US Government rules on Gender Identity

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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby Heaven Swan » Sat Oct 01, 2016 11:01 pm

American Dream wrote:
The most important point though is generational: the vast, vast majority of younger feminists I know are pro-trans liberation no matter what their sexuality or gender. The older ones are much more given to gender essentialism and transphobic sentiment no matter whether they are liberal, radical or whatever else. This is important.


Luther Blisset wrote:

Could it be a generational thing?


I will say this though, I never ever meet trans women of color over 40. When I was a young art student I knew many trans women of color in my peer group. I have no idea where any of them are now even though the remainder of the social circles are still intact. I have to assume they are already dead.


These are examples of the two main weapons/talking points of trans-activists. The first is using ageism to shame 2nd wave feminists who disagree and to imply or state that all young people are on board with transactivist dogma and liberal feminism. It is true that younger people are being relentlessly bombarded with this stuff and have less experience to help them see through the BS but I guarantee you that there are plenty of radical feminists in their 20's and 30's and many are quite committed.

The abuse-positive lib fem 'porn and prostitution are empowering' ideology is even being taught in some women's studies programs, where lib fem professors have been hired in, but to their credit many young people don't buy it. Thanks for posting Magdalene Burns videos, I'm so glad she's speaking out. And she's a college student so they can't deploy the usual ageist verbal violence towards her.

The other favorite weapon is using transwoman of color as human shields, and constantly referring to them as the most oppressed people on earth. It no longer seems to matter that in the US, 3-4 women per day are murdered by intimate partners.

Yesterday a transwoman of color named Kryzie King pleaded guilty to torturing and murdering a 4 year old boy.

https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160929/midtown/kryzie-king-myls-dobson-child-fatality-adminstration-for-childrens-services

Note that this and the New York Times article make no mention of the fact that she's transgender. In the NY Post and Daily News they do but many other crimes by transwoman are being reported across the board and statistically attributed to women.

I wonder if Kryzie King will be housed in a women's prison? You see how it's the poorest and most vulnerable women in homeless shelters and prisons who will pay most dearly for this rush to PC hell or whatever is behind these executive orders and the pushing through of laws favoring trans and stripping women of their rights.
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Oct 02, 2016 12:17 pm

Last few days I've been rediscovering my sympathies for radical feminism. There are issues on which we disagree, but oh do they cut through a lot of bullshit.

Heaven, this is really one case where a monocausal view of the world fails, in my opinion. The question of "what's behind" these executive orders, etc., may be blinding us to what is right up front. It automatically implies that there is a "behind," something hidden to us. Sooner or later that will lead us to some grand narrative about hidden forces looking and planning to "destroy the traditional family" (which was so wonderful), possibly throwing in (because it's part of the style) an ultimate exterminationist program (as if this was even the way to accomplish that).

I say, let's look at this as an actual lobby, since in every issue that wins legislation and regulation within the OPEN state (as opposed to the deep/spook state), that is what you will always find: a complex of organized political actors pushing and pulling around the lawmakers and the executive agencies.

First, let us define "transgender ideologists" (a category that only partly overlaps withtransgender people, and currently includes a lot of liberals period) as those trying to a) break down the notion of biological sex as the real-material basis for a social class distinction (in which gender is an ideological system that grows to justify that), and b) replace it with the notion that gender is somehow natural, or at any rate more natural or essential than biological sex, and is achieved as an identity that (re)constructs sex.

First, they have been incredibly opportunistic and effective at using the tools of activism and media at the right place and the right time to serve a variety of interests and especially provide distraction from other issues and, from the perspective of a top down power, a goodly portion of divide-and-rule. There are various money interests involved, such as the surgeons and psychiatrists making professional hay out of this, but it's also generally convenient for the neoliberal order in ways that have been realized gradually.

Neoliberalism when it first became openly dominant (Thatcher and Reagan) was formerly oriented to workerist virtue and "family values" conservatism. Since the nineties takeover of the social-democratic and electoral center-left parties, it has increasingly decorated itself with a selective identity liberationism. That also happens to be more appropriate to a flexible "gig economy" model of labor. From the perspective of power, transgenderism is an easy and relatively harmless cutting-edge cause. It avoids big messy issues that impact on vast majorities but come with economic and political costs, like the defense of abortion rights, or addressing the deterioration of general work conditions and ever-declining pay for the bottom 50-plus percent.

But second, and I'm inclined to think above all, these ideologies, effectively (no matter what their exponents may think individually) provide us with the spectacle of men (biological ones, transitioned or not) attacking feminist women (mostly) in a confusionist way, one that appears to reject but actually reinforces a let us call it neo-patriarchal agenda. While it's offensive to the conservative to say that biological sex somehow does not exist and is produced by one's feeling of identity, transgenderist ideologues (again not every trans person, probably not a majority thereof) restore gender as a magically natural binary, with status on the m or the f side now determined by one's own internal feeling, but still upholding a positively cartoonish ideal of what a "woman" is supposed to be.

In a rational and free society, if you are a male who happens to feel like you are a woman, you should be free to be just like a real human woman: which is to say, you should be free to exist with your feelings whatever they are in harmony with any body or personality type along an enormous spectrum that includes everyone -- since women come in literally as many varieties as men! -- dress as you like, act as you like, without being attacked for it and also without having to alter anything in your physical makeup specifically so as to meet the criteria of an ideal "woman." Maybe that, a breakdown of gender assignments altogether, but with no need to deny the continuing existence of sex, would be a threat to conservative, patriarchal notions. One way to recuperate it is to create the idea that your thinking of yourself as a woman means you also have to "transition" physically in some fashion, thus firmly reuniting gender notions with biological sex.

Anyway, for me the bottom line is this: An actually small bunch of (mostly white) (and mostly) biological men, currently very well placed for the zeitgeist, get to play lead spokespersons for all of the oppressed, absurdly attacking (mostly) women as their "oppressors," while espousing an extreme atomized individualism and myth of self-actualization as the highest moral value. We should all get to be exactly who we really are (perhaps after a process of struggling to discover that) by becoming it in our own private spheres, which are all there really is. It's all about "pursuit of happiness" and demands the particular "negative liberty" of not having to be exposed to any party-poopers who conceive of society and classes as collectives, and who imply the individual's imagination of self is limited somehow by any (good or bad) outside social or god forbid natural realities. So it's perfectly liberal, in its way. And what comes out in practice is basically the same old punching-down in a new, confusionist form, that happens to see a group of men appropriating third-wave feminist terminology (though not always the understanding) and using that to render second-wave feminist issues obsolete. What's not to like, from a traditional male privilege perspective? Many MRAs do look on approvingly.
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby Project Willow » Sun Oct 02, 2016 2:31 pm

American Dream wrote:This may be helpful:



No. We're a sexually dimorphic species, that's just simple biological, material fact. Intersex is a genetic anomaly, and intersex people are sick of the trans agenda co-opting their issues. A female is no less of a female if she is infertile or menopausal, and a male no less a male if he's been castrated. The survival of our species depends on knowing what’s in someone’s pants. The entire diatribe attempts to wish away the fact that the vast majority of our social relations are organized around mating and procreation. The overwhelming drive to reproduce doesn't magically disappear based on the psychological needs of a tiny minority of people. And that's pretty much what this essay is all about. It's an incredibly privileged and male approach, and it's not healthy, for anyone involved.
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby American Dream » Sun Oct 02, 2016 2:52 pm

Radical social struggle by necessity involves going beyond a narrow fixation on identitarian categories and the limitations inherent in privilege politics:



P. VALENTINE

The Gender Distinction in Communisation Theory

Communisation theory is primed to do what only a minority of Marxist feminists have attempted to do over the last 50 years of inquiry: re-articulate the capitalist mode of production as being constituted no less by the man/woman relation than by the class relation.2 What would ideally emerge from such a project is a ‘single system’ in which the gender relation and the class relation are equally necessary elements within a totality, rather than the subsumption of one to the other, or the erection of a ‘dual system’ of two different and autonomous systems of patriarchy and capitalism. We say communisation is ‘primed’ for this project because one of the major interventions of communisation theory has been to theorize communism as the abolition not only of capitalists, but also of workers; of work itself and thus of value; of the wage labor relation itself and thus of the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’. This distinction is cast in a variety of terms including the conceptual dyads public/private; social/nonsocial; public/domestic, and is almost unequivocally understood by gender theorists as a grounding element in the production of gender.

Communisation’s very starting point is a demand for the abolition of fundamental material elements of the reproduction of gender – the division of social life into two ‘spheres.’ This implies an analysis of the system of gender and class as a unity, and because it focuses on the gender binary as a material relation of exploitation or oppression in which the two sides are produced rather than given, it also articulates the patriarchy in a way which opens avenues toward new and more rigorous theories of gender oppression that are able to link the exploitation and oppression of women with violence and oppression based on hetero-normativity and cis-normativity. However, until the work of Théorie Communiste (TC) and recently Maya Andrea Gonzalez, conversations around communisation had completely ignored gender, or had merely added gender to the list of things to be abolished through communisation, amounting to little more than buttering the toast of communisation with radical cultural gender theory.3 A critique of the gender binary, of the essentialist identities of ‘woman’ and ‘man,’ which could lead equally to their destruction or proliferation, is attached to a theory of communisation without affecting the concept of what constitutes the capitalist totality. The mere shift from women’s liberation to gender abolition cast in these basic terms represents little advance in theory over the well-trodden ‘postmodern’ shift to de-essentialize identity (an important move, but not particularly new or rare). As TC have written,

If the abolition of the gender distinction is necessary from the point of view of the ‘success’ of communisation, it is not in the name of the abolition of all the mediations of society. It is in its concrete and immediate character that the contradiction between men and women imposes itself on the ‘success’ of communisation, against what that relation implies in terms of violence, invisibilisation, the ascription to a subordinate position.4


Only a substantive theory of the production and reproduction of gender in capitalism can give real non-idealist content to the abolition of gender. The important questions are: what is ‘woman’ and ‘man’, what is the gender relation, and what is its relation to class? The nascent forays into gender theory from the communising tendency have tended towards two major elisions: avoiding the problematic of race and its relation to class and gender, and displacing an analysis of sexual violence to the sidelines of the production and reproduction of the gender distinction. We will here attempt a brief overview and assessment of existing communisationist gender theory and point towards some of these obvious gaps.

...We believe that capital is a totality that is ‘classed’, ‘gendered’ and ‘raced’ by virtue of its own internal logic. These are not three contradictions that sit on three thrones in the centre of the capitalist totality, homologous with one another, dictating its logic. We must reveal exactly how race and gender are necessary social relations based on particular material processes within the capitalist mode of production.28 Through the recent work of communisationist gender theory, we have come to understand ‘women’ as the category describing those whose activity, unwaged and waged, is appropriated in their totality by society (‘men’). This relation inscribes two distinct ‘spheres’ that ground the gender binary. The fact that the boundaries around these spheres are violently policed does not mean they are static – in fact their policing also involves a constant manipulation of the boundaries. We understand ‘proletariat’ as the category describing those who do not own the means of production, and are forced to either sell their labor to those who do (the ‘capitalists’) or are cast out to waste away. How are we to understand the category of ‘racialized,’ or perhaps of ‘black,’ or perhaps ‘ethnicized’? It seems possible that these categories are necessarily related to capital’s necessary overproduction of humans within the necessary movement of capitalist development, and its consequent need to kill, obliterate, remove and dispossess such bodies.29 But how do we structure this theory, and how does it relate to waged exploitation and to the two “spheres”? One fruitful direction for communisation theory to take might be to bring theories of surplus population (such as those articulated in the recent Endnotes 2) into dialogue with theorists of race and ghettos, prisons, and unemployment, in particular the work of Loic Wacquant, Ruth Gilmore, and the above-mentioned Wilderson. Communisation theory must also look to, critique, and expand upon the work on race done by autonomist Marxists such as Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Harry Cleaver, all of whom emphasize the key role of race in reproducing stratification within the working class, constructing a hierarchy of labor powers, and providing the ruling class with a mechanism with which to fracture and divide proletarians.

For now, we note, especially for our European comrades (who continue to be more resistant to these questions than any other comrades we’ve encountered around the world), the obvious fact that the reproduction of racial and ethnic hierarchies affect, form and constitute every moment and place of capital’s reproduction. A range of feminists, from African-American feminists like Patricia Hill Collins to eco-feminists like Maria Mies, have noted and argued that gender is produced through racialization, and that racialization is produced through gender. Indeed, communisation’s theory of gender is deeply flawed due to its failure to comprehend how gender itself is fundamentally structured through systems of racialization. The work of Evelyn Nakano Glenn provides strong evidence of the way in which the female sphere of reproductive labor discussed by TC and Gonzalez is itself propped up by a racial division. The historical reliance of white women on the paid reproductive labor of women of color has allowed white women to embody a feminine cultural ideal decoupled from dirtier and more physically demanding domestic tasks. The paid labor of women of color has also allowed white women to enter the labor force without forcing the burden of reproductive labor upon men. Glenn shows how this racial division of reproductive labor establishes a particular relationship between white women and women of color, in which racial hierarchy becomes the mechanism by which white women can offload some of the labor forced upon them by their husbands onto other women.30 These important insights must be a starting point for further theorization.

Communisation has now been able to say, there is never a proletarian who is not gendered, so we must also be able to say there is never a proletarian or a ‘woman’ or ‘man’ who is not raced. Communisationists can’t afford to turn a blind eye to these necessary processes of the capitalist totality.


More at: http://www.liesjournal.net/volume1-12-g ... ction.html
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby tapitsbo » Sun Oct 02, 2016 8:49 pm

Project Willow » Sun Oct 02, 2016 2:31 pm wrote:
American Dream wrote:This may be helpful:



No. We're a sexually dimorphic species, that's just simple biological, material fact. Intersex is a genetic anomaly, and intersex people are sick of the trans agenda co-opting their issues. A female is no less of a female if she is infertile or menopausal, and a male no less a male if he's been castrated. The survival of our species depends on knowing what’s in someone’s pants. The entire diatribe attempts to wish away the fact that the vast majority of our social relations are organized around mating and procreation. The overwhelming drive to reproduce doesn't magically disappear based on the psychological needs of a tiny minority of people. And that's pretty much what this essay is all about. It's an incredibly privileged and male approach, and it's not healthy, for anyone involved.


But usually I find it's women delivering the message that dimorphism isn't real, outside of somewhere like this board. Yes some men like to piggyback onto the whole genderfluid/genderqueer rhetoric but it's clearly centered around (some) women and driven by them where I live.

A lot of my exposure to what some might call the "trans trend" and related belief systems hasn't been coming from openly trans people, whatever role their activists may have played in getting this off the ground - I remember when this was a much more marginal cause, and at the time I was quite sympathetic to it.

It's coming from the visible figureheads of mainstream institutional authority - legislators, corporate executives, university administrators, etc. That is interesting to me.

Of course, the more pronounced educational policies and things like that oriented around all of this are being introduced in selected areas like Ontario and Sweden, where sizeable minorities grate at the decisions of the authorities to enforce what is often seen by them as a radical "gender ideology". Strategy of tension?
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 03, 2016 9:38 am

Sex is dimorphic. Gender being what is constructed on top of sexual dimorphism is fluid, and can be queer as all hell, and this has always been true, and people have always been paying a (variable) price for the various ways in which they do not conform to a rigid (and false) gender dimorphism, which takes different forms but is present in all modern cultures.
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby brekin » Mon Oct 03, 2016 1:40 pm

You've probably seen this today. Geez, I'm with the pope on this one "gender identity, which is no more a choice than height or hair color"? Is that something that really should be taught in schools at the lower levels? Granted, this is coming from a celibate man who wears a dress daily.

Pope Francis’ Remarks Disappoint Gay and Transgender Groups

Leaders of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups expressed dismay on Wednesday after Pope Francis said that schoolchildren are being taught they can choose their gender as part of what he called an “ideological colonization.”

Francis was meeting privately with bishops in Poland last week when he broached the matter. “Today, in schools they are teaching this to children — to children! — that everyone can choose their gender,” he said, according to a transcript released by the Vatican on Tuesday.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of DignityUSA, a leading organization of L.G.B.T. Catholics, said the comments represented a “dangerous ignorance” about gender identity, which is no more a choice than height or hair color.


“It’s very troubling that the pope would say this,” Ms. Duddy-Burke said on Wednesday. “It also shows that the pope doesn’t understand the danger that his words can mean for gender-nonconforming people, particularly those who live in countries with laws or cultural pressures that put these people at risk for violence.”
In his remarks, the pope said the idea of choosing gender was being taught with schoolbooks supplied by influential donors and countries. He did not identify which.
“This is terrible,” he said, according to the transcript.

Francis, who is Argentine, also did not offer examples of classrooms using such a curriculum. But church analysts say he has long harbored resentment over so-called ideological colonialism, the notion that international groups offer aid to developing nations contingent upon the adoption of Western values.
“It’s not all that clear who he’s mad at and what’s upsetting him,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior analyst for The National Catholic Reporter. “But there’s something underlying there. And I think it’s primarily that he feels that this kind of stuff is being pushed down their throats.”

During a trip to the Philippines in 2015, the pope warned of “the new ideological colonization that tries to destroy the family.” Asked by journalists what he meant, he was reported to have given the example of an education minister in Argentina who was offered a loan to build schools on the condition that the textbooks include “gender theory.”

The pontiff’s latest remarks represented a letdown for gay rights groups that were encouraged by the pope’s conciliatory remarks in June after the massacre of gay patrons at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Francis said at the time that gays were owed an apology for past mistreatment by Christians.
Sarah McBride, a spokeswoman for the Human Rights Campaign, said the words sent a ripple of hope through the L.G.B.T. community that the Vatican might be embracing a broader stance on inclusion.

She added, however, “I think what’s clear in this last statement is that maybe those sentiments weren’t universally applied — that for transgender people, the pontiff is applying a different standard.”Francis, whose papacy began in 2013, has won admirers, and detractors, for his relatively progressive views on social issues, once declaring, “Who am I to judge?” on the matter of gay priests. Austen Ivereigh, the author of “The Great Reformer,” a biography of Pope Francis, said the pontiff also has a track record of reaching out to transgender people and telling them they are “children of God and part of the church.”

Perhaps the best-known example was in early 2015, when a Spanish daily reported that Francis had invited a transgender man to the Vatican after he wrote that he had been rejected by his parish. The man, Diego Neria Lejarraga, later said the experience “changed my life.”
Mr. Ivereigh said the pontiff’s remarks last week represented no prejudice toward transgender people, but rather a rejection of so-called gender ideology.
“His view is that gender is a gift of God — it’s part of the created world,” Mr. Ivereigh said. “And that gender ideology, which says that gender is something that you can choose and select, is an abstract ideology which doesn’t correspond to that human reality.”

In a major document regarding family issues released in April — titled “Amoris Laetitia,” Latin for “The Joy of Love” — Francis warns of “an ideology of gender” as a threat to the family.“Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift,” he writes. “At the same time, we are called to protect our humanity, and this means, in the first place, accepting it and respecting it as it was created.”

L.G.B.T. leaders said Wednesday that the pope had failed to grasp that one’s gender identity is discovered, often at a very young age, not chosen. Ms. McBride, of the Human Rights Campaign, noted that transgender people have been a part of humanity throughout time and across cultures.
“There have been times where he’s demonstrated compassion,” she said of Francis. “Then there have been other times where his words have been not only hurtful, and frankly harmful, but really demonstrating a misunderstanding of what it means to be transgender.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/world ... roups.html
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 03, 2016 1:45 pm

Did he cite examples? Doubtless not.
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby brekin » Mon Oct 03, 2016 1:52 pm

JackRiddler » Mon Oct 03, 2016 12:45 pm wrote:Did he cite examples? Doubtless not.


No, I think he was just riffing on a theme. Extract from the transcript below. But I would think the Pope would know a thing or two about ideological colonization. ;) And really with the Fed gov weighing in on with gender identity, it is only a matter of time before institutions and schools won't get fed money if they don't abide.

I would like to conclude with this aspect, since behind all this there are ideologies. In Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, and in some countries of Asia, there are genuine forms of ideological colonization taking place. And one of these - I will call it clearly by its name – is [the ideology of] “gender”. Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this? Because the books are provided by the persons and institutions that give you money. These forms of ideological colonization are also supported by influential countries. And this terrible!

http://press.vatican.va/content/salasta ... 65.html#en
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby Project Willow » Mon Oct 03, 2016 2:21 pm

Podcast on the issue, well worth a listen.

The trouble with transing kids

The days of Marlo Thomas’ “Free to be… You and Me,” it seems, are long gone. Now, when kids don’t quite “fit” within the gender roles prescribed by a patriarchal society, no longer do we say, “You’re fine just the way you are!” Instead, more and more frequently, we are saying, “Maybe you were born in the wrong body.”

The quickly popularized phenomenon of transing kids — that is, to begin youth on treatment programs as soon as they proclaim a “gender identity” that doesn’t match the gender roles traditionally attached to their biological sex, ushering them into the process of “transitioning” towards living as the so-called “opposite gender” — has been widely celebrated and supported by liberals and progressives alike. But are we moving too quickly? What are the consequences of medical interventions like this on children? What are the social consequences?

With many questions left unanswered (and many questions not being asked in the first place), the “trans kids” trend needs more interrogation.

Lisa Marchiano, LCSW, is a clinical social worker and Jungian analyst. She is also one of those people who is concerned we’re moving too fast and too uncritically towards transitioning kids. Her article, “Layers of meaning: A Jungian analyst questions the identity model for trans-identified youth” can be found at 4thWaveNow. For more on her work, visit The Jung Soul. I spoke with her over the phone from her home in Philadelphia.

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2016/10/02/podcast-trouble-transing-kids/
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 03, 2016 3:33 pm

.

The pope really has little to say legitimately on this issue unless it's an apology for his outfit having supported centuries of violence against the gender non-conforming, more specifically: women who did not fit, and single-sex attracted people generally, and oh yeah women even if they did fit.

And if he's not bothering to be specific, then he is effectively and recklessly mixing up variant "ideological messages" (in his outfit known as "commandments" or "lessons")

like

"girls can do math and sports and don't have to starve themselves or dress up like puppets for men,"

or

"boys can like flowers or other boys and wear dresses and should not be beaten up for any of that, in either bathroom,"

with

"if you have a feeling that you identify with the 'opposite' 'gender' we should get you into treatment with hormones and start chopping right away."

This is complicated.

I believe drawing the distinction between sex and gender, and how sex is the basis for defining actual classes and a division of labor, while gender is the conditioning and ideology that justifies it (roughly speaking) is essential to understanding.

This is nothing you're going to get from the pope! He should stick to capitalism, a subject his outfit understands very well.

.
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby Agent Orange Cooper » Mon Oct 03, 2016 5:55 pm

I can't wait for the first time a parent cuts their child's arm or leg off because the child had 'declared' her/himself 'trans-abled' and the parent wanted to accommodate that very sacred and progressive decision (made by their 6 year old).
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby Heaven Swan » Mon Oct 03, 2016 11:21 pm

Jack Riddler wrote:
Heaven, this is really one case where a monocausal view of the world fails, in my opinion. The question of "what's behind" these executive orders, etc., may be blinding us to what is right up front. It automatically implies that there is a "behind," something hidden to us. Sooner or later that will lead us to some grand narrative about hidden forces looking and planning to "destroy the traditional family" (which was so wonderful), possibly throwing in (because it's part of the style) an ultimate exterminationist program (as if this was even the way to accomplish that).


Yes, it does seem like a 'perfect storm' of convergence of support from many quarters and directions, not only top down. But since there's more political support from the left than the right, I don't see how 'destruction of the traditional family' would be the main objective, if there is one.

I say, let's look at this as an actual lobby, since in every issue that wins legislation and regulation within the OPEN state (as opposed to the deep/spook state), that is what you will always find: a complex of organized political actors pushing and pulling around the lawmakers and the executive agencies.


As far as lobbying goes, there are reports that many of the gays and lesbians that ran gay organizations such as HRC (Human Rights Campaign), fought to obtain gay marriage and won. When then many of them went off and got married, trans moved in to fill the vacuum and took over the organizations.

Along with trans organizations like Silvia Rivera Law Project, the gay orgs prioritized lobbying for trans rights and issues (and by the way I support their right to not be discriminated against in housing, jobs, their safety, 100%).

A lot of groups lobby but has any oppressed group ever been so successful at pushing through avalanches of legislation in such a short time period, garnering tremendous support in academia and the highest levels of government, the media (NYT publishes at least 3 fawning, hyper-supportive articles per week and frequently blocks comments that raise valid questions)? This seems unprecedented.

The lobbying no doubt had some effect but inquiring minds can't help but wonder if there has been some deep state think tank that has come up with an agenda of support.

Trans is convenient to neo liberalism, patriarchy, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, shrinks...and all the reasons you mentioned in your post and it could very well be a 'perfect storm' convergence of interests but if there is a deep state agenda I wonder what the thrust or objective of it could be?

Above you mention the habit conspiracy researchers have of siting the idea of an 'ultimate exterminationist program' . I agree that this is lazy thinking and usually seems like it's coming out of left field. In the case of trans though there is actual sterilization involved as a result of some of the pharmaceutical and surgical treatments. There are many reports of gender doctors and clinics basically giving the stuff out to whoever wants it with no hoops to jump through, especially when it comes to the autistic and the marginalized, And now, thanks to the lobbying, in many states hormones and surgery are paid for by Medicaid. Since the overwhelming majority of f to m's are lesbians and many or most of the child and teenage m to f transitioners are gay the specter of gay eugenics does raise it's head.

The f to m trans friend that I mentioned before is convinced that the aim of all this is sterilization and eugenics. I tend to think that the deep state agenda, if there is one of course, would be much broader and possibly already covered in what we've already discussed (promoting of individual solutions, distraction from other issues, etc) but it might be interesting to hear any ideas or analysis people on this site might come up with.
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 04, 2016 10:18 am

Shocking that the neoLiberal Establishment will appropriate relatively narrow struggles of oppressed groups (e.g. bathrooms for trans* people) as a means towards legitimating the workings of the larger machine. Meanwhile, above and beyond the often limited discourse between transphobic and transcentric identiarianisms, a much bigger social struggle is going on, which includes Transliberation but goes far, far beyond it...
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Re: US Government rules on Gender Identity

Postby Heaven Swan » Tue Oct 04, 2016 10:47 am

Shocking that the neoLiberal Establishment will appropriate relatively narrow struggles of oppressed groups (e.g. bathrooms for trans* people) as a means towards legitimating the workings of the larger machine. Meanwhile, above and beyond the often limited discourse between transphobic and transcentric identiarianisms, a much bigger social struggle is going on, which includes Transliberation but goes far, far beyond it...


It's about far more than bathrooms.
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