Thursday, September 28, 2017

A strange pathway to transsexualism

Helen Lewis of the left-wing magazine New Statesman wrote a story last year about why so many teenage girls don't want to identify as girls:
Among internet-literate teenagers, gender has become the primary way to challenge the mores of older generations. I know four journalists – London-based, middle class – whose children have announced that they do not consider themselves to be girls. It seems too many to be a coincidence.

Helen Lewis makes two main points in her story. First, she pushes the liberal idea that masculinity and femininity are arbitrary constructs that limit individuals and that should rightly be overthrown. However, she is concerned that young people challenging sex distinctions might think that they have to commit themselves to becoming transsexual.
We should welcome young people challenging gender, an arbitrary system that has acquired the status of immutable human nature

...But separating dissatisfaction with the social constraints of gender from body dysphoria is vital. Because we have smudged together the categories of “transsexual” and “transgender”, is every youngster who questions their gender – and, frankly, every youngster should, because gender is restrictive bollocks – getting the message that they must bind their breasts or tuck their penis?

Liberals are committed ideologically to the idea that sex distinctions are restrictive prisons. It stems from their underlying belief that individuals should be autonomously self created. Our sex is something we don't get to create for our self and therefore it is held negatively to be limiting to the individual.

If, however, you don't have the liberal starting point, you are more likely to see sex distinctions positively as an important aspect of identity, and as a pathway of self-development. The point is to try to perfect our sexed nature, rather than to liberate ourselves from it.

Helen Lewis goes on to make an interesting admission about her own attitude to her sex:
In the year to March 2015, the Tavistock in London – the only specialist gender clinic in the country for under-16s – saw 697 children. This year, it saw 1,419. The largest surge has been among girls aged 14 and over and it is this group I feel most personal affinity for, because, if I were growing up today, I would be among them. A few years ago, I found a textbook from my junior school, with three sentences that floored me: “My name is Helen. I am nine years old. I am skinny.” And the truth was, I was skinny. I had a bowl haircut and wore culottes. Then puberty hit and I piled on a few stone in a year. Taut pink skin turned to lumpen fat and mottled flesh. And everyone had an opinion about it. I was trapped inside a body that didn’t feel like mine any more.

Many of my school friends felt the same way. Some tried to escape through vomiting or starving. Others were part of that charmed cohort who became lissom, beautiful, golden; their parents felt a different sort of ­worry and they were treated to sermons about getting into strange men’s cars.

I won my body back by defacing it; at least, that’s how my parents saw it. An earring, then two. And another. Then piercings that no one could see: nursing each one like a wound or a child. Salvation through pain: a metal bar through cartilage that couldn’t be slept on for a month. A tattoo that hurt like hell. Pink hair, ebbing to orange in a shower that looked like Carrie. And finally – finally – a body that felt like me.

I tell my story not to belittle anyone else’s, or to imply that they have chosen the wrong path. If you cannot live in your body, then change it – and the world must help you to do that.

What she seems to be describing is that moment in time in our teenage years when we develop into our adult bodies and we become aware of where we stand in the dating pecking order (what is sometimes called our SMV).

Apparently she was a little on the chubby side and therefore she felt bad about her adult body and rejected it. She could not live in her body, not because nature really intended for her to be a boy, but because she did not rank herself amongst the most sexually attractive of women.

I'm not quite sure how to respond to this. It strikes me as an all or nothing attitude: either you are born perfect or else you reject your body and deface it so that you feel like it is your own. I can't help but feel that if she had cultivated what was beautiful within and without that she would have developed towards something much higher and greater than being just another pierced and tattooed young woman.

13 comments:

  1. Can you explain the thought process behind defacing your body to make it your own?

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    1. Well, I can guess at it. I suppose that if you don't see your body as a God given thing, but rather as a blank canvas that has no meaning apart from the one you give to it, and you don't like it as it is, then maybe you might want to give it a meaning by making it match up to your interior state. If your interior state is disordered or disarranged, then maybe you will want this reflected in your outward appearance.

      But who knows, maybe it is as mysterious as the girls who feel better after they have cut themselves, something I don't fully understand.

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    2. Defacing your body in certain ways is also a signal that you're not 'in the game' and therefore do not need to suffer painful rejection by suitors

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  2. "Complimenting" self-creation is the even more primary act of self-annihilation which is rooted in a desire for radical sexual autonomy, i.e., trans-sexuality.

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  3. I'm repeating myself again, but... what underlies the disordered mentality imbued into these young empty-headed females is the strategically implanted concept that they gave no consent to any of the so-called immutable realities of their sovereign existence. The principle fact - that they did not consent to being born - entitles them to unlimited rights and privileges and compensations from their parents and from the unjust society in which they were arbitrarily embedded.
    Being told, they are told, that they are one sex and not the other, that they "should" be feminine, not masculine or neuter; is a profound injustice which, if left to its accidents and appearances, will manifest as a life of resentment and anger and oppression or despair. What could be more unfair to our modern societies' hyper-sexualized young females than to arbitrarily label them female, without a formal, fair procedure designed to target and affect at the first inkling, that a child is ready to consent to being identified as male or female, rather than remaining as neither. Consent, above all else, is the ruling imperative. The sooner, the better.
    Consent is the core of "autonomous self creation". Consent, what constitutes it, at what age, by and between and among who, and under what limits. Unconstrained sovereign individual consent is modern liberalism's manifest destiny ("Go neuter, young woman"}, the last unconquered frontier; the annihilation of the myth of the shared virtue that America's naive founders relied on as the transcending glue that would hold their delicate scheme together.
    At some point, I have no doubt, maybe after my son's coming parenthood, his children's children, will be born with no sex identity - by law - and that any subsequent voluntary request for sex identification, if desired for some untold reason, will only be authoritative for the narrow, temporary purpose particular to the government form by which it is applied for.
    Man and woman, the actual social constructions, will increasingly be disparaged and marginalized, perhaps meeting under the radar, in Speakeasys or in secret meetups in suburban neighborhoods after hours. Demure women in feminine costume, gentlemen honoring them appropriately attired.
    Newspaper story: The police again raid the most popular of these places; the Knowngall Inn. Hyper masculine female cops beat the suddenly resistant men who attempt to protect the women. Days of riots ensue.
    Years later the Knowngall riots would be seen as the single most important event leading to the liberation of man and woman. ?

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    1. Interesting thought that one day birth certificates will be by law without an indication of biological sex - that this will not be determined until age of consent is reached. If liberalism continues on unchecked this would seem to be a logical outcome of the ruling ideology.

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    2. "Liberalism" as self-creation is the wrong frame.

      "Liberalism" as self-annihilation is the right frame.

      The "self-creation" is particular and concrete, i.e., not autonomous and oppressive.

      Self-annihilation is the "engine" of the autonomous desire.

      "Self-creation" is just the exterior shield providing the "engine" space to perpetually combust within.

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    3. thordaddy, could you please explain what you mean. Please write a coherent paragraph or two that explain your ideas. I don't understand your series of bullet points.

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    4. Buck O...

      Under "equality" dogma, "self-creation" and "self-annihilation" are equal.

      So "we" can recognize a (t)ruth within a larger falsehood.

      "Our" job is, ultimately, to speak (T)ruth to falsehood thereby delineating the acts of the radical autonomist as truly creative or purposely annihilating.

      Ergo, being castrated is not truly creative, but purposely annihilative. Yet, either way, under "equality" dogma, self-inflicted castration is finally liberating.

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  4. Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.

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    1. For most, by all appearances, that is a forlorn hope. In saner times, their equivalents were content to enter a convent.

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  5. Buck O

    I may be wrong but I think what Thordaddy is trying to say is that Liberalism tells us it is about self-creation, but the reality is that it is about self-destruction. It uses self-creation as a cover to hide it's true nature.

    Mark Moncrieff
    Upon Hope Blog - A Traditional Conservative Future

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