Trans

like Kathleen Stock's Material Girls, this is another invaluable resource for those navigating the new 'trans' landscape. Where Stock's first 7 pages quickly situated how we got here, Joyce uses 2 full chapters to explain, in detail, each of the famous and/or legislative cases that brought changes to the law, society, and perception. whereas Lili Elbe (of The Danish Girl film) truly believed she would one day be able to conceive and bear a child in her experimental transplanted womb, Christine Jorgensen's claim to womanhood came from the press who hoodwinked a naive public when they coined the term sex-change. Ashley Corbett's divorce trial resulted in legislation that outlawed same-sex marriage in Britain (tee-ing up future legislation that introduced a legal fiction: sex-change), and Jan Morris demonstrated the ease of altering legal documents from M to F in America, effectively erasing material reality.

Even though Darwin's theory of evolution (with his two-sexed model) radically changed the world, an ancient one-sex model has managed to quietly grow into one of the main planks of gender-identity ideology, that being: all humans contain both sexes, where one end of said spectrum (and naturally superior) is 'man' and the other is 'woman' (naturally inferior) with 'exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong place'. this theory allows a fantasy to exist that sex can move incrementally across the spectrum until sex-change is achieved. more disturbingly, by considering traits such as dress, presentation and behaviour as incremental movements, adherents of this theory can then justify that Joan of Arc was indeed a man (instead of an emerging model for female variation).

The origin of autogynephilia is also more seriously studied, with solid evidence coming from the fields of sexology, psychology, and medical history (as well as a highly educated male-to-female transitioner). And although autogynephelia is not presented as a shameful status, the tendency of the patients to lie in their gender clinic assessments (and how to compensate for that) makes for interesting reading.

lastly, everyone should read the chapter called Back in the Box for it's explanations of how PIE managed to make inroads with the Labour Party, the Green Party, civil rights groups, and society at large. Eileen Fairweather, a journalist whose has won awards for uncovering how pedophiles exploit institutional weakness and political correctness is right when she says gender-identity ideology, with teachers encouraging children to keep secrets from parents, is dangerous territory. whenever I hear murmurs of how PIE was almost mainstreamed in the 1970s and 1980s I am still incredulous this history is not more well-known.

ok, not lastly... there were other things this book elucidated that I couldn't bind together in a cohesive paragraph. here they are:

-roughly, sex is a biological category, and gender is a historical category; sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how

-historian Selina Todd makes a case that the state of feminism in her time will ultimately decide if a woman is more likely to identify as a man, or fight for more freedoms for ALL women. (think of Lillias Barker pretending to be Colonel Barker vs the suffragettes)

-study: Canadian gay men, Mexican muxes, and Australian fa'afafine are cultural variants of the same biological trait: male androphilia. traditional, non-western frameworks for understanding feminise men are warped thru a Western lens which reinterprets them as transwomen. it's a type of colonialism. (also) children who experience distress with their sexed bodies often start out as merely gender-atypical, with the distress developing only as they learn that their feelings and behaviours were unacceptable to others.

-the problem when newspapers are 'shocked' at election results: the duty of journalists should be describing the world as it is, and then maybe adding commentary about how it could be. instead we have journalist describing a wished-for-world as if it already existed.

-merit beliefs are based on evidence, and if the evidence changes, the beliefs can too. crony beliefs are about fitting in and making the right impression. but nothing important is allowed to ride on a crony belief: even a true believer who insists transwomen are women in every circumstance (prisons, sports, lesbian suitability) when the true believer requires a gestational surrogate, they will not once consider asking a transwoman because, at some unacknowledged level, they know it would be futile.