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The Authoritative Book on the Trans Movement
Last year over at The Federalist I wrote an essay about how the militancy of the transgender movement made me reconsider my support for gay marriage movement. I still support the right to marry — I’m a fan of marriage and think everyone should do it — but it became clear that the gay marriage movement wasn’t just about gaining the right to marry; it was about forcing total compliance.
How does one respond to the transgender movement? In his new book on the phenomenon, When Harry Became Sally, Ryan T. Anderson writes, “The transgender movement has hit breakneck speed. In the space of a year it’s gone from something that most Americans had never heard of to a cause claiming the mantle of civil rights.” He goes on to explain, “A discordant gender identity is said to represent who the person really is, by contrast with the sex ‘assigned at birth,’ and therefore any failure to accept and support a transgender identity amounts to bigotry. We are told that not treating people as the gender they claim to be is discriminatory. But is it true that a boy could be ‘trapped’ in a girl’s body? Is our sex merely ‘assigned’ to us? Can modern medicine ‘reassign’ sex? What is the most loving and helpful response to the condition of gender dysphoria?”
For the average American, the question is likely: why should I care? The answer, is, in the words of Erick Erickson: you will be made to care. When it comes to the transgender movement, Anderson explains how and why we will be made to care. He writes about how government policy and law are being shaped by activists in the movement, how the politics have invaded school curriculum, and he writes “the most striking aspect of the transgender moment may be the influence of ideology on medical practice.” This ideology affects how those suffering from gender dysphoria are treated according to ideology, not science.
What is perhaps the most heartbreaking about Anderson’s book are the stories of those who regret “transitioning” to a new gender. They have taken hormones, have had surgeries and have changed their bodies forever; and yet they are still not free from emotional turmoil, and in many ways, have only seen it become worse since their transition.
Social politics are changing at a dizzying speed and the transgender movement is perhaps the clearest example of just how fast. On this issue, like many others, there appears to be a silent majority. Anderson writes “American consumers across the country made their opinions known through the power of the purse after Target criticized North Carolina’s ‘bathroom bill’ and announced its own ‘inclusive’ policy in a blog post in April 2016. Customers, it said, would be free to use the restroom of their choice, regardless of biological sex. In response, 1.4 million people pledged not to shop at Target unless and until the company changed its policy. Target continues to insist that the controversy has not affected sales, but stock value and retail numbers tell a different story. In April 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that ‘Target’s stock has fallen about 25% this year… After Target announced its policy online, ‘shopper traffic and same-store sales started sliding for the first time in years.”
Perhaps even more than the gay marriage debate, it will become impossible for any American to stay silent. With schools injecting gender politics into their sexual education curriculum, with bathrooms in stores and locker rooms in schools becoming open to anyone regardless of biological sex; we are being given more reasons to care every day. With transgender activists controlling so much of the narrative in the media, in academia, and in the medical field, Anderson has created a valuable resource for the silent majority, who hopefully won’t stay silent for long.
Published in Culture
This part is chilling.
And it all began immediately after the Obergefell decision in 2015. I always knew the left would need to invent a new minority after same sex marriage was established. It was only a question of what it would be. The timing was almost like clockwork.
As you quote from the author, it appears that the left does not want discordant identity to be considered a malfunction, or a handicap to be fixed…because that would mean that the transgender person would cease to be trangender once they transitioned…but rather a distinct identity in and of itself to be celebrated and affirmed as such. The same way homosexuality is. But this is still very confusing to many people. Being transgender necessarily implies transitioning, it would seem. This means that the transgender person identifies with the opposite gender, not with the state of being transgender. In order to understand the new realities, in Orwellian fashion we have to be able to hold two opposite beliefs at the same time.
I can assure you, I will not be made to care.
Bethany,
Aside from the politics and aside from the sympathy, what would be a single general term for all that Anderson is describing? There seems to be only one term that could encompass it all. That would be Sexual Schizophrenia. Accepting this, what once was simply considered mental illness would once again be classified as such.
Am I too parsimonious or is the world simply full of cr*p? I leave this to Ricochet to decide. I’ve got to get prepared for Pesach and I just don’t have any more time to spend on this subject.
Regards,
Jim
The term is gender dysphoria. Chag sameach!
How much of this mishegas can be traced to scientifically unsupported decisions to make changes in the DSM from version to version?
Additionally, what is the mapping, so to speak, between DSM definitions/categorizations and insurance-reimbursable treatment types per CSM and/or common health insurance industry norms (perhaps as codified/reified in ICD-10)?
In other words, investigation of the ideological trappings aside, does it make substantive sense to follow the money?
I suppose that the uniformed Armed Forces and the Federal penitentiary system might be distinctive cases where special pleading for “free” gender transitioning treatments/surgeries (courtesy of the taxpayers) has a uniquely high probability of success — but mightn’t it be possible that the GD/Gender Dysphoria activist cadres are similarly seizing their moment as much as a bid to get others to foot the bill as to force societal acceptance (criteria for which can be as fluid as their own identities)?
Sure, the “average” GD activist might be a true believer as to the “necessity” of enforcing a “you will be made to care” regime, but perhaps the cannier (and more influential?) activists might have been strategizing all this hullabaloo all along chiefly as a way to clear the proverbial battlespace, so as to ensure that the rest of us “will be made to pay for the care.”
Derech agav, Chag Kasher veSameach!
Danny,
Now you’ve got it. As my grandfather might have said, “If the meshuggeneh wants it, let the meshuggeneh pay for it.” Meshuggeneh, now there’s a technical term that is sorely needed in this world at this time.
Zissen Pesach to you Danny!
Regards,
Jim
I’m sure that some thought was given to it, but the subtitle to Anderson’s book strikes me as rather mistaken. Moment?
It could be excessively optimistic.
But “moment” is often used to describe passing fads that span years. The immediate example that sprang to mind was the “libertarian moment” that was somewhere between Ron Paul and Rand Paul, and definitely ended sometime before 2016. If it really was a “moment.”
Well, they had the letters all picked out in advance, right? They won for L, G, and B in Obergefell, so next on the list was T. Not too much question.
I go with Joe ‘s description here.
On the Smart Girl Politics podcast Kira Davis has noted a few times that her son’s high school in metro Los Angeles has about 12-15% of the kids identifying as trans and that statistically that is just impossible. Her observation echoes polls that were common during the same sex marriage debate which put the public perception of homosexuality vs measured numbers and found that people wildly overestimated the percentages. If you look at The Atlantic article I linked to, the percentage of trans in that high school is four or five times the number of people who were identifying as homosexual just 7 years ago.
The more things you require the government to pay for, the less money there is to pay for defense. That is part of the reason that Obama wanted the Iran deal: With Iran as regional hegemon, the US could step away from the Middle East, and Progressives would be able to use the this as reason enough to gut the military in order to add hugely expensive entitlements–which would make increasing defense spending more difficult down the road.
A marketing campaign to increase the number of people likely to claim that entitlement was one part of the strategy, and it overlaps with other ways to help prepare the public for this. The usual media suspects were the channels for this marketing. Gender reassignment is one such entitlement. The
propagandamarketing includes news stories and such things as a transgender storyline on Grey’s Anatomy.I love this.
Just another sign of civilizational collapse. As Camille Paglia has observed, when things such as the acceptance of homosexuality, BDSM (hello 50 shades of grey) and transgenderism it is a sign of a civilization that no longer believes in itself and that we are in a late phase or decadent phase. It happened in Ancient Rome, Byzantium, the end of the British empire and the Weimar Republic. We need a spiritual awakening in the West or we’re doomed
“Moment,” “mass delusion deliberately inculcated to further total transformation,” you say potato, I say potahto.
I will need to dig it up but I did see some investigative linking of some trans activists and bank-rollers to pharmaceutical companies that specialize in hormone treatments.
It was pretty deep.
They killed it with Gary. Libertarians hate conservatives, too.
Found it:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/
And
Really should read the whole thing… it’s well detailed.
A good third of what Alex Jones babbles about comes true eventually. That is just a fact. I bet a million people believe everything he says.
Good call – but it was not that obvious even five years ago.
In Fall 2013, I was taking Systematic Theology 103 (Angelology, Anthropology, and Harmartiology – that is, the nature of Angels, Man, and Sin). The professor split the class up into groups of 5-6 and gave us a short list of project topics; my group chose: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body: A theology of transgenderism.”
At that time, there was precious little useful research material to be gleaned from the literature, or from the internet in general. At that time, less than five years ago (from what I could find, at least), the general opinion of homosexuals was that transgenders were a tiny freak-show minority that was giving the gay-rights movement a bad name.
I still amazes me how quickly all of that changed…
Some think that the uncool “het” institution of marriage became a political issue just to empower the Democrat party. I remember the old days.
I’ve done a lot of reading on this topic (which hardly makes me an expert), but the effects on children in particular is devastating. The propaganda and pressures they undergo when they have any questions about their sexuality is abominable. Children need to be left alone to find their way through these questions without pressure. I’m convinced that gender dysphoria needs to be treated psychologically in the cases of distress on the issue..
I’m with @matede. Any society which can lie to itself about the nature of marriage is doomed. I just heard Thomas Sowell say it on the podcast (paraphrasing): We’re acting as if male/female marriage is just like any other family arrangement.” That is clearly nonsense to anyone with eyes to see.
My family and I watched an episode of American Idol last night where the final audition was a transgender (cross-dresser?) who had won a spot on the show previously. They usually save the best for last, and here was this guy dressed in a skinny mini and tippy toe platforms, able to sing bass and soprano (very talented — no doubt), with enough makeup to cover an entire whorehouse population for a year. But, the most disturbing part came from Lionel Richie (love you Lionel, but dude!), who said: “We have a lot of people who come in here confused about who they are. You have cleared up the confusion.” ?!?!!
No! He’s imposed his confusion on the rest of us and is demanding more than tolerance — he’s demanding approval!
This will not end well.
P.S. Ryan Anderson is the best! I heard him speak at my parish during the marriage debacle. He’s an amazingly clear (moral) thinker.
This makes me crazy. The state officially saying that heterosexual household formation is the same thing as homosexual household formation is just nuts. Two different labels are the only thing that makes any sense.
Westy,
Agreed.
Regards,
Jim