I Would Give It All Away In A Heartbeat
I don’t understand what it feels like to be trans. And believe me, I’ve tried.
I’ve spent hours debating the metaphysical inconsistencies of being “born in the wrong body.” I’ve racked my brain trying to figure out what it “feels like” to be a man. I’ve asked countless people how undergoing surgery and taking hormones brings them closer to a more “authentic self.”
But in the end, that doesn’t matter. Man or woman, black or white, gay or straight, trans or cis, none of us understands each other perfectly. What does matter is that we talk to each other and listen to each other and figure out how to live together without making each other miserable.
In my article, Trans Activism’s Self-Inflicted Backlash, I wrote about how difficult it’s become to talk about trans issues. And how that difficulty is harming perceptions of the trans community. The comments section has many examples of how hard it seems to be to listen to each other’s perspectives. But T, who you might remember from this conversation, shared a perspective that I don’t think is heard nearly often enough.
T:
I would vote for treating boys and girls equally and letting them figure it out. As a person with breasts (annoyingly large ones , too), a vagina, a barely functional reproductive system and a whole lot of baggage growing up being told what I should be or want, who should tell me what a woman is?
I would give it all away in a heartbeat to be allowed to feel comfortable and not expected to look, act or sound a certain way. Genetic sex, biological sex etc, they're not so simple. Chasing an ideal of what a man or women is, or is supposed to be, is what got us into this mess in the first place.
I think these ideas are inherently toxic and while pointing out feminine or masculine traits can be fine, I guess we all need labels as a throwback to our preferences, but saying who can have those traits based on a roll of the dice made by the universe at your conception and then at various points along the way of your growth seems like stunting our potential as human beings.
I think a healthy dose of caution is fine with these conversations, but if we're fine with kids psychologically damaging each other on social media, or children born and raised by abusive families, then I don't see that the choices made by children, for themselves, trying to figure out who they are is on the whole more damaging.
Steve QJ:
if we're fine with kids psychologically damaging each other on social media, or children born and raised by abusive families
I mean, that's the point; are we fine with these things? I'm certainly not. If somebody criticises these things, are they labelled a bigot? Do they face an avalanche of abuse or risk losing their job?
One of the most eye-opening things I've learned about trans issues is actually nothing to do with trans people at all. It's the point you made about how you'd give your body and reproductive system and baggage away in a heartbeat if it meant being allowed to be comfortable and not expected to look, act or sound a certain way.
I've heard lots of women, some of whom transitioned and detransitioned, some of whom didn't transition at all, say exactly this. Almost word for word. It's a point I'd never grasped having grown up as a male.
Being a teenage girl, especially a teenage girl growing up with Instagram and Youtube and online porn, and hating the expectations being placed upon you by society, seems like the most obvious, natural thing in the world. The idea that they'd "give it all away in a heartbeat" to not have to go through that makes perfect sense. And I strongly suspect it's behind the ~4000% increase in teenage girls identifying as trans, most of them, coincidentally enough, when they start to hit puberty.
But what if the problem isn't these girls' bodies, but society? What if, by normalising the idea that any girl who wants to escape the sexist pressures they face must actually be a man in the "wrong body" and should therefore have surgery and take hormones for the rest of their lives, is one of the biggest social engineering mistakes humanity has ever made?
I'm not arguing that trans people don't exist. I know personally that they do. But I also think that something else is going on in society today. I might be completely wrong, of course. My issue that it's so hard to even have a conversation about it.
Trans people have existed for thousands of years. But so have people like T. People who are trying to deal with the expectations and burdens thrust upon them (quite literally in some cases) by society. People who are having a hard time navigating those awkward, uncomfortable years that lead to adulthood.
Somewhere along the line, society has adopted this idea that these children always “know themselves well enough” to make decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. But, of course, they don’t. And leaving them to manage this uniquely difficult time by themselves is abandoning every single responsibility we have as adults.
The needs of trans people and the needs of people like T aren’t at odds with each other. Neither is one a threat to the other. Trans people should get the care they need. So should teenagers who feel like T. And that care will be different in each case. It’s not “conversion therapy” to take a little time to figure out which is which.
Teenagers, adults, men, women, most of us barely understand ourselves. Never mind anybody else. But in the end, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we talk to each other and listen to each other and try not to make ourselves or each other miserable.
Continuing. The thrust of your opening post is to encourage dialogue and civility and mutual understanding, and while I would be wrong to argue against that noble premise *in generality* I think it's irresponsible to counsel love and support and acceptance for something so unhealthy and so alarming.
Check it: there are thirteen year old girls getting surgeries happily administered by unscrupulous surgeons who accept a certificate of eligibility easily obtained for a fee over the Internet along with the many thousands of dollars they charge. Sorry but this is not something we should just open our arms in hugs for.
But! If one of these girls goes to a counselor looking for the permission to get sliced, and the counselor decides that she is merely an unhappy person seeking an escape from misery and is not actually dysphoric, *he will be fired*. The imperative to validate everything "trans" is monstrous and I really cannot understand why, even in the name of being kind to one another, you would go along with it.
Even if it's just puberty-blocking hormones and not surgery, these girls are screwing up their bodies for what is very likely just a phase. The law needs to step in.
OK, I'm going to try to keep this level and keep the "nonbinary" crap out of it.
I am gay. For some reason people lump gay and bisexual people in with this ensemble of gender bending trends as though we have something to do with each other. Homosexuality has been a steady 3-5% of human population across continents of culture and millennia of time. While people have become more open, less reluctant to come out, as social acceptance waxed, there has never been a surge to 30% or 50% or 80% of the population. Homosexuality is clearly as much a part of normal human variation as left-handedness, and its concomitant psychological maladies can all be lain at the feet of prejudice.
Suppose the percentage identifying as gay suddenly went up tenfold. My delight at all the new potential sex partners would be completely swamped by puzzlement and suspicion; sexual orientation is a fundamental aspect of identity and a sudden change from its constancy would raise alarms.
Gender identity is a lot more fundamental than sexual orientation; very few gay people wish they could be the opposite sex, and the overlap between the LG and the T is insignificant.
And yet. You mention a 4000% (!) increase in teenage girls identifying with the opposite gender and just breeze along as though this is nothing but a statistic. It is a fuck of a lot more than that. Even a 40% increase should raise alarms.
First of all it is coming at a time when "trans" is trendy, part of a nearly mindless impulse toward a set of ill-conceived social goals mostly inspired by postmodernism, the most intellectually vapid movement in the history of social thought. By stringent medical definition gender dysphoria affects one in 30,000 male births and one in 100,000 female. If we are seeing a forty-fold increase in the latter, we should be looking for explanations a lot more carefully than we rush to encouraging acceptance of what is clearly a dangerously unhealthy trend.
In a stunning turn of events this weird surge is coming at a time of unprecedented personal stress and dissatisfaction, we are living through year after year of Cuban Missile Crisis level anxiety every day as the country enters its second civil war.
The serial killer in Silence of the Lambs was murdering young woman to make a "woman suit" because he had been rejected for reassignment surgery. He hated his life and wanted to be something different. And what could be more different than gender? I see explanations like this as a lot more plausible than believing that, all of a sudden, forty time the usual number of young girls want to change their gender.
Not buying that for a second.
And ... the stridently totalitarian (you know what I mean) rhetoric of this movement is incongruent with true conviction, it is at the level of rhetorical violence, people trying to convince not just others but convince themselves that their preposterous beliefs ("a trans woman is not a man") are true.