January 3, 2024 - 10:00am
What a difference a year can make. In retrospect, 2023 looks like a turning point for the trans movement in the United Kingdom, but could the same happen for the US in 2024?
The New York Times reported this week that “some of the most contentious issues in the country will dominate the agendas of state legislatures” this year, with debates over gender front and centre. So far, 22 states have banned at least some surgical and/or pharmaceutical interventions for gender-distressed youth — although many of these bans have yet to go into effect. Ongoing legal challenges in multiple states will drag the issue ever closer to the Supreme Court docket.
The map of the US is starting to look like a patchwork quilt of states where youth transition is banned and self-proclaimed “sanctuary states” which facilitate easy access to transition for youth. Access to puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries will depend on where one lives, with a handful of purple states likely to remain uncommitted in either direction.
But bans — even bans tied up in litigation —are also messaging devices. While some members of the public will respond in predictably partisan ways, lining up for or against the bans without bothering to size up issues at stake, others will take the opportunity to look closer. Many of those who do will not like what they see. The biggest drivers of public opposition to the trans movement have always been trans activists themselves, in particular their intractability when their demands collide with the interests, needs, and rights of other groups, like women and children. That’s a trend that will only accelerate as public scrutiny increases.
In the US, public support for key agenda items — access to single-sex spaces and sports, and youth gender transition — is rapidly falling. Pollsters lamented that “general society [is] not willing to allow more rights for transgender people.” Yet what the public seems to be rejecting here are not “more rights” for transgender people, but instead the risks to safety, fairness, and ethical medical practice upon which an unreasonable movement insists. People who are tolerant of difference may baulk at being expected to go along with nonsense.
Increasingly, it seems as if common sense will ultimately prevail. The sight of a man atop the podium in a women’s cycling race is galling, as is the fact that a troubled teenager who cannot be trusted to get a tattoo is somehow empowered to pick her gender and amputate her breasts.
Public understanding of trans issues was always something activists explicitly avoided, as a remarkable strategy document revealed several years ago. Instead of focusing on winning hearts and minds by informing and persuading the public, activists preferred to operate behind closed doors — covertly lobbying politicians, piggybacking on more popular causes such as gay marriage and abortion rights, and shunning media scrutiny.
The US will likely be a lot more litigious than the UK in its approach. From cases brought by detransitioners to female athletes, the courts may end up playing a significant role in changing policy and increasing public awareness of the conflicts gender identity raises around issues like safeguarding vulnerable patients and ensuring fairness in sport.
There will be plenty of political mudslinging, especially as the presidential primaries kick off in February. Republicans will run on the issue and Democrats will struggle, as so many UK politicians have, to balance the demands of their activist base with the need to not look like lunatics so close to Election Day.
But perhaps there is a middle way, even in such a divided country. Last week, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill which would have banned gender transition for minors. Jamie Reed, the whistleblower from the gender clinic at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, reflected that “today could actually be a win if your goals are these: Ending medical transitions in pediatrics AND Adult care that is careful, regulated and requires mental health oversight.”
Alongside his veto, DeWine announced changes in administrative policy that Reed believes most “reasonable people cannot argue against,” including collecting data on all patients seeking transition and their outcomes, requiring mental healthcare for youth and adults seeking transition, and shutting down providers that do not offer this care.
These moves should help clarify basic facts about the interventions being used and how patients fare over time, two questions which have been critically neglected to date. Then, the public conversation may be shifted from political point-scoring to the cooler terrain of medical ethics and evidence-based inquiry.
Eliza Mondegreen is a graduate student in psychiatry and the author of Writing Behavior on Substack.
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SubscribeAnyone who dares to push back against the activists’ agenda on the issue is routinely described as a fascist.
Say what you like about fascists, but at least they get the Trans running on time.
Oh, so it turns out you can use that word without the coy “@”.
It was cast into the “pending” limbo, so I re-posted.
The fact that an algorithm has been put in place on this site in order to police our language is in itself a worrying form of totalitarianism. Especially as most of the conversation here is pretty reasonable & decent (well I like to think I am!)
Having humans moderate everything is expensive. The problem is that the algorithm is not politically neutral. I suspect that describing something as Stalinist will not attract moderation attention.
Gloria Estefan tried to warn us: The algorithm’s gonna get you….
I consider myself very reasonable, but do my best to behave thoroughly indecently towards the woke scum, because you should always treat f@scists like dirt.
I consider myself very reasonable, but do my best to behave thoroughly indecently towards the woke skum, because you should always treat f@scists like dirt.
Anyone who dares to push back against the activists’ agenda on the issue is routinely described as a f@scist.
Say what you like about f@scists, but at least they get the Trans running on time.
Mussolini also managed to ‘drain the swamp’ (Pontine marshes). Will Trump make good on that promise too ?
Genius comment.
Mussolini doubtlessly did drag in private but would have imprisoned (at best) all the public practitioners!
Whether they would use these precise terms or not, I think the majority of the public instinctively understand the difference between the two broad categories of rights.
Absolute rights which apply without exception – e.g. all humans have the absolute right not to be subjected to slavery.
Qualified rights which must be balanced against other considerations – e.g. freedom of speech doesn’t extend to shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre.
I think the public are fine with “more rights” for trans people, where that means extending and maintaining absolute rights to them on an equal basis as all other people. Where the public is beginning to see the problem is in regard to qualified rights, which by their nature imply having to balance a conflict of rights between different groups.
The trans lobby’s tactic is obviously to try to present all trans people’s rights as simply a matter of extending absolute rights. That’s one of the reasons why they avoid challenge and scrutiny.
Of course the absolute right not to be subjected to slavery was in the past treated as a qualified right so that when it conflicted with the right that some should not to be arbitrarily deprived of their property rights was only resolved in the colonies of Britain in 1831 by a compulsory purchase scheme that established the former right while not breaching the latter too flagrantly.
Good points. Do they not already have absolute rights ‘on an equal basis as all other people’?
To the best of my knowledge, yes.
I would certainly be interested to learn what rights Trans people think they don’t have on an equal basis. All I’ve seen from trans rights activists when addressing this question is essentially meaningless stuff like the right to “live their full lives”
“I would certainly be interested to learn what rights Trans people think they don’t have on an equal basis.” <– Answered ad nauseam, but to reiterate.
And of course every law and policy enacting such is an example of transgender people being denied their individual inherent human rights.
No, in fact the legal existence of transgender people at all is being debated. People who do not exist have no rights at all.
“..I think the public are fine with “more rights” for trans people, where that means extending and maintaining absolute rights to them on an equal basis as all other people..”
Can anyone explain what rights ‘trans’ people do not have that other people do?
For a start, the use of ‘gender’ along with ‘trans’ is disingenuous. This word refers to the way we might choose to present ourselves, based on current stereotypes. So the word that they want to use is SEX. But they can’t because, as most thinking people understand, sex is immutable. So the term ‘transsexual’ has been quietly dropped in favour of the meaningless term ‘transgender’.
So if we accept that no one can change sex, but that anyone may wear whatever they want (within the bounds of reason and decency) then what rights do people who are minded to call themselves “transgender’ NOT have?
Please see my response to Hilary re. rights.
On the question of defining gender and sex, I think a priority for those seeking to defend single sex spaces in 2024 is to fight for clear definitions of gender and sex, along the lines which you use in your post.
It only serves the trans rights activist’s purposes to keep this as confused and ambiguous as possible. Because if the terms are used interchangeably then it is harder to pin down the difference between changing gender and changing sex.
Its only really possible to defend sex based rights if you have a clear definition of what sex is and why it is immutable.
I think this is because they are dishonest and actually do straight-up mean “sex” most of the time when referring to “gender”, and even when they manage to produce a definition for “gender” and “gender identity” that isn’t circular or incoherent it is always something that relies on sex for meaning and cannot be separated from it.
Indeed. ‘Gender’ is the Trojan horse by which adults with nefarious intentions can gain access to children.
No, liar. No such thing is true, neither can you support your claim in any way.
“I think this … separated from it.” <– Your deliberate ignorance and tendentious claims not to understand what is plain are not convincing. Neither are any examples of your victims who are themselves in any way confused make your point.
Human beings are sexually dimorphic along hundreds of different measures — axes of development — and the complexity of exactly how far towards either male or female any one individual develops on any single axis is not a matter of only of their having one of two X v Y patterns.
While the “soft sciences” claim otherwise, the evidence based sciences term gender to be that sexual dimorphism as a whole seen between the ears of a person. It produces in an individual the inclination to perceive from among those around them as they grow up, those who are also of their gender so they may be emulated in their gendered behaviors and the gender of the person thereby signaled.
There is nothing circular or incoherent about that.
Yeah I’m heavily pregnant so my tolerance for thought salad such as this is rock bottom.
If this is the product of the sexual dimorphism between your ears, it produces in me an inclination to perceive that you are a particularly silly and hubristic man
Femaleness and maleness are signalled because they are meaningful. These are not cheap arbitrary linguistics but archetypes, behaviours, roles, rituals and traditions generated from core human experiences. Every person ever to exist was born from the union of a man and a woman. What’s the point of a male (attempting to) emulate female behaviour to try to signal that he is female when he is not? You’re mistaking the signal for the thing itself. You are a road sign pointing to nowhere. It is futile
It is not a possibility to “defend single sex spaces” because minorities of visible sexual dimorphism exist, and you will find you are not able to pick and choose which minorities you can allow or abuse — and being transgender is only such a minority of sexual dimorphism, and not any threat to any person of whatever sex or gender.
“Its only really possible to defend sex based rights” <– There are none such, and never have been. There are now and have only ever been privileges accorded on the basis of apparent gender, conflating that with sex.
Can anyone explain what rights ‘trans’ people do not have that other people do?
No, they can’t, which becomes incandescently obvious when you that question and watch an activist go into a sputtering froth before, predictably, calling you transphobic. Because it’s not about rights as you and I define them. It’s about a forced normalization of something abnormal, especially regarding children.
“No, they can’t” <– Oh yes I can, starting with unimpaired access to proper heatlhcare for a medical problem, for political reasons.
You wrote, “. It’s about a forced normalization of something abnormal, especially regarding children.”, it is normal for 1 in 150 people to be transgender. You are trying to enforce prior morally illegitimate standards of coerced “normality”.
You have no excuse for it.
“Can anyone explain what rights ‘trans’ people do not have that other people do?” <– The whole editorial slant of this herd called UnHerd is that they should no have access to proper healthcare for their medical problem — especially when in their youth — and should have no legal existence; they are to be forced to pretend as a matter of law to be cisgender.
Do you have any other ridiculously easy, to the point of being evidence you are stupid, questions?
“the use of ‘gender’ along with ‘trans’ is disingenuous.” <– No, it is not, neither are you able to even give a colorable explanation as to how it is such.
“So the term ‘transsexual’ has been quietly dropped in favour of the meaningless term ‘transgender’.” <– Another idiocy. Transsexual was dropped because it was reinforcing in the common public opinion the idea it was only about a sexual fetish — when it is no more about that than anyone’s being a man or woman is. Transgender is not “meaningless” it means exactly the same thing that transsexual did — someone whose gender and visible sex had developed while in utero to be enough at odds that they have noticed the matter.
good distinction. Thank you
“the risks to safety, fairness, and ethical medical practice upon which an unreasonable movement insists” <– There is no such movement and there are no such risks. Slavery is mentioned below, and the fact is the claims there are such a movement and such risks is a lie on the same order as that once told, that slaves are happy and better off being such.
Trans people have always had the right to dress in the clothing of that conventionally belonging to the opposite sex and the right to chop bit off themselves. Their rights have not been seriously questioned.
Unfortunately, what the activists demand in terms of rights is that the rest of us conform to their fantasy and treat them as if they were a different sex for all purposes and that inevitably infringes the rights of others and is a totalitarian demand that should never have attracted the support it has received. In due course sanity will prevail and some compromises will remain but the gross infringement of others rights will hopefully not be maintained.
The activists demands are a particular infringement of the rights of the young not to be hurried down a partway albeit of their choice that they might well come to regret.
I’m not so sure sanity will return. The staggering amount of people on LinkedIn with pronouns in their bio shows just how deep down the rabbit hole we’ve slid.
Although the pronoun displays do make it much easier to bin the CVs of prospective applicants for work. Ain’t no one sensible got time for an activist in the ranks.
There are lots of people in my workplace with pronouns in their email signatures (mostly women). They think they are being allies, to a cause they don’t understand. They aren’t die-hard TRAs. Watch those she/hers quietly disappear when the reality of what gender-ideology really stands for filters its way into their myopic consciousness.
Same here. I’m sure most of them believe they are ‘being kind’ and see no downside to sending that signal. If it was seen to be more contentious then many of them would withdraw because they don’t feel that strongly and don’t want to be seen as extremists.
Hadn’t even thought about the consequences of this. Presumably in some institutions it works the other way? HR in universities binning applications that do not include pronouns??
“Trans people have always had the right to dress in the clothing of that conventionally belonging to the opposite sex and the right to chop bit off themselves.” <– No, in fact that was a crime in England until at least the 1870’s and of course you are about attempting to prohibit any “chopping” now.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249001862_A_Study_of_the_Rights_of_Cross-dressers_in_the_UK
“Unfortunately, what the activists demand in terms of rights is that the rest of us conform to their fantasy and treat them as if they were a different sex for all purposes and that inevitably infringes the rights of others” <– There is no fantasy involved and what you claim is that infringes on no else’s rights.
Pollsters lamented that “general society [is] not willing to allow more rights for transgender people.”
Well, no; not when those ‘rights’ come at the expense of other people. Because that’s how rights work. Yours end where mine begin and vice-versa.
So far, 22 states have banned at least some surgical and/or pharmaceutical interventions for gender-distressed youth
Ten years ago, such a sentence would have been unthinkable, the work of a literary fantasist. And what is ‘gender distressed?’ We’ve come a long way from anorexia and other eating disorders that led to a similar volume of outsized attention.
“not when those ‘rights’ come at the expense of other people” <– They do not. That they do is your delusion, only.
‘And what is ‘gender distressed?” <– A person whose gender while in utero developed at odds enough with their sex that they notice the issue.
Duh.
“We’ve come a … of outsized attention.” <– Which has nothing to do with it, except I note the “attention” is all manufactured controversy for the purpose of exploitation by bigots for purposes of succeeding in politics where they have nothing real to say.
“collecting data on all patients seeking transition and their outcomes, requiring mental healthcare for youth and adults seeking transition, and shutting down providers that do not offer this care.”
Count on the trans movement to oppose exactly this; they don’t want close examination of the situation and will end up arguing that people seeking transition do not need mental health care, as what they are doing is actually mentally healthy – it’s the rest of us who are ill.
Questioning a trans identity is considered transphobic as it’s not affirming so you’re right, they’ll object and scream the house down.
“Questioning a trans identity is considered transphobic” <– You certainly have no excuse to do so. What should be pretended to be your purpose other than expressing your bigotry?
Imbecile, the data is already gathered. It does not support you.
Here is a small sample.
https://taliaperkinssspace.quora.com/People-are-born-transgender-they-are-not-mentally-ill-it-is-no-paraphilia-it-is-a-physical-birth-defect-no-more-a-men
“it’s the rest of us who are ill.” <– You are mentally ill, you permit your obvious bigotry to impel you to call for the abuse of innocent people including children.
I’ll give DeWine credit for signing the heartbeat bill, but vetoing this new bill was cowardly.
I see the Beeb is attempting to normalise trans by including trans presenting kids in children’s programmes.
Do you mean Dr Who, or are there other programmes where this is happening?
It is normal for 1 in 150 people, including children, to be transgender. It is not normal to try to hide a child, or make them ashamed of who they are for no reason.
Transgenderism is what happens when a mental illness is “transitioned” to a civil rights movement. A mental illness cannot be cured with a surgical procedure. Doctors who mutilate children belong in jail.
Except that this confuses genuine dysphoria – a mental illness – with fetishism, a sexual paraphilia. Guess which of the two are loudest within the trans-rights movement?
I read accounts like those in “Men trapped in Men’s Bodies” and have been acquainted with MTF spaces online for at least a decade at this point. I’m not so sure than there is a clearcut distinction. Many of the straight paraphiliacs experience genuine distress with their sex, and the gay men with traditional dysphoria still fetishize “woman” as something that only exists in the context of male sexuality (“The final frontier of kink for gay men is women” – Juno Dawson, a gay mtf)
But you’re not wrong that the identity fetishists are louder than those who speak openly about psychological disorder!
There is no mental illness involved. No evidence there is any such mental illness was fund in over 50 years of psychiatry presuming it, so they gave up on the idea.
You do not know better than they do.
You are the willful child mutilator.
You want to force some girls to have beards and deep voices and to force some boys to have breasts and a period.
Teenage children are being encouraged to hate themselves.
By Social Conservatives, yes. I hope you fail.
The trans movement got so far so stealthily and yes, as everyone becomes aware of the problem, questions are finally asked.
Yes, stealth is the way. The current sneaky move is for the WHO to establish “Transgender Health Guidelines” drawn up by transgender activists. Announcement made on 18th December 2023, comments must be in by 8th January 2024!!! Not surprisingly, there is a petition against this move, so far signed by 3,882 individuals and organisations. https://who-decides.org/
As has been pointed out by UK women such as Helen Joyce, a major concern is the impact this ‘guidance’ will have on smaller, developing nations that do not have the expertise, money or resources to conduct their own research into this area, and therefore adopt the WHO recommendations without question or public scrutiny.
Funny, what you are lying to call “stealthy” is a publicly available, publicly published document.
Why, it is as if you are a deceitful imbecile.
There is no actual problem. What you are calling “stealth” is the fact there is no real problem going back for 20 years or more. The questions are already answered, you just don’t like the answers, and you are trying to mandate child abusing fake answers in law and policy in their place.
Dream on!
With so much confusion over the topic, I like to stick to what we do know:
This kind of surgery, puberty blockers and artificial hormones can, will and do, 100 percent, cause massive health issues down the track for these young people. That’s really sad.
When I was 17 or 18, I used to believe, raised as a catholic, that I would be punished by God and fail my exams if I masturbated the night before an exam. Pity – cause a good night’s sleep would have been real handy……my point is young people change their minds and their beliefs. Surgery is irreversible.
Whenever you are sitting there, scratching your head and saying to yourself: why does this subject get so much media coverage and air time ? Why are there trans people popping up everywhere in films and TV series all of a sudden ? Why on earth would politicians decide that it’s okay for men who identify as women to be allowed in places where nudity occurs such as change rooms and public toilets? Be allowed to compete against women in physical sports where bodily safety then comes into play? Or even more absurdly: a male criminal who identifies as female be allowed to transfer to a female prison. You’d think that last statement I made was a joke but it’s already happened in Canada and a few other places. It’s just lucky that known rapists would never taken advantage of the system…….
All of the above points I have made, are the reasons that reasonable people who actually care about the welfare of their women and children, are beginning to say “f..k this” – enough is enough. Despite the clear and obvious political and social control agenda that is at play.
“This kind of surgery, puberty blockers and artificial hormones can, will and do, 100 percent, cause massive health issues down the track for these young people.” <– A lie entire. Not even one thing you said in that mass of confabulation is true.
“When I was … is at play.” <– And you managed never in all that word salad to ever say anything simultaneously true and relevant.
One of the people on the WHO panel who are drawing up guidelines to give all children the right to transition believes that ALL children should be out on puberty blockers, giving them time to decide “which puberty they want to go through”. But it is only possible to go through the puberty of your natal sex, arriving thereby at sexual maturity which brings the possibility of sexual reproduction. But a transgender child taking blockers and hormones doesn’t go through ANY puberty. They do not arrive at sexual maturity and cannot reproduce at all if they’re natal boys. It’s less clear with girls as they are born with eggs in situ. But girls can only go through female puberty, they cannot become sexually mature males.
There are not two optional liberties. There is only the puberty of one’s birth sex or no puberty at all.
“One of the people on the WHO panel who are drawing up guidelines to give all children the right to transition believes that ALL children should be out on puberty blockers, giving them time to decide “which puberty they want to go through”” <– No liar, they are pointing out the hypocritical presumption of those who claim transgender children can never (or too rarely) get it right — so they must be prohibited from having the choice — and the presumption that presumed cisgender children always get it right.
“But a transgender child taking blockers and hormones doesn’t go through ANY puberty.” <– A lie.
“They do not arrive at sexual maturity and cannot reproduce” <– Another lie, even in the case of people who have surgery. Gamete banking works, and those who choose to put off surgery until they can make use of theirs.
“they cannot become sexually mature males.” <– Which has no relevance to you, even to the limited degree it is true at all — because it is not your business to inflict misery on other people for the sake of what you imagine they should choose for themselves.
They do not exist to flatter your moral vanity.
You do not own them.
This is a key Democrat issue so a lot of the core education question hinges on autumn electoral developments, likewise with the fashion for racial separatism and radical Islamism.
IDK, maybe trans women are just a species of 5th column colonizers asserting their male patriarchal privilege as faux women. Is dominance in women’s athletics just-one form of their subversive agenda to rule the whole gender. LOL, Judith Butler we turn our lonely eyes to you..