So, I just became a paying subscriber to TLP having been so impressed by Ms. Davis' earnest, rational and caring approach to a fraught subject. When my book store of choice, The Vermont Book Shop, is accepting pre-orders for her new book, I'll be there, at least virtually since I don't live in Vermont. I'm still learning about this issue and feel indebted to Ms. Davis for her voice, knowledge and humanity.
Comment from the trenches: I do stuff on gender—here’s my forthcoming journal article 'Sex Reassignment and Gender Misfits': https://babersite.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/gender-misfits-revision-after-acceptance-1.docx (warning: my copy—not yet proof-read at the journal end). Here and elsewhere I argue that sex reassignment to fit people’s bodies to their supposed ‘gender identity’ is a conservative strategy. It’s the same old same old ‘essentialism’—assuming that some constellation of psychological traits, preferences, interests, behavioral dispositions are inherently feminine or masculine and that when women or men don’t have the appropriate feminine or masculine psychology they need to be fixed to fit assigned sex roles.
During the last century the program to fix gender-non-conforming women promoted by advice columnists and psychologists was to remodel their personalities to conform to their assigned gender norms. Women who weren’t appropriately ‘feminine’ were deemed ‘neurotic’ and subjected to psychotherapy to ‘adjust’ them to their ‘feminine role’. As a gender misfit I’ve had some personal experience with this. Now, with advances in technology, gender misfits are declared trans and are candidates for ‘gender affirming care’ to remodel their bodies to fit their supposed inner gender. Same old same old.
I’m <explitive deleted> fed up. Last year a junior colleague who does ‘gender studies’ informed me that I am likely ‘trans’, in spite of the fact that I’m reasonably happy with my body, though I wish it were somewhat slimmer, do not intend to go on cross-sex hormones or have my body chopped to match my ‘gender identity’, and have always been exclusively and enthusiastically heterosexual. Brave women that: I’m tenured and physically fit and can probably beat her up in more than one sense.
I don’t like the ‘tomboy’ designation, which suggests a cute, feisty girl who will some time in mid-adolescence straighten out and become a princess: there are no tom-MEN. I’m a gender misfit. I am not trans. I’m sick of the whole trans thing which, from my gender misfit perspective, is the same old same old. I am an echt angry feminist. Oh yeah, from the shameless advertising division my more accessible pop piece ‘Who Took Away My Feminism’ https://hebaber.substack.com/p/who-took-away-my-feminism.
I think this is the realization lacking in many if not most of the people that the gender ideology radical activists exploit.
It is my observation that there are very few trans people, or people that decide their gender identity needs to be different than their XX or XY genetics at birth, that would be considered highly attractive by current societal norms. Like it or not, we are all wired to seek external validation that we are liked and wanted, and the prettier babies, children and adults get more positive attention. Lacking that attention while also being someone that has more general gender and sex confusion, probably puts them at risk for being attracted to reassignment. Ideally we would not care about what others think and be happy in our own skin. But that isn't human nature for most.
I really don't care what an adult does. My problem is the activist attention on children, whom at puberty and the flood of hormones and their awkward growth stage, are generally always going to be confused about gender and sex... until they get through puberty.
Gender non conforming people have existed since the beginning of time, and always will. The difference between then and now is that there is a profitable gender industry that puts cash in the pockets of policy makers. Biden changing the legal definition of sex to include gender identity via executive order (13988) erased women and women's rights. Trump just restored women's rights.Everyone in America has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but males don't get to benefit from woman's rights. That's not an inalienable right.
I have a longer exposure to this issue than most. Back in the 1980s, I was the C-suite guy with employee health insurance in my portfolio and was very hands on in working with the advisory committee. One of the things we did was to get a quarterly summary of the really expensive claims (with identifiers removed). We did this because high end claims are a major driver of premiums and we wanted to keep our fingers on that pulse to make sure we weren't surprised. Most of them were pretty predictable- end of life stuff, cancer, premies, but we noted what were called sex change operations in that day. So we asked the insurance company to explain. The answer were that these were babies who were born with both sets of genitalia. The operation was to remove one set. Small percentage of total babies but it stuck out in the expensive case data and that this had been going on forever. Possible that this initial determination by doctors included some mistakes. Fortunately, I was retired by the time the adolescent cases exploded. Pretty sure the committee would have shut it down or tried to.
Ms. Davis made an excellent point about the way liberals and liberal institutions came to embrace and implement gender identity ideology. The capture was undemocratic while the trans movement itself is antidemocratic. At least that is how it appears from the outside. Perhaps someday a scholar will compile an objective history of the movement that will confirm, dismiss or modify the assumptions that follow.
As Ms. Davis observed, businesses, professions and government bodies appear to have adopted policies, procedures and programs that advanced trans activists' objectives without due process. In other words, they did not notify those who would be bound or affected by pro-trans measures of their intent to carry them out. Neither did they provide an opportunity to ask searching and skeptical questions of the proponents of gender-inclusive programs or a process by which trans activists' proposals could be amended in response to criticism and suggestions. Worse yet, trans activists planted the idea that anyone who criticized any element of applied gender ideology was a hater and a transphobe. And on the seventh day they rolled it all out.
What makes the trans movement antidemocratic is its absolute refusal to engage with critics. For its defense it relies on censorship and smearing its opponents. The former thwarts all attempts at change by democratic methods. The latter rigs the outcome of any challenge sex realists might be able to mount.
I very much look forward to listening to this podcast. I greatly admire Mr. Teixeira for his keen historical understanding of the trans movement and of the gender identity ideology that animates it. He and Sam Harris [1] are the only two significant figures outside the gender critical movement I know of who really get the problem and are up to date on what is being done by centrists to curb the excesses of trans activism.
Why can't the other pundits of his generation wake up and see the trans movement for the pernicious bundle of lies that it is?
I think that almost everything both of you are saying is pretty close to being true. But if you want it to stick, it needs to be accompanied by a specific enumeration of what rights trans people do have, and a defense of them if them if those rights are being taken away. Adults do have the right to surgery and hormones if they want them, and there is no reason why transwomen shouldn't be called women, because they are in some sense. There really is some evidence that Trans people have different brains from Cispeople, so in a sense they are in the wrong bodies. I'm not certainthese particular claims are true, but I've read compelling arguments for them. But the point is, if you spend as much time defending Trans rights as you do attacking the overreach of transactivists, you have a much better chance of resolving this dispute and going on to more important issues. My guess is that the majority of trans people don't go along with the worst excesses of the activists, and the support for the latter would dissipate if it became clear they don't speak for most trans people.
So, I just became a paying subscriber to TLP having been so impressed by Ms. Davis' earnest, rational and caring approach to a fraught subject. When my book store of choice, The Vermont Book Shop, is accepting pre-orders for her new book, I'll be there, at least virtually since I don't live in Vermont. I'm still learning about this issue and feel indebted to Ms. Davis for her voice, knowledge and humanity.
Comment from the trenches: I do stuff on gender—here’s my forthcoming journal article 'Sex Reassignment and Gender Misfits': https://babersite.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/gender-misfits-revision-after-acceptance-1.docx (warning: my copy—not yet proof-read at the journal end). Here and elsewhere I argue that sex reassignment to fit people’s bodies to their supposed ‘gender identity’ is a conservative strategy. It’s the same old same old ‘essentialism’—assuming that some constellation of psychological traits, preferences, interests, behavioral dispositions are inherently feminine or masculine and that when women or men don’t have the appropriate feminine or masculine psychology they need to be fixed to fit assigned sex roles.
During the last century the program to fix gender-non-conforming women promoted by advice columnists and psychologists was to remodel their personalities to conform to their assigned gender norms. Women who weren’t appropriately ‘feminine’ were deemed ‘neurotic’ and subjected to psychotherapy to ‘adjust’ them to their ‘feminine role’. As a gender misfit I’ve had some personal experience with this. Now, with advances in technology, gender misfits are declared trans and are candidates for ‘gender affirming care’ to remodel their bodies to fit their supposed inner gender. Same old same old.
I’m <explitive deleted> fed up. Last year a junior colleague who does ‘gender studies’ informed me that I am likely ‘trans’, in spite of the fact that I’m reasonably happy with my body, though I wish it were somewhat slimmer, do not intend to go on cross-sex hormones or have my body chopped to match my ‘gender identity’, and have always been exclusively and enthusiastically heterosexual. Brave women that: I’m tenured and physically fit and can probably beat her up in more than one sense.
I don’t like the ‘tomboy’ designation, which suggests a cute, feisty girl who will some time in mid-adolescence straighten out and become a princess: there are no tom-MEN. I’m a gender misfit. I am not trans. I’m sick of the whole trans thing which, from my gender misfit perspective, is the same old same old. I am an echt angry feminist. Oh yeah, from the shameless advertising division my more accessible pop piece ‘Who Took Away My Feminism’ https://hebaber.substack.com/p/who-took-away-my-feminism.
"I’m a gender misfit. I am not trans."
I think this is the realization lacking in many if not most of the people that the gender ideology radical activists exploit.
It is my observation that there are very few trans people, or people that decide their gender identity needs to be different than their XX or XY genetics at birth, that would be considered highly attractive by current societal norms. Like it or not, we are all wired to seek external validation that we are liked and wanted, and the prettier babies, children and adults get more positive attention. Lacking that attention while also being someone that has more general gender and sex confusion, probably puts them at risk for being attracted to reassignment. Ideally we would not care about what others think and be happy in our own skin. But that isn't human nature for most.
I really don't care what an adult does. My problem is the activist attention on children, whom at puberty and the flood of hormones and their awkward growth stage, are generally always going to be confused about gender and sex... until they get through puberty.
Bravo! Keep doing what you're doing.
Gender non conforming people have existed since the beginning of time, and always will. The difference between then and now is that there is a profitable gender industry that puts cash in the pockets of policy makers. Biden changing the legal definition of sex to include gender identity via executive order (13988) erased women and women's rights. Trump just restored women's rights.Everyone in America has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but males don't get to benefit from woman's rights. That's not an inalienable right.
I have a longer exposure to this issue than most. Back in the 1980s, I was the C-suite guy with employee health insurance in my portfolio and was very hands on in working with the advisory committee. One of the things we did was to get a quarterly summary of the really expensive claims (with identifiers removed). We did this because high end claims are a major driver of premiums and we wanted to keep our fingers on that pulse to make sure we weren't surprised. Most of them were pretty predictable- end of life stuff, cancer, premies, but we noted what were called sex change operations in that day. So we asked the insurance company to explain. The answer were that these were babies who were born with both sets of genitalia. The operation was to remove one set. Small percentage of total babies but it stuck out in the expensive case data and that this had been going on forever. Possible that this initial determination by doctors included some mistakes. Fortunately, I was retired by the time the adolescent cases exploded. Pretty sure the committee would have shut it down or tried to.
Ms. Davis made an excellent point about the way liberals and liberal institutions came to embrace and implement gender identity ideology. The capture was undemocratic while the trans movement itself is antidemocratic. At least that is how it appears from the outside. Perhaps someday a scholar will compile an objective history of the movement that will confirm, dismiss or modify the assumptions that follow.
As Ms. Davis observed, businesses, professions and government bodies appear to have adopted policies, procedures and programs that advanced trans activists' objectives without due process. In other words, they did not notify those who would be bound or affected by pro-trans measures of their intent to carry them out. Neither did they provide an opportunity to ask searching and skeptical questions of the proponents of gender-inclusive programs or a process by which trans activists' proposals could be amended in response to criticism and suggestions. Worse yet, trans activists planted the idea that anyone who criticized any element of applied gender ideology was a hater and a transphobe. And on the seventh day they rolled it all out.
What makes the trans movement antidemocratic is its absolute refusal to engage with critics. For its defense it relies on censorship and smearing its opponents. The former thwarts all attempts at change by democratic methods. The latter rigs the outcome of any challenge sex realists might be able to mount.
This cannot stand.
It sounds like Ms. Davis and Andrew Sullivan would make a good podcast.
I very much look forward to listening to this podcast. I greatly admire Mr. Teixeira for his keen historical understanding of the trans movement and of the gender identity ideology that animates it. He and Sam Harris [1] are the only two significant figures outside the gender critical movement I know of who really get the problem and are up to date on what is being done by centrists to curb the excesses of trans activism.
Why can't the other pundits of his generation wake up and see the trans movement for the pernicious bundle of lies that it is?
[1] November 20, 2024 | Appearance on The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/sam-harris-our-democracy-is-already
I think that almost everything both of you are saying is pretty close to being true. But if you want it to stick, it needs to be accompanied by a specific enumeration of what rights trans people do have, and a defense of them if them if those rights are being taken away. Adults do have the right to surgery and hormones if they want them, and there is no reason why transwomen shouldn't be called women, because they are in some sense. There really is some evidence that Trans people have different brains from Cispeople, so in a sense they are in the wrong bodies. I'm not certainthese particular claims are true, but I've read compelling arguments for them. But the point is, if you spend as much time defending Trans rights as you do attacking the overreach of transactivists, you have a much better chance of resolving this dispute and going on to more important issues. My guess is that the majority of trans people don't go along with the worst excesses of the activists, and the support for the latter would dissipate if it became clear they don't speak for most trans people.