Guest blog: TERFism, or why trans women should matter to youth-lovers

[Rolo]

Maybe you should do some basic research into the funding of USAID, NED, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, etc. The International Republican Institute actually funded transgender dance in Bangladesh.

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/02/07/repu ... angladesh/

For years, the Republican Party-aligned International Republican Institute’s (IRI) agenda in Bangladesh has been dominated by ethnic minority and transgender issues, with leaked documents revealing the Institute sponsored “the largest published survey of LGBTI people in Bangladesh” and that a full 24% of the 1,868 Bangladeshis who participated in IRI programs in 2019 and 2020 were transgender.

The IRI’s cultural activities were conducted with explicitly subversive objectives, aiming to recruit socially excluded groups as regime change activists. They mirrored the US government’s machinations in Cuba, where, as The Grayzone reported, USAID funded rappers, artists, and “desocialized and marginalized youth” to undermine the country’s socialist government.

Since its founding in 1983, the congressionally-funded IRI has been run by Republican politicians and operatives dedicated to the cause of “democracy promotion” abroad. IRI’s Chairman, Sen. Dan Sullivan, is a vehement opponent of same sex marriage who signed on to a GOP letter calling to restrict the participation of transgender youth in sports. While many of the institute’s board members are Never Trump Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney, the board also includes Sen. Tom Cotton, a top Trump ally who strongly opposes transgender medical interventions for youth.

Also:

Discussions that would guide the Institute’s actions were similarly dominated by transgender voices, with 136 of the 308 community members the IRI interviewed when generating policy proposals listed as “transgender/nonbinary.” According to the documents, these meetings generated 60 policy proposals, of which 17 related specifically to “LGBTI” issues.



So if Republicans are so anti-trans and all of that, then why should they literally support trans groups in Bangladesh? You think that what you think is just organically your own ideas? Why do you think Google shows you what it shows you? Why does the media cover some stuff and not others? It makes no difference if you're Belgian or not because the propaganda is all being controlled from the US anyway. Left or right, gay or straight, white or black, it's all US imperialist narratives being funded by the US government and intelligence agencies.

[Julia]

Maybe you should do some basic research into the funding of USAID, NED, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, etc. The International Republican Institute actually funded transgender dance in Bangladesh.

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/02/07/repu ... angladesh/

For years, the Republican Party-aligned International Republican Institute’s (IRI) agenda in Bangladesh has been dominated by ethnic minority and transgender issues, with leaked documents revealing the Institute sponsored “the largest published survey of LGBTI people in Bangladesh” and that a full 24% of the 1,868 Bangladeshis who participated in IRI programs in 2019 and 2020 were transgender.

The IRI’s cultural activities were conducted with explicitly subversive objectives, aiming to recruit socially excluded groups as regime change activists. They mirrored the US government’s machinations in Cuba, where, as The Grayzone reported, USAID funded rappers, artists, and “desocialized and marginalized youth” to undermine the country’s socialist government.

Since its founding in 1983, the congressionally-funded IRI has been run by Republican politicians and operatives dedicated to the cause of “democracy promotion” abroad. IRI’s Chairman, Sen. Dan Sullivan, is a vehement opponent of same sex marriage who signed on to a GOP letter calling to restrict the participation of transgender youth in sports. While many of the institute’s board members are Never Trump Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney, the board also includes Sen. Tom Cotton, a top Trump ally who strongly opposes transgender medical interventions for youth.

Also:

Discussions that would guide the Institute’s actions were similarly dominated by transgender voices, with 136 of the 308 community members the IRI interviewed when generating policy proposals listed as “transgender/nonbinary.” According to the documents, these meetings generated 60 policy proposals, of which 17 related specifically to “LGBTI” issues.



So if Republicans are so anti-trans and all of that, then why should they literally support trans groups in Bangladesh? You think that what you think is just organically your own ideas? Why do you think Google shows you what it shows you? Why does the media cover some stuff and not others? It makes no difference if you're Belgian or not because the propaganda is all being controlled from the US anyway. Left or right, gay or straight, white or black, it's all US imperialist narratives being funded by the US government and intelligence agencies.

Once again, my sincere apologies for not meeting your expectations, but I don't really use Google or pay attention to news and media and all that stuff. I'm one of those people who spends all their days immersed in boring, old books — half of which, ironically, emphasise the importance of not conforming to beliefs and opinions, encouraging readers to think for themselves instead (which, by the way, is quite different from conforming to a different perspective).

I do share your view that the media can be highly deceptive, and when something does get thrown in my face, I take it with a considerable grain of salt. This is part of the reason I’m not particularly interested in it anymore. I would strongly advice you to adopt a similar approach. Given the way you express yourself, I am concerned about your mental health. Have you considered how these thoughts and beliefs might be affecting your daily life?

I could provide hundreds of articles detailing instances of Republicans harming trans people, which would far outweigh your single article. However, I’m not particularly interested in engaging in an argument with you. Partly because it holds little significance for me, and partly to avoid enabling your overactive imagination.

[Julia]

Maybe you should do some basic research into the funding of USAID, NED, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, etc. The International Republican Institute actually funded transgender dance in Bangladesh.

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/02/07/repu ... angladesh/

For years, the Republican Party-aligned International Republican Institute’s (IRI) agenda in Bangladesh has been dominated by ethnic minority and transgender issues, with leaked documents revealing the Institute sponsored “the largest published survey of LGBTI people in Bangladesh” and that a full 24% of the 1,868 Bangladeshis who participated in IRI programs in 2019 and 2020 were transgender.

The IRI’s cultural activities were conducted with explicitly subversive objectives, aiming to recruit socially excluded groups as regime change activists. They mirrored the US government’s machinations in Cuba, where, as The Grayzone reported, USAID funded rappers, artists, and “desocialized and marginalized youth” to undermine the country’s socialist government.

Since its founding in 1983, the congressionally-funded IRI has been run by Republican politicians and operatives dedicated to the cause of “democracy promotion” abroad. IRI’s Chairman, Sen. Dan Sullivan, is a vehement opponent of same sex marriage who signed on to a GOP letter calling to restrict the participation of transgender youth in sports. While many of the institute’s board members are Never Trump Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney, the board also includes Sen. Tom Cotton, a top Trump ally who strongly opposes transgender medical interventions for youth.

Also:

Discussions that would guide the Institute’s actions were similarly dominated by transgender voices, with 136 of the 308 community members the IRI interviewed when generating policy proposals listed as “transgender/nonbinary.” According to the documents, these meetings generated 60 policy proposals, of which 17 related specifically to “LGBTI” issues.



So if Republicans are so anti-trans and all of that, then why should they literally support trans groups in Bangladesh? You think that what you think is just organically your own ideas? Why do you think Google shows you what it shows you? Why does the media cover some stuff and not others? It makes no difference if you're Belgian or not because the propaganda is all being controlled from the US anyway. Left or right, gay or straight, white or black, it's all US imperialist narratives being funded by the US government and intelligence agencies.

Once again, my sincere apologies for not meeting your expectations, but I don't really use Google or pay attention to news and media and all that stuff. I'm one of those people who spends all their days immersed in boring, old books — half of which, ironically, emphasise the importance of not conforming to beliefs and opinions, encouraging readers to think for themselves instead (which, by the way, is quite different from conforming to a different perspective).

I do share your view that the media can be highly deceptive, and when something does get thrown in my face, I take it with a considerable grain of salt. This is part of the reason I’m not particularly interested in it anymore. I would strongly advice you to adopt a similar approach. Given the way you express yourself, I am concerned about your mental health. Have you considered how these thoughts and beliefs might be affecting your daily life?

I could provide hundreds of articles detailing instances of Republicans harming trans people, which would far outweigh your single article. However, I’m not particularly interested in engaging in an argument with you. Partly because it holds little significance for me, and partly to avoid enabling your overactive imagination.

"I'm not interested, you're crazy".

More dishonesty and disingenuous behavior, along with gaslighting and personal attacks. No one needs to deal with racist, imperialist scum like yourself.

If you say so.

[Artaxerxes II]

I do thin this is a quite disagreeable piece, and that's coming from someone who previously believed in Julia's position in the past. My notes are all over the place, so I'll make sure to produce an elaborate response in the future. But here are my main criticisms.

First, let's look at this quote from Julia's article:

What this indicates is that TERFism is very capable of supporting establishment politics. As youth-lovers, this should concern us. The modern paradigm around sexuality and gender is deeply exclusionary towards us. We cannot fit into the model of adult, heterosexual love, no matter how hard we try to adjust ourselves. Despite the progress which has been made, this paradigm is still based on a familial, heterosexual unit which we disrupt as sexual 'deviants' and social nonconformists.

My main issue with this passage is that, assuming that I'm right, Lial here is using queer theory to make this point, which I disagree with. While her point does apply to homosexual childlovers and general "enbylovers", the same can't be said of heterosexual girlovers and boylovers, who do fit into said familial, heterosexual unit by virtue of their attraction being heterosexual. Indeed, it has been argued that the relative prevalence of girl-love within the general normal male population might be due to evolutionary reasons, such as early bonding between older men and little girls producing a stable mental relationship. Essentially, being engaged/married to a pre-pubescent girl effectively acted as a sort of "pre-ordering wives". So Lial's framework doesn't take into consideration heterosexual MAPs, who by most estimates form the majority of the MAP community in the real world, even if we excluded non-exclusive MAPs from the general sample. I mostly blame it on how no MAP ever came up with a critical theory that centres MAPs as the subjects in the same way critical race theory and queer theory do with regards to race and non-normative sexualities, respectively. I can see why MAPs rely on queer theory, but the main issue is that it fails to account for the experiences of heterosexual girl-lovers who, by all accounts, make up a significant portion of the global male population. After all, nothing is more trad than adult-minor marriage. As such, to address the experience of all MAPs, we need our own critical theory that provides a consistent framework to analyse our experiences.

Second issue is less about ethics, and more about tactics. To copy and paste what I said in other thread, this is it:

Previously, I would have agreed with such a view. After all, if kids are old enough to transition, they are old enough to engage in activities that don't result in permanent physical changes (such as sexual activity). But now? I don't agree as much, for the following reasons:

• The initial support for trans kids and gender transitioning for children, rather than being based on bodily autonomy, was primarily based on medicalism (i.e., transitioning should be allowable if it improves the trans kid's mental health), so making the jump from accepting trans kids to accepting intergenerational intimacy/ACSC was always going to be a big stretch as many pedophobic trans rights activists would point out, especially when they try to separate gender from sex (something that is accepted in the occident to a lesser extent). Thus, child transgenderism might be interpreted as a way to "desexualise" the child in light of the insistence of separating gender from biological sex. After all, if one were to accept this premise, can one really argue that gender transitioning "sexualises" kids?
• Since the 2000s (when the first trans kids like Jazz Jennings began to appear) there has been a long-enough time to test out the effects of encouraging such medical practices, and if the results aren't favourable for trans people (which increasingly looks like the case) then it's unlikely that integrating infantile gender transitioning into MAP rights activism will do us any favour in the future. And it's not just research showing that children and teens with gender dysphoria change their mind with regard to transitioning, but laws have been passed either taking out transitioning from government healthcare funds, or full-ban on transitioning for legal minors (like in Arkansas and Arizona). The situation doesn't look good in the USA, unless the federal government passes some bill enshrining trans rights for all (kids included) and hope that it trickles down to America's vassals in Europe and elsewhere, hope which may be dashed with a 2024 Trump presidency.
• As we've seen with the aftermath of Anita Bryant's "Save Our Kids" campaign, the gay rights movement has been willing to throw their allies under the bus in a bid to gain societal acceptance, and back then pederasts were at the receiving end. Now, with the increasing association of the trans rights movement with pedophilia (a.k.a., pedotoileting), it's not unthinkable if hay and bisexual people begin to distance themselves from trans people to avoid the anti-pedi guilt-by-association tactic. It worked before, so why would the present be any different? And looking at current trends in liberal politics, far more liberals seem to be, at best, hesitant on supporting trans rights, especially as their primary reason for supporting unlimited gender transitioning was medicalist. As the medicalist position becomes harder to support, they'll either have to support full bodily autonomy for youths even for sexual activity, or they'll have to throw trans people of all ages under the bus. Not to be a pessimist but, knowing their nature and historical trends, I think they'll likely take the second option.

So, these are the reasons why I don't think that trans kids will lead to acceptance of MAPs and intergenerational intimacy. I've been quite sceptical about anyone promoting such a scheme by now, so I don't think it will do us any favour associating with child gender transitioning (not that it stops right-wing antis from associating trans kids to pedophilia normalisation conspiracies). In this sense, the issue of child transgenderism is not close enough to issues affecting MAPs for us to consider theirs to be integral to our agenda, except in the case of bodily autonomy but even that that is a stretch. Now, what are your thoughts on this guys.

Overall, with the rise of populism not going away anytime soon, perhaps MAPs should look towards ingraining themselves into populist movements, be it on the right or left, rather than using bourgeois liberal identity politics utilised by trans rights activists too, partly because I think such tactics have outlived with 2021 BLM being the apex of minority rights activism, but also because I came to the realisation that MAPs will never be accepted by the current neoliberal establishment. Whatever the strategy is, I don't think it'll do us good for MAPs to associate themselves with the trans rights movement. At best, I can only see it as a good if the rest of the LGB crew gets thrown under the bus by Trump just like the same crew did with MAPs at Stonewall.

[Rolo]

I was clearly insulted with these statements:

"Given the way you express yourself, I am concerned about your mental health. Have you considered how these thoughts and beliefs might be affecting your daily life?"

"Partly because it holds little significance for me, and partly to avoid enabling your overactive imagination."

These are clearly personal attacks, but this person is not censored but my whole post is censored because of the last sentence? How does that make sense? Just because one is more direct and the other is being a passive-aggressive asshole? It's clear that there is extremely biased censorship going on here for the benefit of some "oppressed" people who somehow happen to have all the power in every single place they are.

In response to my board warning, I will give my own warning. If I am unjustifiably censored or warned again, then I request for my account to be deleted. I will also warn off anyone I can from participating with map-union in any way.

[Fragment]

If you had reported the post in question, it would've been easier to take action. I agree that references to mental health like that are insulting, even if the language used is polite.

I really don't want to have to lock this topic, so please both of you (and anyone else looking at participating) remember that disagreeing with the message doesn't mean attacking the messenger.

[Julia]

My apologies to Rolo for any offence caused, and to the mods for my inappropriate behaviour. I will refrain from making insulting comments in the future.

[PorcelainLark]

Overall, with the rise of populism not going away anytime soon, perhaps MAPs should look towards ingraining themselves into populist movements...

There isn't a snowball's chance in Hell that will work.

At best, I can only see it as a good if the rest of the LGB crew gets thrown under the bus by Trump just like the same crew did with MAPs at Stonewall.

How does that benefit MAPs? Two wrongs don't make a right.

[Artaxerxes II]

There isn't a snowball's chance in Hell that will work.

How so? I see no reason why we shouldn't appeal to young men, many of whom are rejecting liberalism for populism. Like it or not, unless we play both sides, MAPs will be on a sinking ship sooner than later. So what' the harm in appealing to the cohort most likely to throw a revolution, which is young men of fighting age, most of whom are shifting to the right?

How does that benefit MAPs? Two wrongs don't make a right.

By having the LGBTQ+ lobby marginalised from the mainstream establishment, it'll be easier for MAPs to gain leverage and thus have greater power when it comes to dealing with the LGBTQ+ folks. This is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation. It's just the inevitability that follows with trans exclusion, as shown by Trump's executive order defining gender as binary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdNRsCLRxhg

I see no reason why Trump would limit himself to just trans people, might as well go after the LGB too sooner or later.

As both groups (i.e., MAPs and the rainbow people) get put under the boot by Trump's chaotic second term, the probability of large segments of the rainbow people re-assessing their previous pedophobia will reach critical mass as they won't have much of a reason to exclude MAPs from their coalition.

One must be able to always make the best of any situation and, as far as I'm concerned, we don't have many card in our deck to play.

[PorcelainLark]

How so? I see no reason why we shouldn't appeal to young men, many of whom are rejecting liberalism for populism. Like it or not, unless we play both sides, MAPs will be on a sinking ship sooner than later. So what' the harm in appealing to the cohort most likely to throw a revolution, which is young men of fighting age, most of whom are shifting to the right?

Populism depends on the construction of an in-group and vilification of an out-group. The hostility towards the out-group means populism can't be co-opted. Populism is based on the sense of threat from an out-group, so as long as we are perceived as a threat by the majority, we will be vilified in order to build and maintain support for populism.

It is worth noting that this meaning of the people tends to be both integrative and divisive: not only does it attempt to unite an angry and silent majority, but it also tries to mobilize this majority against a defined enemy (e.g., “the establishment”).

Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. [p. 11]

The identification process underlying populist communication can be regarded as populist identity framing by combining the construction of in-group favouritism and out-group hostility (Mols 2012; Tajfel & Turner 1986).

BOS, L., SCHEMER, C., CORBU, N., HAMELEERS, M., ANDREADIS, I., SCHULZ, A., SCHMUCK, D., REINEMANN, C. and FAWZI, N. (2020), The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment.

By priming in-group favourability and out-group hostility, it constructs a severe threat to the people's in-group status, which is likely to enhance a subjective sense of injustice among those who identify with this in-group (e.g., Elchardus & Spruyt 2016; Van Zomeren et al. 2008). Research in the field of identity framing has indicated that in-group mobilisation results from priming a severe threat to the well-being of the group (e.g., Postmes et al. 1999; Van Zomeren et al. 2008), motivating the in-group to take action (e.g., Simon & Klandermans 2001). It is exactly this injustice that is central to the populist identity frame.

ibid.

Mudde, C., & Kaltwasser, C. (2017). Populism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
https://www2.daad.de/medien/mudde_rovir ... pulism.pdf

BOS, L., SCHEMER, C., CORBU, N., HAMELEERS, M., ANDREADIS, I., SCHULZ, A., SCHMUCK, D., REINEMANN, C. and FAWZI, N. (2020), The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment.
https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/do ... 6765.12334

By having the LGBTQ+ lobby marginalised from the mainstream establishment, it'll be easier for MAPs to gain leverage and thus have greater power when it comes to dealing with the LGBTQ+ folks. This is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation. It's just the inevitability that follows with trans exclusion, as shown by Trump's executive order defining gender as binary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdNRsCLRxhg

I see no reason why Trump would limit himself to just trans people, might as well go after the LGB too sooner or later.

As both groups (i.e., MAPs and the rainbow people) get put under the boot by Trump's chaotic second term, the probability of large segments of the rainbow people re-assessing their previous pedophobia will reach critical mass as they won't have much of a reason to exclude MAPs from their coalition.

One must be able to always make the best of any situation and, as far as I'm concerned, we don't have many card in our deck to play.

LGBT people already enjoyed relatively widespread acceptance. Being repressed by Trump won't bring them down to our level, because as soon as Democrats get back into power, LGBT people are back to being comparatively accepted in society. If there's evidence to the contrary, I'd be glad to hear it.