{"id":1323,"date":"2023-06-27T16:50:36","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T16:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/?p=1323"},"modified":"2023-06-27T18:12:02","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T18:12:02","slug":"im-watchin-tumblr-ma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/2023\/06\/im-watchin-tumblr-ma\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Watchin’ Tumblr, Ma!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was researching Current Trends in Feminism a few years back, and came across a furious blog entitled 4thWaveNow<\/a>. Now, I knew that so-called Third Wave Feminism was a mess\u2014a doggy dinner of warmed-over Communism, race-mixing, and Jewish palaver\u2014and I was pleased to find someone else reading its beads. Except that’s not really what was happening. The whole blog is focused not on feminism, but wacky, marginal social trends.<\/p>\n

The lady writing the long comment below tells a story that is oft repeated at that blog. Not only oft repeated, but jam-full of the same clich\u00e9s. “I\u2019ve marched against war, racism, for health care, for women\u2019s and gay and lesbian rights”…that sort of thing over and over. You never see testimony from anyone who claims to be “a based race-realist and supporter of traditional Christian values.” No, they all want you to know how screaming-mimi Lefty they are, and want you to share their belief that it is somehow ironic that their fever-swamp ideas have brought them chin-deep into the Big Muddy.<\/p>\n

Of course there is no irony there at all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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It ain\u2019t a liberation\u00a0movement<\/a><\/h1>\n
Posted on\u00a0<\/span>
10<\/a><\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n

Like most good liberals, I was totally on board with transgender \u201cliberation.\u201d After all, it\u2019s the next civil rights struggle,\u00a0right? I\u2019ve marched against war, racism, for health care, for women\u2019s and gay and\u00a0lesbian rights. \u00a0In the 1980s, I surfed \u00a0the Second Wave of feminism, loving who I chose, dressing as I chose, speaking\u00a0my mind, and living the life of equality first wavers like Susan B. Anthony,\u00a0Charlotte Gilman, and Emma Goldman fought so hard for. I was a two-time\u00a0election worker on President Obama\u2019s campaigns. In the past couple of years, I celebrated\u00a0as homophobic laws toppled, state by state, and gay marriage morphed into mainstream\u00a0reality. And until recently, I\u2019ve had the unexamined, vague conviction that the\u00a0\u201cT\u201d in LGBT was part of the same good trend: more inclusion for the\u00a0marginalized.<\/p>\n

But that has all changed. I\u2019ve shifted from the cookie-cutter\u00a0progressive vantage point I inhabited only a few months ago. It\u2019s not a\u00a0180\u00a0turnaround. I believe in civil rights for all people, and I don\u2019t think trans\u00a0people should face job, housing, or other discrimination. But I no longer see transgenderism\u00a0as a liberation movement. From where I now stand, I see it as a profound and\u00a0fundamentally conservative undermining of the gains of the Second Wave of\u00a0feminism. It\u2019s the Third Wave, a tsunami of narcissism, of post-modernist\u00a0relativism run amok\u2026a hall of mirrors, wave upon wave of shiny, YouTube transition\u00a0videos and Tumblr confessions\u2026 where subjective feelings and ideas always trump\u00a0physical reality.<\/p>\n

Something has gone wrong. Very wrong. I\u2019ve been asleep for 20\u00a0years, but now I\u2019m waking up\u2026because my own teenage daughter is being churned\u00a0and tossed in this very turbulent sea.<\/p>\n

When my daughter announced to me that she is transgender a\u00a0few months ago, my initial reaction was basically positive\u2014even though she had\u00a0never before expressed the tiniest inkling of any such identity. In fact, she\u00a0had always talked about how glad she was to be a girl. I\u2019d raised her to feel\u00a0that, like me, she could dress, act, or be anything she wanted to be and until\u00a0very recently, that\u2019s exactly what she did.<\/p>\n

The change was abrupt. She admitted to binge-watching\u00a0triumphant and ecstatic FTM transition videos for days on end. She started\u00a0using jargon like \u201cgenderqueer.\u201d But despite this turnaround, despite misgivings,\u00a0I made an appointment with a gender therapist, ruminating on what it would mean\u00a0to welcome a son into the erstwhile form of a daughter.<\/p>\n

A researcher and scientist by profession and by avocation, I\u00a0dived deeply into the Internet and medical literature on FTMs. And the more I\u00a0read, talked, and emailed (and I delved a lot), the weaker my kneejerk-liberal \u201ctrans\u00a0ally\u201d position became.<\/p>\n

I learned that everything I had taken for granted about\u00a0women\u2019s liberation has changed. A dislike of pink and traditionally (think:\u00a01950s norms) female activities and interests now means a girl, a teen, is \u201cactually\u201d\u00a0a boy. \u00a0Instead of acceptance if a girl wears\u00a0denim and button-down shirts, that\u2019s called by the archaic term \u201ccross dressing\u201d\u00a0and the girl is pressured to \u201ctransition.\u201d Gender role conformity is more rigid\u00a0than ever, which is the great irony of transgenderism. Girls who used to find\u00a0their home as \u201cbutch\u201d lesbians don\u2019t have anyone to identify with or look up to\u00a0anymore. Women\u2019s or lesbian bookstores, discussion groups, bars seem to have\u00a0vanished from the face of the earth. Everything has been subsumed under the \u201cqueer\u201d\u00a0label. \u00a0And while nearly all FTMs start\u00a0out as lesbians, they disavow it after beginning \u201ctransition.\u201d They were never\u00a0really lesbians, after all. They are \u201creally\u201d just crossdressers who yearn to\u00a0be male.<\/p>\n

And when it comes to \u201ctransition,\u201d the holy grail, the magic\u00a0elixir, is testosterone. It would be one thing if \u201cT\u201d could be used experimentally,\u00a0then abandoned, with only temporary and reversible changes to the mind and\u00a0body. Then you could say: Why not? Give it a try. But even a few weeks on \u201cT\u201d usually\u00a0results in forever-thickened vocal cords, forever-thickened body and facial\u00a0hair, and\u2014by some accounts I\u2019ve read\u2014even brain changes that are hard to undo. \u00a0If a girl or woman transitions and changes her\u00a0mind, she will forever live in a modified, altered body, whether she likes it\u00a0later or not. Sterility is another risk. And many FTMs on long term hormone\u00a0treatment are plagued by chronic infections, heart trouble, high blood\u00a0pressure, premature aging.<\/p>\n

That the frontal lobes of teenagers\u2019 brains are not fully developed\u00a0is now settled science, no more controversial than gravity or evolution. \u00a0We now know that executive function\u2014judgment,\u00a0impulse control, planning, and self monitoring skills\u2014don\u2019t reach maturity in\u00a0young people until at least the age of 25. Yet the medical and psychological\u00a0professions are allowing\u2014no, they are\u00a0pushing<\/i>\u2014surgical\u00a0and pharmaceutical transition as the \u201canswer\u201d for teens who are questioning their identities. There\u2019s a huge cognitive dissonance here: If adolescence is a\u00a0time of limited executive function, how on earth can we be encouraging, let\u00a0alone\u00a0celebrating<\/i>, such life-changing\u00a0decisions being made by teen (and much younger) people?<\/p>\n

How can it be that surgery and testosterone are now seen as the\u00a0only<\/i>\u00a0viable solution to the feeling\u00a0that a female doesn\u2019t fit conventional gender stereotypes? What happened to:\u00a0women can be anything they want to be? Shave your legs, don\u2019t, cut your hair,\u00a0don\u2019t\u2026.love who you want, work on cars, have a child, don\u2019t\u2026.that\u2019s liberation\u00a0as I\u2019ve always understood it. But Second Wave feminism is considered stodgy and\u00a0old fashioned now. Despite its fundamentally liberating message to women.<\/p>\n

A 4th<\/sup>\u00a0Wave of Feminism. We need it. We need it NOW.<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was researching Current Trends in Feminism a few years back, and came across a furious blog entitled 4thWaveNow. Now, I knew that so-called Third Wave Feminism was a mess\u2014a doggy dinner of warmed-over Communism, race-mixing, and Jewish palaver\u2014and I was pleased to find someone else reading its beads. Except that’s not really what was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cocoa-marsh"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6KTdR-ll","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1323"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1754,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions\/1754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/margotdarby.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}