“Operation Looking-Glass,” or, Why Loopy Trans-Allies Should Be Kept Out of Reach of Children

Rob McGee
Rob McGee
Jul 10, 2017 · 6 min read

[Note: The following includes quotations from more than one comment by the same author — the above Brendon Carpenter — and arranged in a pleasing and logical sequence as I saw fit.]

Parents have a right to provide their trans children with sexual reassignment treatment.

Some would argue that if a 15-year-old is unhappy and conflicted about having homosexual feelings, parents should have not have a right to “opt their child in” to so-called reparative therapy — the assumption is that such therapy is so rarely effective that the helping the child come to terms with being non-hetero is the more rational choice. (Personally, I tend to support bans on reparative therapy for minors, as long as the bans are not written so broadly as to outlaw “gay-teen abstinence” programs. No child, straight or gay, has ever come to grief by deferring sexual experimentation for a few more years.)

Surgery of course should always be given serious consideration.

Yes, one should seriously consider not doing the surgery at all — certainly not on a minor — because while the effects of early hormone treatments may be partly reversible so long as you don’t mind the trifling side-effect of lifelong infertility, there’s no way to reverse a hysterectomy, or the removal of ovaries or testes.

When we are able to grow sexual organs, it will be easier to come to terms with these surgeries for children, because surgeries will be reversible.

Brendon, you display a lack of attention to plausibility and realism that makes Star Wars look like “hard sci-fi.” Replacing a surgically-constructed neo-vagina with a grafted-on, vat-grown neo-phallus is not really the same thing as “reversing the surgery.” Even if the results are cosmetically acceptable — sort of — there are likely to be certain functional differences from a natural penis.

At any rate, we can only hope that these laboratory-made sexual organs never escape into the wild…

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a dick,” thought Alice. “But a dick without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!”

Lewis Carroll was AWARE that he was writing nonsense. That was the point.

If parents do not agree their children should be treated, then there should be an age set in which children should be able to receive treatment without their consent. 18 years old is not that age limit, because as adulthood approaches for males, testosterone has already made most of its changes on our bodies. Similar processes occur for the female-bodied. It is too late to modify one’s body convincingly to match one’s gender identity.

“Convincingly”?! I understand that some late-transitioning MtFs are self-conscious about the fact that they’ve got broad shoulders and prominent Adam’s apples and big square jaws and hair everywhere that has to be lasered off at great expense — preferably at the great expense of other taxpayers and insurance-buyers.

But since you’ve repeatedly argued that gender is merely a social construct, and proclaim “genderfluidity” as a cultural ideal, you should presumably be willing to insist that it’s perfectly all right for a self-identified woman with XY chromosomes to have sandpaper-y facial stubble and still be a woman. Why oh why, then, would you think it’s urgently important to start a 13-year-old kid on opposite-sex hormones just so that the child will “pass better” as an adult? Millions and millions of teenagers manage to survive until age 18 even though their bodies are totally gross, and millions and millions of adults eventually come to terms with the fact that they will never be convincing as centerfold-models, no matter what they might claim in online dating profiles.

At any rate, grown-up biological males with roundish hips, feminine jawlines, and no facial hair are perfectly commonplace, so it seems to me that grown-up “transmen” who have the same features and proportions — because they went through a normal female puberty and didn’t start on testosterone until after age 18 — are in pretty much the same boat.

So the take-home message I’m getting is that your opinions have been heavily shaped by the grievances of late-transitioning men who aren’t quite believable as women, except perhaps at a distance of 20 feet with a soft-focus lens — and that so-called TERFs may be correct in complaining that the trans movement is largely driven by the personal obsessions of these very same “autogynephiles.”

Once we have machine wombs, and mass-produced consumer wombs, and human reproduction can be entirely isolated from individual humans, will there be any more reason for females alone to be encouraged to be nurturing and empathetic?

Brendon, to be strictly accurate about it, we already have “mass-produced consumer wombs” — they’re called “Third World Women” whose economic prospects are so dismal that they hire themselves out as surrogates for wealthy First World couples, with the understanding that the mother who carried the child for nine months is contractually obliged to sign away her parental rights and never see the kid again. Hooray for progress!

No, but seriously, let us examine your “mass-produced consumer womb” idea a little further. When the thermostat fails on a mass-produced consumer bread machine, you end up with an inedible loaf that gets chucked in the trash. If a completely hypothetical “Grow-A-Kidney” machine that you picked up at Best Buy happens to malfunction, you end up with a non-functional kidney that you chuck in the trash or cut up and grill as a treat for the dog.

However, if something goes wrong with a “mass-produced consumer womb,” you end up with a dead baby — or a child who’s born alive, but with serious birth defects. In other words, gestating a baby in a machine-womb from conception to birth requires a level of ultra-precise Quality Control that in all likelihood will never, EVER be attainable under “home user” conditions. If “sperm-to-full-term” machine gestation ever becomes a reality, the process will necessarily be done in highly specialized laboratories and closely monitored by expert technicians.

(Incidentally, since you’ve written elsewhere about the ecological crisis of human overpopulation, I’m not sure why you’d be so giddy about the prospect of a technology that would allow us to produce new babies at a rate in excess of what can be achieved by the “traditional method.”)

Anyway, I had wondered earlier why you’re on this particular mission, and you explained:

I have a moral responsibility to compensate for the harmful ideas I put into the heads of so many wonderful people in northeastern Brazil. I hope to spend my life spreading respect for tolerance and reason to atone.

If you really feel the need to atone for whatever the hell it was you did in northeastern Brazil, perhaps you should spend more time debunking The Book of Mormon in Portuguese, and less time scolding English speakers that using “he” for a male-to-female transsexual is an act of oppressive violence.

And when you’re peddling hormones and the scalpel for children who feel unhappy with their bodies, and who lack the intellectual and emotional maturity to understand the long-term consequences of “medical transitioning” and the limits on what such procedures can achieve; and when you resort to naive World Of Tomorrow fantasy to help sell the idea — honestly, dude, maybe you should back to telling Brazilians that Joseph Smith found a new revelation from Christ on some gold plates buried in New York.

Rob McGee

Written by

Rob McGee

Openly homosexual man, but “gay” sounds stupid. Anti-anal, pro-Frot. Bible-believing atheist. Non-Randroid libertarian. Can “гаварить па-рюсски” a little.

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