Heather Brunskell-Evans

The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography

Michele Moore

The essays in this volume are written by clinicians, psychologists, sociologists, educators, parents and de-transitioners. Contributors demonstrate how â ~transgender children and young peopleâ (TM) are invented in different medical, social and political contexts: from specialist gender identity development services to lobby groups and their school resources, gender guides and workbooks; from the world of the YouTube vlogger to the consulting rooms of psychiatrists; from the pharmaceutical industry to television documentaries; and from the developmental models of psychologists to the complexities of intersex medicine. Far from just investigating how they are invented the authors demonstrate the considerable psychological and physical harms perpetrated on children and young people by transgender ideology, and offer tangible examples of where and how adults should intervene to protect them.

Inventing Transgender Children and Young People

This book is a collection of essays about the current theory and practice of transgendering children. Essays are written against the grain of the popularised medical definition of 'the transgender child' as a young person whose 'true' gender lies in the brain, or pre-social 'identity'. Contributors contest this diagnosis from a range of perspectives, including as social theorists, psychotherapists, persons living as transgender, individuals who have de-transitioned, and parents of adolescents identifying as transgender. They argue that medicine, social policy and the law build ideas about 'the transgender child', and contend that it is politics, not science, which accounts for the exponential rise in the number of children diagnosed as transgender by gender identity clinics. They conclude that today's medical and social trend for transgendering children is not liberal and progressive, but politically reactionary, physically and psychologically dangerous and abusive.

Born in Your Own Body

Transgender Children and Young People

This edited collection examines pornography as a material practice that eroticises gender inequality and sexual violence towards women. It addresses the complex relationship between pornography and medicine (in particular, sexology and psycho-therapy) whereby medicine has historically, and currently, afforded pornography considerable legitimacy and even authority. Pornography naturalises women’s submission and men’s dominance as if gendered power is rooted in biology not politics. In contrast to the populist view that medicine is objective and rational, the contributors here demonstrate that medicine has been complicit with the construction of gender difference, and in that construction the relationship with pornography is not incidental but fundamental. A range of theoretical approaches critically engages with this topic in the light, firstly, of radical feminist ideas about patriarchy and the politics of gender, and, secondly, of the rapidly changing conditions of global capitalism and digital-technologies. In its broad approach, the book also engages with the ideas of Michel Foucault, particularly his refutation of the liberal hypothesis that sexuality is a deep biological and psychological human property which is repressed by traditional, patriarchal discourses and which can be freed from authoritarianism, for example by producing and consuming pornography. In taking pornography as a cultural and social phenomenon, the concepts brought to bear by the contributors critically scrutinise not only pornography and medicine, but also current media scholarship. The 21st century has witnessed a growth in (neo-)liberal academic literature which is pro-pornography. This book provides a critical counterpoint to this current academic trend, and demonstrates its lack of engagement with the politics of the multi-billion dollar pornography industry which creates the desire for the product it sells, the individualism of its arguments which analyse pornography as personal fantasy, and the paucity of theoretical analysis. In contrast, this book re-opens the feminist debate about pornography for a new generation of critical thinkers in the 21st century. Pornography matters politically and ethically. It matters in the real world as well as in fantasy; it matters to performers as well as to consumers; it matters to adults as well as to children; and it matters to men as well as to women.

Performing Sexual Liberation

At a time when supposedly enlightened attitudes are championed by the mainstream, philosopher and activist Heather Brunskell-Evans shows how, in plain view under the guise of liberalism, a regressive men's rights movement is posing a massive threat to the human rights of women and children everywhere.This movement is transgender politics has turned coloniser, erasing the bodies, agency and autonomy of women and children, while asserting men's rights to bodily intrusion into every social and personal space. In a complete reversal of feminist gender critical analyses, sex and gender are redefined: identity is now called 'innate' (a 'feeling' located somewhere in the body) and biological sex is said to be socially constructed (and hence changeable). This ensures a lifetime of drug dependency for transitioners, thereby delivering vast profits for Big Pharma in a capitalist dream.Everyone, including every trans person, has the right to live freely without discrimination. But the transgender movement has been hijacked by misogynists who are appropriating and inverting the struggles of feminism to deliver an agenda devoid of feminist principles. An eye-opening book.

Transgender Body Politics

This book is a collection of essays about the current theory and practice of transgendering children. Essays are written against the grain of the popularised medical definition of ‘the transgender child’ as a young person whose ‘true’ gender lies in the brain, or pre-social ‘identity’. Contributors contest this diagnosis from a range of perspectives, including as social theorists, psychotherapists, persons living as transgender, individuals who have de-transitioned, and parents of adolescents identifying as transgender. They argue that medicine, social policy and the law build ideas about ‘the transgender child’, and contend that it is politics, not science, which accounts for the exponential rise in the number of children diagnosed as transgender by gender identity clinics. They conclude that today’s medical and social trend for transgendering children is not liberal and progressive, but politically reactionary, physically and psychologically dangerous and abusive.

Heather Brunskell-Evans

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