In a December 2016 anti-transgender essay “Not My Rights Movement,” Fred Litwin claims that while “the latest data from the U.K. suggests that 20 in 100,000 are transsexual,” nonetheless “referrals to gender dysphoria clinics are skyrocketing” and puberty blockers are “not uncommon,” yet “few people actually go forward to surgery.” To reconcile the elements of this narrative, he claims that children falsely believe they are “in the wrong bodies” because trans people are overrepresented in the media, and I guess later they figure themselves out.
He linked his article to an online petition started in November 2015 by a group LGB Voice. Their 2015 petition no longer exists live but is archived. Similarly, their website lgbvoice.org was only live during 2016, when they featured a few human rights stories with phrases like "LGB Syrian refugees" and "gay asylum seekers" in the headlines and were very clear in their topmost articles that their mission was to "drop the T." Their "About" page said: "We are a group of normal, everyday Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people," but they did not name themselves.
"When I was growing up,” Litwin says in his article — he was born in the mid-1950s — there were transsexuals and transvestites, but “Transgender” aka “Trans” is a new thing that means something else. He uses the word “trans” inconsistently: sometimes he says it means nonbinary identity, not getting hormones or surgery, or the belief that gender is a social construct. At other times, he uses "trans" as a synonym for “transsexual,” as when he quotes a psychiatrist “helping people transition” and these people are referred to as “trans patients.” In any case, he complains about “the omnipresent ideology of transgenderism,” for which he plainly has no definition, which suggests to me it is not omnipresent after all and perhaps is not an ideology at all.
Yes, he says, “protect trans people from discrimination in housing and employment,” as for any minority. “But" — these people always do the but — "pronoun use?” And so he gave high praise to Jordan Peterson for “crusading against federal Bill C-16 which amends the Canadian Human Rights Act and the hate crimes section of the Criminal Code to include gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds for discrimination and hate speech.”
So then I read his book I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak (see my comment on Goodreads). It did not address my question of why he would reject this one conspiracy theory and yet embrace transphobia which is another kind of conspiracy theory.
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