Mick Hartley

Wesley Yang spells it out:

Transgenderism is an ongoing project of attempting to normalize a bizarre subculture built around esoteric pseudo-medical practices from the outermost fringe of human extremity and make it compulsory for every American to join that subculture and to make that subculture the mainstream culture of the Western world. One requires only the most cursory understanding of the pioneering figures responsible for the mainstreaming of transgenderism — who they were and what their motives were — to understand this as a matter of certainty.

It is as if ascetics who scourge themselves with whips in public or amputee fetishists began teaching their beliefs to young schoolchildren and recruiting them to join their ranks. One is forced into the strange position of referencing practices that are not more bizarre than transgenderism — that are indeed arguably less bizarre — to make an analogy in an attempt to restore some semblance of sanity and proportionality to our thinking about this. The normalization has already gone far enough that the whole culture suffers from vertigo where it is unable to orient itself in space or time.

Giving the same off-label cancer drugs that are used to chemically castrate adult sex offenders to pubescent children who have been brainwashed to fear the decisive stage of mental, physical, and emotional maturation that resolves gender dysphoria in children in most cases is self-evidently an act of madness and medicalized child abuse unmatched by anything in the history of modern medicine. It took the self-lobotomization of the American professional and managerial classes for our truth-seeking apparatus not to see this fact that is self-evident to any normal person with normal human instincts.

This self-lobotomization occurred across mainstream institutions of all kinds — all it required was the incantation of a few odious euphemisms, the manipulation of rewards and punishments, and confident claims by various authorities that self-evidently ludicrous claims were in fact settled science.

Now we are in phase one of recognizing that there was never any science to any of it.

It was all a lie told by cultists who managed to infiltrate and corrupt society’s knowledge-generating, certifying, and enforcement apparatus — it was the most outrageous of all such possible lies, so outrageous that nobody could believe that anyone would attempt it, much less succeed, unless there was some actual substance behind it, some real grounds for epistemic and moral confidence. There was none.

This was prompted by Jesse Singal’s piece in the NYT yesterday on the breaking of the gender medicine consensus in the US. Yang adds this:

Singal is still constrained to persist in the conceit that there are good faith actors who might undertake good faith research into “trans youth.” But he’s doing so largely as a rhetorical concession to make his message palatable to good liberals still unable to grasp the enormity of the con to which they’ve been party.

And, in response to someone who argues that there are trans people “whose psychology does not align with their biological sex”:

No there aren’t. There are people who profess in all sincerity to being happier while mimicking the other sex than before, but nothing about such claims, even if true, establishes, or ever could establish, that there are “real trans people.”

The term is nothing more than reification into a quasi-medical framing of the normal variation in tastes and interest.

Because gender identity is not a thing. Some people may feel more feminine, or more masculine, than gender stereotypes – many will be gay – but that doesn’t mean they’re “trans”, and need medical intervention.