Lefty Ⓥ dismayed by dogma and woo. Dems need rational dialogue re: “gender identity.” Please start listening to ex-trans-identified folk & aware AGPs.
Joined November 2023
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To my fellow libs/progressives/Democrats who are starting to have questions regarding “trans” claims…
I recommend this 2023 memo as an excellent explainer— transpolicy.substack.com/p/t… Its author has personal experience w/issues of cross-sex identity.
Also helpful: see next link ⬇️
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This article brings me back to something I’ve spoken about many times. In the 1980s I saw people who had taken overdoses after discovering that sex reassignment hadn’t cured their existing problems. They had changed their bodies but the problems were still there.
In those days, individuals were expected to spend two years living in their preferred gender role, with psychological assessment and psychotherapy before surgery. I think that time matters. We need to understand what the person thinks these interventions are going to do for them, and help them understand the limits of what transition can achieve.
The numbers have gone up exponentially and the demographic changed. We are seeing many more neurodivergent young adults presenting when they go to university, fearful of the adult world and not feeling they fit in. Questions start getting asked about intimate relationships, how they are going to manage independently and what contribution they might make to adult life.
The people I’m describing often feel detached from their body. They don’t really feel they own it, but they are also struggling to establish a mind of their own. It’s almost as if they believe they have to do something concrete and drastic to their body before they can claim it as their own.
Many are riddled with self-hatred feeling they don’t measure up to an ideal of who they should be. That hatred is often directed towards the body, particularly the aspects they cannot control and find intolerable. They are desperately looking for a solution that doesn’t involve understanding any of this. Thinking about it is resisted because it threatens to bring back the doubt and confusion they have projected out. They create a sort of avatar in their mind and believe that becoming this person through medical transition will cure their problems.
As I say in Identity and the Foundational Myth, over several years they can develop a belief system that explains their struggles through the idea that they were born in the wrong body. In the cases I’m talking about, I think this is a false explanation that provides cover for underlying anxieties and conflicts. We need to understand what is going on behind the belief.
I’ve also seen the casualties: people who have had medical interventions and regret them. They hadn’t appreciated that surgeons can imitate aspects of natural biology but cannot reproduce its full workings. Afterwards, they have to live with the problems they had before and the additional problems caused by medication and surgery. Turning 18 doesn’t suddenly mean someone understands what this might mean for the rest of their life.
And scandalously, the Levy review found that adult services didn’t have the outcome data needed to know how people were doing or properly assess the safety of their care. Why aren’t we following people up systematically and finding out?
We need to know whether these expensive, irreversible interventions help people live productive lives, have relationships and make the contribution to society they want to make. How are they getting on in middle age? What has happened to the problems they hoped transition would resolve?
The Finnish study found that psychiatric treatment needs did not subside after medical transition. It doesn’t answer the question about middle age, but it should make us want to find out more. We don’t seem very interested in what happens to people in the years afterwards.
This is why I think a period of psychotherapy before irreversible interventions is so important. It should help the individual understand their own motives and beliefs, so they are in a better position to think about what they want, what they hope treatment will achieve and the risks involved.
In the end, individuals have to decide how best to live their own lives. But a slow process, with time for reflection, can help them become more self-aware and make more informed decisions.
@BayswaterSG @Telegraph @NHSEngland @YvetteCooperMP
Taxpayers foot £6.5m bill for trans breast removal surgeries telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
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A lot of us were very willing to have a debate without heat, @stonewalluk, and the reason that never happened wasn't because gender critical feminists didn't want one.
While we were trying to get you to listen to our concerns, your former CEO was telling a BBC boss that gay people not wanting to include the opposite sex in their dating pool was 'sexual racism'. While we were pointing out the homophobia inherent in gender ideology, Stonewall ambassador Alex Drummond (a bearded, heterosexual man who'd had no surgery and taken no cross-sex hormones but liked wearing skirts), was going into schools to talk to students about his 'lesbian' identity. @BluskyeAllison, who actually is a lesbian, was subject to unlawful discrimination at her place of work for tweeting: ‘Stonewall recently hired Morgan Page, a male bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can coerce young lesbians into having sex with them. Page called [it] “overcoming the cotton ceiling”.’
When the UK Supreme Court upheld women's right to single sex spaces, you issued a statement expressing your unhappiness about the ruling. In her report on your unhappy influence at the University of Essex, you were found by barrister @akuareindorf to have misrepresented the law as it related to women's rights: '[Stonewall have] stated the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is’.
In 2018, you publicly advised schools to shred a research pack saying there were risks to puberty blockers, in spite of the fact that you aren't a medical charity and that there was already credible evidence that puberty blockers are neither irreversible nor harm-free. Meanwhile you produced your own educational packs, recommending a children's book, for ages 5-9, in which the parent 'is neither a man, nor a woman – they’re non-binary.' In July 2022, Stonewall sent out a tweet that read ‘Research suggests that children as young as two recognise their trans identity'.
@thetimes has reported how you've sought to control the language used by NHS trusts and government on their social-media accounts. Organisations would get points from you for replacing commonly understood words with ideologically approved terms, eg, 'birthing parent' instead of 'mother'. thetimes.com/uk/society/arti…
In short, you took a maximalist position on gender identity ideology, which you attempted to enforce by diktat. You refused to acknowledge that you'd hitched your wagon to a cause that, unlike civil rights, gay rights or women's rights, sought to strip rights from others. You sought to curtail everyone's right to freedom of speech and belief by controlling what it was permissible to think and say, through the management and political class. You have argued against women's and girl's rights to their own spaces, their sports and to assemble without men. Your former CEO tried to shame gay women/men into dating the opposite sex if the latter claimed to be female/male.
Your mantra was 'no debate' because, like all totalitarians, you preferred slogans, bullying and infiltration of powerful institutions to talking to opponents. You appear to have had no concern for the lowly people your ideology was harming: gender confused kids, female rape victims, female prisoners, regular people hounded and investigated at their places of work for refusing to accept the new mandates on sex and gender issued from on high.
Your 'activism' has been a disaster for those trans-identified people who really do just want to get on with their lives in peace. You have besmirched the name of an organisation many of us were once proud to donate to, the charity that was partly responsible for securing the legal right of gay people to marry, which a lot of us thought would never happen in our lifetimes. The milquetoast words quoted below do not erase a decade of gender activism that has been disastrous not only for individuals but for society as a whole.
There was once a debate to be had, but until you acknowledge the direct harm you've caused, it is no more possible to debate you than to persuade a person in the throes of a drug-induced psychosis that they are not, in fact, the reincarnated Christ.
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Don't believe the lies about "invasive genital exams" in sports physicals.
Spokane Pediatrician explains that doctors already know the sex of their patients and that it is recorded in every child's medical record.
Vote YES on I-638 to restore fairness to girls' sports.
@DIAGdemocrats @KnownHeretic @TCSWashington
chronline.com/stories/commen…
FYI about Daniel Moraff. I came across this today from Mike Elk, a labor reporter: paydayreport.com/platners-gu…
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The psychological experiment she refers to, about pressure to conform, was first conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_c…
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Males and females may differ, on average, across many psychological and neurological traits. For most individual traits, however, the distributions overlap substantially, with many males and females falling well within the same range.
When these traits are considered simultaneously in a multivariate space, the overlap between the sexes can decrease considerably. As more informative traits are added, classification accuracy generally increases.
Some people take this to mean that every male and every female must therefore be profoundly different. But that conclusion does not follow. Multivariate sex differences are primarily population-level patterns: they tell us that groups can be distinguished with increasing accuracy, not that every individual is highly atypical of members of the other sex.
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@BrianLehrer on @WNYC just (mis)informed listeners that detransitioners don't require any special medical care. They can "just stop."
This is disinformation. There are no guidelines, no billing codes, and no protocol for detransitioners. Democrats have blocked detrans care bills.
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“Gender identity” is often presented as a deep, innate psychological essence that exists independently of biological sex. However, the evidence for such a claim is far less clear than is commonly assumed.
At its most basic level, what is called “gender identity” can be understood as an individual’s perception, understanding, or subjective relationship to their biological sex. Neurologically, researchers do not directly observe a “gender identity” module in the brain. Rather, they identify statistical correlations between certain brain regions, networks, or patterns of activity and individuals’ self-reported feelings, beliefs, and experiences. This is no different in principle from studying political identity, religious identity, national identity, athletic identity, or any other self-concept. The fact that a mental state correlates with brain activity does not establish that it is an innate, biologically distinct entity.
The statement that “gender identity is in the brain” therefore risks overstating what neuroscience can actually demonstrate. Every thought, belief, preference, and self-conception is represented in the brain in some form. Saying that gender identity has neural correlates tells us little more than the fact that people think about themselves in sex-related ways.
At most, biological, developmental, psychological, and social factors may influence whether an individual feels comfortable with, identifies with, or rejects aspects of their sexed body. These influences are worthy of study. However, it does not follow that “gender identity” should be treated as a separate category that supersedes biological sex in law, medicine, or public policy.
Biological sex has direct physical, reproductive, and physiological consequences that are relevant in areas such as healthcare, sport, privacy, data collection, and scientific research. Any policy framework that elevates subjective identity above these objective realities bears the burden of demonstrating why such a departure is justified. Simply asserting that gender identity is real or that it has neural correlates does not, by itself, establish that it should take precedence over biological sex in legal or institutional decision-making.
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The Gender-Critical or "TERF" Position is a materialist analysis of sex, gender, and women’s rights. It is not a theory of hatred toward trans-identified people. It is a claim about the importance of sex as a real, human, and materially significant category in law, language, medicine, safeguarding, sport, and feminism.
Trans activists often misrepresent the views of GC feminists, sex realists and TERFs becaue honesty would cause them to lose the argument.
The following is an attempt to represent my position as a gender critical, sex realist and radical feminist precisely so it is easier to see when that view is being intentionally misrepresented and/or understood by bad faith representatives of trans activism.
I know my own position better than anyone. Bad faith is presuming to tell me what my own position is in order to discredit me. That's worse than a strawman, and the main tactic of gender essentialist activism.
Here is my actual position: the only position I need to defend:
1. Sex is real and materially significant
Sex in human beings is not an identity, a feeling, a role, or a personality type. It is a reproductive and developmental category: male and female are the two human sex classes that are the means of human reproduction. Male is the sex class organized around the development of small, mobile gametes and female is the sex class organized around the development of large, immobile gametes.
This does not mean every person is fertile, typical, or currently capable of reproduction. Infertility, menopause, hysterectomy, castration, DSDs, injury, age, or illness do not erase sex. Sex is not a human performance and there is no standard for sex beyond teproductive role. Sex is a human condition and an innate, immutable attribute of the human body.
Gender-critical feminists reject the idea that sex is “assigned at birth” in the sense of being invented, guessed, or arbitrarily imposed by authority. In ordinary cases, sex is observed and recorded. Even in rare, extraordinary cases with ambiguous secondary sex characteristics, with modern instrumentation, the primary atrribute of sex is observable at the definitive level beyond the crude level of external genitalia at the cellular level.
2. Women are female human beings
In this framework, “woman” means an adult human female. “Girl” means a juvenile human female.
This definition does not depend on femininity, beauty, clothing, sexual behaviour, reproductive capacity, compliance, heterosexuality, or conformity to stereotypes. A woman can be masculine, feminine, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, celibate, infertile, disabled, old, young, gender-nonconforming, or medically atypical. She remains a woman because she is female.
The position is therefore not that women must look, act, dress, think, or feel a certain way. It is the opposite: women should be free from the sex-based stereotypes traditionally imposed on female people.
3. Gender is not sex
Radical feminism distinguishes sex from gender.
Sex refers to the embodied, biological male/female distinction.
Gender refers to the social roles, stereotypes, expectations, behaviours, and hierarchies imposed on people because of sex.
Gender-critical feminism does not seek to preserve gender roles. It seeks to abolish their coercive power.
A feminine male does not become female. A masculine female does not become male. No one should have to change sex category, medically alter their body, or adopt a new identity to be allowed to reject sexist expectations.
Continued...
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Another week, another attempt by woke academics to push sex pseudoscience.
In my video, I explain why a new paper in Neurotoxicology claiming that "sex is a spectrum," a "mosaic of factors," and a "conglomeration of variables" isn't just wrong, but totally self-refuting.
It tries to argue that the term "sex differences" is an "underdefined generalization that creates a distinct binary" when sex is actually a "spectrum."
So instead of saying "sex differences," the authors propose a new term: "Sex-Associated Variables," or SAVs. These SAVs, according to the authors, include morphological, genetic, and endocrine factors.
The authors state that "The use of SAVs allows for a more nuanced analysis of potential sex differences by using several different sex related characteristics as a defined variable that can be correlated with outcomes, rather than a reductive category."
But ask yourself this: How do the authors know which variables are "associated" with being male or female without knowing what males and females are independently of these SAVs?
The entire point of the paper is to deny a gamete-based view of sex on grounds that it is overly "reductive" and fails to capture the complexity of sex differences. But the authors are totally oblivious (or at least willfully ignorant) to the fact that their ability to assign SAVs to a particular sex, not just in humans but in non-human animals as well, necessarily presupposes the validity of the gamete-based view of sex.
Watch the video for a more detailed breakdown.
I've covered this argument, and many others, in great detail in my scholarly paper "Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes."
If you want a solid framework that exposes the central flaws in woke pseudoscience surrounding biological sex, I strongly recommend reading it. It's open access and relatively short.
Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes:link.springer.com/article/10…
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Health Secretary James Murray says he would no longer say 'Trans Women are Women', that single-sex spaces should be protected on the basis on sex, and that sex and gender are different things.
This is a big turnaround. In 2022 he defended a male swimmer competing in the female category (Lia Thomas) on the basis that 'Trans Women are Women'.
"You’ve said in the past ‘trans women are women’. Have you changed your mind?"
@JustinOnWeb asks new Health Secretary James Murray if he’s shifted his position like predecessor Wes Streeting.
Wesley makes a good point here.
There is a kind of trauma-bonding that accompanies being bullied and gaslit by the political establishment of the state of California that will lay a foundation for future action among some of the most agentic, competitive, physically fit girls in America, whom the Democratic party has seen fit to subject to a relentless humiliation ritual while declaring itself to be at the vanguard of morality and decency.
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Former BBC News director Fran Unsworth claims she was driven out of her role by trans activism.
She describes an atmosphere of internal bullying, pressure and fear around trans coverage - with editors reportedly reluctant to go near certain stories.
This matters - a lot.
Because journalism is, at its heart, about telling the truth. Even when the truth is uncomfortable.
So when basic facts are blurred, or language is used in a way that obscures rather than clarifies, the
consequences go far beyond one article, one newsroom or one broadcast.
And when journalists become afraid to state basic facts, challenge the language they are being asked to use or even cover certain stories - our of fear of what their colleagues might think - journalism stops informing the public.
It starts influencing them.
And that is activism, not journalism.
Link to read below (gift link) 👇
Flicka retweeted
Uhhh… that’s the problem!!!
No adult stepped in and said:
“You are a girl and you cannot become a boy… but that does NOT limit who you can be.”
Instead, adults increasingly interpret normal childhood identity exploration literally.
A little girl saying:
“I’m a boy”
could mean:
“I relate more to boys.”
“I like boy clothes.”
“I don’t fit feminine stereotypes.”
“I like rough play.”
“I admire male characters.”
“I feel different.”
Children say imaginative and identity-based things constantly.
The healthier response used to be:
“You’re still a girl, but girls can do almost anything.”
Wear boy clothes.
Get short haircuts.
Play sports.
Climb trees.
Reject stereotypes.
Be masculine.
Be different.
None of that requires telling a child they were “born in the wrong body.”
That’s the shift people are debating.
Not whether kids should be safe.
Not whether kids should be loved.
Whether adults should reinforce a child’s belief that they literally are the opposite sex instead of helping them understand that personality and biology are not the same thing.
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Superb, must-watch speech by @MaeveHalligan on the betrayal by the "LGBTQ" movement of those whose interests it was once created to serve.
xitter.gq/MaeveHalligan/status/2…
Thank you, @prof_curiosity1, for the clarity your writing provides.
A sample from this important piece:
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YES! Make this an article! Sunk cost fallacy plus my side bias plus group dynamics and bad data? You too can have a "1% regret rate."
Crazy. D.A. NYC🗽
Oh, btw - me this week. ❤️
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@60Minutes I am a public school teacher in Oregon who entered the profession in 2018. I could not believe how many kids in rural parts of the state had been allowed to transition. I watched kids change for the worse. I know of girls who had radical mastectomies and then regretted it. These stories need to be told. And it needs to be included how much WE teachers were conscripted into reinforcing it. Laced into every workshop. All throughout our union. I have been enraged at this from the start.
Ben Kawaller is right: It is massive news that a former President of GLAAD has evolved his views on youth gender medicine.
@bariweiss why don’t you let Leslie Stahl do another segment on this on 60 Minutes? Cover the fact that the Trans Lobby forced the narrative to be muddied. This stuff is a huge story! It’s huge story that the former President of GLAAD told @benkawaller that he radically evolved his views on youth transition. We need this break. W need the truth to be told.
