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Democrats and Trans Rights
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‘Trans rights’ has never been a civil rights issue
Indisputably a nutjob, Chase Strangio is the soul of nominative determinism. The lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union is a ‘trans man’ – meaning a woman, of course; one of the trans movement’s lesser impositions is forcing consumers of pliant media to keep translating wishful thinking...
www.spectator.co.uk
‘Trans rights’ has never been a civil rights issue
Lionel Shriver
Indisputably a nutjob, Chase Strangio is the soul of nominative determinism. The lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union is a ‘trans man’ – meaning a woman, of course; one of the trans movement’s lesser impositions is forcing consumers of pliant media to keep translating wishful thinking into real life, much as the unhip once had to keep remembering that ‘super-bad’ means ‘super-good’.
Strangio is a rare example of sexual disguise that is reasonably persuasive. The 42-year-old woman passes for a certain kind of man: weedy, slight and very short, with narrow shoulders, Marx Brothers eyebrows, just-credible facial hair, a tight fade over the ears bursting into a cocky skywards coiffure, and a chronically smarmy, self-satisfied expression. Strangio comes across as nerdy, weak and perplexingly vain. Plenty of bona fide males out there fit that general description while to all appearances failing to embody the once-prized attributes of traditional masculinity. At a glance, Strangio belongs to that benighted class of weirdos, wimps and wusses – the ultimate swipe-left. So much trouble and expense lavished on passing as a male sissy, when the lawyer might have made a respectable broad.
Is it perversity or hypocrisy? Strangio resents that alphabet land is dominated by the ‘gay white men’ whose appearance she is aping, decries the Supreme Court – before which she has just appeared – as a ‘vile institution’, believes as a lawyer that law is ‘not a dignified system’ and, typically, is highly invested in the alchemy of having changed sex yet does not believe in the existence of sex. ‘A penis is not a male body part,’ she claims. ‘It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.’ Behold, Exhibit B for the Democrats’ foisting of crackpots into positions of responsibility (granted, Donald Trump has form in that regard as well). Naturally, Exhibit A is Admiral ‘Rachel’ Levine, who may single-handedly have convinced Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, because the US military was then apparently a joke.
Before the Supreme Court, Strangio headed the ACLU case against Tennessee, which had banned puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries for minors. Last week’s 6-3 decision in Tennessee’s favour rescues similar laws in 26 other states, which prevent doctors from neutering, mutilating and disrupting the maturation of underage patients suffering under the contagious misapprehension that they are not the sex they are. Just like the UK Supreme Court’s recent decision that in law biological sex trumps an imaginary ‘gender identity’, this is a big win for sanity, physical reality and common sense.
The ACLU argued that because puberty blockers are occasionally prescribed to arrest precocious puberty, banning their use to make sexual fancy dress more convincing in future amounts to discrimination. The logic is skewed. The world is full of things that are good for one purpose and bad for another. Nothing against picking crops, but if I used a combine harvester to vacuum your sitting-room carpet, I’d expect you to sue. There’s a night-and-day medical difference between a double mastectomy to cure breast cancer and the linguistically sanitised ‘top surgery’ that lops healthy breasts off bamboozled girls who will never breastfeed their children in the unlikely event they can still reproduce.
From the start, this whole trans business has been sold as a civil rights issue. But there is no movement in the West to deny transgender people equal access to housing or employment, much less to ‘kill trans people’, as Strangio asserts. There are no water fountains or lunch counters from which trans people are banished.
This is a medical issue – specifically, a mental health issue – slyly packaged as a campaign against bigotry.
We don’t let children get tattoos, because they’re too young to understand the concept of permanence and they could come to regret covering their limbs in dinosaurs. It’s therefore just sensible safeguarding for the state to keep kids from opting to take powerful drugs that prevent their bodies from maturing or from opting to get their genitals carved up just because some poor excuses for grown-ups planted this fanciful notion that one can play swapsies with biological sex.This movement’s ‘trans rights’ decode as the rights to: compel other people to mouth lies that contradict what they see with their own eyes;
impose the widespread adoption of dehumanising language such as ‘menstruators’ and ‘birthing people’; force the well-adjusted to finance costly elective plastic surgery through taxation and insurance premiums; walk around women’s changing rooms with one’s wang hanging out; turn women’s sports into a farce; and most importantly, it seems, coax children and mixed-up teenagers to make drastic, irreversible medical decisions which may well result in infection, reduced bone density, lifelong reliance on pharmaceuticals, poor ability to form relationships, sexual dysfunction, impotence and infertility. Perhaps also in searing regret – especially once this sick societal obsession finally subsides and its victims no longer constitute sacralised members of the avant-garde but the awkward residue of an old mistake. We’re making progress, but this festishistic ideology is perniciously entrenched. Children are still butchered in American blue states. Let’s relieve insurance companies and the NHS of the obligation to provide gender-denying care. It’s past time we restored the conviction you’re really the opposite sex to being a mental illness, and one not necessarily that is best treated by humouring the delusion. Sure, men can wear dresses and women tuxes, but doctors who mangle fully functional body parts violate the Hippocratic oath.
Aren’t we all to some degree ‘born in the wrong body’? I’m an abysmal 5ft 2in, yet I identify as 6ft 7in. I also identify as 23, so that I expect you all to ignore my skin’s telltale crenulation and to ask eagerly whether I’m planning to attend graduate school. I identify as beautiful, so watch the mouth.
I identify as immortal, too, so that on my deathbed I am sure to identify like fury as an alive person, and if anyone makes a move to call an undertaker I will see them in court. Apologies to the jury in advance, for the smell is apt to be unpleasant.‘Transgender’ Kids Usually Grow Up Gay
Summarize
When I was a boy, I ‘felt’ more like a girl. Thank goodness I was left alone to become the man I am.
June 30, 2025 at 2:36 pm
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After the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors, “LGBT” organizations issued statements condemning the court’s decision. I’m gay, and I welcome the court’s decision. So-called gender-affirming is a new form of “conversion therapy.” Instead of “praying away the gay,” we are “transing” it away.
Decades ago in Amsterdam, clinicians observed that adult transgender patients were frequently suicidal and had difficulties with social functioning. They attributed this to their inability to “pass” convincingly as the opposite sex. Thus, they thought, if a child didn’t conform to standard sex roles, why not arrest his natural development with puberty blockers and give him only opposite-sex hormones, so that he’ll never develop those unwanted sex characteristics to begin with? The “Dutch protocol” was born.
Of the first 70 adolescents to be treated with this protocol, 62 were homosexual, six were bisexual, one was heterosexual, and one didn’t know yet. One male in the original cohort died at 18 after a botched vaginoplasty. Since puberty blockers had stunted the growth of his genitals, there wasn’t enough tissue for the surgeons to fashion into something that resembled a vagina. In its place they took part of his intestine, which became infected.
Childhood nonconformity with sex roles is one of the most dependable predictors of homosexuality in adulthood. Every major study to date confirms that the majority of children who express confusion about their sex will desist by the end of puberty and grow up to be gay or lesbian. Preventing a child who expresses confusion about his sex from going through puberty prevents him from reaching the stage where that confusion might naturally resolve. Doctors who “lock in” this confusion with drugs and surgery then congratulate themselves for getting the diagnosis right.
Adult gays and lesbians don’t need studies to tell us any of this. So many of us can look back on our own childhoods—how different we felt from our peers, and how strongly we preferred the toys and activities of the opposite sex. I was relentlessly bullied as a kid. “Are you a girl?” my classmates taunted me. “Of course I’m a boy,” I replied. But the truth was, I had always “felt” more like a girl. I much preferred pink and purple over blue, I loved fashion and choreography, and I hated football. Plus, I felt much safer around the girls. So much more like myself.
When I reached adulthood and began to accept myself as the gay male that I am, I resolved to help create a world where children are told that it’s OK to be an unconventional boy or girl. For a while, I thought we were on the right track. But now, instead of making more space for nonconformity, we’re medicalizing it. Instead of telling kids they’re fine the way they are, we’re saying the opposite: No, it’s not OK to be this way. There is only one way to be a boy and one way to be a girl. You don’t fit. We have to fix you.
Two years ago I interviewed psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, who in 2007 adapted the Dutch protocol for use in the U.S. During that conversation, Ms. Edwards-Leeper used the word “cult” five times to describe what had become of pediatric gender medicine. When I told her about my own childhood, and said I feared that, if I were growing up now, I might have been falsely affirmed as a “trans girl,” she responded, “I’m sure you would have.”
While the Supreme Court’s decision will allow the 20-plus state bans on pediatric gender medicine to stand, there is no telling how long this medical scandal will continue in the U.S. Meantime, how dare the leaders of LGBT organizations accuse people like me of hatred and bigotry, when they support regressive medical practices that are antithetical to everything the gay-liberation movement once stood for?
Mr. Appel is author of “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.”
the cac mamba
Veteran
the fact that there's several progressives on here, angrily reading about this
imagine being that much of a partisan hack. they're worse than MAGAs
the cac mamba
Veteran
Listen I think it’s dangerous game people like libs of tok are playing trying to make it seem like all or most gay or trans people are child predators.
I don’t believe that at all. Sure some
are just like any other group of people.
While I think the pronoun sh1t is goofy and letting trans men fight women is dangerous I have nothing against them as a whole
My biggest beef is the Dems pandering to such a small group of people that has done much more harm then good for Dems because the country as a whole ain’t rocking with the trehs.
Trehs at this point should take small victories and be happy with Dems being for them having basic rights like everyone else
Getting greedy and wanting everything at once has gotten them here which is a dangerous place for them
I don’t believe that at all. Sure some
are just like any other group of people.
While I think the pronoun sh1t is goofy and letting trans men fight women is dangerous I have nothing against them as a whole
My biggest beef is the Dems pandering to such a small group of people that has done much more harm then good for Dems because the country as a whole ain’t rocking with the trehs.
Trehs at this point should take small victories and be happy with Dems being for them having basic rights like everyone else
Getting greedy and wanting everything at once has gotten them here which is a dangerous place for them
Pull Up the Roots
Breakfast for dinner.
Name the pandering. Show me the campaigns that center them above everyone else. And stop saying you have nothing against them, because that is at odd with what you are actually saying.
the cac mamba
Veteran
people support gay rights, because it isn't asking anything of anyone else. it's just two consenting adults getting married; it affects no one
the trans movement is demanding that the rest of society rewrite basic biology and reality, and that women allow mentally ill men to invade their spaces. i'm glad that republicans are shutting down this bullshyt, since dems are too cowardly
it's ironic that so much of the progressive movement is about hating/rejecting white men, unless it's white men trying to impose their will on marginalized women
then they put white men first. that right there shows how full of shyt these people are. it's all a fukking clown show