The False Narrative of Regrettable Transness

Here’s a function of ‘regret’ in anti-trans narrative

Glowing by Masashi Wakui from Pixabay

“Gender-critical” ideology is dualism, I’ve argued. Philosophically, that’s what it is. Proposing a division between body and mind, it sides — unlike Christianity — with the body.

In 2021, Maya Forstater’s court victory (upon appeal) protected her so-called gender-critical opinions as a “belief” under the UK Equality Act. In this context, gender-criticalism presents itself as quasi-religious “belief,” which is just a legal and cultural shield for organized hate. This anti-transgender standpoint politicizes itself to diminish the rights and dignity of actual trans people.

In “Gender critical believers,” Rachel Saunders retrospectively pinpoints the Forstater case as a flashpoint that “essentially turned the gender critical movement from a fringe movement into a quasi-cult”; now, “gender critical voices are curating an ever tighter circle of ‘facts’, to the point that any opinion outside those are viewed as heretical.”

More specifically, as Rachel puts it, this movement “is reductive because it sees women as inherently the victims of society, and trans women always seeking out those victims for their crimes. It debases womanhood to the point that the only way to be a woman is to either be a victim or a…