Recommended readings: Trans: When Ideology meets Reality, by Helen Joyce

 

In her book Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality, The Economist writer Helen Joyce presents a compelling study of what is behind the "non-binary" movement.

Joyce argues that while sex is a biological reality and gender a social convention, using surgery to change the former on behalf of the latter is not "liberating" but restricting future options. Joyce studied what is behind the extreme "sex-reassignment" hormonal treatments and surgery -especially in children-.

Rather than focusing on the "non-binary" versus "binary" false discussion -sexuality has a spectrum that determines that no person is 100 percent male or female and cross-dressing and homosexual sex and relationships have always been part of normal sexuality-, Joyce focuses on what she calls "transactivism" and the special interests behind its agenda. She explains:

"It is a story of policy and institutional capture; of charitable foundations controlled by billionaires joining forces with activist groups to pump money into lobbying behind the scenes for legal change. They have won over big political parties, notably America’s Democrats, and big businesses, including tech giants. 

They are backed, too, by academics in gender studies, queer theory, and allied fields, and by the pharmaceutical and health- care industries, which have woken up to the fortunes to be made from ‘gender- affirmative’ medicine. 

This powerful new lobby far outnumbers the trans people it claims to speak for. 

And it serves their interests very poorly. Its ideological focus means it seeks to silence anyone who does not support gender self-identification – which includes many post-operative transsexuals, who are under no illusion as to how much bodies matter. 

It also ignores other possible solutions to problems faced by trans people – research into the causes and treatment of gender dysphoria, for instance, or adding unisex facilities alongside single-sex ones. Its overreach is likely to provoke a backlash that will harm ordinary trans people, who simply want safety and social acceptance. 

When the general public finally realizes what is being demanded, the blame may not land with the activists, where it belongs."

Joyce explores the forces behind "transactivism" and the perils for minors and their parents of itas agenda and clarifies several concepts focusing on the consequences:

"This is a book about an idea, one that seems simple but has far-reaching consequences. 

The idea is that people should count as men or women according to how they feel and what they declare, instead of their biology. It’s called gender self-identification, and it is the central tenet of a fast-developing belief system that sees everyone as possessing a gender identity that may or may not match the body in which it is housed. 

When there is a mismatch, the person is ‘transgender’– trans for short – and it is the identity, not the body, that should determine how everyone else sees and treats them. The origins of this belief system date back almost a century, to when doctors first sought to give physical form to the yearnings of a handful of people who longed to change sex. 

For decades such ‘transsexuals’ were few and far between, the concern of a handful of maverick clinicians, who would provide hormones and surgeries to reshape their patients’ bodies to match their desires as closely as possible. Bureaucrats and governments treated them as exceptions, to be accommodated in society with varying degrees of competence and compassion. But since the turn of the century, the exception has become the rule. National laws, company policies, school curricula, medical protocols, academic research and media style guides are being rewritten to privilege self- declared gender identity over biological sex. 

Roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed. 

In the simplistic version of the new creed that has hardened into social-justice orthodoxy, gender is no longer even something that is performed. It is innate and ineffable: something like a sexed soul. 

What is being demanded is no longer flexibility, but a redefinition of what it means for anyone to be a man or woman – a total rewrite of societal rules. 

liberal, secular society can accommodate many subjective belief systems, even mutually contradictory ones. What it must never do is impose one group’s beliefs on everyone else. 

Gender self-identification, however, is a demand for validation by others. The label is a misnomer. It is actually about requiring others to identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim. Since evolution has equipped humans with the ability to recognize other people’s sex, almost instantaneously and with exquisite accuracy, very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex. And so to see them as that sex, everyone else must discount what their senses are telling them."

Joyce explores and predicts several backlashes that transactivism is already generating in different areas such as:

Sports

"Their entire purpose is to enable fair competition, since the physical differences between the sexes give males an overwhelming athletic advantage, and competing separately is the only way that exceptional females can get their due. 

Allowing males to identify as women for the purposes of entry to women’s competitions makes no more sense than allowing heavyweights to box as flyweights, or able-bodied athletes to enter the Paralympics, or adults to compete as under- eighteens. And yet, under pressure from transactivists, almost every sporting authority right up to the International Olympic Committee has moved to gender self-identification. The sight of stronger, heavier, faster males easily beating the world’s best female athletes is sure to outrage deep-seated intuitions about fair play – once it comes to wider notice. "

Pediatric Gender Surgery

"Until recently, hardly any children presented at gender clinics, but in the past decade the number has soared. Every one of the dozen or so studies of children with gender dysphoria – discomfort and misery caused by one’s biological sex – has found that most grow out of it, as long as they are supported in their gender non-conformity and not encouraged in a cross-sex identification. Many of these ‘desisters’ are destined to grow up gay: there is copious evidence of a strong link between early gender non-conformity and adult homosexuality. 

But as gender clinics have come under activists’ sway, the treatment they offer has taken an ideological turn. Instead of advising parents to watch and wait with sympathy and kindness, they now work on the assumption that childhood gender dysphoria destines someone to trans adulthood. They recommend immediate ‘social transition’– a change of name, pronouns and presentation – followed successively by drugs to block puberty, cross- sex hormones and surgery, often while the patient is still in their teens. This treatment pathway is a fast track to sexual dysfunction and sterility in adulthood."

The book also covers the negative impact this agenda has on women's rights and the cultural acceptance of alternatives such as bisexuality and homosexuality as not just lifelong but personal, private, and changing options.

Ancient societies such as Classical Greece had already achieved a better balance as any reader of Plato can verify. But Plato and the Great Books are temporarily (we hope) out of fashion, so Joyce's book is a very helpful alternative to distinguish between reason and nonsense.