The transgender delusion

Sep 3, 2021 by

by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:

Shon Faye’s book confirms that transgenderism is about control, not autonomy.

Shon Faye is a man who believes he is a woman. He is wholly convinced that, while he might have reached ‘womanhood’ via a different method to, say, my mother, he is as much a woman as she is. I think he is mistaken. In fact, I think he is deluded. In my view, as sincerely held as Faye’s, a male who undergoes castrative surgery or hormonal treatment no more becomes a woman than a man who chops off his ear becomes Vincent van Gogh. I say this not to be insulting but rather to draw attention to one of the key moral dilemmas of the transgender issue – the question of whose beliefs should enjoy precedence at the social and legal level. Mine, and others’, which holds that sex is immutable and that the consequences of pretending otherwise are often quite dire? Or Faye’s, and the trans movement’s more broadly, which posits that sex can be chosen, that children as young as three can be trans, and that anyone who refuses to accept these ‘facts’ is a bigot?

Reading Faye’s new book, The Transgender Issue, is a discombobulating experience. It is well written, in cool, measured tones, and yet it promotes a worldview that will feel wholly alien to most people. There is a disconnect between the steady, seemingly reasonable prose and the fundamentally preposterous claims that are made. So Faye critiques ‘the standardised relationship between one’s genitalia at birth and the assignment of one of two fixed gender identities’ – what the rest of us refer to as ‘declaring the sex of a newborn baby’. ‘Babies born with observable penises are recorded as male’, Faye huffs, as if this is unusual; as if this isn’t how the vast majority of humanity has always understood sex and truth, and still does.

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