Originally published August 3, 2016.
You see all kinds of unusual in the city. The other day, I saw something unusual, but increasingly common. I was walking behind two transgender women. Not to be confused with what we knew as transvestites back in the day, who usually identify as gay men and seem to regard the whole thing as a bit of performance art and a lark.
Transvestites wouldn’t have taken themselves so seriously, and wouldn’t have expected everyone else to either. Your garden-variety trannie would have probably laughed in your face if you’d started tiptoeing and fawning over them with Cultural Marxist newspeak like ‘gender fluid’ or ‘gender binary’, or whatever other term replaced some previously-acceptable-but-now-unthinkable term three minutes and thirty-seven seconds ago.
But a funny thing happened. Much like the dot com boom, the similarly intangible sub-victim boom took off like a rocket. People who were previously miserable, insufferable, and in need of micro-management over every aspect of their lives fell over each other in a race to the finish line of perceived persecution.
Instead of seeking help for various mental illnesses and frequent suicidal compulsions like any pro-active person might do, they seemed to embrace misery and conscious self-defeatism as a loud and proud (even with all that shame) lifestyle choice. It was a veritable gold rush of whiny prospectors in search of rich veins of sub-group persecution they could call their own.
Sub-victim mining claims were lodged left right and centre with websites like Salon.com and Slate. Transitional honkies like Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King staked claims on rich deposits of trans-racial gold. Lena Dunham found a rich vein of feminist ore beneath a perceived glass ceiling that inexplicably still allowed her to prosper in a ‘sexist patriarchal’ entertainment industry despite not being particularly charming, not particularly attractive, not particularly talented, and not particularly entertaining. It was a sub-victim gold rush that made a select few excessively wealthy, and made the rest look incredibly foolish, though most of us were too polite to tell them so.
The thing that surprised me most about these two dudes or dudes in transit wasn’t them, but the hard wired reactions of myself and pretty much every other pedestrian regardless of age, gender (bona fide gender that can be confirmed by DNA testing), or race was exactly the same.
I did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them. The young African woman coming the other way did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them. The elderly Asian man walking with the aid of a cane did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them. A young, very hipster-looking guy, who you’d assume wouldn’t be fazed by too many things in life and would appreciate the irony of what he was seeing, did a double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them.
Then I saw a woman with a small child coming the other way. The woman similarly did double-take, then politely and conspicuously pretended not to notice them (I was seeing a trend). As soon as I saw the look of disbelief in the face of the child, the ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ theme started playing in my head.
The child attempted to point, but his embarrassed and very aware of her surrounds mother grabbed his arm mid-raise and hurried past the pair, red-faced with a sheepish embarrassed grin. Honesty from the mouths of babes averted.
I imagine that these two individuals put the stares down to the lecherous leering that attractive women are subjected to every day by sexist males, and the jealous stares of less-attractive and less-stylish women. Never would it have occurred to them in a million years that the trigger for these stares was as simple as seeing the unusual spectacle of a couple of dudes in dresses.
It occurred to me soon afterwards that the reaction of myself, and every other person save the innocently honest child was a good metaphor not only for the transgender agenda, but for standard policy regarding most Cultural Marxist pet causes. It is the art of conspicuously pretending not to notice the bleeding obvious.
For people who were allegedly born as the very ether of womanhood inside, these two honestly weren’t fooling anyone. Only a psychologically confused dude would assume that garish furs, gaudy pearls, way too much make-up, an evening gown, and a pesticide-like dousing of perfume without any feminine subtlety was appropriate for a lunchtime CBD power walk. I’m sure any genuine ladies reading would see such a spectacle as something akin to caricature, and would be confused as to how somebody who truly feels such a strong connection to womanhood inside can produce such a poor approximation of it.
Much like the old fable about the Emperor’s New Clothes, we’re made to feel ashamed about doing a very natural double-take over something that doesn’t appear quite right, then play a disingenuous and harmful game of politeness and enabling of mental illness.
I totally get that there are people who don’t feel they were born into the right body. Who will never feel comfortable in their own skin. Who are mortified every time they look in the mirror and see a person who looks completely alien to them. They’re called anorexics. We try and help them get better through psychiatric help. We don’t help them buy laxatives and discourage them from eating. Nor do we tell them they look fantastic, beautiful, and brave at 38kg.
There is little tangible difference between anorexia and the whole transgender issue. Any family who has been touched with anorexia will plainly recognise the parallels and the madness of enabling transgender people.
Both are mental illnesses with strikingly similar symptoms. Both have an unusually high mortality rate by suicide. Both are very much first world manifestations. A doctor would be medically negligent to feed into the first, yet the transgender issue has become politicised to such an extent that many practitioners are certainly too afraid to explore mental illness as a possible root cause before green-lighting catastrophic body modification.
Another disorder strikingly similar to the transgender phenomenon (and Cultural Marxism in general) is Munchausen Syndrome. Munchausen Syndrome is a psychological disorder that sees the sufferer deliberately keeping him or herself ill to gain sympathy, usually with non-lethal ingestion of poison. It’s a manufactured state of victimhood, surely a medical manifestation of regressive leftism if ever there was one.
Even more disturbing parallels to the transgender debate appear when you look at Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. MSBP occurs when a relative (usually a parent) keeps a child sick with non-lethal doses of poison in order to get attention and sympathy themselves. We now see all of these coincidentally heavily left-leaning parents deciding that their very effeminate son or masculine daughter has been born as the wrong sex and requires gender reassignment immediately and without measured consideration.
The yearning for victim status is so great among these self-loathing types that they will take a child who, in all likelihood, would otherwise mature into a happy and fulfilled gay or lesbian (or, God forbid, heterosexual) and make their life as traumatic and doomed to end in tragedy as humanly possible, just so that they can feel suitably progressive. Throwing family members under the bus to appease regressive left doctrine is a common theme for these types. A decade ago, a gay or lesbian child would have satisfied their cravings for victimhood. But in 2016, a gay man is virtually part of the patriarchy and just won’t cut it. Gender reassignment will, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Anorexia sufferers are 47 times more likely to commit suicide than members of the wider community. Post-operation transgender individuals are 27 times more likely to commit suicide than those in the wider community. A staggeringly disturbing statistic when you consider that only 0.3% of the population identify as transgender, and fewer still are post-op. There are only two conclusions to be drawn from this mortality statistic. The first is that gender reassignment is a horrible mistake in at least a sizeable proportion of cases. The second is that many if not most of these individuals are clearly psychologically disturbed, and even a full attainment of their desired identity won’t bring the peace and stability that so many of us take for granted.
Drugs and medical procedures with clear tendencies toward failure are discontinued or legislated against all the time. An elderly relative of mine with depression was taken off Lithium because some users were experiencing damage to their liver over a prolonged time. The fact that this patient was elderly and enjoyed a higher quality of life on Lithium, and probably wouldn’t live long enough to see any of these negative side effects, were irrelevant to the medical profession. She went through an unstable and unhappy last few years for the sake of a politically correct and politically popular decision.
A few patients with liver issues was enough to dramatically reduce the quality of life that millions enjoyed. Millions who to a man would probably have been willing to take that risk as the benefits outweighed the minor risks. Meanwhile, a procedure that in all likelihood will make a mentally disturbed person 27 times more likely to commit suicide, that will see a rate of post-op regret of 20%, and remains scientifically unproven to improve quality of life in any way, shape, or form not only continues, but is encouraged and promoted as a positive healthy lifestyle choice.
One in six or 16.666% of people with a tattoo regret the decision. Less than the percentage of regret of those who opt for gender reassignment. We’d all be outraged if a parent allowed their child to get a tattoo. Nobody would take issue with our opinion. Yet the regressive left are happy for parents to opt for a life path for their children that has a 20% rate of regret, and makes them 27 times more likely to end their own life. Nobody would tolerate any non-political medical procedure with such spectacular failure rates, but add a pinch of social justice, a clove of regressive leftism, and a half a cup of mental illness, and you have something that is popular conformist opinion in 2016, but will be spoken of in the same hushed infamous tone as thalidomide in decades to come.
Believe me, as someone with a few libertarian leanings, the conclusion I’ve arrived at is a tough one. Sleep with whoever you want to, dress as you like, do what you like as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. Live and let live. But therein lies the problem. We have a duty of care to at least try to protect the clearly mentally imbalanced from themselves. I’m sure none of you would actively encourage someone with severe anorexia by telling them they look great, or encourage someone with severe depression to jump off a bridge because that’s their right. Why then are we so eager to get behind such a self-destructive (both literally and figuratively) medical procedure? Libertarianism has its limits, and we definitely don’t need to be medically enabling somebody’s psychosis.
The regressive left takes a different approach to transgender than they do with other victim sub-groups. Usually the left regards Blacks for example as fragile, completely hopeless, and incapable of self determination without their big government micromanagement to maintain order. On the transgender side of things, they take people that they should be realising have issues with self-determination, and who could do with a little micromanagement (not to mention some medication) to bring some semblance of happiness to their lives, and give them free reign to explore their psychosis.
The Hans Christian Anderson tale ‘The Emperors New Clothes’ was strangely prescient in regard to this whole situation. Nobody actually believes that these men are women, or that these women are men. Nor do they believe that these people are making life decisions of sound mind. They just have to pretend they do out of fear of being ostracised. They dare not say that they don’t see any suit of clothes, and won’t until a child points as the one that I saw attempted to and cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”