If, tomorrow morning, an otherwise healthy 25-year-old woman decided she was a 70-year-old, male, Vietnam War vet, would that be normal? Would you feel pressure to take her at her word and change your life to accommodate that idea
Related: Is Confusing Your Kids About Gender a Form of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy?
Would you change your language your laws the very nature of public discourse and acceptable behavior?
Probably not.
How about if she decided that she was just a 70-year old man?
What if the 25-year old decided she was not a man or a veteran but was 70 years old?
No one would pillory you for refusing to accept, not just personally but in all aspects of culture and society, that the woman was what she claimed. Suggesting therapy would not be out of the ordinary, nor would it be subject to abuse, name-calling, or harassment.
Unless she woke up the next day and decided she was just a man.
And I’m not saying she can’t decide any of those things. I am saying that it does not require me to reimagine the world as she sees it, nor does it entitle anyone else to harass me for refusing to do so.
To borrow/paraphrase from Ben Shapiro, you are still a human being entitled to the same rights and liberties all humans can share, but these do not give you right to make me pretend that men are women and women are men.
“I’m not going to modify basic biology because it threatens your subjective sense of what you are.”
And,
The idea behind the transgender movement as a civil rights movement is that all of their problems would just go away if I would pretend that they are the sex to which they claim…membership. That’s nonsense. The transgender suicide rate is 40%…and there’s a study that came out last year that it makes no difference statistically speaking as to whether people recognize you as a transgender person or not. Which suggests there is a high rate of comorbidity between transgenderism…and suicidality.
As I’ve been noting of late, why would any culture openly embrace a lifestyle and then subject their children to it knowing that for some more significant number it will result in substance abuse and that for 4 in 10 it is probably a death sentence?
Especially when statistically, left to their own devices more than 90% of children who question gender at any age (often referred to as going through a stage) discover they are otherwise healthy heterosexuals?
I would not in any way interfere with an adult making that decision for themselves, but when an adult deliberately interferes in the otherwise typical sexual development of a child, I tend to agree with the American College of Pediatricians. It is child abuse.
Ben’s analysis is brilliant and always worth the time.
https://youtu.be/aoSv7Tr19S8
