So, it’s looking like this trans wave might have finally peaked, stopped claiming new ground and started to get rolled back

Remember in the ‘70s you had Renee Richards and Wendy Carlos and that whole wave

And by my beloved '90s we had uh, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs and the villain in Ace Ventura and I guess “this chick’s got a dick!” moments in The Crying Game and Trainspotting? And in real life, Hugh Grant getting blown by a Thai ladyboy hooker?

In between that was the one thing the 80s radfem/socon alliance actually got, “morally mandated” transition out of the realm of possibility, unfunded elective bottom surgery gated behind an intense passing-oriented psychotherapy program

People note that pointedly anti-trans legislation is coming simultaneous with the collapse of an increasingly brittle and overstretched pro-trans consensus in “mainstream” media culture

Which yeah, that’s the risk of such a forward-leaning pose, demanding 100% or nothing, claiming new ground before you’ve secured your last gains.

In the late '70s Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, who were not only the President and -to-be but also icons of Evangelicalism and Conservativism, came out against the antigay politics of the Briggs Initiative. But then the weather changed.

Going on defense you could probably secure the switch to an informed consent hormones-only model. Transing clinics (there’s one down the street!) will be around and taken somewhat more seriously than marijuana card clinics. States can make up their own gender ID rules and they’re portable. Youth stuff goes state by state, might loosen up over 15 years if it normalizes. (“But then we’d sacrifice a whole generation to—” yes. We would.)

Going on defense, of course, meaning not putting forth any new claims and allowing some of the more over-their-skis ones to lapse, leaving anyone trying to retain them to wither on the vine

But in this peer-to-peer ideological system I don’t see any supervening leadership that could make that turn, and I have a hard time picturing someone drawing enough charismatic power/clout from pitching it to implement it, at least until you’re clearly staring down the barrel of something worse

The people who tried to purge Substack, thought it was a good thing to put with-me-or-against-me stakes in the 2021 media economy, they’re not there yet