Continuing my mini-trend from yesterday, I link here to another conservative rag, the Weekly Standard. The same disclaimer holds: I consider myself on the opposite side of the political spectrum from journals like this. I am sharing this article because it is an incredibly comprehensive analysis and summary of the transgender phenomenon in all its ramifications–political, medical, media, and academic. The author, Charlotte Allen, covers a huge amount of ground, and I recommend it in particular to anyone interested in understanding the recent wars in the research community, and how and why certain experts–such as Michael Bailey, Alice Dreger, and Ray Blanchard–have been vilified by transactivists, despite the fact that they still support medical treatment for transgender people. The lengthy piece also dissects the lopsided media coverage of all things trans; covers the bathroom wars; details the slow but steady takeover of LGB advocacy organizations by trans activists; the recent capitulation of venerable women’s colleges to pressure to admit trans women; the TERF wars; the recent trans-kid trend; the growing influence of wealthy, late transitioning male-to-female CEOs and media figures; and much more.
If the liberal and mainstream media would only lift their self-imposed gag order, a piece of probing, in-depth journalism like this could be published there, too. This is no right-wing polemic. It is a recitation of facts and history. A few highlights:
The most interesting aspect of what might be called the transgender triumph is the extent to which transwomen have managed to invade and occupy the niche called “women”—without many noticeable complaints from the occupants of that slot since time immemorial. For example, Martine Rothblatt, founder and CEO of the biotech manufacturer United Therapeutics (and also founder of Sirius XM), is celebrated as the highest-paid female executive in the United States (north of $38 million a year). But Roth-blatt, now in her early 60s, was known as Martin Rothblatt for the first 40-odd years of her life, until she came out as a woman in 1994. Her pre-coming out years were marked by joint law and business degrees from UCLA, a stint at a top Washington, D.C., law firm, and high-level consulting in satellite communications. Rothblatt has been married to a woman since 1982 (two children, plus an adopted daughter), and before that had fathered a child by another woman. “I love when the good women get ahead!” was the online comment of one female reader of a glowing December 2014 article about Rothblatt in the Washington Post’s Sunday magazine.
************************
Critics of puberty blockers, now administered in at least 37 locations in the United States according to Spack, point to the expense, the numerous side-effects associated with Lupron and its pharmaceutical relatives, and the possibility that parents and physicians might be pushing children who would otherwise grow out of their transgender identities into a lifetime of painful and costly surgery, dependence on daily doses of estrogen and other hormones, and the difficulty of finding a place for themselves in a world in which their femininity will always be questioned. On top of that, taking large doses of the hormones of the opposite biological sex almost invariably renders the taker sterile.
***********************************
“It’s a worship of masculinity,” said Sheila Jeffreys, a political science professor at the University of Melbourne, in a phone interview. Jeffreys’s 2014 book Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism argues that “transgenderism” is a way for men subtly to impose male dominance via surgery and hormones upon traditionally female spheres, obliterating female identity and harming not just lesbians, by taking over their spaces, but the women who were once their wives, as well as the mothers who mourn the loss of their familiar children. This happens both when men decide they’re women and when women decide they’re men, Jeffreys argues. “Chaz Bono is a lesbian,” Jeffreys said. “You can’t become a man.”
It goes without saying that Jeffreys and the other radical feminists are frequent targets of transgender activists and their progressive allies, derided as either dinosaur holdovers from the 1970s or as transphobic menaces. They have acquired their own derogatory acronym in transgender-activist circles: TERFs, for “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.” A 2013 article for Salon by Samantha Allen, a transwoman online columnist who frequently dispenses advice to women on feminist issues (and successfully crowdfunded a vagina for herself in 2013), was titled “The Hate Group Masquerading as Feminists” and pointed out that few mainstream feminists share their views.
That may be true enough given today’s ideological climate and intensive language- and thought-policing, but there is something to be said for the radfems’ emperor’s-new-clothes view of the middle-aged male-to-female transitioners who now dominate the transgender scene. It does seem odd that someone who lived two-thirds of her life as a man is now lauded as America’s highest-paid female CEO, or that people who weren’t born female gripe on the Internet about “male privilege.” It seems equally odd that a board co-chairman of a leading gay and lesbian rights organization is someone whose life experiences and even sexual orientation resemble those of neither gays nor lesbians. It’s hard not to wonder whether such stereotypically male traits as aggression, competitiveness, and libido dominandi haven’t played a role in late-in-life transitioners’ thrust to the forefront of feminist and LGBT ranks—and in their scorched-earth pushback against anyone who criticizes them.
There is much, much more. Read the whole thing.