@Candidate No 7 that’s a really interesting piece by Shon Faye. It’s good to hear an honest (though incorrect) account of how they are perceiving this massive downturn in their social power. He’s correctly concluding that this was a trend, and that it’s permanently over, but doesn’t understand the true causes.
I went and read the piece by Jules Gill-Peterson he mentioned in the substack piece. Link
here. Archive
here.
It's titled
Reject Transgender Liberalism, and the argument, like many others in the vaguely socialist left in the US, centers around the idea of a true working class struggle having been coopted by cosmopolitan professionals more interested in self-actualization than securing the specific right to change sex, as in medically.
His prescription is that the movement should shift away from trying to establish "transgender" as a protected class to arguing about the fact that the US legal system already has recognized the right to change sex, even prior to the formation of the modern trans movement, essentially making an originalist argument around the 14th amendment.
He cites as evidence an 1866 case were a black person, initially thought to be a woman, was allowed to testify about the Memphis massacre and the rapes that occurred then. This person is then apparently raided in their home a decade later for crossdressing. and found to be anatomically male, even if apparently living as a woman. Jules claims this shows that the court was willing to accept the testimony of a trans woman as representing women, until political opponents destroyed them. In practice its really hard to know what happened there at all, it could easily have been someone with ambiguous genitals or some other DSD. So she or he, who knows, but it doesn't prove the point Gill-Peterson's trying to make at all.
In general the point is that changing sex was recognized as something possible in ambiguous grey zones all over US history, so it's not 'novel". Except, it is immediately obvious to me that the argument that trans people should be treated as in all cases equivalent and equal to their biological counterparts is in fact entirely novel. In 1866 public bathrooms were still new and women weren't allowed in them at all. There were essentially no female segregated spaces outside of the home, and certainly none conceived of to protect women from potential molestation. Ditto women's sports, women's organizations, etc. It was uncontroversial then, and probably would have remained pretty uncontroversial now, for someone to medically transition and exist in a general social grey area, on the margins without too much notice, and without trying to force themselves into spaces where biological sex difference have material relevance. Which is not the case today.
He's also made arguments that cases where a trans woman was recognized as female for reason of marriage or divorce in the mid 20th century equates to a long standing tradition of the courts recognizing the that trans women are to always be treated like biological women. But again, false. In those cases, it was pragmatic, it pointedly didn't involve accessing spaces where vulnerable women were expecting to be free of potential male predation. Nor is there anywhere any justification in his arguments for why trans medical interventions for minors are a longstanding right. Even in his own originalist framing, he should realize that many rights are age gated, voting being the most obvious one. All his precedents are circumstantial, not categorical. They don't establish that “trans women = biological women” across all contexts was ever understood by anybody, because it wasn't.
So I think he's wrong. The Gender Bendy NB bullshit was cringe, but normies just accepted it as weird queer nonsense and moved on. It was the specific medical arguments, the overriding of biology that medically transitioned troons made, the idea of surgery and hormones for minors, that caused the backlash. The novelty today is not “changing sex,” but the universalist claim that medical transition should override all material distinctions of sex, including in contexts where biology has relevance (sports, prisons, bathrooms, etc.).
, I was a fool and I was trying to be nice and help others as I always have“
