Originally Posted by
IMPress Polly
For a number of years now, I have been, for public consumption, a supporter of the transgender rights movement. At first that sentiment was genuine, but the truth that I've kept bottled up to now is that that support has long since become purely superficial. My support for transgender rights activism (hereafter TRA for short) hasn't been genuine and heartfelt for more than two years now. I haven't disclosed as much to anyone until now out of a general feeling that the problem was with me; that I had unfair prejudices around this issue that needed to be overcome. There's been a rapidly escalating amount of pressure, particularly on the political left and among social liberals, to be supportive of the movement and its goals, to the point that I now can honestly say that I would probably lose my job if I were to voice my honest opinions on this subject or use what I feel are the correct gender pronouns to describe trans people in a visible way (to which end I am only disclosing my actual opinions on this issue in places like this where I'm confident that my colleagues and students will not see them and will remain, in my professional life, officially PC for public consumption). But I've reached the point where something has to give. I have to tell somebody what my real feelings are!
The truth is that I don't have a politically correct opinion of the transgender rights movement. You may have even seen some subtle signs of that already. At first I was supportive of the movement, but the more its goals have come to light, and the more they have been actually implemented, the more questions and objections I've found I have. The truth is that I have never genuinely supported ideas like de-gendering public restrooms or locker rooms or shelters for battered women and children or other safe spaces for girls and women or, for that matter, sports teams, that I furthermore do not accept the sexist, Victorian-era theory of the gendered brain around which transgender identity politics revolve, that I regard the transitioning of children as a form of socially acceptable child abuse, and that I have very strong feelings about the transgender movement demanding that lesbians be open to dating and $#@!ing people with penises, among other things. I have to date seen not a shred of real evidence that transitioning from one identity to another results in increased happiness or well-being or that dysphoria is thereby eliminated and the prospect of suicide averted, and lots of evidence that gender dysphoria is a condition that is almost always overcome eventually if not conceded to and validated. I have, in fact, seen no evidence that dysphoria is even a naturally-occurring condition at all and believe its existence to be purely consequential of social engineering.
Though I formally abandoned radical feminism in 2016 over its increasingly uniform objections to transgenderism, the truth is that I never left that camp in spirit, which is why you continue to see me link to sites like Feminist Current anyway. So yeah, I am actually what they call a "terf". There. I have said it. I feel better now.
(I have reasons for holding all of the aforementioned views that I do. If anyone needs, I can elaborate further on any given subject.)