This is Not Normal, We Must Not Forget That



Depicted above, Mike Konrad’s idea of a trans elder.

Mike Madeupname, American Streetcorner Prophet:

Transgenderism and Cancer

So things are in an “interesting” state at the moment.

The right, filled with pestilent hatred of everything and anything different from them has awkwardly celebrated the idea of winning for the sake of winning, assuming the fascist swing of their authoritarian dear leader du jour would only thwack us filthy liberals in the jaw and teach us all a lesson about ever thinking we can be full human beings again.

But that’s a really hard thing to do these days. Cause it turns out nazis are actually really fucking bad at actually running a country and so we’ve got an imploding mess more and more obviously installed by a foreign power and getting less and less able to hide it that is face-planting against the sole branch of the Government that hasn’t been co-opted into the fascist state… yet.

And that has culminated in a national budget proposal which would make a first-act Dickensian villain go “hang on now, I know I said they should die and decrease the surplus population, but this is going too far”. Which, you know, when you’re a shaky fascist state who is constantly pissing off your security detail and the security organizations that protect you, it’s a real good idea to make it so poor folks have literally no means of survival and nothing to lose in fighting you. Great life lessons from King Louis XVI there.

Which is leaving the blighted refuge of the right with a moral quandary. They could acknowledge that their chosen object of worship is not actually a golden messiah, but a standard con man that all must move against to still retain a semi-functional country.

Or they can cling even tighter to a fantasy world and focus even harder on how much they can’t wait to see the filthy “lesser folk” burn in the flames that are licking up the sides of their houses.

And so unsurprisingly, the standard names who’ve spent their whole lives in opulent unearned wealth telling their material betters what they want to hear, have gone completely around the bend in defense of the nightmare they have trapped us in.

And most have responded by putting their fingers in their ears and trying to ignore away the recent news and bills and focus instead on copying their dear leader and making up whatever shit they think will rile up their troglodyte followers into focusing more on say… where people like me pee or the fact that some black people haven’t been gunned down on the street yet than the way in the eyes of the rich white assholes in charge, we’re all the trannies unworthy of life.

Which, I mean, isn’t new. The right has willfully disconnected itself from reality since at least the 70s and likely long before and it has led to a number of problems as deluded comfortable assholes have demanded their fake problems be given infinitely more time and attention than the actual real people dying by the millions.

But things have gotten… well, way way more disconnected from even the pretense of actual facts, willfully and intentionally stealing each other’s made up “facts” and quoting them in gospel truth hoping to get the thrill of seeing their rambling conspiracy theories spill out of the most powerful man in America’s mouth in the coming weeks.

And honestly the whole thing is a little numbing. Because these people are willingly choosing ignorance and hate over their own survival because they are so focused on hurting us. And especially hurting those of us who are transgender as we’re the hot new thing to hate and apparently make a nice little trio with muslims and latinx people for what right-wingers spend all their time obsessing about instead of having real problems.

And I’m not sure I want to do another right-wing anti-trans rant, because it’s always the same fucking bullshit, blah blah “mutilation”, blah blah “think of the children”, blah blah “mentally ill”, blah blah *nod and a wink to the idea of trans people being pedophiles while we openly celebrate an open child molester as our president* and well, there’s a lot more horrible awful shit our president is doing and targeting, even if right wing fucks seem really fixated on us and our junk.

So, I’m going to just sk-

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle): Trans people need to be stopped because cancer.

… ok, that’s a new one. What?

Wait, wait, oh is this my formerly favorite brand of right-wing faux intellectual posturing? Nazis trying to explain Biology despite decades of deliberately keeping themselves and their children ignorant of even the vaguest shapes of how it works?

… sigh… It’s not the same now that we’re in the Apocalypse, but what the hell, let’s put on the old stirrups for nostalgia’s sake.

Pharmaceutical companies have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to test new drugs.

Ah yes, sing me a song of tragic billionaires and faceless companies as I wonder how many close friends of mine will die if your twisted ass Obamacare knock-off doesn’t get shut down in a flurry of angry constituent phone calls. It’s like music to my ears. Music that makes me start wondering how easy it is to find guillotine construction instructions online.

Yet, we in America are permitting confused youth to be used as guinea pigs in medical procedures that mutilate the anatomy and flood the body with potentially damaging hormones.

And it’s TERF talking point number 1, unironically spewing forth from the mouths of the right-wingers thanks to so many prominent TERFs gladly choosing to work with the religious right to show all us evil transes because one time someone tried to go to a music festival and a transphobe threw a fucking fit.

And shock of all shocks, it’s not true (I know! Lies from a right-winger in the age of “alternative facts”. That’s so unpredictable).

It’s pretty much impossible for a trans kid to access any form of surgery and pretty close to impossible for most trans adults as well. And as for hormones, there’s the standard extralegal methods, but most places make you wait til you’re 18 or really fucking close just to make sure 6 years of no puberty hasn’t changed your mind.

The most we give kids is puberty blockers when they’re old enough, which are about one of the safest medications out there, so TERFs have been stealing a page from the Misogynist Forced Birth movement* and been making up a bunch of scurrilous bullshit about how blockers cause cancer (I’m sure that’ll crop up later) based on… well, the same evidence Trump has that Obama wiretapped his microwave.

Because folks were starting to notice that their monomaniacal focus on trans kid’s junk** wasn’t based on anything the kids were actually seeking from their schools and society.

*Let’s cut the shit and stop coddling these fuckers. They know they are an anti-sex cult dead set on forcing women back into the kitchen through any means necessary and it’s time to stop entertaining their propaganda that they give one single fuck about “babies” or actually believe that abortion is murder. It’s basically just “islamics are raping your women” bullshit, trying to put a heroic face on genocidal policies.

**I’m legally obligated every time we get some ranty rambling piece furiously obsessing over the genitals of trans kids to point to this excellent piece of journalism noting How Child Molesters have Strong Opinions on being Trans. Yeah, just going to leave that there as necessary context for the shitshow to follow.

The current rush to acceptance of transgenderism ignores a problem beyond the immediately obvious. Are we setting up hundreds of thousands for early deaths due to cancer?

… go on…***

***I’ve been noticing more and more of late how deeply painfully aggressively ignorant bigots are about the groups they obsess with. It’s like hearing someone who really hates snakes going on for an hour about their long galloping legs and antlers. And it gets really obvious in places like here, where he’s so eager to translate a TERF talking point into libertarian evo psych that he, like the hate group he’s cribbing notes from, haven’t seemed to bother to notice that trans people… uh… don’t currently live that long in general. Our homicide rate is through the roofs, we tend to die in poverty a lot, and our suicide rate hovers around 50% on a good day. And most predictions on what a trans person’s lifespan is tend to place it around late 30s. And yeah, unsurprisingly, the reason is pretty much bigotry, hatred, and discrimination. So yeah, even if this was real and not based in nothing but horse shit, it’d still be like #90,000 on the list of pressing issues to trans lives.

Every cell in the human body has a sexual fingerprint in the sex chromosome (allosome) pairs.

Oh… oh dear, we see the right-wng bigot take a few tentative swims from shore into the dangerous land where facts live and the dangerous realization that they are fucking immoral monsters of human beings****.

****Yeah, Aunt Cerberus is done with this shit and with the right-wing propagandizing and shouting down the left with their habit of just repeating their lies louder and more violently until they “win”. The right is not moral, has never been moral, has always been on the side of hurting others and denying justice, has supported every monstrous worldview that has ever existed. And the way they’ve somehow been able to spin that open violent hatred and gleeful desire to end the world as “moral” simply because they make a lot of noise about people finding love or existing as themselves is fucking sickening. The right wing is a vile tanker of shit and anyone who belongs to it is willfully and knowingly complicit with straight up evil. Sorry if that hurts some deplorable feelings, but it’s the truth. There hasn’t been a “conservative activist” in years whose death hasn’t measurably improved the lives of some oppressed group somewhere (which is why the right-wing is so quick to insist on “respect” when their figures die, because they know there’s nothing to celebrate that you want to be openly seen celebrating).

And that swim has found itself tepidly in Biology Bay. So, yes, home-schooled person who was taught that Biology was the Devil, let’s hear how you believe chromosomes work.

The born male has a XY pair. The born female an XX.

The fact that so many fuckwits argue against my and my fiancee’s rights because of their chucklefuck half-remembering of high school biology is why I work so hard to be a Biology teacher. So at least the next generation will know how chromosomes and sex assignment at birth work*

*Short summary is basically you have chromosome 23 and it has its most common alleles as X and Y, with X holding most of the functional proteins and Y holding a few here and there that are mostly responsible for kicking up the testosterone in utero… usually. That testosterone or estrogen in utero is what usually dictates early genital signs which the doctor looks at for five seconds before assigning a sex and which may have no connection to either actual gender or chromosome configuration. Basically, you can have XY folks who are assigned female at birth and XX folks assigned male at birth, and a whole swath of people who end up with some sort of ambiguous genitalia at birth because they have both in utero or neither. These are intersex people and are frequently subjected to nonconsensual genital “rearrangement” in order for it to more closely “resemble” a “proper” genitalia configuration so that all the bigoted transphobes can cling to their delusions that the world is easily divided between pussies and penises. Cause ya know, it was so in doubt whether the crocodile tears over “mutilated genitals” wasn’t basically the “but babies” dodge for the transphobe crowd.

These chromosomes do serve a function beyond mere reproduction. Without getting too complicated: Most genes contain the information needed to make functional molecules called proteins. — Genetics Home Reference

Ok, I’ll crack a temporary smile. This is adorable as fuck. It’s like baby’s first awkward steps to a base level understanding of Biology, but instead of cute, it’s the rambling half-formed conjectures of some bitter octogenarian mostly pissed off that he is aware people like me exist and who has direct power over my ability to survive and keep my trans kids alive.

But hey, a few points for a brief bit of actually accurate scientific information. Chromosomes do indeed code genes which are then translated into various proteins that drive overall body function.

So how is this going to turn into the standard litany of utter idiocy about people having vaginas like ducks that can remove unwanted sperm and high testosterone making more male babies.

Essentially, the chromosomes, which carry those genes, are the control center of the cell, the central processing unit — controlling processes above and apart from cell reproduction. Protein synthesis, so necessary for life, is controlled by these chromosomes. We would be foolish not to conjecture that Y chromosomes were not designed to act properly in cell floating in a bath of female hormones; neither an XX pair in cell floating under a bath of male hormones. Since these hormones might conceivably cause cells to go awry in protein production, as well as in cell reproduction, we should not be surprised to see unusual problems of transgenders with cancers.

That’s… not how that works. That’s not how any of that works.

Yeah, genes make proteins, but at the risk of adding ya know, actual real observable facts, which proteins get made when is the actual name of the game for temporary and persistent change. And this tends to be regulated by hormones. So instead of producing protein X that would lead to say thicker hair proteins, you produce protein Y that leads to thinner hair proteins and that dictates the standard secondary sex characteristics most people use to guess likely gender.

It’s actually a pretty robust system and can handle a lot of dramatic changes because it’s not actually stewing the DNA in a “bath of hormones”, but rather just shifting what gets expressed and more often, what gets expressed to what degree (it’s likely going to blow most angry sexist bigots’ minds but everyone has both estrogen and testosterone in their system unless they have a legitimate block on one or the other. And in fact, the body actually takes excess testosterone and turns it into estrogen, which is why steroid abusers start experiencing some effects similar to undergoing hormone replacement therapy)*.

*And what will blow their minds even more is the simple fact that it’s the systems that they view as most set that are among the most responsive to shifting hormone patterns. The penis and the clitoris are the same damn organ, and will basically shift and grow/shrink towards more resembling the other depending on the current hormone bath. Same with scrotum and labia. Which also makes their genital obsessions really laughable, because whatever they imagine what’s in my pants looks like really really doesn’t resemble the reality of what’s in my pants.

Also, yes, let’s just highlight that he’s arguing against the rights and humanity of people because he imagines that chromosomes are affected by hormones and that could “theoretically” cause cancer.

Bob save me from angry powerful fucknozzles thinking their delusions about how the world works trumps how the world actually works. And why it’s past time to stop entertaining their bullshit. Their delusions are killing us all and it’s time for them to wake the fuck up.

Add in that transgenders, even after surgery, will retain residue tissue unique to one gender, and noting that those specific tissues will be subjected to hormone levels they were not designed to process, and the possible outcomes become frightening.

*head tilt*

This is so alien to anything even approaching how Biology works that I’m almost perversely fascinated by it. Like, what the fuck does he think happens in trans bodies. That we’ve got a bunch of XY chromosomes just itching to create a penis again if we’ve got no testes to continuously pump testosterone into our system? That our tissue retains conscious memory and thus somehow isn’t a plastic bundle of cells whose character and actions are largely dictated by the hormone patterns it is exposed to?

That you could take a “guy cell” and a “girl cell” and see totally distinct differences no matter whether or not they were exposed to a mostly testosterone system or a mostly estrogen system?

Fuck, this whole “cancer” dodge is a standard TERF talking point, how do you fuck cribbing the notes from that so bad that you’re talking about sentient cells*?

*Though their belief that random tissue has sentience and will is probably a good one to sell if you still want to play pretend that you believe a clump of inert cells is a baby or that you care anything about that beyond “punishing” the carrying parent for being a “slut”.

The research is just starting … There is a dangerous paucity of data on transgender health issues, and little research, which is why the NIH launched a five-year study of trans youth last year. — Newsweek In September 2015, the Lancet editorialized: Case reports and anecdotal evidence suggest that transgender people have a disproportionate cancer burden, but without high-level evidence, health-care providers are stifled in their ability to provide adequate guidance. — The Lancet

A) The articles in question both spent the majority of their time pointing out the majority of the issue is well, the same as most trans people’s problems, cis people being too wrapped up in their weird ideas about us to actually just treat us like the humans we are and giving us equal treatment based on it. Both articles cited problems where doctors were just straight up not giving screenings or letting folks know their results. And trans people in general tend to be very wary of doctors given how many of us are abused, harassed, or denied medical treatment by doctors or how often doctors get really creepy about blaming every health problem you have on transitioning even if the problem existed before any form of transition occurred.

Hell, just see or read for yourself.

B) Yeah, the elephant in the room is that most trans health care we’ve got right now is deeply hostile to our existence and sees decreasing the rate of transition as a goal in and of itself. So you get the TERF obsession with the theoretical idea that we might have an increased cancer risk rate being used as an excuse to justify continued gatekeeping of even preliminary care. You get creepy cis child molesters like Dr. Kenneth Zucker stripping trans kids and commenting on the sexual desirability of their genitals and trying to publish it as science. And the few doctors who’ve got decades of experience with us tend to be creepsters who fetishize us or who are woefully behind the times for recommended medical treatment. And of course endless streams of people wanting to put us through wrong and dysphoric puberties to “make sure” we are doubly extra super sure this time.

But hey, yes, let’s pretend the “cancer” thing has anything to do with actual concern for trans lifespans and health.

Well, why would anyone expect anything else? Hormones are powerful chemicals. Yet, with complete disregard to possible future consequences, our society has endeavored to allow a dispensing of cocktails of these hormones to teens who seek to reorient themselves.

Cocktails?

… oh. OH. Wow.

Okay, yeah, I know in the eyes of bigots, trans people are just gay people who gayed too hard, but holy fuck, picturing hormones like HIV medication… wow. That really just takes the subtext and makes it glaringly homophobic text.

He then goes off on a long-winded ramble about abortions causing cancer which is one of the typical litany of bullshit that the forced-birth pro-slavery assholes have tried to sell to make their open loathing of anyone with a uterus seem like compassion rather than an open loathing of their escape from their “proper” role.

Which fits considering that’s basically the main objection to trans people and gay people. We break the fantasy narrative of the “proper” roles of men and women and how distinct and immutable those differences must be and how rigidly we must cling to patriarchal bullshit.

And that’s what disgusts me about right-wingers. That they are willing to kill, torture, abuse, and devote their lives even when it fucks over themselves to hurt us all because our existence inconveniences a fantasy they want to cling to, an ignorance they want to continue to hold on to.

Our lives are considered beneath their temper tantrum that our existence provided inconvenient evidence that they were wrong about something. And they’re willing to destroy the entire world out of that temper tantrum and refusal to accept that reality exists whether they like it or not.

Now, take this a step further, and what should we expect when mothers indulge (or possibly influence) their sons’ wish to be female, such as Avery Jackson who appeared on the cover of National Geographic. She [Avery’s mother] has said Avery will take hormone blockers when she reaches puberty, and that if she wanted surgery in the future it would be something the family would consider. — Daily Mail Hormone blockers?! Male and female brains are different. All his life, Avery’s brain has been male. Then suddenly, a switch will be turned off.

Oh, hey blockers. I knew they would come up eventually. After all, this is the only transitional health care trans youth actually receive, so of course the bigots need to eventually wind their way down to at least acknowledging them even if they quickly spin back to wild rants about surgeries and hormones, because it’s really hard to sell “no puberty, almost no side effects” or “social transition (i.e. letting a kid dress how they want and using a different name and pronoun if they like)” as being quite as scary or as easy to turn into evocations of horror movie imagery to justify badgering and harassing kids.

And we also get to hear from the Professor more about how bodies work. Apparently our brains are switches that shut down in the presence of new hormones causing something something bad stuff.

Again, this is the level of understanding of the human body that gets to dictate my right to exist and survive and my access to health care.

And I’m gosh darned thrilled about that.

Or how about this mother, who gives her 14-year-old boy estrogen? And what should society do when courts order a father to treat his daughter as a boy? In the meantime, the judge ordered, P.K. will continue to get the hormone blockers. — LifeSite News

But hey, we’re stepping dangerously close to reality again, so it’s time to restrengthen the hate on with manufactured grievances based on incidents that were wholly made up by folks who’ve realized that even using real incidents is meaningless for these chucklefucks.

And of course we get the spectre of “proud man denied his right to openly abuse his daughter into faking being a man for his comfort and anxiety about his own toxic masculinity by evil feminazis and judges” because that’s the poison rock these fuckers are choking on. Their attempts to live by a broken toxic masculinity system they can never win and wanting desperately to feel like they have a real grievance in not being allowed to dictate the lives of others to serve their own intentional ignorance.

Do these jurists understand that skeletal and brain development during puberty will be irreversible should the child later on change its mind?

Cause the life of one potential cis person accidentally being allowed to transition… which as a child would mean an easily reversible puberty blocker you just stop taking is worth the deaths of countless trans kids. Because the point is to prevent transition or kindness or any real resource for trans kids. To have them kill themselves by the thousands so you can continue to imagine that trans people don’t actually exist and you’ll have to adjust to their existence in the world.

Like, do these fuckers even get how high our suicide numbers are because of this shit?

Do they even realize that transgenders often try to kill themselves? Hence, it’s of little surprise that, tragically, of those who put themselves through this imaginary “transition,” 41 percent will subsequently attempt suicide. — Barbwire

Oh, so you are aware, Barbwire is the paper of SPLC-identified hate group member Matt Barber who has used my image to stir up hate contributions for his little anti-queer crusade*. And like most of his “facts” about gay people, these numbers come straight from the very depths of his ass.

*Long story, but the shorter is that this fucking creepster likes to go to queer events and try and get pictures of “freaks” he can use to recruit the money that pays for his mansion. And I got to be the lucky recipient of that one year. Which pretty much ended my attendance at that particular event cause I draw the line pretty firmly at not being exploited to harm other queer folks.

All this shitshow needs is for this fucker to start trying to sell the intentionally misleadingly named hate group American College of Pediatricians as if it was a more credible version of the real American Academy of Pediatricians that actually provides real healthcare.

Finally, the American College of Pediatricians — not the more powerful American Academy of Pediatricians — has condemned this indulgence of transgenderism as child abuse.

Of course. And let me guess. It all ends in a rant about how the doctors are being pressured by trans activists into ignoring the truth, blah de blah?

Insanity at this level is not benign, but deliberate. The American Medical Association is delinquent in its duty for not opposing this. I cannot believe most American doctors are clueless; but I can believe they are cowed into silence. We are sacrificing a generation of confused children and adults to the Moloch of political correctness spawned by the rather small, but ferocious, LBGT community. Not merely will these confused children be neutered, but they may soon be victims of hitherto unknown hormonally-induced cancer epidemics.

Ah yes. Indeed.

Let’s be frank, there’s a reason they are obsessing about us, why they are selling bigoted narratives about an entire religious faith and insinuating underhanded actions by a transient racial minority.

And it’s the same reason that allowed the cancerous shell of Nazism to so easily take over an already dying and evil Republican Party.

The nazis are big into reruns, intend a rerun. And we’re basically getting a rerun of the people they blamed during their first rise to power. Muslim people in replacement for Jewish people, Undocumented Immigrants and Latinx people for Romani, and Trans people for… well, trans people.

Cause there’s a reason why our research is so scattered and thin.

And it looks like this:

And it’s… infuriating. Because once again, when trans people looked to just be gaining rights and repairing the decades of research that the nazis destroyed the first go around, their ideological descendants come out of the woodwork with direct desire to do the same once more.

Firing up the brownshirts on how “evil” and “child harming” our existences are so they’ll feel ever more justified in trying to hurt us and ignoring how much they are hurting themselves in the process.

And it’s going to kill trans kids by the truckload. Already, there’s a bill in Texas called SB 6, which will basically make it impossible for a trans kid to use the correct restroom or locker room at school and basically gives the bullies carte blanche to harass and commit violence on them.

It can still be stopped in the House, so if you live in Texas and especially if you have a red representative, please call, please show up for protests, please don’t let the trans community fight alone.

Cause that’s the situation everyone in this country is up against, people so swallowed by their hate and their desire to “win” over their perceived enemies that they’ll burn down the whole damn world to hurt us.

And there’s specific groups of people they are targeting first, hoping that we will all turn a blind eye and let it happen.

Please. I beg you. Don’t.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. I’d love to write less of these responses to transphobic shit, but that’d require the GOP getting off my tits for five fucking seconds so I can do so. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™