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.
"My empathy/sympathy for their plight got carried away in my statement."
Yeah, this is really the tragedy for me. So many people, myself very much included, just want to take this attitude. And it's only when you start to think carefully about the implications that it becomes clear that it's not really possible to *always* just live and let live when it comes to trans people.
Especially if we indulge the idea that men can become women simply by saying "oh, I'm a woman now."
So many people who speak up on these issues (JK Rowling always springs to mind) have had their characters absolutely assassinated because the instinctive response is "what are you trying to interfere in these poor people's lives?" And all the issues of child safeguarding or female sport or female spaces kind of get lost in the noise unless you're spectacularly careful about how you talk about them.
Is there anything to this "grooming" stuff? I have a hard time believing that a child can be manipulating into doubting his sex. OK, when we're talking about hundreds of millions of people there are going to be some dots on the extremes of the distribution but this Florida thing with voters spraying blood from their eyes at the idea that teh libs are "grooming" kids is just nuts.
"I have a hard time believing that a child can be manipulating into doubting his sex."
Yeah, "grooming" is obviously evocative, disingenuous language, but it's not entirely without basis. Think of it this way:
If you tell a very young female child (4/5, say) who is exploring their identity, that liking "boy" things means that hey are literally a boy, they not only have no mental framework to doubt you, they'll believe you. You're an adult after all.
They'll feel validated and heard, and this is a pretty rare, exciting experience for a child. If you persist with that by using male pronouns and having all the other adults around them treat them as a boy too, the path back to "Oh, no, I've changed my mind since I was 4", shrinks pretty dramatically. I've heard the same story from numerous detransitioners. Even when they start having doubts, the social pressure of the identity that's been crafted around them is very hard to overcome.
It's a difficult one to discuss with any precision. Social and surgical transition is obviously right for some people. It's obviously wrong for others. The question is, how many, and what's the correct balance of affirmation and questioning? I think we're getting that balance very wrong right now as a society.
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.
I had to Google "TMI." Our personal experiences influence our stereotypes, but that doesn't make them universally true or false. It can be informative pertaining to where our views come from.
In the spirit of that, when I was 15 (too young to drive) I liked to shoot pool. My neighborhood pool room had no snooker tables and I liked to play on them to stay sharp. There was a big pool room where a world championship had once taken place at Grand & Olive that had them. That was also a red-light district and there was a gay bar there.
I hitch-hiked and quickly got picked up leaving. Often by gay men who would offer me money for sex at some point before we got where I said I was going (never before I got into the car). Which take-away would be appropriate? They were pedos trying to turn an adolescent boy into a homosexual prostitute or did they think that I was a prostitute looking to get picked up? Is there any sweeping generalized stereotype justified by that? I don't write that to counter anything that you wrote. In a gay bar you will find gay men. Do they represent a larger group that they are a member of? I don't think you were saying that. We all have our life experiences.
Was that aimed at me from a previous unpleasant exchange we had or adding something you find valuable to this story? I don't know, but you should know that I've got no hard feelings. Not a double entendre ;0)
We're cool. I offer the same apology for anything inadvertent from me. We'd probably like each other at a table with a pitcher of beer and a bowl of chips. The internet often leads to misunderstanding.
Patient communication leads to understanding and there is precious little of that on the Internet. Steve brings a contagious reflection and thoughtfulness to this little forum.
Were there only more of that n the social media. Even Medium is a cesspool now; any deviation from the trans orthodoxy brings on horrible attacks, at least as bad as those from the right. I find this symmetry most troubling.
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.
Thank you! I’m loving all the neuroscience I’m being treated to! I find this stuff absolutely fascinating 😁 But I’m still very leery of the idea of male and female “brain phenotypes.”
We don’t separate males and females because of brain phenotypes, and we no longer claim that women are incapable of certain types of work because of their fragile, feminine sensibilities. We separate them because of physical differences and societal norms of privacy.
Differences in brain chemistry, in the aggregate, don’t tell us anything useful about individual behaviour. And even if they did, I don’t think we’d need that to justify treating trans people humanely (I know you’re not suggestion we *would* need that).
The clearest evidence that trans brains are different from cis brains is that trans people suffer from gender dysphoria. I don’t think any further diagnosis is required. Nor would a brain scan remove the risk of transition regret. There’s the possibility of regret with any significant body modification. And because brain scans aren’t likely to be 100% perfect, some genuinely dysphoric people would probably slip through the cracks.
I just think we need to a) differentiate very clearly between conversion therapy and appropriate counselling for people about to make a decision that will lead to lifelong medicalisation, b) de-stigmatised gender “non-conformity,” and c) recognise that gender identity doesn’t trump biological sex in some instances.
Dividing people into male and female across the number of categories that we do is a clearly imperfect method. In many cases, the reasoning is obvious, but in others, it's not even done because there are meaningful differences between men and women, but to encourage more women and girls to participate in certain fields.
Men had such a head start with regards to almost everything, that boosting female participation requires a little effort. I'm all for creating trans spaces too. But sadly, trans people don't seem to want them. I understand some of the reasons for this, but they're basically all about reality butting up against their desire for affirmation. And we'll find ourselves in even more complicated waters if pre-pubertal transition becomes more common.
Gah! It's so frustrating! We're trying to unravel all of these incredibly complex, nuanced, interlocking issues, and it's taboo to talk honestly about pretty much every aspect of them.😅
And by the way, I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed, other than those based on things like childbirth or upper body strength. Or more specifically, that there were no inherent mental or psychological differences between male and female minds or brains (tho some differences in bodies).
Studies of early infant preferences, preferences among other primates, cross cultural correlations, and occupations in countries with fewer gender barriers have convinced me that such a "blank slate" attitude is no longer scientifically supportable. If juvenile monkeys studied in their native habitat show marked gender preferences for rag dolls vs bright colored toy trucks with moving parts, it's hard to chalk that up to patriarchal conditioning. I reluctantly concede that there is good evidence of some non-trivial sex based underlying differences in proclivities and interests.
Of course, culture adds a whole bunch of other arbitrary associations on top of that; wearing lipstick or carrying purses is unlikely to have any biological roots. And individuals can be slightly or strongly atypical of group trends. So I continue to believe that, for example, both males and females should be welcomed into any occupation for which they are qualified and interested. In no way does my new recognition of some underlying propensities suggest that we erect sex-based barriers to individuals who want to pursue interests typical or atypical of their sex.
But it does cause me to question whether observing any deviation from 49%/51% ratios *automatically* implies discrimination or barriers. Sometimes it might, sometimes it may reflect free choices, and statistically differing proclivities.
So accepting that there are partially different male and female (and possible MtF and FtM) brain phenotypes does not imply any return to rigid stereotyping and restrictions. No need to shy away from recognizing the results of the analysis I linked because we are afraid of the implications of accepting the results.
" I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed."
I think we more or less agree here. I don't think of gender roles as *entirely* socially constructed. As you say, we see differences in male and female behaviour across pretty much all animal species. But again, we’re talking in aggregates. Individuals are different.
Pick any masculine trait you like, and there’s a female out there who exhibits it to a greater degree than you. In fact, there’s an individual female who exhibits *all* of the traditionally masculine traits to a greater degree than you (and me too obviously, I’m not questioning your manhood😁). Strength, aggression, height, agreeableness (or a lack thereof), you name it.
So while it’s true that gendered behaviour is, in part, biological, and that observing these differences isn't necessarily discriminatory, the important point (which you make as well) is that individuals should still be left free to choose their own destiny. Because there is enormous variation in how individuals behave that defies the bell curves.
I'm leery of the idea of male and female brains, not because I don’t understand that males and females are different, but because population level differences are terrible predictors of individual tendencies. And I think a focus at the population level naturally tempts us to overlook this.
Your male brain works differently to my male brain. And each of our brains probably work very similarly to some women's brains. So the sweet spot for me is just to treat everybody as if they're the same unless there are clear physical reasons not to.
Steve, I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that.
First, consider that before the WPATH gender-affirmative care standard and puberty blockers. research on children with Gender Dysphoria showed that about 80% had that dysphoria resolve during puberty. (Most became gay or lesbian). That is, only about 1/5 of GD cases were actually trans. Being trans is not the only cause of GD.
And consider that almost all of the cases of ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, typically propagated by social contagion amongst teenagers - mainly girls - without previous GD) come to believe that they suddenly have GD - and who can say they do not? Does that 4000% increase in diagnosed GD reflect a 4000% increase in actual trans, or in "I believe I have GD and nobody can prove differently"?
Or consider the male prisoners who suddenly discover that they have GD in order to be transferred to a women's prison? Who's to say they didn't suddenly get GD (and perhaps spontaneously heal from it upon release)? GD is entirely subjective after all.
What I'm saying is that while I believe that there really is a subjective psychological condition of Gender Dysphoria, it's EXTREMELY imprecisely bounded (remember that sudden 4000% increase? Does that suggest that only 2.5% of the reported GD in that group is actually based on trans status?), and this can happen because there is zero objective evidence of it and many social or pragmatic reasons to delude oneself or others about it.
So GD is not the same as being trans, any more than having a fever is the same as having influenza. (And fevers can be objectively measured!)
If brain scans can fairly reliably determine 4 phenotypes (with FAR less than a 40 false positives to each true positive), that would likely be vastly more precise than relying on asserted subjective GD as the gold standard benchmark.
And yes, you are right that we agree that we don't need this to treat people humanely. Everybody should be treated humanely, trans or cis, GD or no GD.
This is more about society trying to (1) better understand the underlying nature of the problem (eg: 4 distinct phenotypes rather than only two with some people having perfect reversals, like a 100% female brain in a male body) as a guide to needed balances and tradeoffs, and (2) having some relatively objective validation. In other words, it could provide some tools for rationally making the tricky decisions needed to wisely make those humane policies.
You might have noticed the degree of irrationality involved today, and thus the need for any rational and humane assistance in threading a path. Not ironclad doctrine, just meaningful additional guidance from science, rather than relying exclusively on ideologically reshaped subjective reports.
"I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that"
Yeah, maybe I wasn't perfectly clear here. I do think gender dysphoria (GD) is the gold standard, but a) I think a lot of people calling themselves trans today don't actually have GD, b) GD status can change, and c) I'm talking about an official, not self diagnosis.
I'm not arguing that somebody with GD should automatically be given hormones and surgery. Especially when they're children. I think surgery and hormone treatments should be a last resort when all other efforts to help the person deal with their distress have failed.
Again, the significant and irreversible nature of gender affirming surgery means that some percentage of people will always have regrets. The aim is simply to make that number as small as reasonably possible.
Yes, most dysphoric children will outgrow their feelings and become (usually homosexual) children. I hate the fact that this has become one of the many taboos in trans discourse. That's why I think it's important to normalise gender "non-conformity".
I think, for a lot of these kids, if they were able to explore their relationship to their gender without learning to think they were in the "wrong body," they'd experience much less distress and would be much more comfortable waiting for adulthood to see if they were in that 80%.
ROGD should absolutely be assumed to be temporary (again, in most cases this would fail a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria), and medical interventions should at least wait until the child is an adult. Given that most cases of ROGD manifest well into puberty, I don't think this would be a big issue in most cases with proper care and counselling.
I think adults really underestimate how impressionable children are, and how much of their sense of identity they absorb from their parents and friends. We really need to give them the chance to develop into adults before making these life-changing choices. That the ~80% desistance rate isn't enough to convince people of this shows how lost we are.
But, since gender affirmative treatment has become required in much of the US, and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions, and puberty blockers are fairly widely used, today it's close to illegal and certainly infeasible to reproduce any assessment of how often GD would desist on its own. So those advocating for this cause may be hoping that the pre-WPATH data on resolved GD will age out and be forgotten.
Some of the selling points of puberty blockers are: (1) it just delays puberty, but kids can always change their mind later, and (2) they do no irreversible harm in the meanwhile. However, nearly 100% of those taking puberty blockers continue on that path (while we have reason to believe that only perhaps 20% would absent chemical intervention). Apparently going through normal puberty (including developing sexual attractions) is part of what helps resolve the GD for many of the homosexual kids. Sigh.
"and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions,"
Yep, this is the first layer of insanity that needs to be rolled back. I think the de-trans community are gong to be invaluable here, because they're the ones pushing for it the hardest and are the living proof that blindly affirming children isn't the answer.
Not only do (I think it actually *is*) 100% of children on puberty blockers go on to transition, but the claim that they're reversible or do no harm is a lie. Not only that, but as I think I mentioned earlier, putting prepubescent children on puberty blockers can actually make their gender reassignment *more* difficult.
Passion GBR covered the brain science about the same way I would have so I'll just add that Steven Pinker is the one who convinced me that there are in fact brain differences. There just aren't any IQ differences. Women's brains are designed *overall* to be better at communication and articulating emotion, and men are *in general* better at math and engineering functions, so we may always have some lopsided professions but that doesn't matter, what does is our value judgements about them. Right now, any time cognitive/neuroscientists talk about these brain differences they strike me as going overboard to emphasize this doesn't mean women should be kept out of certain professions (apparently no one worries there are hardly any male hairdressers who aren't gay :) ) or that women are somehow less intellectual than men. The right has traditionally used biological differences to oppress others (like you and me) and that's what the left justly fears - so why not challenge the value judgements rather than the reality?
I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Starship Troopers from the '90s (I may have mentioned this before, can't remember) but it presented a military in which men and women were completely equal and even showered together without the men trying to molest everyone. One of my co-workers said that was utterly unrealistic as in battle, male soldiers would absolutely be concerned with defending female soldiers and that it would be near-impossible to shower with them and not be aroused. I said that's the way it is today but I can foresee something like that happening in the future, once we shed enough of our prejudices and got used to women (and everyone else) as equals. And especially when the traditionalist, misogynist military gets over the idea that women exist to fulfill their sexual needs.
This is why I dislike identity politics as a solution to society's ills. I'd rather we work toward a society in which everyone does what they do best and no one cares if there aren't enough black people/white people/male/female/trans people/gays/Southeast Asians/whatever in a particular profession. I don't care if men are better at me than math - no one told me math is hard, that girls can't do math - certainly my parents never did, but I still sucked at it. (The way I was taught didn't help either - that's on crappy Southern schools in the '60s and early '70s).
I think evolving toward acknowledging differences without judgement is where we need to be. I'm good with lack of gender parity in STEM if every woman who wants to be there is, and is getting the same treatment as everyone else.
I certainly agree with your major points. In particular, our society needs to get over the idea that "our side" needs to suppress or distort true facts, because we are afraid that the other side will misuse such facts. That direction lies tyranny. Like the way that governments allowed *without accountability* to freely censor things for national security, will gravitate into abusing that power to censor embarrassments or challenges to the ruling party. We need to challenge the misinterpretations or false implications, not suppress any "inconvenient truths".
(This also fit's with Steve's questions of "is pretending that trans women are the same as biological women really the only way to support treating trans folks humanely?")
Small dissents.
Today, I would question whether human being (without editing their genomes) are ever likely to en masse avoid arousal from exposure to nakedness. Note how widespread coverage of the loins is cross culturally around the world. I think that may indicate an innate propensity which can only partially and inconsistently be overridden by culture. (For selective groups, it can certainly happen. I'm quite familiar with naturism etc. But what works for a selective subset like that may not work for the broad unselected society; and the military - composed largely of young folks - is going to be closer to the broader society than to naturists. Or perhaps worse.).
I would agree that it would be possible to culturally get past the "male soldiers losing focus due to protecting female soldiers" thing. After all, many cultures without chivalry concepts are willing to sacrifice women more easily than men, so that's obviously easily affected by culture. There are other reasons that women may relatively rarely make good combat soldiers; the major physical differences can be very relevant. How many woman can carry an average or above average weight wounded man over their shoulders? A few, not most. Reports are that standards are often watered down to allow women to pass. That works, in peacetime. (Of course, guiding a drone or repairing a helicopter or flying a plane is quite another matter).
There are some far more practical reasons to gird one's loins no matter where you live: Flies and other annoying critters that find the scent of one's butthole positively heavenly, LOL! We don't have bushy tails to chase them away like horses. In addition, women have a second orifice bugs might find terribly attractive.
We may think it's about keeping men's basest instincts (LOL) in check and I can't swear it isn't, but if I lived in the jungle with a bunch of women I'd still wear a skirt. If I had memory of modern life I'd wear a bra too, because I've always found braless uncomfortable.
When men see nudity all day long it stops being sexualized. Boy oh boy was my long hair sexualized when I was in Turkey; I was followed around by men all day long trying to get into my pants, as was my blonde friend with whom I was traveling. Chinese men sexualized women's feet at one point and Victorian men famously sexualized ankles and legs. And in those jungle/savannah societies, the men clearly don't go around in a state of arousal all day long at the sight of all those naked boobs.
About once in a century the world produces a mathematics genius who blazes new trails. The Frenchman Galois was one of them; Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Gödel, a few others. John Horton Conway, inventor of the famous Game of Life, may be one.
1) They are always men (Hypatia, a 5th century Greek woman. may have been one; there have been no other qualifying women in modern times).
2) They all do their best work before the age of twenty.
These are not just brilliant mathematicians, they are off the scale. They're far too rare to draw any statistically valid conclusions from.
Hypatia's father was a mathematician who supported her in her endeavours; many Greek fathers wouldn't have. Hedy Lamarr likely might have been a far greater engineer and inventor had she not been born a few decades later; she was self-taught. Imagine what she might have become had she been formally trained. When she tried to sell her 'spread spectrum technology' invention to the Navy after WWII, she was told she'd be more valuable selling 'kisses and war bonds'. Know you place, little girl!
There were women who wanted to go up into space in the 20th century; they were, as aviators, as accomplished as any man, but NASA and the military always found excuses to not send them even though they came close a few times. Somewhere deep inside the myriad excuses they offered was the one they couldn't admit to themselves, except occasionally to each other: Male astronauts were the new heroes, but if even a *girl* can go up into space, it can't be that hard.
I believe STEM can be more sex-integrated than it is if we remove the barriers for women, including just being more overall supportive of girls who show a knack for STEM skills and talents. I'm not sure it will ever achieve a 50/50 parity. I don't care as long as every woman (or POC)'s talents are being used, along with every white/male's, to the best of their ability.
I wouldn't argue with any of this, but the rarity of female math geniuses is very unlikely just another instance of keeping women down.
Who would argue against fairness in admissions? In STEM work? There has been more progress since 1980 in this kind of equality than in the millennia previous. May it continue to full equality.
I need to add something though and I don't seek to be offensive ... I recently removed myself from a blog community where three members would shoehorn unfairness to women into the most unrelated topics, daily bitter rants that got very old. They could not accept that any man was with them. In this chapter of this forum we're discussing gender issues. I don't deny a word of what you wrote but please don't make a habit of it. Thanks in advance.
My degree is in mathematics and I've been reading the history of mathematics since before my voice changed. I don't think you can make the case that the gender inequality of these trailblazing mathematicians can be lain at the feet of misogyny.
Poetess Emily Dickenson was unpublished in her lifetime; when her writings were discovered she was elevated to the highest esteem in poetry, and that was long before feminism. There have been stellar female mathematicians and physicists (Emmy Noether springs to mind) but the Galois/Gödel class seems reserved to young men.
As for representation in STEM I think it's more complicated than that. I'm a software developer and technical writer (my boss is an American woman though the company is in London) and concede that I have worked with very few women. There are a lot more of them in HR and the business side of the industry than writing code.
As you have said, the super geniuses are too rare to learn more statistically.
But it appears that in many related species, and across a surprising number of dimensions, males tend to have a higher standard deviation then females, so that there tend to be more at the high end and more at the low end even if the mean or mode or medians are basically the same. This can be true of, say, height or speed, and likely intelligence or many specialized aptitudes.
It's possible that this has some evolutionary advantage for a species, where there is a tension and tradeoff between "conforming to what works best today" and "preserving alleles which might help adapt to future changes". Maybe the relatively more expendable males have a slightly different setpoint.
This can mean an unequal distribution of sexes at the top or bottom end, even with equal opportunities and without external discrimination or cultural factors.
And obviously, this does NOT justify any sort of discrimination!! It says nothing about any individual, who may be typical or atypical.
It is however yet another reason to not automatically assume that discrimination can be assumed to be the only explanation for observation of unequal representation in situations requiring relatively rarified skills or interests.
I wasn't arguing that men are solely responsible for keeping women down, or that there'd be more female math geniuses if there were more fathers like Hypatia's. My father, who helped me with my math homework, NEVER taught me I couldn't do math, or that girls couldn't do it well. In fact I *told* him that and he refused to believe it. He was right, of course, and he dragged me through like ten years of math classes until I was no longer required to take them. I was NO budding Hypatia.
I suspect you're right, that there's more going on to the lack of female math geniuses than male holding back, and we're in less position to argue 'misogyny' now because I keep seeing the integration of women and POC in places they weren't in the last ten years. Like corporate websites and leadership pages and in higher-level positions.
I suspect we may spend awhile playing catchup due to historical male obstructionism, but I think we're making progress already. I'm seeing more female CTOs and VPs of IT; ten years ago, women on corporate websites were almost always VPs of Marketing, Communications, and HR. Is it affirmative action or merit? Who knows? Like it was in Hedy Lamarr's time.
We may *never*, in the best of future times, acheive parity with men in certain spaces, but that's okay, as long as the next baby Hypatia is allowed to pursue her talents and skills without being flayed alive by ignorant Christians :)
And in the meantime, there's nothing wrong with going back to the long-way-around way of getting to medical transition...living like the opposite gender for a year or two, lots of counseling, make sure this is what the person really wants. The trans movement is rushing medical transition on everyone for reasons I'm still trying to figure out. The medical community *used* to recognize surgical transition as a giant mother of a move not to be undertaken by either doctors or patients lightly; now the trans movement uses the threat of suicide, and encourages children to threaten this, to get what they want.
Given how prevalent suicide had already become *before* trans became a fad (and I do believe a lot of it is), I'm not at all convinced all 'trans' people are truly trans, or that their suicidality stems from genuine dysphoria.
But we humans are masters at distracting ourselves from whatever is *really* the underlying problem(s).
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.
There are differences in brain wiring and sometimes they support the stereotypes but it doesn't matter; we're not our biology, it's not our destiny. The brain differences are there. Steven Pinker gets into this rather a lot. Here's an article by a different researcher on the diffs:
Standard deviation and distance from the mean are and indication of the strength and significance of data when assigning meaning. Just a mindset I developed in the job I retired from where I had to provide an executive summary to project managers ($$$) about the significance of my data.
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?
"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"
Again, you're saying this because you're assigning different moral weight and validity to different types of psychological distress. Schizophrenia = crazy. Gender dysphoria = valid. No. Both schizophrenics and people with gender dysphoria simply want their distress to stop.
What if I compared gender dysphoria to body integrity disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria) instead? Where people identify as disabled and feel powerfully compelled to amputate healthy limbs or paralyse themselves so they become the wheelchair users the deeply feel themselves to be? Can we then have a conversation about whether these people should be unquestioningly affirmed?
I'm not saying that treating people with gender dysphoria harms them. I'm saying that the current affirmation only model is potentially harmful (as evidenced by the increasing numbers of people, mainly young girls, coming forward to say how they were let down by their gender health care providers).
I'm saying that comparing counselling for young people who are about to make life-long, life-altering changes to their bodies, to gay conversion therapy, both trivialises the horrors of conversion therapy and fails our duty of care to minors.
I don't want trans people to do anything. Well, except get the care they need and live happy lives. But I want the medical community to act responsibly.
I want us to continue being able to talk honestly about biological reality (in the case of sport for example) so that the needs of both women and trans people can be addressed.
And I want us to fully recognise the influence we have over the thinking of young children. And to stop telling them that a preference for stereotypically male/female things means there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed through lifelong medicalisation.
It's widely known that ~80% of trans identifying children will stop identifying as trans after puberty. And this saves them from a lifetime of hormone therapy and surgery that, as we can see in Feffy's case, absolutely does not guarantee good mental health. I don't think we should make these facts taboo.
I want trans people to *think* about what they're doing, ask themselves what they *really* want, question whether being trans will address and solve underlying problems they may have, and stop listening to what everyone else is telling them they should think, do or feel.
There's an awful lot of peer pressure in this movement that transfolk need to take responsibility for.
The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis.
If everyone going through a "nonbinary" phase was granted reassignment surgery there would be a hell of a lot of regret once the latest fad turned to, oh, having antlers grafted in, or vertical pupils.
"The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis."
I really wonder if this is still the case. I believe this figure is based on a time when there were still actual safeguards in place. Individuals who wanted to transition received counselling and spent time living as the opposite sex before they had hormones and surgery. These simple, logical steps obviously weeded out the people who might have regretted transition.
This is all the sane people are arguing for.
I recently saw a podcast with Buck Angel and Blair White saying the same thing. It's not that I don't think trans people exist or that they'll all regret surgery (I know you're not accusing me of this), it's that the real condition of gender dysphoria has been turned into a fad with little to no concern for the children caught up in it.
Your last sentence is far and away the most important issue for me. Any gender reassignment treatment should be absolutely illegal until adulthood and psychiatric evaluation.
The adherents of this fad will not be moved by science. To even suggest a medical dimension to GD sends them into apoplectic rage.
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.
Let's go back to the days when transitioning was a long, slow process beginning with living as the opposite sex for a year or two and then getting hormones and surgery and all that. Especially for kids, this will give them some breathing space to make up their minds and perhaps outgrow the GD, which 80% of them will do if not interfered with too young. The fact that the trans movement is so hell-bent on railroading anyone who exhibits interest in transitioning points to the need to have their own personal feelings validated rather than any concern for whether they're harming others.
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.
One of my favorite names was Crystal Shanda Lear (a real person, and daughter of the man behind Lear Jets). She went to the same school as my partner, many decades ago, in Geneva, Switzerland. Her family called her Shanda. (Say it out loud if you don't get it).
And I once worked with a woman whose married name was Sandy Beach.
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.
"My empathy/sympathy for their plight got carried away in my statement."
Yeah, this is really the tragedy for me. So many people, myself very much included, just want to take this attitude. And it's only when you start to think carefully about the implications that it becomes clear that it's not really possible to *always* just live and let live when it comes to trans people.
Especially if we indulge the idea that men can become women simply by saying "oh, I'm a woman now."
So many people who speak up on these issues (JK Rowling always springs to mind) have had their characters absolutely assassinated because the instinctive response is "what are you trying to interfere in these poor people's lives?" And all the issues of child safeguarding or female sport or female spaces kind of get lost in the noise unless you're spectacularly careful about how you talk about them.
Is there anything to this "grooming" stuff? I have a hard time believing that a child can be manipulating into doubting his sex. OK, when we're talking about hundreds of millions of people there are going to be some dots on the extremes of the distribution but this Florida thing with voters spraying blood from their eyes at the idea that teh libs are "grooming" kids is just nuts.
"I have a hard time believing that a child can be manipulating into doubting his sex."
Yeah, "grooming" is obviously evocative, disingenuous language, but it's not entirely without basis. Think of it this way:
If you tell a very young female child (4/5, say) who is exploring their identity, that liking "boy" things means that hey are literally a boy, they not only have no mental framework to doubt you, they'll believe you. You're an adult after all.
They'll feel validated and heard, and this is a pretty rare, exciting experience for a child. If you persist with that by using male pronouns and having all the other adults around them treat them as a boy too, the path back to "Oh, no, I've changed my mind since I was 4", shrinks pretty dramatically. I've heard the same story from numerous detransitioners. Even when they start having doubts, the social pressure of the identity that's been crafted around them is very hard to overcome.
It's a difficult one to discuss with any precision. Social and surgical transition is obviously right for some people. It's obviously wrong for others. The question is, how many, and what's the correct balance of affirmation and questioning? I think we're getting that balance very wrong right now as a society.
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.
I had to Google "TMI." Our personal experiences influence our stereotypes, but that doesn't make them universally true or false. It can be informative pertaining to where our views come from.
In the spirit of that, when I was 15 (too young to drive) I liked to shoot pool. My neighborhood pool room had no snooker tables and I liked to play on them to stay sharp. There was a big pool room where a world championship had once taken place at Grand & Olive that had them. That was also a red-light district and there was a gay bar there.
I hitch-hiked and quickly got picked up leaving. Often by gay men who would offer me money for sex at some point before we got where I said I was going (never before I got into the car). Which take-away would be appropriate? They were pedos trying to turn an adolescent boy into a homosexual prostitute or did they think that I was a prostitute looking to get picked up? Is there any sweeping generalized stereotype justified by that? I don't write that to counter anything that you wrote. In a gay bar you will find gay men. Do they represent a larger group that they are a member of? I don't think you were saying that. We all have our life experiences.
Was that aimed at me from a previous unpleasant exchange we had or adding something you find valuable to this story? I don't know, but you should know that I've got no hard feelings. Not a double entendre ;0)
First of all there was no implied message in there, in fact I have no idea what you're talking about. I apologize for anything inadvertent.
Some gay men are attracted to guys a lot younger than them. I came out at 20 and it wasn't for over a decade that my attractions began to age.
The idea that anyone not gay can be turned gay is something very few have ever believed.
We're cool. I offer the same apology for anything inadvertent from me. We'd probably like each other at a table with a pitcher of beer and a bowl of chips. The internet often leads to misunderstanding.
Patient communication leads to understanding and there is precious little of that on the Internet. Steve brings a contagious reflection and thoughtfulness to this little forum.
Were there only more of that n the social media. Even Medium is a cesspool now; any deviation from the trans orthodoxy brings on horrible attacks, at least as bad as those from the right. I find this symmetry most troubling.
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.
Thank you! I’m loving all the neuroscience I’m being treated to! I find this stuff absolutely fascinating 😁 But I’m still very leery of the idea of male and female “brain phenotypes.”
We don’t separate males and females because of brain phenotypes, and we no longer claim that women are incapable of certain types of work because of their fragile, feminine sensibilities. We separate them because of physical differences and societal norms of privacy.
Differences in brain chemistry, in the aggregate, don’t tell us anything useful about individual behaviour. And even if they did, I don’t think we’d need that to justify treating trans people humanely (I know you’re not suggestion we *would* need that).
The clearest evidence that trans brains are different from cis brains is that trans people suffer from gender dysphoria. I don’t think any further diagnosis is required. Nor would a brain scan remove the risk of transition regret. There’s the possibility of regret with any significant body modification. And because brain scans aren’t likely to be 100% perfect, some genuinely dysphoric people would probably slip through the cracks.
I just think we need to a) differentiate very clearly between conversion therapy and appropriate counselling for people about to make a decision that will lead to lifelong medicalisation, b) de-stigmatised gender “non-conformity,” and c) recognise that gender identity doesn’t trump biological sex in some instances.
Dividing people into male and female across the number of categories that we do is a clearly imperfect method. In many cases, the reasoning is obvious, but in others, it's not even done because there are meaningful differences between men and women, but to encourage more women and girls to participate in certain fields.
Men had such a head start with regards to almost everything, that boosting female participation requires a little effort. I'm all for creating trans spaces too. But sadly, trans people don't seem to want them. I understand some of the reasons for this, but they're basically all about reality butting up against their desire for affirmation. And we'll find ourselves in even more complicated waters if pre-pubertal transition becomes more common.
Gah! It's so frustrating! We're trying to unravel all of these incredibly complex, nuanced, interlocking issues, and it's taboo to talk honestly about pretty much every aspect of them.😅
And by the way, I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed, other than those based on things like childbirth or upper body strength. Or more specifically, that there were no inherent mental or psychological differences between male and female minds or brains (tho some differences in bodies).
Studies of early infant preferences, preferences among other primates, cross cultural correlations, and occupations in countries with fewer gender barriers have convinced me that such a "blank slate" attitude is no longer scientifically supportable. If juvenile monkeys studied in their native habitat show marked gender preferences for rag dolls vs bright colored toy trucks with moving parts, it's hard to chalk that up to patriarchal conditioning. I reluctantly concede that there is good evidence of some non-trivial sex based underlying differences in proclivities and interests.
Of course, culture adds a whole bunch of other arbitrary associations on top of that; wearing lipstick or carrying purses is unlikely to have any biological roots. And individuals can be slightly or strongly atypical of group trends. So I continue to believe that, for example, both males and females should be welcomed into any occupation for which they are qualified and interested. In no way does my new recognition of some underlying propensities suggest that we erect sex-based barriers to individuals who want to pursue interests typical or atypical of their sex.
But it does cause me to question whether observing any deviation from 49%/51% ratios *automatically* implies discrimination or barriers. Sometimes it might, sometimes it may reflect free choices, and statistically differing proclivities.
So accepting that there are partially different male and female (and possible MtF and FtM) brain phenotypes does not imply any return to rigid stereotyping and restrictions. No need to shy away from recognizing the results of the analysis I linked because we are afraid of the implications of accepting the results.
" I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed."
I think we more or less agree here. I don't think of gender roles as *entirely* socially constructed. As you say, we see differences in male and female behaviour across pretty much all animal species. But again, we’re talking in aggregates. Individuals are different.
Pick any masculine trait you like, and there’s a female out there who exhibits it to a greater degree than you. In fact, there’s an individual female who exhibits *all* of the traditionally masculine traits to a greater degree than you (and me too obviously, I’m not questioning your manhood😁). Strength, aggression, height, agreeableness (or a lack thereof), you name it.
So while it’s true that gendered behaviour is, in part, biological, and that observing these differences isn't necessarily discriminatory, the important point (which you make as well) is that individuals should still be left free to choose their own destiny. Because there is enormous variation in how individuals behave that defies the bell curves.
I'm leery of the idea of male and female brains, not because I don’t understand that males and females are different, but because population level differences are terrible predictors of individual tendencies. And I think a focus at the population level naturally tempts us to overlook this.
Your male brain works differently to my male brain. And each of our brains probably work very similarly to some women's brains. So the sweet spot for me is just to treat everybody as if they're the same unless there are clear physical reasons not to.
Steve, I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that.
First, consider that before the WPATH gender-affirmative care standard and puberty blockers. research on children with Gender Dysphoria showed that about 80% had that dysphoria resolve during puberty. (Most became gay or lesbian). That is, only about 1/5 of GD cases were actually trans. Being trans is not the only cause of GD.
And consider that almost all of the cases of ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, typically propagated by social contagion amongst teenagers - mainly girls - without previous GD) come to believe that they suddenly have GD - and who can say they do not? Does that 4000% increase in diagnosed GD reflect a 4000% increase in actual trans, or in "I believe I have GD and nobody can prove differently"?
Or consider the male prisoners who suddenly discover that they have GD in order to be transferred to a women's prison? Who's to say they didn't suddenly get GD (and perhaps spontaneously heal from it upon release)? GD is entirely subjective after all.
What I'm saying is that while I believe that there really is a subjective psychological condition of Gender Dysphoria, it's EXTREMELY imprecisely bounded (remember that sudden 4000% increase? Does that suggest that only 2.5% of the reported GD in that group is actually based on trans status?), and this can happen because there is zero objective evidence of it and many social or pragmatic reasons to delude oneself or others about it.
So GD is not the same as being trans, any more than having a fever is the same as having influenza. (And fevers can be objectively measured!)
If brain scans can fairly reliably determine 4 phenotypes (with FAR less than a 40 false positives to each true positive), that would likely be vastly more precise than relying on asserted subjective GD as the gold standard benchmark.
And yes, you are right that we agree that we don't need this to treat people humanely. Everybody should be treated humanely, trans or cis, GD or no GD.
This is more about society trying to (1) better understand the underlying nature of the problem (eg: 4 distinct phenotypes rather than only two with some people having perfect reversals, like a 100% female brain in a male body) as a guide to needed balances and tradeoffs, and (2) having some relatively objective validation. In other words, it could provide some tools for rationally making the tricky decisions needed to wisely make those humane policies.
You might have noticed the degree of irrationality involved today, and thus the need for any rational and humane assistance in threading a path. Not ironclad doctrine, just meaningful additional guidance from science, rather than relying exclusively on ideologically reshaped subjective reports.
"I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that"
Yeah, maybe I wasn't perfectly clear here. I do think gender dysphoria (GD) is the gold standard, but a) I think a lot of people calling themselves trans today don't actually have GD, b) GD status can change, and c) I'm talking about an official, not self diagnosis.
I'm not arguing that somebody with GD should automatically be given hormones and surgery. Especially when they're children. I think surgery and hormone treatments should be a last resort when all other efforts to help the person deal with their distress have failed.
Again, the significant and irreversible nature of gender affirming surgery means that some percentage of people will always have regrets. The aim is simply to make that number as small as reasonably possible.
Yes, most dysphoric children will outgrow their feelings and become (usually homosexual) children. I hate the fact that this has become one of the many taboos in trans discourse. That's why I think it's important to normalise gender "non-conformity".
I think, for a lot of these kids, if they were able to explore their relationship to their gender without learning to think they were in the "wrong body," they'd experience much less distress and would be much more comfortable waiting for adulthood to see if they were in that 80%.
ROGD should absolutely be assumed to be temporary (again, in most cases this would fail a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria), and medical interventions should at least wait until the child is an adult. Given that most cases of ROGD manifest well into puberty, I don't think this would be a big issue in most cases with proper care and counselling.
I think adults really underestimate how impressionable children are, and how much of their sense of identity they absorb from their parents and friends. We really need to give them the chance to develop into adults before making these life-changing choices. That the ~80% desistance rate isn't enough to convince people of this shows how lost we are.
Yep.
But, since gender affirmative treatment has become required in much of the US, and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions, and puberty blockers are fairly widely used, today it's close to illegal and certainly infeasible to reproduce any assessment of how often GD would desist on its own. So those advocating for this cause may be hoping that the pre-WPATH data on resolved GD will age out and be forgotten.
Some of the selling points of puberty blockers are: (1) it just delays puberty, but kids can always change their mind later, and (2) they do no irreversible harm in the meanwhile. However, nearly 100% of those taking puberty blockers continue on that path (while we have reason to believe that only perhaps 20% would absent chemical intervention). Apparently going through normal puberty (including developing sexual attractions) is part of what helps resolve the GD for many of the homosexual kids. Sigh.
"and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions,"
Yep, this is the first layer of insanity that needs to be rolled back. I think the de-trans community are gong to be invaluable here, because they're the ones pushing for it the hardest and are the living proof that blindly affirming children isn't the answer.
Not only do (I think it actually *is*) 100% of children on puberty blockers go on to transition, but the claim that they're reversible or do no harm is a lie. Not only that, but as I think I mentioned earlier, putting prepubescent children on puberty blockers can actually make their gender reassignment *more* difficult.
Passion GBR covered the brain science about the same way I would have so I'll just add that Steven Pinker is the one who convinced me that there are in fact brain differences. There just aren't any IQ differences. Women's brains are designed *overall* to be better at communication and articulating emotion, and men are *in general* better at math and engineering functions, so we may always have some lopsided professions but that doesn't matter, what does is our value judgements about them. Right now, any time cognitive/neuroscientists talk about these brain differences they strike me as going overboard to emphasize this doesn't mean women should be kept out of certain professions (apparently no one worries there are hardly any male hairdressers who aren't gay :) ) or that women are somehow less intellectual than men. The right has traditionally used biological differences to oppress others (like you and me) and that's what the left justly fears - so why not challenge the value judgements rather than the reality?
I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Starship Troopers from the '90s (I may have mentioned this before, can't remember) but it presented a military in which men and women were completely equal and even showered together without the men trying to molest everyone. One of my co-workers said that was utterly unrealistic as in battle, male soldiers would absolutely be concerned with defending female soldiers and that it would be near-impossible to shower with them and not be aroused. I said that's the way it is today but I can foresee something like that happening in the future, once we shed enough of our prejudices and got used to women (and everyone else) as equals. And especially when the traditionalist, misogynist military gets over the idea that women exist to fulfill their sexual needs.
This is why I dislike identity politics as a solution to society's ills. I'd rather we work toward a society in which everyone does what they do best and no one cares if there aren't enough black people/white people/male/female/trans people/gays/Southeast Asians/whatever in a particular profession. I don't care if men are better at me than math - no one told me math is hard, that girls can't do math - certainly my parents never did, but I still sucked at it. (The way I was taught didn't help either - that's on crappy Southern schools in the '60s and early '70s).
I think evolving toward acknowledging differences without judgement is where we need to be. I'm good with lack of gender parity in STEM if every woman who wants to be there is, and is getting the same treatment as everyone else.
I certainly agree with your major points. In particular, our society needs to get over the idea that "our side" needs to suppress or distort true facts, because we are afraid that the other side will misuse such facts. That direction lies tyranny. Like the way that governments allowed *without accountability* to freely censor things for national security, will gravitate into abusing that power to censor embarrassments or challenges to the ruling party. We need to challenge the misinterpretations or false implications, not suppress any "inconvenient truths".
(This also fit's with Steve's questions of "is pretending that trans women are the same as biological women really the only way to support treating trans folks humanely?")
Small dissents.
Today, I would question whether human being (without editing their genomes) are ever likely to en masse avoid arousal from exposure to nakedness. Note how widespread coverage of the loins is cross culturally around the world. I think that may indicate an innate propensity which can only partially and inconsistently be overridden by culture. (For selective groups, it can certainly happen. I'm quite familiar with naturism etc. But what works for a selective subset like that may not work for the broad unselected society; and the military - composed largely of young folks - is going to be closer to the broader society than to naturists. Or perhaps worse.).
I would agree that it would be possible to culturally get past the "male soldiers losing focus due to protecting female soldiers" thing. After all, many cultures without chivalry concepts are willing to sacrifice women more easily than men, so that's obviously easily affected by culture. There are other reasons that women may relatively rarely make good combat soldiers; the major physical differences can be very relevant. How many woman can carry an average or above average weight wounded man over their shoulders? A few, not most. Reports are that standards are often watered down to allow women to pass. That works, in peacetime. (Of course, guiding a drone or repairing a helicopter or flying a plane is quite another matter).
There are some far more practical reasons to gird one's loins no matter where you live: Flies and other annoying critters that find the scent of one's butthole positively heavenly, LOL! We don't have bushy tails to chase them away like horses. In addition, women have a second orifice bugs might find terribly attractive.
We may think it's about keeping men's basest instincts (LOL) in check and I can't swear it isn't, but if I lived in the jungle with a bunch of women I'd still wear a skirt. If I had memory of modern life I'd wear a bra too, because I've always found braless uncomfortable.
When men see nudity all day long it stops being sexualized. Boy oh boy was my long hair sexualized when I was in Turkey; I was followed around by men all day long trying to get into my pants, as was my blonde friend with whom I was traveling. Chinese men sexualized women's feet at one point and Victorian men famously sexualized ankles and legs. And in those jungle/savannah societies, the men clearly don't go around in a state of arousal all day long at the sight of all those naked boobs.
Male arousal by breasts is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Covering the genitalia probably has more to do with their vulnerability than the potential for arousal leading to rape.
About once in a century the world produces a mathematics genius who blazes new trails. The Frenchman Galois was one of them; Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Gödel, a few others. John Horton Conway, inventor of the famous Game of Life, may be one.
1) They are always men (Hypatia, a 5th century Greek woman. may have been one; there have been no other qualifying women in modern times).
2) They all do their best work before the age of twenty.
These are not just brilliant mathematicians, they are off the scale. They're far too rare to draw any statistically valid conclusions from.
Hypatia's father was a mathematician who supported her in her endeavours; many Greek fathers wouldn't have. Hedy Lamarr likely might have been a far greater engineer and inventor had she not been born a few decades later; she was self-taught. Imagine what she might have become had she been formally trained. When she tried to sell her 'spread spectrum technology' invention to the Navy after WWII, she was told she'd be more valuable selling 'kisses and war bonds'. Know you place, little girl!
There were women who wanted to go up into space in the 20th century; they were, as aviators, as accomplished as any man, but NASA and the military always found excuses to not send them even though they came close a few times. Somewhere deep inside the myriad excuses they offered was the one they couldn't admit to themselves, except occasionally to each other: Male astronauts were the new heroes, but if even a *girl* can go up into space, it can't be that hard.
I believe STEM can be more sex-integrated than it is if we remove the barriers for women, including just being more overall supportive of girls who show a knack for STEM skills and talents. I'm not sure it will ever achieve a 50/50 parity. I don't care as long as every woman (or POC)'s talents are being used, along with every white/male's, to the best of their ability.
I wouldn't argue with any of this, but the rarity of female math geniuses is very unlikely just another instance of keeping women down.
Who would argue against fairness in admissions? In STEM work? There has been more progress since 1980 in this kind of equality than in the millennia previous. May it continue to full equality.
I need to add something though and I don't seek to be offensive ... I recently removed myself from a blog community where three members would shoehorn unfairness to women into the most unrelated topics, daily bitter rants that got very old. They could not accept that any man was with them. In this chapter of this forum we're discussing gender issues. I don't deny a word of what you wrote but please don't make a habit of it. Thanks in advance.
My degree is in mathematics and I've been reading the history of mathematics since before my voice changed. I don't think you can make the case that the gender inequality of these trailblazing mathematicians can be lain at the feet of misogyny.
Poetess Emily Dickenson was unpublished in her lifetime; when her writings were discovered she was elevated to the highest esteem in poetry, and that was long before feminism. There have been stellar female mathematicians and physicists (Emmy Noether springs to mind) but the Galois/Gödel class seems reserved to young men.
As for representation in STEM I think it's more complicated than that. I'm a software developer and technical writer (my boss is an American woman though the company is in London) and concede that I have worked with very few women. There are a lot more of them in HR and the business side of the industry than writing code.
As you have said, the super geniuses are too rare to learn more statistically.
But it appears that in many related species, and across a surprising number of dimensions, males tend to have a higher standard deviation then females, so that there tend to be more at the high end and more at the low end even if the mean or mode or medians are basically the same. This can be true of, say, height or speed, and likely intelligence or many specialized aptitudes.
It's possible that this has some evolutionary advantage for a species, where there is a tension and tradeoff between "conforming to what works best today" and "preserving alleles which might help adapt to future changes". Maybe the relatively more expendable males have a slightly different setpoint.
This can mean an unequal distribution of sexes at the top or bottom end, even with equal opportunities and without external discrimination or cultural factors.
And obviously, this does NOT justify any sort of discrimination!! It says nothing about any individual, who may be typical or atypical.
It is however yet another reason to not automatically assume that discrimination can be assumed to be the only explanation for observation of unequal representation in situations requiring relatively rarified skills or interests.
I wasn't arguing that men are solely responsible for keeping women down, or that there'd be more female math geniuses if there were more fathers like Hypatia's. My father, who helped me with my math homework, NEVER taught me I couldn't do math, or that girls couldn't do it well. In fact I *told* him that and he refused to believe it. He was right, of course, and he dragged me through like ten years of math classes until I was no longer required to take them. I was NO budding Hypatia.
I suspect you're right, that there's more going on to the lack of female math geniuses than male holding back, and we're in less position to argue 'misogyny' now because I keep seeing the integration of women and POC in places they weren't in the last ten years. Like corporate websites and leadership pages and in higher-level positions.
I suspect we may spend awhile playing catchup due to historical male obstructionism, but I think we're making progress already. I'm seeing more female CTOs and VPs of IT; ten years ago, women on corporate websites were almost always VPs of Marketing, Communications, and HR. Is it affirmative action or merit? Who knows? Like it was in Hedy Lamarr's time.
We may *never*, in the best of future times, acheive parity with men in certain spaces, but that's okay, as long as the next baby Hypatia is allowed to pursue her talents and skills without being flayed alive by ignorant Christians :)
And in the meantime, there's nothing wrong with going back to the long-way-around way of getting to medical transition...living like the opposite gender for a year or two, lots of counseling, make sure this is what the person really wants. The trans movement is rushing medical transition on everyone for reasons I'm still trying to figure out. The medical community *used* to recognize surgical transition as a giant mother of a move not to be undertaken by either doctors or patients lightly; now the trans movement uses the threat of suicide, and encourages children to threaten this, to get what they want.
Given how prevalent suicide had already become *before* trans became a fad (and I do believe a lot of it is), I'm not at all convinced all 'trans' people are truly trans, or that their suicidality stems from genuine dysphoria.
But we humans are masters at distracting ourselves from whatever is *really* the underlying problem(s).
"The trans movement is rushing medical transition on everyone"
... while at the same time flying into rage at any suggestion that GD has a medical dimension
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.
There are differences in brain wiring and sometimes they support the stereotypes but it doesn't matter; we're not our biology, it's not our destiny. The brain differences are there. Steven Pinker gets into this rather a lot. Here's an article by a different researcher on the diffs:
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html
Fascinating!
A thing I wish these studies had sigma and zeta values included so we could see if the data is significant, or noise more easily.
What do you mean, like evaluating to see how worthy they are of citation? Not sure what sigma & Zeta values are.
Standard deviation and distance from the mean are and indication of the strength and significance of data when assigning meaning. Just a mindset I developed in the job I retired from where I had to provide an executive summary to project managers ($$$) about the significance of my data.
That is an interesting thing that I was unaware of.
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?
"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"
Again, you're saying this because you're assigning different moral weight and validity to different types of psychological distress. Schizophrenia = crazy. Gender dysphoria = valid. No. Both schizophrenics and people with gender dysphoria simply want their distress to stop.
What if I compared gender dysphoria to body integrity disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria) instead? Where people identify as disabled and feel powerfully compelled to amputate healthy limbs or paralyse themselves so they become the wheelchair users the deeply feel themselves to be? Can we then have a conversation about whether these people should be unquestioningly affirmed?
I'm not saying that treating people with gender dysphoria harms them. I'm saying that the current affirmation only model is potentially harmful (as evidenced by the increasing numbers of people, mainly young girls, coming forward to say how they were let down by their gender health care providers).
I'm saying that comparing counselling for young people who are about to make life-long, life-altering changes to their bodies, to gay conversion therapy, both trivialises the horrors of conversion therapy and fails our duty of care to minors.
I don't want trans people to do anything. Well, except get the care they need and live happy lives. But I want the medical community to act responsibly.
I want us to continue being able to talk honestly about biological reality (in the case of sport for example) so that the needs of both women and trans people can be addressed.
And I want us to fully recognise the influence we have over the thinking of young children. And to stop telling them that a preference for stereotypically male/female things means there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed through lifelong medicalisation.
It's widely known that ~80% of trans identifying children will stop identifying as trans after puberty. And this saves them from a lifetime of hormone therapy and surgery that, as we can see in Feffy's case, absolutely does not guarantee good mental health. I don't think we should make these facts taboo.
I want trans people to *think* about what they're doing, ask themselves what they *really* want, question whether being trans will address and solve underlying problems they may have, and stop listening to what everyone else is telling them they should think, do or feel.
There's an awful lot of peer pressure in this movement that transfolk need to take responsibility for.
The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis.
If everyone going through a "nonbinary" phase was granted reassignment surgery there would be a hell of a lot of regret once the latest fad turned to, oh, having antlers grafted in, or vertical pupils.
"The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis."
I really wonder if this is still the case. I believe this figure is based on a time when there were still actual safeguards in place. Individuals who wanted to transition received counselling and spent time living as the opposite sex before they had hormones and surgery. These simple, logical steps obviously weeded out the people who might have regretted transition.
This is all the sane people are arguing for.
I recently saw a podcast with Buck Angel and Blair White saying the same thing. It's not that I don't think trans people exist or that they'll all regret surgery (I know you're not accusing me of this), it's that the real condition of gender dysphoria has been turned into a fad with little to no concern for the children caught up in it.
Your last sentence is far and away the most important issue for me. Any gender reassignment treatment should be absolutely illegal until adulthood and psychiatric evaluation.
The adherents of this fad will not be moved by science. To even suggest a medical dimension to GD sends them into apoplectic rage.
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.
Let's go back to the days when transitioning was a long, slow process beginning with living as the opposite sex for a year or two and then getting hormones and surgery and all that. Especially for kids, this will give them some breathing space to make up their minds and perhaps outgrow the GD, which 80% of them will do if not interfered with too young. The fact that the trans movement is so hell-bent on railroading anyone who exhibits interest in transitioning points to the need to have their own personal feelings validated rather than any concern for whether they're harming others.
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.
"There is a woman whose actual name is Jelly Sandwich."
😂 I mean, come on! Surely this is child abuse!
One of my favorite names was Crystal Shanda Lear (a real person, and daughter of the man behind Lear Jets). She went to the same school as my partner, many decades ago, in Geneva, Switzerland. Her family called her Shanda. (Say it out loud if you don't get it).
And I once worked with a woman whose married name was Sandy Beach.
In the Richland, WA phone book there was a
Hum, Dyna Mo
"Dynamo Hum" was a Frank Zappa song.
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.
Yes, it is.
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.