Twenty statements about transgenderism

Introduction

Here are twenty statements about transgenderism as a social phenomenon or an ideology. The first twelve are probably fairly obvious; the others concern the aims and methods of transgenderism as a political project, looking especially at its use of a single word.

Factual assertions

1. 1. No one can change their sex. A person’s sex, like a woodpecker’s or a giraffe’s, is theirs for life.
   2. It is no more possible to be born in the wrong body than it is to be born in the wrong century.
   3. To think that there is any one explanation of transgenderism, such as that those affected have a mental illness, is mistaken. If a girl of twelve decides that she is “trans” after attending five hours of lessons from an activist, one each day for a week, at a school where such children receive special attention, and two of her friends decide that they are going to be “trans” as well, they do not have a mental illness, at least not yet. They are simply impressionable girls who have been persuaded that being “trans” will solve their problems, make them fashionable and entitle them to certain privileges. The trouble is not mental illness on their part but viciousness on the part of the activist and folly on the part of the school. Then, some transgenders are simply exhibitionists. Some are trouble-makers. Some appear to take cross-sex hormones almost as recreational drugs.[1] Many transgenders are mentally ill, but there are many types who are not.
   4. Transgender activists could not have created the havoc they have created without the support of the mainstream media, who have consistently promoted their ideology at least since 2015, when Bruce Jenner made a dramatic appearance in a dress. Headlines read: “Call her Caitlyn!”, “A brave Olympian, transformed!” and “Quite inspiring!”. Others read: “Caitlyn is hot!” and “She looks like Rita Hayworth, so glamorous!” No headline read: “What does this man think he is doing?” or simply “Yuck!”                                                   
   5. As a doctrine, transgenderism is unconvincing. We are expected to regard the assumed sex of a transgender person as authentic: this is the real them; we mustn’t mention the fact that they once appeared to belong to the other sex, and so on. Yet then someone is hailed as transgender who appears as a woman one day and a man the next. Then, how can someone who believes that they belong to the opposite sex think of “transitioning” when according to them they are already at the destination?
   6. The term “biological sex” is a tautology. Sex is by definition biological. Equally tautological is a term like “biologically male”. If one is male, one is male biologically. To say that one might be male but not biologically is like saying that one might be six feet tall but not physically.
   7. Even when the mainstream media appear to question transgender ideology, they do not challenge the idea at the heart of it, that a person can change their sex. They still communicate the idea by speaking the ideology’s language. Thus when someone like Piers Morgan ridicules the ideology for saying that a man might call himself a woman and expect to be taken seriously by asking what stops him from calling himself a two-spirit penguin and expecting to be taken seriously, he still defers to the ideology by talking about “biological males”, “trans women” and so forth. He will never cease to imply that a woman might in some way be a man or say to a man presenting himself as a woman: “Let’s be honest, you’re a man”.
   8. The controversy over transgenders in sport is unnecessary. It only started when sports officials gave in to transgender activists by acting as if a man might be a woman if he called himself one. The rule that had applied before this was sufficient: men’s sports are for men; women’s sports are for women. There was no need to let the fact that the occasional female athlete has a disorder of sexual development undermine this rule, still less was there any need to let the rule be discarded because of an ideology. It is the same with prisons, changing rooms and bathrooms. Transgender activists, with the aid of their converts in officialdom, have made a mess out of a simple system that was perfectly viable.
   9. Hurting a transgender person’s feelings matters no more than hurting anyone else’s feelings. Moreover, when a transgender person says that such and such a thing would hurt his feelings and so must not be done, how do we know that it really would hurt his feelings? Perhaps he is only saying it to enjoy the power someone gave him by telling him he belonged to an especially important class of people. Perhaps he is only revelling in the chance he has been given to tell other people what they can and cannot do.
   10. The good nature of transgender activists is open to question. One of their favourite tactics is to confront those who challenge them with statistics showing that transgenders attempt suicide at a higher rate than others.[2]  “If you don’t agree with me, I might kill myself, and the blood will be on your hands”, they suggest. What a low trick! If they cite these statistics to curry sympathy for transgenders in general, it is hardly any better. Why must sympathy be wrenched out of us in this way when we could be left to feel however much sympathy we would feel naturally?
   11. By disseminating transgender ideology, the media have spread strange ideas about people’s rights. The BBC quoted a woman calling herself Luke Anderson as saying: “No one has the right to tell you who you are”, meaning to tell you what sex you are.[3] Why not? Why should one be any less entitled to tell someone what sex they are, should the need arise, than to tell them what day of the week it is? But no: for transgender activists, free speech is anathema lest the truth be spoken.
   12. Most male transgenders make unconvincing women. The young ones only tend to illustrate a faintly pornographic view of women held by certain men, while the older ones or those taking part in sport make little attempt to hide their maleness. None display such female characteristics as an interest in babies, a desire to be agreeable or a preference for indirect communicative strategies. Quite the opposite in the case of the last two points, especially where activists are concerned. When defending their “identities” they tend to be as confrontational and pugnacious as any other confrontational or pugnacious man.

The Politics

13. The reason transgenderism exploded in the media in 2015, having been prefigured by Time magazine the year before, is that this was when the US Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states. With that accomplished, the progressive agenda could proceed to its next item.[4]

14. By this time much of the establishment had already embraced the ideology. A British county council adopted a “Trans Inclusion Schools Toolkit” in 2014.[5] “Trans awareness training” was being provided in British schools the year before,[6] when the Home Office already had a transgender “staff support network”.[7] Also by 2013 American schools were being forced to allow boys to attend school as girls, use the girls’ bathroom and compete in girls’ sports.[8] Activists were already trying to get therapy that encouraged troubled children to accept their sex being criminalised. Also in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) responded to lobbying from transgender activists by dropping “gender identity disorder” from the new edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in favour of “gender dysphoria”, which, thanks to a modified definition of a disorder that also resulted from lobbying by transgender activists, only qualified as a disorder if it caused distress to those affected.[9] As it turned out, those affected mainly felt distress when other people did not do as they wished or when they needed a psychiatric diagnosis to support a claim for the cost of “treatment” from their health insurance.[10]

15. Transgender activists use language strategically to confuse, especially the word “gender”, which is commonly believed to have two senses. One is a psycho-social sense denoting the attitudes and behaviours generally associated with the sexes, which anyone might exhibit regardless of their sex. It was with this sense that feminists adopted the word in the 1970s, the word having previously been limited to the classification of the nouns of certain languages.[11] In the other sense, “gender” can mean sex itself, and the word has been used in this sense so persistently by the media, on official forms and elsewhere for more than twenty years that it is now barely acceptable to call sex “sex”; we must call it “gender”.

Activists exploit the potential for confusion created by this ambiguity by using the word so that it will be understood in one sense, only for it to turn out that they mean it in the other. Thus when we first heard them say that there were many genders, we assumed that they could not mean that there were many sexes because it was so obvious that there are only two. Nor did the new genders sound like plausible alternatives to being male or female; they sounded more like moods, personality types or jokes, as in “aethergender”, which is defined as feeling commanding, or “anongender”, a gender unknown to both oneself and others. But the activists went on to attack anyone who asserted that there were just two sexes. When they said that one could change one’s gender, we again thought that they must mean one’s psycho-social gender since it is obvious that no one can change their sex, but then they insisted that a man who has changed his “gender” has become a woman. Such equivocation was mentioned by George Orwell when he pointed out that words conducive to producing a desired response were “often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”[12]

16. On analysis, however, the psycho-social sense of the word “gender” is a phantom. Feminists never used the word in this sense. If a couple decided that she would go out to work while he stayed at home to look after the children, feminists didn’t say that they were swapping genders but that they were swapping gender roles, by which they meant sex roles, showing that for them gender was the same as sex.[13] When transgender activists use the word “gender”, they too mean sex. “Gender” is just a euphemism for it.

17. As well as using the word “gender” to equivocate, transgender activists use it to make what they are talking about sound more mysterious and dignified than it really is. They speak of “gender identity”, defining this as a person’s deep, inner sense of their “gender” as though one’s gender identity were an intimate personal possession. All they mean is a person’s idea of what sex they are.[14] But to say that someone is trying to work out what sex they are might provoke a derisive laugh, whereas describing them as struggling with their gender identity might elicit respectful sympathy.

18. So determined are transgender activists to retain the capacity of the word “gender” to confuse and obfuscate that they will not say what they mean by it. The International Journal of Transgenderism does not define the word even in a paper about language.[15] The Gender Identity Research and Education Society does not define it even in a document about terminology.[16] Nor is it defined in an official report called “Gender and Development: Concepts and Definitions”.[17] The British government is in no more of a hurry to define it. Put “What does the UK government mean by ‘gender’?” into a search engine and you will get a reference to a document entitled “What is the difference between sex and gender?”,[18] which instead of answering the question links to another document, which links to a third, which says that defining sex and gender is not within its scope.[19] This third document states that it supersedes an earlier version that explained the differences between sex and gender but says that the explanation does not appear in this updated version because it does not reflect the government’s current position. It doesn’t say what the government’s current position is, but only that sex and gender are “evolving topics”.

19.  We do, however, know what the APA means by “gender”, because the introduction to DSM-5 states that it now uses this word instead of “sex”, and sure enough, whereas DSM-4 spoke of “the other sex”, “assigned sex”, and “cross-sex roles”,[20] DSM-5 talks about “the other gender”, “assigned gender” and “cross-gender roles”.[21] So for the APA the two words are synonymous. It explains its change of terminology by saying that the concept of sex “is inadequate when referring to individuals with a disorder of sex development”,[22] which makes about as much sense as it would do for the American Ophthalmological Society to say that it no longer uses the word “eye” because the concept is inadequate when talking about people with eye problems. Obviously the APA’s stated rationale was bogus, given to cover its real reason for the change, which happened to be that the change had been lobbied for by transgender activists.[23] This shows how much these activists value the word “gender”, with its capacity to confuse and obfuscate, as opposed to “sex”, which everyone understands.

20. It was feminism that paved the way for transgenderism, for it was feminists who came up with the idea of essential sexual equality, meaning that the sexes are in themselves the same. Anything a man can do, a woman can, and so on. The only reason the sexes appear to differ, say feminists, is that women are oppressed by society, the patriarchy or in short by men. Without this, we would see that they only differed in such trivial respects as that women have wider hips than men, potentially milk-producing breasts and can bear children. In any way that matters, the sexes are interchangeable, and if they are interchangeable, how hard can it be to “transition” from one to the other?

Conclusion

Transgenderism is the latest phase of a wider project aimed at breaking down all distinctions between human groups, in this case between the sexes. It is a profoundly subversive project since the sex distinction, as well as being sublimely simple, is the deepest that exists in any society and the one around which it is mainly organised.

Transgenderism has wrecked the lives of countless people and brought untold misery to thousands of families when children have been affected by transgender activism coming at them from the mainstream media, social media, their schools and the medical profession. It has made enemies of all those who believe that Homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species and that a person’s sex is immutable, yet it still expects our sympathy and support. The untruth of its basic tenet, that a person can change their sex, makes the rest of it untrue, nor does it even cohere as a system of false beliefs. Transgenders themselves are little to blame, for they are pawns in a game being played by their activists, who are presumably in turn pawns in a game being played by our hostile elites.

The ideology’s power and reach, gained through lobbying and infiltrating our institutions, is at first astounding, but is less so when we remember that transgenderism is a component ideology of political correctness, now called “wokeness”, which tends to the destruction of Western civilisation, and what institution does not want to be “woke” or politically correct?

[1] A man posting to a transgender message board reported on his experiences when “messing around with various forms of estrogen delivery”. Another wondered whether although he didn’t “identify as transgender” he could get female hormones from a clinic. See The Transgender Boards, posts dated Jan. 6th 2015 and Aug. 6th 2016 respectively, https://thetransgendertimes.forumotion.com.

[2] In fact, while there is a mainstream consensus that trans people attempt suicide more often than others [presumably for a variety of reasons, including the results of “gender affirming care”],  there are no statistics on actual suicides among transgenders. Newsweek (March 30, 2023). https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-transgender-attempted-suicide-rate-1791504

[3] BBC News, Nov. 20th 2015, “Is a gender recognition certificate crucial or cruel?”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-34832811.

[4] This observation was made somewhere by Millennial Woes. It is also implied by Helen Joyce, 2022, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, London: Oneworld, Chapter 10.

[5] East Sussex County Council Children’s Services, Oct. 2014, “Trans* Inclusion Schools Toolkit”, https://czone.eastsussex.gov.uk/media/2480/trans-toolkit.pdf. The Council appears to have been given this document, which appears no longer to be online, by an LGBT group called Allsorts Youth Project: https://www.allsortsyouth.org.uk/about/our-journey.

[6] Allsorts Youth Project, op. cit..

[7] Home Office, 2013, “Diversity Strategy 2013-2016: Making the Most of Our Diversity”, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/226459/E_D_Strategy_report_v3.PDF.

[8] National Catholic Register, Aug. 22nd 2013, “Gender Identity Debate: When Reality Causes Distress”, http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/gender-identity-debate-when-reality-causes-distress.

[9] Efforts to get the APA to stop calling Gender Identity Disorder a disorder were led by an activist named Kelley Winters, who argued that the diagnosis imposed the “harmful stigma of mental illness and sexual disorder on gender-variant and nonconforming children”. See National Catholic Register, Aug. 22nd 2013, op. cit.

[10] See (1) MassResistance, Jan. 14th 2018, “The terrible fraud of ‘transgender medicine’”, a talk by Quentin Van Meter given in Nov. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mtQ1geeD_c; (2) Human Life International, Feb. 25th 2022, “Gender Dysphoria in the DSM-5: The Change in Terminology”, https://www.hli.org/resources/dsm-5-gender-dysphoria/; (3) National Catholic Register, Aug. 22nd 2013, op. cit.

The activist organisation World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) had lobbied the APA saying that “being a transgender person does not in itself constitute mental illness” (from a letter from WPATH, Aug 15th 2017, https://www.wpath.org/policies), yet it also described procedures such as facial hair removal as “mental health treatments” which were “medically necessary for many transgender patients”, and had disputed the opinion of some insurance companies that this was not the case (see a letter from WPATH dated July 15th 2016, which also referred to WPATH’s Medical Necessity Statement, which described facial hair removal as a “medically necessary sex reassignment procedure” (https://s3.amazonaws.com/amo_hub_content/Association140/files/Letter%20Re_Medical%20Necessity%20of%20Electrolysis_7-15-15.pdf).

See also Clinical Advisor, Nov. 14th 2013, “Understanding the changes in DSM-5”, https://www.clinicaladvisor.com/features/understanding-the-changes-in-dsm-5/article/321035/2/, which states: “Gender dysphoria was included in the [APA] manual to facilitate clinical care and allow access to insurance coverage that supports mental health”.

[11] To be more precise, feminists picked the word “gender” up from the “sexologist” John Money, who had first applied it to human beings by coining the term “gender role” in 1955 to refer to how a person disclosed himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman (David Haig, 2004, “The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles, 1945–2001”, Archives of Sexual Behavior 33 (2), pp. 87-96, quoted in “Gender, Theories of”, Encyclopedia.com, http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gender-theories, p. 91). Presumably John Money just wanted to be different. He might just as well have used the term “sex role”. Money was also the psychologist who advocated that David Reimer, whose penis was cut off accidentally during circumcision, to be raised as a girl. With disastrous results—a textbook case of biology over environment. And he argued that “affectional paedophilia” was not pathological.

[12] George Orwell, “Politics and the English language”, in Orwell 1970 (1968), The Collected Essays: Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 162 (essay first published 1946).

[13] Today’s feminists have given up their old definition of “gender” but have yet to agree on a new one. Possible definitions currently circulating include: (a) a designator of cultural representations and significations, (b) the structure of consciousness, internalised ideology or performative practice, (c) the discursive means by which sexed nature or natural sex is produced and established as prediscursive, namely the process that constructs the internal coherence of sex or the causal force of sex, (d) a feature of subjectivity as a social variable, (e) an obligatory masquerade, (f) an effect of power structures organised in institutions, practices and discourses that regulates and establishes its various shapes and meanings, (g) a hierarchical system that maintains the subordination of females as a class to males through force.  Sources: (1) Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: “Theories of Gender”, 2007, http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/gender-theories; (2) The Other McCain, Feb. 8th 2017, “Transgender Social Contagion”, http://theothermccain.com/2017/02/08/transgender-social-contagion/. These definitions show how clever and sophisticated feminists are, but also how slow in coming to see that “sex and all that goes with it” would suffice as a definition of “gender”.

[14] “Gender identity” is usually defined as a “sense”, often given an air of profundity, as in (1) “one’s deeply held core sense of being male, female, some of both or neither, [which] does not always correspond to biological sex”; (2) “the personal sense of one’s own gender”; (3) “your internal sense of self (male, female, neither, or both)”; and (4) “our deeply held sense of ourselves”; (5) “A person’s internal sense of their own gender”. Sources: (1) American Psychiatric Association, Aug. 2022, “What is Gender Dysphoria?”, https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria; (2) Wikipedia, accessed approx. 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity); (3) East Sussex County Council Children’s Services, Oct. 2014, op. cit.; (4) Guardian, May 23rd 2018, “‘A woman on Wednesdays’? That’s just not how trans self-declaration works”, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/23/woman-wednesdays-transphobic-labour-trans; (5) GOV.UK  (presented to parliament by Penny Mordaunt MP, Minister for Women and Equalities), July 2018, “Reform of the Gender Recognition Act — Government Consultation”, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/721725/GRA-Consultation-document.pdf#page=12.

[15] International Journal of Transgenderism, Dec. 15th 2016, “Language and trans health”, https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/Ethics%20and%20Standards/Language%20Policy.pdf.

[16] Gender Identity Research and Education Society, no date, “Terminology”, http://www.gires.org.uk/resources/terminology/.

[17] Hazel Reeves and Sally Baden, Department for International Development, University of Sussex, Feb. 2000, “Gender and Development: Concepts and Definitions”, Report No 55, https://courseware.cutm.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Gender-and-Development-Concepts-and-Definitions.pdf.

[18] GOV.UK, Feb. 21st 2019, “What is the difference between sex and gender?”, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/what-is-the-difference-between-sex-and-gender.

[19] Office for National Statistics, April 21st 2023, “Sex and gender within the context of data collected for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”, https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/articles/whatisthedifferencebetweensexandgender/2019-02-21.

[20] DSM-4, 1994: http://www.mental-health-today.com/gender/dsm.htm.

[21] DSM-5, 2013: https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria.

[22] National Catholic Register, Aug. 22nd 2013, op. cit.

[23] Especially from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.