Great discussion, thank you to Anna for participating! And Happy Birthday, Cori!
On the issue of identity, to which Anna seems to give a lot of weight. When she said that some kids may be same-sex attracted, but not "identify" as gay, and asked, "so what does 'gay' even mean?" (if I heard her correctly), I was thinking: well, if that's the case, what does "identify" even mean, if it's a denial of your actual sexuality? Or your sex?
And this is the big difference between Anna "identifying" as a psychologist, and anyone identifying as trans. Anna identifying as a psychologist does not require anyone around her to deny reality. It doesn't require anyone to pretend that 1+1=0. Identifying as trans does exactly that, and that is the problem. Denying reality to validate someone's identity is a huge ask, and comes with enormous costs to society at the numbers it's happening now, as we see with the fight over women's spaces and sports.
As Helen Joyce once said, allowing the notion that 1+1=0 is not just "one little equation, so why do you care?". Pretending that it is true brings the entire field of mathematics crashing down. Similarly, if you allow the reality of sex to be denied, it has profound practical impacts on society. That's why an "identity" at odds with reality is so problematic, and we should stop elevating and reifying this concept to the degree that we recently have.
Absolutely. This was what stood out to me in the discussion as such an odd, anti-realist position. OK, there may be nuances and variation in sexual orientation, differences between sexual attraction and active sexual relations, but same-sex attraction is clear enough in most cases that this, "they might not identify as gay," to my mind, compounds the problem, colluding with the desire to deny reality (possibly arising from internalised homophobia).
Later, Anna opined that young people have the right to form their identities (also paraphrasing here), seeming to suggest no bounds to that "right", (and also made some comment about intersectionality, if I remember right). I strongly disagree. I think identity politics has made illegitimate inroads into culture. We have no such right. We can think whatever we want about ourselves, but the rest of society - and certainly therapists - should not affirm irrational or unscientific beliefs. We have a duty, in fact, to challenge them to encourage sanity.
Glad I didn't mischaracterize her comments - I was worried I had misunderstood and thought I should go back and re-listen. It seemed at odds with everything else she said.
Yes, both "gender" and "identity" are poison now. Believe me when I tell you that one used to be able to go decades without needing to read, use or think about either of those accursed words! "Gender" used to be a characteristic of nouns; the only time one heard "identity" was in television tropes like "mistaken identity" or "identity crisis." And yet, and yet, we all found our genitals and who we like and what we like to do and what we like to eat and what we like to explore and imitate in the world's cultures. *Human* cultures.
There are multiple forces despoiling people's bodies and lives in the name of "trans," and homophobia is certainly one of them. But there are two points that maybe don't get made as often so I'll throw them out there. One is that the homophobia is, very often, coming from *inside* the house. Most everyday straight people today are about as afraid of normie gays and lesbians as they are of Hello Kitty. If you are a trans-entitlement activist, however, you not only fluff up the prospect of Big Homophobia out there to scare young gay folk, you *hide* behind it as if the disgust with you is a disgust with gays.
The other point is that Big Misogyny is alive and well, and that teenage girls can act, even unconsciously, to take down and demoralize other teenage girls in intrasexual competition, often to the point of unwellness. So maybe some girls used to harangue others about not being feminine enough to be cool or accepted; now they're pushing each other toward being "masculine" enough. Plus ca change...
I just popped off above, Kate. I agree. Anna was great until she was like...."Gee, I've fogotten the last 50 years, and now I don't know what gay even means any more?" Suddenly sexual orientation has been rendered incomprehensible to people. It's a wildly stupid question.
Sarah's (a.k.a. Eliza's) comment about patients "not going through adolescence" got me thinking about Claudia, a key character in Anne Rice's novel, Interview with the Vampire, who is a 5-year-old girl turned into a vampire. As a result, she becomes immortal but is forever trapped in the body of a child, unable to physically mature. Denied her natural progression of human development, she questions her purpose and identity, feeling like a "monstrous child" who belongs nowhere.
So, back to the real world, what's the effect of puberty blockers on the relationships between the children who are put on them and their same-aged peers?
What is adolescence for?
Thinking back to your own (assuming that you had one), do you wish you hadn't moved forward along with others your age, but instead remained at the same mental and physical level of a prepubescent child?
Had you stayed underdeveloped, while your peers left you behind and matured (painfully and awkwardly) into adults, do you think that would have made you feel alienated from everyone else your age, out of sync with the culture of you own cohort in time? Might you have felt like a "monstrous child" who belongs nowhere, like Claudia?
Bodily functions carry on regardless and accelerate. The female body goes into earlier menopause. How Gender Medicine Impacts Female Bodies, with Elaine Miller
I think something missing is that the main concept of homophobia doesn't always tell the whole story. It seems as though women my age (28) & younger don't describe themselves as lesbians, they prefer to use "gay" or "queer". I think women who are distressed by oversexualisation don't want to describe something as personal as their romantic and sexual experiences with a term that's become so associated with a porn category.
I have never been shamed as weird by peers for being a lesbian but I have experienced sexual harrassment whilst visibly part of a lesbian couple in public. I can see how it could be distressing for a sensitive person made anxious by sexual attention from men to feel so visible because of men's interest in lesbians, to the point they might want to become a man so they could be in invisible straight relationships. So in that way they could share similar motivations to the straight women who want to become gay men because of a similar distress over sexualisation
Yes, which is a big red flag. This is horrific! We're calmly discussing how vile homophobic bullying is so rife in western societies that young people are preferring to be sterile life-long medical patients, so as to be "invisible", rather than openly gay. And they celebrate this under the sick irony of "Pride". I'm thankful for your knowledge about how this may be exacerbated by pornographic depictions of homosexuality, but I still think homophobia pretty much tells the whole story.
I'm sure there has always been homophobia among middle schoolers, but listening to what my kids tell me about the discourse at their school, where "gay" is an insult and "trans" makes you a brave social justice warrior, I do have to wonder if it has gotten worse in connection with the rise of the trans craze. I just heard Andrew Doyle saying this on a podcast - that homophobia will always be there, but that there was a window in the first decade of this millennium where it was as as easy as it would get to be gay, and now homophobia has resurged in conjunction with gender ideology.
It is so frustrating seeing my community believing that they are being progressive by supporting this. They are so open-minded their brains fell out.
Speaking of benefit, the judgement itself is subjective. A trans identified teen I know was "doing very well" according to a psychiatrist friend while taking anxiety med and smoking weed daily. Benefit?
Non-gender recommendation: coloring book "Atlantis" by Hanna Karlzon (beautiful art, excellent paper, hard cover) and Arrtx coloring pencils (good quality, good value for money, work great with that paper)
Such a good episode. Thank you for inviting Anna. And happy birthday, Cori.
The question about clinicians basing their proof on their subjective interpretations of what they see in their patients: Go back to the debunked concept of facilitated communication. Even after having concrete, objective proof the communication was coming from the facilitator and not the non-speaking individual, so many professionals still insisted FC was real, beneficial, and legitimate so it got repackaged as rapid promoting and spell 2 communicate. Then people even went so far as to believe it was working because of telepathy, as we see in the (unfortunately) wildly popular Telepathy Tapes podcast. As for patient reports of certainty the GAC treatments are working, there are so many treatments that don't get prescribed just because they work in the short term or patients like them in the short term. There are weight loss drugs that are extremely effective and give results that patients love that aren't prescribed because of their risks and longterm side effects.
Professionals *really* need to be aware of how suggestible highly distressed young people can be to narratives of expressing distress. My daughter did not start self-harming or expressing ideas of suicidal ideation until a psychologist told her she was diagnosing her with depression and did a risk assessment on her which asked detailed questions about these things. She went from not experiencing thoughts of either of those to calling the hotline number the psychologist gave her two days later. Someone I know told me her daughter started self-harming after hearing her teacher express concern to the class about a friend's daughter doing it. She had never even heard of cutting before that. Professionals must understand how much they might be creating these symptoms in the kids they work with.
My non gender thing of the week, aside from more gardening, is that I bought a humidifier for my computer room because the air gets very dry in here during the summer. I've never owned one before but it does seem to be making the room more bearable. I'm just worried I'm going to overdo it and end up electrocuting myself, or turning the room into a mould paradise or something.
The instructions had a warning about not placing it too close to electrical items in case the added humidity causes an electrical fire*. I suspect I'd have to over do it by quite a bit to cause a fire, but like I said, it's in the computer room...
Overall, I enjoyed this episode. I thought Anna's perspective was very valuable. I want to push back on something, however. At one point, towards the end, Anna made a long statement about sexual-orientation-as-identity - and it was utter nonsense. I realize that this cohort gets up set when you tell them that they are gay. I also realize that there are a lot of "straight men" who are having sex with men. Spoiler alert: they aren't straight.
I worked in public health for many years, and yes, we say men who have sex with men.. THIS IS A FIG LEAF. No one believes, or rather no one used to believe anyway, that the "straight men" with anal gonorrhea from bottoming were actually straight. Yes, fig leaves are sometimes required, but let's call it what it is.
Sexual orientation is not self-ID. If folks are saying they are gay, but aren't actually same sex attracted, are not gay. This kind of thinking that sexual orientation is some sort of fluid, social phenom is very frustrating to hear from a psychologist. Sorry, most of these kids are gay.
And Cori is right. If you've had your puberty blocked, you're whole understanding of sexual orientation or sexuality writ-large is entirely distorted. The lack of "based" and reality distortion Anna was engaging here was pretty frustrating.
That said, love the show. Loved the episode. Please thank Anna for speaking out on this very important issue. Despite my critique here, she is brave and did us a great service.
Why do people (who are supposedly well trained in being scientists) keep saying they've seen individuals who have benefitted from going on puberty blockers? That's assuming causality, when there is no justification for doing so. They could just as easily say about those same individuals that they're doing well, DESPITE having gone on puberty blockers.
Oh, I shouldn't be commenting as I am listening . . . I'd save myself some keystrokes. I could have just typed: "Like she said!" about Dr. Hutchinson.
I think that the concept that Lisa Selin Davis was referring to when she asked (at about 45 minutes) if a person can be harmed even if at the time of the harm they did not feel the harm is called Nachträglichkeit by Freud and Après-coup by Lacan. It is when an event acquires traumatic significance after its initial occurrence, when the person has reached a developmental stage that allows them to understand and process it.
Another concern: Anna describes how young people don't "identify" as "gay" or "lesbian" etc. This is promoted as a form of freedom, fluidity, release from the binary, etc.
However, how much of this disinterest in identifying as homosexual is the result of the vast amount of gender propaganda these young people have been subjected to? It's simply uncool to have a sexuality that "locks in" the sex binary (either homo or hetero).
I would guess this is a result of social pressure, not some new way to identify.
"However, how much of this disinterest in identifying as homosexual is the result of the vast amount of gender propaganda these young people have been subjected to?"
That might be true from about 2015 on, but before that there was such a stigma attached to being gay or lesbian that a lot of organisations, mainly public health bodies, would use language like "men who have sex with men" instead of just saying "Gay" or "Homosexual" men as a way of including closeted gay men. I don't know if there were similar issues with lesbians, but I remember starting to hear in the 00s that many lesbians were shunning the term because it had become so associated with pornography.
Turning factual categories into identity categories is a less than ideal situation as far as I'm concerned. The whole point of gay liberation was to make people less ashamed of being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but now those terms are so corrupted that young people don't want to adopt them. As far as groups like Stonewall are concerned being a "Lesbian" shouldn't preclude one from being open to sex with penis havers and being "Gay" shouldn't preclude one from being open to sex with vagina havers. If that's what they're being taught in school it's no wonder loads of young people aren't adopting the label.
I don't like this concept of "masking" that Anna describes: it implies that there is something more authentic underneath our presentation, that our public or social presentation is some kind of lie.
What she calls "masking" should more accurately be considered a form of functional inhibition. We don't run around screaming because the grocery store was out of strawberries: we suppress such emotions in public. We *regulate* our emotions because *it's good to regulate emotions.*
I'm concerned that this is yet another psychological concept that encourages young people to be disinhibited and dysregulated in order to be "authentic." This doesn't help them.
I think it would be better to explain to them that we all present different parts of ourselves in different social contexts *and nothing is wrong with that.* We don't throw tantrums like toddlers in grocery stores not because it's socially unacceptable but because we've learned to handle our negative emotions.
I wonder if you invited him, if “Orlando” would come on the show? I’d really like to hear his perspective, as someone who’s been campaigning doggedly to get UK bureaucrats to be more candid with the public over there.
His writing has impressed me as having such clarity and honesty. I don’t know that he’s ever given an audio interview!
His latest post is “My experience of ‘late-onset gender dysphoria’” (in which he describes the self-recognition he felt when he encountered the concepts of autogynephilia and pseudobisexuality, and explains why he thinks it’s more helpful/accurate to speak of “cross-sex identity disorder”): https://open.substack.com/pub/transpolicy/p/my-experience-of-late-onset-gender?
And just today he tweeted about a piece he posted last month—entitled “Objection to the Cass Review’s puberty blocker clinical trial”—in which he wrote: “If the NHS and the medical profession were to cover the actual reasons behind gender dysphoria, including autogynephilia, then it would rapidly become apparent that it is a fantasy that children are able to discern that they have the ‘gender identity’ of the opposite sex, or of something else entirely, e.g. ‘non-binary’, and that all medicalisation around this issue should stop, including the proposed puberty blocker clinical trial.”
Why is distress about not conforming to regressive gender stereotypes treated as an illness that is cured by reinforcing those stereotypes? Gender dysphoria is a system of a sexist system. It is not a diagnosis. Gender clinics? Why? Diseases that have verifiable symptoms have clinics .
While not universal, I think there are two things going on here:
For girls: Social contagion and the desire to "identify" out of your sex class.
For boys: To make them F*ckable for "real men." It sounds crass but you see this across the societies have have "3rd gender" concepts. As Helen Joyce points out, these are always dumping grounds for sissy-boys who can't hide it. The societies think they are useless, so they dump them into this liminal "not-man" category wherein gay/bi men who "pass" can have license to f-them w/o penalty. I think the discomfort with sissy-boys coupled with the stigma of male homosexuality is what motivates it. In our societies we render it in terms of disease states. It's all disgusting.
Great discussion, thank you to Anna for participating! And Happy Birthday, Cori!
On the issue of identity, to which Anna seems to give a lot of weight. When she said that some kids may be same-sex attracted, but not "identify" as gay, and asked, "so what does 'gay' even mean?" (if I heard her correctly), I was thinking: well, if that's the case, what does "identify" even mean, if it's a denial of your actual sexuality? Or your sex?
And this is the big difference between Anna "identifying" as a psychologist, and anyone identifying as trans. Anna identifying as a psychologist does not require anyone around her to deny reality. It doesn't require anyone to pretend that 1+1=0. Identifying as trans does exactly that, and that is the problem. Denying reality to validate someone's identity is a huge ask, and comes with enormous costs to society at the numbers it's happening now, as we see with the fight over women's spaces and sports.
As Helen Joyce once said, allowing the notion that 1+1=0 is not just "one little equation, so why do you care?". Pretending that it is true brings the entire field of mathematics crashing down. Similarly, if you allow the reality of sex to be denied, it has profound practical impacts on society. That's why an "identity" at odds with reality is so problematic, and we should stop elevating and reifying this concept to the degree that we recently have.
Absolutely. This was what stood out to me in the discussion as such an odd, anti-realist position. OK, there may be nuances and variation in sexual orientation, differences between sexual attraction and active sexual relations, but same-sex attraction is clear enough in most cases that this, "they might not identify as gay," to my mind, compounds the problem, colluding with the desire to deny reality (possibly arising from internalised homophobia).
Later, Anna opined that young people have the right to form their identities (also paraphrasing here), seeming to suggest no bounds to that "right", (and also made some comment about intersectionality, if I remember right). I strongly disagree. I think identity politics has made illegitimate inroads into culture. We have no such right. We can think whatever we want about ourselves, but the rest of society - and certainly therapists - should not affirm irrational or unscientific beliefs. We have a duty, in fact, to challenge them to encourage sanity.
Glad I didn't mischaracterize her comments - I was worried I had misunderstood and thought I should go back and re-listen. It seemed at odds with everything else she said.
Yes, both "gender" and "identity" are poison now. Believe me when I tell you that one used to be able to go decades without needing to read, use or think about either of those accursed words! "Gender" used to be a characteristic of nouns; the only time one heard "identity" was in television tropes like "mistaken identity" or "identity crisis." And yet, and yet, we all found our genitals and who we like and what we like to do and what we like to eat and what we like to explore and imitate in the world's cultures. *Human* cultures.
There are multiple forces despoiling people's bodies and lives in the name of "trans," and homophobia is certainly one of them. But there are two points that maybe don't get made as often so I'll throw them out there. One is that the homophobia is, very often, coming from *inside* the house. Most everyday straight people today are about as afraid of normie gays and lesbians as they are of Hello Kitty. If you are a trans-entitlement activist, however, you not only fluff up the prospect of Big Homophobia out there to scare young gay folk, you *hide* behind it as if the disgust with you is a disgust with gays.
The other point is that Big Misogyny is alive and well, and that teenage girls can act, even unconsciously, to take down and demoralize other teenage girls in intrasexual competition, often to the point of unwellness. So maybe some girls used to harangue others about not being feminine enough to be cool or accepted; now they're pushing each other toward being "masculine" enough. Plus ca change...
I just popped off above, Kate. I agree. Anna was great until she was like...."Gee, I've fogotten the last 50 years, and now I don't know what gay even means any more?" Suddenly sexual orientation has been rendered incomprehensible to people. It's a wildly stupid question.
Sarah's (a.k.a. Eliza's) comment about patients "not going through adolescence" got me thinking about Claudia, a key character in Anne Rice's novel, Interview with the Vampire, who is a 5-year-old girl turned into a vampire. As a result, she becomes immortal but is forever trapped in the body of a child, unable to physically mature. Denied her natural progression of human development, she questions her purpose and identity, feeling like a "monstrous child" who belongs nowhere.
So, back to the real world, what's the effect of puberty blockers on the relationships between the children who are put on them and their same-aged peers?
What is adolescence for?
Thinking back to your own (assuming that you had one), do you wish you hadn't moved forward along with others your age, but instead remained at the same mental and physical level of a prepubescent child?
Had you stayed underdeveloped, while your peers left you behind and matured (painfully and awkwardly) into adults, do you think that would have made you feel alienated from everyone else your age, out of sync with the culture of you own cohort in time? Might you have felt like a "monstrous child" who belongs nowhere, like Claudia?
Bodily functions carry on regardless and accelerate. The female body goes into earlier menopause. How Gender Medicine Impacts Female Bodies, with Elaine Miller
https://youtu.be/gmp-0bZ1r2E?si=B1PdkMXqJ07qspRJ
Idk instead I’m thinking whether Claudia should stayed mentally prepubescent for 800 years or something
Happy Birthday, Cori!
I think something missing is that the main concept of homophobia doesn't always tell the whole story. It seems as though women my age (28) & younger don't describe themselves as lesbians, they prefer to use "gay" or "queer". I think women who are distressed by oversexualisation don't want to describe something as personal as their romantic and sexual experiences with a term that's become so associated with a porn category.
I have never been shamed as weird by peers for being a lesbian but I have experienced sexual harrassment whilst visibly part of a lesbian couple in public. I can see how it could be distressing for a sensitive person made anxious by sexual attention from men to feel so visible because of men's interest in lesbians, to the point they might want to become a man so they could be in invisible straight relationships. So in that way they could share similar motivations to the straight women who want to become gay men because of a similar distress over sexualisation
Yes, which is a big red flag. This is horrific! We're calmly discussing how vile homophobic bullying is so rife in western societies that young people are preferring to be sterile life-long medical patients, so as to be "invisible", rather than openly gay. And they celebrate this under the sick irony of "Pride". I'm thankful for your knowledge about how this may be exacerbated by pornographic depictions of homosexuality, but I still think homophobia pretty much tells the whole story.
I'm sure there has always been homophobia among middle schoolers, but listening to what my kids tell me about the discourse at their school, where "gay" is an insult and "trans" makes you a brave social justice warrior, I do have to wonder if it has gotten worse in connection with the rise of the trans craze. I just heard Andrew Doyle saying this on a podcast - that homophobia will always be there, but that there was a window in the first decade of this millennium where it was as as easy as it would get to be gay, and now homophobia has resurged in conjunction with gender ideology.
It is so frustrating seeing my community believing that they are being progressive by supporting this. They are so open-minded their brains fell out.
Speaking of benefit, the judgement itself is subjective. A trans identified teen I know was "doing very well" according to a psychiatrist friend while taking anxiety med and smoking weed daily. Benefit?
Non-gender recommendation: coloring book "Atlantis" by Hanna Karlzon (beautiful art, excellent paper, hard cover) and Arrtx coloring pencils (good quality, good value for money, work great with that paper)
Such a good episode. Thank you for inviting Anna. And happy birthday, Cori.
The question about clinicians basing their proof on their subjective interpretations of what they see in their patients: Go back to the debunked concept of facilitated communication. Even after having concrete, objective proof the communication was coming from the facilitator and not the non-speaking individual, so many professionals still insisted FC was real, beneficial, and legitimate so it got repackaged as rapid promoting and spell 2 communicate. Then people even went so far as to believe it was working because of telepathy, as we see in the (unfortunately) wildly popular Telepathy Tapes podcast. As for patient reports of certainty the GAC treatments are working, there are so many treatments that don't get prescribed just because they work in the short term or patients like them in the short term. There are weight loss drugs that are extremely effective and give results that patients love that aren't prescribed because of their risks and longterm side effects.
Professionals *really* need to be aware of how suggestible highly distressed young people can be to narratives of expressing distress. My daughter did not start self-harming or expressing ideas of suicidal ideation until a psychologist told her she was diagnosing her with depression and did a risk assessment on her which asked detailed questions about these things. She went from not experiencing thoughts of either of those to calling the hotline number the psychologist gave her two days later. Someone I know told me her daughter started self-harming after hearing her teacher express concern to the class about a friend's daughter doing it. She had never even heard of cutting before that. Professionals must understand how much they might be creating these symptoms in the kids they work with.
My non gender thing of the week, aside from more gardening, is that I bought a humidifier for my computer room because the air gets very dry in here during the summer. I've never owned one before but it does seem to be making the room more bearable. I'm just worried I'm going to overdo it and end up electrocuting myself, or turning the room into a mould paradise or something.
Wait, how would the electrocuting yourself happen??
The instructions had a warning about not placing it too close to electrical items in case the added humidity causes an electrical fire*. I suspect I'd have to over do it by quite a bit to cause a fire, but like I said, it's in the computer room...
*edit: electrical fire or electrical discharge
Overall, I enjoyed this episode. I thought Anna's perspective was very valuable. I want to push back on something, however. At one point, towards the end, Anna made a long statement about sexual-orientation-as-identity - and it was utter nonsense. I realize that this cohort gets up set when you tell them that they are gay. I also realize that there are a lot of "straight men" who are having sex with men. Spoiler alert: they aren't straight.
I worked in public health for many years, and yes, we say men who have sex with men.. THIS IS A FIG LEAF. No one believes, or rather no one used to believe anyway, that the "straight men" with anal gonorrhea from bottoming were actually straight. Yes, fig leaves are sometimes required, but let's call it what it is.
Sexual orientation is not self-ID. If folks are saying they are gay, but aren't actually same sex attracted, are not gay. This kind of thinking that sexual orientation is some sort of fluid, social phenom is very frustrating to hear from a psychologist. Sorry, most of these kids are gay.
And Cori is right. If you've had your puberty blocked, you're whole understanding of sexual orientation or sexuality writ-large is entirely distorted. The lack of "based" and reality distortion Anna was engaging here was pretty frustrating.
That said, love the show. Loved the episode. Please thank Anna for speaking out on this very important issue. Despite my critique here, she is brave and did us a great service.
Why do people (who are supposedly well trained in being scientists) keep saying they've seen individuals who have benefitted from going on puberty blockers? That's assuming causality, when there is no justification for doing so. They could just as easily say about those same individuals that they're doing well, DESPITE having gone on puberty blockers.
Oh, I shouldn't be commenting as I am listening . . . I'd save myself some keystrokes. I could have just typed: "Like she said!" about Dr. Hutchinson.
I thought the same thing.
I think that the concept that Lisa Selin Davis was referring to when she asked (at about 45 minutes) if a person can be harmed even if at the time of the harm they did not feel the harm is called Nachträglichkeit by Freud and Après-coup by Lacan. It is when an event acquires traumatic significance after its initial occurrence, when the person has reached a developmental stage that allows them to understand and process it.
Jamie, it’s crazy that you were hired because you had trans spouse!
Well I would like to think that I met the job qualifications in other ways also, but I absolutely know that it was considered a strong benefit.
Another concern: Anna describes how young people don't "identify" as "gay" or "lesbian" etc. This is promoted as a form of freedom, fluidity, release from the binary, etc.
However, how much of this disinterest in identifying as homosexual is the result of the vast amount of gender propaganda these young people have been subjected to? It's simply uncool to have a sexuality that "locks in" the sex binary (either homo or hetero).
I would guess this is a result of social pressure, not some new way to identify.
"However, how much of this disinterest in identifying as homosexual is the result of the vast amount of gender propaganda these young people have been subjected to?"
That might be true from about 2015 on, but before that there was such a stigma attached to being gay or lesbian that a lot of organisations, mainly public health bodies, would use language like "men who have sex with men" instead of just saying "Gay" or "Homosexual" men as a way of including closeted gay men. I don't know if there were similar issues with lesbians, but I remember starting to hear in the 00s that many lesbians were shunning the term because it had become so associated with pornography.
Turning factual categories into identity categories is a less than ideal situation as far as I'm concerned. The whole point of gay liberation was to make people less ashamed of being gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but now those terms are so corrupted that young people don't want to adopt them. As far as groups like Stonewall are concerned being a "Lesbian" shouldn't preclude one from being open to sex with penis havers and being "Gay" shouldn't preclude one from being open to sex with vagina havers. If that's what they're being taught in school it's no wonder loads of young people aren't adopting the label.
Thanks for the context!
I don't like this concept of "masking" that Anna describes: it implies that there is something more authentic underneath our presentation, that our public or social presentation is some kind of lie.
What she calls "masking" should more accurately be considered a form of functional inhibition. We don't run around screaming because the grocery store was out of strawberries: we suppress such emotions in public. We *regulate* our emotions because *it's good to regulate emotions.*
I'm concerned that this is yet another psychological concept that encourages young people to be disinhibited and dysregulated in order to be "authentic." This doesn't help them.
I think it would be better to explain to them that we all present different parts of ourselves in different social contexts *and nothing is wrong with that.* We don't throw tantrums like toddlers in grocery stores not because it's socially unacceptable but because we've learned to handle our negative emotions.
Thanks for having Anna on!
I wonder if you invited him, if “Orlando” would come on the show? I’d really like to hear his perspective, as someone who’s been campaigning doggedly to get UK bureaucrats to be more candid with the public over there.
His writing has impressed me as having such clarity and honesty. I don’t know that he’s ever given an audio interview!
His latest post is “My experience of ‘late-onset gender dysphoria’” (in which he describes the self-recognition he felt when he encountered the concepts of autogynephilia and pseudobisexuality, and explains why he thinks it’s more helpful/accurate to speak of “cross-sex identity disorder”): https://open.substack.com/pub/transpolicy/p/my-experience-of-late-onset-gender?
And just today he tweeted about a piece he posted last month—entitled “Objection to the Cass Review’s puberty blocker clinical trial”—in which he wrote: “If the NHS and the medical profession were to cover the actual reasons behind gender dysphoria, including autogynephilia, then it would rapidly become apparent that it is a fantasy that children are able to discern that they have the ‘gender identity’ of the opposite sex, or of something else entirely, e.g. ‘non-binary’, and that all medicalisation around this issue should stop, including the proposed puberty blocker clinical trial.”
(Excerpt from
https://transpolicy.substack.com/p/objection-to-the-cass-reviews-puberty )
Even if you can’t get him on as a guest, I’d love to know what the intrepid Informed Dissent crew thinks about Orlando’s message! Thanks in advance.
Why is distress about not conforming to regressive gender stereotypes treated as an illness that is cured by reinforcing those stereotypes? Gender dysphoria is a system of a sexist system. It is not a diagnosis. Gender clinics? Why? Diseases that have verifiable symptoms have clinics .
While not universal, I think there are two things going on here:
For girls: Social contagion and the desire to "identify" out of your sex class.
For boys: To make them F*ckable for "real men." It sounds crass but you see this across the societies have have "3rd gender" concepts. As Helen Joyce points out, these are always dumping grounds for sissy-boys who can't hide it. The societies think they are useless, so they dump them into this liminal "not-man" category wherein gay/bi men who "pass" can have license to f-them w/o penalty. I think the discomfort with sissy-boys coupled with the stigma of male homosexuality is what motivates it. In our societies we render it in terms of disease states. It's all disgusting.