My header picture on my Twitter account was, for much of 2017, a screen capture from a 4Chan thread that was originally flagged up to me by a close friend. The author makes the statement:
“tfw (‘that feeling when’) your mom is a close friend of Miranda Yardley and literally didn’t allow you to transition because he didn’t say you should”
I’ve had a number of transgender males suggest to me that I ‘feel proud’ for the ‘psychotic behaviour’ of making a kid cry (I didn’t, that statement was made by someone commenting on this original post) and that I was ‘bragging about preventing some trans kid from transitioning’.
Well, I wasn’t but hey, if my words help just one person come to terms with their own body and not choose the difficult life of ‘transition’, then my work has been successful.
I have written before about how children are leveraged by transgender activists to validate their own identity on the basis of gender nonconformity: kids do, in the words of Autumn Sandeen, remove the mystery of, and desexualise the trans experience. Yes, he really said this. In a masterful stroke, this creation of a culture cementing sex stereotypes to the pre-Victorian concept of innate rigid personalities based upon sex is hailed as progressive: we are told that people are now free to be who they are and live the life they choose. This is utter bullshit: the price of admission is to comply or to change. Even the Church of England get this.
There appear to be any number of transgender evangelists who wish to poison the well of the transgender debate by accusing anyone who is critical of transgender dogma by reframing their argument as illiberal Right-wing ultra-conservative views. Of course, the reality of this is even stranger than the fiction; the conservative Right and the regressive Left of transgender dogma share more than they differ.
It is interesting to look at gender stereotyping within the context of the conservative Right and the regressive Left. This allows us to see just how much these orthodoxies have in common. The result is, clear as day, exactly the same sort of horseshoe theory we find in other areas of transgender activism, with the Right defining the subject (interests and culture) by the object (the child), and the regressive Left defining the object (the child) by the subject (the interests and culture).
The conservative Right:
- Only girls wear dresses, have long hair and play with dolls; and
- Only boys wear trousers, have short hair blue and play with cars.
The regressive Left:
- If a child wears dresses, has long hair and plays with dolls, she must be a girl; and
- If a child wears trousers, has short hair and plays with cars, he must be a boy.
Both are limiting, both are unfair, and in reality neither are accepting of the wishes of the object: the child. One requires the subject to change to match the object, thus the Right limits behaviour based upon the rigidity of the object’s material reality, meanwhile the Left changes the object to match the subject. In a perverse twisting of the harm principle, the position of the Left is to accommodate the wishes of the object by physically changing the object to match the subject: incapable of differentiating gender non-conformity from transgender, it’s goodbye gonads, hello brutal surgery and a lifetime of hormones. So-called progression is the new regression.
There seems to me something uniquely cruel in telling children their bodies are wrong because they do not match the interests our culture deems appropriate for their sex. The adults who promote this lethally toxic culture should feel ashamed of themselves. Of course, they never will: they are fanatics.
This is a failure of and within the Left; why is it the conversations about transgender dogma and in particular any criticism of the transing of children is hosted by conservative and Right-wing media? Having had work published faithfully within this conservative and Right-wing media, work which is critical of transgender dogma and presents argument using a material analysis more typical of class-based socialist argument, I’m left wondering whether the Left-wing press either represents the Left or even gives a fuck.
It is 2017, and a preference for sex based stereotypes is seen as being evidence that children and young adults have been born into the wrong body. This is being championed by middle aged, middle class men whose children would not exist if these same men had these same convictions when they were young and had their own balls cut off. These men, and the voices who champion them, deserve your disgust; for the disgust and revulsion they truly feel is that which lives inside them.
I can’t help thinking about George, in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. Published in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. She’s just a tomboy. She seems to be allowed to cut her hair short and wear boys’ clothes, and nobody remarks on this in any particular way. It’s just how she is. It’s also noticeable that she leaves the feminine role in the group to the younger Anne.
Then, it was understood that children worked through this in their own way. Leave them alone and they’ll sort it out. Nowadays George would be grabbed by these Mermaid people and put on hormones. And this is an advance? I don’t think so.
I should add this. Blyton was not intending to portray a child with “gender dysphoria”. Not only was the term and indeed the concept unheard-of at the time, Blyton herself was conventional enough to have avoided such concepts.
The inclusion of George in a straightforward series of adventure novels for children has another explanation. Blyton had an eye on her readership. The tomboy girl was (and is) a common phenomenon to the point of being a stereotype. Blyton included one feminine girl and one tomboy in the group with an eye to sales I believe. The format gave girls a choice of characters to identify with, and ensured a wide appeal. (As an aside, one could characterise Arya and Sansa Stark in much the same terms.)
Tomboys were ordinary enough to be marketed to, and still are. They were regarded as ordinary girls and if you just left them alone they grew up into whatever sort of woman they were going to be, gay or straight. Now we’re in danger of sexualising these girls prematurely and dragging them into all sorts of harm. It’s a serious issue.
No George was often commented upon by the boys and Anne told that her version of girl was much more preferable to George’s. The point for me when I was reading these books was that I could never understand why either Anne or George would give a flying fuck what the boys thought.
I was a tomboy, wanted a name that could be a boy’s or a girl’s like Sam, Jo, etc., and rarely played with the girls because I couldn’t bear the drama and infighting. I’m a straight woman, with kids who developed an acute feminism habit haha
The number of children who are not 1. dealing with a rejection of societal aspiration and assumptions about children of their sex, 2. dealing with a blossoming homosexual sexuality, 3. dealing with an internalisation of shame following an assault that they ground in their body (never spoken about, yet sudden gender dysphoria is an indication of sexual abuse) are tiny, so why on earth treat everyone as trans?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. I’ve been dragged to hell and back with issues regarding my daughter ( who is a tomboy;) she started to see the school counselor who “empowered” my 12 year old to fight for who she wanted to be… A boy. She’s still at an age where she can still be bribed with sweets, likes to blow big bubbles in the bath and can be pretty grown up too( I’m not denying that!) Following sessions with the counselor her head was filled with ideas of surgery and hormone replacement! I’ve stopped the sessions, the issue still lingers at times but it’s nothing compared to how it was. I respect completely that she doesn’t feel like a girl (I never did, but I didn’t feel like a boy either, I just thought they had an easier time!) I’ve told her that when she has an ‘adult mind’ I’ll support her and be proud of whoever she is, as I am now. But until She’s old enough, a tomboy she is.
Counsellor sounds like they are searching for a poster transboy to champion! Did they go on a recent course?
Thank you, Miranda, for writing this and thank you for your entire blog. I really love your thoughts on feminism and sex/gender issues.
Those middle aged, middle class men don’t have their balls chopped off. They have lady dicks. They don’t have man boobs on transmen though. They must be chopped off. Why are women condoning this bullshit? The most offensive crap has been from female allies to be honest eg ‘having rapists in a women’s prison is not even an issue, as women rape each other with objects. So it is transphobic to report on sexual assaults by rapists in women’s prisons’. I kid you not! They are so keen to show off their commitment to their bullying transgender masters, they would sell women and kids down the river.