“but all I became was a mutilated and abused version of myself”
Katie Lennon – Detransitioner
Parents Clinging To A Self-Affirming Delusion
Helen Joyce thinks she has landed upon a crucial motivation for some of those caught within the gender identity matrix.
And how those few often paralyze entire organizations.
…“A lot of people have done what is the worst thing you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably, because of it. Those people will have to believe that they did the right thing for the rest of their lives, for their own sanity, and for their own self-respect. So they’ll still be fighting, and each one of those people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups.
“Like, I’ve lost count of the number of times that somebody has said to me of a specific organization that has been turned upside down on this, “Oh, the deputy director has a trans child.” Or, oh, the journalist on that paper who does special investigations has a trans child. Or whatever. The entire organization gets paralyzed by that one person. And it may not even be widely known at that organization that they have a trans child. But it will come out, people will have sort of said quietly, and now you can’t talk truth in front of that person, and you know you can’t, because what you’re saying is: “You as a parent have done a truly, like, a human rights abuse level of awful thing to your own child that can not be fixed.
“There are specific individuals who are actively against women’s rights here and it is not known why they are, but I happen to know through the back channels that it is because they’ve transed their child.
“So those people will do anything for the entire rest of their lives to destroy me and people like me because people like me are standing in reproach to them. I don’t want to be, I’m not talking directly to them, and I don’t spend my time bitching to them.
“But the fact is that just simply by saying we will never accept natural males in women’s spaces, well it is their son that we’re talking about. And they’ve told their son that he can get himself sterilized and destroy his own basic sexual function and women will accept him as a woman. And if we don’t, there’s no way back for them and that child.
“They’ve sold their child a bill of goods that they can’t deliver on.“
Helen Joyce
[Transcript from Interview conducted by Peter Boghossian : timestamp 1:07:26]
These are not people who want to radically restructure society; the Neo-Marxists, Neo-Maoists, the Critical Theorists, the hard core ideologues who want to reduce ‘cisheteropatriarchy’ and capitalism to the dustbin of history.
These are parents who can’t possibly admit what they have done.
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Defining Sex Precisely: Return To Normal
I just read an excellent article by Jay Richards: Why States Must Define Sex Precisely.
He argues for a return to the biological understanding of sex, rejecting the subjective notions of gender ideology. Also, he calls for precise legal definitions of sex that are rooted in biology and that can withstand the ideological pressures of the current age.
The once uncontested definitions of “male” and “female” are now under siege due to the growing influence of gender ideology. This ideology seeks to redefine sex in federal laws and regulations to include “gender identity,” a move that threatens to undermine all preexisting legal references to sex.
Among other things, this blog has pointed out that Title IX advancements in the area of Women’s Sport has been negatively impacted by this move.
Legal Matters
Richards criticizes the vague and general definitions of sex proposed by some state legislators, arguing that they fail to provide a clear distinction between males and females.
Vague legal definitions create openings for gender ideology to gain a toehold.
He highlights the need for precise definitions of sex in state law, citing the ongoing debate in Montana as an example.
As I have done on this blog, Richards criticizes the misuse of disorders of sexual development, often mislabeled as “intersex” conditions, to argue for the existence of more than two sexes or fluidity of sexes. He points out that these disorders occur in a minuscule percentage of the population and do not justify the claims of gender ideology.
The main way gender ideologues have confused the public is by falsely claiming that disorders of sexual development, often mislabeled “intersex” conditions, prove that there are more than two sexes—or that the sexes are somehow fluid or mere endpoints on a spectrum.
Rather these conditions are disorders…
For instance, we know that humans are bipeds—that they naturally have two legs. But if a child is born without one or both legs, do we conclude that the newborn isn’t human, is a member of another species, or is “interspecies”? Of course not. We recognize that the child suffers from some sort of disorder—some disruption in development involving, say, chromosomes or an event in utero. Note that we’re engaged in counterfactual reasoning. We infer that the newborn would have had two legs except for some event or abnormality that prevented this from happening.
The article concludes by advocating for precise definitions of sex that capture the central concept of biological sex, account for normal development and disorders, and accommodate different stages of development. For example:
A human female is, minimally, a member of the human species who, under normal development, produces relatively large, relatively immobile gametes—ova—at some point in her life cycle, and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of that gamete.
For the discussions ahead, legislative or otherwise, learn these arguments!
Companion Post
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Sex Matters