More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes.
I wondered if she knew that sexists often say they would have listened to women if only they had stated their demands more nicely and politely, and whether she realised that once she is no longer young and beautiful, the same sorts of things will be said about her, too.
Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed.
In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul.
In no society – anywhere, ever – have people been oblivious to the sex of those around them, and certainly not in situations involving nakedness or physical contact.
in all societies – everywhere, always – the overwhelming majority of violence, sexual assault and harassment suffered by female people has been perpetrated by male ones. Single-sex spaces exist for these reasons, not to prop up privilege or pander to prejudice. And it is logically impossible to admit people of one sex to spaces intended for the other while keeping them single-sex.
Most people are in the dark about what is being demanded by transactivists. They understand the call for ‘trans rights’ to mean compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity. I, alongside every critic of gender-identity ideology I have spoken to for this book, am right behind this.
A liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else.
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.
there is copious evidence of a strong link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality.
I think it is deeply unkind to force female athletes to compete against males, and a scandal to sterilise children. These things are happening partly because of an admirable, but poorly thought-out, sense of compassion for trans people.
This compassion is, not coincidentally, mostly demanded of women, who are socialised to put their own needs last and punished more severely than men when they refuse to comply.
The share with traits suggestive of an autistic-spectrum disorder is much higher than in the general population. These traits include dissociative feelings, which can be misinterpreted as gender dysphoria, and rigid thinking, which can lead someone to conclude that deviating from sex stereotypes makes a person trans.
According to the ancient ‘one-sex model’, men and women were essentially similar, except that women’s reproductive anatomy was inverted and inferior. Women have ‘exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places’, wrote Galen, a Greek physician of the second century.
And if altering superficial characteristics such as dress, presentation and behaviour is understood as moving someone along a sex spectrum, then a woman who rejects those stereotypes is making herself less of a woman, rather than demonstrating that they are unnecessary to womanhood.
‘But traditional, non-Western frameworks for understanding masculine women or feminine men as “third genders” are often warped when viewed through a Western lens, which reinterprets them as transwomen or transmen. It’s a type of colonialism.’
It would indeed be natural that someone whose body did not match their gender identity fantasised about having the right body. But if gender identity is not sexual in origin, then there is no reason those fantasies should be erotic. They also tend to continue post-transition, strengthening the conclusion that they constitute a paraphilia rather than a coping mechanism.
Moreover, autogynephiles often eroticise aspects of womanhood that most women dislike, such as menstruation, undergoing intimate medical examinations, experiencing sexism or wearing uncomfortable clothes. ‘Forced feminisation’ – someone making a man cross-dress or undergo sex-reassignment surgery – is a staple of transgender erotica. Quite a few of Lawrence’s informants say they would find it shameful to be a woman, and that this turns them on. ‘Experiencing the daily humiliation and degradation of being a woman, forced to wear women’s clothes and lipstick, is extremely attractive to me,’
...more
‘If a guy decides he’s coming to work as a woman from now on, it’s one thing for him to say: “I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’ve always been a woman inside,” and quite another to say: “I’ve moved on from just masturbating in women’s clothes to wearing them all the time.” ’
This explains why such rage is mostly directed at women, even though it is men who commit almost all anti-trans harassment and violence. Blanchard’s observations of extremist transactivism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynephiles. Their anger results from ‘envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them’, he has tweeted. ‘They direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant.’
Lawrence adds another piece to the puzzle of transactivist rage. She posits that autogynephilia’s inwardly directed nature, and the frustrations attendant on requiring others to validate your cross-sex identity, mean that the condition co-occurs with narcissistic disorders more often than would happen by chance. And narcissists often respond to minor slights with disproportionate rage. It is not hard to find evidence of ‘narcissistic personality traits, including a sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and lack of empathy’ in the attacks on Bailey, she writes in a 2008 paper entitled ‘Shame and
...more
In our computerised age, mind is imagined as software running on the brain’s hardware. Unsurprisingly, this idea has an intuitive appeal for those who believe that a true self may be housed in a body of the wrong sex.
The truth is that we are our bodies, and our bodies are our selves.
Within applied postmodernism, objectivity is essentially impossible. Logic and reason are not ideals to be striven for, but attempts to shore up privilege. Language is taken to shape reality, not describe it. Oppression is brought into existence by discourse. Equality is no longer achieved by replacing unjust laws and practices with new ones that give everyone the chance to thrive, but by individuals defining their own identities, and ‘troubling’ or ‘queering’ the definitions of oppressed groups.
It is a feeble form of dualism, to be sure: the grandeur of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ replaced by ‘they/them’ on a pronoun badge.
The great difficulty for this philosophy is getting other people to accept identities that are entirely subjective and have no physical correlate.
If you want everyone to accept gender-identity ideology, they must be persuaded that sexed bodies are not material, and that gender identities are.
Deconstruction is supposed to free the members of a subordinate class from subjugation within a binary – and I suppose it does, in a purely linguistic sense. But it is freedom at a high price: denial that the subordinated class even exists in any clearly defined way.
The two elements of a binary, in other words, can continue to describe the same distinct groups as they always did, while being stripped of the associations and interpretations that situate one group as dominant and the other as subordinate. Such work is essential to imagining a better future, for women and every other group on the wrong side of a binary. But queer theory does none of it. Instead, because of gender-identity ideology, the quest for the liberation of people with female bodies has arrived at an extraordinary position: that they do not even constitute a group that merits a name.
When Richard Green and others first studied them in the 1970s and 1980s, no clinician believed their feelings actually made them members of the opposite sex, or dreamed of treating them with drugs or surgery. They simply sought to predict how those children would feel as adults. And every study pointed to the same conclusion: they were pretty likely to grow up gay, and very unlikely to still identify as or want to be members of the opposite sex. There was no such thing as a ‘trans child’ in the sense of one who could be identified as certain, or even highly likely, to grow up to be a trans
...more
Far more plausible is that puberty blockers, as well as blocking the physical changes that puberty brings, also blocked the developmental process whereby gender dysphoria often resolves.
Both social transition and puberty blockers are presented to parents as easily reversible. But in reality, they are the early stages of what physicians call a ‘cascade of intervention’.
Pre-pubescent children easily pass as the opposite sex, and after socially transitioning may give little thought to their true sex for years. When adolescence beckons, they become distressed and agitate for puberty blockers. And, as much clinical experience now shows, that is an almost sure route to cross-sex hormones. So parents who socially transition their children are fast-tracking them to medical and surgical transition, all the while believing that such decisions are many years away.
In 2020 Trinity Neal, a sixteen-year-old male child in Delaware, had genital sex-reassignment surgery paid for by Medicaid.
Zucker was cast as a reactionary for recommending that pre-pubertal children did not transition socially, but were instead supported to become comfortable in their own sex, and progressed to drugs and social transition only in adolescence. There are still clinicians who follow this approach, he says, but they keep a low profile because they don’t want to be ‘terrorised’.
In 2020 the National Institute for Care and Health Excellence (NICE), the official body tasked with assessing the effectiveness of treatment options within Britain’s National Health Service, produced reviews of the evidence for prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for childhood and adolescent gender dysphoria. It ranked the standard of evidence as ‘very low’ in every category it considered. Every single study that found any benefit for puberty blockers, it concluded, ‘could represent changes that are either of questionable clinical value, or the studies themselves are not
...more
One paper, published in January 2020 in Pediatrics, a high-impact journal, claims that puberty blockers make it less likely that a person will consider suicide. But an analysis by Michael Biggs of Oxford University published a few months later in Archives of Sexual Behavior (the journal edited by Ken Zucker) shows that it is catastrophically flawed. The analysis is based on data extracted from a low-quality, non-representative online survey. No attempt was made to ensure that respondents were in America, or to stop people responding repeatedly (each response was entered into a prize draw).
The misrepresentations are egregious. ‘Remarkably, not only did the AAP statement fail to include any of the actual outcomes literature on such cases, but it also misrepresented the contents of its citations, which repeatedly said the very opposite of what the AAP attributed to them,’
The lack of decent research and misrepresentation of findings mean gender affirmation cannot even be described as a risky experiment on children, since ‘experiment’ implies someone, somewhere, is tracking outcomes and comparing them with other options.
a mortality rate of over one percent for a treatment given to healthy children is sobering.
But very surprisingly, puberty blockers have never been put through clinical trials for use in gender medicine, and are not licensed by their manufacturers for this purpose. Their main uses are to treat hormone-related conditions in adulthood, in particular endometriosis and prostate cancer, and to ‘chemically castrate’ sex offenders. The two studies that looked at what happened when they were used to delay puberty in animals suggested this caused defects in spatial memory and increased behaviours thought to be analogous to depression in humans.
The drugs stop calcium being laid down in bones, and studies suggest a significant drop in IQ.
American women treated in childhood for precocious puberty are suing the manufacturer of one puberty blocker, Lupron, alleging that it caused brittle bones, mental problems and chronic pain.
Many people are unaware of the impact of missing puberty on fertility. They read articles about transmen giving birth, and do not understand that those transmen must have experienced much or all of female puberty before starting testosterone. Or they hear mention of ‘fertility preservation’ – the extraction and storage of eggs and sperm – before sex-reassignment surgery and do not realise that without at least partial puberty, there will be no eggs or sperm that can be preserved.
cramps. Transmen who decide to go through female puberty and retain their sex organs to keep open the option of pregnancy may find they soon need a hysterectomy for medical reasons.
For transwomen, yet another downside of blocking puberty is that it keeps the genitals child-sized. This means there is too little skin for standard sex-reassignment procedures.
And finally, the cross-sex hormones to which early social transitioning almost inevitably leads come with their own risks. For transmen, they are associated with higher risks of cardiovascular problems, including high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke, dementia in later life, liver problems, diabetes and joint problems. Less is known about the impact on transwomen, but low testosterone is known to cause fatigue, brittle bones and high cholesterol levels in biological males, and taking oestrogen is likely to raise their risk of some cancers, including breast cancer.
All in all, gender affirmation not only locks in persistence but creates trans adults who have lost fertility and sexual function, and exposed themselves to unknown health risks, in return for passing better. And those trade-offs are being made, not by adult trans people in full awareness of the risks, but in childhood, when parents and clinicians decide to socially transition children, or give them puberty blockers, without anyone acknowledging where this is almost certain to lead.
Horrifying statistics are thrown around without context. Once you search for sources, they fall apart. Take, for example, an endlessly repeated figure of forty-eight percent for the share of young trans people who have attempted suicide. It turns out to be based on the responses of twenty-seven British trans people in a larger survey promoted on LGBT websites. Not only is the number of respondents tiny, but there is no reason to think they are typical (if you want to find out something about a whole population, you must construct a representative sample).
In 2019, after some staff at the Tavistock raised concerns that children were being fast-tracked to transition, an internal review passed to Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship investigative programme, concluded that parents who preferred their child to be trans and straight, rather than ‘cis’ and gay, played a significant role in some referrals. Two clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that soon ‘there would be no gay people left.’
