If you are new around here (and I hope you stick around!), you probably want to know that one of the horses I am currently beating to death is the issue of “gender.” You can find links to much of what I’ve written here. I do need to update it, though.
My writing in this space has always been about articulating angles and approaches that I’m not seeing voiced in many other places, especially in the Catholic world. So with this issue. There is certainly discussion about this matter, but what I try to bring to the discussion here are the insights from outside the Catholic world that others – even those who are working on the issue in Catholic Land – are reluctant to bring to bear, for whatever reason: for to discuss this openly involves being honest about difficult and not-family-friendly topics like sexual fetishes, being forthright about unpleasant, even grotesque medical procedures and their outcomes, as well as the important role secular radical feminists (as opposed to captured mainstream liberal feminists) and lesbian-rights activists are playing in fighting the Trans Agenda, or to even acknowledge the enormous role that misogyny plays in the trans-rights movement.
Catholic discussions are, for the most part, also still bending over backwards to try to deal with this by affirming the existence of “trans” as an actual thing. It’s not. There is no way that a “reality” which includes young women noping out of womanhood and heterosexual men in wigs and stripper clothes demanding access to women’s private spaces is an actual cohesive identity.
So a few links for today:
Kara Dansky on this matter. Dansky is a liberal Democrat who has been on the forefront of this issue in this country, especially related to sports. This short column is a decent primer.
The crux of the matter is this: People across the political spectrum have been persuaded to accept that there is a coherent category of people for whom sex is irrelevant and that this category of people is called “transgender” (or simply “trans”). Democrats on the whole support “rights for ‘transgender people,’” and Republicans on the whole oppose allowing sex-confused people to hijack sex-specific spaces. But regardless of whether or not a person supports or opposes “rights for ‘transgender people,’” that person probably believes that there is such a category of people.
But there isn’t. “Trans” is a lie. It is a lie as big as the lie that the emperor is wearing clothes. He isn’t wearing clothes. He’s naked. He’s just too arrogant to acknowledge it, and everyone around him is too cowed to say so….
….But that is exactly the goal of gender ideology: to take over our institutions and destroy from within any truth that grounds us to material reality, including biological sex. The entire edifice of “trans” is being driven by a vicious industry whose aim is to literally obliterate the reality of sex. This industry is a loose conglomeration of Big Tech, Big Pharma, medical supply companies, legacy media, and government agencies. I realize this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t. This industry operates out in the open, from renowned children’s hospitals to legacy newsrooms to the White House itself.
Related to Danksy’s last paragraph are a couple of items of which you might be aware, if you follow these things.
WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Last week, it issued revised guidelines for “gender-affirming” healthcare. The basic purpose was to: lower permissible ages for treatments, drive wedges between parents and children, and to be blunt, reduce liability for medical practitioners
- Removal of minimum ages for irreversible medicalisation – The standard does not place any weight on nuanced concern for the welfare and wellbeing of vulnerable children. It does not consider that gender dysphoria is a mental-health symptom and many young people have co-morbidities such as autism and mental-health diagnoses. The guidelines have removed any minimum age limit for a child to be given puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or sex-reassignment surgery (so long as that child has reached ‘Tanner Stage 2’ of puberty, which can be as young as nine years old). Interestingly, minimum ages had been included in the originally published document before these were quickly removed via a ‘correction’ online. The guidelines state that double mastectomies, euphemistically called ‘chest masculinization surgery’, “can be considered in minors”. Equally, ‘vaginoplasty’ may be considered for under 18-year-olds. The guidelines make it clear that there should be no requirement for a child to have taken cross-sex hormones prior to surgery, “if not desired” by a child – emphasising the consumeristic nature of these guidelines. Hormone treatment is recommended even though it can cause infertility
- Chest binding and genital tucking for children – Healthcare professionals are instructed to provide education to children on both ‘chest binding’ and ‘genital tucking’, on the basis that this will provide “comfort” and “lower rates of misgendering”. Chest binding can cause pain, infection and even fractures and the tucking can cause decreased sperm concentration.
- Alienation of parents – Healthcare professionals are advised to “challenge” parents who are unsupportive of their child medically transitioning. Equally, they are recommended to prescribe hormone treatment for children without parental involvement, if such involvement would be “harmful or unnecessary”.
- Focus on irreversible surgery – The guidelines provides a ‘shopping list’ of recommended surgery for children and adults with ‘trans’ identities. These include, but are not limited to:
- Body contouring
- Voice surgery
- Hair transplant
- Jaw augmentation
- Liposuction
- Brow lift
- Lip shortening
- Calf implant
- Mastectomy
- Hysterectomy
- Vaginoplasty
- Phalloplasty
- Abandonment of mental-health safeguarding – The guidelines explicitly state that therapy or counselling should “never be mandatory” before prescribing irreversible medication or surgery, including for children. Therapeutic professionals are told that they must not impose their own narratives or preconceptions, yet are also told that they must be “gender affirming”. These principles are fundamentally incompatible.
- Disregarding of mental ill-health – Clinicians are advised that not all mental illness “can or should be resolved” prior to prescribing irreversible medication or surgery. The standard recommends that hormone treatment should not be withheld simply because a child has a ‘neurodevelopment condition’.
- Eunuchs – A completely new chapter is dedicated to ‘Eunuchs’ who are defined as individuals who are “assigned male at birth and wish to eliminate masculine physical features or genitals”. The guidelines appear to support individuals who seek “castration” and they are now deemed to fall under the “gender diverse umbrella”. From an ethical and therapeutic standpoint, this is deeply concerning.
On this last point, from one of the many Twitter accounts worth following on this:
We really need to understand this – a hyperfocus on children’s sexuality, an assumption that they should be even thinking about it, does, indeed, collapse the boundaries between children and adults.
Also: someday, perhaps, a mass-rising will take place among mental health practitioners who will point out that to say one can only be one’s true self via taking one’s healthy body and subjecting it to surgery, hormonal tricks and life-long medical care ….does not make sense. Maybe.
Of course, you probably know about Matt Walsh’s expose of what’s going on at Vanderbilt. The governor has called for an investigation.
As he summarizes it:
So, let’s review. Vanderbilt got into the gender transition game admittedly in large part because it is very financially profitable. They then threatened any staff members who objected, and enlisted a gang of trans activists to act as surveillance in order to force compliance.
9/26 Update: Here’s a firefwall-free link to a NYTimes article today focusing on “top surgery” – aka double mastectomies – and the question of minors. Not completely balanced, but not completely silent about criticisms, either,
Circling back to some points of which you should be aware, if you are not already.
The goal of this movement is not, despite these horrors, to just codify the medically-transitioned as a new category called “trans.”
It is, self-identification. That is, the conviction that your declaration of your sex (or gender or whatever – it’s confusing) is totally, and absolutely dependent on nothing but your own desires. You say you are a gal and should be allowed in this changing room? Encoding self-identification into law and policy makes that not only possible, but inevitable. With no defense possible, at all.
You can select the gender marker you would like printed on your U.S. passport. The gender you select does not need to match the gender on your supporting documentation such as a birth certificate, previous passport, or state ID. We no longer require medical documentation to change the gender marker on your U.S. passport.
At this time, you can select male (M), female (F), or unspecified or another gender identity (X) as your gender marker if you are applying for a U.S. passport book and selecting routine service. You can apply in-person at a passport acceptance facility or renew by mail.
That’s the goal, right there. So that women and girls will have no defense against males in their spaces, whether that be restroom, locker room, shelter or prison.
And on a less serious – but still serious note – so that idiots (or genius trolls – I used to assume he was doing an Ali G, but gender – but I don’t think so…) like this guy can be invited to speak at the “Forbes Power Women’s Summit.”
Mulvaney’s Instagram. He has almost 8 million followers on TikTok.