Howdy folks.

In the interest of fairness I decided to spruce up my comments policy to be a bit more detailed and explicit. Regulars have more or less already been following these conditions anyways, but I also decided to explicitly document the Points Refuted a Thousand Times. This is to help make more available the myth-busting information, and also to point out that I’m under no obligation to repeat myself when my previous work stands, a demand which has occasionally cropped up in the filtered comments.

Everything below is listed here.

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The first comment you post on Against the Grain is automatically sent into moderation. This is to bring your commentary to my attention. There are a number of things I have little patience for on this blag, detailed below, and if you run afoul of them your comment may be edited, filtered out, or your account banned altogether. Your participation is contingent on the following:

1. Stay on topic

If your first instinct is to change the subject, you’ll likely be called on it. If I start a conversation about the angles Jesse Singal employs in his trans-antagonistic journalism, braying on about this obscure murder committed 30 years ago by a trans woman is not relevant.

2. Make disagreements about the argument

Attack the argument. Question its premises, or question the logical construction. I am not generally fond of attacking the arguer as opposed to the argument. On a related note…

3. Definitely no hate speech

Ad hominems usually net you warnings, unless you employ language that singles out a person’s immutable characteristics as inherently inferior or undesirable, in which case I toss you out. This includes but is not limited to language demeaning gender identity, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ability, sex, etc.

4. No Points Refuted a Thousand Times

My material on trans issues is occasionally repetitive because the opponents to trans rights offer repetitive discourse. If something was wrong six months ago, it remains wrong today unless new information has been produced. So no, I am not going to tailor-suit a refutation to something that has already been shown to be bunk nonsense, and reciting these points uncritically will not impress me.

Some PRATTs relevant to this blog include:

• Transition-related healthcare is specifically to resolve gender dysphoria. It is not a eugenicist conspiracy to eradicate gender nonconforming gay kids.
• Transition-related healthcare is specifically to resolve gender dysphoria. It has not claimed to be a cure-all, nor would it need to be a cure-all to be valid.
• We’ve already tried treating gender dysphoria with antipsychotics. It doesn’t work.
• 80% of children admitted to Dr. Zucker’s gender identity clinic were not gender dysphoric–this is by Dr. Zucker’s own admission. It is therefore not true that 80% of his subjects “desisted” from gender dysphoria, because they never had it to begin with.
• Dr. Zucker was discredited for publishing research that conflates gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria. He was discredited on an academic basis. This work may have been prompted by the complaints of trans activists, but we did not “fire him.”
• ___ trapped in a ___ body was a metaphor proposed by the first cisgender doctors charged with trans care. It was not our metaphor, nor does it serve as the basis of trans feminism.
• “Gender identity” is used in trans feminism as a short hand for a subjective experience of one’s sexed attributes. The external expectations placed upon you because of your assigned sex are a separate matter. Do not conflate the two. It is entirely possible to oppose the latter and not the former.
• There is little scientific consensus on why gender dysphoria occurs, but we’ve ruled out mommy issues, PTSD, OCD, and autism. Check the Freud at the door please.
• Formal research on gender variance dates to the early 20th century. It is not a Tumblr fad.
• The Canadian Criminal Code possesses no mechanisms to prosecute someone for not using proper titles. Thus, Bill C-16 cannot criminalize the act of misgendering a trans person, deliberately or otherwise.
• Cecilia Dhejne’s study shows a cohort of trans women from the 70s and 80s who are as likely to be charged for a “sex crime” as cis men. Selling sex was such a crime during that time. So no, her study does not prove that trans women are as violent as cis men.
• Autogynephilia is not falsifiable, making it shitty science. More importantly, some ~90% of cis women qualify is “autogynephilic.” It’s nothing more than an attempt to slut shame trans women.
• The only children receiving “irreversible” genital surgeries are intersex. Endosex trans kids don’t even qualify for surgery by WPATH standards. Arguments citing “irreversible changes” for children are therefore referencing something that doesn’t exist in the context of trans kids (though intersex folks would likely appreciate it if you could take your concern where it’s actually needed).
• Psychopathology is not inevitable in gender variant people. It is a product of discrimination, so if you could stop citing our psychopathology as a reason to discriminate against us, that’d be great.
• Criminalizing trans people’s ability to access public accommodations does nothing to make you safer. An overwhelming amount of sexualized violence is perpetrated by people the victim trusts. Stranger danger is vastly overstated.
• It is not commonly held, even by trans feminists, that trans and cis women are identical. What trans feminists often argue instead is that the distinction between the two is often/sometimes limited to theory, because we experience many manifestations of misogyny in practice.
• “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist” was actually coined by a cisgender radical feminist who found the sex essentialism in TERF arguments to be anathema to gender liberation. It could only be a slur in the same way that any other descriptive word spoken with enough venom counts as a slur–certainly “Muslim” and “liberal” carries implicit hostility when invoked by white supremacists, but the words themselves do not automatically have derogatory intent in common parlance, and neither does “TERF.”
• A binary model is inadequate to describe developmental biology. If your analysis is contingent on the notion of biological sex being fixed, unchanging, one characteristic (rather than a series of characteristics) and binary, you’re glossing over a lot of biology and genetics.
• A binary model of gender is specifically a euro-colonial one. Many cultures prior to colonial contact had more expansive models. “That’s the way I was taught in grade school” is not an adequate defense for the euro-colonial model.
• Gender affirmation provides constant opportunities for children to change their minds and does not prescribe one particular treatment plan. There is no inevitable conveyor belt locking kids into this process.
• GnRH is specifically a hormone agonist, preventing the production of hormones. It is thus fractally wrong to oppose transition healthcare for adolescents on the basis that they’re “being pumped full of hormones” when the treatment protocol is about stopping hormone production.
• Yes, trans people have already tried loving ourselves, no, transitioning doesn’t preclude that.
• Cathy Brennan might be a fake goth.

Yes, this tedious, fact-free nonsense tends to repeat itself.

Note that bringing up a PRATT doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from the comments, if and only if you can introduce new information that wasn’t discussed the first time.

5. Breaking these rules on other blogs on the network will also get you banned.

I regularly read the works of my colleagues, so even if you aren’t accountable to my conditions on their blog, you’re still subject to them when you come to mine. A history of violating the above conditions elsewhere will generally burn any goodwill I might otherwise assume when you pop up in moderation.

-Shiv