I think many, probably the majority of people believe that the current expansion of trans identification among the young is an organic development and that the movement for trans rights comes from grass roots activism. At least some of the massive increase in young people, particularly young women, identifying as members of the opposite sex seems to be a psychological contagion like the rise of anorexia and eating disorders among girls and young women back in the 1970s. Gender critical feminists have also suggested that natural feelings of awkwardness and fear of the degrading sex acts in contemporary pornography may also be behind it. Many adolescent girls are embarrassed or feel awkward about their developing breasts and the sexual attention they get from boys and their periods. They may also be terrified of what they see in pornography with women beaten and strangled. One of the gender critical feminists speaking on YouTube said that fifty per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 had been strangled during sex. This is an alarming statistic, if true. Children are being exposed to pornography through the internet at increasingly younger ages. So, it is argued, some young women try to escape from these awkward, uncomfortable aspects of femininity and frightening, sadistic sex by believing that they are really men.
But there are also very powerful corporate forces behind the trans movement. There’s a considerable amount of funding from various lobby groups as well as pharmaceutical companies and activist lawyers. For example, it’s been claimed that the company that produces lupron, used as puberty blocker for trans-identified children, has given a very generous donation to the Lib Dems. A few years ago a document emerged from Denton’s, an international company of lawyers, about how to introduce pro-trans legislation into governments around the world. This advised activists to keep very quiet about what they were doing. There was to be no publicity. Instead, the legislation was to be tacked on to genuinely popular government motions. This is happened in countries like Spain, Iceland and Scotland, where various gender recognition acts, in which women are defined according to mental/psychological identification rather than biological reality, were added to popular measures legalising gay marriage. Gender critical feminists have remarked that these tactics are the exact opposite of what popular reforming movements have done in the past. The gay rights movement, for example, wanted people to know about them and to understand what they were campaigning for. But Denton’s didn’t, and so showed that they, at least, believed that trans rights weren’t popular. Of course, against this is the pro-trans stance of the mainstream gay organisations like Stonewall and so on. From Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex’s point of view, medical transition is immensely lucrative. Doctors and clinics performing the treatment are paid very well, and the side-effects of the treatment may mean that many trans people need supportive medical care for the rest of their lives. The surgery itself has a 30 per cent failure rate, which is absolutely unacceptable anywhere else in medicine, so that patients need corrective surgery. Once this is done, they need to be kept on cross-sex hormones, which may have detrimental effects on bone density and the heart. Many transmen need to have hysterectomies after being placed on testosterone. This is not because they want the surgery done, but because the hormone causes the uterus to atrophy and stick to the body cavity. The result is extremely painful. And there is the related criticism that the groups demanding better healthcare for trans people aren’t interested in improving these aspects of their treatment. What they want is the expansion of medical transition.
I’ve started watching an interview on YouTube with Benjamin Boyce and K. Yang. It’s two hours or so long, so it might be some time before I see all of it. Yang’s a New York based gay rights activist and was a fervent supporter of trans rights until she became disillusioned. The video’s title is about how activists are carrying water for the corporations. If this is true, then it means that the idealistic people campaigning for trans people are being cynically used by big businesses whose only real concern is the profit margin.
Tags: Anorexia, Assault, Benjamin Boyce, Children, Corporate Donations, Denton's, Feminism, Gay Rights, Gays, K. Yang, Lawyers, Lib Dems, Lobby Groups, New York, Pharmaceutical Companies, Pornography, Stonewall, Transgendered People, Women, Youtube
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
December 16, 2022 at 1:22 pm |
Careful. Starmer will have you chucked out if he saw this- not so much for the trans-critical side, but for the assertion that “big corporate forces…promoting transgender craze” may sound to him like the BS conspiracies about “The JeWs promote hOmoSeXuAlIty!”
December 16, 2022 at 2:12 pm |
Oh, he won’t like the trans critical stuff either. This is the man who refused to answer the question whether women have cervixes and shouted that it was a question that shouldn’t be asked. Apparently at one meeting he said that if he gets in, he’ll make it compulsory to use people’s preferred pronouns. And gender critical gays are worried about his proposed ban on conversion therapy as it look likes the trans activists ‘transing the gay away’.
December 16, 2022 at 7:28 pm
If Starmer makes it compulsory to use people’s preferred pronouns, I can see a lot of Labour supporters switching to Reclaim, Reform, Ukip or SDP by 2028 (the next-bar-one election).
December 16, 2022 at 9:00 pm
The anti-trans activist Kelly-Jay Keen has announced that she’s going to stand against him at the next election. She doesn’t expect she’ll win, but she does want to use the occasion to raise the issue of the way trans rights impact on women. As for the preferred pronouns, this was the issue that launched Jordan Peterson on his career as international conservative intellectual. Canada was considering passing a law demanding people use trans people’s preferred pronouns. Peter said that he’d defy the law, though he also added that if one of his students was trans and wanted him to address them by the pronoun of the opposite biological sex, he’d go along with it.
December 19, 2022 at 2:16 pm
Re Peterson- I didn’t think it was anti-trans stuff that launched his career- it was anti-feminism more broadly (see also Sargon of Ukip).
December 19, 2022 at 2:27 pm
You’re right, but the anti-trans stuff was part of it as well.
December 19, 2022 at 2:32 pm
Peterson is a misogynistic horror.
December 19, 2022 at 3:12 pm
He’s very anti-feminist, which is why the Lotus Eaters like him. I don’t know if you saw them, but after he made some strange remark comparing humans to lobsters in our evolutionary history there were a load of videos showing him sprouting the crustaceans.
December 17, 2022 at 11:46 am |
What sort of numbers are we talking about here? What proportion of the population identify as trans as opposed to the proportion who identify as gay or lesbian? I don’t recall the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 being followed by this degree of public angst. Your suggestion that the whole thing has been ramped up by commercial interests for base motives has something going for it. One of these base motives might be simply to distract attention from more immediate and genuinely pressing political issues!
December 19, 2022 at 2:17 pm |
In much the same as the Tories plugged the Rwanda Plan to distract from their, er, “insincerities” over Partygate!
December 19, 2022 at 2:35 pm |
The actual number of people identifying as trans has expanded immensely even though, compared to the rest of the population, it’s still very low. Before trans rights was being pushed, there only about four or five cases a year, and these were mostly men. Now it’s in the thousands and they’re mostly female. The new gender clinic they’re planning to replace the Tavistock is planned to have 200 plus beds. And if we’re talking about percentages of the population, trans people are a small percentage of the gay population, which is about 6 per cent of the general population. Which means that there shouldn’t really be the numbers to demand that the definition of woman, for example, should be changed or that Starmer can’t say that women have cervixes. Nor that some hospitals should refer to mothers in childbirth as ‘birthing people’.
As far as I can make out, it’s the anti-trans movement that’s grassroots, not the trans movement. GB News and the rest may be pushing the issue as a distraction from the Tories’ troubles, but it didn’t start with them. Kelly-Jay Keen started out on the socialist left, but rebelled when she started getting criticism and then abuse simply for asking reasonable questions about the issue. That’s why she says that many women feel let down by the Labour party.
December 19, 2022 at 5:16 pm
It seems to me that Starmer has jumped on this bandwagon in rather the way that Labour right-winger Roy Hattersley jumped on the “abolish all public schools” bandwagon – thinking, no doubt, that this wd give him socialist credibility but well aware that there was not a cat’s chance in hell of anything being done about it. Plus Starmer has shown no respect for the democratic will of the membership – expelling an elected member of the NEC from the party – and no evidence that he will keep any promises he may make. Remember how he secured the leadership by lying to members.
If the numbers of transsexuals involved are indeed so small, then it is clear that the impetus is not coming from transsexuals, but, as you say, from sinister corporate forces, possibly hoping that Starmer will take further steps to make his party unelectable. As to defining gender on public documents, I see no harm in including “male transsexual” and “female transsexual” among the boxes to be ticked, but some campaigners – and Starmer? – seem to be intent on allowing people to misrepresent their biological gender, which is patently ridiculous and creates an ugly precedent. Regarding toilets, remember Malcolm X’s comments on desegregated public toilets: “Hallelujah! Now you can sit down with the white folks – on the toilet!” In other words, he considered toilets to be a very minor issue in a political context. I suppose if push came to shove most pubs and cafes could be required to supply a single loo marked “Trans”. There’s hardly likely to be a queue!