patrick.net

Is trans the new anorexia?
Becoming a woman is an unappealing business

When teaching freshman composition in New York colleges in the mid-Eighties, I picked up a peculiar pattern in one-on-one conferences with my female students. With improbable frequency, they’d confide that they were anorexic. The term had only entered the popular lexicon about 10 years earlier, and public awareness of the perturbing derangement had been given a huge boost by the pop singer Karen Carpenter’s death in 1983. Yet not all these 18-year-old students were disturbingly underweight. It took me a minute to get it. They aspired to be anorexic. Anorexia was a prestige diagnosis. ...

Both self-starvation and transgenderism guarantee elevation to a perceived social elite. At least in the minds of some anorexics, being immune to the temptations of crisps and biscuits that seduce mere mortals induces an emotionally nutritious sensation of superiority. ...

Coming out as trans likewise greatly increases attention from schoolmates, teachers and a whole industry of therapists, endocrinologists and surgeons. In a single syllable, “trans” likewise seems to offer a readymade answer to who you are. Freeman tells us that “when an anorexic says, ‘I don’t want to be fat, I want to be thin,’ they are saying, ‘I want to be other than I am, and what I am is unhappy. I want to be someone else.” ...

Especially since girls came to dominate boys in paediatric gender clinics 3:1, both forms of dysmorphia often hit the same population: suggestible, insecure adolescent girls with a fragile sense of self who are desperate to forestall all that womanhood entails...

As for treatment, anorexia is universally acknowledged as an illness. Doctors regard this potentially fatal form of dysmorphia as a psychiatric ailment that must be arrested and resolved. Not so transgenderism, which is often celebrated, if not beatified as a state of higher consciousness. “Gender-affirming care” doesn’t treat the illness but indulges the patient’s delusions to the hilt. ...

Conversely, we’re implicitly dangling the promise that on the other side of transitioning to the opposite sex — or feigning transition, since inborn sex is written in our every cell — all a young person’s problems will be solved. Being trans is now a misguidedly easy-seeming shortcut to knowing who you are. But I’m betting that as an identity, being surgically mangled and hormonally discombobulated rarely goes the distance. Moreover, the physical price of buying this false promise of turning into a butterfly is stupendously high: sexual dysfunction, infertility, surgical complications and infections, and the side-effects of powerful medications for life.

What these conditions have most in common is being dreadful answers to the questions that inevitably torture young people: who am I, what makes me unique, what makes me loveable, what do I want to achieve, why does just being alive seem so hard, am I the only one who feels so dejected, what does it mean to become a man or a woman, and is there any way I can get out of growing up? The responsible adult’s reply to that last one must be a gentle but firm “no”.

27 Colorado Democrats voted to protect sexual predators who are caught indecently exposing themselves to minors.

Republicans in the state House introduced legislation to make it a class 6 felony for anyone to indecently expose themselves to children.

In Colorado, it is currently only considered a class 1 misdemeanor if a person indecently exposes themselves in the view of a child, if it is the first offense.

Despite the presumably nonpartisan nature of the bill, Democrats fought to the bitter end to block it.

Democrats argued against jailing flashers because the predator could be “mentally impaired.”

They also claimed that the measure is an “attack” against “the transgender community” and that the law could be used to “ban drag shows.”

Yesterday, the UK Telegraph ran a “comment,” which I think is similar to an op-ed, spicily titled “Trans Ideology Will Let Mediocre Men Destroy Women’s Sport.” The sub-headline was even better: “In my book, [trans] athletes like Austin Killips are thieves – yet those whose prizes they take are being forced to maintain this mortifying charade.”

Mediocre men! A mortifying charade! The British do really have a way with words; they invented English, after all. Read those phrases back to yourself in a woman’s English accent.

Austin Killips is a man (stem and berries still on the bush) who pretends to be a woman. In 2019, Killips took up cycling for the first time in his life, and this year the 27-year-old American finished a record-breaking +89 seconds ahead of the reigning champion, Italy’s Marcela Prieto, in the ladies’ general class, and he also claimed the prized “Queen of the Mountains jersey.”

He also took the $35,000 cash prize. Thanks ladies! ...

But most significant, to me, was how the op-ed suggests the narrative is shifting. Only a year ago, this kind of article by a mainstream writer, of this kind of incendiary, anti-trans op-ed — a “mortifying charade!” — would have gotten Allison cancelled, fired, and banned from polite British society faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle.”

Mental Healthcare Burden of Transgender Youth Before and After Gender-Affirming Treatment

Heavy Psychiatric Care Costs Get Worse after Hormones

People generally look at self-sterilizing teenagers and think the world has gone insane. What they rarely notice is the racial angle. Virtually all of them are white, basically none of them are black, and the Asian, brown, and Hispanic trannies I’ve encountered are … well I don’t encounter many. Seen in this way, transgenderism is a racialized assault on the reproductive future of Europeans.