The Trans Phenomenon Re-Examined: The Girls Aren't Alright
What vision of womanhood are we offering young girls that could be so unattractive that escaping it is worth any cost?
There is no better illustration of our growing political, social and moral divide than the sudden emergence of transgender issues, from shared bathrooms to shared sports teams, into international prominence. Seemingly overnight, our entire understanding of human biology was re-written, from the top down, by politicians and bureaucrats speaking a new and strange language to insist that the most fundamental of categories, male and female, were in fact artificial – constructs of a benighted and oppressive past.
Even in a culture accustomed to bouncing from political flashpoint to political flashpoint – this week tackling climate change, next week racial justice, with gun control emerging every time mass murder is committed – the dizzying rapidity of this change did not go unnoticed. How could it? Former Olympic hero Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn, GLAMOUR’s Woman of the Year in 2015. Children as young as six years old began suing their school districts for the right to enter the bathrooms that aligned with their “gender identity,” and the entire state of North Carolina incurred media scorn and celebrity boycott for a statute passed in 2016, the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, that restricted use of public restrooms by the sex registered on birth certificates.
To its immense credit, the United States took most of this in stride, even with a sense of detached humour, but if the spectacle of the statuesque Jenner glammed up in a dress and makeup, running for political office as a Republican, was merely amusing – just one among many curiosities in the American political circus – there were nonetheless extremely consequential issues brought to the fore by the trans activists that deserved greater scrutiny and public oversight than they received.
Two belated but vital books, the American journalist Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage (2020) and Irish journalist Helen Joyce’s Trans (2021), offer important insights into the trans phenomenon that have been conveniently overlooked or downplayed, to the detriment of a group once favored by progressive politics: women.
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