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Transgenderism Is Female Appropriation
Men who become women, transgender if you like, are simply appropriating the female appearance. Without the proper body functions, this is only a surface change. It is a change in the appearance, not in the genetic material that makes a woman female. Some of the hormones may be added or subtracted, sure, however, it does not mean having a truly female experience.
Transgender women never have a first period. They never have the worry about being pregnant; either that they are or that they’re not. They never have the joy of wondering just how normal their anatomical bits are: they are scientifically implanted or grown and adjusted according to spec. They never grow up with the fear of men.
Transgender women get all of the surface portrayal. Like drag queens, they appear female, but unlike drag queens, they do not do it for play or show or entertainment. They somehow genuinely believe that their surface performance of femininity should be respected and even accepted by other women. Though they have challenges of their own, they do not have the same ones as women.
How is it that feminists and liberals everywhere have not condemned this? It is using the perceived experiences of women and profiting by them. It is using an outside experience of what it is to be a woman and internalizing it as if there were any ability to know the workings of women.
For all the concern about appropriating another’s experience, I do not know how it is that we women have allowed men to even steal the experience of being woman from us.
Published in General
Ironically, even longer term will be eradication of gender (because gender is a social construct and all social constructs are oppressive). Leaving us once again with only biology and any social effects arising therefrom.
That’s the worse part: otherwise sane people are going along with this turmoil only to wind up at the same starting point eventually – because sex and gender are functions of biology primarily and culture only secondarily.
And that’s a good assumption. Same reason we look both ways before crossing the street.
More than that actually. Throw in alcohol or even just youthful aggression, and even someone who isn’t a rapist can end up hurting or scaring a woman – or even doing something they shouldn’t have done. Throw in being human, having passions, and even responding to the passions of others an quickly we realize that there are no real barriers keeping relations “normal”, only ideas and notions. And there’s plenty bad that can happen short of felony rape.
That’s the key observation. The left’s celebration of perversion and mental illness is, at its root, a manifestation of the need of fallen people to betray. People of the left learn to create divisions, so that they can elevate themselves in the distinction. Once a division has ripened and matured, its no longer useful as a distinguishing badge of merit. So the lefties always require new perversities to force on others.
It’s a bad sign that they’re having to dig so deep. Trans loonies are what, 0.6% of us? (Officially at least. I doubt it’s half that much in reality.) That says the rot is thoroughly established and Gramsci’s long marchers have taken the capitol.
I wish we’d get back to proper terms.
Sex is what you are. Gender is a social construct. Is there more than one gender? Maybe. Depends on the culture. And really, who cares. I don’t care if you identify as Twin Souled. Whatever. You have a penis or a vagina or, in very rare cases, both. What we should be doing is being more concerned with the people who are actually born as both. Intersexed individuals have a very difficult life because they do actually have to decide upon a sex or (as is sometimes becoming the case) not decide on any.
We should be doing more to help those very few people who do not fit into any one category to feel at home in their bodies and to overcome their genetic abnormalities. Those people are having a very difficult time because they truly are neither male, nor female, are often incapable of procreating, and have a serious mixture of sex hormones. That is really the trans experience. Not really being any part of what is, necessarily, a duality.
And those very few people deserve compassion, kindness, and medical help.
Agreed on compassion for the truly intersex, and also for anyone else too who is struggling with individual uncertainty or chafing against cultural expectations. Compassion us a good default attitude.
I’m not sure, though, that I agree that gender is a social construct. Cultural perhaps, but informed and influenced by biology.
I have never had a problem with homosexuality. I have always had a problem with militant activists. The transgendered movement has plenty of this second group.
When you get down to it, transgenderism is a denial of science. Transvestites play with gender construction per superficial cultural constructs, i.e. pink is female and blue is male, which is not even historically consistent. So if you want to wear a dress, cool. If you want to be Annie Hall, fine. (I loved her look, actually.) Those things are cultural. If you want to be a drag queen, okay! You be you.
But transgendered people deny those markers that are immutable.
I am supposed to accept a man is truly a woman because he is wearing lipgloss? Because he cuts off part of his body? I am truly a woman, and I rarely wear makeup at all. If I got a breast enhancement, those wouldn’t be real, (though I do have my own breasts.) The author is right. This is appropriation at its worst.
Hermaphrodites are a distinct group, and they are not really part of the conversation. They are like the tiny percent of women who are the victims of rape and incest that provide the ethical construct to abort millions of children each year.
I don’t understand why we as a society are participating in this stupid, stupid, stupid fraud. And yeah. It’s become “cool” to be transgendered, which is why I know a ton of people who identify as such. They should read a few books on existentialism and figure out what being “authentic” actually means.
It’s all annoying.
Gary, I think that I argued the contrary view, very convincingly, a couple of months back, relying on peer-reviewed publications and objective data.
I don’t want to re-argue it, either. My question for you is whether Mr. Sullivan relied on data, or anecdote, if you recall. Links would be helpful. If there is genuine, contrary data, I’d like to take a look.
I think that this is the study you have in mind, by Lisa Littman at Brown University. I don’t think that your characterization is quite correct, but the general result was that adolescents and young adults were experiencing “rapid onset” gender dysphoria, with a mechanism that appeared to be social contagion and specifically peer contagion. (These are technical terms for psychological disorders that spread socially, and had been previously used in research on eating disorders.)
Let’s face it, Jerry, you and I have been around the block a few times on this, and I’m pretty unlikely to buy into “very convincingly”. Here’s one press release by the American Psychological Association. I brought up Sullivan because he thinks the loosey-goosey definitions of sex that the trans crowd is pushing are wrong; do you think they aren’t?
In any case, TheRightNurse deserves arguments relevant to her post, not ours, as I think you agree.
Absolutely right, and nicely put.
There are a lot of people running around simultaneously denying that an objective reality exists while insisting that their preferred fiction is objective reality. It must be a very confusing way to live.
Gender is a grammatical construct. English has three.
Amen! And what is all this “narrative” nonsense? Nothing is right or wrong and there is little so terrible that one cannot bring himself to do it, but every stupid issue turns on its “narrative”. Mere utterances determine the nature of the reality.
Had I wanted to listen to blathering about “narrative”, I would have signed up for a fiction writers’ workshop.
I should do one of those. 😜
I agree. Thing is, when the kid claims doghood or identifies as an airplane, parents take it in stride, humor the kid, the kid grows out of it.
Kid claims a different gender and the parents react differently. Questions are asked, professionals are called, discussion are had.
Very exciting to a kid (another thing parents know is that kids like, crave, and need attention).
Did you hear about the tests on Kasimir Pulaski?
Not that I agree with these people, but I don’t think that they’re denying that objective reality exists. I think they’re claiming that biological sex is an objective reality (with limited importance or impact on anything); they’re further claiming that gender is no longer roughly synonymous with sex; they’re finally claiming that gender is an inherently subjective experience and that the predefined social constructs of gender roles are simply a convenient categorization to make communicating that subjective experience easier and that a binary menu is too restrictive to be useful/humane.
Here’s where I agree with them: none of us knows how any other individual feels. I’m a man, but I don’t really know how other men experience being a man. I can guess; I can read literature and compare notes over a beer; I can’t know. Trans people can guess, read, and compare notes too – they might very well identify with some, many, or all of the experiences common to others claiming to be men. A trans woman might have experienced harassment or even abuse from a man thinking the trans woman was really a woman. Etc.
Here’s where I disagree: 1) communicating that subjective experience suffers diminishing returns at a steep rate the more specific and granular one tries to get in categorizing themselves. I’m an Ed G – so much more than “man” or “cis-male” or whatever. 2) Biology isn’t unimportant; it’s not wholly determinative but biological realities dictate much about our choices, preferences, realities. Sex qualified in the traditional ways communicates more than pan-gender or two-spirit could. 3) Aside from communication: sex tells others more about what to expect in terms of relations and real-world results than modern gender classifications do. 4) We already have a good system which is binary with modifiers for all sorts of spectrum differences – change is just radical, unnecessary, and authoritarian.
“Transgender women never have a first period. They never have the worry about being pregnant; either that they are or that they’re not.”
It’s about genetics, not some socially appropriated belief system. Some parents make these choices for kids well before their first period. That’s abusive; that’s sick. People (particularly the so-called experts) who ignore genetic origins of male/female behavior eschew science.
I had a childhood friend over 50 years ago that insisted she was a dog. It lasted a little bit, and we laugh about it today.
I think those pushing for early transformation do not believe they will be held responsible if it doesn’t work out very well, and they are right. It will be the child and their family that pays for these crusader’s interference. The guy that developed the lobotomy got a Nobel Prize, I think, and you don’t see that being promoted today. Perhaps gender transitioning drugs and surgery are the new lobotomy.
A former co-worker had two children “diagnosed” as being on the autism spectrum. Particularly with his daughter, he thought the child was manipulating the system because she liked the attention she got as a result.
He did indeed receive the Nobel Prize. I remind people of that all the time when they trust scientists regarding invasive “cures”.
Great points.
Nature vs. Nurture: meet ‘Whim’.
I will now sing in praise of lobotomies.
But not for very long. They helped – or seemed to help – with the agonized and screaming insane. The end.
Next they get used for the merely invonvenient insane; same with drugs.
We’re smarter now.
Mostly.
The implied context behind the usage of “Appropriation” is the person appropropriating is benefiting unfairly and therefore undeserving of some of the benefits they think their appropriation deserves. This is wholly different from imitation being recognized in some circumstances as flattery (I appreciate the point made re drag queens and entertainment, Thanks RN). The person doing the imitation knows they are imitating the opposite sex and sincerely appreciates any approval they receive, which they know is given freely, unlike the appropriator, whose world view is distorted and self-centered, demanding that the world and people bend to their world view. This creates an unwelcome imposition on people whose world view is different than theirs. It is in essence, anti-social.
Hah!
I’ll join you. A phlebotomist at an office I used to work at had had a lobotomy. Worked great. She got married, got a good job, and is having a good life. I’m a fan.
Are they voluntary? Can they be done on someone without their permission?
Of course it’s voluntary. People want effective treatments. In certain situations, lobotomies work beautifully.
Another unfortunate stereotype is electroshock therapy. No antidepressant drug has ever surpassed the safety and efficiency data of electroshock. But it’s hard to use because people are scared of it. Too bad.
They were done on people without their permission in the past. Did they work sometimes? Of course. Were they abused? Of course.
https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-surprising-history-of-the-lobotomy/