This is an excellent, thoughtful piece. It speaks to many of my personal concerns. I am NOT cis-female. I’m a 70ish female. I recognize that I’ll be judged as transphobic but I’m sick and tired of the tip of the tail wagging the dog. And an observation - changing your sex does not change your brain. Confront the issues which are giving you pain rather than thinking that an external change will fix everything.
Actually, no human changes sex. By definition, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither are thereby sexless. And medical science hasn't advanced to the point of allowing people to change one set of gonads into the other.
But Google "female definition"; note that the only coherent and honest definition is the one from Google & OED:
"female (adjective): of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes."
Similar definition from same source for "male":
"male (adjective): of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring."
I agree but unfortunately the divisive rhetoric will not end until universities stop receiving funding to publish inaccurate research that fuels the false debate on this issue.
So would you agree that if all the gender studies and related academic departments in Canada were defunded tomorrow, people like the former president of Valbella Gourmet Foods in Canmore would stop accusing Pride organizers of grooming children?
The first step would be to acknowledge that Gender Studies is an emerging Social Science without foundation. It’s not legit. As such, taxpayers shouldn’t be funding it.
Have to disagree with you, Tara. I have no problem with Gender Studies being an area of Social Studies. What I have a problem with is the idea that Gender Studies is an area of Biology.
We actually are agreeing here. This placement in Social Sciences however is unfortunate as there is equally no basis for it in this area as well. What universities have it under Social Studies?
Precious little science or even scientific method in much if not all of "gender studies", or "women studies" for that matter.
ICYMI, a great article by Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico on the "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender". Been a while since I read it, but this passage describes the profound differences in the definitions for the sexes used in the "social sciences" versus the standard definitions of biology:
"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense indefinite] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense indefinite] large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
As for "Women Studies", see this passage from a review of Koertge's & Patai's "Professing Feminism":
"The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
And one of the authors of the book, Noretta Koertge had a rather damning philosophy paper of her own on “the feminist repudiation of logic”:
"A responsible academic advisor should actively encourage those who lack confidence to stick with courses like logic and mathematics instead of falling prey to old stereotypes about women lacking the aptitude for abstract, linear thinking. Unfortunately, the predominant feminist response has been to attack logic and other traditional canons of rationality as sexist. ….
I wish I could end the story of the feminist critique of logic on this happy note. Unfortunately, however, some feminists have claimed that not just the homework exercises but the very enterprise of characterizing the formal structure of logical inference cannot be separated from sexism, racism, and totalitarianism. And in her new book, 'Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic', Nye concludes that while men are master of logic, women are more inclined to be masters [pic] of reading (p. 184). If Nye is right, women students would be well-advised to stay away from logic classes. The skills that logic purports to teach are socially deleterious [!] and thank goodness women have little aptitude from them."
Right. And would you say that legislation like Florida's 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act is a logical, proportionate, and necessary response to the spread of ideas from illegitimate social sciences like gender studies?
I live in Canada as well - Alberta-born and raised, in fact. I raised the Florida legislation only because Stratton himself does: "some jurisdictions want to ban any mention of gays, lesbians and trans people from schools, which would directly discriminate against kids from LGBT families, and implicitly reinforce the shame of self-hate of closeted students."
Stratton also claims that academic work is responsible for the populist backlash: "This populist backlash, the outcome of imposed elite academic theory, threatens to destroy generations of hard-won social capital for minority communities."
Since you seem to agree - given your comment that "the divisive rhetoric will not end until universities stop receiving funding to publish inaccurate research that fuels the false debate on this issue" - I was just curious how you see this playing out. Once the useless university departments are defunded, why will the alt-right stop harassing Pride organizers?
who knows? Outrageous people do abominable things all the time. I can't predict the future, but I can support the notion to call for accountability for where and what our tax payer dollars fund. Academia is at the core and the root of many illegitimate theories and constructs that are now being legitimized by government institutions, the medical community and big business. The backlash is predictable which is why Stratton was right to mention it. What I am merely suggesting, is that the one thing that we can control, is wasteful spending on institutions offering illegitimate courses based on nothing more than fear and constructs being dreamed up by some Sociologists looking for quick rich schemes. There is no place for that in our publicly funded institutions. Focus on what we can control first.
Hey Michael, I may be ignorant to the Florida law - the way I understand it is they have legislated against public schools talking about sexuality or gender identity from grades 3 down. Is there more here I am missing?
As a fellow Canuck you may have some interest in what I had submitted to Statistics Canada in response to their call for "consultation on gender and sexual diversity statistical metadata standards”:
Google Drive link in the article which discusses three "Statistics Departments Corrupted by Gender Ideology" - Britain's, New Zealand's, and Canada's own.
Or Literary Traditions or Time Travel and Narrative or Monster Encounters: Monsters and the Monstrous in Literature or Tree Stories or Old English Language and Literature or Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing or Queer Writing or English Renaissance Literature or Medieval Literature -- all at U of T.
Thank-you for finally addressing this topic! I have been standing in front of women's prisons for two years now, protesting the incarceration of intact males alongside women. I have written to my MP on 4 separate occasions about the prison issue and he/his office have never responded. Perhaps this brick wall that I've been smashing my head against is softening?
I do wish you had been able to go more into the harm to women posed by public autogynephilia (i.e. the social and legal pressure currently placed on women to participate in a male sexual fantasy, regardless of their consent), but I realized the darker side of AGP may be too deep a rabbithole for newcomers to the terf wars.
I am disappointed to see The Line run this article. This article doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said by hundreds of keyboard activists and dozens of Quilette articles. It even contains the standard line that this is somehow the fault of "imposed elite academic theories". It's not worth it to ask what theories, who is pushing them or how exactly academics have succeeded in imposing their theories because this line of argument is all a house of cards. If you want to place the blame somewhere it should be on the organizations/bureaucracies/governments that care more about saving face and good PR than conceptual clarity. THAT would be an interesting article read.
I disagree - I have read the Quillette articles but I found this to be a useful overview. I am really looking forward to the authors views on how we back out of this mess because there are thousands of articles on how everything is going to hell - but not many about how we get back on track. Looking at US alt right media I can confirm that true open homophobia has taken off in reaction to some of the. Izard excesses of the trans movement in relation to children. I think lawsuits will cool the rhetoric - but as a society we need to figure out how ‘the tip of the dog’s tail’ (great expression) was allowed to get a stranglehold on all our institutions.
I have listened to an interview on Trish Wood is Critical with a lady named Jennifer Bilek. She says it stems from and is funded by a billionaire transgender woman/man with the last name Phrizker who at one time was also a Lt. Col. in the US Army. Big Tech is also involved so there is plenty of money flowing into the trans world. There is also a in an article that Jennifer Bilek wrote in the Tablet called Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities. Just some more follow the money information.
I think it should be easy. Some things (jail, change rooms etc.) should be divided by sex which, in humans is 99.98% (either XX or XY). For those who are intersex they should go where there external genitalia indicates. For other things, we can use gender rather than sex and anyone can be whatever. When those who chose have their external genitalia changed then they call follow the rules for intersex.
As someone who wants to do and say things that do not hurt people, yet, who has not a deep tolerance for nonsense, I am looking forward to the next installment from this sensible writer.
This’ll be one hell of a comment but I really like The Line and I have a lot to say about this. I have a lot of problems with the article but I wanna go over some of the sources used in the article in hopes of showing how flawed the general argument is.
The first source claims that the UK's main NHS clinic for transitioning: Tavistock may be sued by over 1000 families whose children were rushed into transitioning at a young age. That number comes from the lawyer who is suing the clinic. The clinic retorts that “around 1,000 patients have been referred to its endocrinology teams, to access hormone suppressants, over the past decade.” In addition in the UK for a trans teenager to get HRT the NHS requires that they be 16 years old and be on hormone suppressants for a year. That means that more or less every teenager who started their medical transition would be included in the clinic's figure. Therefore for the lawyer's number to be correct, almost every single person who was given treatment by the clinic would need to sue them. Or maybe the lawyer just pulled the number out of their ass to draw attention?
The next source I would like to mention is the article by the bbc linked to when the author said that “those who refuse sex with women who have a penis are transphobic.” That BBC article was widely condemned for the only data in the article being from a group “Get The L Out” whose mission statement includes stopping as many people from transitioning as possible, and not respecting their identities. In addition the article says that they reached out to prominent trans people but they didn’t want to talk to them, but this was a lie because they interviewed Chelsea Poe and then cut her interview from the story. In addition when the article was originally published the main source was Lily Cade who talked about how she was being pressured into sex with trans women. But Lily Cade admitted to sexually assault! Ironic that an article about about pressuring women into sex didn’t mention that one of their sources raped someone. The BBC is a serious outlet though so they quietly cut that part of the article without acknowledging they made a mistake.
Next the author wrote that “Male sex offenders have suddenly self-identified as women and been put in women’s prisons on sentencing.” I read the source and have no problems saying that the trans woman in the article is a terrible person who deserves to rot in jail. However, saying that they suddenly identified as a woman is blatantly false since the person mentioned in the article was in the process of transitioning for three to five years prior to going to jail. This is not a case of someone transitioning in bad faith in order to game the system. And if this is the best case the author can come up with then maybe we should just conclude that people don’t transition in bad faith.
After that the article mentions Lia Thomas just as every article like this does. There’s a common misconception that Lia Thomas was a bad swimmer before she transitioned but that can’t be further from the truth. In Lia’s freshman year, when she still competed on the men's team and before she was on HRT, she had the 6th fastest national time in the 1000m free. Once she transitioned her performance dropped drastically. Then once the bar for her to compete on the women's team was cleared she placed only slightly better on the women's team in her junior year than she did on the men's team in her freshman year. If she didn’t transition she would still be a phenomenal swimmer. I don’t have too much else to say about Thomas but one other point I would like to make is that it seems like articles like this one seem to focus on people like Lia Thomas and not at all on people like Fischer Wells who is a 13 year old trans girl who rallied her classmates to make a girls field hockey team. She played in one season before the state said it was illegal for Fischer (the only trans girl who played sports in the entire state) to play on a school sports team with her friends.
Finally I wanna give a shout out to the source for when the author quotes someone who said “Women and girls who are trans are biological women and girls.” If you click the link to that it will bring you to a tweet by the city of Toronto from April 2021 saying who was eligible to get vaccinated. I have no doubts the tweet the author referenced is real. I'm just analyzing the sources and I thought that slip up was funny.
I went into this article hoping for nuance but that wasn’t what I found. I analyzed the sources that the article used because every single time this topic is discussed they use the exact same sources. It wasn’t just that but it was also the same biological essentialism, and the same both sides argument I’ve seen a dozen times before. Instead of an article that was peppered with actual nuance and clarity about language (like the history of language that trans people used which I actually found very interesting and informative) I found a fear baiting article that analyzed a marginalized group who are at the receiving end of an uptick in hate crimes (see the bomb threat on the Boston Children's Hospital just today) and targeted harassment (see the swatting and repeated doxxing of trans Twitch streamer Keffals), and attempted to make an equivalence to the people arguing that said marginalized group are the real oppressors.
I've seen many people make that accusation, but it seems a thin beef based on a misunderstanding of the nature of categories. Many people don't seem to realize that "male" and "female" are just the names for categories and members of them, and that there are objective criteria that must be met to qualify for membership.
That the criteria are essential to the categories doesn't mean that category membership is essential to qualify as humans. It's "essential" to the category "teenager" to be 13 to 19 inclusive, but most of us have survived the revocation of our membership cards in that category without too much trauma. Same thing with "male" and "female" - at any one time, some third of us are sexless.
Thank you. I appreciate the clarity of your piece. I do feel in today’s world one is unable to question without being labeled as bigoted or god forbid “unwoke”.
Excellent article. The insanity at the federal and some provinces are pushing this agenda to the detriment of gay and straight people. The reason groomer is used is to shame those people who classify children as Trans because of behavior that would have been normal or may indicate they may be gay. The willingness to give these drugs to children is abuse and has to be condemned.
Very informative article. I always knew that the issues were complicated but until now had no idea of the degree. Blissfully ignorant has worked for me.
ICYMI, an oldish article on "The Incoherence of Gender Ideology" at Quillette about a year ago by philosopher and Substacker Michael Robillard gives something of a useful if somewhat flawed overview:
Quite a good essay - some interesting perspectives and useful links.
Certainly has been astounding the degree to which gender ideology has corrupted so much of the public discourse, and so many public institutions. Haven't read much of this myself yet, but others here might be interested in Joanna Williams' "The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology" for chapter and verse on the topic:
But more particularly on the corruption of language, I was somewhat "amused" on reading the linked Wikipedia article on "Transgender", this opening passage in particular:
"Some transgender people who desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another identify as transsexual."
No human changes sex since to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, and medical science hasn't advanced yet to the point of swapping out one set of functioning gonads for the other type. Why it was a bit "disconcerting" to see Allan's "distinguish transsexuals, who wanted to surgically change sex, from transvestites" which is just as bad for engaging in the same "redefinitions of language and concepts" that he justifiably decries.
But somewhat more broadly, that statement of Wikipedia's is just further evidence of the rot that gender ideology has wrought - so to speak - in an otherwise credible and useful resource. Basically, on anything to do with gender, Wikipedia is just as "ideologically captured" as is Stonewall, and as Tavistock was. I have been "deplatformed" there as an editor myself for objecting to the claim in the article on transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard that "she" had "transitioned to female"; see my Substack essay on that "enlightening experience" for details:
Smart, insightful and a very helpful contribution to the narrow/non existing public debate. I have now subscribed to The Line and I am looking forward to reading your thoughts on "how we can go about restoring some sanity to this conversation",
Stratton's article provides some interesting points and perspectives that I hadn't seen much of before. But here's an oldish article on "The Incoherence of Gender Ideology" at Quillette about a year ago by philosopher and Substacker Michael Robillard that gives something of a broader and more useful if somewhat flawed overview:
This is an excellent, thoughtful piece. It speaks to many of my personal concerns. I am NOT cis-female. I’m a 70ish female. I recognize that I’ll be judged as transphobic but I’m sick and tired of the tip of the tail wagging the dog. And an observation - changing your sex does not change your brain. Confront the issues which are giving you pain rather than thinking that an external change will fix everything.
Actually, no human changes sex. By definition, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither are thereby sexless. And medical science hasn't advanced to the point of allowing people to change one set of gonads into the other.
But Google "female definition"; note that the only coherent and honest definition is the one from Google & OED:
"female (adjective): of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) which can be fertilized by male gametes."
Similar definition from same source for "male":
"male (adjective): of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring."
Excellent essay - clear, concise, free of dogma and cant - with precise boundaries both in grammar and space.
Now if only we could get Justin Trudeau to read it.
I agree but unfortunately the divisive rhetoric will not end until universities stop receiving funding to publish inaccurate research that fuels the false debate on this issue.
So would you agree that if all the gender studies and related academic departments in Canada were defunded tomorrow, people like the former president of Valbella Gourmet Foods in Canmore would stop accusing Pride organizers of grooming children?
The first step would be to acknowledge that Gender Studies is an emerging Social Science without foundation. It’s not legit. As such, taxpayers shouldn’t be funding it.
Have to disagree with you, Tara. I have no problem with Gender Studies being an area of Social Studies. What I have a problem with is the idea that Gender Studies is an area of Biology.
We actually are agreeing here. This placement in Social Sciences however is unfortunate as there is equally no basis for it in this area as well. What universities have it under Social Studies?
Science generally refers to how something is studied, i.e., scientific method. It leads to results / conclusions that are duplicatable by others.
Precious little science or even scientific method in much if not all of "gender studies", or "women studies" for that matter.
ICYMI, a great article by Marco Del Giudice of the University of New Mexico on the "Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender". Been a while since I read it, but this passage describes the profound differences in the definitions for the sexes used in the "social sciences" versus the standard definitions of biology:
"On a deeper level, the ‘patchwork’ definition of sex used in the social sciences is purely descriptive and lacks a functional rationale. This contrasts sharply with how the sexes are defined in biology. From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce [present tense indefinite] small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce [present tense indefinite] large gametes (e.g., eggs; Kodric-Brown & Brown, 1987)"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346447193_Ideological_Bias_in_the_Psychology_of_Sex_and_Gender
As for "Women Studies", see this passage from a review of Koertge's & Patai's "Professing Feminism":
"The authors, however, demonstrate that these problems have existed since their ideology’s inception, and were particularly common within Women Studies programs. The authors wrote of the isolationist attitude that dominates many of the programs, along with a virulent anti-science, anti-intellectual sentiment driving many of the professors, staff and students."
https://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/07/27/professing-feminism-noh/
And one of the authors of the book, Noretta Koertge had a rather damning philosophy paper of her own on “the feminist repudiation of logic”:
"A responsible academic advisor should actively encourage those who lack confidence to stick with courses like logic and mathematics instead of falling prey to old stereotypes about women lacking the aptitude for abstract, linear thinking. Unfortunately, the predominant feminist response has been to attack logic and other traditional canons of rationality as sexist. ….
I wish I could end the story of the feminist critique of logic on this happy note. Unfortunately, however, some feminists have claimed that not just the homework exercises but the very enterprise of characterizing the formal structure of logical inference cannot be separated from sexism, racism, and totalitarianism. And in her new book, 'Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic', Nye concludes that while men are master of logic, women are more inclined to be masters [pic] of reading (p. 184). If Nye is right, women students would be well-advised to stay away from logic classes. The skills that logic purports to teach are socially deleterious [!] and thank goodness women have little aptitude from them."
https://philpapers.org/rec/KOETFC
Provides some justification for the argument that much of feminism itself bears a great deal of responsibility for the whole transgender clusterfuck.
You can study tiddly winks too. That doesn’t mean it should be publicly funded.
Right. And would you say that legislation like Florida's 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act is a logical, proportionate, and necessary response to the spread of ideas from illegitimate social sciences like gender studies?
No clue. I live in Canada, not Florida. As such, let’s stick to the topic at hand.
Enjoy your day.
I live in Canada as well - Alberta-born and raised, in fact. I raised the Florida legislation only because Stratton himself does: "some jurisdictions want to ban any mention of gays, lesbians and trans people from schools, which would directly discriminate against kids from LGBT families, and implicitly reinforce the shame of self-hate of closeted students."
Stratton also claims that academic work is responsible for the populist backlash: "This populist backlash, the outcome of imposed elite academic theory, threatens to destroy generations of hard-won social capital for minority communities."
Since you seem to agree - given your comment that "the divisive rhetoric will not end until universities stop receiving funding to publish inaccurate research that fuels the false debate on this issue" - I was just curious how you see this playing out. Once the useless university departments are defunded, why will the alt-right stop harassing Pride organizers?
who knows? Outrageous people do abominable things all the time. I can't predict the future, but I can support the notion to call for accountability for where and what our tax payer dollars fund. Academia is at the core and the root of many illegitimate theories and constructs that are now being legitimized by government institutions, the medical community and big business. The backlash is predictable which is why Stratton was right to mention it. What I am merely suggesting, is that the one thing that we can control, is wasteful spending on institutions offering illegitimate courses based on nothing more than fear and constructs being dreamed up by some Sociologists looking for quick rich schemes. There is no place for that in our publicly funded institutions. Focus on what we can control first.
Hey Michael, I may be ignorant to the Florida law - the way I understand it is they have legislated against public schools talking about sexuality or gender identity from grades 3 down. Is there more here I am missing?
As a fellow Canuck you may have some interest in what I had submitted to Statistics Canada in response to their call for "consultation on gender and sexual diversity statistical metadata standards”:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/statistics-departments-corrupted
Google Drive link in the article which discusses three "Statistics Departments Corrupted by Gender Ideology" - Britain's, New Zealand's, and Canada's own.
Or Literary Traditions or Time Travel and Narrative or Monster Encounters: Monsters and the Monstrous in Literature or Tree Stories or Old English Language and Literature or Introduction to Colonial and Postcolonial Writing or Queer Writing or English Renaissance Literature or Medieval Literature -- all at U of T.
Thank-you for finally addressing this topic! I have been standing in front of women's prisons for two years now, protesting the incarceration of intact males alongside women. I have written to my MP on 4 separate occasions about the prison issue and he/his office have never responded. Perhaps this brick wall that I've been smashing my head against is softening?
Thank you for an excellent article.
I do wish you had been able to go more into the harm to women posed by public autogynephilia (i.e. the social and legal pressure currently placed on women to participate in a male sexual fantasy, regardless of their consent), but I realized the darker side of AGP may be too deep a rabbithole for newcomers to the terf wars.
I am disappointed to see The Line run this article. This article doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said by hundreds of keyboard activists and dozens of Quilette articles. It even contains the standard line that this is somehow the fault of "imposed elite academic theories". It's not worth it to ask what theories, who is pushing them or how exactly academics have succeeded in imposing their theories because this line of argument is all a house of cards. If you want to place the blame somewhere it should be on the organizations/bureaucracies/governments that care more about saving face and good PR than conceptual clarity. THAT would be an interesting article read.
I disagree - I have read the Quillette articles but I found this to be a useful overview. I am really looking forward to the authors views on how we back out of this mess because there are thousands of articles on how everything is going to hell - but not many about how we get back on track. Looking at US alt right media I can confirm that true open homophobia has taken off in reaction to some of the. Izard excesses of the trans movement in relation to children. I think lawsuits will cool the rhetoric - but as a society we need to figure out how ‘the tip of the dog’s tail’ (great expression) was allowed to get a stranglehold on all our institutions.
I have listened to an interview on Trish Wood is Critical with a lady named Jennifer Bilek. She says it stems from and is funded by a billionaire transgender woman/man with the last name Phrizker who at one time was also a Lt. Col. in the US Army. Big Tech is also involved so there is plenty of money flowing into the trans world. There is also a in an article that Jennifer Bilek wrote in the Tablet called Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities. Just some more follow the money information.
I think it should be easy. Some things (jail, change rooms etc.) should be divided by sex which, in humans is 99.98% (either XX or XY). For those who are intersex they should go where there external genitalia indicates. For other things, we can use gender rather than sex and anyone can be whatever. When those who chose have their external genitalia changed then they call follow the rules for intersex.
As someone who wants to do and say things that do not hurt people, yet, who has not a deep tolerance for nonsense, I am looking forward to the next installment from this sensible writer.
Am I even allowed to comment on this?
This’ll be one hell of a comment but I really like The Line and I have a lot to say about this. I have a lot of problems with the article but I wanna go over some of the sources used in the article in hopes of showing how flawed the general argument is.
The first source claims that the UK's main NHS clinic for transitioning: Tavistock may be sued by over 1000 families whose children were rushed into transitioning at a young age. That number comes from the lawyer who is suing the clinic. The clinic retorts that “around 1,000 patients have been referred to its endocrinology teams, to access hormone suppressants, over the past decade.” In addition in the UK for a trans teenager to get HRT the NHS requires that they be 16 years old and be on hormone suppressants for a year. That means that more or less every teenager who started their medical transition would be included in the clinic's figure. Therefore for the lawyer's number to be correct, almost every single person who was given treatment by the clinic would need to sue them. Or maybe the lawyer just pulled the number out of their ass to draw attention?
The next source I would like to mention is the article by the bbc linked to when the author said that “those who refuse sex with women who have a penis are transphobic.” That BBC article was widely condemned for the only data in the article being from a group “Get The L Out” whose mission statement includes stopping as many people from transitioning as possible, and not respecting their identities. In addition the article says that they reached out to prominent trans people but they didn’t want to talk to them, but this was a lie because they interviewed Chelsea Poe and then cut her interview from the story. In addition when the article was originally published the main source was Lily Cade who talked about how she was being pressured into sex with trans women. But Lily Cade admitted to sexually assault! Ironic that an article about about pressuring women into sex didn’t mention that one of their sources raped someone. The BBC is a serious outlet though so they quietly cut that part of the article without acknowledging they made a mistake.
Next the author wrote that “Male sex offenders have suddenly self-identified as women and been put in women’s prisons on sentencing.” I read the source and have no problems saying that the trans woman in the article is a terrible person who deserves to rot in jail. However, saying that they suddenly identified as a woman is blatantly false since the person mentioned in the article was in the process of transitioning for three to five years prior to going to jail. This is not a case of someone transitioning in bad faith in order to game the system. And if this is the best case the author can come up with then maybe we should just conclude that people don’t transition in bad faith.
After that the article mentions Lia Thomas just as every article like this does. There’s a common misconception that Lia Thomas was a bad swimmer before she transitioned but that can’t be further from the truth. In Lia’s freshman year, when she still competed on the men's team and before she was on HRT, she had the 6th fastest national time in the 1000m free. Once she transitioned her performance dropped drastically. Then once the bar for her to compete on the women's team was cleared she placed only slightly better on the women's team in her junior year than she did on the men's team in her freshman year. If she didn’t transition she would still be a phenomenal swimmer. I don’t have too much else to say about Thomas but one other point I would like to make is that it seems like articles like this one seem to focus on people like Lia Thomas and not at all on people like Fischer Wells who is a 13 year old trans girl who rallied her classmates to make a girls field hockey team. She played in one season before the state said it was illegal for Fischer (the only trans girl who played sports in the entire state) to play on a school sports team with her friends.
Finally I wanna give a shout out to the source for when the author quotes someone who said “Women and girls who are trans are biological women and girls.” If you click the link to that it will bring you to a tweet by the city of Toronto from April 2021 saying who was eligible to get vaccinated. I have no doubts the tweet the author referenced is real. I'm just analyzing the sources and I thought that slip up was funny.
I went into this article hoping for nuance but that wasn’t what I found. I analyzed the sources that the article used because every single time this topic is discussed they use the exact same sources. It wasn’t just that but it was also the same biological essentialism, and the same both sides argument I’ve seen a dozen times before. Instead of an article that was peppered with actual nuance and clarity about language (like the history of language that trans people used which I actually found very interesting and informative) I found a fear baiting article that analyzed a marginalized group who are at the receiving end of an uptick in hate crimes (see the bomb threat on the Boston Children's Hospital just today) and targeted harassment (see the swatting and repeated doxxing of trans Twitch streamer Keffals), and attempted to make an equivalence to the people arguing that said marginalized group are the real oppressors.
What do you mean by "biological essentialism"?
I've seen many people make that accusation, but it seems a thin beef based on a misunderstanding of the nature of categories. Many people don't seem to realize that "male" and "female" are just the names for categories and members of them, and that there are objective criteria that must be met to qualify for membership.
That the criteria are essential to the categories doesn't mean that category membership is essential to qualify as humans. It's "essential" to the category "teenager" to be 13 to 19 inclusive, but most of us have survived the revocation of our membership cards in that category without too much trauma. Same thing with "male" and "female" - at any one time, some third of us are sexless.
Thank you. I appreciate the clarity of your piece. I do feel in today’s world one is unable to question without being labeled as bigoted or god forbid “unwoke”.
Excellent article. The insanity at the federal and some provinces are pushing this agenda to the detriment of gay and straight people. The reason groomer is used is to shame those people who classify children as Trans because of behavior that would have been normal or may indicate they may be gay. The willingness to give these drugs to children is abuse and has to be condemned.
Very informative article. I always knew that the issues were complicated but until now had no idea of the degree. Blissfully ignorant has worked for me.
Complicated, indeed.
ICYMI, an oldish article on "The Incoherence of Gender Ideology" at Quillette about a year ago by philosopher and Substacker Michael Robillard gives something of a useful if somewhat flawed overview:
https://archive.ph/4e2n0
Good article.
Quite a good essay - some interesting perspectives and useful links.
Certainly has been astounding the degree to which gender ideology has corrupted so much of the public discourse, and so many public institutions. Haven't read much of this myself yet, but others here might be interested in Joanna Williams' "The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology" for chapter and verse on the topic:
https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/2454-A-The-Corrosive-Impact-of-TI-ppi-110-WEB.pdf
But more particularly on the corruption of language, I was somewhat "amused" on reading the linked Wikipedia article on "Transgender", this opening passage in particular:
"Some transgender people who desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another identify as transsexual."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender
No human changes sex since to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, and medical science hasn't advanced yet to the point of swapping out one set of functioning gonads for the other type. Why it was a bit "disconcerting" to see Allan's "distinguish transsexuals, who wanted to surgically change sex, from transvestites" which is just as bad for engaging in the same "redefinitions of language and concepts" that he justifiably decries.
But somewhat more broadly, that statement of Wikipedia's is just further evidence of the rot that gender ideology has wrought - so to speak - in an otherwise credible and useful resource. Basically, on anything to do with gender, Wikipedia is just as "ideologically captured" as is Stonewall, and as Tavistock was. I have been "deplatformed" there as an editor myself for objecting to the claim in the article on transwoman and Olympian Laurel Hubbard that "she" had "transitioned to female"; see my Substack essay on that "enlightening experience" for details:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/wikipedias-lysenkoism
Smart, insightful and a very helpful contribution to the narrow/non existing public debate. I have now subscribed to The Line and I am looking forward to reading your thoughts on "how we can go about restoring some sanity to this conversation",
Thanks. I have been trying to figure out what people were talking about on this subject and failed. Your essay helps - a lot.
Fairly complicated issue.
Stratton's article provides some interesting points and perspectives that I hadn't seen much of before. But here's an oldish article on "The Incoherence of Gender Ideology" at Quillette about a year ago by philosopher and Substacker Michael Robillard that gives something of a broader and more useful if somewhat flawed overview:
https://archive.ph/4e2n0