That Trans Thing

So here's my take...

The aim of the Trans movement is, one assumes, to help Trans people establish productive, stable, emotionally-satisfying lives in society, and to help them deal with, and get legal remedy for, the occasional ignorance and prejudice they may meet(1). Sounds like a nice part-time gig for a few lawyers, medical advisors and social workers. Not something an FTSE 100 company needs a policy on, and certainly nothing trillion-dollar hedge funds such as Black Rock and Vanguard need to be involved in.

The core demand of Trans activism is that people of one sex(2) should be able to claim the legal and institutional rights, privileges and protections accruing to people of the others. Since women already have all the legal and institutional rights of men, Trans activism reduces to the demand that men should have access have to the many rights, privileges and protections of women in Western societies that are not shared with men(3).

Unlike religious conversion, where considerable changes of behaviour are required of the convert, the Trans movement insists that no changes of phenotype or behaviour are required of the Trans person. Men should get the special rights and privileges of women simply by professing that they "identify as a woman". This has been a really terrible decision, opening the door to a parade of chancers, frauds, and grifters who have tarnished the Trans brand badly.

Another terrible decision was to copy the feminist tactic of "Invading male spaces": this was the idea that anywhere men gathered together should be subject to female supervision and policing. In Western societies this has been more or less completely successful. In the same way, Trans activists insist on the right to "invade female spaces": women must have nowhere they can feel safe from male intrusion, observation, and competition.

Another series of bad decisions has been to fail to distance itself from...

a) children who use it to irritate their parents and bully their teachers 

b) trillion-dollar hedge funds using it to advance their profitability and influence (cf "ESG / DIE") 

c) the social-work / teaching / NHS / local government / civil service / media nexus, who are using it to silence or remove their opponents 

d) governments who are using it as a distraction from the serious issues 

e) media who use it as click-bait and to put on a freak-show

How the Trans movement shakes off these mistakes, and becomes useful again... I have no idea.



(1) I know. But it's what they should be doing 

(2) There are men, women and hermaphrodites. "Man" means anyone with at least one Y in their chromosome, "hermaphrodite" means hermaphrodite, and everyone else is a woman. 

(3) Don't pretend there aren't any.