For as long as I can remember, I have known I am a girl. That certainty is as instinctive as knowing I am right-handed. It is difficult to explain to someone who has never been transgender or loved someone who is, but I have never lived this way to gain an advantage or take something from someone else. I live this way to honor what I know is true.
I transitioned at four years old. By sixth grade, my identity was public. I grew used to the double takes, the questions, the quiet skepticism. Most of it did not bother me. Curiosity, even when clumsy, is human. People understand gender differently, and I was taught to respect all ideas, just as I hope others respect mine.
That someone has so perverted this young mind as to think it’s in the “wrong” body. Yes, I do get vicious about that.
At 4, sure, kids have ideas over who they are. Pink and dolls and all that. Boys and girls are indeed, on average, different too. But that someone’s gone on from well, why shouldn’t a lad be interested in pink princess dolls to they’re the wrong sex?
Grr.
…
Someone has sat, made all that up, and invented the symbols.
Gotta have a hobby, I suppose. Especially if it’s funded.
How can you know you’re a girl if you’re not a girl?
Because mummy has told them…….
Yeah, I get that in this case. Timmy’s right about what to do with the parents.
But an older man who comes out with the same bilge?
He has Free Will. As an adult he has the right to self harm or identify as he pleases, as long as he isn’t harming others in the process.
And more importantly as long as he at least makes the effort and shaves.
It’s always the mother…
So he knew at age 4 that he was a girl? Fuck off, liar. I’ll bet you don’t even remember being 4 years old.
NFW a 4 year old differentiated sex.
Many years ago I stopped a five year old from trying to fly – by jumping from his first floor window.
Four year olds have delusions – if they’re dangerous they should not be encouraged.
For as long as I can remember, I have known I am a girl.
Just like the bloke who knows he’s Napoleon.
” or that the scientific evidence on trans women’s advantages is mixed or even”
That’s the big lie snuck in…..
And really… the delusion that there *wouldn’t* be a backlash if you engage in *competitive* athletics and start winning once your 14 yr old body starts benefiting from the fact that you’re biologically *male* , with male hips and muscle insertions, in a running event…
That little bit alone is well-researched, documented, and there’s nothing “mixed or even” about the conclusions.
It’s even one of the reasons for the differences in high-level training between males and females…
No 14 year-old wrote that article.
Also:
If you are a journalist or reader, a supporter or a skeptic, do the work before you speak. Seek out credible information. Hold your opinions to the highest standard of truth.
Ok, here are the facts: YOU ARE A BOY.
Yep. Whether it thought it was a girl or not is irrelevant. No one cares. You are a boy; doesn’t matter what you think. Or ‘know.’
As someone in the UK who has a family member who is a girl and transitioned to presenting as a boy I can assure previous commenters cases certainly exist where it is not the mother. Indeed it seems very unlikely than any mother would wish a severe mental disorder on her child. Contrary to what you might expect from the press coverage the NHS refused hormonal treatment and breast removal the child requested. Unfortunately the child waited until she was an adult got a job saved money and paid for these privately. She lives a normal life with no fuss.
This is a website for old people and I am sure that we all remember that trans people existed when we were young. The disorder is not new. Mental disorders deserve our sympathy. However there is no justification for the state promoting them or facilitating them.
“Indeed it seems very unlikely than any mother would wish a severe mental disorder on her child.”
You’ve lived a sheltered life then.
seems very unlikely than any mother would wish a severe mental disorder on her child
I knew one. She was undoubtedly a Munchausen’s mother. Fortunately, despite the mother’s assiduous grooming, the girl seems to have grown out of it.
And actually, I think Munchausen’s is all around us. That’s progressives, that is.
“Unfortunately the child waited until she was an adult got a job saved money and paid for these privately. She lives a normal life with no fuss.”
This is not what the controversy is about. Adults using their own money can do a lot of things most people would consider foolish. But that’s what being an adult is about – it’s up to them.
The controversy is where a child (and it’s children, not 17-year old “children”) is being operated on due to expressing ideas that could be interpreted as not being quite in the standard mold. And also being paid for by the public, though that’s just the cherry on top.
Trans people don’t exist now. You correctly described your relative as a girl ‘presenting as a boy’.
However, it is true that the mentally ill have always been with us. We just didn’t treat them by cutting their tits off.
I am sure that we all remember that trans people existed when we were young. The disorder is not new. Mental disorders deserve our sympathy. However there is no justification for the state promoting them or facilitating them.
I don’t remember there being any trannies when I was young. The Two Ronnies in drag maybe. Nobody thought sex could be changed.
Mental disorders deserve sympathy, especially since they’re rarely sympathetic. I don’t think most “trans” people start out mentally ill tbh. I think they usually start out with porn addiction, or normal teenage confusion, and get put on a pipeline to full blown mental illness. The drugs don’t work, they just make them worse. Insanity is infectious
I don’t remember there being any trannies when I was young.
Lots of “female impersonators” though.
Btw I was about to take my Alzheimer’s medication and watch Countdown but then I had another thought:
Contrary to what you might expect from the press coverage the NHS refused hormonal treatment and breast removal the child requested. Unfortunately the child waited until she was an adult got a job saved money and paid for these privately. She lives a normal life with no fuss.
Unfortunately the NHS isn’t the only vector of transgender. They’ve all got smartphones now, and that means they all have strangers in parasocial online relationships egging them on at all times. Detransitioners, otoh, are chased out of LGBTQ spaces by enraged trannies who don’t like what they see in the mirror.
Terrible news about your relative. I hope she gets better. It’s not just the mental health danger, but the ongoing effects of artificial hormones, if she’s on them, are devastating to the body.
I fully accept that. However, you are male and nothing is going to change that.
My late uncle Jim knew that the Chinese were bugging his house. He wasn’t misunderstood, he was a paranoid schizophrenic.
When they were four my boys thought they were dinosaurs.
Now that they are young men they think I am.
Through each degrading claim and ostentatious headline, I realized the conversation was more malevolent than I anticipated. Not because of what they said about my performance, but because of what they said about my character. This was not a healthy debate about fairness in sports; it was about my worth as a person.
Nice try, groomers, but I know this wasn’t written by a 14 year old.
Countless adults absently unlocked their phones and devastated a 14 year old
Lol, nature is healing. When I was a 14 year old, being devastated by adults was called “school”, and none of the boys were foolish enough to turn up in a skirt.
What happens to all the tits and dicks that get cut off?
(Asking for a friend, obvs.)
Horror movie idea
They get elected to Parliament?
ummm… “medical waste”… So It *should* end up in the Furnace… After a week in one of the cooling cells in the morgue, because it’s *supposed* to work that way and daily collections/burnings are Too Expensive.
Recycled?
They become an installation in Tate Modern and win the Turner Prize.
At 8 days, kids will get circumcised because they’re Jewish.
How do they know they’re Jewish at 8 days? How do other kids know they’re Christian, or Muslim, or Hindu, or followers of the Aztec Gods?
How do kids know they’re British, or French, or American, or Russian, or Palestinian? How can people change from one to another? How do they know if they support Millwall, or Manchester United, or Liverpool FC?
How do kids know they’re science geeks, or artists, or singers, or footballers, or writers? How do they know if they prefer strawberry ice cream or chocolate? What about Brussels sprouts? How do they decide if they want to be an introvert or extrovert? How do they find out they’re shy?
There has been a long debate over ‘nature versus nurture’ – whether our mental characteristics, beliefs, preferences, likes and dislikes are the consequences of culture and upbringing, fitting in with our parents and family and the society around us, or if some of it is hardwired, innate, instinctive, genetic. And usually it is a mixture – the interaction of innate characteristics with culture to yield results which not entirely either.
So extroverts have extra dopamine receptors in their brains, and introverts more acetylcholine receptors. There is a ‘hardwired’ aspect to it, but it can be overruled by force of will. It also depends on the social acceptability of introversion or extroversion. Introverts can be pushed by society to come out of their shells. Extroverts can be told to shut up and sit down. There are entire cultures that go with being an introvert or extrovert, and these are learnt.
So what about sex? Well, back in the 60s the lefty feminists subscribed to the ‘blank slate’ nurture theory of gender. Boys and girls were different because of their upbringing. Girls were given dolls and dressed in pink, and told to be demure and polite and pretty, and boys were encouraged to run around climbing trees and jumping in muddy puddles and having sword fights with sticks. Boys were better at maths and science because they were *told* they were better by their parents. And what sort of parent would mentally cripple their daughters like that by teaching them that they couldn’t do science as well as the boys?
Well, in the 80s the scientists looked at it, and concluded that they feminists were wrong, and sex differences were hardwired in the brain. And some of the best evidence for that was the minority of cases where genetic conditions resulted in people getting the hardwiring for the other sex.
You can think of it as a bit like being an introvert. You can be ‘brought up as an extrovert’ by extrovert parents, and pushed to socialise. You can learn how to party, and fit in with society. You can learn to hide what you are if introversion is socially unacceptable. And if society thinks introversion is a sickness, a mental illness, a sign of moral degeneration, and if fathers beat their children out of shame if they’re caught indoors on a sunny day reading a book, they will. Maybe society is so liberal that they will allow that adults can choose to be introverts, when they’re old enough to decide, so long as they get up to their perverted practices in private, but children are too young to know what they are, and if any of them start showing introverted tendencies it must be the parents pushing it on them.
To some degree, I think the science is irrelevant, though. Classic liberals and libertarians hold that if people are only ‘hurting’ themselves with their lifestyle choices and not anyone else it’s none of society’s business, that parents have the right and responsibility to make the decisions for their own children (even if that involves making them eat Brussels sprouts), and that society and the state should butt out. Even if they’re wrong, it’s *their* life, not yours. That applies to people’s religious or political views – matters that really *are* imposed by parent’s culture. You don’t want people declaring the right wing a mental illness and taking your children away to be indoctrinated in proper leftism. Same for the mental illnesses of Christianity, or atheism. Plenty of societies are like that, and do.
But people are inconsistent about it. They’ll insist on the right to self-determination and the right of parents to bring up their children as they choose when it comes to defending their *own* beliefs and cultural practices. But they’ll revert to interfering in other people’s private and family life if it’s something they have been brought up to have a cultural taboo over.
I’d agree the gender revolution went too far. They went from demanding the freedom to live their own lives as they chose to imposing that life and culture on other people who didn’t like it, or agree with it, or believe in it. Protestants first sought religious freedom from Catholic domination, but then switched to persecuting Catholics. People do that.
The only culture war that really matters is authoritarians versus libertarians. Do you prevent cultural conflict by forcing everyone into one culture and forbid any deviation from it, or do you allow multiple cultures and ways of life, and require that we leave each other alone to get on with it, you to your ways, and us to ours? Do you agree with the woke/Muslims/socialists/environmentalists that you can and should force people to follow society’s rules, and merely disagree on what those rules should be? Are you a classic liberal only when it is convenient to you? Or are you not a liberal at all?
tl;dr
Plus, intellectually dishonest bullshit. ‘How do kids know they’re Christian’, ffs.
Maybe they had a vision of Christ and were inspired directly by the Holy Spirit? Or maybe it’s because their parents pushed them into it.
I have my opinion, and they no doubt have theirs. But whether Christianity is true or obviously a delusional mental illness is irrelevant to the more important point of whether society has any right to impose either opinion on its members.
If we grant people the right to raise their children as Christians, and I do, even though I think all the stuff about salvation and sin is intellectually dishonest bullshit, and the story about the angel and the talking donkey is just ridiculous, then the same must apply to other beliefs. If we don’t, then we don’t. But we ought to be honest about which side we’re on.
Ok, I’ll bite.
If you saw a parent who passionately and sincerely believes in committing sodomitic acts of public incest with his pre-pubescent children committing a sodomitic act of public incest with one of his pre-pubescent children, would you:
a) kick the shit out of him, authoritarian or not, or;
b) let him get on with it, because that’s the libertarian thing to do and who are you to impose your views on him?
I just know I am going to end up regretting this.
a). Because he’s intending to serve his own interests, not those of his children.
I felt sure you’d wriggle out if somehow.
It’s a very standard argument. Libertarians call for freedom. Opponents say that would mean the freedom to rape and murder and steal. Libertarians say no it wouldn’t, and would then go on to explain JS Mill’s harm principle.
I assume I don’t need to, here.
What if the child has given you to understand that he is fine with being incestuously buggered in public and you see him smiling at the point where he is being buggered?
To put it another way, how do you know the parent is serving his own interests, or only his own interests?
Or to put it another, other way, why are you distinguishing a parent who sodomises his child from a parent who has his child castrated (and likewise why are you treating reactions to the two as somehow opposing ends on the libertarian-authoritarian scale)?
I think that’s very unlikely.
I don’t support that either.
But the distinction is in understanding the arguments for and against it being in the child’s interests. Prepubescent children have no interest in sex, and it is a potentially dangerous and painful process, so I can’t see any reason why buggery could be in their interests, rather than their father’s. But hypothetically, suppose a doctor needed to do a rectal examination for medical reasons. It’s essentially the same act, but now we can see a reason why it might be in their interests: to save their life, or prevent a serious medical condition getting worse. There are risks and consequences, either way, and a parent is supposed to weigh them up on behalf of the child, in the child’s interests.
The parent might have personal beliefs that get in the way of that. Maybe they don’t believe in bowel cancer, or maybe they have religious objections and feel that it imperils the child’s immortal soul to have them treated. (Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t accept blood transfusions, for example.) But the parents are still doing their best to look out for their children, and I’ll take that over impersonal functionaries of the state, or the equally dubious opinions of interfering busybody strangers. There does come a point where the issue is stark enough that society has to intervene, when the parent is either obviously not considering the interests of the child, or not capable themselves of making informed and rational decisions. However, the bar for that has to be very high.
We have to consider the other side of the trade-off. If we accept the principle that we as part of society can intervene in somebody else’s family life, then that means other people as part of society can intervene in ours. You know what sort of crazy opinions some other people have. Do you really want them to be able to say you’re wrong, and overrule you in medical decisions?
None of us knows for sure what the right answer is. We’re all fallible, with opinions that often turn out to be wrong. Whose judgement should we trust? The parents are generally the most likely to look out for their children’s interests, and knowing them, to know what they want and how they value things. I’d not overrule parents who said no to transgender transitioning, even if I disagreed. By the same principle, I’d not overrule any who said yes. It’s none of our business.
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
I agree, infant circumcision is wrong and barbarous.
Yes. But the question is whether society should therefore ban it.
Should a Christian society make sin illegal?
Yes. But the question is whether society should therefore ban it.
Of course we should ban painful unnecessary surgery on infants. Penises are not modular and not designed to be pruned
Should a Christian society make sin illegal?
Absolutely. If I catch you coveting my ox, you better watch out buddy.
🙂 Can I say you have a nice ass, though?
Leviticus 19:33-19:34.
“The only culture war that really matters is authoritarians versus libertarians. ”
No its not. Because libertarians are a death cult. Given the opportunity they will eventually allow the thing that will destroy them the freedom to do so. Libertarians are the Right wing version of socialists, trying to create a world that can never not descend into chaos because those pesky human beings just won’t fit into the society they are trying to create. Being libertarian is an evolutionary dead end, as the West is currently finding out.
The reality is all successful civilisations are authoritarian to some degree or other. The trick to being successful is choosing correctly what to be authoritarian about, and how much. Thats why this civilisation thing is so hard. Its a constant balancing act between too much and too little authoritarianism, and on what subjects. That why when you have a successful civilisation, anyone who suggests changing it by making it more libertarian (or authoritarian) needs to be ‘persuaded’ this is a bad idea. How you go about persuading such people is another of those very difficult value judgements that civilisation is built upon.
Gamecock considered himself libertarian for decades. Until he realized isolationism doesn’t work in a world with ICBMs.
Gamecock considered himself libertarian for decades.
P. J. O’Rourke wrote that he thought he was a libertarian until he held his first child and realised he’d suddenly become a conservative. As usual with his writing, there was a bit of dramatic license there I suspect, but the point was well made. It’s not just about me, I have responsibilities now.
He did endorse Hilary Clinton over Trump though, so maybe his judgement was slipping!
There’s no conflict between loving your children, wanting the best for them and being a libertarian. Libertarian does not just mean legalising dope. It also means legalising guns so that you can shoot people that try and rape your daughter.
“Conservatives” are just socialists who want different goodies from government. Which is always a trap because the real winner is always government and their friends, not you.
You don’t get to choose. Society chooses. Sooner or later, your enemies choose.
Authoritarians always see authoritarianism as the ideal system because they always imagine themselves to be in charge of what’s compulsory and what’s forbidden. Or people like themselves.
But the truth is that once there are levers of power to push, there is a constant struggle to be the ones in charge of pushing them. And nobody ever wins all the time.
So you’ll build your marvellous “just a little bit authoritarian” society, and then you’ll suddenly find that the Green Woke Socialist LGBT Nanny-staters have moved into the driving seat and are pushing your beautiful shiny levers, and now here you are.
Say the wrong thing, and you’ll find the plod coming round for a chat, just before you lose your job. Happy joy.
Political correctness has gone mad, but it’s just the consequence of living in a slightly authoritarian society. The time to get rid of the levers is when you’re in power, not after you’ve lost it. But authoritarians never believe they will, until it’s too late.
It’s what the US Constitution and other Bills of Rights are for – to take away the levers of control from society. But everyone always thinks it’s in a good cause, and nobody would be stupid enough to abuse it, and so start to tinker.
It’s where we get politicians from, and where the trouble starts.
Every society that has ever existed has been authoritarian to some degree or other. The libertarian ideal society has never existed, nor ever will, any more than the socialist ideal one does. Both are theoretically workable, but come up against the cold reality of how human beings actually behave and interact with each other. Your failure is to see that just because a society with a bit more freedom than another might be a bit better to live in, it does not necessarily follow that total freedom will be best of all.
After all we are living through your libertarian ideal – the West is allowing Islam to gain a foothold, ‘because freedom’ and this will ultimately destroy the West and all the freedom therein. And if you can’t see that, you are either an idiot or an ideologue. Or both.
Have you the slightest idea of the amount of legislation controlling our lives? We are might not be in the most authoritarian society possible, but libertarian it certainly is not.
Again, ‘freedom’ doesn’t mean the freedom to do anything you like. Islam violates the harm principle, so it can’t be allowed.
Praying five times a day, sure. Wear strange clothes, whatever. Refuse to eat pork or drink alcohol, don’t care. Go on pilgrimage, give to charity, go ahead.
But no to jihad, no to blasphemy laws, no to rioting in the street over a bunch of cartoons, or some kid at school disrespecting the Koran. No to forced marriages. No to FGM. No to killing apostates. No to honour killings. No to burning down churches or synagogues or attacking Christians and Jews. No to making it compulsory.
Libertarianism isn’t supposed to be passive about these things. There are a lot of things we don’t care about. If it doesn’t do anyone else any harm (or they freely consent), it’s none of our business. But when it *does* do harm, it very definitely is. *Our* freedoms to believe and live as we choose, unmolested, have to be defended with vigour!
ogh ye gods, NiV….
“So extroverts have extra dopamine receptors in their brains, and introverts more acetylcholine receptors.”
I’ll just say : SAUCE?!! and leave it at that….
Parklife!