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- No, if you want to actually understand the radical feminist position on this (and other topics), read the works of radical feminists, not furious ranting blog posts.
I'd recommend these books to start off with - two classics, for the historical perspective, and two more recent ones, that discuss the modern transactivist movement that's so controversial right now:
* Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male
* Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
* Julie Bindel, Feminism for Women: The Real Route To Liberation
* Kara Dansky, The Abolition of Sex
- Calling gender affirming care "gay conversion therapy" is a disingenuous tactic deployed by anti-trans activists. One of the most common things that parents who disown their trans kids say is "why can't you just be gay" so pitching it as conversion therapy is very... odd.
You even illustrate this point yourself when you say:
> Very few conservatives in 2023 are riled up by homosexuality.
but also...
> the current trend of medicalizing gender as a form of gay conversion therapy
Kenneth Zucker's whole practice was geared, in fact, toward converting trans kids into gay kids. He says himself in his writing that being homosexual is preferable to being transsexual, since the latter requires medical intervention. The thing is, trans people and gay people have different needs and desires. They aren't the same group. So it's wrong to try to force gay kids to be trans or trans kids to be gay. But these days what you'll find is trans kids being pushed to be gay. A perfect inversion of the image you've painted.
The reason I "conflate" transsexuality (the word has two s's, also nobody uses it anymore, you should just say 'being transgender') with being gay is because the very same arguments and tactics used against gay people in the 80's - it's a mental illness, a social contagion, they're grooming kids, etc... - is being used again against trans people today. There was even a bathroom and women's sports panic in the 80's around lesbians in women's sports "preying" on straight girls.
Trans people had been considered merely a part of the gay community, along with other gender non-conforming people who may today identify as non-binary, until relatively recently. The fight for gay rights benefitted trans people, but we're at a point now where they have their own struggles, like the struggle for medical treatment.
It's a struggle that's been fought since the 70's when Janice Raymond wrote "The Transsexual Empire" and worked with the Reagan administration to make it more difficult for trans people to get medical treatment. Nothing about it is new, except for the alliance between conservative Christians and secular anti-trans activists - an unholy union if I've ever seen one.
- Sure there is! The thread that binds it all together is history. Understanding what's going on with JK's axe she's grinding starts in the 1970s with the rise and splintering of the Radical Feminist movement, the rise of Radical Lesbian Feminism and in particular the seminal book for what people now call TERFs, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male written in 1979 by Janice Raymond. Absolutely nothing uttered by JK is her own original idea and you can trace them all the way back to where they actually came from and what was going on in history at the time that precipitated them.
Gender studies is basically history + philosophy but focused on a particular topic.
- > This is why we're seeing a spate of non-gendered neologisms being pushed - "birthing person", etc.
Almost all of these neologisms are in place to create conceptual space for trans men in AFAB medical contexts and yet almost all of the criticisms are directed at trans women. The fixation on trans women at all times speaks to something more going on beneath the surface in these debates. I think that something is just digust and anger looking for post-facto reasons to lash out.
Like I said in other comments, I think self-id without any qualifications is "off". But the arguments being levied against it come attached to a lot of other arguments that are clearly motivated by hate and disgust at trans women rather than concern over this particular topic.
Like the people against self-id would also like to make it so that a trans woman who transitioned when she was 12 and adopted a child couldn't access a women's shelter for her and her child if she were to be abused by her husband someday just because she has a Y chromosome. This is obviously just as "off" as saying that any guy who says they are a woman can play college women's volleyball the next day.
Like seriously, "gender critical" people are so dead set on sex sex sex that they forget that most trans people aren't TRAs but rather just want to live normal lives and are rather invisible in society. The changes gender crits want to make will make their lives much more difficult which I think is the point right? Janice Raymond said that she wanted to see transsexualism extinguished by making it as costly and difficult as possible to be trans more or less in her book The Transsexual Empire....
It's cruelty for the sake of marginalizing a group out of existence. Very ugly stuff.
If it weren't for that, I think the debate around self-id would be a lot less fraught. It's depressing to me as a person who transitioned pre-2010. Life was more comfortable before all of this rage was unleashed on us. I went from never having to think about being trans to suddenly 15 years in having to think of it nearly every day due to the constant attacks and vitriol in the news.
Like even my husband's parents suddenly became open transphobes which was a shock. I've known them for years. Something very mean is going on that goes far beyond poor miss Stock's academic freedom.
- I condemn the parts of it that are transphobic, and I wonder why nobody mentions it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transphobia#Transphobia_in_femi...
> Radical feminist Janice Raymond's 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire, was and still is controversial due to its unequivocal condemnation of transsexual surgeries. In the book Raymond says, "All transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves .... Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women, so that they seem non-invasive."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgenderis...
> In 1999, the book the whole woman, Germaine Greer published a sequel to The Female Eunuch. One chapter was titled "Pantomime Dames", wherein she states her opposition to accepting transsexuals who were assigned male at birth as women:[3]"Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex. No so-called sex-change has ever begged for a uterus-and-ovaries transplant; if uterus-and-ovaries transplants were made mandatory for wannabe women they would disappear overnight. The insistence that man-made women be accepted as women is the institutional expression of the mistaken conviction that women are defective males."
and:
> Gloria Steinem has questioned transsexualism. In 1977, she expressed disapproval that the heavily publicized sex-role change of tennis player Renée Richards had been characterized as "a frightening instance of what feminism could lead to" or as "living proof that feminism isn't necessary." Steinem wrote, "At a minimum, it was a diversion from the widespread problems of sexual inequality."
It goes on. And on. And on. And on. And now watch this issue get ignored again, as it usually is, and me be accused of 'derailing' for bringing it up in this context.
