Defending the Indefensible or It’s Not Us Who Are Acting Like Nazis

Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul - Francois Rabelais

This guy loved parades and flags too. Photo credit: Anne Frank Stichting, Amsterdam/ Deutschland Erwacht

A frequent accusation to us gender critical types is that we are Nazis for insisting on our own spaces and not accepting that the hundreds of genders presented to us are valid. Women’s rights advocate Kellie-Jay Keen has taken lots of flak for would-be Neo-Nazis turning up uninvited to her Let Women Speak rallies. To refer to women defending their rights to single sex spaces and services as Nazis is known in psychology as “projection”.

This concept, first described by Freud is: “Unconscious discomfort can lead people to attribute unacceptable feelings or impulses to someone else to avoid confronting them. Projection allows the difficult trait to be addressed without the individual fully recognizing it in themselves.”

Furthermore, projection can act as an attribution of one’s own thoughts and beliefs onto others as when a bully projects their own feelings of vulnerability onto those around them and blames others for their own shortcomings.

I suspect that most of those hooded and masked young men Trans Rights Activists shouting “Nazi” into the faces of middle-aged women at public rallies have not majored in European history at school and really don’t know much about the Nazis other than that they had great imagery and cool uniforms and flags. For if they did, then they would realize that their movement is the natural heir to the Nazis, not us believers in biology.

The parallels between the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) aka known as the Nazis and the trans rights movement are truly frightening. Hitler founded his party in 1920 and it was slow to get off the ground. By the time he was appointed (not elected) Chancellor in January 1933, it was after a long campaign that incorporated propaganda, public indoctrination and the stealth needed to incorporate publicly unacceptable ideas without their citizen’s active cooperation.

The method used by Hitler and his henchmen to bring the German citizenry into line was called Gleichschaltung. This has been translated into “working in lockstep”, "coordination", "Nazification of state and society", "synchronization", and "bringing into line". It brooked no opposition; it was a ‘my way or the highway’ method of coercing everyone into if not believing in societal changes, at least going along with them. Today, one example of this is the compulsory declaration of one’s pronouns.

The government used legal means to give their actions a semblance of legality. If this doesn’t sound familiar, it should. How many countries have brought in sex self-ID laws under the radar of Joe and Jane Public? That this is a deliberate strategy is no secret.

Other hallmarks of Nazi rule should also ring some bells. Huge parades, flags galore and stirring oratory were all part of the package that the NSDAP used to promulgate their message. In 1936 membership of the Hitlerjugend (youth organization) was made compulsory; parents could not opt their children out of paying obeisance to the Führer any more than parents today can opt their children out of the gender woo that is woven throughout many school curricula in the Western world. How many children consider it essential to belong to the school LGBTQ+ club? If they don’t belong, will others think they aren’t inclusive enough?

Most ironically, the first attempt at a modern sex change operation most likely took place in Berlin in the 1930s on a patient known as Lili Elbe. And the first clinic specializing in sexual health and catering to transsexuals (as they were referred to then) was also in Germany. But once the Nazis came to power anyone identifying as trans met the same fate as the Jews: extermination. This level of “deviance” was not tolerated at all.

Hitler viewed Germany and its people as a body. A body which needed to expel germs that made it sick. He viewed the Jewish population, along with gypsies, any sexual deviation from what he considered the norm, anyone with any physical or intellectual conditions that made them not conform to his healthy ideal, as a virus that needed to be eliminated for the health of greater Germany.

Queering science harms real human beings

Hitler left school before finishing the equivalent of high school and was known to be both lazy and ignorant in regard to science, technology and basic research. Once Jews were no longer able to work or teach at universities and research facilities, Hitler lost most of the scientific talent that had propelled Germany to its exalted state of excellence in the sciences. Because he didn’t understand most of what he was told about the various projects that ultimately were used in warfare against the Allies, Germany’s research capabilities were hampered, and this was a factor in Germany’s loss of WWII.

Relying more on his particular belief systems, rather than on the facts behind physics, chemistry and the biological sciences, Hitler made decisions that today’s queer theory proponents would well understand. He believed that the power of his mind alone was enough to bring about his Thousand Year Reich.

In a similar fashion, today’s researchers in trans gender health research, believe that making harmful body modifications through taking wrong sex hormones and surgeries that mutilate previously healthy bodies is a cure or a fix for complex mental health problems.

This is sad for adults, heartbreaking for children (who are being lied to about their life choices and then affirmed in their delusional thinking) and potentially catastrophic for fetal development. If you have ever dealt with a person who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, I don’t need to tell you about the effects of what being exposed to substances in utero that can cause harm can do to an innocent child.

No rational person believes that children can make informed consent decisions about life changing medical interventions. And you can’t even have a facade of consent in regard to substances that will affect a fetus.

Fetuses cannot consent to anything.

The other day, I read a study called, “Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the “normal”: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender pregnancy”. The quotation marks around “normal” turned out to be significant. Because in the context of queer theory, normal really is a dirty word. To queer is to twist, to break or bend out of shape. Which is fine in a philosophy class, but when translated to real world actions and actual people tends to create a blood on the floor situation, at least metaphorically.

And when dealing with the mental health of pregnant women, queering their fetuses by removing normality removes the choice of those future adults to create their own destinies due to actions that can irreparably damage them.

Quotes in italics below are from this study.

Ultimately, we argue that in the context of lacking and uncertain medical evidence (HRT with testosterone during pregnancy and chest feeding) in a highly gendered treatment context (pregnancy and lactation care), both patients and providers tend to pursue precautionary, offspring-focused treatment approaches.

The words highly gendered imply that pregnancy and lactation care are artificially constructed in the same way as assuming that nurses are women and doctors are men. This is false. Pregnancy and lactation are both sexed activities, that have nothing to do with gender. Men performing womanhood will never need this care and however they may present, only women will need the care offered during pregnancy and lactation.

There is a reason that treatment approaches during pregnancy are offspring-focused. Because fetal development is the most vulnerable time in a mammalian lifespan, and this is the period when the optimization of any health we are going to have is set.

Thalidomide given to pregnant women caused disastrous birth defects in children, but was very effective in treating morning sickness. It was offspring-focused to stop prescribing an efficacious treatment for a condition that can be truly debilitating for women, but it was the only moral choice.

These approaches reinscribe binarized notions of sex, resulting in social control in their attempts to safeguard against non-normative potential future outcomes for offspring.

This word salad is not approaching the Judith Butler level of deliberate obfuscation, but it is trying. There is nothing wrong with binarized notions of sex because when it comes to sex, that’s all us mammals have going for us. On the biological level you can be female or male and that’s it folks, there are no other choices. In this context the prefix bi-means two as in bicycle (two wheels) and bivalve (the two shells of some species of shellfish). Anything else is someone’s invention so reproductively speaking, is irrelevant.

It is obvious that those involved in the trans agenda are against any form of safeguarding. That’s how you get half naked men gyrating in front of toddlers while they pretend to read books about glittery unicorns. But to be against safeguarding that might prevent children from suffering from Disorders of Sexual Development or future reproductive difficulties of their own is reprehensible. Most women make whatever lifestyle changes are necessary to prevent their children from harm while they are pregnant, but this paper calls this social control.

This is made clear in the next sentence:

These offspring-focused risk-avoidance strategies and approaches are, we argue, part of the gendered precautionary labor of pregnancy and pregnancy care itself, and not without potentially-harmful consequences for trans people and society more broadly.

In other words, the authors clearly feel that the precautionary labor of pregnancy should not apply to this pregnant population, thereby prioritizing their feelings and beliefs over the actual health of their babies. And note that they also seem to be saying that if drowning fetuses in abnormally high levels of testosterone creates more queer people, this is a societal good.

First, we find that health care providers reinscribe their status and authority, in the context of uncertainty, by prescribing caution as they advise their trans patients to pause testosterone therapy, center normative development of trans offspring, and cast trans patients’ pursuit of testosterone therapy during pregnancy as illicit or selfish.

I should hope that health care providers advise caution considering the number of other drugs that women are advised not to take as they are harmful to fetal development. Some dangers are immediately obvious; for example, the babies of women who use heroin during their pregnancies are very difficult to feed and settle and have a distinctive piercing cry that is distressing and unmistakable. These babies have deleterious brain changes that last forever. Other drugs may take until babies are grown into adults before the manifestation of harm presents. The daughters of women who were prescribed Diethylstilbestrol (DES) appeared to be healthy until they grew up and got cancer at alarming rates and also suffered from numerous reproductive problems.

The list of drugs not to be taken during pregnancy is long and the reason is always to preserve fetal wellbeing. It’s not because they don’t work for women who become pregnant.

Second, we find that trans patients juggle competing priorities, in the context of uncertainty, as they work to maintain their sense of self and wellbeing, ensure continuing access to health care, and grapple with what it means to protect their offspring from becoming anything other than “normal.” 

Health care providers are not advising caution about testosterone administration during pregnancy because they are prejudiced against trans gendered people, but because they are concerned about irreversible damage that can happen to babies exposed to this. If, as a “man” contemplating pregnancy, you think you can’t deal without testosterone administration, then you probably shouldn’t be considering pregnancy. Parenting another human being is the ultimate challenge to mental health and it does not have a time period where you can say, “right, done now”.

Health care providers whose narratives expressed judgment that trans people who wish to pursue tailored testosterone dosing (or who worry about pausing testosterone during pregnancy) are selfish or “blinkered” fail to consider the myriad cisnormative structural barriers to culturally-competent care that trans people often face.

Trans people who only center themselves in every narrative are selfishly not considering the needs of a new human being who wouldn’t even exist, without their actions. Never forget that a fetus is unable to consent to their mother’s drug use.

Common fears included potential changes in voice, hair thickness/growth, or fat distribution that may make public recognition as a man more challenging, concerns about increased levels of body dysphoria and depression and higher likelihood of postpartum depression, being feminized and misgendered by providers throughout their pregnancy. 

If you are unhappy with the thought of how your body is going to change over the course of pregnancy, then once again you may need to reconsider your plans for having children. An obviously pregnant belly is going to give the game away. Expecting everyone around you to pretend that you are a man is not a realistic expectation when dealing with a situation that is totally dependent on sex, not gender.

I had come to such good terms with myself and with my body, how it affected my sexuality, how I could relate with others—physically, but also generally like how I moved in the world. I really felt whole. And having this prospect of having to give this up was so much worse than what I think I had endured before—when I did not even know how good it could feel to be on T.

No one is pressuring this woman to have a baby; there is no expectation here. For those women who find themselves feeling like this woman does, there is an easy fix; don’t get pregnant. Real men don’t do this.

There is no comment on the paradox of trans men who have become pregnant through penis in vagina sex, (which, unless artificial reproductive therapy is utilized, is the usual way that conception occurs and is the only way that unplanned pregnancy happens). Railing against “being seen and treated as a woman” while pregnant is disingenuous if having sex like a woman was what brought you into the maternity care system.

I also wonder if there is an element of social construction in the incredible rise of body dysphoria in Western countries? A great unhappiness about a girl’s body can be a result of sexual abuse, but according to breastfeeding workers in central and southern Africa (where breastfeeding is the norm and formula is not freely available in hospitals), Black mothers have no problem with breastfeeding their babies because this is their cultural norm, despite reports of high rates of sexual abuse and rape being rampant in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet those mothers who suffered no obvious impediment to successful breastfeeding, but struggled with being able to put their babies to the breast, are nearly all confined to the non-Black population. 

Queer theory claims that everything is a social construction, so why not this?

Their narratives highlighted the power and control that health care providers held as they made determinations about whether they would or would not provide care for trans patients.

It’s not about power and control, it’s about a duty of care toward the two patients that the maternity care system is working with. Some practitioners they may feel unable to compromise their own values. Or they believe that not causing potential harm to a baby is more important than acceding to the wishes of an adult. Health care professionals are not obliged to cater to patients making demands that they do not agree with. Doctors are not obliged to prescribe antibiotics for viral infections. Midwives are not obliged to support a woman who has had five cesarean sections who wants to have a home birth at a remote cabin, hours away from medical help.

Again, we don't have any information on that because nobody lets cis women take testosterone and breastfeed. 

(The on that this is referring to is talking about testosterone administration during breastfeeding.) Why would women want to take testosterone while breastfeeding when one of the well-known effects of this is an insufficient milk supply? The other effect of excessive testosterone during breastfeeding is postpartum depression.

It is truly fascinating that the one thing not even mentioned in this paper is “top surgery”, which is a euphemism for an elective double mastectomy that removes women’s healthy breasts, which renders breastfeeding impossible. All the talk about the possible effects of taking testosterone while feeding a baby is made moot if you have no breasts. And as the latest top surgery look is a nipple free chest…

If a piece of lactiferous glandular tissue managed to escape the surgeon’s scalpel, then you may find some chest swelling occurs during pregnancy or after a baby is born. But as a surgically relocated nipple is essentially ‘pasted on’, rather than connected to the complicated system of blood vessels, nerves and tissue that comprises the normal anatomy of a healthy mammary gland any milk produced has no way to exit the chest so will be reabsorbed.

This trans lifeworld, understanding of life possibilities, and vision for the future provides an important alternative to the cisnormative assumptions of some health care providers.

Based on this sort of thinking our treatment of girls and women with anorexia is all wrong. Rather than heavy duty psychiatric support and a program that insists they consume a certain number of calories per day, we should be giving them weight loss tips and gym memberships. Because they “know” they are fat. Nevertheless, conscientious medical professionals now realize that delusional thinking should not always be affirmed by others.

Such approaches differ meaningfully from gendered and normative expectations that gestational parents must always and automatically self-sacrifice or choose optimal approaches that exclusively prioritize the potential well-being and normative development of offspring. 

So, health professionals need to be on board with the notion that trans gendered people are OK with the possibility of harming their children and the expectation that they will be complicit in this.

Illegal drug consumption, alcohol and smoking during pregnancy are not socially considered acceptable for women, but trans “men” feel they should not be held to the same standards?

In this context of medical ambiguity and uncertainty in the hyper-gendered context of pregnancy and lactation care, both health care providers and trans patients engaged in precautionary approaches that prioritized potential fetal and infant health and wellbeing (and imaginaries concerning future offspring’s normative development) over adult trans patient health (particularly mental health) and wellbeing in the present.

I should hope so! If their own mothers (even if they don’t see themselves as mothers, their babies do) are not concerned with their life long wellbeing that is contingent on fetal development, it’s good that someone is. Pregnancy and lactation are not hyper-gendered, they are SEXED.

It also raises the specter of panoptics of the womb and epistemic injustice as it simultaneously reflects elevation of the epistemic authority of medical professionals and erosion of the epistemic privilege of trans gestational parents.

This crap verbiage is designed to bamboozle the reader into thinking that an important point has been made. Because if you, Average Reader cannot understand this important message then you will accept that the academic experts are right, and you are just an ignorant person.

Much of trans medicine has been built on the assumption of binary genders. 

Because this is the only assumption that works in mammals if you are talking about reproduction, which is always sexed. No fertility clinic anywhere has ever managed to create a new human being with any different combination than one (female) egg and one (male) sperm. Some things you can’t mix and match.

Which needs and whose well-being are protected (and challenged) as these decisions are made, and to what potential personal and social consequences?

I am at a loss to think why the ‘rules’ should be different for trans parents. In some countries, pregnant women who smoke a joint are put into jail under the guise of child protective purposes (I do not think this is valid or good), but the consequences for the babies of this client group do not need to be considered as more important than the adults?

Whose needs should be paramount: an adult or a fetus/baby?

Doing so attends not only to the social control functions of working to prevent non-normative bodies and people, and the artificial binarization of sex and gender in medicine and society, but also that between mental and physical health as it insists upon increased attention to the mental health concerns and well-being experienced by trans people before, during, and after pregnancy.

Needless to say, the authors of this paper and I disagree about this. Reproductively speaking there is no such thing as an artificial binarization of sex and gender is irrelevant. If after you birth, you start to hemorrhage, how you identify will be irrelevant to your care. And in no way could I ever endorse a system that ranks an adult’s mental health over the physical and mental health of a fetus, a baby or a child. Part of an adult’s role in regard to caring for children is safeguarding them from harm and that includes from their mother if she is too mentally unwell to prioritize their wellbeing.

Hitler loved parades and flags!

Hitler chose a different design for his flags Image by bearfotos</a> on Freepik

Where Hitler viewed his country and society as a body that needed to be purged of viruses in the form of groups of people who didn’t conform to his conception of normal, those under the spell of queer theory believe that normal society needs to be broken up by altering bodies to negate what evolution has designed us to be, even if the price is so harmful that lives are made miserable and short in the process. Both Hitler and the queer theorists blur boundaries, trade in beliefs over facts and twist science into self-serving fictions that have caused great distress and harm to large populations.

I’d say if those who like to go to women’s rights rallies to berate women for believing in biological facts want to bring their swastikas along, they are in good company with the little man with the moustache. I’m not on board with that brand of Gleichschaltung.