I always appreciate your tone when looking out over the cultural landscape. As someone who is almost 40 and has kids 12 and 13, well I’ve been exposed to this world four ways. 1) I tend to get intellectual crushes on a certain writer or video producer or radio-maker, and at one time it was for me Natalie Wynn, who is old school trans, before it was popularized and therefore a useful social power play. (S)he made this https://youtu.be/QuN6GfUix7c about the style mistake of the Left before the Left was co-opted and destroyed by faux ‘progressive’ supporting the current thing including trans rights. (S)he is also a spectacular video artist and cultural theorist and not ‘for’ stating your pronouns or demanding protected-victim status. I wonder what she is thinking about the current terrorism... haven’t checked. May do.
2) I worked with a let’s say community organizing effort which was colonized and destroyed by radical identity politics which shut down all capacity for doing the work we were ostensibly organized to do
3) my son had told me about this aggressively victim-claiming population in his school where it is clearly a case of taking up an identity which is useful to get social standing through a back door for people who don’t feel they can access it through conventional pathways that used to dominate in middle school.
4) I was at the state capital for other business and saw a young person state on the record that ‘my guidance counselor told me that I would kill myself if I wasn’t supported to transition.’ And the problem with this was supposed to be that she wasn’t being supported enough by the state legal structures, not that her guidance counselor was telling her that she would kill herself if she didn’t get cut up surgically.
I knew something what it was like and that it was growing out of proportion to any possible physical reality. Thanks for sharing the level of violence that has coalesced around this. It just keeps accelerating.
I have undergone a rapid series of shifts on this issue. I used to supervise in a summer program for children w special needs and behavioral issues. The last summer there I had a female college age counselor ask if she should let her campers know that she was trans. I had no idea what she was talking about, she was obviously not a transsexual. I said no. While we often had counselors dealing with their own psyche issues, they just seemed to roll off of her. I kinda forgot about her until I went from "live and let live" to "what are they doing to children?" I was reminded of her psychological state, the opposite of flexible and resilient. It could be a stressful job, and she was always stressed, and more positive than I would have expected. She seemed to fit the model of someone choosing the identity instead of dealing with underlying issues.
I don't know if you're familiar w Jennifer Bilek and her 11th Hour Blog, it also helped me gain clarity. It's very obvious that this is a political ideology attempting to replace sex with gender in law. I reject the political ideology and the idea of trans used to push it. My problem w people like Wynn, and all of the "true trans" is that they have inconsistent self serving positions. They will oppose child transition, while, as Wynn does, call JK Rowling transphobic for supporting the safety of women and children. The only reason this is pushed on children is because it validates adults who want to say they were born this way. The only reason people accept it is on the basis that some ppl are truly trans and this is early intervention. It seems obvious that for the sake of children we need to destroy the concept of transition. Adults can mutilate their bodies, but that's all it should be acknowledged to be.
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. You should definitely check out Bilek's work if it's unfamiliar.
I always appreciate your tone when looking out over the cultural landscape. As someone who is almost 40 and has kids 12 and 13, well I’ve been exposed to this world four ways. 1) I tend to get intellectual crushes on a certain writer or video producer or radio-maker, and at one time it was for me Natalie Wynn, who is old school trans, before it was popularized and therefore a useful social power play. (S)he made this https://youtu.be/QuN6GfUix7c about the style mistake of the Left before the Left was co-opted and destroyed by faux ‘progressive’ supporting the current thing including trans rights. (S)he is also a spectacular video artist and cultural theorist and not ‘for’ stating your pronouns or demanding protected-victim status. I wonder what she is thinking about the current terrorism... haven’t checked. May do.
2) I worked with a let’s say community organizing effort which was colonized and destroyed by radical identity politics which shut down all capacity for doing the work we were ostensibly organized to do
3) my son had told me about this aggressively victim-claiming population in his school where it is clearly a case of taking up an identity which is useful to get social standing through a back door for people who don’t feel they can access it through conventional pathways that used to dominate in middle school.
4) I was at the state capital for other business and saw a young person state on the record that ‘my guidance counselor told me that I would kill myself if I wasn’t supported to transition.’ And the problem with this was supposed to be that she wasn’t being supported enough by the state legal structures, not that her guidance counselor was telling her that she would kill herself if she didn’t get cut up surgically.
I knew something what it was like and that it was growing out of proportion to any possible physical reality. Thanks for sharing the level of violence that has coalesced around this. It just keeps accelerating.
I have undergone a rapid series of shifts on this issue. I used to supervise in a summer program for children w special needs and behavioral issues. The last summer there I had a female college age counselor ask if she should let her campers know that she was trans. I had no idea what she was talking about, she was obviously not a transsexual. I said no. While we often had counselors dealing with their own psyche issues, they just seemed to roll off of her. I kinda forgot about her until I went from "live and let live" to "what are they doing to children?" I was reminded of her psychological state, the opposite of flexible and resilient. It could be a stressful job, and she was always stressed, and more positive than I would have expected. She seemed to fit the model of someone choosing the identity instead of dealing with underlying issues.
I don't know if you're familiar w Jennifer Bilek and her 11th Hour Blog, it also helped me gain clarity. It's very obvious that this is a political ideology attempting to replace sex with gender in law. I reject the political ideology and the idea of trans used to push it. My problem w people like Wynn, and all of the "true trans" is that they have inconsistent self serving positions. They will oppose child transition, while, as Wynn does, call JK Rowling transphobic for supporting the safety of women and children. The only reason this is pushed on children is because it validates adults who want to say they were born this way. The only reason people accept it is on the basis that some ppl are truly trans and this is early intervention. It seems obvious that for the sake of children we need to destroy the concept of transition. Adults can mutilate their bodies, but that's all it should be acknowledged to be.
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. You should definitely check out Bilek's work if it's unfamiliar.
Yeah I wrote almost exactly this article as an email to the ppl of extinction rebellion when I signed out of there fed up https://open.substack.com/pub/jbilek/p/corporatism-the-new-new-left-and?r=1hp4he&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post thanks for sharing and again, thanks for your podcast