“Gender Critical” transphobes like to associate their trans enemies with terrible things. They call trans folks and their allies “Men’s Rights Activists” — because, you see, trans women are really men, so if you support trans people you’re fighting for men’s rights. (I guess trans men, whom transphobes think are women, don’t count.)
Meanwhile, along with their far-right allies, the Gender Crits attack trans folks, drag queens, and assorted kinksters as “groomers” for basically existing in the presence of children.
Now some Gender Crits have decided to add “conversion therapy” to the list of Bad Things to Saddle Trans People With, suggesting that “transgenderism” is akin to the pseudo-psychiatric torture once commonly used to try to “cure” gay men and lesbians of their sexual orientations.
What’s the logic here? It’s a bit flimsy, but apparently to the Gender Crits, “transgenderism” consists mainly of trans lesbians trying to convince cis lesbians to suck their dicks (literally).
In the TumblrInAction subreddit, which has become Reddit’s main transphobe hangout since the banning of the Gender Critical subreddit, someone called MastermindX writes:
Sounds a bit like trans people trying to convince lesbians to suck their cock, except instead of soft spoken [like regular conversion therapists] they are screeching at you, calling you horrible names, and threatening to kill you.
A regular commenter called Comfortable_Mango_11 explains, further or, rather, fails to explain.
Incredibly, having just about come to our senses and decided to let gay people live their lives without being persecuted or penalised in any way, society has allowed perhaps the grimmest form of conversion therapy not just to flourish but to become mainstream and encouraged by most of our institutions.
And how exactly is this alleged grim new conversion theory like traditional conversion therapy?
Like a new religion, transgenderism promises to replace confusion with certainty, misery with happiness, and sexual alienation with sexual success. It fails in all these things.
None of that explains anything. Or really means much of anything. It’s a prime example of what Orwell criticized about political language, a passage designed “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Its methods are far more brutal than the shock therapy pioneered, and dismissed, in the 20th century, for it requires its followers to butcher their owI’m a teacher too,n bodies – to submit themselves to the surgeon’s scalpel, turning healthy organs into non-functioning ones, to erase entire erogenous zones, to make what is fertile infertile. Even sexual pleasure is annihilated.
Sounds to me like you’re saying that the trans conversion therapists are converting … themselves?
The point of all this is to turn men into women, or women into men – though it is obvious to everyone that this transformation has never once been successful in anything other than a pantomime, silicone tits kind of way.
No logic or evidence here, just name calling.
To encourage young people to hate their bodies and to try to be something they can never be is surely the cruellest thing anyone could do – yet those who say so are told to “check your thinking”.
So is this the “conversion therapy” you’re talking about? The “transgenders” are trying to make everyone trans? I’m pretty sure that’s not actually a thing.
Instead of all this nonsense, young people should keep the bodies they’ve got, find someone who loves them for who they are, and have faith that nature is not so daft as to go around dumping female brains into male bodies or vice versa. That simply doesn’t happen.
Saying something doesn’t make it so; Mother Nature does “daft” things all the time.
Elsewhere in the discussion a couple of teachers report that “transgenderism” has converted many of their students into baby transes.
“I’m a teacher.,” Enough-Emu3430 writes.
As it stands in my classes, straight kids are getting bullied for not being queer and the gay and lesbian kids are as closeted as ever despite how inclusive everyone is supposed to be. Meanwhile the alphabet soup kids use their newfound identities to manipulate the adults around them and have a lot of fun doing it.
Yeah, I don’t actually believe you.
Another teacher tells a similar tale.
“I’m a teacher too,” Altruistic-Fill-8111 adds,
and occasionally someone on the teacher subreddit will post that they’re frustrated with kids changing names and pronouns daily (yes, daily) and how it’s getting ridiculous. So many of the other teachers will comment about how th teacher is a horrible person for assuming that the kids are doing it for attention and how “they’re just exploring their identity and trying on new names is part of that” – like, no. So glad I teach elementary school. Although we now have a non binary child in first grade who has changed her name.
Please, please try not to make their life miserable in your class. And try not to call them “she” to their face.
I don’t know what makes her non binary, other than her parents telling her she is.
Yeah, that’s not quite how that works.
Sigh. It’s all getting so ridiculous.
It’s ridiculous in the TumblrInAction subreddit every day.
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What’s with their obsession with trans lesbians?
Well, I know they can’t focus on straight trans women because they might reveal also how homophobic their rethoric is(the “gay men are a gentle breeze away from being transed because trans women and gay men are basically the same” rethoric), but why not being more vehemently against the rape cis men get away with without even crossdressing?
“Encouraging young people to hate their bodies” is a framing that makes me so angry. When I was 11, I didn’t know transgender was a thing, but that didn’t stop me wanting to be a boy and trying to scientifically work out if there was some way I could not go through all the body changes they told us about. Because amazingly enough, it comes from inside us, it’s not imposed from outside.
@Nicholas Kiddle you’re absolutely right. Plus if they really wanted to stop children learning to hate their bodies, they’d be attacking unrealistic beauty standards rather than trans people – working on the social problem rather than going after individuals.
What I hate is how easily watered-down versions of this rhetoric slip into the mainstream. Your average suburban mom might not think that trans people are p*dos or that the existence of trans people is some sort of plot, but that didn’t stop my mom from asking me if someone was trying to make me be trans.
Not sure if this has already been mentioned, but apparently Peterson and Farrell have teamed up to make a video about mass shootings.
I do NOT have the spoons for that, so I’m passing it off to David or anyone else who can stand almost two hours of garbage.
From the point of view of “nature”, simplistically interpreted as typical human reproductive norms, “dumping female brains into male bodies or vice versa” isn’t any more “daft” than “dumping” same-sex attraction into anybody’s brain. If “fertility” is the (arbitrary) criterion for “naturalness”, then same-sex sexual activity doesn’t make the cut.
It never ceases to amaze me how blithely many transphobic lesbians and other gay-rights supporters weaponize “unnaturalness” rhetoric targeting transgender and nonbinary people. Don’t y’all remember like five seconds ago when mainstream culture was constantly calling YOU “unnatural” for not wanting straight sex??
Nature made human heads that are too big for human pelvises go through human pelvises.
Dogs are literally more suited for reproduction than humans(not that they also don’t have complications).
If intelligent design was true, the designer was drunk to the brink of alcohol-induced coma while making humans specifically.
@Kimstu: Not to mention that that attitude implies a view of nature that is… romanticized at the very least. I mean, by that logic nature would inherently tend towards eugenics or something (which these types might even endorse under a different brandname).
what’s the difference between a female and male brain?
this isn’t a setup for a punchline, i literally have no clue what this means pls advs
@Ada Christine
It hasn’t been proven either way(which is why it’s super shady to use any criteria of the sort to declare anyone as trans).
i was hoping for a tongue-in-cheek reply along the lines of female brains having ovaries and a uterus 😂
@Kimstu
The heterosexists never see to go apeshit over the fact that so women like to give blowjobs. I wonder why that is?
I bet some of these… I hesitate to call them people… are infertile and therefore not “real” “natural” cis-straights.
It would come as a great shock to all the trans men and women I know that they no longer have a sex drive, and that they’ve “butchered” their groinal bits. I haven’t asked, because it’s none of my business, but I’m pretty sure none of them I know have bothered with bottom surgery and yet they have sexual relationships and marriages (and divorce, but a lower percentage than the cis people I know).
@Ada Christine: Wouldn’t that make male brains dickheads?
@Ada Christine,
The best hypothesis we have on this indicates neurological hard wiring that we don’t understand. Basically having to do with the brains map of the body and what hormone balance works best. Which is why HRT not only does a ton to treat dysphoria, but also related chronic depression and anxiety. It has also been shown to improve cognitive function.
As to the “ruined sex life” myth… It’s a myth. Most trans people have vastly improved sex lives post translation. As usual the transphobes are full of BS and it would’ve been nice for David to point that out. Bottom surgery resulting in loss of sensitivity, or pain, is an uncommon result. Usually due to complications from surgery. Although trans people who experience it tend to be more satisfied with the results, than had they not done it. Transition treatments have among the lowest regret rates among any medical procedures. Which includes literal life saving ones. Such as heart surgery and cancer treatments.
This seems to be a good example of the kind of nonsense which results when you try to combine the two main schools of thought in the gendercrit movement. If you look carefully, you can see the influence of both of them here.
One is that we should demolish gender roles and gender aesthetics and just “let people be people”. However, we should still retain designations and keep the sexes separate for certain purposes because, I’unno, reasons. (If forced to give a reason, they typically go with some form of naturalistic fallacy.) And in order to keep the sexes completely separate, that means no sex-related physical alterations can be allowed. (Which raises a whole host of issues I’ve never seen them meaningfully address if at all, but then again, I don’t spend much time in those spaces.)
The other is that anything biologically associated with masculinity (penises, XY chromosomes, high testosterone primarily) is a corruption which turns people into monsters, and that corruption is permanent and cannot be purged by physical alteration. So they must gatekeep “true womanhood” and keep anything resembling (their idea of) femininity out of the hands of the corrupted so they can easily identify and protect each other. Those who qualify as “true women” but refuse to join must be coerced into it, when possible, for their own good. Those who don’t qualify as “true women” but are seen as being abused or preyed on by men are told to get their own groups, but (presumably, I’m speculating here) they are not allowed to use any language, practices, or aesthetics which implies any link to “true womanhood”.
Putting aside that both of them are different flavors of wrong, you can’t both enforce gender and abolish it. You have to either pick one, or come up with a new school of thought which accounts for the essentials of both. (Or better yet, just abandon the whole gendercrit ideology.) However, this does not stop them from trying to explain the motivations and actions of their ideological opponents in the context of both schools simultaneously, which is why the result is often “barely coherent mess wildly divorced from reality” instead of “understandable, if wrongheaded, mistake”.
This leads to paradoxes like “you can’t be trans, but you can be GNC (Gender non-conforming) as long as you identify as your physical/birth sex, also no you can’t in any meaningful sense because that’s indistinguishable from colonizing femininity.”
Meanwhile, Nature™ has somehow never bothered to consult the TERFs. Here’s a beautiful example of what Nature™ just stands by and allows organisms to get away with (and of the value of a kid sharing his independent amateur science project, undertaken out of curiosity and love of bugs).
Presenting the story of then sixteen-year-old oddity-txt on Tumblr, and Chicken Nugget the Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillar:
https://spooky-scary-skeletrans.tumblr.com/post/612035772823060480/so-i-found-this-caterpillar-on-my-way-to-class
@GSS
maybe a head-dick?
@Natsume
ah yeah i forgot about the mental mapping part which is funny because i think it applies to me. at least, i feel less horrible about my body since deleting my testosterone facilities
Let’s not forget the frogs mentioned in Jurassic Park that can spontaneously change sex.
@FMOx: I love that story.
@Snowberry
Thank you. This explains things I couldn’t wrap my brain around because they were totally contradictory.
Their unscientific thinking is scary to me, because I think they’re not far from taking a position against intersex people. “Natural” is always ideologically defined to justify eugenics and coercion. If they define women exclusive of genetic and hormonal variations, that’s a lot of people outside of their charmed circle, many more than they seem to realize. They keep claiming intersex is rare, so they can other us without doing too much harm. None of that is true, and it shows contempt for human rights.
it’s not natural (in my opinion) for billionaires to exist, but the world seems to bend over backwards for them.
I, a trans person, perhaps equally unnatural, am not asking the world to accommodate my every fleeting whim. i just want some basic human decency. is that a big ask?
for the most part, I’m privileged enough to live in a time and place where that isn’t a problem in my everyday life. but the things i read and hear make me very anxious that what personal security in my rights that i do have is at tremendous risk. and I’m anxious and often fearful for trans people everywhere that isn’t as safe and secure as my quiet corner of the world.
It is natural that my kidneys stopped working, and unnatural that I repeatedly had my body mutilated with surgery, drugs, and machines in an effort to replicate them.
Just last month, I had my hip sawn off and replaced with unnatural metal just because I hated part of my body – specifically the dying femur that caused literally crippling pain.
It’s certainly not natural to be sitting on a chair inside a house while typing on a computer keyboard, but every internet transphobe yelling ‘unnatural!’ is doing exactly that. Probably while wearing (very unnatural) clothing.