With all due respect to Mr. Long Chu's "norm based right" to publicly spout absolute nonsense and make money doing so - I must add that this is the same openly misogynistic porn-clown who gained notoriety, and a Pulitzer no less, for such breathtakingly woke and derogatory observations as - (The “barest essentials” of “femaleness” are “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”). And of course who can forget? - ("Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is."). Who better to weigh in on the "rights" and "needs" of children? Mengele perhaps, or maybe the Marquis de Sade?
Normophobia began in the 60's with 'hip' etc....the denigration of so-called 'boring' 1950's so-called conformity. The denigration, in essence, of adulthood. Of course this hipster "freedom from" mentality was just a newer (and more toxic) form of conformity. The rest, as they say, is history and we are - 60 years on - living with the results. Joan Didion saw it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing,” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
> But what if “normal” is not, in fact, a political fabrication of “white cisheteropatriarchy”? What if “normal” describes something real, however muddied and contested this is, and however inextricable from culture and ideology?
Then, from their perspective, all is lost, for Progressivism is rooted in a foundation of postmodernist philosophy, the core of which is that objectivity is impossible and fundamentally delusional. It's the old rhetorical trick of arguing a motte-and-bailey between "X is not perfect; there are some cases where it fails" and "X is entirely worthless," applied to the understanding of reality.
And because Progress must always be a moving target, always "progressing," always pushing further, ever further into realms of insanity, it makes perfect sense to move one step further, from "reality is worthless" to "reality is evil." But if reality turns out to not be worthless and evil afterall, but rather good and useful, then the ideology built atop this notion crumbles like the proverbial house built on sand by a foolish man.
Once again, an exceptional analysis. "Normophobia" is a brilliant way of putting it. I myself have called it "the pathology to normalize the marginal."
His "Three Pessimists" is about the fatal error that all demented yet romantic fanatics have been making since the days of J-J Rousseau, basically that just because some part of the existing world—in this case sexual norms and sexual relations—does not center your specific needs or leaves you standing outside alone in the rain, as cruel and sad as that may be, it doesn't mean these things are ipso facto evil and need to be destroyed in the name of "liberation". But Pessoa said it better:
"The romantic refers everything to himself and is incapable of thinking objectively. What happens to him happens to the universality of things. If he is sad, the world not only seems, but is, wrong.
Suppose a romantic falls in love with a girl of a higher social station, and that this difference in class prevents their marriage, or, perhaps, even love on her side, for social conventions go deep into the soul, as reformers often ignore. The romantic will say, “I cannot have the girl I love because of social conventions; therefore social conventions are bad.” It would never occur to a realist to attack social conventions on the score that they produce such results for him, or individual troubles of any kind. He knows that laws are good or bad generally, that no law can fit every particular case come under it, that the best law will produce terrible injustices in particular cases. But he does not conclude that there should be no law; he concludes only that the people involved in those particular cases have been unlucky.
To make realities of our particular feelings and dispositions, to convert our moods into measures of the universe, to believe that, because we want justice or love justice, Nature must necessarily have the same want or the same love, to suppose that because a thing is bad it can be made better without making it worse—these are romantic attitudes, and they define all minds which are incapable of conceiving reality as something outside themselves, infants crying for sublunary moons.
Almost all modern social reform is a romantic concept, an effort to invest reality with our wishes."
Hi Mary, it's your old critical theory teacher here (I use an pen-name on Substack, but I can't get it quite right, so bear with me).
There's something in the trans debate as it pertains to children which is a massive elephant in the room, and it has a bearing on the puberty blockers debate. It perhaps applies more to girls than boys, but that is relevant given that there has been a large increase in the number of girls presenting themselves as trans in recent years.
Although figures differ according to different studies, Victorian girls were completing puberty around age 16. This age has declined as time has gone on, and now there are reports of some girls beginning puberty at the age of seven or even lower. Nobody knows exactly why; whether it's the noxious soup of chemicals which the world is awash with, or problematic nutrition, or stress, some other factor, or a combination. This seems to me to be tragic and catastrophic - that children should be losing years of carefree childhood and being prematurely shackled to bodies which perform functions, and elicit responses from society, which even adult women find troublesome to negotiate.
I'm wondering whether some of the gender dysphoria found among girls reporting themselves as trans is actually based in the fact that they are simply not ready to enter adult bodies. They want to be carefree; climbing trees, camping out and running around, not being stared at or treated by adult men as if they're older than they are, or even worrying about boys or who might see their body hair or whether they can dare to wear white jeans. The situation is intensified (as Hadley Freeman has pointed out) by the hyper-critical focus on women's bodies in the media and in social media, and by a cynical culture which treats women as soulless carcasses which exist for the purpose of sex rather than as human beings.
I don't know how many boys have equivalent experiences. However, I do think that children just need time to be children. If a child is not ready to live in an adult body, maybe we should listen to them. In particular, if children are entering puberty before they are ready because they have been exposed to a chemically and nutritionally toxic environment, we shouldn't see their distress as a cry against nature, but as a warning sign that we have produced an un-natural environment which, physically and socially, pushes adult bodies on them before they are ready. One way of easing their distress while we sort out the disgusting mess we've made of the environment may (ironically) be to use puberty blockers, maybe this is the way it has to be, at least until we've found out why childhood is being curtailed in the way it is and fixed the issue.
I can remember at the age of 11 praying desperately, every night, not to grow up. The horror of acquiring a grown-up "lady's body" was a prospect which seemed like a fate worse than death. There is a reason some children feel like this - they are still, mentally, children, and they have a child's natural queasiness about the functioning of the physical adult world (although certainly degrading images of adult women on Page 3 didn't help assuage the revulsion I felt towards adult bodies). Most kids grow out of this queasiness. Some don't. Some just need more time.
I think this is different from actively wanting to be a different sex - that's a different topic. But I think it's something significant that is overlooked and ignored in the more general debate about gender dysphoria.
I agree with the charge of nihilism, as modern progressive extremists tend to bear a consistent suspicion of—if not outright hatred for—any kind of structure or formation.
I say this as a former (reformed/escaped) lunatic progressive myself. In 1988, say, I never imagined the ivory tower diddlings of Foucault, Deleuze, Marcuse et al would ever see any application towards actual society (praxis, if you must). For instance, Deconstruction sure seemed like a dead end, a trendy little mental masturbation regime of the moment, but here we are, in 2024, being told that the signs and patterns which are patently obvious and/or accepted by the vast majority of human beings are not only slippery, but are outright violent and unjust.
The pathological "utopian" flattening-out impulse attacks any available level: social, political, linguistic, even biological. Any kind of crystallization, coagulation, ossification, bonding is suspect and must be smashed to allow the free flow of, er, I don't know, I suppose desire. Anti-Oedipus lives!
It sounds like Andrea Long Chu's argument is plucked straight out of pre-WWI European line of thinking (which inevitably showed that some of the thinkers of the time were in fact diddlers and not some great theorists/philosophers, like Thomas Mann). It is not new, but it is alarming that American thinking is so far behind and is showing all the signs of moral decay that only something like war on their own territory could fix.
This is why I have been since the issue of teen or pre-teen sex transition arose. Because the issue is not at an issue of sexuality; the issue is the de-centering of all normality. The proposition that anything we consider normal is a social construction, and therefore an imposition of the socially powerful against the socially weak. It is Foucault's paradise.
Sex or gender, take your pick, that is just the thin edge of the blade. Succeed in cutting humans away from the fundamental differentiation of man and woman and the rest of normality will fall like a row of dominoes.
But I think the driving energy is not fear of normality (normophobia) but a desire to escape the intensely painful reality of being a lonely human in a completely atomized society. For which the image of a mother putting her children up for sale is a stark indicator.
Foucault and his crew were upset by the meaninglessness of existence. The meaningfulness of human existence lies in the social relations between people. Primary among these are the relationships of family.
Judith Butler and her crew believe they can transcend their alienation by pushing it to the extreme -- transhumanism. I say that is a Fou'ault's errand.
When talking about two parent families, another important norm is that children need two parents of the opposite sex. Gay marriage was at its root similar to the no fault divorce laws and the trans movement in that it deprived children of the norms and guardrails they need. It also made any defense of normal “homophobic,” which cleared the way for more a more radical normaphobia.
You might be correct that Chu isn’t a pedophile. But, neither does Chu exhibit the normal reaction of a decent human being faced with pedophilia, which is to recoil in horror. That alone is evidence of moral derangement.
Leftism is a Death Cult of Kindergartners. They have the stunted thinking of a not overly bright child that all the ills of the world are caused by mean words and sexual politics. When you begin culling your herd, beginning with the young, you are a road to extinction and that fact never enters their heads. They honestly seem to think that if we get rid of sex, then the world will be perfect. If we restrict speech, the world will be perfect. They scream democracy, never realizing that no one controls a mob, but magically, they will be able to do it.
I'd like to be able to say that Chu being given license and a platform to declare his insane notions is unbelievable. But it's not. Even though we were cautioned against it, we've been "defining deviancy down" for generations. It's perfectly acceptable now to permit the normal, natural, and healthy to be reviled by the sick and twisted in the public sphere. And for some to find his thoughts credible.
I feel like "Make America Normal Again" would be both a powerful political slogan and a philosophically coherent position.
With all due respect to Mr. Long Chu's "norm based right" to publicly spout absolute nonsense and make money doing so - I must add that this is the same openly misogynistic porn-clown who gained notoriety, and a Pulitzer no less, for such breathtakingly woke and derogatory observations as - (The “barest essentials” of “femaleness” are “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes.”). And of course who can forget? - ("Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is."). Who better to weigh in on the "rights" and "needs" of children? Mengele perhaps, or maybe the Marquis de Sade?
Normophobia began in the 60's with 'hip' etc....the denigration of so-called 'boring' 1950's so-called conformity. The denigration, in essence, of adulthood. Of course this hipster "freedom from" mentality was just a newer (and more toxic) form of conformity. The rest, as they say, is history and we are - 60 years on - living with the results. Joan Didion saw it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing,” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
> But what if “normal” is not, in fact, a political fabrication of “white cisheteropatriarchy”? What if “normal” describes something real, however muddied and contested this is, and however inextricable from culture and ideology?
Then, from their perspective, all is lost, for Progressivism is rooted in a foundation of postmodernist philosophy, the core of which is that objectivity is impossible and fundamentally delusional. It's the old rhetorical trick of arguing a motte-and-bailey between "X is not perfect; there are some cases where it fails" and "X is entirely worthless," applied to the understanding of reality.
And because Progress must always be a moving target, always "progressing," always pushing further, ever further into realms of insanity, it makes perfect sense to move one step further, from "reality is worthless" to "reality is evil." But if reality turns out to not be worthless and evil afterall, but rather good and useful, then the ideology built atop this notion crumbles like the proverbial house built on sand by a foolish man.
Once again, an exceptional analysis. "Normophobia" is a brilliant way of putting it. I myself have called it "the pathology to normalize the marginal."
I was thinking of Pessoa and Mary beat me to him.
His "Three Pessimists" is about the fatal error that all demented yet romantic fanatics have been making since the days of J-J Rousseau, basically that just because some part of the existing world—in this case sexual norms and sexual relations—does not center your specific needs or leaves you standing outside alone in the rain, as cruel and sad as that may be, it doesn't mean these things are ipso facto evil and need to be destroyed in the name of "liberation". But Pessoa said it better:
"The romantic refers everything to himself and is incapable of thinking objectively. What happens to him happens to the universality of things. If he is sad, the world not only seems, but is, wrong.
Suppose a romantic falls in love with a girl of a higher social station, and that this difference in class prevents their marriage, or, perhaps, even love on her side, for social conventions go deep into the soul, as reformers often ignore. The romantic will say, “I cannot have the girl I love because of social conventions; therefore social conventions are bad.” It would never occur to a realist to attack social conventions on the score that they produce such results for him, or individual troubles of any kind. He knows that laws are good or bad generally, that no law can fit every particular case come under it, that the best law will produce terrible injustices in particular cases. But he does not conclude that there should be no law; he concludes only that the people involved in those particular cases have been unlucky.
To make realities of our particular feelings and dispositions, to convert our moods into measures of the universe, to believe that, because we want justice or love justice, Nature must necessarily have the same want or the same love, to suppose that because a thing is bad it can be made better without making it worse—these are romantic attitudes, and they define all minds which are incapable of conceiving reality as something outside themselves, infants crying for sublunary moons.
Almost all modern social reform is a romantic concept, an effort to invest reality with our wishes."
I think Ms Harrington makes (2) mistakes, maybe more.
1. Mr/s Chu thinks he is normal; s/he is putting her/his self forward as the new normal.
2. Ms Harrington is trying to engage with Mr/s Chu intellectually, but there’s no there, there. Why not go to an insane asylum looking for a debate.
Hi Mary, it's your old critical theory teacher here (I use an pen-name on Substack, but I can't get it quite right, so bear with me).
There's something in the trans debate as it pertains to children which is a massive elephant in the room, and it has a bearing on the puberty blockers debate. It perhaps applies more to girls than boys, but that is relevant given that there has been a large increase in the number of girls presenting themselves as trans in recent years.
Although figures differ according to different studies, Victorian girls were completing puberty around age 16. This age has declined as time has gone on, and now there are reports of some girls beginning puberty at the age of seven or even lower. Nobody knows exactly why; whether it's the noxious soup of chemicals which the world is awash with, or problematic nutrition, or stress, some other factor, or a combination. This seems to me to be tragic and catastrophic - that children should be losing years of carefree childhood and being prematurely shackled to bodies which perform functions, and elicit responses from society, which even adult women find troublesome to negotiate.
I'm wondering whether some of the gender dysphoria found among girls reporting themselves as trans is actually based in the fact that they are simply not ready to enter adult bodies. They want to be carefree; climbing trees, camping out and running around, not being stared at or treated by adult men as if they're older than they are, or even worrying about boys or who might see their body hair or whether they can dare to wear white jeans. The situation is intensified (as Hadley Freeman has pointed out) by the hyper-critical focus on women's bodies in the media and in social media, and by a cynical culture which treats women as soulless carcasses which exist for the purpose of sex rather than as human beings.
I don't know how many boys have equivalent experiences. However, I do think that children just need time to be children. If a child is not ready to live in an adult body, maybe we should listen to them. In particular, if children are entering puberty before they are ready because they have been exposed to a chemically and nutritionally toxic environment, we shouldn't see their distress as a cry against nature, but as a warning sign that we have produced an un-natural environment which, physically and socially, pushes adult bodies on them before they are ready. One way of easing their distress while we sort out the disgusting mess we've made of the environment may (ironically) be to use puberty blockers, maybe this is the way it has to be, at least until we've found out why childhood is being curtailed in the way it is and fixed the issue.
I can remember at the age of 11 praying desperately, every night, not to grow up. The horror of acquiring a grown-up "lady's body" was a prospect which seemed like a fate worse than death. There is a reason some children feel like this - they are still, mentally, children, and they have a child's natural queasiness about the functioning of the physical adult world (although certainly degrading images of adult women on Page 3 didn't help assuage the revulsion I felt towards adult bodies). Most kids grow out of this queasiness. Some don't. Some just need more time.
I think this is different from actively wanting to be a different sex - that's a different topic. But I think it's something significant that is overlooked and ignored in the more general debate about gender dysphoria.
I agree with the charge of nihilism, as modern progressive extremists tend to bear a consistent suspicion of—if not outright hatred for—any kind of structure or formation.
I say this as a former (reformed/escaped) lunatic progressive myself. In 1988, say, I never imagined the ivory tower diddlings of Foucault, Deleuze, Marcuse et al would ever see any application towards actual society (praxis, if you must). For instance, Deconstruction sure seemed like a dead end, a trendy little mental masturbation regime of the moment, but here we are, in 2024, being told that the signs and patterns which are patently obvious and/or accepted by the vast majority of human beings are not only slippery, but are outright violent and unjust.
The pathological "utopian" flattening-out impulse attacks any available level: social, political, linguistic, even biological. Any kind of crystallization, coagulation, ossification, bonding is suspect and must be smashed to allow the free flow of, er, I don't know, I suppose desire. Anti-Oedipus lives!
It sounds like Andrea Long Chu's argument is plucked straight out of pre-WWI European line of thinking (which inevitably showed that some of the thinkers of the time were in fact diddlers and not some great theorists/philosophers, like Thomas Mann). It is not new, but it is alarming that American thinking is so far behind and is showing all the signs of moral decay that only something like war on their own territory could fix.
This is why I have been since the issue of teen or pre-teen sex transition arose. Because the issue is not at an issue of sexuality; the issue is the de-centering of all normality. The proposition that anything we consider normal is a social construction, and therefore an imposition of the socially powerful against the socially weak. It is Foucault's paradise.
Sex or gender, take your pick, that is just the thin edge of the blade. Succeed in cutting humans away from the fundamental differentiation of man and woman and the rest of normality will fall like a row of dominoes.
But I think the driving energy is not fear of normality (normophobia) but a desire to escape the intensely painful reality of being a lonely human in a completely atomized society. For which the image of a mother putting her children up for sale is a stark indicator.
Foucault and his crew were upset by the meaninglessness of existence. The meaningfulness of human existence lies in the social relations between people. Primary among these are the relationships of family.
Judith Butler and her crew believe they can transcend their alienation by pushing it to the extreme -- transhumanism. I say that is a Fou'ault's errand.
Chu's conclusion entails lowering the age of consent for any-and-all purposes.
When talking about two parent families, another important norm is that children need two parents of the opposite sex. Gay marriage was at its root similar to the no fault divorce laws and the trans movement in that it deprived children of the norms and guardrails they need. It also made any defense of normal “homophobic,” which cleared the way for more a more radical normaphobia.
You might be correct that Chu isn’t a pedophile. But, neither does Chu exhibit the normal reaction of a decent human being faced with pedophilia, which is to recoil in horror. That alone is evidence of moral derangement.
Leftism is a Death Cult of Kindergartners. They have the stunted thinking of a not overly bright child that all the ills of the world are caused by mean words and sexual politics. When you begin culling your herd, beginning with the young, you are a road to extinction and that fact never enters their heads. They honestly seem to think that if we get rid of sex, then the world will be perfect. If we restrict speech, the world will be perfect. They scream democracy, never realizing that no one controls a mob, but magically, they will be able to do it.
I'd like to be able to say that Chu being given license and a platform to declare his insane notions is unbelievable. But it's not. Even though we were cautioned against it, we've been "defining deviancy down" for generations. It's perfectly acceptable now to permit the normal, natural, and healthy to be reviled by the sick and twisted in the public sphere. And for some to find his thoughts credible.