one. He went to Jamaica to begin his career and was so shocked and horrified that he instead became an adamant abolitionist. (Thomas Macualay viewed his father as essentially a somewhat embarrassing hippie and the Quakers as a bizarre, possibly dangerous cult.) The Quakers were, in fact, phenomenal on this issue. Their efforts should be much, much better known.
But, indeed, these people were all in a tiny minority. And they had no sway in 1770s England. They were unknown or viewed as crazies or, at best, eccentrics.
Gradually an abolition movement did grow. The slave trade was abolished in the British empire in the very early 1800s. Slavery itself in 1833. The British navy even stopped the Atlantic slave trade, an incredible achievement. (On a purely logistic level, it would be like if the “war on drugs” had been decisively won and no more drugs were available.)
A great force behind much of this were the efforts of upper-middle-class and affluent British women. Women who made it, in essence, their professional career (though, of course, they were paid nothing). This, too, should be better known.
Instead, we have Nikole Hannah-Jones just making shit up, including (but not limited to) giving the British Empire credit for turning on slavery decades before it did.
Jake Silverstein’s role in this ludicrous travesty should not be forgotten.
Absolutely individuals, a small number, were opposed to slavery and considered it a moral evil. But, until the time period I noted, these were a minority. I believe that the Prince Consort of Queen Victoria, Albert, made an important speech about the evil of slavery.
In the US, the Quakers, Unitarians, and some others on the religious left opposed slavery.
The "1619 project" which attempts to make the slavery situation in the US to be one of particular heinousness is distorting history.
I don't think we are much in disagreement on the main points.
Although we “lost” the Reconstruction, the US fought a Civil War with the Union cause being the abolition of slavery. Lincoln could have let the confederate states go without much damage to the health and wealth of the nation. An ancestor of mine immigrated from Germany and was part of a German-speaking regiment during the Civil War because he viewed slavery as an evil to be abolished.
That’s fairly anti-slavery by any measure.
Yes, I agree. The sentiment at the time of the Civil War was, in the North, strongly against slavery. In the South, there was both a pro-slavery sentiment, and a sentiment of "keep yer damn Yankee noses out of our business".
As to the Germans, the German immigrants were refugees escaping the "conservative backlash" to the Revolution of 1848. Most of the immigrants were from the St Louis area under Fritz Siegal. "I served mit Siegal" was the call.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but my belief is that slavery, throughout human history, existed in every society which had the ability to enslave people.
Can you name one other that was constructed around a principle like “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?
Lesser point: very few of them were as totally reliant on slavery as the American south. Though Rome was.
Just in case I wasn’t clear , my comment was not in support of that evil, slavery
I know. Wasn’t suggesting otherwise.
I have no problem with a liberal newspaper arguing that America’s history is irrevocably stained & diminished by slavery. And I have no problem with a conservative publication arguing that, as evil as slavery was, that’s not entirely fair as there’s a need for historical context, etc.
I may lean more one way than the other, but once the inherent evil is conceded, I can recognize a good faith argument. Even if I don’t agree with it.
What none of us should tolerate is outright brazen lies.
Jake Silverstein promoted outright lies. He defended them. He patronizingly dismissed historians who respectfully tried to correct the record.
This is the culture in which the trans coverage letter to the NYT took place. People claim moral authority and lie and slander honest, dedicated, competent journalists, scientists and historians. Other media then covers the story in a dishonest way, rather than call out liars.
Polls for gay marriage support showed it consistently and steadily going up and up. The same can’t be said for trans support, which has seen a sharp downturn over the past few years. Trans activists are sinking public support of the cause via trying to impose it on everyone else and mass censorship. The NYT did nothing wrong on trans but the activists (like the person who runs TransgenderMap) display levels of zeal the most fanatical Christian couldn’t even match.
Support for L G B is declining, in point of fact. Recent polls have shown gay marriage support down 10 pts.
The reason is that LGB support TQ. The TQ support for "drag queen pervert hour" is completely repellent to normal people. The Big Gay organizations like the Human Rights Campaign still actively promote TQ. So, although SOME LGB are distancing from the perverse delusion of trans, there is institutional support.
So long as LGB are supporting TQ, they will go down with it.
They're forced teamed.
Yes, "forced teaming" is the common term used to describe the coercion that T and later Q used to get into the same "victim category" with LGB.
However, the time has come for Big Gay to forcibly reject TQ, but they are not doing that. Big Gay is doubling down on "drag pervert promotion", on the Genderbread Man, on the victim status of trannies.
As L’s see 12–year-old possible L’s being converted to T’s, they’re increasingly joining the drop-T movement. Remains to be seen whether they’ll be joined by many G’s. I wouldn’t be shocked to see an eventual divorce of L and G. It seems to be a marriage of convenience and common perceived enemies more than of love and affection.
"The Gays"have been incredibly patient with the Trans tying their looniness to the broader Gay and Lesbian community. I suggest the time for patience is well over...
The notion of "decades of puberty blockers" is a complete fabrication. The use of puberty blockers was first proposed in 1996 in the "Dutch protocol". The method was VERY SPARINGLY used until about 2015. Since 2015 and the advent of the ROGD tidal wave of trans deluded children, more have been put on this EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH WHICH HAS NO EVIDENTIARY SUPPORT. The entire rotten enterprise of "gender-affirming care" is experimental. Even today, in August 2023, more side-effects are coming out - these include osteoperosis at 22, heart aspects, retinal damage, and so forth.
Almost all studies have been on VERY small groups. ALL longitudinal studies have unacceptable loss-to-follow-up. The research is TERRIBLE. There is DELIBERATE and ACKNOWLEDGED DATA MANIPULATION.
If a person goes on a hormone that is not appropriate for the SEX THEY ARE AT SINCE CONCEPTION, there are dire and life-long debilitating consequences. If you decide to do this, you are part of a huge experiment. Good luck!! At least you won't have children who will be forced to support your damaged carcass into old age.
There is no doubt that Transmania is the Big Lie of our era, a combo of frontal lobotomy, Satanic panic and Mao's Thought Reform. That this has been sold as "the great civil rights struggle of our time" will live on as the perfect symbol of American decline (intellectual, moral and political), a grotesquerie on par with Roman gladiator shows and Aztec human sacrifice.
And as "Gender Theory" and all its works have no scientfic foundation and are rooted in the deranged idea that the mammalian sex binary is an oppressive political imposition that needs to be destroyed, its proponents have no choice but to rely on every possibe underhanded tactic: hounding and attacking opponents and dissenters (like Jesse), victim wallowing ("Your questions are literal genocide!"), intense moral blackmail and emotional bullying, brazen lying and gaslighting, plus the lowest form of argument ever crafted: do you want a dead son or a living daughter!?
The upscale progressive media class has painted themselves into quite a corner here: the Science is settled! (even though new studies are done constantly), they screech, and then they present the 2 options that all zealots in the grip of a fundamentalist mania give: either join our cult and bow down and worship our sacred idol (the Holy Trans child) or else be cast beyond the moral pale and smeared as a "hate group".
This has become a Manichaean moral crusade for them, and what used to be called "journalism" no longer applies. Our progressive media have abandoned journalism (and rationality) to become narrative-enforcement agents and Defenders of the One True Faith.
Wow, Well that about sums it up. Well writ, Clever P.!
“Do you think she is more or less angry than the Swedish teenager facing severe spinal damage because of what puberty blockers did to their skeleton, or that kid’s parents?”
I love the rare occasions when Jesse relaxes his grip a bit and releases some venom.
Thank you!!!
"But that doesn’t mean you have to accept what they say. In fact, if you do accept what they say in a mindless or parrotlike fashion, you’re no longer performing journalism. You should probably leave this field, in fact, and go work for one of the many rights organizations that could use the PR assistance. You’ll be better paid there, and ideally the slot you vacate will be filled by one of the perhaps tens of thousands of competent, principled journalists who have been laid off during our industry’s implosion."
About left-handedness--when I look at those charts, it seems to have gone up from 2% to 12% over a period of **40 years.**
Number of people presenting at GIDS: 51 in 2009 and 1766 in 2016. A factor of 34 in **seven** years.
(from https://cass.independent-review.uk/entry-5-evidence-epidemiology-october-2021/ )
It went up much faster and by much more than lefthandedness.
If you put the proportional increase in lefthandedness on the same plot you'd barely see it, it would be at the bottom..
There’s also not an army of “experts” constantly hammering kids with the message “Are you depressed? Do you hate something about yourself? It might be because you are actually left handed!”
To be fair to the lefthanded-ness argument. If lefthanded-ness were significantly MORE suppressed earlier(the way being trans was), it would also have shown a larger spike. The fact that this spike is larger doesn't mean it can't work as an example.
I take the lefthanded-ness argument as "here is an example of a plausible reason why you would see a spike that was _not_ the result of social contagion".
Taking it as "this _proves_ it is not the result of social contagion" is obviously taking it too far - but saying "this spike is bigger than lefthandedness so it can't be that" isn't definitely true _either_.
The comparison with left-handedness would be inane even if the curves were similar. After all, affirming left-handedness requires doing nothing, whereas affirming gender requires a lifetime of serious hormonal and surgical interventions. Not hard to see why one is making parents (and outsiders) more worried.
I'm currently reading Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children, by Hannah Barnes. I warmly recommend it to anyone interested in the youth gender medicine debate.
I found the chapter on puberty blockers, one of the earliest parts of the books, to be absolutely stunning.
Thanks, Jesse. What a lot of work. So frustrating that you have to do this over and over again.
I remember seeing a longer version of the left handedness chart and it went back three hundred years or do and saw a steady state, then a big dip starting around the Industrial Revolution and eventually coming back up.
That's what I remember seeing as the rebuttal to Oliver et al. The chart is selectively excerpted to show the part that fits the narrative.
Where can I find that chart and is it true?
Figure 3.2 in http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/CandHchapter06/HistoryGeographyHumanHandedness.pdf I guess.
Thanks you so much! Very interesting paper as well.
Yes I think it dipped during the industrial revolution's start?
These folks style themselves as the proud adversaries of transphobes, but they see their true enemy as anyone who introduces nuance into the discussion. This is because they're not in competition with actual transphobes, as almost no one in that rightwing audience is persuadable, nor are trans allies going to be led astray by the bile.
But there are many fair-minded people on the left who are intrigued by compelling, nuanced arguments and would come to realize how unreasonable the ideology of the hardliners is if the well weren't poisoned. Obviously the activists can't scare them away from listening by explicitly saying, "Don't listen to nuanced points of view!" So instead they just cry transphobia and a lot of good-hearted people think, "Oh, Jesse Singal is a transphobe? Yikes, I don't want any part of that."
This tactic is, of course, is not at all unique to this particular issue. Where would Scientology (or any other successful cult) be if, instead of vilifying their critics, they said to their dupes: "By all means, listen to the counter-arguments and we're sure you'll come back to us more faithful than ever."
I can only imagine how exhausting it is to do this painstaking work over and over. So important! I am grateful.
Fantastic work. I also used to love OTM. Man, they are terrible now.
I happened across that interview on the radio by accident (my hobby is timing how long it'll take in an NPR story to bring up race--relevant or not)--and found myself as frustrated as you.
What's of central interest to me now is how the trans-activist movement (or whomever) has so effectively silenced any questioning or debate on this entire topic. Why is this topic given a pass, every. single. time?
What in our institutions happened at a fundamental level with this topic that extinguished all curiosity, and silenced all inquiry? Why elevate "gender identity"--this subjective, internal "sense"--to such dizzying heights and paramount importance (over all that we can see, touch, experience externally)?
And the "or whomever" parenthetical addition here is also of supreme interest--where did this come from (Judith Butler, etc., I guess), but who were the seminal (pun not intended) people in politics, medicine, legislation, social influence that proliferated this so thoroughly unquestioningly and then made it absolute dogma?
There's an amazing book in those topics, somewhere.
Some people say, "Follow the money." Jennifer Bilek is one who has.
https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
If you want answers to these questions, you need to look at the research Jennifer Bilek has done about the ultra wealthy men who have built their life purpose around their autogynophilia and are pouring money into the trans cause. These include John Stryker, Martine Rothblatt, and Jennifer Pritzker, "sister" of Illinois Governor Pritzker. There is some extremely big money behind this. Bilek's research is indispensable.
Some is described in Joyce's excellent book trans.
Sadly, I read that book, and didn't find it to be as excellent as I'd hoped it would be--but it's a start!
How about Kathleen Stock's Material Girls?
Have you seen the Denton's Document? Look it up
Anyone have the link to the original--possibly back from 2016 or prior? All links I find are to a more recent 2021 (apparently) one, and the other links are dead.
What remains strange and ominous is the way lesbians and gays have allowed themselves to be exploited and (one assumes) shame-silenced into a facsimile of unwavering support for radical trans activism. We know it's not so, and that the portrayal of LGBTQetc. as a lock-step, homogenous community is a fraud. Lesbians and gays need to find their voice and speak out on this. Some have, but not nearly enough. Like others, they've been cowed into silence.