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Joe Duncan's avatar

"If you are not trans, you should not speak about what being trans entails. It's really simple, isn't it? Don't talk about things you don't understand. Don't talk about other people's lives and experiences as if you knew better than them. 2023 seems to be a bit late a year to still have to teach, to adults, that if you still insist to talk about things of which you have no experience and that you don't understand, you'll have to accept the consequences."

This logic drives me crazy. I cut my teeth, largely through historical accident, on writing about human sexuality. I was bombarded on all sides with criticisms as my writing reached wider and wider audiences. First, trickled in the responses that I'm not doing enough. "Your writing is almost entirely heteronormative (odd, seeing as I myself may be hetero but my relationships and those I discuss are decidedly not normative). I wrote what I'm familiar with—at first. As I wrote more, I expanded to more and more topics that I have less and less, if any, experience with. Then it became, "How dare you write about things you have no experience with?"

The message was clear: damned if you do, damned if you don't.

If you write about the heteronormative relationships you're intimately familiar with, you're ignoring other people's situation. If you write about their situation, you're speaking about the experience of others without any real experience of your own.

What seems lost is a combination of two ideas:

1. That there's merit in both objectivity, observation of things from the outside, AND the phenomena and emotions of personal subjective experience. Both are merited and powerful forms of inquiry and neither should be shunned in favor of the other, as modern science and phenomenology have both shown, concerning the former and latter, respectively.

2. That there's value in ideas that don't confirm our inner experiences. I wonder how much of this is a byproduct of our technologies that feed us things we agree with, things we like, things that make us feel positive feelings via algorithm all day long. When all you've known or most of what you've known has been carefully hand-picked to conform to your biases, and it streams through a screen you stare at all day, that's bound to have some consequences. It's no wonder we can't engage with daring ideas anymore, let alone ideas that don't perfect conform to our preconceived molds about how the things and events in the world ought to be.

I absolutely must reiterate that I have many friends in the LGBTQ community and these pseudo-activists represent precisely none of them, and make them feel uncomfortable, probably in the same way the loud-mouth Trump and all of his ideological Republican minions don't represent me, a ginger-haired pasty white American dude who just happens to match the demographic of their most die-hard voters.

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PhDBiologistMom's avatar

Great piece. But I think you meant “conversion therapy,” not “conversation therapy,” in your third from last paragraph?

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