Alternate title: Ross Douthat "both sides" the trans/gay panic bullshit to make his liberal readers feel better about being bigoted.
Liberals are slowly learning that they're actually reactionaries
And they like it
returning to their dixiecrat roots
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saying trump is "finally presidential" when he bombs syria
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being okay with torch-marching nazis to own putin
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deregulating and privatizing everything to prove they aren't berniebros
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forgetting ICE camps exist as soon as their guy is elected
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This is by Ross Douthat, he's the NYT's resident weird conservative Catholic traditionalist.
What the fuck
There is no clear evidence that any of this is making kids happier or better adjusted; instead all we see is a worsening of teen mental health, blurring into a young-adult landscape where sex and relationships and marriage are on the wane. So what we need now is probably more emphasis on biology, normativity and reconciliation with your own maleness or femaleness, not further deconstruction.
:kombucha-disgust:
Both sidesing usually gives the left no credit whatsoever. We are ALWAYS the bad guys no matter what. When was the last time anyone genuinely wanted to hear our side of the story in good faith? NEVER.
*the author quietly shoving the material causes of social disintegration under the rug*
This is the gays fault!
The Young People: I am sad and depressed bc of capitalisms and its disastrous effects on my life and the world
Author: NO You are sad bc you are overly sensitive and overly gay
I'm sad and depressed bc of capitalisms and its disastrous effects on my life and the world AND bc I'm overly sensitive and overly gay
Also maybe youth mental health is worsening because we continue to do nothing to address their material conditions or the advancing climate apocalypse.
Jesus Christ this guy sucks so fucking much.
guys i just had sex as a young adult but im also trans what happens now
there is an enormous gap between what people are willing to say in public and what they really think
Wow who would've guessed? NYT truly giving us the deepest insights
And like, who? I think people are perfectly comfortable saying they want to [redacted] the group NO ONE LIKES, and that group isn't even allowed to retaliate. Try to say "That's a bunch of religious bullshit" to them, they'll just screech "FEDORA!" at you and automatically claim victory.
Wish we had more Ricky Gervais' people that are not afraid to give the masses the middle finger right back.
religion isn't what makes people bigots. it's just the terms some bigots are used to expressing their beliefs in.
There is no clear evidence that any of this is making kids happier or better adjusted; instead all we see is a worsening of teen mental health, blurring into a young-adult landscape where sex and relationships and marriage are on the wane.
Yes the disintegration of the social fabric is definitely being caused by kids being gay on tiktok and has no other immediate material causes. Glad we could clear that up.
Seriously, though, 21% of Gen Z is queer? Holy shit I had no idea! That's awesome.
Is this higher than estimates of closeted non-heterosexuality in the past?
Controversial topic but I would really like to examine this and whether it has always been that way, or whether there are environmental factors increasing it, whether sexuality is actually more fluid than we thought, etc etc. From a purely good faith and healthy point of view I mean. It just seems much much higher than I expected. Only a topic I would consider exploring among other non-hetero people I think... For obvious reasons.
Idk but European culture over the last like 3-400 years is the most strictly and violent heternormative, hetersexual, and gender rigid culture I'm familiar with. Various kinds of homosexual and gender variant roles were much more common and unmarked in various cultures all over the world before the Europeans got super fucking extra about one man, one woman, and no gay stuff.
This seems to be true in the UK too , kinda based. I'm still super curious about it though, in particular because going through a very real sexual preference change myself while transitioning led me to questioning how hardcoded it really is.
I have a hard time with the idea of any level of biological determinism because my "training" as an anthropologist emphasized again and again how wildly flexible culture can be, and how expressions of masculine and feminine rolls can be very different in differing cultures. So I kind of just trust people when they tell me that they always knew they were X or Y or Q or whatever. I think we're still a long way from understanding fully how chromosomes, genetics, culture, and individual experience combine to manifest as gender. Because it does seem to be a mash up of different things, with most people being somewhere on the two humps of the bell curve for man and woman, but then there's all kinds of outliers and unexpected things popping up that don't necessarily fit the model.
Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
On a related note, I went to college back in '03ish, and I observed at the time that a lot of people were much more flexible in their sexuality and gender presentation than I'd ever seen in highschool. I long held a theory that there were a lot more not-straight people than commonly believed, and it came out in college because people were in a safer place, away from their parents and communities, where they could experiment and express themselve for the first time. And then when the left college and went back in to the real, more socially violent and repressive world, they'd clamp down on those differences and perform the expected cisheteronormative roles. And I think that 21% number supports what I was seeing. I'm so glad younger people feel that they can be open about it and don't have to hide just to survive as much.
One factor that's worth noting is that the definition of LGBT+ has expanded to be more inclusive. 20 years ago, an asexual person for instance might not even know that asexuality is a thing, and might have felt that they don't fit in or qualify as an LGBT person. Likewise, for me, I didn't identify as LGBT bc I didn't want to be with a man as a man, and it was only later that I realized being trans was an option, and of course my exposure early on was transphobic stuff like South Park. There's also, like, sissies were/are a thing in BDSM with AMAB people who might be into feminization/crossdressing, but might also be more into women and therefore might not have identified as LGBT before, but now I'm sure some identify as NB/trans.
Having said that, I don't think that sexuality is as set in stone as people think it is. To some extent, saying that people are naturally LGBT or not-LGBT kind of assumes that categories of gender are innate, as well as attraction. But if that were true, then standards of beauty wouldn't change over time.
If we want to dissect this, like, some people are turned on by high heels, and I think it should be obvious that there's no "high heel gene" that determines that. Rather, heels have a certain meaning based on socially constructed associations. Originally, heels were worn by men looking to appear taller and therefore more masculine, but over time they shifted to be associated with women. A person might enjoy wearing heels themselves, or they might enjoy getting stepped on, or any number of other interactions with them, and these interactions have a psychological meaning to the people involved, and may fulfill psychological needs and desires that are more complex than simple attraction. If a person feels pressured in their day to day life, they may seek to hand over control in a sexual context, for example. A person's psychological needs are dependent on their material conditions, meanwhile, the meaning that they assign to particular stimuli are very much influenced by culture. And if we can say that being attracted to heels is determined by social conditioning and the cultural meaning assigned to them, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say the same about, say, breasts.
So hypothetically, would it be possible to like, raise a kid in a lab and control whether they're attracted to men or women? I think it'd be possible to tip the scales, but the human mind is very complex and I doubt that it's possible to predict things to that extent. If you try to make them be attracted to one thing, they might discover another thing and find it new and exciting instead. Like, conversion therapy and stuff can just make it so that being straight is associated with doing what your parents and society want you to do, while being gay is associated with defying that and doing what you want. So it's not something that can be changed so bluntly. But I think it stands to reason that generally speaking, social stigma is going to lead to fewer people identifying a certain way, and that's even if it's an anonymous survey, because people are going to be less likely to investigate feelings or be open to new experiences, and to admit things to themselves.
I think sexuality is rather fluid based on what I've seen and experienced in my life. I don't think there's anything wrong with "born this way" rhetoric, and there's certainly people it applies to, but a huge percent of bi people I know (including myself) say that doesn't really match how they came into their sexuality, so there's definitely a broad spectrum.
To be way, way overly fair to the author of this shitty, shitty article, that quote is the last little bit of the "third position" in his stupid Rorschach test. He doesn't necessarily believe what he's saying there, he's explaining what the TERF/conservative camp thinks. (I bet you anything he does actually agree with the TERFs/conservatives, but he's pretending to be more objective for the purpose of writing this piece.)
But of course this stakes-raising cuts both ways, because for the first camp, convinced that these interventions are essential to transgender mental health, the stakes of the debate are literally life and death, and to defer too much to parental objections is to make trans suicide more likely. Which helps explain why, in spaces where the progressive view is dominant, there are frequent attempts to remove trans issues from debate entirely, lest the mere existence of a controversy spur trans youth to despair.
hmm, i wonder why adults seeking to debate and criminalize trans people's identities has a negative effect on the mental health of trans youth? hmmmm, that sure is a tough one, we should continue to debate their right to exist while we figure it out
Archive link for anyone masochistic enough to dive into this one https://archive.ph/8EMs6
"Most of the Generation Zers identifying as L.G.B.T. are calling themselves bisexual and will probably end up in straight relationships, if they aren’t in th"
i lasted longer than i thought i would
oh fuck oh god im trans and i ended up in a straight relationship :ohnoes:
my straight relationship got gay af real quick when my girlfriend transitioned
since a system that encourages “tomboyish girls or effeminate boys” to “identify as the opposite sex” ends up confirming “all the hoary gender stereotypes that made generations of gay and lesbian people (and many straight people) miserable.”
Transphobes say this shit a lot, and I have yet to see any evidence or even hear any anecdotes (that aren't transphobes on the internet) of this happening. Where on earth are people encouraging tomboys to transition? Now of course there are young trans men (and people with various other transmasc identities) and maybe what's happening is transphobes read these young trans people as tomboys and see their transitions as externally coerced. That's the only sense I can really make of this claim, but maybe I'm wrong. Does anyone have any stories or evidence that GNC young people are encouraged to transition when they otherwise wouldn't?
Edit: Fucking hell, this article has all the greatest (transphobic) hits. Now we're fear-mongering about parents afraid for their children who have been put on a path of surgical intervention. As a child whose father seriously freaked the fuck out when I told him I was getting top surgery, I think I'm in a position to say here that parental fears should have very little bearing on what transition-related steps trans people take. Fuck this article, seriously.
Edit 2: Ok, what the fuck is he even saying here (below)? What is "the skeptics' case" he's talking about? Write clearer, asshole!
This uniquely American climate also raises uncomfortable questions for the few conservatives, like myself, who enjoy a substantial liberal readership. You will notice that I have written this essay in a studiously cautious style, on the theory that as I am in fact a known social conservative, my too-vigorous prosecution of the skeptics’ case would serve only to reinforce the current progressive orthodoxy — enabling the response that, see, to doubt the wisdom of puberty blockers or the authenticity of teenage self-identification is the province of Catholics, religious conservatives, the out-group.
Where on earth are people encouraging tomboys to transition?
No one is. This is the same bullshit the same people pulled in the 90s, saying you can't allow gay people to be teachers because they will convince students who aren't gay to be gay.
To understand them, you have to start with their core belief: that no one is really transgender. Most religious conservatives like Douthat (I'd ballpark at least 25% of the US) believe that without external influence, no one would be transgender. Their faith dictates that this must be true. Because if God made someone who was one gender but with the body of another, then that implies that God is ok with being trans. They might concede that maybe you have some thoughts or feelings about gender, but those are "sinful" so just repress them, pray to ask Jesus into your heart, and you won't have those feelings anymore.
So, you and I know the real situation. There are trans kids who want to identify as their correct gender say at school, and there are now some schools and teachers that are encouraging that. All very cool, shouldn't be controversial. But to religious conservatives, they cannot conceive of kids being inherently trans. So they see the same situation and think "someone" is pushing this on the kids. Add to this to the fact that they think the current zeitgeist at schools is that you ain't cool unless you're LGBT, so they think kids are under constant pressure from students, teachers, and society to be trans... and you can start to see the contours of their ridiculous ideologies.
Personally I think this is all leading to both pogroms against LGBT folks, but will also be used to demolish public schools and get the country to adopt vouchers.
Where on earth are people encouraging tomboys to transition?
I took the tomboy-to-butch-lesbian pipeline and at literally every point in my gender presentation journey was the exact opposite, where I'd be discouraged from doing anything that was any more tomboyish/butch/masc than what I was already doing and would be encouraged to be more traditionally feminine and heterosexual.
For example: When I finally cut my hair short like I'd wanted to when I was 8, I was in my 20s (a whole ass adult a thousand miles away from where I grew up and where my parents lived) my parents still had a conniption, and had another one when I started cutting it a little shorter than that.
The concerns of some same-sex marriage advocates, meanwhile, are lucidly expressed by Jonathan Rauch in a recent essay for The American Purpose. Rauch argues that the push for gay marriage represented a triumph of moderation over radicalism within the gay community itself and worries that today’s transgender-rights activists are taking a different path.
Can I get a big "Fuck Cisheteronormative Assimilationists" from the audience please?
I hate this shit. "We triumphantly threw the most vulnerable among us under the bus, sacrificing them for our own comfort and security".
worries that today’s transgender-rights activists are taking a different path.
you're god damn right :jesse-wtf:
