Links - 12th June 2019 (1) (Trans Mania)

JAMES KIRKUP: Is Britain FINALLY coming to its senses over transgender madness?"The transgender equality agenda has advanced through Britain’s institutions with extraordinary speed. In a few years, promoting ‘trans rights’ has become central to healthcare, policing, education and the law, raising many troubling questions.The only thing more extraordinary than the rapid spread of this new orthodoxy is how little scrutiny it has faced and the aggressive intolerance directed towards those who question it.During a Westminster career which began as a junior Commons researcher 25 years ago, I have never encountered a movement that has spread so swiftly and successfully, and has so fiercely rejected any challenge to its orthodoxy.The lack of scrutiny has led to a new disturbing reality in which women have been sexually assaulted in prison by trans inmates, trans athletes increasingly compete as females, children transition rapidly, and women suffer vitriolic abuse for standing up for their rights. Possibly the most troubling aspect of this story is how so many politicians have failed to challenge a movement whose agenda they know can infringe on the rights and freedoms of others.By looking the other way and keeping quiet, MPs have allowed a small group of activists to set the agenda and even write policies, without anyone ever consulting or even informing the public.Last week, however, there were encouraging signs that common sense is entering the debate. That is long overdue and much needed. Perhaps the most significant sign that there has been a shift in the debate is the division around LGBT group Stonewall... the trans lobby’s hold on Stonewall might just be weakening. Some donors are deserting, the CEO has quit and leading gay equality campaigners are going public with their doubts about its adoption of the trans agenda.Even Simon Fanshawe, a co-founder of the group, has condemned its ‘extreme’ position following its campaign to amend the Gender Recognition Act. Meanwhile, in the political sphere, the word in Whitehall is that Penny Mordaunt, the Equalities Minister, is starting to have doubts about changing the law to allow people to self-identify their sex.Responses to a Government consultation on those reforms showed opposition from women in every part of Britain, other than a few very small clusters in London and a few university towns. Tories who once saw the trans agenda as a way to modernise and reach out to young voters now realise things are more complicated than that... One of the defining features of the trans lobbyists are the vituperative attacks they orchestrate on anyone who dares disagree or question them. Many do not dare to ask probing questions publicly. Some fear being branded transphobic – a charge that can kill a career in the public sector, even when it is baseless.Indeed, many ‘gender critical’ women fear ‘doxing’ attacks, where personal information is hacked from emails and social media accounts and spread across the internet. There are also threats of violence and actual violence. The online hatred directed at anyone who questions the trans orthodoxy is relentless. A recent report by MPs on the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hate Crime found ‘clear examples of threats and calls to violence against women’ who question the trans lobby.Those women cannot rely on the police to help – quite the contrary. Many forces have embraced the trans agenda and enforce it with remarkable zeal. Several women, and some men, have had calls and visits from officers over legal comments on social media because they might hurt transgender feelings. This is an absurd situation."
This doesn't help people who claim the 'gay agenda' is a myth or who claim this isn't the future of more conservative societies (e.g. in Taiwan it looks like gay marriage is going to be forced through)

A manifesto for heresy - "To deny that men can become women is the modern equivalent of denying that a wafer of bread and a cup of wine became the flesh and blood of Christ during Mass. If you deny the magic of transgenderism, you will be subjected to a similar wild-eyed fury that was once visited upon those who denied the magic of transubstantiation.There is a religious-style zeal to the protection of transgenderism from criticism or denial or blasphemy. The word ‘transphobia’ is used to demonise the belief that men cannot become women. Fighting transphobia isn’t about ending discrimination against trans people – it is about silencing moral views that are now considered unacceptable; it is about turning certain beliefs into heresies... A TERF is a witch. That is really what TERF means: troublesome woman, uppity woman, defiant woman, heretic... recently we had the spectacle of 300 female members of the Labour Party resigning in protest at the party’s decision to include people who were born male on all-women shortlists. And other party members, including male ones, cheered as the women left. ‘Get the TERFs out’, they tweeted. That is, cast the witches out. Expel them. Heretics not welcome. That many left-wing men laugh at these women’s concerns, or approve of the censorship of their ideas, or conspire in the demonisation of them as TERFs, suggests the ideology of transgenderism has a strong streak of misogyny. Indeed, trans activism looks increasingly like misogyny in drag. Witness, also, how criticism of the trans ideology is written off not only as wrong, but as dangerous, as morally corrupted and morally corrupting... As one historical account puts it, people and sometimes entire communities were viewed as being ‘infected with heresy’. Today, that profoundly censorious idea finds expression in the war on the blasphemy of transphobia... it’s worth noting that heresy actually means choice. The word heresy comes from the Greek for ‘choice’, for ‘the chosen thing’. To be a heretic is to make a choice – the wrong choice, in the view of the guardians of orthodoxy... The two most common brands imposed on those judged to hold heretical beliefs are ‘phobic‘ and ‘denier’. They are fascinating terms. The first, ‘phobic’, speaks to the treatment of certain views as irrational fears, as forms of mental illness, essentially. And the second, ‘denier’, echoes precisely the terminology used against those who were dragged before the Inquisition. They, too, were deniers: deniers of the light of Christ... when the Runnymede Trust first popularised the term ‘Islamophobia’, in the 1990s, it included in its definition any expression that treats Islam as ‘inferior to Western values’. So to make a particular moral judgement, in this case that Western ideals are better than Islamic ones, is to be unstable, diseased. This is a clear example of the language of demonology being used to make a heresy out of a perfectly legitimate moral view... In the words of Isaac Asimov, ‘Some of the greatest names in science have been… heretics. Startling scientific advances usually begin as heresies.’ That science and its adherents now contribute to the policing and punishment of heresy represents an abandonment of the openness to rebuke and falsification that makes science such an important endeavour in the first place."

I can't keep up with trans-activism, the community is impossible to please and I'm tired of it. : TrueOffMyChest - "I don't like the term cis. To me, it's a useless and ugly term, I don't want to be called cis. That's pretty simple, isn't it? Transgender people don't want to be called derogatory terms or anything besides what they identify as, cool. Transwomen want to be considered women, cool. But when I want to be called a woman? Suddenly they're all too happy to dismiss my discomfort... People always tried to assure me that this shit was rare, "trans people in real life aren't like that" "those are FAKE trans people, REAL trans people wouldn't say that" "you only find people like that on Tumblr" etc etc.Well guess what? They aren't rare, they're FUCKING EVERYWHERE. They're in my school, on every fucking social media platform, and above all, they're fucking inescapable on any sort of art website I have ever tried to join. I mean, my god, I just want to DRAW and LOOK AT PRETTY PICTURES and HAVE A GOOD TIME WITHOUT WORRYING ABOUT PEOPLE HARASSING ME FOR POSTING A FEMALE CHARACTER WITHOUT MAKING IT SUPER CLEAR WHETHER OR NOT SHE'S CIS. I want to make any characters I want without people shitting on me with comments like "you only make cis girls!!!!" or "what do you mean your lesbian character doesn't date people with penises???????"... they've never given me an actual explanation of what it means to feel like a woman. All it ever boils down to is traditional femininity, which I don't think should define women at all. In fact, I think it's super offensive and SEXIST to act like the only thing that determines whether or not someone is a woman is how pretty she is, how much she likes traditionally feminine things, and how well she conforms to traditionally feminine roles and behavior. I'm a bit of a tomboy and I'm a bisexual, so these people have been trying to shove the idea that I might be non-binary or transgender down my throat since day 1. No! I'm a girl! I don't want to be anything BUT a girl! Why does the fact that I have traditionally masculine interests make me less of a girl?! UGH. Sorry, but I'm officially a "terf". None of this shit makes sense anymore and the more I "learn" the less I understand. I don't get why biological sex wasn't good enough. If you're so in love with pink, dresses, and doing your nails, why can't you do that as a man? A lot of you insist on keeping your penis anyway! What's the harm in identifying by your genitals that you WANT to keep?... Your rhetoric makes no sense, it's hypocritical, unscientific, illogical, and you harass people for being incapable of reading minds so... I'm a terf now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of course I support people who have sex dysphoria, but I'm no longer going to entertain this gender nonsense. Frankly, it's the opposite of progressive. I should have realized how insane it was the moment they started giving hormones to children, demanding that lesbians accept women with penises, and forcing their way into women's rape and abuse rehab centers - while insisting they don't have bottom dysphoria and therefor must keep their penis."
If you just want attention and to bully others...

Trans Athletes: The Death Of Women's Sports - "Most experts say that the average testosterone production for biological females ranges between 0.52 to 2.8 nmol/L. The Mayo Clinic put that range even lower (2). And while experts may vary in what they consider average among females, the consensus is almost always below 3 nanomoles/L.But remember, federations like the IOC require a male-born person to suppress and maintain testosterone production at 10 nanomoles/L.So even if a woman was genetically blessed with testosterone levels that reached 3 nmol/L, that would still be less than half of what a trans woman would be allowed to have during the competition... And yes, there are occurrences of female outliers who have elevated testosterone production from things that affect hormonal output, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, but those are rare occurrences in which their hormones may still remain below 10 nmol/L. And these outliers won't have the advantage of going through puberty with the peak testosterone production of a young man... let's just pretend that trans women were required to sufficiently lower their levels to that of an average biological women. The next thing we'd have to acknowledge is that the amount of testosterone they previously produced will have had a huge impact on their anatomy and physiology... The male-born will likely never experience the iron deficiencies related to the combination of hard training and heavy menstrual flow. Nor will they ever have to worry about the female athletic triad, a condition that occurs when a woman's activity level drives her hormones down to a point at which she stops having a period and, as a result, her bone mineral density decreases (common in endurance athletes) (6).None of these differences between biological males and females are mentioned in the articles praising trans competitors as "groundbreaking," "brave," or "heroic."... I'd hate to be in charge of any sports federation right now. To be "fair" to a very small group (0.6% of the population), a much larger group (50.8% of the population) must have their chances of winning greatly diminished. Trans activism has put federations in this position. Because if they do the right thing, their federation will be smeared, protested, labeled discriminatory, or get sued... Sharron Davies, who won a silver medal in swimming in the 1980 Olympics, also tweeted:"I have nothing against anyone who wishes to be transgender. However, I believe there is a fundamental difference between the binary sex you are born with and the gender you may identify as. To protect women's sport, those with a male sex advantage should not be able to compete in women's sport."She later said in an interview that all the international athletes she's spoken with agree with her position, but they're afraid to speak out. As expected, Davies has been labeled as transphobic."

Effects of perceived discrimination on mental health and mental health services utilization among gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons - "Although perceived discrimination was associated with almost all of the indicators of mental health and utilization of mental health care that we examined, adjusting for discrimination did not significantly reduce mental health disparities between heterosexual and LGBT persons"
This suggests that discrimination is not why LGBTs have worse (mental) health

Gender and Period Care Products – Lunette Menstrual Cup - "the use of female-centric words needs to cease in the menstruation industry. This begs the question of what to say instead.Depending on the context, you can try to avoid naming groups of people. For example, instead of saying “Some people who menstruate prefer Lunette” you could say “Lunette is a preferred menstrual care product”. I mean, we all get that, if you’re using a period product then you probably have a period.I’ve been guilty of quipping “people with uteruses” from time to time - until I realized that, hey, this person who has a uterus may really, really wish they didn’t have one. And so to lump them into a group that reminds them that they do have a uterus, possibly contributing to body dysmorphia, well, I don’t want any part of that. .. It is time for us to use this knowledge and understanding to change another label. We’ve changed racist labels. We’ve changed sexist labels. Now, let’s change cisexist ones. Periods are not inherently feminine. Periods are a biological phenomenon that impacts the lives of people who are born with a uterus. We have the power to grow toward inclusion of all people who menstruate, and now is the time for that shift. All people deserve to feel comfortable taking care of themselves during their time of the month. Period."
How deep does the rabbit hole go?

The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren't - "Jackie came out to friends and family first and then posted a note on Facebook. She was adopting new pronouns, the note said, and she would like her community to respect that. It looked, at first, like a typical coming out circa 2017, one of many posted online every day as more and more people come out as transgender, nonbinary, or genderqueer. But Jackie's post was different. She wasn't coming out as trans, she was coming out as de-trans.... This has ignited a contentious debate both in and outside the trans community, with various sides accusing each other of bigotry, harassment, censorship, and damaging the fight for trans rights... "clinicians are a little afraid of being labeled 'gatekeepers.'"Until recently, the "gatekeeper" model of trans care was standard, and it meant that who could or could not change their bodies was ultimately up to therapists... in the 1980s, patients had to live as their target gender for two years before medical intervention."They were required to supply documentation that showed they were actually living out in the community as the opposite sex and not just ordering pizza delivery and putting on a dress," Blanchard said. "By today's standard, that would be incredibly oppressive."... "I didn't really feel like I could talk to my counselors about detransitioning in the way that I wanted," she said, "because they have specific political views, and I felt like if I said I had these criticisms of the whole concept of transitioning, they would have thought I was being brainwashed by transphobic bigots or whatever."... There have... been almost a dozen studies of looking at the rate of "desistance," among trans-identified kids—which, in this context, refers to cases in which trans kids eventually identify as their sex at birth. Canadian sex researcher James Cantor summarized those studies' findings in a blog post: "Despite the differences in country, culture, decade, and follow-up length and method, all the studies have come to a remarkably similar conclusion: Only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks."... about 80 percent trans kids eventually identified as their sex at birth. Some trans activists and academics, however, argue that these studies are flawed, the patients surveyed weren't really transgender, and that mass desistance doesn't exist."The desistance myth was promoted by reparative therapists, concern trolls, and charlatans," trans advocate Brynn Tannehill wrote on the Huffington Post. "It's time for the 80 percent desistance figure to be relegated to the same junk science bin as the utterly discredited link between vaccines and autism."... In some ways, she faults them for enabling her transition, even though it's exactly what she wanted at the time. She writes about her experience online, and in one post, she says that a favored therapist "helped me hurt myself""
Using non trans logic, reducing gatekeeping means more patients will regret transitioning