What Motivates the Trans Movement?

This post is a pastiche of various articles that you can find linked below. This post also concludes my transgender odyssey, please read the previous articles before you read this one.

I’ve talked a lot about the fake news, pseudoscience, and the millions of dollars behind the trans movement but I seem to have left out perhaps the most obvious question: what does the T actually stand for?

I sought a definition of the ‘T’, of LGBTIQ+, from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), who writes in their Transgender FAQ:

What’s the difference between sex and gender?
Sex refers to the designation of a person at birth as either “male” or “female” based on their anatomy (e.g. reproductive organs) and/or their biology (e.g. hormones).
Gender refers to the traditional or stereotypical roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society consider appropriate for men and women.

So far, so good. We seem to agree.

What is gender identity and gender expression?
Gender identity refers to a person’s innate, deeply-felt psychological identification as a man, woman or some other gender.
Gender expression refers to the external manifestation of a person’s gender identity, which may or may not conform to socially-defined behaviors and characteristics typically associated with being either masculine or feminine.

“psychological identification as a man, woman or some other gender”

How do you identify as a man or a woman? If we take the standard definiton of “adult human male” and “adult human female” then you can’t identify as either. You are male or you are female.

What does the word “transgender” mean?
Transgender – or trans – is an umbrella term for people whose gender identity or expression is different from those typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth (e.g., the sex listed on their birth certificate).

Okay, a butch lesbian has a ‘gender expression’ that is different from those typically associated with the sex assigned to them at birth — does that make a butch lesbian transgender? Drawing from HRC’s own definitions, being transgender is about identifying with the traditional or stereotypical roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society consider appropriate for the other sex. Under the HRC’s definition, all the drag queens on RuPaul are transgender. Last I checked, almost all of them were happy gay men.

The HRC then tells us that to live as the other gender, one must transition:

“Transitioning is the process some transgender people go through to begin living as the gender with which they identify, rather than the sex assigned to them at birth. This may or may not include hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery and other medical procedures.”

Only some transgender people go through transition? What are the other transgender people doing then? What makes them the other gender? How are they the opposite sex, outside of saying they are? It doesn’t make sense.

This definition includes many people who have no gender dysphoria and no intention to make changes to their bodies. Cross-dressers are also considered trans.

Perhaps there is some sort of enlightenment I am missing out on. Let us look at the words of Diane Ehrensaft to get a better idea of what gender is all about.

“Gender Tootsie Roll Pops: These are the children who exhibit one gender on the outside but experience another gender on the inside. In the spirit of the true gender self and false gender self, the crunchy outside is often the gender that accommodates to the expectations of the surrounding world, while the soft gooey inside is the stuff of authenticity and realness. So, the hard candy is in place to protect or shield the inside chewiness from an unaccepting world or an internalized unaccepting part of one’s own self. It is the gender Tootsie Roll Pops, if not provided with resilience building, who can buckle under the weight of hiding their true insides from the world, putting them at risk for psychological stress and distress”

Ehrensaft appears not to be the only top gender specialist fond of snack metaphors. Olson-Kennedy delivered these remarks at the inaugural USPATH conference in Los Angeles, as part of a symposium entitled “Outside The Binary”:

An 8-year-old kid comes into my practice, and this is the story with this kid: Assigned female at birth, 8 years old, was completely presenting male whatever that means—short haircut, boy’s clothes–but what was happening, is, this kid went to a very religious school and in the girls’ bathroom which is where this kid was going. People are like, “why is there a boy in the girl’s bathroom? That’s a real problem.” And so this kid was like, so that’s not super working for me, so I think that I wanna maybe enroll in school as a boy. This kid had come up with this entirely on their own.

The kid was brought to a doctor at 8 years old because she likes short hair and “boy’s clothes” and she has gotten flak from the school about it.

[2:10]: So at one point, I said to the kid, “so do you think that you’re a girl or a boy? And this kid was like…I could just see, there was, like, this confusion on the kid’s face. Like, “actually I never really thought about that.” And so this kid said, “well, I’m a girl, ’cause I have this body”

[2:34] Right? This is how this kid had learned to talk about their gender…that it’s based on their body.

“Had learned?” Is Olson-Kennedy actually telling her audience that a little girl demonstrating her understanding of biological reality is something that was erroneously imparted, as opposed to the doublethink-newspeak indoctrination Olson-Kennedy is about to peddle?

[2:40] And I said, “oh, so …and I completely made this up on the spot, by the way, but …I said, “Do you ever eat pop tarts?” And the kid was like, oh, of course. And I said, “well you know how they come in that foil packet?” Yes. “Well, what if there was a strawberry pop tart in a foil packet, in a box that said ‘Cinnamon Pop Tarts.’? Is it a strawberry pop tart, or a cinnamon pop tart?”

Your body is just a wrapper, a piece of foil to be discarded so the “real” self can be revealed.

[3:00] The kid’s like, “Duh! A strawberry pop tart.” And I was like, “so…”

At this point [3:09], there is a staged pause and we hear the audience laugh loudly and knowingly.

[3:12] And the kid turned to the mom and said, “I think I’m a boy and the girl’s covering me up.”

[3:17] Audible murmurs and “wows” from Olson-Kennedy’s rapt audience

Johanna Olson-Kennedy is not a developmental psychologist. Of course, it doesn’t take a PhD, an MD, or even a high school diploma to know that children as young as eight still believe in Santa Claus; that they can transform themselves into animals or super heroes; have not learned to distinguish fact from fantasy.

[3:41] So, I don’t think I made this kid a boy.”

Again, a dramatic pause for appreciative laughter. No, Johanna, you didn’t “make this kid a boy.” You made her believe she is a boy, authority figure that you are.

[3:44] I mean, and if I did, and I’m wrong, then I’m totally gonna come to this conference and tell people that I was wrong. I will.

That probably won’t be necessary. You did a bang-up job teaching a young child that she can change her sex, that her defiance of gender norms means she’s not a girl, so desistance is unlikely at this point. We’re on the road to blockers, cross sex hormones, and sterilization. The whole enchilada.

Make no mistake: This approach is what is on the ascendant when it comes to gender nonconforming children and how such kids are being treated in the United States of America in 2020. Johanna Olson-Kennedy is one of the leading pediatric gender doctors in the US, running the largest clinic in the country. She is not some fringe figure. She is one of the recipients of a $5.7 million grant from the NIH to “study” kids like this 8-year-old (with no control groups of non-transitioned children).

But back to the other snack: the tootsie roll. That was a quote from Ehrensaft’s book The Gender Creative Child. And that was just one of many gems.

“While writing Gender Born, Gender Made, I conjured up the concept of the gender creative child — the child who weaves together nature, nurture, and culture in an infinite variety of ways to establish the gender that is “me.” That “me” may be a boy, a girl, or a mélange of gender, and may not reflect the sex that was listed on the child’s birth certificate — or it could.”

“I am neither an essentialist — one who says that gender is a given and set at birth or before — nor am I a social constructivist — one who says that gender is just a people-made concept that fluctuates over time. Rather, I am a transactionalist — one who says that nature and nurture crisscross over time in a myriad of ways in the context of each particular culture to create gender as we know it. No doubt some of what we will look at about gender is heavily weighted on the nature end — having to do with the biology of the child. And some of it is heavily weighted on the nurture end — having to do with the social mores of gender and family practices. But like a well-built mobile, every weighted piece is carefully balanced in relationship to every other piece to make the suspended, gracefully flowing gender sculpture that is unique to each person on earth.”

“establish the gender that is me” “unique to each person on earth”

So it’s… your personality? It’s ‘me’?

Ok! So gender is masculine and feminine stereotypes, and gender identity is a self-assessment of one’s stereotypical degree of “masculinity” or “femininity”. Got it.

“In contemporary versions of gender development theory that take into account gender variations as a normal part of the human condition, the understanding is that the sex assigned at birth may match the gender a youth will eventually know themselves to be, but it might not. Each child is presented with a developmental task of weaving together threads of nature, nurture, and culture to establish their individual and unique authentic gender self. This self will be composed of both gender identity — who I know myself to be as male, female, or other, and gender expressions — how I choose to perform my gender, including clothing choices, activity preferences, friendship choices, and so forth. Recently, this transactional relationship between nature, nurture, and culture in gender development has been referred to as the gender web, broken up into components that consist of the items in”

Gender changes over time – and it is affected by culture. This is nonsense, why are we medicating people over this? And if gender can change over time, what about transgender children? Can their gender change after you’ve castrated them? Why is this something that requires medical intervention?

In the same paper Ehrensaft then presents a summation of the ‘gender affirmative’ model that LGBTQI+ organizations are promoting, she is promoting, and oligarchs are funding.

Ehrensaft labels “gender affirmative” therapy as “listen and act,” i.e., essentially follow the child’s lead in whether or not to proceed with early interventions like social transition and puberty blockers. According to Ehrensaft, this boils down to whether the child says they ARE (vs. “want to be”) the opposite sex, and how “persistent, insistent, and consistent” they are in asserting their cross-sex identification and gender “expression.”

“The basic therapeutic tenet of the gender affirmative model is quite simple: When it comes to knowing a child’s gender, it is not for us to tell, but for the children to say. In contrast to the watchful waiting model, once information is gathered to assess a child’s gender status, action is taken to allow that child to exercise that gender. Therefore, if after careful consideration, it becomes clear that a young child is affirmed in their gender, demonstrating that the gender they know themselves is different than or opposite to the gender that would match the sex assigned to them at birth, the gender affirmative model supports a social transition to allow that child to fully live in that gender, whether that child is 3, 7, or 17 years old. Such decision-making is governed by stages, rather than ages, both for social transitions and later for medical interventions.”

Remember, according to the Human Rights Campaign and Ehrensaft herself, gender is stereotypes. This paper is literally saying that if the sexed body does not match the stereotypes assigned to it; it requires medical intervention to ‘affirm gender’. Despite this pathology being cultural, and acknowledging this fact, Ehrensaft still wants to chemically and physically castrate children who do not conform to ‘gender’. If a child believes they should be, or are the other sex, because they do not conform to society’s expectations and stereotypes of their sex, Ehrensaft believes we should medicalize this and treat them with drugs, and ultimately ‘affirm their gender’ by castrating them. She has published two books on this subject, encouraging the castration of non-conforming children. She has sat on advisory boards for drug companies to promote this off-label use of their medication.

From the horse’s mouth, being transgender is about identifying with stereotypes and not being a stereotypical member of one’s own sex, then using modern medicine to fix this problem. This problem is fixed by treatments to cosmetically resemble the opposite sex.

If you don’t conform to sex stereotypes, you need medicalization. This is what these scientists believe.

And that goes even for babies, according to Ehrensaft. During a conference event in Santa Cruz, a man asks how one might tell if a pre-verbal one or two-year-old is transgender. Ehrensaft’s answer, delivered with a knowing and confident smile [Clip for this excerpt is here]:

[Preverbal children] are very action oriented. This is where mirroring is really important. And listening to actions. So let me give you an example.
I have a colleague who is transgender. There is a video of him as a toddler–he was assigned female at birth–tearing barrettes out of then-her hair. And throwing them on the ground. And sobbing. That’s a gender message.

Ehrensaft is a developmental psychologist, and the only reason she can think of that a 2-year-old girl might detest the feel of barrettes in her hair is that the child is really a boy?

What else does Ehrensaft advise for parents who are so concerned about their baby’s “gender identity”?

So you look for those kinds of actions….like tearing a skirt off. …There was one on that Barbara Walters special, this child wore the little onesie with the snap-ups between the legs. And at age one would unsnap them to make a dress, so the dress would flow. This is a child who was assigned male. That’s a communication, a pre-verbal communication about gender.

Ehrensaft then counsels parents not to try to squelch non-sex-stereotyped behaviors (good advice), but ruins it with a faith-based assertion of innate gender identity:

And children will know [they are transgender] by the second year of life… they probably know before that but that’s pre-pre verbal.

This is a PhD. developmental psychologist talking here. What is her evidence base for saying babies “know” their gender identity?

The ‘gender affirming model’ has been around for less than two decades. Two decades ago, it was considered settled science that gender dysphoric children mostly grow up gay and that puberty suppression was ill-advised. Regardless of the fact that it contradicts all prior science and thought on the subject, it has emerged and become accepted extremely rapidly. It begs the question: why the change?

There is zero evidence that there is any such thing as a “transgender” 2 or 3 or 5 or 7-year-old child. All we have are adults claiming that if a little girl insists, “Mommy, I’m a boy,” this means she is a boy. There is only this quasi-religious, fervent belief in the idea that someone can be “born in the wrong body.” But this is nonsense.

Imagine if we had people dysphoric about having two legs and desired amputation to soothe this mental distress. A group of scientists went to the NIH and received a grant to follow them longitudinally after chopping a leg off to soothe their mental pain. These scientists don’t have a control group of people who were treated with mental health care instead of leg chopping, and then proceed to conclude that chopping off legs is a great idea with no real empirical evidence. They keep admitting they don’t have empirical evidence in studies funded by said government. Oh, and the scientists have links to a billionaire philanthropist who believes in leg chopping, having received it themselves to soothe their mental distress, who is donating millions of dollars to the cause of supporting leg chopping. Some of these researchers are, or were, in activist organizations telling children about leg chopping and it’s benefits to the leg dysphoric. Some of them are being paid by drug companies taking advantage of the new amputee affirming treatment.

This is not how normal science works. Gender dysphoria is the only situation in which medical intervention does not cure a sick body, but hacks away at healthy body parts in the process of adapting physical and congruent psychological identity.

A person with body integrity identity disorder (BIID) identifies as a disabled person and feels trapped in a fully functional body. Individuals with BIID are often so distressed by their fully capable bodies that they seek surgical amputation of healthy limbs or the surgical severing of their spinal cord. Nobody would suggest that doctors should enable their symptoms. One tried in the UK, but it didn’t end well.

Gender dysphoria is the exception because the treatment was not developed with the patient’s best interests in mind, but with the goal of social control. It wasn’t the patient’s distress that surgery was meant to alleviate, but society’s discomfort around gender non-conforming people.

Let us think about it: what every group in the transgender lobby is demanding is essentially guaranteed access to medication for off-label purposes. None of these drugs are approved for transgender uses. Given the data we do have and the state of the science behind that data, accompanied by the side effects up to and including death, it is unlikely to ever be approved by the FDA in a clinical trial. Unless, of course, the side effects were better than the outcome. Hence, the creation of a perception that transgender people are murdered a at higher rates than the general population, even though that isn’t true. Saying that the side effects are better than the suicide of the patient probably wouldn’t pass muster either, given that medical intervention did not change the fact that transgender people have elevated suicide rates compared to the general population.

Hence our endless bad statistics and fake news. A survey with methodological flaws and some good messaging can cover for the actual reality, at least to the general public. Because the one way these ‘treatments’ could get approved is if the problem is worse than the side effects and the solution — this poor, gender dysphoric wilting flower of a person will kill themselves or be murdered unless they can access ‘gender-affirming healthcare’. Dangerous drugs that have failed clinical trials before could be issued on-label for this process and protected by civil rights legislation. That the ideology that is built around these demands is incoherent, serves only to foist drugs on to vulnerable people, and is fundamentally homophobic is of little consequence to those who see the dollar signs.

Transition could be a big business, which over a 50-year period of ‘transition’ could create a market worth trillions of dollars, if not more. Think of the potential markets! Surgeries that run into the six-figures. Body modifications that have not yet been invented outside of science fiction. And some of the 90’s best-selling-drugs, drugs that could be best-sellers again if only they had blanket approval to be used on a class of people once again.

The modern transgender movement is an astroturf tiger. It is not grassroots, it is not organic, and it serves the purposes of no one beyond homophobes and pharmaceutical companies. The LGB community needs to wake up and start talking back to the fox in the hen house.

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