Never Critique "Trans": The Rule of Not Applying Generalizability to Trans Advocates

The audience member wrote: "I think you're coming from a good place in your heart but your blind spots and biases are influencing your take on this. There's a lot of probably and likely in your speech. I don't think it's fair to dismiss trans men and women in the way that this video does by saying they're probably just transitioning because it's easier to align with normativity. This is lumping trans people into a group of pathology. Please be careful and challenge yourself on this topic."

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the engagement. As always, I value the kind of discussion that can hold disagreement without hostility.

While I understand the sentiment, I only used the word "likely" once, and never used the word "probably."

That said — I fully acknowledge I am generalizing based on patterns and observations of experts who have dedicated five, ten, and fifteen years of scholarly output. I certainly didn't make any of these claims myself. I became interested in this movement when I started to see the erosion of women's rights and the deeply disturbing consequences of this ideology.

The individuals — many of whom suffer from multiple mental health comorbidities — are often ignored when seeking gender-affirming care. There is extensive evidence of this. See detransitioner testimony and studies that describe inadequate and negligent therapeutic practices ignoring high rates of depression, anxiety, autism spectrum conditions, and trauma.

I think it's interesting that generalizing based on observed patterns is condemned when it comes to trans-identifying populations but readily accepted when discussing men and women as generalized groups. I think this is a defensive argument strategy that shuts down critical thinking because someone might have a couple of friends who don't fit the generalized observations.

I can appreciate that individuals have individual paths that should be documented and studied, and it's important not to essentialize. But most sociological, scientific, theoretical, and feminist discussion is based on documented or observed patterns in large groups. Even individual case studies and autoethnographic work is written so that we can glean insight into a larger social phenomenon.

Exploring hypotheses isn't the same as dismissing people.

My position is that we should be able to examine all contributing factors — including cultural norms, trauma, sexuality, and social reinforcement — without treating those questions as off-limits.

Criticizing advocates of gender ideology or sex positivity is not automatically anti-trans or anti-sexual identity. Making an observation about men who attempt to be women and the sexual entitlement to women's bodies, sports, prisons, and law is not anti-trans people.

As soon as the notion of trans enters the conversation, some people instantly wall up in defense of their friends who have been caught up in this — which I can sympathize with — and shut down all critical thinking.

The direct criticism is to men only. Gender ideology, as I analyze it, functions as a sexual-entitlement movement of men. Men who insist on everyone affirming them, despite concerns about the communication of bodies, the overt sexual objectification in presenting women as hypersexualized stereotypes — which in fact reinforces rigid gender roles — and who commodify interchangeable women's body parts. This is objectification. The type of objectification that does not honor the fact that no one is born in the wrong body and nothing is wrong with these bodies. This is body dysmorphia on steroids — which we all suffer from, men and women alike.

The critique is not directed at women who identify as men leading this movement. These women are most likely lesbians who see that the trans path is closer to heterosexual normativity — therefore easier than being gay — or they are women who want to escape the sexually objectifying path that womanhood presents. That is a rational response to an irrational culture, and it deserves compassion and analysis, not condemnation.

Advocates in the trans movement do not necessarily represent trans people themselves. The trans movement did not stem from a civil rights grassroots movement. It was birthed out of sexual fetish communities, Foucauldian and Butlerian postmodernism, and entrepreneurial doctors and medical capitalist enterprises who would love nothing more than to normalize sexual fetish in public life, demonstrate the elite intellectual ability to topple reality itself, make money, and uphold the social status of the virtue-signaling liberal elite — who are blinded with progressive certainty but have literally stopped thinking critically.