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A review by lpm100
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce
dark
funny
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
5+/5 stars
"Thoughtful, philosophical and articulate characterization of a peculiar Western Psychic Epidemic."
*******
Of the book:
-13 chapters plus introduction and conclusion
-301 pages of prose, about 20/chapter
-114 references (0.3/page= thinly sourced)
-NO INDEX nor glossary.
I was listening to YouTube presentations as I was driving at work one day, and the author of this book came up interviewing with Richard Dawkins. (Of course, I tired of Dawkins long ago, but his gender realist stance on the Transgender Hysteria made me take the time to listen to the interview with Helen Joyce.)
Her striking observation was that: you could never predict the form that a platypus would take, but you could explain its existence by evolutionary reverse engineering.
By extension, she says that the Transgender Hysteria is but one of MANY possible banalities that could have materialized in a decaying Western society.
It's just that *this* one did.
And all of the details are just stamp collecting.
I've already read three other books about this topic, and so there is some overlap.
1. "Irreversible Damage," Abigail Shrier. (This hysteria is mostly in the group most vulnerable to hysterias- young women with mental problems).
2. "Lost in Transnation," Miriam Grossman. (Institutional corruption by transgender zealots, with a focus on medical corruption.)
3. "When Harry Became Sally," Ryan Anderson (similar philosophical observations, but more US-centric).
What this book brings new to the table is:
1. A less US centric perspective (yes, I'm aware that Americans tend to forget that there is an entire world outside the borders of the United States);
2. Quantification of psychic epidemics. To give just one example: Multiple Personality Disorder showed up 76 times in the previous two centuries, but after "Three Faces of Eve," 40,000 people were diagnosed between 1985 and 1995. Let's not also forget about the "satanic panic."
3. Multiple personality and gender dysphoria have parallels that a small number of therapists to count for a large share of diagnosis, and the malaise is extremely nebulous and poorly defined - - but makes the patient feel special.
4. A lot of good philosophical discussion (with doses of that characteristic dry English sense of humor--"Acompanying teaching materials often seem about to make an excellent point, only to miss it spectacularly").
a. The paradox that gender is socially constructed, but it needs to exist in reality for people to diagnose themselves with this disease?
b. And the fact that gender categories also need to be rigid in order to give troubled people something to move away from, but then they are fluid in every other case?
c. People that are feminists and want to protect women's rights find themselves in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis other left wing radicals who are all for 6'4 men with a deep voice (that can arbitrarily be called "Lia Thomas") and male parts changing in the locker room with actual women that have authentic ladybits.
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. Trans foolishness is but a symptom of civilizatioal decay. I'm currently working on a book that explores just that theme.
2. The ACLU is a wicked organization. Any time somebody is pushing some strange/perverse/destructive agenda, they are right in the thick of it. (Maybe when they get tired of this transgender thing, their next client will likely be NAMBLA.)
3. Fabulous White People (and let's be clear that that is whose crusade this is) just absolutely sickeningly insist on equating the Civil Rights movement with this mishegoss. Did they ever see black people as equal citizens, or were they just looking for some unpleasant finger to poke in the eye of Other White People?
4. When mass movements go on for too long, they sow the seeds of their own destruction: through some strange intellectual prestidigitation, the definition of women was expanded to anybody who says that he might be one. And just like *that* normative feminists became "trans exclusionary radical feminists."
5. For people like Richard Dawkins (Sam Harris, etc): the chickens have come home to roost--he has done his part to create the world in which the British Humanist Association withdraws his own award for expressing transgender heresy. Dawkins and others like him did as much as possible to destroy traditional religious morality, but "When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point" (Hoffer). And so religious zealots that might otherwise have been fine torturing themselves fasting for Lent or Ramadan have now taken up this topic.
*******
Chapter Synopses
1. A brief history of transsexuality, and the first gender reassignment surgery was in 1922 in Germany on a Danish man. It also happens that sexual dimorphism is a 1.2 billion year evolutionary project, so there's that.
2. Autogynephilia as a competing diagnosis that is also mistaken for gender dysphoria. Change of gender dysphoria from a medical disorder into a political identity. A vicious smear campaign against the sexologist Michael Bailey for even daring to do research into auto-gynephilia.
3. The famous movie "The Matrix" was actually a metaphor for "gender transition" and it was written by two siblings that both transitioned to women after its release.
4. Evidence of all types is extremely wek, shaky, and scarce. Actual outcomes about suicide? Mental comorbidities with dysphoria? Long-term mental Health outcomes? Long-term effects of hormone treatment?
5. James Barry/Margaret Bulkley. Significant prevalence of confounding mental issues with these types, particularly autism. Teenage girls were not part of this trend until yesterday. (Point discussed at more length by Abigail Shrier in her book "Irreversible Damage.")
6. The issue is working its way through the courts with strange results. Famous case of James Younger where an embittered, mentally ill ex-wife wants to try to turn the son into a girl out of spite. Several reports of Child Protective Services being called when parents refuse to "affirm" an identity as well as many cases where children transition is enabled by school administration, who then hides it from the parents. It is VERY EASY for pedophiles to co-opt these movements, as a lot of them did during the gay rights movement. (Lots of interesting cases here with references.)
7. (p.136): "The central doctrine of gender identity ideology - - that your gender is what you say it is - - necessarily precludes any objective delineation. Try 'a squawm is anyone who identifies as a squawm,' or 'every lazap is a lazap.' Now, can you say what a squawm or a lazap is?" All manner of bizarre verbal contortion: people who menstruate / pregnant people / birthing parents / chest feeding / human milk feeding families / black birthing bodies.
8. The Strange Case of Jonathan Yaniv. Female only spaces (prisons, bathrooms) DO matter for women. Only a complete idiot would not understand why letting any guy self-defined as a woman to enter female spaces is not the best choice. So, of course that is the position of much of the US government, acting in concert with the ACLU. So, the question of female only spaces is answered with "we just need to pee."
9. Statistics on the differences in athletic performance between male and female bodies common explanation of how a man who cannot even make the top 400 competing against men can become number one when competing as a woman against women.
10. Bathroom gender wars. It's not enough to create single sex bathrooms for trans people. It's not enough to put them behind a curtain if they have to be in the locker room of their desired sex. It is important to make 99% of other women uncomfortable by having men in their locker rooms. It's very easy to change rules by ukase in the context of American regulatory agencies. Sex can become gender by doing an end run around Congress.
11. The trans movement is different to other civil rights movements in that it seems to be focused on regulatory agencies and levers of power, and is NOT not a grassroots movement. Lots of bored (Jewish) billionaires finance this. James Pritzker. John Stryker, with his Arcus foundation. And then also George Soros, the proud Jewish Nazi collaborator. Cost: puberty blockers, $20,000. Top surgery, $10,000. Vaginoplasty, $30,000. Metoidoplasty, $20,000. Phalloplasty, $150,000.
12. "Free speech is incompatible with privileging discourse over material reality. Feminist and gay rights groups..... end up promoting policies that harm women and gay people. Children's charities tear up safeguarding procedures. Scientific societies repeat cultish mantras. Anti-sensorship campaigners whip up witch hunts."
13. Transgender hysteria of today is the Scopes monkey trial of 1925. Documentation of several British reversals of the psychic epidemic. Severing of the "T" from LGBT.
Conclusion. Transgender movement today is not the same thing as the gay rights movement of several decades ago, and the author is hopeful that this hysteria will wear itself out.
*******
Verdict: Strongly recommended.
*******
Vocabulary:
doyenne
deed poll
androphilic
social justice≈applied postmodernism
Gish gallop
reify
Judith Butler
Nemo's Law
Godwin's Law
totted up
psychic epidemic
reflex ailment
reflex theorist
"vicarious nasal menstruation" (WTF?)
tyro
begging the question (p.154)
policy capture /institutional capture
bepenised
nosey-parker
Cheka
*******
Quotes:
(p.5) "Whether or not transition makes people happier is an important questions for individuals and clinicians, especially when it involves irreversible hormonal or surgical interventions. But it is irrelevant to evaluating the truth of gender identity ideology, and to whether self-declared gender should replace sex across society. To draw another analogy, whether a religion makes its believers happy is irrelevant to the question of whether its God exists, or whether everyone else should be compelled to pay it lip service."
(p.69): "Over the years, bewildering variety of binaries have been deconstructed. Theorists have claimed that speech is a form of writing, presence of form of absence and sanity a form of neurosis. Nowadays the technique is mainly applied to sex and gender within "queer theory" -- a hard to define academic field that seeks to upendq conventional thinking about what is normative or deviant; innate or socially constructed; stable or mutating."
(p.99): "With enough time and rumination, anyone distressed can end up thinking that they're trans."
(p.143): "In its erasure of sex categories, gender identity ideology seeks to change not just the present, but the past, too. Any woman who..... succeeded in transcending societal strictures on her sex is not at the risk of being retroactively transitioned."
(p.157): "Of the 125 transgender prisoners known to be an English prisons in the late 2017, 60 were 'transwomen' who had committed sexual offenses, a share far higher than in the general male prison population, let alone in the female one."
(p.161): "Pearsall had told fellow inmates in a Men's prison that the point of identifying as trans was to do easier time."
(p.167): "Women are not human shields. You don't make trans women safer by making women less safe."
(p.169): "... Preoperative trans women attended the festival in defiance of the band and provoked confrontation, for example by using the communal open-air showers - - to put it bluntly, exposing their penises in a non-consensually in a lesbian centered space."
(p. 194): "... testosterone suppression has barely any impact on the sporting performance of people who have been through male puberty. Muscle mass and strength typically Fall by less than 5% after 1 year of suppression and very little more thereafter."
(p.219): "Polarization feeds on itself, as extremes on one side provide the cautionary tales used by extremes on the other to whip up fear and hatred. Moderates within each party stay silent, since the opposition seems a greater threat than their own hardliners."
(p.224): "[Gender self identification] is not a human right at all. It's a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accepts trans people's subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws."
(p.251): "As journalism became a graduate profession, new entrants brought the censoriousness of campus activism with them."
(p.256): "You do not have to be particularly cynical to think that the holder of a chair of transgender studies funded by a trans billionaire or campaign group is unlikely to produce research showing that gender self identification is harmful for women."
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
5+/5 stars
"Thoughtful, philosophical and articulate characterization of a peculiar Western Psychic Epidemic."
*******
Of the book:
-13 chapters plus introduction and conclusion
-301 pages of prose, about 20/chapter
-114 references (0.3/page= thinly sourced)
-NO INDEX nor glossary.
I was listening to YouTube presentations as I was driving at work one day, and the author of this book came up interviewing with Richard Dawkins. (Of course, I tired of Dawkins long ago, but his gender realist stance on the Transgender Hysteria made me take the time to listen to the interview with Helen Joyce.)
Her striking observation was that: you could never predict the form that a platypus would take, but you could explain its existence by evolutionary reverse engineering.
By extension, she says that the Transgender Hysteria is but one of MANY possible banalities that could have materialized in a decaying Western society.
It's just that *this* one did.
And all of the details are just stamp collecting.
I've already read three other books about this topic, and so there is some overlap.
1. "Irreversible Damage," Abigail Shrier. (This hysteria is mostly in the group most vulnerable to hysterias- young women with mental problems).
2. "Lost in Transnation," Miriam Grossman. (Institutional corruption by transgender zealots, with a focus on medical corruption.)
3. "When Harry Became Sally," Ryan Anderson (similar philosophical observations, but more US-centric).
What this book brings new to the table is:
1. A less US centric perspective (yes, I'm aware that Americans tend to forget that there is an entire world outside the borders of the United States);
2. Quantification of psychic epidemics. To give just one example: Multiple Personality Disorder showed up 76 times in the previous two centuries, but after "Three Faces of Eve," 40,000 people were diagnosed between 1985 and 1995. Let's not also forget about the "satanic panic."
3. Multiple personality and gender dysphoria have parallels that a small number of therapists to count for a large share of diagnosis, and the malaise is extremely nebulous and poorly defined - - but makes the patient feel special.
4. A lot of good philosophical discussion (with doses of that characteristic dry English sense of humor--"Acompanying teaching materials often seem about to make an excellent point, only to miss it spectacularly").
a. The paradox that gender is socially constructed, but it needs to exist in reality for people to diagnose themselves with this disease?
b. And the fact that gender categories also need to be rigid in order to give troubled people something to move away from, but then they are fluid in every other case?
c. People that are feminists and want to protect women's rights find themselves in an uncomfortable position vis-à-vis other left wing radicals who are all for 6'4 men with a deep voice (that can arbitrarily be called "Lia Thomas") and male parts changing in the locker room with actual women that have authentic ladybits.
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. Trans foolishness is but a symptom of civilizatioal decay. I'm currently working on a book that explores just that theme.
2. The ACLU is a wicked organization. Any time somebody is pushing some strange/perverse/destructive agenda, they are right in the thick of it. (Maybe when they get tired of this transgender thing, their next client will likely be NAMBLA.)
3. Fabulous White People (and let's be clear that that is whose crusade this is) just absolutely sickeningly insist on equating the Civil Rights movement with this mishegoss. Did they ever see black people as equal citizens, or were they just looking for some unpleasant finger to poke in the eye of Other White People?
4. When mass movements go on for too long, they sow the seeds of their own destruction: through some strange intellectual prestidigitation, the definition of women was expanded to anybody who says that he might be one. And just like *that* normative feminists became "trans exclusionary radical feminists."
5. For people like Richard Dawkins (Sam Harris, etc): the chickens have come home to roost--he has done his part to create the world in which the British Humanist Association withdraws his own award for expressing transgender heresy. Dawkins and others like him did as much as possible to destroy traditional religious morality, but "When we debunk a fanatical faith or prejudice, we do not strike at the root of fanaticism. We merely prevent its leaking out at a certain point, with the likely result that it will leak out at some other point" (Hoffer). And so religious zealots that might otherwise have been fine torturing themselves fasting for Lent or Ramadan have now taken up this topic.
*******
Chapter Synopses
1. A brief history of transsexuality, and the first gender reassignment surgery was in 1922 in Germany on a Danish man. It also happens that sexual dimorphism is a 1.2 billion year evolutionary project, so there's that.
2. Autogynephilia as a competing diagnosis that is also mistaken for gender dysphoria. Change of gender dysphoria from a medical disorder into a political identity. A vicious smear campaign against the sexologist Michael Bailey for even daring to do research into auto-gynephilia.
3. The famous movie "The Matrix" was actually a metaphor for "gender transition" and it was written by two siblings that both transitioned to women after its release.
4. Evidence of all types is extremely wek, shaky, and scarce. Actual outcomes about suicide? Mental comorbidities with dysphoria? Long-term mental Health outcomes? Long-term effects of hormone treatment?
5. James Barry/Margaret Bulkley. Significant prevalence of confounding mental issues with these types, particularly autism. Teenage girls were not part of this trend until yesterday. (Point discussed at more length by Abigail Shrier in her book "Irreversible Damage.")
6. The issue is working its way through the courts with strange results. Famous case of James Younger where an embittered, mentally ill ex-wife wants to try to turn the son into a girl out of spite. Several reports of Child Protective Services being called when parents refuse to "affirm" an identity as well as many cases where children transition is enabled by school administration, who then hides it from the parents. It is VERY EASY for pedophiles to co-opt these movements, as a lot of them did during the gay rights movement. (Lots of interesting cases here with references.)
7. (p.136): "The central doctrine of gender identity ideology - - that your gender is what you say it is - - necessarily precludes any objective delineation. Try 'a squawm is anyone who identifies as a squawm,' or 'every lazap is a lazap.' Now, can you say what a squawm or a lazap is?" All manner of bizarre verbal contortion: people who menstruate / pregnant people / birthing parents / chest feeding / human milk feeding families / black birthing bodies.
8. The Strange Case of Jonathan Yaniv. Female only spaces (prisons, bathrooms) DO matter for women. Only a complete idiot would not understand why letting any guy self-defined as a woman to enter female spaces is not the best choice. So, of course that is the position of much of the US government, acting in concert with the ACLU. So, the question of female only spaces is answered with "we just need to pee."
9. Statistics on the differences in athletic performance between male and female bodies common explanation of how a man who cannot even make the top 400 competing against men can become number one when competing as a woman against women.
10. Bathroom gender wars. It's not enough to create single sex bathrooms for trans people. It's not enough to put them behind a curtain if they have to be in the locker room of their desired sex. It is important to make 99% of other women uncomfortable by having men in their locker rooms. It's very easy to change rules by ukase in the context of American regulatory agencies. Sex can become gender by doing an end run around Congress.
11. The trans movement is different to other civil rights movements in that it seems to be focused on regulatory agencies and levers of power, and is NOT not a grassroots movement. Lots of bored (Jewish) billionaires finance this. James Pritzker. John Stryker, with his Arcus foundation. And then also George Soros, the proud Jewish Nazi collaborator. Cost: puberty blockers, $20,000. Top surgery, $10,000. Vaginoplasty, $30,000. Metoidoplasty, $20,000. Phalloplasty, $150,000.
12. "Free speech is incompatible with privileging discourse over material reality. Feminist and gay rights groups..... end up promoting policies that harm women and gay people. Children's charities tear up safeguarding procedures. Scientific societies repeat cultish mantras. Anti-sensorship campaigners whip up witch hunts."
13. Transgender hysteria of today is the Scopes monkey trial of 1925. Documentation of several British reversals of the psychic epidemic. Severing of the "T" from LGBT.
Conclusion. Transgender movement today is not the same thing as the gay rights movement of several decades ago, and the author is hopeful that this hysteria will wear itself out.
*******
Verdict: Strongly recommended.
*******
Vocabulary:
doyenne
deed poll
androphilic
social justice≈applied postmodernism
Gish gallop
reify
Judith Butler
Nemo's Law
Godwin's Law
totted up
psychic epidemic
reflex ailment
reflex theorist
"vicarious nasal menstruation" (WTF?)
tyro
begging the question (p.154)
policy capture /institutional capture
bepenised
nosey-parker
Cheka
*******
Quotes:
(p.5) "Whether or not transition makes people happier is an important questions for individuals and clinicians, especially when it involves irreversible hormonal or surgical interventions. But it is irrelevant to evaluating the truth of gender identity ideology, and to whether self-declared gender should replace sex across society. To draw another analogy, whether a religion makes its believers happy is irrelevant to the question of whether its God exists, or whether everyone else should be compelled to pay it lip service."
(p.69): "Over the years, bewildering variety of binaries have been deconstructed. Theorists have claimed that speech is a form of writing, presence of form of absence and sanity a form of neurosis. Nowadays the technique is mainly applied to sex and gender within "queer theory" -- a hard to define academic field that seeks to upendq conventional thinking about what is normative or deviant; innate or socially constructed; stable or mutating."
(p.99): "With enough time and rumination, anyone distressed can end up thinking that they're trans."
(p.143): "In its erasure of sex categories, gender identity ideology seeks to change not just the present, but the past, too. Any woman who..... succeeded in transcending societal strictures on her sex is not at the risk of being retroactively transitioned."
(p.157): "Of the 125 transgender prisoners known to be an English prisons in the late 2017, 60 were 'transwomen' who had committed sexual offenses, a share far higher than in the general male prison population, let alone in the female one."
(p.161): "Pearsall had told fellow inmates in a Men's prison that the point of identifying as trans was to do easier time."
(p.167): "Women are not human shields. You don't make trans women safer by making women less safe."
(p.169): "... Preoperative trans women attended the festival in defiance of the band and provoked confrontation, for example by using the communal open-air showers - - to put it bluntly, exposing their penises in a non-consensually in a lesbian centered space."
(p. 194): "... testosterone suppression has barely any impact on the sporting performance of people who have been through male puberty. Muscle mass and strength typically Fall by less than 5% after 1 year of suppression and very little more thereafter."
(p.219): "Polarization feeds on itself, as extremes on one side provide the cautionary tales used by extremes on the other to whip up fear and hatred. Moderates within each party stay silent, since the opposition seems a greater threat than their own hardliners."
(p.224): "[Gender self identification] is not a human right at all. It's a demand that everyone else lose their rights to single sex spaces, services and activities. And in its requirement that everyone else accepts trans people's subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws."
(p.251): "As journalism became a graduate profession, new entrants brought the censoriousness of campus activism with them."
(p.256): "You do not have to be particularly cynical to think that the holder of a chair of transgender studies funded by a trans billionaire or campaign group is unlikely to produce research showing that gender self identification is harmful for women."