I want to make sure everyone understands why I posted this. It's not about feeling sympathy for men, it's about trying to understand the insanity that has gripped the world. I think Tumblr is a major part of that insanity, and this essay just makes total sense to me when it's about *that*. Even the parts where he goes off on one about feminists could be seen through the funhouse mirror of his tumblr experience. Resentment of feminism, it seems to me, is one of the side effects of the trauma of developing as a young person while on that insane site.
Sure, it's long, and its author has some issues, but if you find a better explanation of what Silicon Valley is doing to developing minds, I'd love to see it.
"Thousands upon thousands of young women spoke at length about the humiliations and abuses of their childhoods, frothing themselves up into a frenzy about how awful and evil men were. The feelings-first interactions of the site fed a black-and-white culture, making it so that any negative personal experiences with boys in youth were hyperbolized, misunderstood, inflated, or fabricated from whole cloth so as to attract attention and sympathy. Many of the women who would catastrophize about their experiences were themselves craven sex addicts with violent fetishes, projecting the rapacity of their desires onto every man they came into contact with. Were anyone to call attention to this fairly obvious dynamic, especially a man, they’d immediately get hounded and smeared as a rape apologist, misogynist, victim-blamer, and perhaps even as a rapist themselves."
No. Arty's response to his friend's suicide was to blame women, This character's response to the harm he suffered from TRA cult is to blame the fact that Tumblr was full of daft teenage girls. All the rules of misogyny. All the time.
Yep. You’re right on with that. If men could just ONCE acknowledge the entirely unreasonable demand they make upon women and girls to be unwavering emotional supports for them into adulthood, and even old age, they might actually enable themselves to become emotionally mature for a change, which is good for everyone. “Social” media isn’t, however, and seems to spread narcissism and mental delusions, which isn’t good for anyone. Not surprising that it is tech companies with majorities of male employees in their ranks who control these destructive platforms.
As usual, it’s just another case of a man blaming women for all that is rotten in the world. It sure gets tiresome reading the drivel from uninspiring, unintelligent men. If a person is a wine connoisseur, they may well find that by regularly associating themselves with teetotalers, they come to feel debased for their appreciation of it. Man has no spiritual authority over women, and never has, only claimed to by domination. That tiresome claim to knowledge of “our Creator” is their group narcissistic manipulation, which results in patriarchy. He decrees that this is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. Freaking tyrannical! Misandry is primarily expressed by men towards other men and always has been, yet you choose to associate yourself with girls and women, who are even bi/homo-sexual, and then WHINE about what you perceive to be theirs? It’s rather shameful that after more than three thousand years of it, men go so far as to be in denial about the enslavement of women by and to men, normalizing it as if Nature caused it somehow, not them!
I thought this was fascinating. Thanks for posting. Part of what he describes shows just how the demonisation of the so-called ‘cis-het normative white man’, and even the gay white or straight black males who are also too ‘cis patriarchal’, seems to be one of the roots why so many young people want to be ‘queer’. After all, why would they not all want to escape being the evil oppressors/aggressors and get social status and affirmation to boot? I think this is the case for white girls/young women too who do anything to avoid being labelled Karens/TERFs.
To get a window into how this happens and the true effed-upness of the world of Tumblr is enlightening — and terrifying to know this is happening to kids. Can’t somebody implode bloody Tumblr??
Thanks for posting this Graham. A bit of a hot mess as Katrina commented earlier but (being of mature years) the penny has dropped about the utterly insane, poisonous bubble that exists out there. I wonder how parents, these days manage to counter the madness.
For me two things have particularly struck.
The cry bully culture. They clearly think that calling people names such as bigot or transphobe actually hurts 'normal' folk. They don't get that outwith the bubble, it's not literal death to insult or be insulted.
Far more worrying is how long this online poison has been around. 2010 mentioned. For me, this explains why so many of our youngish teachers are captured. eg. The Paisley 'Drag Queen story hour'.
Out here, we think safeguarding children is paramount, the cult see no problem pornifying the kids.
The Scottish government is simply one of the worst. This is the sort of material they are embedding in our schools and they can only do it with the teachers on board.
I dipped a toe in tumblr a few years back. Created an account just to follow some fandoms I was interested in (not anime!). Didn't really post anything, and forgot about the account for some year, until I finally got around to deleting it. Even just following a few obscure scifi sites, the posts that would come across my feed would also include lots of top-rated and re-blogged ones, and a lot of them were just spewing bile at anything and anyone. Plus there was some super-weird fetish stuff on there. He's right that they'd fetishise anything. I did not want that shit in my feed but even though I followed nothing like it, there it was.
My primary impression was of a hatred of adults, actually. It was internet Lord of the Flies. I logged back in to delete just after the pandemic hit and there were lots of teenagers eviscerating adults for complaining that working and looking after children at home was difficult (which it was). They were saying ludicrous stuff like how this meant that all these parents must hate their children, with no conception that said parents had to work to, you know, provide the essentials of life for said children. It was full-on teenage melodrama allowed to grow, unchecked, into toxic entitlement and vicious hatred. I deleted without a backward glance!
Another way this manifest was that people following shows would have all these fantasies about how "queer" the characters were, then when the writers didn't follow through on this, they'd absolutely lose it and rail against them for various phobias. The prime example at the time I was briefly active was the Sherlock series. I don't know if Mark Gatiss or Stephen Moffat realised, but they were being virtually crucified for not providing the Sherlock/Watson slash ending the fandom wanted. Like, if you want that, write your wish fulfillment fanfic, don't take it as a personal betrayal! It was like they actually expected that writers owed them, the fans, exactly what they demanded. Bonkers.
I would check out Default Friend, her whole Substack is about delving deep into internet culture and disassembling fandom. "Queer ships" come up often, as do many other revolting things the internet has done to young people's sex lives.
This reminds me of something I once read in the comments section of The AV Club (before it went to shit), which summed up the internet this way: "When you cross a diary with a bathroom wall, you’re going to get a lot of bullshit that’s unbearably mopey and violently obscene." Goes double for Tumblr, from the sound of it.
Well, that was a bit of a hot mess, but interesting to get an understanding of how twisted thought processes can become without anyone to put the brakes on them by examining them in a non-mental environment.
Teachers and educational psychotherapists should read this article and the relevant threads on Tumblr, etc as soon as possible.
This is a new domain of mental health awareness: teachers must develop techniques to build scepticism, critical thinking and self-reliance in kids at an earlier age than before.
Fortunately only a minority of kids who glance at these sites become enthralled. Teachers and parents have a responsibility to keep them from mental as well as physical harm. Vigilance and questioning.
I think it's the kind of kids who would once have become artists and musicians and activists, that's another worry. that we're losing a generation of such people to navel gazing.
Yes. I agree with you: these kids are more sensitive to emotions than the majority. They follow too well the emotional thread and end up "over-empathizing" with "the victims" and stultifying their own growth. The overall effect is infantilising.
You touched on the artistic kids in your interview with Elaine Miller - where she spoke as a scientist, which is my background. I see your concern, and it is real.
Graham... can you see yourself in these kids at all? The ones who are being stunted by all this-- Tumblr, genderology-- and turned inward? So their creativity becomes a kind of self-cannibalism? If all that been around when you were their age, could you have been caught in this hall of mirrors yourself?
I'm certainly a "creative" type of person myself, but I'm also very analytical, and logic/rationality have always been extremely important to me, so perhaps this would have provided sufficient protection... yet I can't help but wonder.
"We had fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare"...
I think it's kind of always taken 9 parts perspiration for every 1 part inspiration. That's the excuse I'm sticking with, at least - I'm more worried that we're losing a generation's art and music to chilling effects and regressive activism.
Graham, I am a theatre director/choreo and I just did a little show with 6 teenage girls. 3 of them were identifying as "queer." One wanted to be called a male name, the other 2 were, from what I could gather, calling themselves gender fluid for the moment. I am so afraid for the theater and "art room" kids. :( There is much more I could say about the changes in this cohort over the past 5 years.
Yes I know someone who just shrugs and thinks you can’t anything about it. But why can’t she just say “no. This is bollocks. Why are you playing along with this?”
Agree! And an understanding of their own biology in sex-segregated classes where it is not just about periods or wet dreams, but about hormones and what that does to your feelings towards others and to your own sense of self. Maybe this happens already, I don't know... I am not that type of teacher.
As Prof Richard Corradi said: "Unlike medical diseases, psychiatric disorders have no diagnostic biologic markers—no physical findings, laboratory tests, or imaging studies. Psychiatric diagnoses consist of symptom checklists determined by committee consensus. It should come as no surprise that the process is exquisitely reactive to prevailing cultural and political winds". https://thefederalist.com/2016/11/17/psychiatry-professor-transgenderism-mass-hysteria-similar-1980s-era-junk-science/
I am talking specifically about the effect of testosterone or oestrogen on behaviour or mental function, not the physical effects on the body, including metabolism.
The biochemistry and metabolic pathways are very well understood now, and this knowledge has allowed the "fine tuning" of dosage to transwomen and T-men for everyday consumption, but not long-term harm which accompanies this ingestion.
It comes back to the lack of any baseline measurement in psychiatry. Without any measurable variable it is impossible to quantify the emotional effects of T and E.
I work with children and young people with mental health problems and it is very helpful to read this article as it gives an insight into the world many of them inhabit. It is only when we attempt to understand that we can begin to help by offering an alternative. Thank you for posting this, Graham
I was also thinking that it's part of why trans activism etc. is such a middle class phenomenon. The working class kids don't have the luxury of spending hours ruminating about their identity on tumblr, because they're supporting their families with second jobs, or being unpaid carers, or just can't afford good internet, and it's anyway wildly outside the scope of their experiences.
Class is seldom commented on in discussion about what's driving this movement -- which seems to be a myriad factors -- but maybe it deserves more attention. A criminologist writing on Twitter has observed in relation to ONS stats (England & Wales) for trans-identified male prisoners as convicted sex offenders (48% in 2019, compared with ?19% of all male prisoners) that these are "bad" stats: not because they're wrong, but because further information is needed to interpret what they mean. And this is that (apparently) most TiM prisoners are middle class: characteristic of a wider trans population, and generally display no OTHER criminal behaviours over a broad range for which working class males get convicted and locked up. So it's in the absence of the usual rates of conviction for theft, robbery, other kinds of assault etc (as more working class kind of crime) that sex offences form a much higher proportion of the crimes for which middle class trans-identified males are convicted, than they do for males generally.
But, he says, there is much better evidence that trans-identified males DO have a higher rate of sex offending than males generally: (99% of sex offenders are male, 88% of victims are female). (But he doesn't say where this evidence is to be found: professional journals & research papers?)
A high rate of sex offending among middle class trans-identified males seems hardly surprising given this movement's focus on sexuality and gender, and the range of associated mostly male paraphilias. These are all studied & written about by middle class male academics, as sexologists with more than obsessive interest in male sexuality themselves. The founding fathers of transactivism included pedophiles and (in the interest of "science") at least one child abuser: getting six year old twins to simulate adult sex.
That's interesting, and it's certainly worth looking at in more detail, particularly how it seems to be falling along class lines. I was aware of the high rate of trans-identified sex offenders in jail but I wasn't sure how much of that was men trying to game the system (particularly in places with self-ID). I'm no psychologist or criminologist, but I understand that paraphilias tend to cluster, and I suppose those that are linked to higher rates of sexual offending (e.g. exhibitionism) may co-occur with others that are not necessarily so. I suspect a lot of it these days may be connected to enjoying violent porn, with one extreme type leading to consumption of more extreme types, feeding harmful paraphilic behaviours.
My impression is that paraphilias seem to be a matter of eroticizing power dynamics, particularly humiliation/shame. This, I think, makes them inherently dangerous, since they're indicative of a predatory mind set-- being turned on by vulnerability and its exploitation. You'd think that men who enjoy being humiliated wouldn't pose a threat, but, understood this way, it makes sense that they do. Just look at the cases reported here, where men dressed as little girls rape real little girls. Or the well-documented phenomenon of male serial killers photographing themselves dressed as women, specifically their victims. The desire to be humiliated and the desire to humiliate seem, for all practical purposes, interchangeable.
"Eroticising power dynamics, particularly humiliation/shame" -- I don't know: don't know enough about BDSM to know what comes first: arousal or shame. Or what causes what. In the case of pedophilia it seems that arousal is the cause of the power dynamics of adult over child: given there are "virtuous pedophiles" who feel attracted to minors but regard this with distress & do NOT follow through.
Whereas active pedophiles appear to feel no shame, & seek to justify their freedom by attributing sexual feelings to children, so that no "abuse" is involved: ie denial of power dynamics.
In the case of AGP and GAMP it appears again that arousal comes first: but the power dynamics of "wanting to be a woman" operate on an internalised (patriarchal) objectification of women as inferior to men, and not quite human, from gendered socialisation. So even wanting to "become" a woman is shameful and humiliating -- let alone carrying it through. It might also be an escape from the burden of being a Man: also shameful. And enraging (in male entitlement mode) when these inferior creatures then don't accept your sacrifices & debasement to become one of them...
Yes ONS stats for criminal offenders/offences in England & Wales will be increasingly unreliable, since the MoJ and police now record offenders by gender ID, not sex. We have de facto self-ID despite failure (so far) of attempts to legalise it. I should have said the 48% and 19% figures were for (I think, needs checking) 2018 & 2019 respectively. The rate of convicted sex offenders among women prisoners at the same times (I think) were 2% and 3%. With a tiny number of female prisoners overall compared with men, the inclusion of even a few TIMs as "women" could easily double the apparent sex offending rate of females.
This is partly why it is so egregious that offenders are recorded by gender ID, not by sex, in the criminal justice system: not to mention TIM sex offenders being foisted onto women prisoners.
Yes according to Blanchard & others, paraphilias -- most of which are male -- seldom exist singly and can be in clusters of up to five. Currently the lead psychologist Dr Richards at the Tavistock GIDS, a TIM who is also president of the British Psychological Association and prominent in WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, is pressing for the DSM-5 to drop all "non-criminal" paraphilias (ie pedophila, necrophilia) as "Disorders" and normalise them.
But (according to Genevieve Gluck) Richards is also trying to fudge the boundary between pedophilia and "ageplay" (adult males dressing up in nappies, etc) as not being related -- whereas other studies say these two paraphilias very often occur together.
Not a long way from the pedophile Foucault who originated post-Structuralist "everything is a cultural construct" obfuscation on which transgender ideology so heavily relies, or the sexologist Dr John Money who never reported active pedophiles among his clients to the police, and forced six-year old male twins -- one with botched sex reassignment surgery -- to simulate adult heterosexual sex. They both later committed suicide.
An apparent authority on autogyneohilia on Twitter who keeps correcting me (one way of learning -- I follow him but he gives me the creeps) maintains there is no "notable" connection between AGP and pedophilia: rather to GAMP, gynandromorphophilia -- a sadomasochostic fixation (links to BDSM) with becoming a woman, as an inferior being.
This makes sense to me of what I understand as narcissistic rage of TIMS whose identity as "women" is, after such self-debasement to "become" a woman, not validated by females. Hence the hatred and vitriol, rape and death threats directed at "TERFs". But it's also explicable in terms of routine cult dynamics of demonising and "othering" non-believers in the gender religion. And the general high level of hysteria in believers.
Gluck has also written about the use and effects of online porn: with rocketing rates of searches on PornHub with the search term "trans" in the last few years. And a similar explosion in discussions of trans-related topics on Reddit: with signups of 50k to 450k. Particularly for "Sissy porn" addressed to "Beta males" deemed to have no chance with women, therefore better be "trans" & have sex with men: with apparently a demand for TIMs, often as prostitutes: also as they have trouble getting work.
Sissy porn includes "Sissy Hypno", hypnotic tracks designed to aid beta male transition by "Bimboification". Newly trans Die Grünen MP Ganserer displays the kind of Barbie doll/Bimbo outfit that suggests he might have been into Sissy hypno.
Another yes, sort of: Gluck reports an increase in male sexual violence and misogyny associated with addictive use of online porn. And someone on this forum reported that one in five searches on PornHub for pedophilic porn are now by British males, but I don't know the source for that.
It was messy and I disagreed with big parts, and he has issues - but that’s the point, isn’t it? These unsupervised spaces like tumblr allow the most unhinged people to set the bar and suck in adolescents and screw them up.
In my day you might have had one toxic mate, who offered dangerous answers to teenage angst, but it was happening in real life, where you had three normal mates, too, who you learned to gravitate towards instead. On tumblr and TikTok etc , these kids have hundreds of toxic penpals, few stable alternatives, and god knows how much time in isolation with them. I’m horribly interested to see how long my generation will continue to allow workplaces to bow down to cry bullies, and to embrace obvious madness like gender identity ideology.
Nearly gave up when the anti-feminism got too oppressive but made it to the end. Not sure how much I want to understand reasons for transactivism any more, too complicated & belong to a generation I have nothing to do with. Tumblr sounds like a worse version of the most self-indulgent, self-pitying, aggressive stuff seen on Twitter. Not keen on interacting with such people. Author of this marathon article sounds more intelligent & self-aware than most.
the problem is Tumblr's age group. It's bad enough what Twitter does to adults. Imagine what this is doing to kids? I think this is a very important document
Yes it is. Need to read it again & think what to do: seemed necessary to venture onto Tumblr & see for myself, however reluctant. Too floored by it on first reading.
The thing that I wonder - based on reading all that - is, are the people that have turned to places like Tublr and formed their young self- and world-concepts from it, people who would have gone off some kind of deep end anyway, even in a pre-internet world? Or does existing online in that way, with all its feeding-upon-itself-ness, cause a large percentage of people who would have "gotten over themselves" in real life, to go off the deep end?
The problem is teenagers are always trying to go off various deep ends. But with hormones and puberty blockers Tumblr could be one they can’t get back from. They’re sealing shut their ability to grow out of it. That’s the worry.
And the author of this is clearly very young. Possibly not even 25 - which is when the brain is finally fully grown. So not had much life experience. And those of us in our 50s and beyond - who by definition have lots of knowledge and experience, are decried as Karens, Boomers etc and told we need to 'educate' ourselves. The adults need to shout much more loudly that teenagers mean puberty means hormones, a jumbled, exciting, terrifying rush of them. Which is where all the other stuff stems from. Feelings, doubts, questioning, pushing boundaries, risk-taking etc. Youngsters need to be taught how to ride that period safely and productively. Not just allowed to retreat into some dark corner and attempt to analyse themselves out of it. It will all settle down but you have to go through it first. All this intense navel-gazing and self-indulgence and agonising misses the point.
To me, adolescence seems like a time of extremes: you ping-pong back and forth between being closer to an adult... and then being closer to a little kid. It's confusing as hell. For example, there's the familiar image of hormone-addled teens who are all about sex... but that's only half the story. The other half is being scared of, and even-- little-kid-like-- GROSSED OUT by sex. Which you can actually see in this guy's account of Tumblr: porn flyin' at ya from every direction... right alongside a strong puritanical streak worthy of the Junior Anti-Sex League from Orwell's "1984". That's adolescence in a nutshell.
What's missing is... adults in the room. To put the brakes on all this teenage extremism. They're testing limits; that's natural. But they're not FINDING any... so they just keep going. Which isn't.
Very glad to have read this. It is, as he said, a crash course in Tumblr, for those of us too old to have encountered it at a young age, or at all. (Badly in need of editing and subheads.) (I'm obvs not the Helena he refers to, whose story of detransitioning back into her female self we read recently.)
The Tumblr theory provides a partial explanation for the current insanity that has overtaken college-age trans activism, male and female. (Many parents of ROGD children desperately need explanations.) As he said, the Internet and its worlds of social media hit these children's pockets at a terrifyingly young age.
But the author's story has absolutely zero to do with the utter misogyny of most trans activism, and the cluelessness of politicians and officeholders. Here in the US, politicians referring to mothers as “birthing parents” or “partners of fathers”? In the UK, politicians thinking it’s wrong to say only women have cervixes? Or stating that men can get one? These people were never steeped in Tumblr tea, and need to be held to account for their idiocy.
As for media figures, well. They’re no longer real journalists, most of them. They’re members of the Industrial Entertainment Complex, and we’ve all seen how THAT enterprise conducts itself, at Sunday's Oscars.
As has been said, there's no talking to or convincing trans activists and their media valets. We just have to talk past them.
I appreciate your comment very much, but I did want to highlight something with this piece which often goes unaddressed in the detransitioner media sphere, namely that it's young women driving the movement forward. The social contagion mostly affects women in large part because women are the ones predominantly pushing it onto each other (though that's not to say men don't). I believe the misogyny of the trans movement overall is less about the misogyny coming from men but from women who don't want to be women (and who don't want men to be men).
I don't believe it's *all* women, obviously not, I know many men who have been groomed by older men into transitioning, and when starting to detransition have met many men trying to convince me not to detransition, but overwhelmingly it is driven by women and by female-dominated social circles, and I think it does a disservice to all the young girls and boys that are getting caught up in this to pretend otherwise. There are very predatory women out there who are trying to convince younger girls to transition, and the feminist framing of the issue obscures their actions entirely.
That is my problem with the radical feminist framing of the trans issue beyond my broader critiques of feminism overall. It offers a very simplistic view of how this developed and attempts to salvage the reputation of its own ideology rather than the lives of the people it's ruined. You can see it in this very comment section with some people saying, "we don't need to understand this ideology, we just need power and money to stop it." They don't really care about the lives ruined by this, in fact, they resent us for having made these decisions in the first place, especially the men and boys like myself.
I fully acknowledge that powerful men were the ones who decided to push this on the world at large, the Pritzkers and Rothblatts of the world, but it could not have been done without the willing participation of the institutions and institutional agents carrying it out, the gender clinics and Planned Parenthoods and public schools which are mostly staffed by women, the vast majority of whom consider themselves progressives and feminists. Those women aren't doing this out of loyalty to Pritzker or Rothblatt, but to pursue their own ambitions and make themselves feel like they're doing something good.
In my honest opinion, I think reducing the world to "oppressor/oppressed" dynamics is how we got here in the first place, and I think ignoring the complicated social fabric that undergirds all of this because it doesn't fit a particular ideological frame is dangerous and self-serving.
Respectfully, Limpidā, teen girls on Tumblr doesn’t explain men the age of Rothblatt and Pritzker, Jeopardy contestant Amy Schneider and US Cabinetmember Rachel Levine, and hundreds, and now thousands of high-profile men in midlife suddenly deciding to live as women. Doubt cyclist Rachel McKinnon or weightlifter Laurel Hubbard spent much time in their teens on Tumblr, either.
Moreover, you said yourself that no one can know for sure who the posters are on Tumblr, or what sex they were. But given what you have said, Tumblr/isolation/mental illness sounds like a partial explanation of the current hysteria & transactivism of younger cohorts.
Nevertheless, T activism began years before the Internet and social media. Originally having resisted including transsexuals in gay rights advocacy, gay rights orgs in the 1990s were pressured to include T and “LGBT” was born. In the 2000s, increased gay and lesbian social acceptance + same-sex marriage were achieved, and ma$$ively well-endowed gay rights orgs pivoted to T rights.
Social media of all varieties put this on steroids.
Nothing this complicated has a single explanation. Thank you for your explanation of the Tumblr portion. Very sorry for terrible experiences, and for the detrans Helena's experiences.
Middle-aged men who transition are autogynephiles going through midlife crisis. This I know. Many are extreme perverts. This I also know and I've written about. I've brushed up against them many times. Rothblatt and Pritzker are ideological transhumanists, who believe in the transcension of humanity into machine. Much of the elite ruling class believe the same. Large portions of the far-right and the far-left believe the same as well. It is an extremely disturbing genocidal ideology and worldview, and according to Rothblatt, transgenderism is the stepping stone to it.
The Tumblr portion is only important because this is where the currently hegemonic strains of transgenderism were developed, and this is where children and teenagers my age and now younger were first radicalized into this ideology and others. The middle-class young people who were on Tumblr in their teens are in education, in the NGO sector, and in the corporate boardroom today. They developed the more radical strains of wokeism as children alongside semi-illiterate graduate students and never grew out of it. My ex, whom I reference in the longer piece, is still a firm believer in all of this, and in the social justice role of the teacher, and she now works with children.
This is where we were all groomed to be activists, groomed to transition, and some of us groomed by pedophiles. The activists are now grooming other young activists, only they're doing it in schools and in the therapist's office as well as online. Tumblr is one node in the vast web of institutions and political actors involved here, most of which (at least in the contemporary period) I would say stems from Pritzker and Rothblatt. But it connects to other nodes, and in very significant ways.
I'm not trans, I'm a detransitioner. Many detrans women I know agree with this analysis as well, including Helena. You didn't read the comment if you think my solution is to simply "blame it on the women." That's a projection because all your ilk do is blame it on the men. Men and women both have roles to play in this, but it overwhelmingly affects women, both as perpetrators and victims. Men are not the ones transitioning girls, they're transitioning boys. Women are transitioning other women. All my nurses and therapists who affirmed me were women. It's not about playing the blame game, it's about acknowledging reality. You don't seem ready to do that.
I think that what people tend to forget about misogyny is... it's not as though boys are taken away and indoctrinated with it in private. This is deeply-rooted in the culture: EVERYBODY absorbs it. And that most definitely includes girls/women. Sure, misogyny operates in different ways for each sex, but no one is immune from it. Unfortunately.
He seems pretty incely to me. I wish people would consider the variety of cultures around the world before they talk about what's "natural" for men and women!
I had a girlfriend the entire time I was trans who repeatedly sexually abused me, destroyed my sense of self, and encouraged and fetishized my transition. Tumblr feminism formed the foundational basis of her justifications for abusing me. But because I complain about the role of feminism in enabling female sexual abuse, I'm an incel. Got it.
Naw, you’re trying to figure things out. You made some valid points. Try not to get defensive. That’s a lot of words and feelings you laid out there. People don’t have to agree with it all. I get what you said about feeling messed up because you’re a white straight male. I can see how this is a problem, since it’s true, especially now, that it’s okay to dismiss anything and everything with an insult against same. It’s weak and lazy. I agree. Generalizations are sh*t. It’s the sign of a lost argument. But you’ve kind of done the same with feminism. That’s okay. It’s your feelings. Your analysis. I suspect like most of us your positions will change as you get older. There are contradictions in everything, all theories. That’s how life works. It’s why we are in a constant state of questioning. A constant state of conflict.
This comment wasn't a disagreement, it was an insult. You're right that I have to learn not to take things personally, especially now that I'm a microcelebrity in this niche. At the same time, it's hard not to when I've been through this hell, telegraphed it as clearly as it happened, and still get called an incel despite never *ever* saying anything remotely close to "women owe me sex" anywhere in the piece or, indeed, anywhere online. But still, you're right. I shouldn't take it personally. These people are strangers.
I would also argue that what you call Tumblr feminism has very little to do with radical feminism. If it did, there wouldn't be a problem. I think certainly most women on this site would call themselves feminists, so they rankle when they hear the word used disparagingly.
I would argue that it does. The "oppressor/oppressed" dynamic that feminists believe exists between men and women is as central to Tumblr feminism as it is to old-school radical feminism. The only real difference is that they added "cis and trans" on top of it, and many of these girls aren't trying to escape womanhood to become men, but to become trans, thereby avoiding their permanent "oppressor" status (which is exactly what I did).
Speaking of Dworkin, she actually wrote very favorably and extensively about transsexuals (except for that one column about AGP), and she is a favorite among the trans-inclusionary radical feminists on the site. Here is an article by her husband explaining her position posthumously: https://bostonreview.net/articles/john-stoltenberg-andrew-dworkin-was-trans-ally/
Additionally, the person who coined the term "transgender" in the first place was Leslie Feinberg, herself a butch lesbian radical feminist and early queer theorist. She's also the author of "Stone Butch Blues," a favorite among many radical feminists and lesbian separatists, both of the pro- and anti-trans varieties. Though she was clearly influenced by Butler, her stronger influences came from women like Steinem and Dworkin, through-and-through second-wavers.
I highlight this not because I believe transgenderism to be some kind of feminist conspiracy or that we live under an oppressive matriarchy, but because the ideological underpinnings do exist within radical feminism, it's just a different strain of it. Some radical feminists believe the eradication of men is a necessity for female liberation. Some believe they have to set up their own country. Some believe they have to liberate themselves from the burden of female anatomy and reproduction. Some believe that the problem lies in how we socially construct gender. Some believe all male criminality is the result of conditioning. Some believe that blurring the line between the sexes is necessary in order to liberate women. Some believe the line should be strictly enforced, with men subjugated. They're all wrong, in my estimation, but they are all competing strains of radical feminism.
I understand that they rankle when they hear it used disparagingly (I mean, I'm rankling at being called an incel), but I do think that in order to understand the full texture of the problem, anyone who is motivated to put a stop to this needs to understand the mentality of the children and adults caught up in this. No one can understand it if they attempt to apply their own ideological filter over the people going through it.
They also likewise need to acknowledge that since this is predominantly affecting women, it is predominantly women who are pushing it forward. This is something that many feminists I've interacted with refuse to believe, but it's true. The social contagion is spreading mostly between other women, which means it's other women who are grooming and transitioning these girls. I've seen it happen firsthand, but I get told I'm a misogynist for pointing it out. They often use the same tactics that male groomers use on their victims (male or female), i.e., lovebombing, exposure to pornography, threats of self-harm, and solicitation of sexual favors. But if you say that women are doing these things, feminists often don't believe you because they MUST believe men are worse.
I consider myself a feminist. I have not read a single work of feminist or gender theory and don't intend to (better uses of my time!). The only feminist "thinker" I have really heard of is Germaine Greer. I don't think you need to know any of that stuff to see the obvious, which is that women and girls are discriminated against the world over, and not just in "traditional" societies or countries such as Saudi Arabia, but in our societies too - just in more pernicious ways. This upsets and enrages me. All the other stuff is academic theorising and not relevant to the real world, in my opinion.
This article was interesting to me, because I grew up when the ArpaNet/Internet existed, but the web didn't, and I had relatively early access to it from around age 12 onwards (from around 1976). Back then, the only things one could do online were text-chat with people at universities and some government contracting companies, read humorous files people had created and made available, and, later, interact with people on Usenet. It was even more male-dominated back then, but there were a few women there as well, mostly engineering students. The level of discourse was quite different from the way it is now - most people online came from pretty intellectual and scientific backgrounds, valued reasoned debate and clever humor. There definely was some stuff you'd expect from male-dominated groups, but I found that the women in that world were accorded quite a bit of respect - it was about how smart/witty you were, not about your sex, and almost all of the women I knew in person from online at that time were very valued and well-treated - maybe due to their rarity.
Then again, these are almost all people 18 and over, so they had grown up in a pre-online world, so that would explain some of the difference in attitude as well. I was the "annoying high school kid" in these groups. ;-)
I've never really come to terms with the fact that the online world went from people being relatively cordial/intelligent/witty/fair on average, to the messy free-for-all insult/insulted-fest its become. :-(
Well, what to make of that? If I were marking it at undergraduate level, it would be somewhere around 55% (if a first year student). There are some good insights, and I learned new things. There is some referencing, and the references add to the whole. However, it is far too long and fails to separate the objective from the subjective (though I doubt that the author expected the article to be seen by so many people outside its intended audience). The insights into an environment I know nothing about are tantalising. I knew about the existence of Tumblr, but never realised what an influential platform it is/was - I thought it had folded some years ago - especially on young women. It leaves more questions than answers in some areas, e.g. a comment about how it was being manipulated by adults to groom young people, and I would have been pleased to see information on that rather than the soul-baring (though again, I recognise that we are not the original intended audience for this). The comments about feminism, whilst challenging, are important to show how it can be (and maybe actually is) being viewed by both trans-identifying girls/young women and detrans boys/young men. We tend to view feminism as not being a threat to men other than by equalising opportunities, but if there is a dynamic in play amongst even a small proportion of young people that feminism is about women taking on the same power roles that men have, then it needs to be included in the analysis of what is happening. Fearful men fight back and fight dirty.
Thank you, Limpidă, for an interesting, if both stylistically and intellectually challenging, read.
I want to make sure everyone understands why I posted this. It's not about feeling sympathy for men, it's about trying to understand the insanity that has gripped the world. I think Tumblr is a major part of that insanity, and this essay just makes total sense to me when it's about *that*. Even the parts where he goes off on one about feminists could be seen through the funhouse mirror of his tumblr experience. Resentment of feminism, it seems to me, is one of the side effects of the trauma of developing as a young person while on that insane site.
Sure, it's long, and its author has some issues, but if you find a better explanation of what Silicon Valley is doing to developing minds, I'd love to see it.
"Thousands upon thousands of young women spoke at length about the humiliations and abuses of their childhoods, frothing themselves up into a frenzy about how awful and evil men were. The feelings-first interactions of the site fed a black-and-white culture, making it so that any negative personal experiences with boys in youth were hyperbolized, misunderstood, inflated, or fabricated from whole cloth so as to attract attention and sympathy. Many of the women who would catastrophize about their experiences were themselves craven sex addicts with violent fetishes, projecting the rapacity of their desires onto every man they came into contact with. Were anyone to call attention to this fairly obvious dynamic, especially a man, they’d immediately get hounded and smeared as a rape apologist, misogynist, victim-blamer, and perhaps even as a rapist themselves."
Another Arty Morty moment.
Leave Arty alone, please.
No. Arty's response to his friend's suicide was to blame women, This character's response to the harm he suffered from TRA cult is to blame the fact that Tumblr was full of daft teenage girls. All the rules of misogyny. All the time.
A SMALL minority of women were calling his friend a pervert. His friend who had died. It was disgusting.
Yep. You’re right on with that. If men could just ONCE acknowledge the entirely unreasonable demand they make upon women and girls to be unwavering emotional supports for them into adulthood, and even old age, they might actually enable themselves to become emotionally mature for a change, which is good for everyone. “Social” media isn’t, however, and seems to spread narcissism and mental delusions, which isn’t good for anyone. Not surprising that it is tech companies with majorities of male employees in their ranks who control these destructive platforms.
As usual, it’s just another case of a man blaming women for all that is rotten in the world. It sure gets tiresome reading the drivel from uninspiring, unintelligent men. If a person is a wine connoisseur, they may well find that by regularly associating themselves with teetotalers, they come to feel debased for their appreciation of it. Man has no spiritual authority over women, and never has, only claimed to by domination. That tiresome claim to knowledge of “our Creator” is their group narcissistic manipulation, which results in patriarchy. He decrees that this is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. Freaking tyrannical! Misandry is primarily expressed by men towards other men and always has been, yet you choose to associate yourself with girls and women, who are even bi/homo-sexual, and then WHINE about what you perceive to be theirs? It’s rather shameful that after more than three thousand years of it, men go so far as to be in denial about the enslavement of women by and to men, normalizing it as if Nature caused it somehow, not them!
I thought this was fascinating. Thanks for posting. Part of what he describes shows just how the demonisation of the so-called ‘cis-het normative white man’, and even the gay white or straight black males who are also too ‘cis patriarchal’, seems to be one of the roots why so many young people want to be ‘queer’. After all, why would they not all want to escape being the evil oppressors/aggressors and get social status and affirmation to boot? I think this is the case for white girls/young women too who do anything to avoid being labelled Karens/TERFs.
To get a window into how this happens and the true effed-upness of the world of Tumblr is enlightening — and terrifying to know this is happening to kids. Can’t somebody implode bloody Tumblr??
Thanks for posting this Graham. A bit of a hot mess as Katrina commented earlier but (being of mature years) the penny has dropped about the utterly insane, poisonous bubble that exists out there. I wonder how parents, these days manage to counter the madness.
For me two things have particularly struck.
The cry bully culture. They clearly think that calling people names such as bigot or transphobe actually hurts 'normal' folk. They don't get that outwith the bubble, it's not literal death to insult or be insulted.
Far more worrying is how long this online poison has been around. 2010 mentioned. For me, this explains why so many of our youngish teachers are captured. eg. The Paisley 'Drag Queen story hour'.
Out here, we think safeguarding children is paramount, the cult see no problem pornifying the kids.
The Scottish government is simply one of the worst. This is the sort of material they are embedding in our schools and they can only do it with the teachers on board.
https://caltonjock.com/2022/03/29/gender-queer-is-the-shape-of-things-to-come/
I dipped a toe in tumblr a few years back. Created an account just to follow some fandoms I was interested in (not anime!). Didn't really post anything, and forgot about the account for some year, until I finally got around to deleting it. Even just following a few obscure scifi sites, the posts that would come across my feed would also include lots of top-rated and re-blogged ones, and a lot of them were just spewing bile at anything and anyone. Plus there was some super-weird fetish stuff on there. He's right that they'd fetishise anything. I did not want that shit in my feed but even though I followed nothing like it, there it was.
My primary impression was of a hatred of adults, actually. It was internet Lord of the Flies. I logged back in to delete just after the pandemic hit and there were lots of teenagers eviscerating adults for complaining that working and looking after children at home was difficult (which it was). They were saying ludicrous stuff like how this meant that all these parents must hate their children, with no conception that said parents had to work to, you know, provide the essentials of life for said children. It was full-on teenage melodrama allowed to grow, unchecked, into toxic entitlement and vicious hatred. I deleted without a backward glance!
Another way this manifest was that people following shows would have all these fantasies about how "queer" the characters were, then when the writers didn't follow through on this, they'd absolutely lose it and rail against them for various phobias. The prime example at the time I was briefly active was the Sherlock series. I don't know if Mark Gatiss or Stephen Moffat realised, but they were being virtually crucified for not providing the Sherlock/Watson slash ending the fandom wanted. Like, if you want that, write your wish fulfillment fanfic, don't take it as a personal betrayal! It was like they actually expected that writers owed them, the fans, exactly what they demanded. Bonkers.
I remember the Great Sherlock Meltdown. "They queerbaited us. Waaaah"
"Queerbaited" - that was the word I was looking for, thank you! Yes, it was pathetic.
Amazing. I sort of wish I had a good way to monitor this stuff. Does anyone write regularly about it?
I don't know, I'm pretty out of touch now. I almost think you'd have to create an account to really see what it's like, but that way lies madness!
I would check out Default Friend, her whole Substack is about delving deep into internet culture and disassembling fandom. "Queer ships" come up often, as do many other revolting things the internet has done to young people's sex lives.
This reminds me of something I once read in the comments section of The AV Club (before it went to shit), which summed up the internet this way: "When you cross a diary with a bathroom wall, you’re going to get a lot of bullshit that’s unbearably mopey and violently obscene." Goes double for Tumblr, from the sound of it.
Well, that was a bit of a hot mess, but interesting to get an understanding of how twisted thought processes can become without anyone to put the brakes on them by examining them in a non-mental environment.
exactly. this is a fucking problem. A really big one
Teachers and educational psychotherapists should read this article and the relevant threads on Tumblr, etc as soon as possible.
This is a new domain of mental health awareness: teachers must develop techniques to build scepticism, critical thinking and self-reliance in kids at an earlier age than before.
Fortunately only a minority of kids who glance at these sites become enthralled. Teachers and parents have a responsibility to keep them from mental as well as physical harm. Vigilance and questioning.
I think it's the kind of kids who would once have become artists and musicians and activists, that's another worry. that we're losing a generation of such people to navel gazing.
Yes. I agree with you: these kids are more sensitive to emotions than the majority. They follow too well the emotional thread and end up "over-empathizing" with "the victims" and stultifying their own growth. The overall effect is infantilising.
You touched on the artistic kids in your interview with Elaine Miller - where she spoke as a scientist, which is my background. I see your concern, and it is real.
Graham... can you see yourself in these kids at all? The ones who are being stunted by all this-- Tumblr, genderology-- and turned inward? So their creativity becomes a kind of self-cannibalism? If all that been around when you were their age, could you have been caught in this hall of mirrors yourself?
I'm certainly a "creative" type of person myself, but I'm also very analytical, and logic/rationality have always been extremely important to me, so perhaps this would have provided sufficient protection... yet I can't help but wonder.
"We had fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare"...
I think it's kind of always taken 9 parts perspiration for every 1 part inspiration. That's the excuse I'm sticking with, at least - I'm more worried that we're losing a generation's art and music to chilling effects and regressive activism.
Graham, I am a theatre director/choreo and I just did a little show with 6 teenage girls. 3 of them were identifying as "queer." One wanted to be called a male name, the other 2 were, from what I could gather, calling themselves gender fluid for the moment. I am so afraid for the theater and "art room" kids. :( There is much more I could say about the changes in this cohort over the past 5 years.
Yes I know someone who just shrugs and thinks you can’t anything about it. But why can’t she just say “no. This is bollocks. Why are you playing along with this?”
Agree! And an understanding of their own biology in sex-segregated classes where it is not just about periods or wet dreams, but about hormones and what that does to your feelings towards others and to your own sense of self. Maybe this happens already, I don't know... I am not that type of teacher.
No one discusses the emotional effects of hormones in school.
And I doubt that this is discussed in medical school psychiatry classes, except in the specialist context of "gender identity". See the recent "cancelling" of a training day at Great Ormond St Hospital: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/19/great-ormond-street-cancels-trainee-doctor-conference-trans/
As Prof Richard Corradi said: "Unlike medical diseases, psychiatric disorders have no diagnostic biologic markers—no physical findings, laboratory tests, or imaging studies. Psychiatric diagnoses consist of symptom checklists determined by committee consensus. It should come as no surprise that the process is exquisitely reactive to prevailing cultural and political winds". https://thefederalist.com/2016/11/17/psychiatry-professor-transgenderism-mass-hysteria-similar-1980s-era-junk-science/
I think hormones are still poorly understood even in the medical community. Perhaps even by endocrinologists!
I am talking specifically about the effect of testosterone or oestrogen on behaviour or mental function, not the physical effects on the body, including metabolism.
The biochemistry and metabolic pathways are very well understood now, and this knowledge has allowed the "fine tuning" of dosage to transwomen and T-men for everyday consumption, but not long-term harm which accompanies this ingestion.
It comes back to the lack of any baseline measurement in psychiatry. Without any measurable variable it is impossible to quantify the emotional effects of T and E.
I work with children and young people with mental health problems and it is very helpful to read this article as it gives an insight into the world many of them inhabit. It is only when we attempt to understand that we can begin to help by offering an alternative. Thank you for posting this, Graham
I was also thinking that it's part of why trans activism etc. is such a middle class phenomenon. The working class kids don't have the luxury of spending hours ruminating about their identity on tumblr, because they're supporting their families with second jobs, or being unpaid carers, or just can't afford good internet, and it's anyway wildly outside the scope of their experiences.
Class is seldom commented on in discussion about what's driving this movement -- which seems to be a myriad factors -- but maybe it deserves more attention. A criminologist writing on Twitter has observed in relation to ONS stats (England & Wales) for trans-identified male prisoners as convicted sex offenders (48% in 2019, compared with ?19% of all male prisoners) that these are "bad" stats: not because they're wrong, but because further information is needed to interpret what they mean. And this is that (apparently) most TiM prisoners are middle class: characteristic of a wider trans population, and generally display no OTHER criminal behaviours over a broad range for which working class males get convicted and locked up. So it's in the absence of the usual rates of conviction for theft, robbery, other kinds of assault etc (as more working class kind of crime) that sex offences form a much higher proportion of the crimes for which middle class trans-identified males are convicted, than they do for males generally.
But, he says, there is much better evidence that trans-identified males DO have a higher rate of sex offending than males generally: (99% of sex offenders are male, 88% of victims are female). (But he doesn't say where this evidence is to be found: professional journals & research papers?)
A high rate of sex offending among middle class trans-identified males seems hardly surprising given this movement's focus on sexuality and gender, and the range of associated mostly male paraphilias. These are all studied & written about by middle class male academics, as sexologists with more than obsessive interest in male sexuality themselves. The founding fathers of transactivism included pedophiles and (in the interest of "science") at least one child abuser: getting six year old twins to simulate adult sex.
That's interesting, and it's certainly worth looking at in more detail, particularly how it seems to be falling along class lines. I was aware of the high rate of trans-identified sex offenders in jail but I wasn't sure how much of that was men trying to game the system (particularly in places with self-ID). I'm no psychologist or criminologist, but I understand that paraphilias tend to cluster, and I suppose those that are linked to higher rates of sexual offending (e.g. exhibitionism) may co-occur with others that are not necessarily so. I suspect a lot of it these days may be connected to enjoying violent porn, with one extreme type leading to consumption of more extreme types, feeding harmful paraphilic behaviours.
My impression is that paraphilias seem to be a matter of eroticizing power dynamics, particularly humiliation/shame. This, I think, makes them inherently dangerous, since they're indicative of a predatory mind set-- being turned on by vulnerability and its exploitation. You'd think that men who enjoy being humiliated wouldn't pose a threat, but, understood this way, it makes sense that they do. Just look at the cases reported here, where men dressed as little girls rape real little girls. Or the well-documented phenomenon of male serial killers photographing themselves dressed as women, specifically their victims. The desire to be humiliated and the desire to humiliate seem, for all practical purposes, interchangeable.
"Eroticising power dynamics, particularly humiliation/shame" -- I don't know: don't know enough about BDSM to know what comes first: arousal or shame. Or what causes what. In the case of pedophilia it seems that arousal is the cause of the power dynamics of adult over child: given there are "virtuous pedophiles" who feel attracted to minors but regard this with distress & do NOT follow through.
Whereas active pedophiles appear to feel no shame, & seek to justify their freedom by attributing sexual feelings to children, so that no "abuse" is involved: ie denial of power dynamics.
In the case of AGP and GAMP it appears again that arousal comes first: but the power dynamics of "wanting to be a woman" operate on an internalised (patriarchal) objectification of women as inferior to men, and not quite human, from gendered socialisation. So even wanting to "become" a woman is shameful and humiliating -- let alone carrying it through. It might also be an escape from the burden of being a Man: also shameful. And enraging (in male entitlement mode) when these inferior creatures then don't accept your sacrifices & debasement to become one of them...
Yes ONS stats for criminal offenders/offences in England & Wales will be increasingly unreliable, since the MoJ and police now record offenders by gender ID, not sex. We have de facto self-ID despite failure (so far) of attempts to legalise it. I should have said the 48% and 19% figures were for (I think, needs checking) 2018 & 2019 respectively. The rate of convicted sex offenders among women prisoners at the same times (I think) were 2% and 3%. With a tiny number of female prisoners overall compared with men, the inclusion of even a few TIMs as "women" could easily double the apparent sex offending rate of females.
This is partly why it is so egregious that offenders are recorded by gender ID, not by sex, in the criminal justice system: not to mention TIM sex offenders being foisted onto women prisoners.
Yes according to Blanchard & others, paraphilias -- most of which are male -- seldom exist singly and can be in clusters of up to five. Currently the lead psychologist Dr Richards at the Tavistock GIDS, a TIM who is also president of the British Psychological Association and prominent in WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, is pressing for the DSM-5 to drop all "non-criminal" paraphilias (ie pedophila, necrophilia) as "Disorders" and normalise them.
But (according to Genevieve Gluck) Richards is also trying to fudge the boundary between pedophilia and "ageplay" (adult males dressing up in nappies, etc) as not being related -- whereas other studies say these two paraphilias very often occur together.
Not a long way from the pedophile Foucault who originated post-Structuralist "everything is a cultural construct" obfuscation on which transgender ideology so heavily relies, or the sexologist Dr John Money who never reported active pedophiles among his clients to the police, and forced six-year old male twins -- one with botched sex reassignment surgery -- to simulate adult heterosexual sex. They both later committed suicide.
An apparent authority on autogyneohilia on Twitter who keeps correcting me (one way of learning -- I follow him but he gives me the creeps) maintains there is no "notable" connection between AGP and pedophilia: rather to GAMP, gynandromorphophilia -- a sadomasochostic fixation (links to BDSM) with becoming a woman, as an inferior being.
This makes sense to me of what I understand as narcissistic rage of TIMS whose identity as "women" is, after such self-debasement to "become" a woman, not validated by females. Hence the hatred and vitriol, rape and death threats directed at "TERFs". But it's also explicable in terms of routine cult dynamics of demonising and "othering" non-believers in the gender religion. And the general high level of hysteria in believers.
Gluck has also written about the use and effects of online porn: with rocketing rates of searches on PornHub with the search term "trans" in the last few years. And a similar explosion in discussions of trans-related topics on Reddit: with signups of 50k to 450k. Particularly for "Sissy porn" addressed to "Beta males" deemed to have no chance with women, therefore better be "trans" & have sex with men: with apparently a demand for TIMs, often as prostitutes: also as they have trouble getting work.
Sissy porn includes "Sissy Hypno", hypnotic tracks designed to aid beta male transition by "Bimboification". Newly trans Die Grünen MP Ganserer displays the kind of Barbie doll/Bimbo outfit that suggests he might have been into Sissy hypno.
Another yes, sort of: Gluck reports an increase in male sexual violence and misogyny associated with addictive use of online porn. And someone on this forum reported that one in five searches on PornHub for pedophilic porn are now by British males, but I don't know the source for that.
Thank you for posting this Graham!
It was messy and I disagreed with big parts, and he has issues - but that’s the point, isn’t it? These unsupervised spaces like tumblr allow the most unhinged people to set the bar and suck in adolescents and screw them up.
In my day you might have had one toxic mate, who offered dangerous answers to teenage angst, but it was happening in real life, where you had three normal mates, too, who you learned to gravitate towards instead. On tumblr and TikTok etc , these kids have hundreds of toxic penpals, few stable alternatives, and god knows how much time in isolation with them. I’m horribly interested to see how long my generation will continue to allow workplaces to bow down to cry bullies, and to embrace obvious madness like gender identity ideology.
Nearly gave up when the anti-feminism got too oppressive but made it to the end. Not sure how much I want to understand reasons for transactivism any more, too complicated & belong to a generation I have nothing to do with. Tumblr sounds like a worse version of the most self-indulgent, self-pitying, aggressive stuff seen on Twitter. Not keen on interacting with such people. Author of this marathon article sounds more intelligent & self-aware than most.
the problem is Tumblr's age group. It's bad enough what Twitter does to adults. Imagine what this is doing to kids? I think this is a very important document
Yes it is. Need to read it again & think what to do: seemed necessary to venture onto Tumblr & see for myself, however reluctant. Too floored by it on first reading.
See also detransitioners sub-reddit (not Tumblr but similar): https://www.reddit.com/r/detrans/ Posters discuss "path in" and "path out".
Thanks for the link
The thing that I wonder - based on reading all that - is, are the people that have turned to places like Tublr and formed their young self- and world-concepts from it, people who would have gone off some kind of deep end anyway, even in a pre-internet world? Or does existing online in that way, with all its feeding-upon-itself-ness, cause a large percentage of people who would have "gotten over themselves" in real life, to go off the deep end?
The problem is teenagers are always trying to go off various deep ends. But with hormones and puberty blockers Tumblr could be one they can’t get back from. They’re sealing shut their ability to grow out of it. That’s the worry.
And the author of this is clearly very young. Possibly not even 25 - which is when the brain is finally fully grown. So not had much life experience. And those of us in our 50s and beyond - who by definition have lots of knowledge and experience, are decried as Karens, Boomers etc and told we need to 'educate' ourselves. The adults need to shout much more loudly that teenagers mean puberty means hormones, a jumbled, exciting, terrifying rush of them. Which is where all the other stuff stems from. Feelings, doubts, questioning, pushing boundaries, risk-taking etc. Youngsters need to be taught how to ride that period safely and productively. Not just allowed to retreat into some dark corner and attempt to analyse themselves out of it. It will all settle down but you have to go through it first. All this intense navel-gazing and self-indulgence and agonising misses the point.
To me, adolescence seems like a time of extremes: you ping-pong back and forth between being closer to an adult... and then being closer to a little kid. It's confusing as hell. For example, there's the familiar image of hormone-addled teens who are all about sex... but that's only half the story. The other half is being scared of, and even-- little-kid-like-- GROSSED OUT by sex. Which you can actually see in this guy's account of Tumblr: porn flyin' at ya from every direction... right alongside a strong puritanical streak worthy of the Junior Anti-Sex League from Orwell's "1984". That's adolescence in a nutshell.
What's missing is... adults in the room. To put the brakes on all this teenage extremism. They're testing limits; that's natural. But they're not FINDING any... so they just keep going. Which isn't.
I can't believe I actually read all of that.
It was a slog, wasn't it?
Very glad to have read this. It is, as he said, a crash course in Tumblr, for those of us too old to have encountered it at a young age, or at all. (Badly in need of editing and subheads.) (I'm obvs not the Helena he refers to, whose story of detransitioning back into her female self we read recently.)
The Tumblr theory provides a partial explanation for the current insanity that has overtaken college-age trans activism, male and female. (Many parents of ROGD children desperately need explanations.) As he said, the Internet and its worlds of social media hit these children's pockets at a terrifyingly young age.
But the author's story has absolutely zero to do with the utter misogyny of most trans activism, and the cluelessness of politicians and officeholders. Here in the US, politicians referring to mothers as “birthing parents” or “partners of fathers”? In the UK, politicians thinking it’s wrong to say only women have cervixes? Or stating that men can get one? These people were never steeped in Tumblr tea, and need to be held to account for their idiocy.
As for media figures, well. They’re no longer real journalists, most of them. They’re members of the Industrial Entertainment Complex, and we’ve all seen how THAT enterprise conducts itself, at Sunday's Oscars.
As has been said, there's no talking to or convincing trans activists and their media valets. We just have to talk past them.
I appreciate your comment very much, but I did want to highlight something with this piece which often goes unaddressed in the detransitioner media sphere, namely that it's young women driving the movement forward. The social contagion mostly affects women in large part because women are the ones predominantly pushing it onto each other (though that's not to say men don't). I believe the misogyny of the trans movement overall is less about the misogyny coming from men but from women who don't want to be women (and who don't want men to be men).
I don't believe it's *all* women, obviously not, I know many men who have been groomed by older men into transitioning, and when starting to detransition have met many men trying to convince me not to detransition, but overwhelmingly it is driven by women and by female-dominated social circles, and I think it does a disservice to all the young girls and boys that are getting caught up in this to pretend otherwise. There are very predatory women out there who are trying to convince younger girls to transition, and the feminist framing of the issue obscures their actions entirely.
That is my problem with the radical feminist framing of the trans issue beyond my broader critiques of feminism overall. It offers a very simplistic view of how this developed and attempts to salvage the reputation of its own ideology rather than the lives of the people it's ruined. You can see it in this very comment section with some people saying, "we don't need to understand this ideology, we just need power and money to stop it." They don't really care about the lives ruined by this, in fact, they resent us for having made these decisions in the first place, especially the men and boys like myself.
I fully acknowledge that powerful men were the ones who decided to push this on the world at large, the Pritzkers and Rothblatts of the world, but it could not have been done without the willing participation of the institutions and institutional agents carrying it out, the gender clinics and Planned Parenthoods and public schools which are mostly staffed by women, the vast majority of whom consider themselves progressives and feminists. Those women aren't doing this out of loyalty to Pritzker or Rothblatt, but to pursue their own ambitions and make themselves feel like they're doing something good.
In my honest opinion, I think reducing the world to "oppressor/oppressed" dynamics is how we got here in the first place, and I think ignoring the complicated social fabric that undergirds all of this because it doesn't fit a particular ideological frame is dangerous and self-serving.
Respectfully, Limpidā, teen girls on Tumblr doesn’t explain men the age of Rothblatt and Pritzker, Jeopardy contestant Amy Schneider and US Cabinetmember Rachel Levine, and hundreds, and now thousands of high-profile men in midlife suddenly deciding to live as women. Doubt cyclist Rachel McKinnon or weightlifter Laurel Hubbard spent much time in their teens on Tumblr, either.
Moreover, you said yourself that no one can know for sure who the posters are on Tumblr, or what sex they were. But given what you have said, Tumblr/isolation/mental illness sounds like a partial explanation of the current hysteria & transactivism of younger cohorts.
Nevertheless, T activism began years before the Internet and social media. Originally having resisted including transsexuals in gay rights advocacy, gay rights orgs in the 1990s were pressured to include T and “LGBT” was born. In the 2000s, increased gay and lesbian social acceptance + same-sex marriage were achieved, and ma$$ively well-endowed gay rights orgs pivoted to T rights.
Social media of all varieties put this on steroids.
Nothing this complicated has a single explanation. Thank you for your explanation of the Tumblr portion. Very sorry for terrible experiences, and for the detrans Helena's experiences.
Middle-aged men who transition are autogynephiles going through midlife crisis. This I know. Many are extreme perverts. This I also know and I've written about. I've brushed up against them many times. Rothblatt and Pritzker are ideological transhumanists, who believe in the transcension of humanity into machine. Much of the elite ruling class believe the same. Large portions of the far-right and the far-left believe the same as well. It is an extremely disturbing genocidal ideology and worldview, and according to Rothblatt, transgenderism is the stepping stone to it.
The Tumblr portion is only important because this is where the currently hegemonic strains of transgenderism were developed, and this is where children and teenagers my age and now younger were first radicalized into this ideology and others. The middle-class young people who were on Tumblr in their teens are in education, in the NGO sector, and in the corporate boardroom today. They developed the more radical strains of wokeism as children alongside semi-illiterate graduate students and never grew out of it. My ex, whom I reference in the longer piece, is still a firm believer in all of this, and in the social justice role of the teacher, and she now works with children.
This is where we were all groomed to be activists, groomed to transition, and some of us groomed by pedophiles. The activists are now grooming other young activists, only they're doing it in schools and in the therapist's office as well as online. Tumblr is one node in the vast web of institutions and political actors involved here, most of which (at least in the contemporary period) I would say stems from Pritzker and Rothblatt. But it connects to other nodes, and in very significant ways.
Your viewpoint is very interesting- thanks and I wish you well.
TRANS BINGO! When it all falls apart, BLAME IT ON THE WOMEN.
I'm not trans, I'm a detransitioner. Many detrans women I know agree with this analysis as well, including Helena. You didn't read the comment if you think my solution is to simply "blame it on the women." That's a projection because all your ilk do is blame it on the men. Men and women both have roles to play in this, but it overwhelmingly affects women, both as perpetrators and victims. Men are not the ones transitioning girls, they're transitioning boys. Women are transitioning other women. All my nurses and therapists who affirmed me were women. It's not about playing the blame game, it's about acknowledging reality. You don't seem ready to do that.
I think that what people tend to forget about misogyny is... it's not as though boys are taken away and indoctrinated with it in private. This is deeply-rooted in the culture: EVERYBODY absorbs it. And that most definitely includes girls/women. Sure, misogyny operates in different ways for each sex, but no one is immune from it. Unfortunately.
He seems pretty incely to me. I wish people would consider the variety of cultures around the world before they talk about what's "natural" for men and women!
I had a girlfriend the entire time I was trans who repeatedly sexually abused me, destroyed my sense of self, and encouraged and fetishized my transition. Tumblr feminism formed the foundational basis of her justifications for abusing me. But because I complain about the role of feminism in enabling female sexual abuse, I'm an incel. Got it.
Naw, you’re trying to figure things out. You made some valid points. Try not to get defensive. That’s a lot of words and feelings you laid out there. People don’t have to agree with it all. I get what you said about feeling messed up because you’re a white straight male. I can see how this is a problem, since it’s true, especially now, that it’s okay to dismiss anything and everything with an insult against same. It’s weak and lazy. I agree. Generalizations are sh*t. It’s the sign of a lost argument. But you’ve kind of done the same with feminism. That’s okay. It’s your feelings. Your analysis. I suspect like most of us your positions will change as you get older. There are contradictions in everything, all theories. That’s how life works. It’s why we are in a constant state of questioning. A constant state of conflict.
This comment wasn't a disagreement, it was an insult. You're right that I have to learn not to take things personally, especially now that I'm a microcelebrity in this niche. At the same time, it's hard not to when I've been through this hell, telegraphed it as clearly as it happened, and still get called an incel despite never *ever* saying anything remotely close to "women owe me sex" anywhere in the piece or, indeed, anywhere online. But still, you're right. I shouldn't take it personally. These people are strangers.
I would also argue that what you call Tumblr feminism has very little to do with radical feminism. If it did, there wouldn't be a problem. I think certainly most women on this site would call themselves feminists, so they rankle when they hear the word used disparagingly.
I would argue that it does. The "oppressor/oppressed" dynamic that feminists believe exists between men and women is as central to Tumblr feminism as it is to old-school radical feminism. The only real difference is that they added "cis and trans" on top of it, and many of these girls aren't trying to escape womanhood to become men, but to become trans, thereby avoiding their permanent "oppressor" status (which is exactly what I did).
Speaking of Dworkin, she actually wrote very favorably and extensively about transsexuals (except for that one column about AGP), and she is a favorite among the trans-inclusionary radical feminists on the site. Here is an article by her husband explaining her position posthumously: https://bostonreview.net/articles/john-stoltenberg-andrew-dworkin-was-trans-ally/
Additionally, the person who coined the term "transgender" in the first place was Leslie Feinberg, herself a butch lesbian radical feminist and early queer theorist. She's also the author of "Stone Butch Blues," a favorite among many radical feminists and lesbian separatists, both of the pro- and anti-trans varieties. Though she was clearly influenced by Butler, her stronger influences came from women like Steinem and Dworkin, through-and-through second-wavers.
I highlight this not because I believe transgenderism to be some kind of feminist conspiracy or that we live under an oppressive matriarchy, but because the ideological underpinnings do exist within radical feminism, it's just a different strain of it. Some radical feminists believe the eradication of men is a necessity for female liberation. Some believe they have to set up their own country. Some believe they have to liberate themselves from the burden of female anatomy and reproduction. Some believe that the problem lies in how we socially construct gender. Some believe all male criminality is the result of conditioning. Some believe that blurring the line between the sexes is necessary in order to liberate women. Some believe the line should be strictly enforced, with men subjugated. They're all wrong, in my estimation, but they are all competing strains of radical feminism.
I understand that they rankle when they hear it used disparagingly (I mean, I'm rankling at being called an incel), but I do think that in order to understand the full texture of the problem, anyone who is motivated to put a stop to this needs to understand the mentality of the children and adults caught up in this. No one can understand it if they attempt to apply their own ideological filter over the people going through it.
They also likewise need to acknowledge that since this is predominantly affecting women, it is predominantly women who are pushing it forward. This is something that many feminists I've interacted with refuse to believe, but it's true. The social contagion is spreading mostly between other women, which means it's other women who are grooming and transitioning these girls. I've seen it happen firsthand, but I get told I'm a misogynist for pointing it out. They often use the same tactics that male groomers use on their victims (male or female), i.e., lovebombing, exposure to pornography, threats of self-harm, and solicitation of sexual favors. But if you say that women are doing these things, feminists often don't believe you because they MUST believe men are worse.
Fuck my old boots! Isn't it lucky that Dworkin died and left a husband to explain what she really meant.
I consider myself a feminist. I have not read a single work of feminist or gender theory and don't intend to (better uses of my time!). The only feminist "thinker" I have really heard of is Germaine Greer. I don't think you need to know any of that stuff to see the obvious, which is that women and girls are discriminated against the world over, and not just in "traditional" societies or countries such as Saudi Arabia, but in our societies too - just in more pernicious ways. This upsets and enrages me. All the other stuff is academic theorising and not relevant to the real world, in my opinion.
A lot to take in there but I found it very insightful and informative.
Helena's story is definitely worth a read. It's long too (which is fair enough; it covers several years of her life), but well-written and moving.
Will look for your full piece, thanks Limpidā.
Whew!
This article was interesting to me, because I grew up when the ArpaNet/Internet existed, but the web didn't, and I had relatively early access to it from around age 12 onwards (from around 1976). Back then, the only things one could do online were text-chat with people at universities and some government contracting companies, read humorous files people had created and made available, and, later, interact with people on Usenet. It was even more male-dominated back then, but there were a few women there as well, mostly engineering students. The level of discourse was quite different from the way it is now - most people online came from pretty intellectual and scientific backgrounds, valued reasoned debate and clever humor. There definely was some stuff you'd expect from male-dominated groups, but I found that the women in that world were accorded quite a bit of respect - it was about how smart/witty you were, not about your sex, and almost all of the women I knew in person from online at that time were very valued and well-treated - maybe due to their rarity.
Then again, these are almost all people 18 and over, so they had grown up in a pre-online world, so that would explain some of the difference in attitude as well. I was the "annoying high school kid" in these groups. ;-)
I've never really come to terms with the fact that the online world went from people being relatively cordial/intelligent/witty/fair on average, to the messy free-for-all insult/insulted-fest its become. :-(
Well, what to make of that? If I were marking it at undergraduate level, it would be somewhere around 55% (if a first year student). There are some good insights, and I learned new things. There is some referencing, and the references add to the whole. However, it is far too long and fails to separate the objective from the subjective (though I doubt that the author expected the article to be seen by so many people outside its intended audience). The insights into an environment I know nothing about are tantalising. I knew about the existence of Tumblr, but never realised what an influential platform it is/was - I thought it had folded some years ago - especially on young women. It leaves more questions than answers in some areas, e.g. a comment about how it was being manipulated by adults to groom young people, and I would have been pleased to see information on that rather than the soul-baring (though again, I recognise that we are not the original intended audience for this). The comments about feminism, whilst challenging, are important to show how it can be (and maybe actually is) being viewed by both trans-identifying girls/young women and detrans boys/young men. We tend to view feminism as not being a threat to men other than by equalising opportunities, but if there is a dynamic in play amongst even a small proportion of young people that feminism is about women taking on the same power roles that men have, then it needs to be included in the analysis of what is happening. Fearful men fight back and fight dirty.
Thank you, Limpidă, for an interesting, if both stylistically and intellectually challenging, read.