I am now caught up, as far as posting these notes for subscribers! I have been working on several long pieces, each about 80% complete. They will appear later this week. Strength & honor everyone, and have a great night.
Spend any time whatsoever in trans spaces and one of the first things you’ll notice is the rampant infantilization.
There are grown adults snuggling with cuddly toys and blaming every kind of negative emotion and social transgression on going through “second puberty” (sorry: still not a thing!). They try to recreate the childhoods and rites of passage they never experienced: giggly sleepovers, bubble-gum pink, sparkly lipgloss and painted nails, truth or dare, learning how to shave and tie ties. They cling to childish hobbies and interests, like Pokémon or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or My Little Ponies, or overidentify with the underage aesthetics of anime. Middle-aged men dress up like schoolgirls, tugging frilly knee socks up over their bony joints and tying bows in their hair.
Trans-identified adults fantasize about do-overs: if only they’d been allowed to transition before puberty struck. Everything would have been different. The fantasy of starting over and blocking puberty helps keep the promise of transition intact when it would otherwise fall apart. Transition didn’t fail because it was a mistake. Transition failed because this pharmaceutical intervention was withheld from me as a child. That, and children make a more appealing face for a movement that struggles with optics. Thus, activists enlist children in an adult cause, trading children’s open futures for talking points and political cover. Activists rally around children and conceal what’s unsavory about the movement behind their innocence.
…
There’s the expectation from many activists that their feelings ought to be handled with kid gloves and—indeed—far too many grown-ups end up placating activists as though they were fussy toddlers.
As is the case with so many of the pieces of discerning writing about this issue reading this made me faintly ill. Most people are starting to hear about the complications and medical malpractice (and abdication of scientific researchers and journalists) regarding youth sex change prescribing and procedures.
But what about the rates of autogynephilia among adult trans-identified men? What about the rates of sexual perversion and criminal offending in this population? What about the behavior of psychopathic men who respond to incentives to label themselves ‘trans’ and therefore gain a new identity or access to women’s and children’s spaces? These are absolutely outstanding issues. I still have read nothing about them in the legacy media.
(The kids-with-smartphones issue is driven by one huge parental rationale: “I want to get a hold of my kids when I need to”. Parents didn’t have this ability for 99.99% of human history, and there are very few instances when it might be useful, even today.
In effect, parents are choosing to soothe their anxiety and their irrational and dysregulated impulses… by pushing the risks and harms onto their kids. They want to be able to text them at any time… so the kids must be poorer students, be more anxious, have access to more explicit content, have worse body image, be more distractible, be more depressed… etc., etc.)
When you’re an early-career scientist working postdoctoral contracts, [DIE dogma] isn’t theoretical – it gets shoved in your face, every day. It was particularly disheartening when I was trying to find a job at the next career stage up, as a tenure-track professor, and being told I had to compromise my integrity and compose a diversity statement first ... with the knowledge that in all likelihood I’d be nevertheless be passed over in favour of the diversity to which I had written the humiliating paean. For the record, I simply refused to do this. That limited my options to the few institutions that didn’t demand obeisance.
I constantly challenge all those (moderate Leftists) who would still rather focus on the Republican party or the ‘far-right’ while remaining silent about the excesses of totalitarian Leftism: is this right? Should someone have to lie and misrepresent their values to be a scientist? Should only people who believe some very specific, fringe (anti-scientific) things about racism and merit and sexism be allowed to be scientists? If your answer is ‘no’ to both of these then you should be against these policies.
The problem is not that people don’t disagree with these rules. The problem is that most people are ambivalent, or cowards. The ambivalent are losing the opportunity to really change their society for the better and the cowardly know exactly who they are and resent the brave every day for being better people than they are.
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Apr. 15 - A Locked Room
I can think of two prominent examples of incoherent contradictions within modern progressivism:
1.) favoring a liberal (open) immigration policy WHILE promoting generous social benefits, single-payer healthcare, housing & unemployment assistance, etc. NO COUNTRY has been able to maintain both (it is literally impossible) and the countries which create a generous social safety net IMMEDIATELY make themselves more restrictive on immigration. If the reasons why aren’t obvious to you please just think about it for 5 minutes… and pretend that you’re a regular working class person (because if you advocate both of these things you’re almost certainly not).
2.) favoring surgeries, prescriptions, and cosmetic procedures to modify primary and secondary sex characteristics for people who identify as trans WHILE advocating for single-payer health systems (where the government pays for all medical care). This betrays a profound understanding of scarcity and other basic economic principles and these two goals would eventually be in tension: ALL countries with single-payer health systems have become deeply skeptical of the GD phenomenon and the claims of trans activists as the rates of disorder have zoomed upwards.
There is simply not enough wealth for all of these things to be achieved simultaneously for very long. People who believe there is are refusing to recognize scarcity and necessary trade-offs.