www.unherd.com

Lionel Shriver #transphobia unherd.com

Is trans the new anorexia?

[...]
Both diagnoses have significant intersections with autism, anxiety and depression, making patients susceptible to a tangible-seeming solution to a generalised discontent. Both populations mistake self-annihilation for a route to enlightenment and rebirth. Both populations seek to salve psychic torment by renouncing the body, the trans child through reconfiguration, the anorexic through evaporation. Both brands of patient embrace the recognisably religious practices of self-abnegation, redemption through suffering and purification via repudiation of the flesh.
[...]
For the paediatric gender clinic whistle-blower Jamie Reed testifies that in America’s liberal enclaves, having a trans kid has become a prestige diagnosis for many parents — one far preferable to the passé status of having a child who’s plain old gay. Reed identifies the root of the problem as another plain old: homophobia.
[...]
As for treatment, anorexia is universally acknowledged as an illness. Doctors regard this potentially fatal form of dysmorphia as a psychiatric ailment that must be arrested and resolved. Not so transgenderism, which is often celebrated, if not beatified as a state of higher consciousness. “Gender-affirming care” doesn’t treat the illness but indulges the patient’s delusions to the hilt. Rather than coach a child to reconcile with reality, clinicians twist reality to reconcile it with the disorder. Anyone who dares describe the bizarre and biologically baseless conviction that one was “born in the wrong body” as a mental health issue is tarred as a transphobe. Were teenage anorexics treated anything like trans kids, they wouldn’t be encouraged to finish their dinner, but rather abjured, “You’re right: you’re fat! Your true self is even thinner! You will never rise to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty until you completely disappear!”
[...]

Lionel Shriver #transphobia unherd.com

Is trans the new anorexia?

[...]
Both neuroses are clearly communicable. Ever since a preoccupation with thinness took off in the Sixties, eating disorders have soared, making the more recent insistence that anorexia is more of a heritable genetic proclivity than a cultural contagion dubious. From the Seventies onwards, an accelerating number of young women have got the idea to express their discontent through debilitating hunger from lavish media coverage, and one another. In kind, since 2010 the number of teenage girls referred to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service increased by 5,000% — making claims of a purely genetic explanation equally iffy. Both these afflictions are social confections. Although tales of people who starved themselves or passed for the opposite sex exist in the historical record, eating disorders and transgenderism on a mass scale are recent inventions. Collectively, we made these dire maladies up.
[...]
Coming out as trans likewise greatly increases attention from schoolmates, teachers and a whole industry of therapists, endocrinologists and surgeons. In a single syllable, “trans” likewise seems to offer a readymade answer to who you are. Freeman tells us that “when an anorexic says, ‘I don’t want to be fat, I want to be thin,’ they are saying, ‘I want to be other than I am, and what I am is unhappy. I want to be someone else.” Clearly, transition to the opposite sex makes the same statement: I want to be someone else. But is becoming someone else really an option?

Especially since girls came to dominate boys in paediatric gender clinics 3:1, both forms of dysmorphia often hit the same population: suggestible, insecure adolescent girls with a fragile sense of self who are desperate to forestall all that womanhood entails: painful periods; vulnerability to rape and pregnancy; sex, often portrayed in ubiquitous internet porn as female humiliation; and fat. For some anorexics, their refusal to grow into women is implicit; when girls take puberty blockers, their refusal to become women is explicit. Having suffered the physical indignities of mature femininity for over 50 years, I don’t entirely blame them.
[...]

Richard Craven & Jeremy Bray #transphobia unherd.com

RE: LGB Alliance’s victory is another loss for gender ideology

( Richard Craven )
“The Commission’s response was even more forthright, reminding charities of the need to debate and campaign “with respect and tolerance”.”
Nobody should respect or tolerate the likes of Mermaids. They advocate child mutilation.

( Jeremy Bray )
Indeed, the LGB Alliance has far more grounds for seeking to strip Mermaids of its charitable status given that it seeks to propagandise gay youths with the belief that they are actually the wrong sex and should mutilate themselves and sign up to a lifetime of experimental hormone treatments. Conversion therapy is too kind a name for it.

( Richard Craven )
Exactly. It’s basically just a child castration cult.

( Richard Craven )
“It rejects the claim that male-bodied trans women can be lesbians”
*It rejects the claim that men can be lesbians

( Richard Craven )
“the Tribunal pointed out that it is not up to the Charity Commission “to tell people what to think, or to regulate public debate in a context where there are deeply held, sincere beliefs on all sides”.”
Not one single living individual sincerely believes what “trans” activists claim to believe.

various commenters #transphobia unherd.com

RE: Don’t blame J.K. Rowling for Brianna Ghey’s death

( Caroline Watson )
If this poor boy was murdered for being ‘gender’ non-conforming and possibly gay, that is not the fault of traditional feminists who support everyone’s right to be those things.
If blood is on anyone’s hands, it is on those of people who rigidly support ‘gender’ stereotypes and would rather a boy pretended to be a girl, and was medicated and mutilated accordingly, rather than accepting him as a gay and probably effeminate boy.
Pretending to be a girl didn’t save him and it won’t others. Teaching children that ‘gender’ is nonsense, and that everyone can be themselves as the sex that they are, just might.

( Lang Cleg )
These people are actually happy that a teen has been murdered because they think it gives them licence. Anyone can see how dangerous this is. Authorities in denial.

( Richard Parker )
Spot on. Viscerally disgusting, isn’t it?

I suppose it does at least add to the growing pile of evidence: that these people care only about winning the argument they’ve started. They clearly don’t care about human beings – either “friend” or “foe” – they only want to burnish their precious preoccupations and grievances. Nothing constructive will come of this, because a cadre of activists are determined to ensure that.

( Linda Hutchinson )
Immediately that I heard that this poor person was trans, I knew that this stuff would happen. The murder of anyone is abhorrent, and I hope that the person(s) who committed this crime are found and punished; at the moment the authorities don’t have a motive, but even it it were a “hate” crime, this should not be a reason not to be critical of the trans movement. If a racist were to be murdered by a self styled anti-racist we would not be saying that criticm of racists is to blame, we would place the blame where it belongs – with the perpetrator.

( Paul S )
Some witches don’t burn. That infuriates the right people.

( Rebecca Bartleet )
The extreme trans activists so openly and actively advocate violent retribution against those who are gender critical, they cannot be surprised if their opponents opt to use it against innocent trans youngsters. Maybe that’s what they want, so they can boost their victim status.

M. M. #racist #wingnut #conspiracy unherd.com

[On a Reichsbürger group arrested for plotting to overthrow the German government]

Ralph Schoellhammer wrote, “The biggest threat to German democracy is not the strength of these radical movements, but the weakness of a government that more and more people feel no longer has their interests at heart.”

The residents of Germany are responsible for its quality of life. Since no foreign power is imposing the current government on the citizens, that government and its actions are precisely what the citizens want. If they do not want it, then they should vote for politicians that reflect what they want.

The divide between government actions (e.g., opening the border to more than one million anti-Western migrants in 2015) and what the European-Germans (i.e., Germans of European ancestry) want will widen if they decline to shut the border. The offspring of the anti-Western migrants will sufficient electoral power to force the government to act in a way that harms the interests of European-Germans.

In California, the Hispanics and their offspring have already steered the state government to act in a way that harms both European-Americans and East-Asian-Americans. Most Hispanics reject Western culture. Most European-Americans and East-Asian Americans identify with Western culture.

By 2040, the United States will cease being a Western nation, due to open borders. By 2040, most Americans will reject Western culture (as the Californian population is swelled by anti-Western migrants from primarily Latin America and secondarily South Asia), and Hispanic culture will dominate. In California, 40% of the residents are currently Hispanic. Most residents of the state already reject Western culture, and Hispanic culture dominates.

The German fate will become the American fate unless European-Germans take responsibility for their votes. They must elect politicians who will (1) shut the border and (2) distance Germany from the United States. A Germany based on Western values is superior to a Germany based on, say, Middle-Eastern values.

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