Transgender Children: The Making of a Modern Hysteria
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Predicting 2030
 April 01 2023
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    ‘ . . . virtually all psychiatric disorders are to some extent artifacts of the time and place in which they occur.’


    ‘When we suffer from underlying psychosocial vulnerabilities . . . our unconscious looks to culturally sanctioned garb in which to clothe our distress.’

     

    Lucy Marchiano’s essay is Chapter Three of Inventing Transgender Children and Young People. It is already clear that a number of ‘book reviews’ of this book will serve us well.*

     

    Marchiano’s essay makes fine sense. She begins with details of two historical ‘fads of mental illness’: the hysteria of the 1800’s, and the anorexia of the 1970’s. She then suggests that ‘I’m in the wrong body’ is just such a fad.

     

    However, she also mentions ‘the dangers of well-intentioned attention to these kinds of contagions’ (because it makes them worse).

     

    Now let’s make an ugly suggestion:

     

    there are two imbalances. The first lies with political cadre with a history of being ruthlessly not-well-intentioned. Twenty years ago, they were desperate to regain political traction after the failure of class politics. Are such activists likely to see the problems of our era as complex? Or would they seek a single cause that boosts their cause?

     

    The second imbalance is the trans craze that these activists have brought into being – the one that Marchiano sees. Both common sense and the tending-to-reductionism history of the left suggest that Marchiano is right.


    Common sense suggests that what we are seeing is not a vast ebullition of cis hatred towards non-cis folks. Thus, two imbalances co-functioning. It’s a krazee-go-round.

     

    PS Kudos to Abigail Shrier, whose book Irreversible Damage has both great statistics and an insight into why teenage girls are particularly susceptible to being railroaded.

     

     

    *The chapter on how activists influenced the U.K. National Health Service into accepting all-politics-no-science gender theory is a lesson in how hopeless Gubmints have become. We’ll Post on this shortly.

    political theory political history trans gender postmodernism
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