A sense of disquiet
An attempt to navigate the trans-agenda
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so…
— Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 1958
Increasingly, both politically and socially, I find myself at odds with many friends, family members and others in my connecting communities. There is an ideology taking over the minds of most of the people I know and I can't keep up. I don't especially want to join this party. As much as I care for the feelings and autonomy of each individual who is at, or on their way to, this party, I don't much care for the scene. And I suspect that this is not a movement of the people for the people, but something altogether more sinister.
My (considerably younger, i.e. early-twenties) sister-in-law, "H", recently came over from Berkeley, California (home of wokedom, it could be said) to stay a few days with us. H came out as a lesbian while still a young teenager. H knew—H had always known and is completely comfortable with it, as are we all. More recently H decided to no longer be a 'she' but a 'they'. I'm puzzled by this. H looks feminine,1 dresses in a feminine way, has a girlfriend who is equally feminine in appearance, and who identifies as a 'she'. Yet H has decided to be a 'they/their/them'. H's younger sibling, P, has also decided to drop the pronoun 'she' but has not fixed on being a 'they', so is ambiguous, fluid, and okay with any pronoun (except, it seems, 'she'). H refers to their sibling P as 'he' and 'my brother'. In conversation I quickly lost track of who, or even how many, we were talking about. I'm even struggling to write all this down and not misgender anyone, as I frequently did in conversation. This paragraph on first writing contained about 8-10 misgenderings. There may still be some remaining. Sorry, sorry. I'm trying!
But let me be clear, it is not transgender that bothers me, it is the trans-agenda. Some of my best friends... and all that jazz. People are people, and all people struggle. For decades, centuries, gay people struggled to be heard, accepted, treated with love and respect, black people too, and all those 'of colour' and even not of colour, just culturally different, the Jews, Roma, Irish, Poles, travellers. And then we have the physically and mentally disabled, the blind, the deaf, all have been discriminated against. And it's not just those obvious minorities; actually great majorities of people, great swathes of the world's population have been, and continue to be oppressed by the system, perhaps most of all women (half the world) and workers/working class people (more than half the world). There are indeed very few who are not oppressed, and those, of course, are the oppressors—for the most part, and by many different accounts, white, western men.
Trans people do not have a monopoly on oppression. What sets this group apart though is that they are—again, for the most part—actually the oppressors. Another case of the world turned on its head.2 The trans-agenda is led by loud, angry white men: men identifying as women, sure, but still born and raised as men, with all the privileges and entitlement that entails. This movement is about men demanding to own everything, including sacred female spaces, places of safety and sisterhood. The trans-agenda is violent, divisive, self-righteous; it is fuelled by indignation and entitlement. Its victims, almost exclusively women, are being silenced, ridiculed, and cancelled.3
Over the course of known history, groups (gangs?) of men have tormented, threatened, intimidated, abused and controlled women by every means at their disposal, almost always violently.4 The trans-agenda is just the next implementation of that pattern. You may have noticed that the voice of trans-men (women identifying as men) is very much a background murmur in this movement. Of course it is. Those raised as women know to keep their mouths shut, and let the men do the talking. This is just more "men taking up space". What's new? Absolutely nothing.
But more than just a bunch of entitled men demanding 'equality' this movement is fuelled by profit, embraced and encouraged by the pharmaceutical industry and the whole medical industrial complex. It took homosexuals decades, centuries to be heard and to be treated with even the most basic dignity. It took women even longer.5 Yet within a few short years the entire trans community has gained widespread, corporate support. Attend any Pride event, interestingly an event now avoided by many 'traditionally' gay people,6 and you'll see more corporate banners than rainbows, cynical corporations harnessing the trans-trend to promote their products and services, in the guise of standing up for "equality".
Most financial institutes, insurance companies, supermarkets, tech companies, etc. jump on this bandwagon, but is the pharmaceutical industry and private medicine that stand to gain the most—i.e. more than just the general feel-good wokeism other corporates are wallowing in. For each transitioning person these industries can, between them, bank on seriously expensive surgery, with likely many top-ups over decades, a lifetime of hormone treatments and other sustaining drugs, and possibly, for many, anti-depression and/or anti-anxiety medication on top of that.7 The younger the transition starts the better of course, hence clinics like Tavistock popping up around the western world. And if anyone changes their mind, and attempts to detransition, well, that's fine too: just different drugs. Anyone who believes that the trans movement is not endorsed and promoted by Big Pharma and the MIC is really not paying attention.
Happily, there is a small counter-movement afoot, led by people like J.K.Rowling (a celebrity), Kathleen Stock (a feminist lesbian writer) and Dr Deborah Hayton (who identifies as a transgender person) to name just a few. Brave people, pushing against the mainstream, confronting the liberal agenda. Dr Hayton writes, "The assertion, trans women are women and trans men are men, is without foundation, but it is the rallying call of a movement that threatens women’s sex-based rights and the mental health of children. I argue that it has also damaged the acceptance of transgender people."8 And of course this year we had the publication of the excellent Cass Report, a critical assessment of transgender treatment for young people.9
The vast majority of humans on this planet have no problem whatsoever with a person choosing to cross-dress, as this is a centuries-old practice with social, spiritual and theatrical application, across many cultures. Many are even okay with people choosing new identities for themselves, but we need to be wary of that, for as a close friend and colleague points out to me, “Identities are things that can be more or less important to a person, that they can make more or less salient, but they can’t be unilaterally chosen. This isn’t how social categorisation works. It [self-identification] destroys language, coerces others and leads to social breakdown. So, given this, what does it mean for a man to say they are a woman? Or more reasonably, to say they are a transwoman? What does that imply for women’s boundaries and spaces?”10 And what does it imply for social agreement? If it is okay for a man to claim to be a woman, because they “feel” it inside, why not for a white person to claim to be black for the same reason, or my 11-year-old daughter’s friend A to identify as a fox? Rationality, logic, and common sense quickly disintegrate and we have anarchy. This is likely why people in the past claiming to be Jesus, or Napoleon, or a banana ended up incarcerated. Crude and even cruel as this response appears, it was less victimisation of the individual than protection of the wider society.
So, while many people may accept (although not necessarily agree with) the individual’s personal choices, all normally functioning human beings have a serious problem with bullying and coercion. That is what we resist. I am not transphobic (actually balk at the term as it is commonly used: I have no fear of any individual or the choices they make), but I am deeply concerned with the trans-agenda, and even, at times, quite fearful of its violence and divisiveness, and afraid especially by what it means for the future of our society, especially for women, so by that token I am certainly transagendaphobic.
Yes, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me, and I do not know on which side of history I’ll land. I only know what I experience today—and both socially and politically I experience a sense of disquiet. Your experience may differ.
I realise of course that in using the term 'feminine' I open myself up to criticisms of stereotyping, and even sexism. Is a dress feminine? Can a man, or a woman identifying as a man, or a man identifying as non-binary not wear a dress then? Who am I to say what is and isn't feminine?
A second example of the world turned upside down is the liberals becoming totalitarian (e.g. Austria/Germany/Canada/Australia during COVID), while the political right become revolutionary (e.g. White House occupation in January 2021). The two things may seem disconnected. They are not.
The obvious example is J.K.Rowling, but there are hundreds more women, likely thousands now, fired from university (and other) jobs, mocked and ridiculed on social media, simply for standing up for the rights of women born women.
As a lesbian colleague writes, “Part of the reason men are scaring women is because of men being socialised to be dicks, and women being socialised to put up with it. But there are also biological differences that really matter. Men ARE on average more aggressive, and physically very much stronger. So women are afraid to assert their boundaries in the face of male aggression for very sensible physical reasons. Appeasement is what we learn as the only way to keep ourselves from getting beaten up. Even if it means sacrificing our own comfort and dignity. Again, this is why we MUST have our own spaces, and the language that enables us to protect them.”
Hard to define the actual time spans, but just measuring from the beginnings of the public movements for equal rights for each group this is approximately correct.
Pride is no place for homosexuals, Unherd, June 2023 & How Pride lost the public, The Spectator, June 2023
One could argue that many potential transitioners are already anxious and depressed, and this seems to be true, but claims that the transition process improves mental illness is ambiguous and the research indecisive. See for example this article from the National Library of Medicine, May 2023, also this report from the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, 2020, which actually indicates a slight rise in psychiatric treatment for those who underwent surgery, and the 2022 updates to the same report here which indicates that hormone treatments and puberty blockers also have more negative than positive effects.
Written evidence submitted by Dr Deborah Hayton to UK Government committee on transgender rights
This challenge is given credence by Richard O’Brian, the famous gender-bending (now trans) originator of the Rocky Horror Show in his statement that a trans woman can’t be a woman, but rather is ‘an idea of a woman’. He also agreed with feminist Germaine Greer that only women born women are women, and that gender surgery, far from being transitional, is simply self-mutilation. Pink News March 2016.
My second Olaf's sentiments. I admire your strength for tackling this Pandora's box. It all seems so bloody senseless that we're spending huge amounts of mental capital on this arena when much larger problems loom. Idiocies is like this can actually swing the current election while matters of genocide and ecological devastation get pushed to background.
Hello Tobias,
Well said. And I'm glad to see more people are finally willing to have this discussion. You write with courage and eloquence - both are admirable as you "attempt to navigate the trans-agenda".
But I find it tedious that you felt it necessary to include some obligatory, sexist, and racist bashing of white men. Perhaps a little self-deprecating "white guilt" in your writing calms the would-be haters who dislike that you dare approach this subject. I cannot think of any other reason to have included this sentence: "there are indeed very few who are not oppressed, and those, of course, are the oppressors—for the most part, and by many different accounts, white, western men."
"for the most part"
Really? Perhaps you and I have read different versions of human history.
An honest accounting of history includes a long list of oppressors who were not white. (.e.g, Qin Shi Huang, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-il, Muammar Gaddafi, Yahya Khan, etc) And many terrible dictators who were not men! (e.g., Wu Zetian, Catherine the Great, Mary I, Ranavalona I, Isabella I of Castile, Cixi, Indira Gandhi, Cleopatra VII, Elizabeth Bathory, etc.) It turns out, treating other humans like dirt is not unique to one race or sex. Not even close!
And perhaps more to my point, only in countries ruled predominantly by "white" people (ugh, I hate having to use such language, but you initiated it) you will observe that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and people of various gender identities are provided equal treatment and/or explicit protections under the law. In fact - I challenge you - list all the countries ruled by "white" people that *prohibit* same-sex marriage. You'll find that list is EMPTY, save for a few soviet exceptions.