The Robinson episode, meanwhile, shows how the language of queer liberation and feminism can be perverted to these ends, and how the specter of transition as "medical mutilation" and patriarchal capitulation is advanced to further transmisogyny on putatively feminist grounds.

This understanding of why, precisely, the global reactionary wave is so fixated on trans people and trans womanhood particularly, is incredibly lacking amongst even many feminist commentators. Trans women are being made the face of a worldwide right-wing "common enemy" to retrench Nationalism.

Queerness is a betrayal---of the family, community, and Nation, a desertion of the imperative to "secure a future" for white or Hindu or Russian or anything hegemonic demographic of children. Giving citizens the freedom to exist outside of heterosexuality is tantamount to legalizing treason.

By making explicit how the position of the child under patriarchy is simply a parental investment, one that owes its parents heterosexuality and reproductive labor, we arrive at the logics underlying queer oppression, revealed as a kind of reproductive monomania fixated on preserving the in-group.

'Irreversible Damage' typifies this synthesis more readily than any succinct theory of intersectional transfeminism. It's why paying attention to how reactionaries construct their arguments and understanding their worldview is so vital to producing cogent feminist and leftist analyses.

Oh lol I was too busy looking for people to congratulate I missed this.

Some people get so angry when anyone criticizes FIRE but don't get upset when trans kids are bullied out of school or to the point of suicide. It's absurd.

thank you Blanchard and Bailey for your psychologists' fetish for Popperian falsifiability, your obsession with erection-monitoring, and your strange disbelief in the idea that you might find both men and women attractive

Blanchardianism can't mask its hatred or its certainty like the old methods could. It requires undisputed authority. Now it's dying, and it's going to take a lot of the state gender monitoring infrastructure with it.

It would be easier for a newly-hatched, isolated trans woman to look at the old typologies, say 'oh, that one sounds rather like me I suppose', thereby offering up her consent and nonresistance to the doctors.

Older typologies had that capacity. Older typologies might say yes, you're some kind of 'heterosexual male', but you cross-dress because of some genuinely-held internal female identity. Older models were agnostic on the causes and etiologies of transness.

That means that it can't seduce you, charm you, or even be amicable to you. You're a pitiable gayboy or a loathesome heterosexual male. It denies that you have any capacity for gendered feelings, non-sexual womanhood, or any non-sexual motivation whatsoever.

The thing about Blanchardianism is that it hates you. It hates your queerness, it's sickened by it, and it offers you its pity if you take on enough of that self-hatred to obey it. That's why it works, it's a tool for breaking a defeated, kneeling foe.

It creates a sliver of perfect female helpmeets who disappear into the straight world, a carnival of hazing to see who else will at least make a good effort of mimicking the first group, and becomes a visible deterrent to even trying for most.

As long as trans people had nowhere else to go, as long as it was the gender doctors or the fundamentalists, the typology was a phenomenal tool of discipline.

Blanchardianism is, in a sense, a victim of cis success. It represents the ultimate over-adaptation of the medical management of queerness, a perfectly efficient machine for an environment with plentiful food and no competition.

The Man Who Would Be Queen came out in 2003 and it shows. It took the absolute nadir of queer culture, after two lost decades of AIDS, for there to be a mainstream culture so fenced-off from queerness that you could write this shit without getting laughed out of the room.