Transphobia: An Action Pack (Pt. 3)
An authoritative collection of details on what transgender means, the current medical status, public perception and backlash.
Hey, you! Yes, you. Are you normal? You didn’t change gender, or anything? Then you might have heard a lot of barking about those mean-old transes coming for your women and children.
Maybe you’re feeling just a bit intimidated by all? You don’t want to upset anyone. This topic is loud, it’s confusing and you probably feel like if you ask for more information you’ll get yelled at.
Well, I’m here to help, best beloved.
This is for you. It’s an action pack I’ve put together. I’m not going to judge you or your current opinions. What I’m going to do is to lay it all out for you: the different terms, what people are arguing about and why one side actually has a heck of a lot more research and logic going on than the other.
All I ask is that you give me the benefit of the doubt for a little bit while I lay the case before you. We’re going to look at some stuff in serious depth, because you might want a lot of detail! You’re welcome to skip bits, skim them or take them as read depending on what you need.
Entries
Glossary entries
- Gender Identity
- GSM, transgender, trans man, trans woman, cisgender, anti-trans campaigner, biological essentialism, misgendering, deadnaming, dogwhistle
- Stochastic violence, conversion therapy, trans-away-the-gay, rapid onset gender dysphoria (this part!)
- Autogynephilia
The Arguments
- Arguments 1 (Part 5 overall)
“What about the minority who are dangerous?”
“Calm down and stop being hysterical!”
“I’m just asking questions…”
“I’m not transphobic I’m just against extremists!”
“We have concerns but the transes silenced us!”
Some variation on “men”… - Arguments 2 (Part 6 overall)
Linking together gay/drag/sex/kink/abuse/pædophilia
Falling back on accusations of perversion
Using Trans Rights Activists / Lobbyists as a derogatory term
Appealing to “the gut” or common sense
Likening trans people to a contagion - Arguments 3 (Part 7 overall)
An appeal to ‘bringing reality’ into the conversation
- Declaring that sex is ‘baked into every cell in your body’
- Declaring that ‘you cannot change sex’
- Declaring that ‘men will always out-compete women’ in sports
Appealing to protecting women and girls - Arguments 4 (Part 8 overall)
An appeal to “ineffable womanhood”
An appeal to being generally “silenced” or “cancelled”
Any line that starts with “Well why can’t I identify as…”
Appealing to a shared experience that trans women cannot have - More soon!
To make it easier, we’ll need to share some terms. Like a little glossary. It’ll make everything a lot easier. You can review or skip these terms as you like.
Stochastic Violence
“Stochastic” is a synonym for “random”. In political activist circles, “stochastic violence” describes a provocateur riling up a crowd to commit random acts of violence. Or, put more bluntly, it’s famous people really winding up their supports against a group to the point that one of their supporters is likely to pick up a gun.
There are plenty of commenters who do this, and increasingly many politicians, but let’s pick Tucker Carlson as an easy example.
Tucksy’s usual MO is to start with a real story — let’s say, “Drag Queen reads children’s book to 8 year olds”. He will then use the most inflammatory language he can conjure to reframe it: “Cross-dressing man performs in front of children”. It’s not wrong per se, but it’s a disingenuous wording.
Next he’ll throw in some accusations that have no evidence or facts behind them: “Deviant cross-dresser grooms kids with school’s blessing!” It’ll stop short of legally actionable lies, but will rely very heavily on innuendo and implications of something being rotten in the state of Denkmark.
Having created this reverse-Potemkin-village in the minds of his audience, he will then pose questions to his viewers: “is this OK? Is this the America you want to live in? Don’t you care about your children? Something must be done, mustn’t it?” This is an emotional plea for support against whatever outrageousness he is reporting.
Finally, he will make circuitous references to direct action, like “is this what our Founding Fathers fought for? Didn’t we once fight two world wars to protect our children? Where are those brave soldiers and patriots now? Turning in their grave, I suspect! Oh, if only something could be done…”
What Carlson has done is to, metaphorically, lead his audience to the entrance of a gun shop, hand them a “wanted” poster for a designated enemy, reiterate the imminent danger that enemy poses, and then shrug and say “oh well, I guess there’s nothing we can do…” whilst nodding his head toward the shop door.
Technically he hasn’t told anyone to do anything, but in another way… he very much has told them exactly what to do. Then it happens. In 2023, Maine, USA, a mass-shooter killed 18 people and injured 13 in an attack — his media consumption revealed him a hardline adherent to conspiracy theories and Right-wing hate-speech directly peddled by (amongst others) Tucker Carlson. It also happened in Buffalo. And in Philadelphia. And on and on it goes.
That is what we mean when we say “stochastic terrorism”.
Conversion Therapy
Despite enormous evidence, there is a belief, particularly amongst conservative parents and some Christians, that being part of the gender-and-sexual-minority community is deviant behaviour that can be corrected. It is rooted in the idea that there is something intrinsically wrong with the victim that must be resisted and turned away — that being queer or trans is a choice people may make for want of sufficient moral fortitude and/or Jesus-bothering.
This belief also leads to its corollary: they also believe “deviant” behaviours can be “learnt”, that otherwise upstanding, moral people can be tricked and/or corrupted. More on this in a bit.
Conversion Therapy is the process of trying to “de-gay” or “de-trans” a person. It ranges across a massive spectrum of instances, from organising sessions with psychiatrists sympathetic to anti-GSM thinking; through to prayer meetings with religious leaders; to boot camps all the way through to electroshock therapy and, Christ save us, “corrective rape”… which is exactly what it sounds like. In decades gone they even tried lobotomies. You can read for yourself the various processes available here.
For the record, you cannot unlearn being gay or trans. It is part of what you are, and how you do (or do not) engage with and express it is for you to decide. Some people may choose to repress or disengage with this part of themselves, usually to remain part of their religious community. Many who try to do so end up with profound trauma, mental health damage and increased suicidal tendencies.
It’s a little bit like ritually striking a blonde child until they agree they are not blonde, will never be blonde again and will, for the rest of their life, dye their hair in shame and self-loathing at this terrible, monstrous facet of themselves.
AH, YES! SOUNDS HEALTHY, DOESN’T IT?
Trans-Away the Gay
This is the theory that queer people (usually young lesbians) are being coerced into wrongly believing they are transgender because trans people are more socially acceptable than queer people. The belief is that the victims are getting this influence from society, online and from “trans activists” — more on all of those theories in a bit.
It initially started as panic over the number of people in the UK, identified as female at birth, who were applying to the small number of gender identity clinics offered by the NHS. It is a fact that this number went up a lot, and that many of the people would identify themselves as being on the autistic spectrum.
Let’s put this massive increase to scrutiny. There are three things we need to better understand this figure:
Firstly, you can easily find very large percentage increases when looking at small numbers. In this case, the number of young people referred to the Tavistock clinic rose from 97 to 5,000 over 2010–2020 — as a headline, that represents an astonishing 5,000%!
But we must be sober and put that number into perspective, because we’re talking about Very Small Numbers and it’s easy to cause big changes in small numbers.
For example: pretend there is a super-rare tropical illness called ‘Purple Aloysius’. It usually affects 1 person in the UK a year. However, a team from Spudchester University went to study the plants in Papua New Jimmy and all fifty of them caught Purple Aloysius! A person could then say “my God, cases of this rare illness have jumped by 5,000%!”
That startling increase will make a grabbing headline, but belies the fact that there are still only fifty cases. That’s the Mathematics of small numbers and why they need context.
Let us then give that number some context. That 5,000-ish figure of young people represents ~0.0356% of all under 18s in the UK. It has increased, up from ~0.0007%, but it’s still a tiny fraction. Now it doesn’t look like such an imminent crisis, does it? Yes, many of them may be on the spectrum but that doesn’t invalidate who they are; why shouldn’t someone be both trans and autistic? Should we deny a person because we think they might be on the mild-end of the autism spectrum and therefore don’t know any better? That’s a very dangerous path against their bodily autonomy and free-will.
Secondly, we must consider that the number of trans people assigned female at birth, in previous decades, were a small minority. Most people applying to the GICs were assigned male at birth. But, given one might expect “transgenderishness” to apply more evenly across genders, we could suppose that this now larger proportion of assigned-female persons is the numbers balancing themselves for previous under-diagnosis. For full disclosure, I do not have numbers or sample data to back that up, but it is no less valid as a theory than “young women being transed” which also has no proof.
Thirdly, and finally (phew!) we must tackle the idea that people are being “made” trans instead of living as queer people. It’s baloney for many reasons, so here’s a handful from the tub:
- Most trans people are queer. Only a minority of us consider ourselves heterosexual. “The gay” is, therefore, not being “transed away”.
- The idea that trans people are better accepted than queer people is a joke outside of some specific cultural situations in South Asia (eg hijras/ہیجڑا persons in Pakistan). In the UK, 85% of the British public support same-gender marriage, whilst only 41% think I should be allowed to use a women’s washroom.
- Conversion therapy makes almost no distinction between trans and queer: they both are predicated on correcting deviations from expected gender norms. Boys should be manly and into women, and girls should be womenly and into men. Most proponents are no more tolerant of queer people than of trans people. I cannot recommend enough Caelen Conrad’s deep-dive into the Gender Critical movement and its ties to queer conversion therapy. Caelen is not only a superb investigator, they also uncover post after post and forum after forum of parents trying to convert their young-adult offspring.
- Being trans isn’t a one-way street. Less than half of trans people have any kind of surgery (source: Trans Equality survey 2015 of 27,000 people in the USA) and some surgery is at least partially reversible (eg mastectomy vs breast implants). Likewise, hormones cause permanent changes but very few are life-altering. If you’re in the 3% of people who are less satisfied after transition (source: 2022 survey of 90,000 people in the USA) you can detransition. It’s not easy and I won’t pretend it’s not traumatic, but you can change back. The answer to that isn’t to make being trans more difficult, it’s to remove stigma around experimenting so people can truly find what makes them happy without needing to commit and fight so hard to be taken seriously.
Those are the three key reasons why “trans away the gay” is nonsense. It has a close ally in “rapid onset gender dysphoria”, who we will look at next.
Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
A term from a thoroughly discredited and debunked study that implies younger people are being tricked into thinking they are trans through online peer pressure, communities and pornography.
This “study” was derived from parents, who were concerned about their trans kids, self-reporting their feelings online.
If you’re thinking “well, that doesn’t sound like a neutral sample, that sounds kinda biased…?” you would be completely correct. That’s why the “research” is complete pigswill. It’d be like taking the political pulse on immigration from The Daily Stormer (wikipedia), declaring the findings to be “research” and then publishing a paper declaring immigration to be a threat.
The study is uncritically cited by anti-trans campaigners because it validates their gut feelings. They feel like trans-stuff come out of nowhere (it didn’t!), they feel like it spread from online sources and they feel disgusted by it. ROGD allows them to feel entitled to their ideas without fear of guilt that they’re hurting people.
It even extends as far as a prediction amongst UK anti-trans campaigners, dating back to around 2019, that in “the next decade” there will be an avalanche of young women taking action against the NHS for funnelling them into gender-affirming care, rather than challenging them.
…Well, we’re five years into that ten-year prediction and thus far no avalanche. But I’m sure it must be just around the corner, right? Conspiratorial predictions of vindication for outlandish theories are hard to disprove, since the believers will not change their opinion — they’ll just say that they got the dates slightly wrong. See also Q-anon and 7th Day Adventists.
This thinking is the natural endpoint of believing “deviant” behaviour can be “corrected”. If you believe it can be unlearnt, then logically you must also believe it is possible to “learn” in the first place. This is what anti-GSM campaigners mean when they say “grooming”, they define it as “one person letting another (especially a young person) think it could ever be OK to be queer or trans”. The fact it has a direct connotation to pædophilia is a lucky coincidence.
For the record, you cannot learn to be gay or trans. You are what you are, and we all must learn to muddle through in a way that feels best to us.
This is part of a multi-part series. New additions will appear when they are ready. All images used were created using DALL-E 3 via OpenAI. Use them if you like, AI sucks and should go in the bin.
