The Lost Generation Strikes Back

by Worriedmom


Dateline: New York, New York, May 6, 2027

 

When you look back at it, what’s most striking is how it seemed like nothing much was happening…and then it happened all at once.  Like watching a thunderstorm roll in over the prairie: the sky strobes with flashes of far-off lightning and the thunder is a barely audible rumble, the clouds mass slowly, the wind picks up bit by bit, but it seems hundreds of miles away; until suddenly it’s right on top of you and pouring down like there’s no tomorrow.

Was it the emergence of PUFF (Parents United For Fairness), the nationwide group of outraged soccer dads and softball moms, who finally rose up as one to demand that girls be included in sports, once every team at every school became comprised exclusively of males and transwomen?  Or was it in 2020, when 57% of all gold medals awarded at the Olympics in women’s events were given to biological men?

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Or was it the simultaneous, highly publicized nationwide demonstrations aimed at the Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, by mobs of furious gays and lesbians, chanting “no gay eugenics” and demanding their movement back?  Was it the Oprah episode featuring 15 de-transitioned adults, which made #HowCouldYouDoThisToMeMom the third fastest trending hashtag in Twitter history?  Many thought the death blow came with the sex abuse scandals.  Interpol had been on the trail of “transition porn” for years, and when the Boston Globe blew the lid off in 2023, many thought the writing was on the wall.

But even though all this helped lead to the eventual fall of the once all-powerful “pediatric T lobby,” the day the movement died was when the trial lawyers smelled blood in the water.

Screen Shot 2017-05-06 at 00.40.22The first rumblings came when the hospitals started spinning off their gender clinics into separate corporations and classifying clinic workers as independent contractors.  Medical schools and teaching hospitals started trying to put as much daylight as possible between their own organizations and the gender crew.  Pediatric gender doctors began setting up contingency plans for a hasty exit from the practice and quietly moving assets abroad.  Insurance companies, faced by skyrocketing costs associated with transition, were by then doubly rocked by the realization that transition would only be the starting point for years of expensive treatments for chronic illnesses brought on by those same pricey procedures and drugs.

Managers of “gender clinics” belatedly realized that it might have been better to impose a distinction between transgender political advocacy and medical advice. They started cracking down on therapists and doctors who made policy and pursued professional vendettas on Twitter and Facebook, but thanks to the Wayback Machine, it was a case of too little, too late.  It took a while to weed out the clinicians who advertised primarily on Tumblr and other youth-oriented platforms, although all of that evidence came in handy later on in courtrooms across the United States.  (To this day, the Trial Lawyers of America sends the “Testpocalypse” doctor a bouquet of roses for his birthday.)

By this point, all 50 states had passed legislation that permitted “gender confirmation surgery” and cross-hormone treatment for children as young as six.  But by 2021, the first wave began to emerge of frightened, sick, and miserable adults.  Few of these individuals were counted or helped by the then-ubiquitous gender clinics, and even though their stories were suppressed by every mainstream and QT media outlet, new underground story-telling techniques started to connect them to each other.  The most prominent voice among them was Brayden, a rising star on the once-popular Trans Channel who had begun his transition at age 7 months.  By then the permanently disabled victim of years of unproven drug therapies and repeated (and unsuccessful) surgeries, all of which were televised, Brayden became a crusader for the “lost generation,” as the legions of victims began to call themselves.  Telegenic and appealing, before he passed away Brayden became the “face” of the movement, and achieved what thousands of previous victims could not: attracting sympathetic news coverage from the many outlets that had once been under the sway of the all-powerful T lobby.

Eventually the stories of the lost generation reached the ears of people who had a tremendous financial interest in seeing to it that they received justice, or at least compensation.  The first lawsuits were launched.  How could we forget that moment in 2022 when, right after he filed the first of what became dozens of lawsuits, a key plaintiff’s class-action attorney was interviewed on the steps of the Southern District of New York: “Dude, we brought the cigarette industry down.  You really think this is going to be hard?”

Although there were several tricky legal problems that had to be resolved first, the plaintiff’s bar sat up and took notice when in 2025 a Texas jury delivered the first successful $10,000,000 verdict for “wrongful transition.”

tenmillionThe verdict was later reduced on appeal, but not until discovery had revealed the astronomically high expenses that would be entailed in providing lifetime care for a young person suffering from fragile bones, peeling and broken teeth, severe mood disorder, cardiovascular disease, and, of course, sterility.  It developed that “informed consent” was anything but, since nobody involved with that documentation actually had any idea of what was being consented to.  Although practitioners had hoped this paperwork would shield them from liability, one of the earliest cases in the area established that neither minors nor their parents could provide informed consent to unknown, and unknowable, medical consequences.  The courts also generally affirmed that patients couldn’t “waive” their care providers’ gross negligence: who knew?

After that, it was off to the races, legally speaking.  Everybody left standing got sued (although by then, most of the top “pediatric gender specialists” had re-located or made themselves judgment-proof).  Insurance companies were the first to crumble: faced with virtually unlimited future expenses, they imposed a blanket denial of coverage for any “gender therapies” for under-age 18 patients.  R.I.C.O. (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) proved a remarkably flexible tool for pursuing groups of affiliated health care providers, surgeons, counselors, drug makers, and the advocates who had encouraged and developed a steady stream of patients.

The NIH finally got into the game when in 2025, it began to finance large-scale studies of young people who had received GnRH agonists at a young age, followed by cross-sex hormones.  Unfortunately, there was no shortage of damaged and ill subjects.  At the congressional hearings that started later that year, government “watchdogs” were faced with angry speeches in the form of questions.  What congress-people from both sides of the aisle urgently wanted to know was why the FDA had permitted human experimentation on, and sterilization of, children, in violation not only of medical ethics but the Geneva Conventions.  There was no good answer.

Many of the “transgender reforms” were reversed as quickly as they’d been enacted.  For instance, the mandatory “Might You Be Trans?  No, Think About It … Really, Might You Be?” psychological screening test administered at the start of the school year for all pupils in all grades was abruptly discontinued.  Hormone-suppressing drugs and cross-sex hormones were pulled from the shelves of school infirmaries everywhere.  Congress amended Title IX again, and sports authorities everywhere agreed to pretend that the period from 2015-2027 “just didn’t happen.”

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Few of these developments healed the victims.  However, a portion of the immense liability pay-outs were eventually directed to the establishment of a nationwide fund, from which disbursements could be made to qualified plaintiffs.

As might be expected, no word was ever heard from most in the press.  There was a limited amount of soul-searching in academia (Pediatric Transition and Satanic Panic: Did We Really Get It Wrong Again? was one of the most-downloaded papers on PubMed in 2028) but by and large, the majority of the most vocal trans-proponents in the press simply “moved on,” and wished everyone else would, too.

By far the most enduring impact of the rise and fall of trans-mania, as it came to be called, will be its impact on the culture wars.  The line between “conservatives” and “liberals” became increasingly blurred, as people on both sides began, first, to realize that they indeed had a common interest and, second, that they could work together effectively despite their differences.  People who had once regarded each other with horror and fear learned that they could advocate for the same outcome, and that joining forces made their voices stronger and more credible.  The respect, tolerance and cooperation that pervaded the “trans lib” movement eventually affected social issues beyond trans-mania: working together, it was not difficult to find solutions to other social justice issues that took into account and respected personal rights and religious freedoms.  Life became much easier when one side did not have to lose so the other side could win.  At last, the war over Planned Parenthood was ended when representatives of all viewpoints were able to hammer out compromises that satisfied all (okay, most) concerns.new york trans

Once the culture wars were finally settled, people of all political persuasions realized the tremendous amounts of energy and time that had been wasted in fighting them, and turned, at last, to solving larger and more systemic problems.  Environmental, educational, economic and social problems became much more susceptible to solution once ideology was out of the picture and the goodwill of both sides was assumed.

Even with all these positive changes, I still mourn the victims, and their faces and stories will haunt me forever.  But at least I can sleep at night, knowing that I did what I could, when I could do it.

How about you?


Worriedmom is a mother of four (allegedly) adult children, who lives in the Northeastern part of the United States.  She practiced law for many years and now works in the non-profit area. She is available to interact in the comments section of this post.

Graphics by Lily Maynard


 

48 thoughts on “The Lost Generation Strikes Back

  1. 😮😃🙂 Sheer joy! My brain has been picturing this but without anywhere near the fabulous detail for over a year. Excellent. Perfect. The news photos! OMG. Now we can watch and see how much of this actually happens. 💻👀 Thank you both! 😌

    • Thank you Petunia! One thing I have certainly learned during this process is that things can happen that we never could have anticipated or predicted. I know I don’t have to go into the litany with you, since things seem to be getting crazier by the day if not the hour sometimes. So, file it under “anything’s possible.”

  2. OMG brilliant! Though that bit about conservatives agreeing to compromises over Planned Parenthood is a bit of a stretch. But I love this whole enterprise! Bravo!

    • Well, speaking of unbelievable… I don’t know how many of us here would ever have imagined ourselves at this day, either. I figured, if you’re going to write fiction, might as well shoot for the moon! (Thanks for your good thoughts Imelda!).

  3. Wow this is brilliant. The contributors to this site’s intelligence, creativity, and ability to debate in a healthy way that’s respectful of everyone’s fundamental humanity is so inspiring. People on this side of the fence aren’t sending death and rape threats to people who disagree with them…
    Amazing work.

  4. Let’s hope this is just the tip of the iceberg of how this will really play out. I have long imagined that parents who cave in to teenagers’ threats of suicide if they don’t transition, will be hated in the future by the very kids who insisted on being called ‘they’ and decided that gender was a bunch of choices.

  5. Cool piece, but you may want to replace the mention of the Geneva Convention with the Helsinki Declaration. The Helsinki Declaration is a code of medical ethics developed after and in direct response to the medical experimentation which went on in Nazi concentration camps. It specifically addresses experimentation on children and how human subjects are used in research. I believe it also covers informed consent. Helsinki should be required reading for anyone interested in this subject.

  6. Also look at the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics, which was the first response to discovery of Nazi medical experimentation. It was a lot stricter than many codes which exist today, obviously because it came in such swift response to the horrors of Nazi experimentation.

    • Kristina, I looked at this quickly and you are absolutely right. In fact, this is going to be the basis for a new article. Thank you so much!

  7. Kudos to both of you! The news article clippings are fantastic (I am such a luddite). I will be printing this off and saving it to pull out in the future when this does, indeed, happen. I just pray that it happens before my dghtr is badly damaged by this. #SexNOTGender

  8. Interesting post. However, it is worth noting that tort law and the civil justice system can be used to restrain the gender identity industry today. There is no need to wait until 2022, when there is a large class of injured plaintiffs and there is no need to develop some new theory of “wrongful transition.” Existing tort law would allow a patient who was hastily guided into transition (or who received inadequate advice or care) to sue for good, old fashioned medical malpractice. If that patient were to win a sizeable award, it would have an impact on the industry as a whole, even though it would be an individual award, not a class award. Malpractice insurers would demand changes in practice. The question is: have any de-transitioners sued, and if not, why not?

    • Genese, yes, it was just more of a thought experiment – I figure that the existing med mal system can actually be used to get a handle on at least some of this stuff and didn’t mean to imply that a nationwide class action is the only way. You might want to scroll down to see an interesting post about six “botched phalloplasty” suits that are happening right now in San Francisco.

      I do think there are interesting and potentially difficult questions that are going to come up about standards of care. As I understand it, not being a practitioner in this area, the USPATH has set what it believes to be the “standard of [competent] care” and if the care given to a plaintiff complies with it, that might be a barrier to recovery. How does that work when the standard of care itself isn’t based on good evidence and best practices? Again, though, I’m not sure because I don’t really know how all this works on the ground – what I do know is that, like matrimonial and landlord-tenant, it’s full of traps for the unwary.

      If you practice in the med mal or insurance areas I’d love to hear your thoughts!

  9. Thank you so much for this. As a worried parent myself, I have a teen daughter determined to start T as soon as possible. The endocrinologist even told her that this is an “experiment”, which filled me with horror. You are so right about how this has the potential to bring liberals and conservatives together — in fact, anyone who cares about biological facts and evidence-based medical intervention in human health issues. But you have to be brave to take it on.

    • Dave, I’m so sorry to hear that. If there is any way to stall or slow things down, that can make all the difference. You didn’t say whether your daughter is of age or living at home right now, but my advice would be, do all you can to change the subject, direct her to healthier things, and see if you can’t at least get her to give it more thought before making a “final” decision. Unfortunately, although some of the side-effects of taking “T” are reversible, some are lasting (depending on the individual).

      So far as the “experiment” point goes… I guess every time I’ve heard THE most shocking and irresponsible advice ever, then I hear something like this. Maybe that endo should get some “experimental” brain surgery!

  10. Thank you so much for this story. I am hoping that this plays out in real life, and earlier, before more kids are caught up in the trend.

    • I happen to be reading a novel right now that deals with the aftermath of the “Satanic panic” that seems to have gripped the country during the 1980’s. (I was buried in a law school library and then a law firm library for most of that decade and don’t recall much about it first-hand). It’s absolutely amazing to me how entirely convinced law enforcement, the therapeutic professions, and parents were that there was actually this vast underground of Satanists doing horrendous things to children, all over the country and the world. I had no idea that things went as far as they did in terms of prosecutions, civil suits, and apparently hundreds of thousands of people “recovering” memories of awful abuse. It’s like we sort of have collective amnesia about it today!

  11. As I’ve said dozens of times before, not until the class action.lawsuits will this crap STOP. The damaged bodies, the quack doctors, surgeons and psyches, the greed of the pharmaceuticals and gender clinics is called to ACCOUNT for the lifelong damage they are doing!!

    There was the 15 minute short The GenderCator and did the trannies call and write in to ban that Lesbian short critical of the pressure to transition that Butch Lesbians are put under, at SF Frameline Lesbian Gay Film Festival, this too would make a great full length futuristic film!!!WE TOLD YOU SO!!!

    Thanks for looking forward and writing a coherent piece should we keep going down.this road!!
    -FeistyAmazon

  12. This post and some of the responses to it make me feel a bit out of sync with the folks posting here. I found solace here because it was a place for those of us who are skeptical about what it means to be transgender and especially about medical transition for minors. But increasingly I see certainty here that is a seeming mirror to the transactivists certainty and that leaves me feeling a bit out in the cold. There is some biological evidence (pretty scant and somewhat hard to interpret because of an overlap with differences associated with sexual orientation) that trans identifying people have some brain differences that make them less like their sex and more like the gender they identify with. That evidence is currently pretty weak, hence my skepticism, but it is not non-existent and it seems hard to have a reasoned conversation if you simply assert that it is not possible that there are people who have an intrinsic sense that they are in the wrong sexed body that is most effectively relieved by medical transition when you can no more prove that to be the case than they can prove that transwomen are women. And I will say that I am uncomfortable with folks using what can only be termed as slurs for transgender people with ease on this site. I am not asking for censorship, but I will say that I think it is totally unnecessary to refer to anyone as a “tranny” and it feels just as yucky to read it here, where I look for support for the choices I am making to protect my child, as it does when I here that my child is called homophobic slurs at school.

    • Losing, I know you have been a valued part of this community for a long time and I don’t want you to feel hurt or disrespected. I went out of my way not to use slurs for transgender people in my piece – however I think you know as well as anyone, 4thWave can’t really control all the words people use in comments. Another problem we have is that (as you also know) the goalposts for what is okay to use and not to use, what one year is fine and the next year shocking violence, are constantly moving. Last year it was well and good to use the term “trans*” and that was encouraged, this year that’s completely unacceptable. People fight over things like, should it be “trans woman” or “transwoman.” Who can keep track?

      I also really don’t see here where anybody is telling transgender people to die in a fire or to choke on their [fill in the blank] or to [fill in the blank] themselves with a chainsaw. Yet, this is the level of what we see from certain corners of the transgender community on a routine basis. I myself feel that as parents we actually have more of a right to be angry and irate towards the people who are mis-treating and mis-leading our children, but you have to be honest and admit, we are certainly not the primary name-callers.

      As you also know, this blog deals primarily with pediatric and teen transition. It’s not that some of us don’t have an opinion about adult transition, and yes from time to time that does bleed into our writing and commenting here. The official position of this blog, so far as I know, is that by and large adults can do what they want with their own bodies, misguided as that may be.

      If your larger point is that the picture of the future that I’ve painted here, where transgenderism is no longer a craze, and children are not being pointed along the transgender road at a young age for being “gender non-conforming,” and where doctors and professionals hold off on “medical transition” unless it is absolutely the only last resort – if that picture strikes you as undesirable or phobic, then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

      • I share your hope that medical transition be treated as a last resort, and I share your frustration that the medical community seems to only have a hammer — medical transition — and thus sees every child/teen with gender identity issues as a nail. I am also agitated on a daily basis about the fact that people on the ground understand full well that there is an epidemic of trans identifying teens that needs to be looked at more carefully and yet when the NY Times (which I adore reading in general) seeks to publish an op-ed on the topic, it’s by a psychiatrist at Yale saying how great it is to make medical transition available to younger people so that they can be happy. But where I part company with many here is that I don’t assume that the author of that piece or in fact most of the folks doing the medical transition work are acting in bad faith or that they are motivated primarily by greed. I think they are wrong and that they are vastly underestimating the risks of harm because they have spent so much more time seeing their patients express gratitude and satisfaction for the treatment that they have offered. I would not rule out the possibility of negligent malpractice in some cases, but I think it weakens our efforts to maintain a reasoned, thoughtful, and critical perspective on these issues when the language veers into accusations of conspiracies (e.g. RICO) and ad hominen. I appreciate that your piece was satire, it’s just that the response to it made me feel like I really want to reassert that I don’t feel that there should be sides here, meaning I am not anti-trans — I am on my child’s side — I want what is best for her and that does not require me to be hostile to anyone else. I read a recent piece on ambivalence and trans issues and how it cannot be that the only two positions on trans people are (1) transwomen are women full stop or (2) transwomen do not exist. I for one definitely count myself somewhere in the middle there and I wanted to put that on the record on this site that has brought me a sense of comfort and community.

      • We welcome a variety of viewpoints on this site, within the broad definition of “gender skeptical.” We also publish some comments by people strongly in disagreement with that viewpoint, including some respectful trans activists. Hopefully anyone reading this site realizes that comments are moderated, but we don’t (and wouldn’t want to) all have precisely the same opinions on the many facets of transgender/transgenderism. No one should expect that we are providing the sort of “safe space” where no one has to ever read a comment they disagree with.

        That said, we prefer respectful language. I would note, however, that some transsexuals (who are frequently labeled “tru scum” by some trans activists) actually refer to THEMSELVES as “trannys.” It didn’t used to be a term of disrespect, and still isn’t, among some transsexuals.

      • I don’t believe that most pro-trans “helping professionals” are actively engaged in some kind of malign conspiracy to harm children (BTW RICO is frequently used in civil cases, not in the way you think though). It is really difficult to know what the pro-trans profession might be up to, though, when they appear to willfully disregard any warning signs about the psychiatric or physical aspects of what they are so cavalierly recommending. What I have so much trouble wrapping my head around is a doctor or therapist getting behind the idea that a child or teen should engage in permanent body mods, when they must be aware (from their life experience if nothing else) that young people’s minds are so changeable and malleable. I do know medical professionals who have decided to stay far, far away from the “trans thing” and I don’t know why some of them are so utterly reckless.

        It’s a bit of a straw man argument to say that folks here “don’t believe there is such a thing as trans.” Obviously, there are plenty of people who believe they are transgender. Although it’s not for me to question whether they have this belief, it is for me to share my ideas about why that might be, and what is the best course of action to take about it (especially when I have a personal stake in this as well).

        I also refuse to be “nice” or “take the middle ground” about what’s happening to athletics for girls and women due to the participation of transgender individuals. I think we’ve been way too nice for way too long about that particular subject. I came of age in sports right as Title IX came into force, and I can’t believe we only had it for a generation before we lost it again. If it’s unseemly or “yucky” for me to be furious about that, that’s too bad.

    • There is *no* such natural thing as ”feeling like a woman or man or a girl or boy”! I don’t feel like a woman inside even though I certainly look like a very pretty woman. Maybe I once felt that way before I became educated and enlightened about the extreme social constructions of gender.

      Maybe if someone hypnotized me and brought me back to when I was a little girl and asked me when I was constantly told even by many strangers in public places, I was a strikingly beautiful baby and child,if I ”felt like a girl” inside,I might have said I don’t know what is that supposed to mean? Which is a great question with a great point. Or I might have said no,or I might have said yes because I got the same extreme gender training into ”femininity” all girls and women do.

      • That is my experience as well, I only understand my gender in relationship to my sex and body, but I also can see in my child’s pain that gender dysphoria is real. It may be triggered by what she read on Tumblr, but my child dreads taking a shower because she knows she will have to confront her feminine body. Having never experienced that distress, I am loathe to insist that it is meaningless.

      • It’s not meaningless.

        Neither is it healthy. And when the entire psych field is in a box dominated by the notion that it’s wrong to explore anything, to do anything but endorse a single answer for a minor person’s self-diagnosis of “being trans” — this is not a good situation. Many young women hate their female bodies. This is common and has forever been common. What is new is a digital world full of chatter affirming that discomfort with the female body is defacto evidence of transness, Backed up by a med/psych/pharm world that also tells these young women that this feeling has a single meaning: inborn transness, due to some yet-to-be determined biological trigger.

        Your child’s distress is real; my child’s distress is real. But my kid’s distress has a history that goes back way before she had online “advisors” affirming that the distress has a single root and a single fix.

        We would all like to spare our kids distress. It’s hard to witness for any compassionate parent, which is most parents. But after YEARS (yeah, it’s been years, at this point) of looking at evidence and research and looking FOR evidence that transition is a good, and safe, long-term fix? Not finding it. Meanwhile I can’t find a psych who’d actually work with my kid on her other stuff without assuming the gender stuff is the entire issue. The anxiety, depression, add, past trauma go untreated.

        Here is a good, recent, and disturbing article from a peer-reviewed journal expressing concerns for how fast the treatment paradigm is outpacing any research:

        https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/58025602/ethical-concerns-about-emerging-treatment-paradigms-for-gender-dysphoria

      • Puzzled — thanks for the citation. It is much appreciated. And all I am trying to communicate is that I am not certain about what is going on and I wish that those who are offering medical transition would be more honest that they have nothing close to certainty to offer either. I would like more in the media and academia to hear our voices and hear that we are not coming from an extreme position — that we are not antagonists, but reasonable, progressive, concerned parents. That’s why I am a little skeptical that this issue will bring the left and right together, because there still appears to be a lot of homophobia on the right that is terrible for our children, most of whom are not heterosexual. Worriedmom — I used yucky in reference to name calling which was not addressed to you but to a commenter (and to 4thwavenow, I think we can see that the fact that some trans people use a term for themselves that it pretty widely accepted as a slur does not make it ok for the rest of us to use it — see the n word) and I am appalled by the name calling and language of some trans activists and I see very little of it here, but that’s why I think it’s important to call it out. And I am aware of the expansion of the use of RICO, but I for one see that as prosecutorial overreach and thus wouldn’t get behind seeing Dr.’s as organized criminals.

    • I’m not a specialist in this area, but it seems to me that evidence for “gender-atypical personalities” being of prenatal origin (because of brain-structure differences) is not the same thing as evidence for “trans self-identity” being of prenatal origin.

  13. Worriedmom, if you and 4th Wave Now keep digging like you have been, you may become the Woodward and Bernstein who blow the lid off the whole thing. Or someone will hand you the transgender equivalent of the Pentagon Papers. 😉

    But there is something sad about even your best case scenario being a feeding frenzy for lawyers and mothers being blamed AGAIN.

    How sure are you about the Satanic Panic? I looked at SMART’s Ritual Abuse website and they make some very convincing points. This is something we really don’t want to be on the wrong side of. Especially since all the child abuse cases that are known now – Indian boarding schools, the Catholic Church, grooming gangs, Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, youth football clubs – it’s like believing cultists were the only ones in society not abusing children. I remain undecided on this but I’d suggest everyone have a look at Ritual Abuse and consider both the case they make and any similarities to what we are seeing now with transgenderism.

    To all who think Marxism always supports transgenderism, I present this:

    We all hope that trans is just a weird anomaly that will pass before too much damage is done, but what I think we are seeing is the rise of the commodity form of gender. It is often asked why people can’t be allowed accept the body and personality they have. The answer is you can’t sell freedom. Such freedom would be a use value only benefiting individuals and society, not an exchange value to enhance profit-making and control for the wealthy. There is a saying that our rulers would love to charge us for the air we breathe and with transgenderism they have got closer to this dream than ever before. Aspects of the human body and personality are now products to be desired, purchased and consumed. Just like capitalism will overwork its labour force then sell them stress-reduction products or make them fat with unhealthy food then sell them diet products, rigid gender roles have created a market for a product that never existed before. It isn’t just a one-off purchase either, but saddles the customer with a lifetime of ‘medical rent’ as the body will need constant maintenance.

    It is unusual as the producer, the consumer and the product are to an extent the same person, but the ‘prosumer’ is common in digital business and has similarities to how people self-radicalise and run off to join ISIS. The fanaticism of transactivism is the dream of every marketing department and how they all wish their customers would behave. Then there is the external structure – the gender clinics and surgeons and they operate much like any other business. Just like Toyota reduced the time to change the die in a metal press from 10 days to 55 seconds, the time between diagnosis and transition has been reduced from years to weeks. It is called reducing the socially necessary labour time and is a fundamental feature of how businesses compete. Consider also how transactivism has deteriorated from the quality of Leslie Feinberg’s writing to the incessant bleating of “transwomen are women”. That’s deskilling and proletarianisation.

    But this isn’t just about profit, these things are also about control. Fifties domesticity wasn’t just a ploy to sell suburban houses, cars and consumer goods. It was also about getting women out of the workforce and buying off organised labour with promises of respectability and the good life. Transgenderism acts as a punishment and a tax on the nonconforming. It is an ideological battering ram, a highly pure distillation of how capitalism sees the world and how it should be. That people are raw materials, products that can be changed and exchanged for money. People claim there is a powerful ‘trans lobby’, but they are not forcing governments to do this against their will. Just like the ‘oil lobby’ or the ‘Israel lobby’, they have some of the easiest jobs in the world because all those involved agree this is how the world should be.

    Transgenderism is still in the ‘wild west’ stage of a new industry and it is impossible to see where it will go. They may end up trading phalloplasty futures on the mercantile exchange. How long have we known that cars are bad for the environment, kill people and are not a particularly good transport solution? Still cars. But even if it ends up only being done in dubious clinics in Mexico and Switzerland they will just find a different way to exploit the same, still existing market they created, like e-cigarettes and ‘healthy’ fast food. You can see this with any number of commodities because once capitalism finds a way to control people and make a profit at the same time, it rarely (ever?) loosens its grip. There is a booming market in gender and it is probably here to stay.

    People may have heard some elements of this argument from Derrick Jensen and Deep Green Resistance, but they take the attitude common to radical environmentalism – “Naughty consumer! Bad!” I do not blame the consumers/commodities/victims (no matter how annoying they may sometimes be) of capitalism’s latest ‘innovation’ because, as many on this site know, how little chance an individual has once this juggernaut starts rolling. As much as I want the best outcome for every family caught up in this, it is a fight against massive odds that most likely will not stop until the day capital falls. And even revolution may not put an end to it (just ask feminists about the persistence of sexism after revolutions) but would cut it off from the main driving forces.

    You’ll know you have reached the critical point of exhaustion and desperation for your children when you support the revolution because “at least the devastation from the resulting civil war will disrupt the medical industry so they won’t be able to get hormones or surgery.” 😉

    • You have a lot of interesting stuff packed into your comments – thanks so much! Have you thought about writing it up as an article? (Also really appreciate the Woodward & Bernstein comment…)

      Just to quickly respond to the Satanic Panic point – you’re right that I don’t know nearly as much about that particular time in history as I do about the transgender panic. I’m not of the impression that the child abuse scandals (Catholic church, private schools, USA Gymnastics) had much to do with Satanism, it seemed like that was a theory of some kind of world-wide conspiracy involving all kinds of influential people and really atrocious abuse, but as I say I don’t have a good understanding of it. What I do recall is at least half a dozen friends “recovering” memories of sexual abuse, and all of them recanting later on. I do think the recovered memories thing was part of it? or at least seems a somewhat useful analogy.

      • Thanks for the offer, I’ll try pulling it all together into something coherent. It may take a while as I’m still working out how the Marxism, feminism, psychology and paranoid secret state eugenics conspiracy theories fit together. As far as I can tell I’m also the only Marxist attempting this so research is slow. What sort of word count did you have in mind and how would I submit it?

        Yes, the current crop of abuse cases are institutional but not ritualistic. The whole ritual abuse thing is complicated and weird. There are arguments that could be made for both perspectives but the thing that I keep coming back to is that if the abuse happened then the proponents of false memory syndrome have pulled off what Holocaust deniers only dream of. Like I said the website Ritual Abuse seems to be the most comprehensive source on the other side of the subject if you want to dig into it (and as our muck-raking investigator you should) :). It certainly gave me some very different potential analogies with trans.

      • Leave it to a communist to assert their agenda wherever they can. Look, transgenderism is simply a precursor to transhumanism . Marxists love nothing more than utopianism and seeing humans as machines who work for the state. Transhumanism or complete control of ones embodiment is classic Stalinism. http://jetpress.org/v24/steinhoff.htm

        Conflating the free market with any issue they can use for their own promotion & propaganda is typical of communists so I wouldn’t assume anyone claiming to be a Marxist is all that genuine in their concerns on this or any issue. Some communists…for now…will appear to care about this issue as long as it serves their interests, then it will be whoever else they can manipulate into buying into their communitarian focused social “bliss.”

        Marx & Satan by Richard Wurmbrand, a survivor of an evil regime carried out by communists is an excellent read. https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Satan-Richard-Wurmbrand/dp/0891073795
        Satanism was real back in the 80’s and many roots of it lead back to utopianism. Sadly there was a panic which overshadowed real victims experiences. Let’s hope that this doesn’t happen for those kids forced to change their bodies.

        I don’t think transgenderism is going to go away like the author of this post imagines (I wish she were right). It’s going to get worse because of digital ideology, apathetic parents, and the destruction of what it means to be human. Remember those Lenin corners people were forced to have in their homes to replace their faith in God with faith in the state? Well get ready folks because we now have Amazon, Google, Apple etc. listening to us & “interacting” with us in our homes. We wear Fit-bits and don’t think twice about those chips in our credit cards that will eventually be used on & in everything courtesy of the IOT. We’re far beyond Lenin corners or a capitalist scheme to get doctors rich. We are dealing with pure evil & when our kids identify as not just as transgender but transgenic…then maybe people will wake up.

      • I just got to spend my Sunday reading about transhumanism and the devil! I live for days like that!

        Transhumanism is a large trough at which all can feed. It’s equally attractive to capitalists who want to live forever and want their workers to no longer require sleep as it is to socialists who want a life of ease and spectacular technological achievement after the revolution. But even that article admits that no new technology on its own has ever harmed capitalism. Rudolph Diesel thought his engine would put an end to toil and look how that turned out. But the whole concept of transhumanism seems to reinforce my point that more of the human body and mind is being commodified.

        Socialism does have an unfortunate history of seeing workers as machines. Gastev’s fantasies of robotic workers freaked Zamyatin out to the point of writing ‘We’. But fortunately since then the sixties have happened and socialist visions of utopia now look very different.

        Socialists almost all have a year after which they disown Russia and it is usually 1927 at the latest. Stalinism is regarded not just as an abomination but a betrayal of socialism. Stalinism is largely a strange form of capitalism where the state acts as one giant corporation that competes with the other giant corporations (states). That’s why Stalinism looks like the British Empire on fast forward – peasants being forced off the land to work in dark satanic mills, imperialism and slavery. Things like Red Corners rose as the state turned away from the masses thinking and acting for themselves. The same encouragement of religious-type behaviour happened after after the French Revolution when the government wanted to reign people in and reassert control.

        Does anyone else think ‘Marx and Satan’ would be the best odd-couple movie ever made? The book is hilariously misguided and will give any leftist a perverse sense of importance. I don’t want to spoil some of the best surprises for anybody who wants to read it, but to give an example of the poor scholarship, one quote is Lenin complaining that they have been discussing making bombs for six months but not one has been built. Wurmbrand claims this was said ‘under the democracy of Kerensky’ implying from July when Kerensky became leader of the Provisional Government to October 1917 when…his services were no longer required. In fact it comes from twelve years earlier, in the run-up to the 1905 Revolution.

        As to my motives I came here almost by accident and found the ideas here made perfect sense. But while radical feminism provides some explanation for what is going on, I realised Marxism can fill in another part of the picture. It is what I can give, according to my ability. And to claim I assert my agenda wherever I can, Mrs Q – I read your blog and you quote the Bible at least as often as I quote Marx!

    • I’m in favor of parents not telling their kids they have to have a certain personality or dress a certain way because of their biological sex. This should not mean denying they have a biological sex. Boys and girls have different issues to deal with.

  14. So true. As a result of societal and parental misunderstanding and pressures we are losing a whole generation of effeminate gay man and Butch lesbians. I feared that this is our future.

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