Truscum, Tucutes, and Kelpselves
From this morning’s mailbag:
I wanted to write to you about this article – https://theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-cult-of-transgender/
I agree with most of the article. I believe being transgender has become a trend in America today and there are too many kids and adults who are jumping on the surgery/hormones bandwagon without a second thought. Many transmen and transwomen will become outright abusive and aggressive if you try to tell them they may not need surgery/hormones in order to be happy. I was assaulted by a transwoman screaming at me “You’re straight! You’re straight” in a park over a year ago. Why? Because I am not getting surgery to mutilate my body.
My name is Jay. I have felt like a man born in a woman’s body most of my life, but I have always been against taking surgery or hormones or modifying my natural body in any way. I identify as a man, but I don’t shove it in people’s faces and I don’t correct people when they call me a “she”. I have more important things to worry about than that insignificant nonsense. I don’t want to change my body at all. I don’t even have piercings or tattoos, but I am still transgender (female-to-male). Because of the “cult of transgender” which insists that a person is only transgender if they mutilate their bodies with surgery and hormones, I am not accepted by the transgender or LGBT communities. They question my decision to not take surgery or hormones over and over and over and over again. They abuse and belittle me and call me a “transtrender”, “tucute”, etc. Transgenders tell me that I am unwanted and that there is no God, so I am all alone and on my own.
If you want to know how bad the Cult of Transgender has become, look up “truscum” and “tucute” on the internet and particularly on websites like Tumblr which is popular for teenagers. The transgender kids who identify as “truscum” regularly harass and bully people they see as “tucute”. Tucute is a derogatory term that these kids use against anyone they think is a fake transgender or “transtrender”. They bully people to the point of suicide.
There is an entire Instagram page where these transgender kids who call themselves “truscum” do nothing but harass and bully other transgender, gays, lesbians, nonbinaries, etc. They bully anyone who isn’t willing to get surgery/hormones and anyone who disagrees with them. The page has over 2,000 followers and it is nothing but hate against other human beings and making fun of them. You can see it here-https://www.instagram.com/tucuteflops/ or look up @tucuteflops on the Instagram app.
The cult of Transgender has become so bad and abusive that they have created entire pages to harass and bully anyone who disagrees with their ideology.
I also want to take this time to say that I am a transgender who is against insurance companies or the government paying for sex change operations or hormones. The “treatments” are cosmetic and transgenders should pay for surgery/hormones with their own money, not with money from other people being forced to give it away against their will for medical procedures they do not approve of and want no connection to.
I do not consider myself conservative. I am a liberal leaning Independent. I voted for Hillary, not Trump. I am also not religious and am a spiritual agnostic. However, your article about what is happening in the transgender now is spot on. Too many of these transgender people have entitlement issues and they are passing on their hateful ideology to teens and kids. We need more articles like yours to keep the transgender problem in check.
Because if we don’t keep them in check, everything will go to hell. And what’s the point of that?
So, I looked up “truscum” (pron. “true-scum”) on Social Justice Wiki. Wow, same planet, different worlds. From that Wiki page:
A large part of truscum tactics boil down to respectability politics, the definist fallacy, and trolling. They attempt, consciously or unconsciously, to discredit and marginalise other members of the transgendercommunity in order to appear acceptable to people with cishet privilege, thus conforming to cisnormative standards as much as possible.
Based on their understanding of what it means to be trans (i.e., a purely medical condition), truscum accuse trans people who do not experience gender dysphoria of appropriating trans labels and culture as a fashion statement or as a misguided attention-seeking technique. They refer to other members of the trans community, especially genderqueer and non-binary people, as “transtrenders“, further erasing their identities.
Such views are not only extremely harmful to other trans people living in the West (which is where almost all truscum live), but also to all non-Western trans people (some of whom live in the West). This is because the medical pathological definition of trans is a Western invention. So truscum’s form of the definist fallacy leads to the complete erasure of trans and non-binary identities (i.e., binarism) that have existed for millennia in other cultures. Truscum, in short, uphold colonialist and white supremacist norms when they act as gatekeepers of what “trans” is.
Here’s a bit more on the “truscum vs. tucute debate,” about which I knew not a blooming thing until just now:
Truscum is Tumblr slang for those trans people who experience dysphoria, want to medically transition and see their being trans as a medical condition. ‘Tucute’ is slang (that I only found out about yesterday, but I’ve seen those people around without knowing the name) for people who don’t think dysphoria is necessary to identify as trans. (They’re also associated with the people who like to use ‘nounself’ pronouns like ‘faeself’ and ‘bunself’.)
It turns out that truscum vs. tucute is a tribal war among transgenders.
Nounself pronouns? We got that, from Nonbinary Wiki:
Nounself pronouns are a wide variety of kinds of gender neutral pronouns. By adapting any noun of one’s choosing into a pronoun, one can create a wide variety of very personal and descriptive pronouns. The sets can be themed around concepts that have nothing to do with gender, such as nature, technology, or abstract concepts. This is similar to xenogender, in which a nonbinary person describes their gender by means of metaphorical concepts that have nothing to do with female or male. Nounself pronouns are a creative and often light-hearted experiment in gender expression. Unlike most neologistic pronouns that are in this wiki’s list of English neutral pronouns, which are intended to be used for all people regardless of gender, nounself pronouns are intended to be used by only a small number of people who feel that they express what is distinctive about themselves.
Nounself pronouns can be especially difficult to use for people who speak English as a second language, or who are neurodivergent or disabled. For this reason, if you ask others to call you by nounself pronouns, it’s good etiquette to offer a secondary set of more standard pronouns, for accessibility.
What are some examples of nounself pronouns? Glad you asked.
- meow, mew, mews, mews, meowself. Created by Tumblr user huntersgotellis in 2014. An animal (cat) themed set.
- kelp, kelp, kelps, kelps, kelpself. A nature themed set created by Tumblr user acedragons in 2014, and independently created by Tumblr user boyghostly in 2014.
Our social norms and legal standards are being revised to accommodate these folks. There is a metaphysics here: the belief that reality is whatever one wills it to be. Reality ultimately becomes incoherent, and that incoherence manifests itself in part through incoherent language. It really does become bedlam. I have an acquaintance whose classmate was female, but who toggled back and forth between identifying as male and female. It depended on the day. Every single day became a guessing game with her friends. Who went along with it out of compassion. Or what they thought was compassion. It seems more likely to me that they were more afraid of being thought of as un-progressive.
Kelpself. Shoot me now.
UPDATE: Reader Mrs. DK writes:
John — I don’t know what kind of idealized world you’re living in. Please see the recent article in the Atlantic. There is no way to “properly diagnose” someone as transgender. My autistic teen daughter was given non-FDA-approved testosterone after signing an “informed consent” form. No diagnosis necessary. In fact, insisting on objective medical tests for these “treatments” is called “gatekeeping” and is considered transphobic.
My federal workplace introduced new honorifics a couple weeks ago, to go along with Dr., Mr., and Ms. The new honorifics are Mx., Misc., and Ind. Yes, in my federal workplace we are forced to comply with honorifics aligned with non-science-based gender ideology, the idea that all people somehow “identify” along a “gender spectrum”.
Needless to say, they left off my honorific, since I identify as royalty and prefer to be called Her Majesty. It’s easy to laugh at this silliness…until you realize that questioning it could get you fired.