A few months ago I watched this fascinating interview with a schizophrenic woman named Cecelia. Cecelia suffers from frequent, often terrifying hallucinations, that she’s had to teach herself to ignore in her day-to-day life. And while this fact alone would justify sharing the interview, what really blew my mind was Cecelia’s response when the interviewer asked her if she was hallucinating as they were talking:
In 1967 when I enlisted in the Marine Corps one of the questions that was asked was, "Have you ever committed a homosexual act?" That question goes to the heart of "is Feffy's husband homosexual?" What's in a word? Does it shine a light on honesty?
Is a person who is attracted to the opposite sex who has a one-time homosexual experience a homosexual? Heterosexual? Bi-sexual? The military questionnaire didn't ask about any of those identities, it asked about a homosexual act having taken place. If I was sexually attracted to a beautiful and passing non-transitioned transwoman and had sex with her in an act that included her penis would the answer to that question be, yes? I think that it would. Which of those identities should I claim? Which would others assign? Does it really matter? It does to the people who think identity is important. I don't dismiss that just because it is not a matter of importance to me.
I doubt that that question is still on enlistment/induction questionnaires, but it shines a light on Feffy's identity issue. If it is complicated for people without gender dysphoria, think of what a quagmire it is for the gender dysphoric.
Jesus, even the language! "Committed" a homosexual act. I'm aware that there's still progress to be made, but I'm so glad we've moved forward from that time.
Anyway, given that Feffy's husband identifies as gay, and I presume Feffy isn't his first partner, I guess it's safe to say that he has "committed" homosexual acts before. But yeah, regardless of the presentation, his relationship with Feffy isn't homosexual. You can think of it as a slippery slope analogy.
If I have sex with a woman with short hair, is that homosexual? How about if she has no discernible breasts? What if she has a little facial hair? What if she's physically stronger than me? What if she's taking male hormones? What level of deviation from feminine stereotypes is required before my relationship with this woman becomes homosexual?
Homosexual is a completely neutral term that describes certain behaviours. Feffy and her husband's relationship, completely valid though it is, doesn't fit the definition. The mistake we've made as a culture (as I mentioned to Feffy) is assigning weight and identity to these words.
In the end, as you say, none of it really matters. I fully support people's right to love whoever they want, in whatever way makes both of them happy. That support simply doesn't extend to (and doesn't *need* to extend to) losing track of objective reality.
I think Feffy's "you must say that my husband is gay" was about validation of Feffy's manhood. More about Feffy's identity than his.
A sad thing about the whole thing is that it is rooted in the failure of people to live and let live for the affairs of others. With apologies to Thomas Jefferson, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg if someone's views on sex or gender are different from mine.
And yes, that enlistment question was a sign of the times although it was considered an issue for a security clearance as something that made you subject to blackmail. But that was only a thing because of prevailing attitudes. Progress is slow which is frustrating. Going backwards is worse.
"I think Feffy's "you must say that my husband is gay" was about validation of Feffy's manhood. More about Feffy's identity than his."
Oh yeah, 100%. So much of the difficulty with this conversation is about validation.
I disagree with your next point though. Or rather, while it almost certainly won't pick your pocket or break *your* leg, it does have a material impact on the lives of women.
The key issue here is that T issues have been so completely conflated with LGB issues. But they're not the same at all. A gay person's life has no impact on anybody else's. Why anybody ever felt the need to interfere in other people's love lives or cared who they married is beyond me.
But the reason trans issues are different, is because it's not simply about how they live their own lives. I don't think that any reasonable person wants to interfere with that. The issue is female-only spaces and female sport and what a woman even *is*. These questions materially affect ~51% of the population.
It's not quite as simple as saying "live and let live." Because gender identities, as opposed to sexual preferences, require the participation and validation of the whole of society. Men will be almost completely unaffected by this. But women won't.
You stated things I do agree with and would like to elaborate on.
There is not so much controversy with trans-men as with trans-women. I think that has a lot to do with our thoughts on a woman's space being a bigger deal than a man's space. I could go on about that, but I don't think it necessary. So yes, trans-women trying to force their way into women' spaces is an issue I neglected in my live and let live thought.
The conflation of the T in the Lthru+ has been successful beyond justification. It is partly due to the trans-what? blurred line. I am strongly influenced by Thai culture. They have spectacularly passing Kathoeys. Are they homosexual transvestites or genuine transexuals? I have previously mentioned one who told me that he was saving up to get transition surgery. I'm no longer in touch with him and don't know if that happened but he seemed to be perfectly happy as a transvestite homosexual where "the girls" kindly treated him like one of their own while knowing that none of them thought of him as an actual woman. While they have a live and let live attitude there, I've stood at a urinal in a public restroom next to a pretty man with his dress raised because, unless things have changed, they are unbending in the idea that you use the restroom you are plumbed for and gendered spaces are controlled as sex specific spaces. So yes, there comes a time when the distinction between trans-woman and woman requires some tempering on live and let live. My empathy/sympathy for their plight got carried away in my statement.
Wanting to politely be treated like and accepted as are two different things. To say otherwise is denial of reality. Now that 96 genders makes the whole thing seem like a twisted fad, I am left to wonder about the difference between actual transgenders and those who aren't really. I frequently see androgynous people out and about. Since their sex or gender identification has no bearing on our interaction, I am ingraining a live and live attitude where it doesn't matter. As you pointed out, sometimes it does matter.
It's important to me to keep my friendships asexual; I've had guys I met regularly for sex but in all my life there has only been one I had any social life with. But the number of nominally heterosexual friends who wanted to have sex with me has been frankly depressing (and most of them wanted to be the bottom).
A lot of straight men harbor homosexual desires and no few have given in to them. And I've known several gay men who were married to women. I didn't ask how much of a sex life they had.
People are often what they appear to be, and labels aren't really helpful. I always wondered why men who were not flaming gay (sometimes married) thought they could hit on me. I suspect it might be more common than people are willing to talk about.
My military active duty was in the 60s when homosexuality was not tolerated. If there were gay Marines around me, they did nothing to reveal that. It might mean that they were just more cautious about allowing it to show. A few years back I learned that one of the guys from my platoon has undergone a sex change. Quite a surprise, but gender dysphoria isn't necessarily about homosexuality.
Like you, my social activities are asexual. At this time a big one for me is old-time music jam sessions. An equal mix of men and women in my general age group. It's about the activity, music, and I've never noticed sex entering into the activity. The same could be said for a ukulele group that I used to play with. I like it that way because sex changes things.
I cam out and spent my first years as a gay man in Norfolk, VA, a Navy town. The bars had a lot of short-haired guys and the clientele burgeoned when the fleet was in. I had sex with a few Marines and every one of them was a bottom, not what anyone would expect. Kinda scary topping a guy who could kill you if he suddenly got mad.
Sorry for the TMI but we are exploding stereotypes here. A lot. Anyway.
Yeah sex changes things, sex ruins things. If I had a friend who suddenly wanted me to f him it wasn't the same anymore. It introduces tension. With my regulars we never did anything more social uh afterward than grab some coffee.
Omg, Steve. You are intelligent, curious, compassionate, and, above all, patient. The deal with language and pronouns and descriptions of who we are is mind boggling, to say the least. You are an extremely wise and persistent voice in observing and articulating truth in perspectives.
I don't want to hurt anyone- particularly people who are so obviously suffering and appear to be fragile in a lot of ways.
I just cannot bring myself to deny reality. I can't believe that extreme plastic surgery and medications are preferable to having someone learn to accept the body they have. We ARE our bodies.
Having been suicidal at times, in my experience the best and *easiest* Way around that is to accept reality as it is. The biggest part-a that is to accept Yourself as You are, as opposed to how You wish You were. Now, there's a lotta people out there, most people, who will tell You they like themselves just fine. That's not what I'm "talking" about at *all.*
Therepy? You change Yourself or You don't. Nobody can do it *for* You. Not "saying" it can't help. Sometimes does, sometimes doesn't. Depends on both You and the particular therapist.
IMHO, this also applies to the trans issues. The number of people who call themselves trans [Edit: is very small], and the number of people who are genetically predisposed to rejecting [Edit:
replace "the" with "their"] biological gender is so small that if You said zero, You wouldn't be far off. Some are psychologically damaged and can't survive in the biological gender they have. Again, vanishingly slim.
The number of people who are trans because it's so common today? Nobody knows. But when pre-K are being told to question their biological gender? That it can be anything they want it to be? It's a lousy term, but this is what it means to call teachers and all-a them "groomers."
As a general rule of thumb, people along the spectrum of ability to SEE reality aren't gonna be materially changed by becoming trans. I guess I should say, IMHO.
TY, Steve. That about the first woman-I-forget-her-name [Edit: Cecelia] was fascinating.
"Having been suicidal at times, in my experience the best and *easiest* Way around that is to accept reality as it is"
I'm lucky enough to have never truly felt suicidal, but this makes intuitive sense to me too.
I though the part where Feffy mentioned that he doesn't tell anybody he's trans in real life was interesting. Having to hide something so significant about yourself because you don't want to face it, must be difficult. It's hard to believe that doesn't have a significant negative effect on your mental health.
Reality can be painful and unpleasant sometimes, for all of us, but fighting it or denying it seems like it'll always lead to more problems than it solves.
Ever read "Silence of the Lambs?" The author did his homework; the serial killer Buffalo Bill hated himself and wanted to change; his murder spree was to create a Woman Suit.
He had applied for the surgery and been turned down; IINM this was one of the clues that led to his capture.
I think the rise in suicide and the rise of the trans fad can be laid at the feet of our increasingly frustrating and unfulfilling lives (entertainment is distraction, not fulfillment), creating cadres of people who want to be someone else.
Same as the people who relocate and change their names ... they bring themselves to the new life, which ends up being as miserable as the old life.
SEXUAL GENDER: *Can* be variable, but generally goes towards Straight, Gay, Lesbian, Bi-.
There are GENDER ROLES: Along a spectrum. *Every* person has male/female (or female/male, if You prefer) in them. Yin and Yang. Too close to 100% of either gender can be pretty toxic to the opposite.
GENDER IDENTITY: Whatever a person says.
Today, I think there's a mass neurosis of *confusion* between these latter two. The fad seems to be to change LG to trans, for some reason i don't [Edit: fully] understand.
Feffy is *not* deluded. Feffy knows that the reproductive organs and genitalia he was born with are those of a woman. He also experiences incredible distress at seeing breasts and a vulva where his mind tells him a masculine chest and penis should be . Feffy's reality testing in tact. He knows what body he was born with. People who are delusional (,prior to treatment) believe the hallucinations are real. Why not accept him as a man if in meeting him at a cocktail party, you would he assume he was a man? The difference between a butch lesbian and a trans man is the trans man feels genuine distress at his primary and secondary sexual charasteristics. The butch lesbian however has no desire for a penii sax and never has. And their must be some inherent sense of gender, or you wouldn't have girls saying I'm a boy and vice- versa..As far as harm to women,, I do think those questions are nuanced and on a case by case basis. I am very tired, so I will reply with those thoughts later.
There's the danger of stumbling over words here. Words like "deluded" (and any words related to mental health really) carry such strong negative connotations that we're reluctant to use them even when they apply. So let's go a little further.
Imagine a man who is fully aware that the body he was born with is that of a human being. But experiences incredible distress at seeing hand and feet where his mind tells him paws and fur should be. He looks behind him and notes that the tail he knows deep down should be there is missing.
I'm conscious that this might sound like I'm being facetious, but I promise I'm not. In fact, there is a man who experiences feelings similar to this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_Cat). Is he not deluded because he knows he's human, and simply thinks there's been some kind of "mistake"? Or is the delusion the belief that he is a cat in the first place?
Yes, I believe that Feffy is deluded. In the same way I think our cat-man is. In the same way that I think Cecelia is.
I'm not dismissing the very obvious distress Feffy feels. And I'm not arguing at all that he should be denied surgery to ease that distress. I'm not saying I wouldn't address and treat him as a man at a cocktail party (I'm referring to him as a man here even though I know he will never read this). But I'm asking until what point we should endorse the idea that those feelings are *real*. That Feffy is literally a man because of that distress. There are wide ranging societal level implications here, that simply can't be addressed on a "case-by-case" basis.
Furthermore, what are the implications of endorsing the idea that having a female body is ever a "developmental" issue. I mean, this idea is so misogynistic as to be almost unbelievable.
I don't think there's an inherent sense of gender at all. I've never spoken to a single person, male or female, cis or trans, whose been able to even remotely describe what it feels like to be a man or a woman. And certainly not in a way that other men or women would agree with. Can you? When a child says they're a boy or a girl, what is really happening here? Some children say this at the age of 4/5. What do we even think a child's understanding of being a girl or a boy *is* at that age? Dresses and dolls and the colour pink? Trucks and fighting and the colour blue?
If a child says they're a boy or a girl, they don't know what they're talking about. Just as when they say any number of things, they don't know what they're talking about. If a little boy wants to wear a dress or put on makeup, that's fine. There is absolutely no harm in that. But if you tell a child that they literally *are* the opposite sex because of this feeling, you, as an adult, begin to create that reality in their heads.
We need to think much more carefully than we are about whether this is actually a kind thing to do.
Well would you consider the cat man's case differently if he had a partial cat brain attached to his human brain? I"m not mocking you or being facetious. I'm linking an article from the Cleveland Clinic that describes differences between men and women"s brains and that transgender brains performed more like the gender they perceived themselves to be. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/
Wow! That's fascinating, thank you. I've heard people talking about "male" and "female" brains before but I must admit I didn't take it very seriously. It all sounds deeply sexist to me.
I found the research this article was based on (https://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0056/ea0056s30.3.htm) at one of the links, and though it's a very interesting look at the potential developmental causes of gender dysphoria, it doesn't say what the Cleveland Clinic article suggests that it does.
The research notes that the brains of some of the transgender subjects reacted chemically in ways that were more similar to the gender they identified as. This is fascinating, but it's not the point. Any more than explaining the developmental or chemical reasons that Cecelia's brain works the way it does would make her hallucinations more real.
I'm not questioning the reality of gender dysphoria. Not at all. I'm not saying that people with gender dysphoria shouldn't get surgery or shouldn't be affirmed socially. I'm saying that gender dysphoria doesn't make a female a male. Nor does having a brain that responds in stereotypically male ways to chemical stimuli (the researchers didn't even extrapolate this to behavioural traits because it would make no sense).
Some men are soft and emotional. Some women are strong and pragmatic. Some men are nurturing and effeminate. Some women are insensitive and butch. There is no such thing as "female" or "male" behaviour once you move past restrictive, often misogynistic stereotypes.
It's about the subset of trans-identified folks who are "early-onset GD androphilic (homosexual) MtFs and early-onset GD gynephilic (homosexual) FtMs. The early onset of GD and sexual orientation are key points in the following analysis".
What they found was that there was evidence that this particular subset of trans folks differ in brain scan measurements from both non-trans males and non-trans females. That is, they could distinguish 4 phenotypes, not just two, from the scans: cis male, cis female, MtF, FtM. And they suggest analogizing this subset as perhaps a form of intersex brain.
There are some interesting implications. One would be that there is no more scientific reason to (based on brain scans) group these MtF folks in with cis females under one label ("women") any more than to group them under the label "men", as their brains differ from both (and from FtM as well). This does not scientifically support the slogan "trans women are women", but it would support treating them humanely, as we try to treat intersex people.
In other words, a good deal of the socio-political problems come from trying to collapse a set of 4 brain phenotypes into two categories, which they do not fit well. Treat them more honestly as 4 categories.
I do want to note that the above does not apply to all trans folks. There are those who discover their trans nature later in life, often fitting the Autogynophile (AGP) profile, which differs in various ways from the group whose brains were studied above. There are the social contagion cases of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. There is the huge fad of identifying as various flavors of non-binary or asexual. Some activists include under the "trans umbrella" those with "cis" gender identities but who get sexual arousal from transvestism. Those would require separate analysis, but I speculate that they are less likely to show up as distinguishable from their birth sex in brain scans.
Imagine in a world 20 years from now, we've come to our senses and we use brain studies to medically and relatively objectively identify MtF and FtM individuals via brain scans, and give them whatever treatments (plural) have been found objectively most successful. They are treated humanely as our fellow citizens whose minority brain type is not their fault and who deserve no stigma, just like intersex people or those born with other abnormalities. They could be treated in ways that are compatible with traditional liberal values of compassion and support, but also compatible with science and medicine, without ideological blinders getting in the way. In different domains they may be treated:
(1) as new categories FtM and MtF trans, provably distinct from cis folks
(2) by their body sex
(3) by their "gender identification"
For every circumstance, we would see which of these three ways work best. For example, for sports, option #2 might work best, while for eg: women writers contests #3 might (or might not) make the most sense, or separate contests just for trans folks (#1) might be good.
And that pragmatic lumping could change with experience, because it would not be based on pretending they are identical in all ways to their biological sex, nor their gender identity sex. Instead we'd be saying "for THIS specific purpose, let's try grouping them with others in a given way for pragmatic reasons" and see if any adjustments are needed later.
Nobody would be "erased", in fact they would be validated by brain scans and supported for their unique categories.
The conclusion of the CC is a red flag that it's not being as academically rigrorous as it might be. It concludes that anxiety & depression might actually be signs of gender dysphoria. Except those are the two most common mental illnesses out there, and GD only got to be 'a thing' just a few years ago, really - about 10-12.
There's a growing recognition in some circles that some so-called GD might actually be distractions from underlying, pre-existing psychological problems. That the rise of 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria' in young people (supported by a highly-peer-reviewed research paper by Lisa Littman, controversial only for trans-ideologues) may actually be peer group- and social media-influenced. That suicidality might not be due to GD but to these underlying problems. Given that suicide rates have risen *dramatically* in the last *twenty years*, before the rise of the trans movement, while suicidality in transfolk may be genuine, it may not necessarily be related to GD.
Feffy sounds like he *might* be one who is 'genuinely' trans (not socially induced) since he feels he was this way since he was four or five, but we can't even take *that* at face value anymore, because he could have been induced to believe that by trans ideologues marketing a 'solution' for him. Here's the problem critical theory set have created for themselves--they've blurred language and meaning so much, we can't trust anyone anymore, not even academics, whose own standards have slipped in service to political ideologues, and certainly not the self-diagnoses of psychologically disturbed individuals.
Millennials and Gen Z have been shown by many studies to be one of the most anxious, stressed, and depressed generations ever, even more than Boomers living through enforced draft and the Vietnam War, not to mention all the other turmoil of the '60s and early '70s, and GD is being marketed to them as a fix for all their problems. One wonders if the high suicide rate among transfolk is partly because transitioning didn't fix all their problems.
And given, how un-self-aware this ironically highly narcissistic movement is, I'm not terribly inclined to believe anymore anyone who claims they 'always' felt this way unless others around them could confirm this.
I think the 'genuine' trans are the ones who really did feel this way from a very early age, and I'm reading a quite convincing personal history of it right now, The Transsexual Scientist, by Dana Bevan, a psychologist and transwoman who described growing up in the Forties feeling this way. So, the part of the CC article that sounds worth exploring is the fact that gender and sex may be on a spectrum (not that hard a concept to consider), and I'm with you that we should just be who we are and love who we do. But the queer theory, which embraces some trans issues, has muddied the labels and language so much they don't make sense, and they make gender and sex way more complicated, frankly, than it is.
Whether GD is real or induced also isn't the final point, but given how ugly the movement has become, it's time for some real pushback and forcing discussions these people don't want to have, because they're afraid of what it means to their self-image.
Here's an article I shared on Facebook this weekend about The New Homophobia in the LGBTQ movement.
First of all, the stereotypes of male and female psychology don't survive actual scientific testing, double-blind and peer-reviewed; women are just as aggressive, men are just as social and so on. Most of the stereotypes are indeed responses to societal expectation.
Except one.
Men in competitive situations will outperform themselves in noncompetitive ones. Women perform identically with or without competition.
And this is why "trans women" in women's sports is just wrong; even without the corporeal advantages of heavier male bones and muscles, that competitive male brain confers an unfair advantage.
When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria rather than support. It seems to imply that the medical establishment harms them by confirming their delusion, instead of training them to reject it . But if they are to reject it, we are back to the awful conversion therapies that were also used on gay people. If you are fine with society affirming them, then what exactly are you objecting too? What do you want trans people to acknowledge or do differently?
Try asking a four year old boy "are you a little girl?" His vehemence will shock you. Sorry but I am not buying that, at that age, it's all "social construct."
Not sure this is delusion at work. Dysphoria is real; depending on your sources, one in 15-65,000 births pass the medical criteria. However when we have hundreds of times as many claiming dysphoria (or insulting intelligence by claiming intermediate gender) then it's hard to accept that there are some genuine ones.
But there are, and they are not being helped by this raging fad.
And it's a painful existence. A genuine dysphoric lives in a state of continuous shock, a sense of wrongness. I dated one guy every time he came to Seattle, years, and I never would have known if he hadn't told me that this meeting would be our last because he was going into surgery soon. He didn't look, act, or sound at all feminine but if he qualified for reassignment then he had passed a high bar.
This is all complex and metaphysical and pushes the limits of our abilities to empathize with someone else experiencing life in a radically different way than we do. Setting aside for now questions of how to handle this issue with children and young adults (18-21-ish), I am inclined to simply respect other people’s wishes for how they would like to be referred to, just as I wouldn’t insist on calling you Steven, even if it’s your REAL name, if you say you prefer Steve. This is of course harder for all of us because, culturally, we’re trained to asses the gender/sex of each person we meet and think of them/treat them in different ways depending on the bucket. So it drives us nuts when they’re either hard to categorize or they want us to categorize them differently than we think they should be. Now, I’m not naive- the vast majority of humans are XX or XY, and that binary has huge biological implications. But sometimes I think we overstate the biological and understate the cultural. Look at how we interact with other species- it’s interesting to know if your friends dog is a boy or girl, but you won’t think of them in radically different ways depending on the answer. Anyway it feels like both sides of this debate can get too hung up on these distinctions. Why does it matter if the word “gay” is appropriate for Feffy’s husband? If it’s important to both of them, they can call themselves gay. I don’t see how it affects any of the rest of us whatsoever? To me, there are much thornier issues to be working through here related to how we discuss these issues with youth.
"just as I wouldn’t insist on calling you Steven, even if it’s your REAL name, if you say you prefer Steve"
Actually, Steve *is* my real name😁 It's on my birth certificate and everything. But while I too am inclined to simply respect people's wishes about how they want to be referred to, the issue runs far deeper than that. And I think this framing conflates too many different things.
First, there's the issue of pronouns and deadnames. This is referring to people as they wish to be referred to, and I am, I think, in complete agreement with you. If somebody tells me their name is Gpjrthgx, I'll do my best to pronounce it. If Dwayne Johnson tells me to use she/her pronouns, I'll oblige without the slightest protest. This is politeness.
But if Dwayne, or any other person, asks me to say that they *are* a woman, there are a bunch of other things I now need to consider. What are the implications of this person being treated identically to a woman in society? What are the potential consequences of the precedent this sets? This is no longer about politeness, it's about policy.
If I'm asked to ignore the differences between sex and gender, or to always consider gender to be more important, what does that mean for sport where we have to acknowledge that male and female bodies perform differently regardless of gender identity? This is no longer about politeness, it's about fairness.
If a friend told me her dog was a she, despite the dog's penis, I'd see that as a cause for concern. Not because I care about the dog's gender identity (nor does the dog presumably), but because a shared relationship to reality is really important. Which is the same reason I think the words are important in general; words are how we interact with that shared reality (I may also be biased as a writer).
The words don't change Feffy and his husband's relationship. And you're right, I don't really care whether his husband calls himself gay or not. If they're happy, I'm happy. But that's because the label one couple chooses doesn't tempt us to do something deeply homophobic like, for example, deny the existence of same-sex attraction. But when this happens on a wider and wider scale, you get people thinking like the tweet that started the conversation.
The more we lose sight of what words mean, the greater the implications for issues that lie far beyond the scope of politeness. I don't think the child safeguarding can be separated from the wider conversation.
I think those are all totally fair and valid concerns! I just think we miss the forest for the trees when we start quibbling with (adult) people about their individual private lives and identifiers. (Also I figured you might actually be a Steve, haha... I know a John who used to have people *insist* he was a Jonathan, he was like, WTF, I know my own name? Hahah!)
My grandma had to go to my uncle Eddie's school to tell his teachers that his name was not Edward.
Only my mother and sisters call me David, and on the rare occasions that my wife isn't calling be Honey, she will use David. Before I retired my picture ID name tag said Dave since its purpose was to inform people how to address me. Names. There is a woman whose actual name is Jelly Sandwich.
Gay men tend to use undiminutive names; Robert, not Bob; Harold, not Harry, Christopher, not Chris (I use the latter, the former takes too long to write).
Jazz musicians go the other way. Stan Getz. Art Pepper. Bill Evans.
I thought this was a fascinating conversation. At times, instructive.
But I'm a bit perplexed. Where are you seeing Feffie's delusion? Is it because he wishes to be a cis man rather than accepting that they are a trans man? If so, I agree that this is delusional thinking (or perhaps just a wish). Or is it because Feffie insists that their husband is still a gay man? My opinion is that it is rather a mental leap for them to think that way (and I also assume that Feffie's husband is actually bisexual). Not that my opinion should matter to Feffie or his husband!
Or are you saying that Feffie's delusion is that they needed to transition from a cis woman to a trans man in the first place? It sounds like Feffie medically transitioned and is healthier/happier now, due to that transition. My hope is that Feffie transitioned when they were a fully informed adult, of course. My understanding is that those experiencing severe, *genuinely* ongoing trauma regarding their biological sex is that that trauma comes from both gender misidentification and a rejection of their actual genitals. Being in the sex that they were born in causes them potentially lifelong mental distress, and so they medically transition. Certainly the older trans women I know can attest that they are much healthier and happier now that they are in the (trans) body that they wanted for many years. Also the medically transitioned trans man I know, who proudly recognizes himself as a "TRANS man" (bless him!) and who is married to a cis woman who considers herself "queer" rather than straight (bless her as well, words have meaning)... well he is in a much healthier place now, then when he was a suicidal teen who felt trapped in a woman's body.
I also think that the need to medically transition is a rare thing and not something that should be done before therapy and definitely not during teen years. The people I am referring to did not transition until they were 100% sure, after years of therapy and well into their late 20s or 30s. They took a conservative approach, realizing that this was a lifelong decision being made, one that would literally change their bodies forever.
Anyway, back to my question to you, about what you consider to be Feffie's delusion... I think you might mean the former (my second paragraph, rather than my third paragraph), but I just wanted to be clear on this!
"But I'm a bit perplexed. Where are you seeing Feffie's delusion?"
(I just re-read this reply and realised that I unintentionally used "she" throughout the first paragraph. I'm going to leave it as is, even though I mean no disrespect, because it perfectly illustrates my point.
The cognitive load required for me to maintain this illusion slips when I let my guard down, because I'm being polite, not truthful. Referring to the reality of Feffy's female body and then typing "he" is so unnatural that I have to concentrate to keep it up. More to the point, it makes the meaning of the paragraph almost incomprehensible which I guess is why I subconsciously switched.)
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I've got into this in a little more detail in my reply to Curious Cat, but yeah, I see Feffy's delusion as the belief that she's a man when a man is an adult human male. That she believes her normal, healthy female body is a "developmental" issue .
Feffy's choice to transition doesn't factor into my thinking at all. It doesn’t make him delusional any more than some people's decision to get breast implants or BBLs or nose jobs makes them delusional. If an adult chooses to get cosmetic surgery for any reason, that's completely up to them (though as I also mention to Curious Cat, it's hard not to see some choices as indicative of mental health issues).
The distress caused by gender dysphoria is, of course, real. I fully support Feffy's right to transition and truly hope that his mental health continues to improve. The fact that he's still suicidal post transition is a serious cause for concern, of course, but I presume things were even worse before.
But given that all the affirmation he's received hasn't made him happy, I can't help but wonder whether we could be doing better for people experiencing this distress.
That is a great point re. still feeling suicidal. Makes me rethink my comment that he is actually healthier & happier. Hopefully that will come. Also, and at the risk of sounding facile, I hope that part of being healthier is perhaps less time online. I think Twitter is not a good place for people who are emotionally or mentally fragile.
This was so distressing to read! In a way, Feffy is absolutely right, there is no complete distinction between sex and gender, and he/she knows it. We are women because we are female; our gender is, indeed, a social construct, but this construct is based on real functions that our bodies have: gestating, menstruating, lactating, being in general shorter, slower, and weaker than a male's body, etc. The superficial stuff, like "presenting" (wearing dresses and makeup, having long hair, loving "girly" things) is the part that hurts us the most, and, alas, it is also the part adopted by transwomen to "prove" they are ... us.
"The superficial stuff, like "presenting" (wearing dresses and makeup, having long hair, loving "girly" things) is the part that hurts us the most, and, alas, it is also the part adopted by transwomen to "prove" they are ... us."
So true. I think (though I suspect that many trans people would disagree or at least never admit it), that what trans women are saying when they say they are women is "we are not like men." Which, according to the stereotypical image of what a man *is*, is certainly true. I just think it's much more productive (and feasible) to challenge the stereotype of what a man is than to dismantle the definition of what a woman is.
Sorry for the deluge of top posts but if you are having this conversation on Medium I would counsel caution. If just one of these people complains that you are "bullying" you will be banned. Not suspended, banned, and any partnership program money you have coming won't come.
A week ago I posted a watered-down version of the post you praised as a breath of sane air; I had two responses. One was a woman screaming about "transphobia" (what a dumb word) but the other was some guy whose entire profile was a recitation of his "queer" credentials who admitted (and boasted) that he had not read past my opening sentence. He said that he was gathering a crowd to report my post. I blocked him and deleted the whole thing.
I was banned from Medium a year ago when one of those "nonbinary" twits reported me for "bullying"; my offense was to state, as I do often, that I will not use "they" as a singular pronoun. This person's responses to me were jaw-droppingly savage, bringing my dead mother into it, about the worst I've seen in my three decades online. Red-eyed savagery. Her avatar was a cartoon of a girl snarling in rage.
I had lobbed no insults, not said anything about the buffoonery that I regard "nonbinary" to be, I had just laid down my refusal to concede to an abuse of grammar. The fact that what she wrote to me was monstrously worse than anything I had written made no impression on Medium, they answered me with form letters. I lost a thousand followers and nearly a thousand dollars in PP money I had coming. To say nothing of a year of writing.
All I had done was say that I refused to refer to her or to any other single person as "they." Not that I had any reason to refer to her at all; I had already blocked her.
You have a commanding presence on Medium, but beware; the curators have swallowed the hook, line, and sinker along with the bait on this "trans" thing and if you write about this stuff you're playing with fire.
One consideration rarely mentioned: the vast majority of these "trans" people do not qualify as genuinely dysphoric. There are resources for helping the dysphoric and they are being drained by people who just want to get attention by jumping on the latest faddish bandwagon.
And they don't give a damn about the harm they are causing, to the dysphoric and to confused kids.
A suggestion I've seen which makes sense to me in today's linguistic landscape, is to describe the biological sex of people that a person is sexually attracted to, rather than focus on the match or mismatch of the sexes of the people involved.
Thus: one's sexual orientation might be "androphilic", "gynephilic", "biphilic" and perhaps "aphilic" for those with no sexual interest in any sex.
Why leave out "gender identity"? Few to zero people seem to have a deeply ingrained psycho-biological sexual attraction to others based on the other person's self chosen "gender identity" (tho they might have idiosyncratic lesser preferences like just as some people have a "type" in regard to height, weight, hair color, nationality, etc). Also "gender identity" has become very semantically confusing, with an ever expanded set of supposed "genders" about which few people agree. (Ask a thousand people for the dozen most common gender identities and see how many have the same list and mean the same thing by the terms they use). Trying to describe attractions by having words for each combination (or set of combinations) of gender identities involved would be a nightmare. So let's stick to SEXual orientation.
Classifying one's sexual attractions by reference to one's own sex may be becoming obsolete, as it seems deeply rooted in old taboos rather than being cleanly descriptive. We can observe that the majority of biological males are gynephilic and the majority of biological females are androphilic, without needing to bake that observation into our very terminology.
In 1967 when I enlisted in the Marine Corps one of the questions that was asked was, "Have you ever committed a homosexual act?" That question goes to the heart of "is Feffy's husband homosexual?" What's in a word? Does it shine a light on honesty?
Is a person who is attracted to the opposite sex who has a one-time homosexual experience a homosexual? Heterosexual? Bi-sexual? The military questionnaire didn't ask about any of those identities, it asked about a homosexual act having taken place. If I was sexually attracted to a beautiful and passing non-transitioned transwoman and had sex with her in an act that included her penis would the answer to that question be, yes? I think that it would. Which of those identities should I claim? Which would others assign? Does it really matter? It does to the people who think identity is important. I don't dismiss that just because it is not a matter of importance to me.
I doubt that that question is still on enlistment/induction questionnaires, but it shines a light on Feffy's identity issue. If it is complicated for people without gender dysphoria, think of what a quagmire it is for the gender dysphoric.
"Have you ever committed a homosexual act?"
Jesus, even the language! "Committed" a homosexual act. I'm aware that there's still progress to be made, but I'm so glad we've moved forward from that time.
Anyway, given that Feffy's husband identifies as gay, and I presume Feffy isn't his first partner, I guess it's safe to say that he has "committed" homosexual acts before. But yeah, regardless of the presentation, his relationship with Feffy isn't homosexual. You can think of it as a slippery slope analogy.
If I have sex with a woman with short hair, is that homosexual? How about if she has no discernible breasts? What if she has a little facial hair? What if she's physically stronger than me? What if she's taking male hormones? What level of deviation from feminine stereotypes is required before my relationship with this woman becomes homosexual?
Homosexual is a completely neutral term that describes certain behaviours. Feffy and her husband's relationship, completely valid though it is, doesn't fit the definition. The mistake we've made as a culture (as I mentioned to Feffy) is assigning weight and identity to these words.
In the end, as you say, none of it really matters. I fully support people's right to love whoever they want, in whatever way makes both of them happy. That support simply doesn't extend to (and doesn't *need* to extend to) losing track of objective reality.
I think Feffy's "you must say that my husband is gay" was about validation of Feffy's manhood. More about Feffy's identity than his.
A sad thing about the whole thing is that it is rooted in the failure of people to live and let live for the affairs of others. With apologies to Thomas Jefferson, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg if someone's views on sex or gender are different from mine.
And yes, that enlistment question was a sign of the times although it was considered an issue for a security clearance as something that made you subject to blackmail. But that was only a thing because of prevailing attitudes. Progress is slow which is frustrating. Going backwards is worse.
"I think Feffy's "you must say that my husband is gay" was about validation of Feffy's manhood. More about Feffy's identity than his."
Oh yeah, 100%. So much of the difficulty with this conversation is about validation.
I disagree with your next point though. Or rather, while it almost certainly won't pick your pocket or break *your* leg, it does have a material impact on the lives of women.
The key issue here is that T issues have been so completely conflated with LGB issues. But they're not the same at all. A gay person's life has no impact on anybody else's. Why anybody ever felt the need to interfere in other people's love lives or cared who they married is beyond me.
But the reason trans issues are different, is because it's not simply about how they live their own lives. I don't think that any reasonable person wants to interfere with that. The issue is female-only spaces and female sport and what a woman even *is*. These questions materially affect ~51% of the population.
It's not quite as simple as saying "live and let live." Because gender identities, as opposed to sexual preferences, require the participation and validation of the whole of society. Men will be almost completely unaffected by this. But women won't.
You stated things I do agree with and would like to elaborate on.
There is not so much controversy with trans-men as with trans-women. I think that has a lot to do with our thoughts on a woman's space being a bigger deal than a man's space. I could go on about that, but I don't think it necessary. So yes, trans-women trying to force their way into women' spaces is an issue I neglected in my live and let live thought.
The conflation of the T in the Lthru+ has been successful beyond justification. It is partly due to the trans-what? blurred line. I am strongly influenced by Thai culture. They have spectacularly passing Kathoeys. Are they homosexual transvestites or genuine transexuals? I have previously mentioned one who told me that he was saving up to get transition surgery. I'm no longer in touch with him and don't know if that happened but he seemed to be perfectly happy as a transvestite homosexual where "the girls" kindly treated him like one of their own while knowing that none of them thought of him as an actual woman. While they have a live and let live attitude there, I've stood at a urinal in a public restroom next to a pretty man with his dress raised because, unless things have changed, they are unbending in the idea that you use the restroom you are plumbed for and gendered spaces are controlled as sex specific spaces. So yes, there comes a time when the distinction between trans-woman and woman requires some tempering on live and let live. My empathy/sympathy for their plight got carried away in my statement.
Wanting to politely be treated like and accepted as are two different things. To say otherwise is denial of reality. Now that 96 genders makes the whole thing seem like a twisted fad, I am left to wonder about the difference between actual transgenders and those who aren't really. I frequently see androgynous people out and about. Since their sex or gender identification has no bearing on our interaction, I am ingraining a live and live attitude where it doesn't matter. As you pointed out, sometimes it does matter.
I wouldn't get too worked up over the word.
It's important to me to keep my friendships asexual; I've had guys I met regularly for sex but in all my life there has only been one I had any social life with. But the number of nominally heterosexual friends who wanted to have sex with me has been frankly depressing (and most of them wanted to be the bottom).
A lot of straight men harbor homosexual desires and no few have given in to them. And I've known several gay men who were married to women. I didn't ask how much of a sex life they had.
Oh, and there are a lot of gay Marines.
People are often what they appear to be, and labels aren't really helpful. I always wondered why men who were not flaming gay (sometimes married) thought they could hit on me. I suspect it might be more common than people are willing to talk about.
My military active duty was in the 60s when homosexuality was not tolerated. If there were gay Marines around me, they did nothing to reveal that. It might mean that they were just more cautious about allowing it to show. A few years back I learned that one of the guys from my platoon has undergone a sex change. Quite a surprise, but gender dysphoria isn't necessarily about homosexuality.
Like you, my social activities are asexual. At this time a big one for me is old-time music jam sessions. An equal mix of men and women in my general age group. It's about the activity, music, and I've never noticed sex entering into the activity. The same could be said for a ukulele group that I used to play with. I like it that way because sex changes things.
I cam out and spent my first years as a gay man in Norfolk, VA, a Navy town. The bars had a lot of short-haired guys and the clientele burgeoned when the fleet was in. I had sex with a few Marines and every one of them was a bottom, not what anyone would expect. Kinda scary topping a guy who could kill you if he suddenly got mad.
Sorry for the TMI but we are exploding stereotypes here. A lot. Anyway.
Yeah sex changes things, sex ruins things. If I had a friend who suddenly wanted me to f him it wasn't the same anymore. It introduces tension. With my regulars we never did anything more social uh afterward than grab some coffee.
Omg, Steve. You are intelligent, curious, compassionate, and, above all, patient. The deal with language and pronouns and descriptions of who we are is mind boggling, to say the least. You are an extremely wise and persistent voice in observing and articulating truth in perspectives.
I love this so much- thank you!
I don't want to hurt anyone- particularly people who are so obviously suffering and appear to be fragile in a lot of ways.
I just cannot bring myself to deny reality. I can't believe that extreme plastic surgery and medications are preferable to having someone learn to accept the body they have. We ARE our bodies.
I think that a man who arranges to have himself castrated is a pretty desperate character and the good ship Learn To Accept Yourself sailed long ago.
Having been suicidal at times, in my experience the best and *easiest* Way around that is to accept reality as it is. The biggest part-a that is to accept Yourself as You are, as opposed to how You wish You were. Now, there's a lotta people out there, most people, who will tell You they like themselves just fine. That's not what I'm "talking" about at *all.*
Therepy? You change Yourself or You don't. Nobody can do it *for* You. Not "saying" it can't help. Sometimes does, sometimes doesn't. Depends on both You and the particular therapist.
IMHO, this also applies to the trans issues. The number of people who call themselves trans [Edit: is very small], and the number of people who are genetically predisposed to rejecting [Edit:
replace "the" with "their"] biological gender is so small that if You said zero, You wouldn't be far off. Some are psychologically damaged and can't survive in the biological gender they have. Again, vanishingly slim.
The number of people who are trans because it's so common today? Nobody knows. But when pre-K are being told to question their biological gender? That it can be anything they want it to be? It's a lousy term, but this is what it means to call teachers and all-a them "groomers."
As a general rule of thumb, people along the spectrum of ability to SEE reality aren't gonna be materially changed by becoming trans. I guess I should say, IMHO.
TY, Steve. That about the first woman-I-forget-her-name [Edit: Cecelia] was fascinating.
"Having been suicidal at times, in my experience the best and *easiest* Way around that is to accept reality as it is"
I'm lucky enough to have never truly felt suicidal, but this makes intuitive sense to me too.
I though the part where Feffy mentioned that he doesn't tell anybody he's trans in real life was interesting. Having to hide something so significant about yourself because you don't want to face it, must be difficult. It's hard to believe that doesn't have a significant negative effect on your mental health.
Reality can be painful and unpleasant sometimes, for all of us, but fighting it or denying it seems like it'll always lead to more problems than it solves.
Ever read "Silence of the Lambs?" The author did his homework; the serial killer Buffalo Bill hated himself and wanted to change; his murder spree was to create a Woman Suit.
He had applied for the surgery and been turned down; IINM this was one of the clues that led to his capture.
I think the rise in suicide and the rise of the trans fad can be laid at the feet of our increasingly frustrating and unfulfilling lives (entertainment is distraction, not fulfillment), creating cadres of people who want to be someone else.
Same as the people who relocate and change their names ... they bring themselves to the new life, which ends up being as miserable as the old life.
To summarize the above:
There's biological GENDER: Two-a them.
SEXUAL GENDER: *Can* be variable, but generally goes towards Straight, Gay, Lesbian, Bi-.
There are GENDER ROLES: Along a spectrum. *Every* person has male/female (or female/male, if You prefer) in them. Yin and Yang. Too close to 100% of either gender can be pretty toxic to the opposite.
GENDER IDENTITY: Whatever a person says.
Today, I think there's a mass neurosis of *confusion* between these latter two. The fad seems to be to change LG to trans, for some reason i don't [Edit: fully] understand.
Feffy is *not* deluded. Feffy knows that the reproductive organs and genitalia he was born with are those of a woman. He also experiences incredible distress at seeing breasts and a vulva where his mind tells him a masculine chest and penis should be . Feffy's reality testing in tact. He knows what body he was born with. People who are delusional (,prior to treatment) believe the hallucinations are real. Why not accept him as a man if in meeting him at a cocktail party, you would he assume he was a man? The difference between a butch lesbian and a trans man is the trans man feels genuine distress at his primary and secondary sexual charasteristics. The butch lesbian however has no desire for a penii sax and never has. And their must be some inherent sense of gender, or you wouldn't have girls saying I'm a boy and vice- versa..As far as harm to women,, I do think those questions are nuanced and on a case by case basis. I am very tired, so I will reply with those thoughts later.
There's the danger of stumbling over words here. Words like "deluded" (and any words related to mental health really) carry such strong negative connotations that we're reluctant to use them even when they apply. So let's go a little further.
Imagine a man who is fully aware that the body he was born with is that of a human being. But experiences incredible distress at seeing hand and feet where his mind tells him paws and fur should be. He looks behind him and notes that the tail he knows deep down should be there is missing.
I'm conscious that this might sound like I'm being facetious, but I promise I'm not. In fact, there is a man who experiences feelings similar to this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_Cat). Is he not deluded because he knows he's human, and simply thinks there's been some kind of "mistake"? Or is the delusion the belief that he is a cat in the first place?
Yes, I believe that Feffy is deluded. In the same way I think our cat-man is. In the same way that I think Cecelia is.
I'm not dismissing the very obvious distress Feffy feels. And I'm not arguing at all that he should be denied surgery to ease that distress. I'm not saying I wouldn't address and treat him as a man at a cocktail party (I'm referring to him as a man here even though I know he will never read this). But I'm asking until what point we should endorse the idea that those feelings are *real*. That Feffy is literally a man because of that distress. There are wide ranging societal level implications here, that simply can't be addressed on a "case-by-case" basis.
Furthermore, what are the implications of endorsing the idea that having a female body is ever a "developmental" issue. I mean, this idea is so misogynistic as to be almost unbelievable.
I don't think there's an inherent sense of gender at all. I've never spoken to a single person, male or female, cis or trans, whose been able to even remotely describe what it feels like to be a man or a woman. And certainly not in a way that other men or women would agree with. Can you? When a child says they're a boy or a girl, what is really happening here? Some children say this at the age of 4/5. What do we even think a child's understanding of being a girl or a boy *is* at that age? Dresses and dolls and the colour pink? Trucks and fighting and the colour blue?
If a child says they're a boy or a girl, they don't know what they're talking about. Just as when they say any number of things, they don't know what they're talking about. If a little boy wants to wear a dress or put on makeup, that's fine. There is absolutely no harm in that. But if you tell a child that they literally *are* the opposite sex because of this feeling, you, as an adult, begin to create that reality in their heads.
We need to think much more carefully than we are about whether this is actually a kind thing to do.
Well would you consider the cat man's case differently if he had a partial cat brain attached to his human brain? I"m not mocking you or being facetious. I'm linking an article from the Cleveland Clinic that describes differences between men and women"s brains and that transgender brains performed more like the gender they perceived themselves to be. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/
Wow! That's fascinating, thank you. I've heard people talking about "male" and "female" brains before but I must admit I didn't take it very seriously. It all sounds deeply sexist to me.
I found the research this article was based on (https://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0056/ea0056s30.3.htm) at one of the links, and though it's a very interesting look at the potential developmental causes of gender dysphoria, it doesn't say what the Cleveland Clinic article suggests that it does.
The research notes that the brains of some of the transgender subjects reacted chemically in ways that were more similar to the gender they identified as. This is fascinating, but it's not the point. Any more than explaining the developmental or chemical reasons that Cecelia's brain works the way it does would make her hallucinations more real.
I'm not questioning the reality of gender dysphoria. Not at all. I'm not saying that people with gender dysphoria shouldn't get surgery or shouldn't be affirmed socially. I'm saying that gender dysphoria doesn't make a female a male. Nor does having a brain that responds in stereotypically male ways to chemical stimuli (the researchers didn't even extrapolate this to behavioural traits because it would make no sense).
Some men are soft and emotional. Some women are strong and pragmatic. Some men are nurturing and effeminate. Some women are insensitive and butch. There is no such thing as "female" or "male" behaviour once you move past restrictive, often misogynistic stereotypes.
Here's an interesting survey of brain difference studies you my find interesting, Steve.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/
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It's about the subset of trans-identified folks who are "early-onset GD androphilic (homosexual) MtFs and early-onset GD gynephilic (homosexual) FtMs. The early onset of GD and sexual orientation are key points in the following analysis".
What they found was that there was evidence that this particular subset of trans folks differ in brain scan measurements from both non-trans males and non-trans females. That is, they could distinguish 4 phenotypes, not just two, from the scans: cis male, cis female, MtF, FtM. And they suggest analogizing this subset as perhaps a form of intersex brain.
There are some interesting implications. One would be that there is no more scientific reason to (based on brain scans) group these MtF folks in with cis females under one label ("women") any more than to group them under the label "men", as their brains differ from both (and from FtM as well). This does not scientifically support the slogan "trans women are women", but it would support treating them humanely, as we try to treat intersex people.
In other words, a good deal of the socio-political problems come from trying to collapse a set of 4 brain phenotypes into two categories, which they do not fit well. Treat them more honestly as 4 categories.
I do want to note that the above does not apply to all trans folks. There are those who discover their trans nature later in life, often fitting the Autogynophile (AGP) profile, which differs in various ways from the group whose brains were studied above. There are the social contagion cases of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. There is the huge fad of identifying as various flavors of non-binary or asexual. Some activists include under the "trans umbrella" those with "cis" gender identities but who get sexual arousal from transvestism. Those would require separate analysis, but I speculate that they are less likely to show up as distinguishable from their birth sex in brain scans.
Imagine in a world 20 years from now, we've come to our senses and we use brain studies to medically and relatively objectively identify MtF and FtM individuals via brain scans, and give them whatever treatments (plural) have been found objectively most successful. They are treated humanely as our fellow citizens whose minority brain type is not their fault and who deserve no stigma, just like intersex people or those born with other abnormalities. They could be treated in ways that are compatible with traditional liberal values of compassion and support, but also compatible with science and medicine, without ideological blinders getting in the way. In different domains they may be treated:
(1) as new categories FtM and MtF trans, provably distinct from cis folks
(2) by their body sex
(3) by their "gender identification"
For every circumstance, we would see which of these three ways work best. For example, for sports, option #2 might work best, while for eg: women writers contests #3 might (or might not) make the most sense, or separate contests just for trans folks (#1) might be good.
And that pragmatic lumping could change with experience, because it would not be based on pretending they are identical in all ways to their biological sex, nor their gender identity sex. Instead we'd be saying "for THIS specific purpose, let's try grouping them with others in a given way for pragmatic reasons" and see if any adjustments are needed later.
Nobody would be "erased", in fact they would be validated by brain scans and supported for their unique categories.
The conclusion of the CC is a red flag that it's not being as academically rigrorous as it might be. It concludes that anxiety & depression might actually be signs of gender dysphoria. Except those are the two most common mental illnesses out there, and GD only got to be 'a thing' just a few years ago, really - about 10-12.
There's a growing recognition in some circles that some so-called GD might actually be distractions from underlying, pre-existing psychological problems. That the rise of 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria' in young people (supported by a highly-peer-reviewed research paper by Lisa Littman, controversial only for trans-ideologues) may actually be peer group- and social media-influenced. That suicidality might not be due to GD but to these underlying problems. Given that suicide rates have risen *dramatically* in the last *twenty years*, before the rise of the trans movement, while suicidality in transfolk may be genuine, it may not necessarily be related to GD.
Feffy sounds like he *might* be one who is 'genuinely' trans (not socially induced) since he feels he was this way since he was four or five, but we can't even take *that* at face value anymore, because he could have been induced to believe that by trans ideologues marketing a 'solution' for him. Here's the problem critical theory set have created for themselves--they've blurred language and meaning so much, we can't trust anyone anymore, not even academics, whose own standards have slipped in service to political ideologues, and certainly not the self-diagnoses of psychologically disturbed individuals.
Millennials and Gen Z have been shown by many studies to be one of the most anxious, stressed, and depressed generations ever, even more than Boomers living through enforced draft and the Vietnam War, not to mention all the other turmoil of the '60s and early '70s, and GD is being marketed to them as a fix for all their problems. One wonders if the high suicide rate among transfolk is partly because transitioning didn't fix all their problems.
And given, how un-self-aware this ironically highly narcissistic movement is, I'm not terribly inclined to believe anymore anyone who claims they 'always' felt this way unless others around them could confirm this.
I think the 'genuine' trans are the ones who really did feel this way from a very early age, and I'm reading a quite convincing personal history of it right now, The Transsexual Scientist, by Dana Bevan, a psychologist and transwoman who described growing up in the Forties feeling this way. So, the part of the CC article that sounds worth exploring is the fact that gender and sex may be on a spectrum (not that hard a concept to consider), and I'm with you that we should just be who we are and love who we do. But the queer theory, which embraces some trans issues, has muddied the labels and language so much they don't make sense, and they make gender and sex way more complicated, frankly, than it is.
Whether GD is real or induced also isn't the final point, but given how ugly the movement has become, it's time for some real pushback and forcing discussions these people don't want to have, because they're afraid of what it means to their self-image.
Here's an article I shared on Facebook this weekend about The New Homophobia in the LGBTQ movement.
https://www.newsweek.com/new-homophobia-opinion-1698969?fbclid=IwAR28pgTqWatkFDn-SQ3GwuUSbPqzeCNtBRdQGHW0yBodQZ_g69GhH9fTBZE
Your last paragraph: not quite.
First of all, the stereotypes of male and female psychology don't survive actual scientific testing, double-blind and peer-reviewed; women are just as aggressive, men are just as social and so on. Most of the stereotypes are indeed responses to societal expectation.
Except one.
Men in competitive situations will outperform themselves in noncompetitive ones. Women perform identically with or without competition.
And this is why "trans women" in women's sports is just wrong; even without the corporeal advantages of heavier male bones and muscles, that competitive male brain confers an unfair advantage.
When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria rather than support. It seems to imply that the medical establishment harms them by confirming their delusion, instead of training them to reject it . But if they are to reject it, we are back to the awful conversion therapies that were also used on gay people. If you are fine with society affirming them, then what exactly are you objecting too? What do you want trans people to acknowledge or do differently?
Try asking a four year old boy "are you a little girl?" His vehemence will shock you. Sorry but I am not buying that, at that age, it's all "social construct."
Not sure this is delusion at work. Dysphoria is real; depending on your sources, one in 15-65,000 births pass the medical criteria. However when we have hundreds of times as many claiming dysphoria (or insulting intelligence by claiming intermediate gender) then it's hard to accept that there are some genuine ones.
But there are, and they are not being helped by this raging fad.
And it's a painful existence. A genuine dysphoric lives in a state of continuous shock, a sense of wrongness. I dated one guy every time he came to Seattle, years, and I never would have known if he hadn't told me that this meeting would be our last because he was going into surgery soon. He didn't look, act, or sound at all feminine but if he qualified for reassignment then he had passed a high bar.
And he didn't give a damn about pronouns.
This is all complex and metaphysical and pushes the limits of our abilities to empathize with someone else experiencing life in a radically different way than we do. Setting aside for now questions of how to handle this issue with children and young adults (18-21-ish), I am inclined to simply respect other people’s wishes for how they would like to be referred to, just as I wouldn’t insist on calling you Steven, even if it’s your REAL name, if you say you prefer Steve. This is of course harder for all of us because, culturally, we’re trained to asses the gender/sex of each person we meet and think of them/treat them in different ways depending on the bucket. So it drives us nuts when they’re either hard to categorize or they want us to categorize them differently than we think they should be. Now, I’m not naive- the vast majority of humans are XX or XY, and that binary has huge biological implications. But sometimes I think we overstate the biological and understate the cultural. Look at how we interact with other species- it’s interesting to know if your friends dog is a boy or girl, but you won’t think of them in radically different ways depending on the answer. Anyway it feels like both sides of this debate can get too hung up on these distinctions. Why does it matter if the word “gay” is appropriate for Feffy’s husband? If it’s important to both of them, they can call themselves gay. I don’t see how it affects any of the rest of us whatsoever? To me, there are much thornier issues to be working through here related to how we discuss these issues with youth.
"just as I wouldn’t insist on calling you Steven, even if it’s your REAL name, if you say you prefer Steve"
Actually, Steve *is* my real name😁 It's on my birth certificate and everything. But while I too am inclined to simply respect people's wishes about how they want to be referred to, the issue runs far deeper than that. And I think this framing conflates too many different things.
First, there's the issue of pronouns and deadnames. This is referring to people as they wish to be referred to, and I am, I think, in complete agreement with you. If somebody tells me their name is Gpjrthgx, I'll do my best to pronounce it. If Dwayne Johnson tells me to use she/her pronouns, I'll oblige without the slightest protest. This is politeness.
But if Dwayne, or any other person, asks me to say that they *are* a woman, there are a bunch of other things I now need to consider. What are the implications of this person being treated identically to a woman in society? What are the potential consequences of the precedent this sets? This is no longer about politeness, it's about policy.
If I'm asked to view a female body as a "developmental problem", as Feffy does, what does that mean for the countless other young girls who feel discomfort with their bodies during puberty? What do we do when there's a 4000% increase in teenage girls identifying as trans (https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/september/4-000-explosion-in-kids-identifying-as-transgender-docs-perform-double-mastectomies-on-healthy-teen-girls), many of whom are put on hormone therapies that permanently change their voices and bodies and have double mastectomies (https://twitter.com/StandingforXX/status/1472988554125058049?s=20&t=yFV1_eEXZ7AdAu-nZ0yPag) that they later regret (https://youtu.be/n0pVuZ0CT7Q)? This is no longer about politeness, it's about safeguarding.
If I'm asked to ignore the differences between sex and gender, or to always consider gender to be more important, what does that mean for sport where we have to acknowledge that male and female bodies perform differently regardless of gender identity? This is no longer about politeness, it's about fairness.
If a friend told me her dog was a she, despite the dog's penis, I'd see that as a cause for concern. Not because I care about the dog's gender identity (nor does the dog presumably), but because a shared relationship to reality is really important. Which is the same reason I think the words are important in general; words are how we interact with that shared reality (I may also be biased as a writer).
The words don't change Feffy and his husband's relationship. And you're right, I don't really care whether his husband calls himself gay or not. If they're happy, I'm happy. But that's because the label one couple chooses doesn't tempt us to do something deeply homophobic like, for example, deny the existence of same-sex attraction. But when this happens on a wider and wider scale, you get people thinking like the tweet that started the conversation.
The more we lose sight of what words mean, the greater the implications for issues that lie far beyond the scope of politeness. I don't think the child safeguarding can be separated from the wider conversation.
I think those are all totally fair and valid concerns! I just think we miss the forest for the trees when we start quibbling with (adult) people about their individual private lives and identifiers. (Also I figured you might actually be a Steve, haha... I know a John who used to have people *insist* he was a Jonathan, he was like, WTF, I know my own name? Hahah!)
"he was like, WTF, I know my own name? Hahah!"
😂 Yep, I know this feeling well.
My grandma had to go to my uncle Eddie's school to tell his teachers that his name was not Edward.
Only my mother and sisters call me David, and on the rare occasions that my wife isn't calling be Honey, she will use David. Before I retired my picture ID name tag said Dave since its purpose was to inform people how to address me. Names. There is a woman whose actual name is Jelly Sandwich.
At least you weren't saddled with a name that would fit right into a Beatrix Potter book.
Gay men tend to use undiminutive names; Robert, not Bob; Harold, not Harry, Christopher, not Chris (I use the latter, the former takes too long to write).
Jazz musicians go the other way. Stan Getz. Art Pepper. Bill Evans.
Oh what a mysterious world we live in.
I thought this was a fascinating conversation. At times, instructive.
But I'm a bit perplexed. Where are you seeing Feffie's delusion? Is it because he wishes to be a cis man rather than accepting that they are a trans man? If so, I agree that this is delusional thinking (or perhaps just a wish). Or is it because Feffie insists that their husband is still a gay man? My opinion is that it is rather a mental leap for them to think that way (and I also assume that Feffie's husband is actually bisexual). Not that my opinion should matter to Feffie or his husband!
Or are you saying that Feffie's delusion is that they needed to transition from a cis woman to a trans man in the first place? It sounds like Feffie medically transitioned and is healthier/happier now, due to that transition. My hope is that Feffie transitioned when they were a fully informed adult, of course. My understanding is that those experiencing severe, *genuinely* ongoing trauma regarding their biological sex is that that trauma comes from both gender misidentification and a rejection of their actual genitals. Being in the sex that they were born in causes them potentially lifelong mental distress, and so they medically transition. Certainly the older trans women I know can attest that they are much healthier and happier now that they are in the (trans) body that they wanted for many years. Also the medically transitioned trans man I know, who proudly recognizes himself as a "TRANS man" (bless him!) and who is married to a cis woman who considers herself "queer" rather than straight (bless her as well, words have meaning)... well he is in a much healthier place now, then when he was a suicidal teen who felt trapped in a woman's body.
I also think that the need to medically transition is a rare thing and not something that should be done before therapy and definitely not during teen years. The people I am referring to did not transition until they were 100% sure, after years of therapy and well into their late 20s or 30s. They took a conservative approach, realizing that this was a lifelong decision being made, one that would literally change their bodies forever.
Anyway, back to my question to you, about what you consider to be Feffie's delusion... I think you might mean the former (my second paragraph, rather than my third paragraph), but I just wanted to be clear on this!
"But I'm a bit perplexed. Where are you seeing Feffie's delusion?"
(I just re-read this reply and realised that I unintentionally used "she" throughout the first paragraph. I'm going to leave it as is, even though I mean no disrespect, because it perfectly illustrates my point.
The cognitive load required for me to maintain this illusion slips when I let my guard down, because I'm being polite, not truthful. Referring to the reality of Feffy's female body and then typing "he" is so unnatural that I have to concentrate to keep it up. More to the point, it makes the meaning of the paragraph almost incomprehensible which I guess is why I subconsciously switched.)
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I've got into this in a little more detail in my reply to Curious Cat, but yeah, I see Feffy's delusion as the belief that she's a man when a man is an adult human male. That she believes her normal, healthy female body is a "developmental" issue .
Feffy's choice to transition doesn't factor into my thinking at all. It doesn’t make him delusional any more than some people's decision to get breast implants or BBLs or nose jobs makes them delusional. If an adult chooses to get cosmetic surgery for any reason, that's completely up to them (though as I also mention to Curious Cat, it's hard not to see some choices as indicative of mental health issues).
The distress caused by gender dysphoria is, of course, real. I fully support Feffy's right to transition and truly hope that his mental health continues to improve. The fact that he's still suicidal post transition is a serious cause for concern, of course, but I presume things were even worse before.
But given that all the affirmation he's received hasn't made him happy, I can't help but wonder whether we could be doing better for people experiencing this distress.
That is a great point re. still feeling suicidal. Makes me rethink my comment that he is actually healthier & happier. Hopefully that will come. Also, and at the risk of sounding facile, I hope that part of being healthier is perhaps less time online. I think Twitter is not a good place for people who are emotionally or mentally fragile.
"Also, and at the risk of sounding facile, I hope that part of being healthier is perhaps less time online."
God no. It doesn't sound facile. I think you're 100% correct.
This was so distressing to read! In a way, Feffy is absolutely right, there is no complete distinction between sex and gender, and he/she knows it. We are women because we are female; our gender is, indeed, a social construct, but this construct is based on real functions that our bodies have: gestating, menstruating, lactating, being in general shorter, slower, and weaker than a male's body, etc. The superficial stuff, like "presenting" (wearing dresses and makeup, having long hair, loving "girly" things) is the part that hurts us the most, and, alas, it is also the part adopted by transwomen to "prove" they are ... us.
"The superficial stuff, like "presenting" (wearing dresses and makeup, having long hair, loving "girly" things) is the part that hurts us the most, and, alas, it is also the part adopted by transwomen to "prove" they are ... us."
So true. I think (though I suspect that many trans people would disagree or at least never admit it), that what trans women are saying when they say they are women is "we are not like men." Which, according to the stereotypical image of what a man *is*, is certainly true. I just think it's much more productive (and feasible) to challenge the stereotype of what a man is than to dismantle the definition of what a woman is.
Sorry for the deluge of top posts but if you are having this conversation on Medium I would counsel caution. If just one of these people complains that you are "bullying" you will be banned. Not suspended, banned, and any partnership program money you have coming won't come.
A week ago I posted a watered-down version of the post you praised as a breath of sane air; I had two responses. One was a woman screaming about "transphobia" (what a dumb word) but the other was some guy whose entire profile was a recitation of his "queer" credentials who admitted (and boasted) that he had not read past my opening sentence. He said that he was gathering a crowd to report my post. I blocked him and deleted the whole thing.
I was banned from Medium a year ago when one of those "nonbinary" twits reported me for "bullying"; my offense was to state, as I do often, that I will not use "they" as a singular pronoun. This person's responses to me were jaw-droppingly savage, bringing my dead mother into it, about the worst I've seen in my three decades online. Red-eyed savagery. Her avatar was a cartoon of a girl snarling in rage.
I had lobbed no insults, not said anything about the buffoonery that I regard "nonbinary" to be, I had just laid down my refusal to concede to an abuse of grammar. The fact that what she wrote to me was monstrously worse than anything I had written made no impression on Medium, they answered me with form letters. I lost a thousand followers and nearly a thousand dollars in PP money I had coming. To say nothing of a year of writing.
All I had done was say that I refused to refer to her or to any other single person as "they." Not that I had any reason to refer to her at all; I had already blocked her.
You have a commanding presence on Medium, but beware; the curators have swallowed the hook, line, and sinker along with the bait on this "trans" thing and if you write about this stuff you're playing with fire.
One consideration rarely mentioned: the vast majority of these "trans" people do not qualify as genuinely dysphoric. There are resources for helping the dysphoric and they are being drained by people who just want to get attention by jumping on the latest faddish bandwagon.
And they don't give a damn about the harm they are causing, to the dysphoric and to confused kids.
"Because the goal isn’t kindness, the goal isn’t truth or compromise, the goal is to have their genuine psychological distress validated."
The goal is attention, Steve, as you know well.
You were arguing with a person so completely overwhelmed with a fanatic preoccupation that she has lost contact with reality.
There are locker rooms, for one.
A suggestion I've seen which makes sense to me in today's linguistic landscape, is to describe the biological sex of people that a person is sexually attracted to, rather than focus on the match or mismatch of the sexes of the people involved.
Thus: one's sexual orientation might be "androphilic", "gynephilic", "biphilic" and perhaps "aphilic" for those with no sexual interest in any sex.
Why leave out "gender identity"? Few to zero people seem to have a deeply ingrained psycho-biological sexual attraction to others based on the other person's self chosen "gender identity" (tho they might have idiosyncratic lesser preferences like just as some people have a "type" in regard to height, weight, hair color, nationality, etc). Also "gender identity" has become very semantically confusing, with an ever expanded set of supposed "genders" about which few people agree. (Ask a thousand people for the dozen most common gender identities and see how many have the same list and mean the same thing by the terms they use). Trying to describe attractions by having words for each combination (or set of combinations) of gender identities involved would be a nightmare. So let's stick to SEXual orientation.
Classifying one's sexual attractions by reference to one's own sex may be becoming obsolete, as it seems deeply rooted in old taboos rather than being cleanly descriptive. We can observe that the majority of biological males are gynephilic and the majority of biological females are androphilic, without needing to bake that observation into our very terminology.