GC don't think that trans campaigns have merely been successful through hard work organising. They think there has been a process of institutional capture.
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It's difficult in some ways to talk about the relevance of conspiracy theories to the GC project, but I think it's important. GC don't *just* think that there are trans activists that they are opposed to. They believe there is a well funded plot.
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This idea of shady international powerful bodies of trans people isn't very new at all, it was invoked in response to complaints against Julie Bindel's 2005 article "Gender Benders Beware", as a justification for ignoring these complaints.
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Ideologically there are two bases here for the distinction I'm making. 1) Whatever power trans people manage to access, it is illegitimate. Public Bodies which hear the arguments and device to support us are corrupted by our influence. We're well poisoners & child corrupters.
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2) There is an ideological self sustaining belief that whatever evidence exists to contradict the idea of a conspiracy is proof of how deep the conspiracy goes. So this is 50% hate, and 50% paranoia. It needs both.
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If there were a simple conflict between trans rights and cis women's rights, this would not be the way the debate is held. I (quite openly) hate most of the anti LGBT evangelical organisations and their use of religious rights to obscure attacks on LGBT and women's rights.
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I make no secret of my beliefs on that front, and while they will often be *polite* about their homophobic viewed (for instance around gay men and lesbians they are using to deflect from homophobia claims) they are quite forthright in their intention to prevent trans healthcare,
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to prevent abortions, to promote conversion therapy for LGBT people and so on. Like there's not a conspiracy there. Their supportive MPs and lords in parliament aren't secretly plotting against trans people. It's an open recognisable movement we are in conflict with.
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Those conspiracy theory memes about trans people, the ones that say the only way we have rights is because the legal body has been corrupted by gender ideology, or that there's a shady international pharmaceutical lobby run by Jews (presumably on their day off from manning...
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...the space laser), that's not about conflict. It's about massive insoluble epistemic problems mixed with power (to maintain and express the belief with rarely any cost) and powerlessness (to control the actions of the other - in this case, trans people) basically spiralling.
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The inability to define us out of existence, or otherwise constrain us, for now, and inability to tolerate the sudden realisation that they don't have that power, their inability to understand complex modern systems (like the behaviour of Twitter likes on JK Rowling tweets)...
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...leaves them stuck howling into the void and finding others to howl with.
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The big problem is that all this shadow conspiracy theory shit has significant costs to maintain the fantasy version of reality as the gaps from the reality that we share together end up tearing themselves apart in the face of the evidence over and over again.
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It is complex and hard to believe a committed lie, it requires support groups of others who are also similarly committed and able to take turns defending against the ingress of new information that might threaten the whole project. It is exhausting and visibly bad for them.
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End of conversation
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