There's a lot of great stuff in this piece, but I just get stuck every time on how people are fucking with their endocrine systems over the most incomprehensible, gobbledygook nonsense.
Masha Gessen's career seems to boil down to "pay attention to MEEEE", which isn't really the best strategy for a highly disagreeable person.
Some points:
1. Gessen seems to claim that sexual preference *is* a choice, but gender identity is *not*. That's going to make a lot of gay people very angry.
2. Social contagion among adult lesbians is absolutely a thing, unless Katie Herzog is lying about man-hating lesbian friends of hers living together all suddenly transitioning one after another.
I really wonder if we're going to see "Mommy Dearest" articles from Messen's kids in ten or fifteen years.
Sady Doyle is another who went trans, whom I will never read again. To me, it just shows the writer's hidden misogyny. LARPing as a man doesn't solve anything.
"Why did I think she was a serious thinker?" Exactly. Masha Gessen is a good journalist, and that's about it. A journalist is not a thinker, never mind a serious one. I saw an interview with her and Butler, which was embarrassing; she was listening to Butler as if the latter was Mother Teresa, full of piousness, and the single idea in the interview was that everybody who disagrees with gender ideology is a fascist. That was Butler--Gessen did have the courage to shyly say that maybe "fascist" was a bit harsh. The reason Gessen has been made into a star is because: 1. in the US, the first criteria to get fame is to declare that you belong to some kind of alternative sexual/gender/genital group and claim persecution for said belonging. Of course, the fact that we were dealing with Putin the Gay Persecutor impressed the American Progressives to no end; 2. Create a persona that follows some type of myth--in this case, the myth of the Russian emigre persecuted by a dictator. Combine the two and voila.
In that Lydia Polgreen piece, Polgreen and Gessen talk about autism and the possibility that some girls who want to transition are autistic. Gessen basically says they should go for it because they’d be better off as trans boys.
"It is probably easier to be a boy on the spectrum than a girl on the spectrum. Like, not a bad choice. Go for it. Your life will be easier if you feel like that’s something that’s an option that works for you."
There's a lot of great stuff in this piece, but I just get stuck every time on how people are fucking with their endocrine systems over the most incomprehensible, gobbledygook nonsense.
Masha Gessen's career seems to boil down to "pay attention to MEEEE", which isn't really the best strategy for a highly disagreeable person.
Some points:
1. Gessen seems to claim that sexual preference *is* a choice, but gender identity is *not*. That's going to make a lot of gay people very angry.
2. Social contagion among adult lesbians is absolutely a thing, unless Katie Herzog is lying about man-hating lesbian friends of hers living together all suddenly transitioning one after another.
I really wonder if we're going to see "Mommy Dearest" articles from Messen's kids in ten or fifteen years.
Sady Doyle is another who went trans, whom I will never read again. To me, it just shows the writer's hidden misogyny. LARPing as a man doesn't solve anything.
"Why did I think she was a serious thinker?" Exactly. Masha Gessen is a good journalist, and that's about it. A journalist is not a thinker, never mind a serious one. I saw an interview with her and Butler, which was embarrassing; she was listening to Butler as if the latter was Mother Teresa, full of piousness, and the single idea in the interview was that everybody who disagrees with gender ideology is a fascist. That was Butler--Gessen did have the courage to shyly say that maybe "fascist" was a bit harsh. The reason Gessen has been made into a star is because: 1. in the US, the first criteria to get fame is to declare that you belong to some kind of alternative sexual/gender/genital group and claim persecution for said belonging. Of course, the fact that we were dealing with Putin the Gay Persecutor impressed the American Progressives to no end; 2. Create a persona that follows some type of myth--in this case, the myth of the Russian emigre persecuted by a dictator. Combine the two and voila.
I was about to comment she sounds like a poundshop Butler (of course Butler sounds like a poundshop Butler)
Another narcissist
In that Lydia Polgreen piece, Polgreen and Gessen talk about autism and the possibility that some girls who want to transition are autistic. Gessen basically says they should go for it because they’d be better off as trans boys.
"It is probably easier to be a boy on the spectrum than a girl on the spectrum. Like, not a bad choice. Go for it. Your life will be easier if you feel like that’s something that’s an option that works for you."