I liked your use of 'sociogenic illness' as an explanatory framework when you first put it out on this substack, I think you've done a fantastic job of fleshing it out! A few things that occurred to me as I was reading: we have two theories of gender floating around on the left. There is the notion of gender as a purely social construct that underpins systemic oppression (a notion that has now crept to include sex itself as well), and there is also a quasi-biological explanation of gender, in which gender has a biological origin, but one that is somehow entirely separate from sex. I'm not sure how either could happen in a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic primate, but whatever.
The former is part of the radical, neo-marxian assault on all that is Western modernity; the latter a sort of psuedo-scientific flanking maneuver conducted by people who can't quite swallow the anti-scientific radicalism of so much 'social theory,' but still feel the need to deconstruct gender for the sake of the revolution.
As for me, it doesn't seem terribly surprising that a creature such as us would come preloaded with some minimal instructions for identifying and attracting mates to reproduce with (just like every other frickin' critter on earth), and that such instructions would work pretty well for most everyone, as nature doesn't play games when it comes to successful reproduction, but then again, I'm a crotchety, science-loving old geezer with a marginally useful PhD in anthropology (which includes a background in archaeology and human ecology and evolution), so my understanding is a bit warped on this topic.
I totally agree that the definition of gender dysphoria has become ossified for critics. 'Idiom of distress' is another fantastic intuition you've had here--it's been clear to anyone who's been reading up on this that gender dysphoria was already a mixed bag way back in the 20th century. Now it's more like a big tent than a mixed bag, and it just keeps growing! Gender dysphoria is a belief for which a sort of convergent cultural evolution has been occurring, and now, all paths lead to trans. The problem the critics have had is mistaking description for explanation (and basically letting go of explanation). Basically, it was already a fuzzy category, but as you've noted, today's critics have been too focused on the changing demographics, rather than the actual mental illness itself. And, one can understand why: it's a hornets nest. If one can do something to get folks to think twice before transitioning kids, why get bogged down with swarms of angry hornets? There's not much pay off in it, and A LOT of danger. Better to throw a diagnostic rope around gender dysphoria without going near any alternative explanation. In fact, maybe they're really just throwing the left a bone, perhaps conceding tactically, rather than out of any firm commitment. Again, what's the percentage in suggesting the whole thing is essentially a mental illness in today's political climate (unless you're Matt Walsh, but the avowed right has other parameters to consider)?
The comparison to eating disorders is another profound insight, and the link there to the phenomenon of social contagion. We don't like to think of mental illness as something we can catch, but oddly enough that's just the human culture instinct at work (albeit in a rather extreme example): we catch other people's behavior literally all the time, it's practically the essence of human behavior, it's our primary survival adaptation, that's how culture works! Indeed, if we didn't catch it unconsciously (although we can do so consciously as well), the culture instinct wouldn't be nearly as effective. The question is one of susceptibility, not of whether such contagion can occur. And what you've done a brilliant job of capturing are the distinct social pressures that have led very different demographics to 'catch' a similar affliction! Another example of this phenomenon is the Tourette's thing on TikTok (also autism, OCD, and myriad other ailments). Catching mental illness (aka self-diagnosing) is all the rage with the kids these days! And for exactly the reason you've identified for the awkward straight 'trans' kids: being mentally ill beats the hell out of being boring and evil! And for gay/lesbian kids dealing with homophobia, it's easier than the alternatives (look at Iran, this is still going on there, it helps the mullahs sleep at night!).
If you don't already have a graduate degree in anthropology, you should know that your analysis is truly insightful! If I was on your dissertation committee, I'd fear for your viability in the academic job market, but I'd applaud your amazing analytic chops. Kudos for a fantastic piece of work!
Thank you for these really interesting ideas, EB—and the very kind words! I’m thrilled to have an anthropologist reading and weighing in. Absolutely delighted to have your thoughts and input, so thank you for reading and commenting!
I think you’ve identified something so important:
“we have two theories of gender floating around on the left. There is the notion of gender as a purely social construct that underpins systemic oppression (a notion that has now crept to include sex itself as well), and there is also a quasi-biological explanation of gender, in which gender has a biological origin, but one that is somehow entirely separate from sex. I'm not sure how either could happen in a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic primate, but whatever.”
Yes! The first one, I guess, was well-intentioned and had some merit (when applied narrowly to gender role expectations). It was useful in the 60s or 70s, say, when women were expected to have helping roles (like moms, nurses, office workers) and men were expected to be the scientists and thinkers, to point out that our gender role expectations are just that — expectations, and not biologically determined laws of nature. Women can be thinkers. Men can be nurses.
But even then there was a weird thread running through that idea that _all_ of this was socialization, and as you say, the root of oppression (almost as if women’s oppression were a plot against them, and not an artifact of biology, where women are tied to infant caretaking and are physically weaker, which makes them more vulnerable and therefore tends to make them dependent on the protection of men, who in turn might feel entitled to a subservient relationship). That’s not right or fair of course, especially in the modern world, but you can see how it developed without anyone trying to actively oppress women.
You would think the idea that gender roles are _all_ socialization would be undermined by the real-world results of trying to raise kids in a gender-neutral way. My own anecdata is that I raised both my kids with all sorts of toys and activities available to them. But the boy preferred superheroes and more active play. The girl preferred dolls and more cooperative play. And a lot of friends have had similar experiences.
As you said, “it doesn't seem terribly surprising that a creature such as us would come preloaded with some minimal instructions for identifying and attracting mates to reproduce with (just like every other frickin' critter on earth), and that such instructions would work pretty well for most everyone, as nature doesn't play games when it comes to successful reproduction.”
Exactly, right? And why is this so hard to understand, given what we know about sexually dimorphic animals?
But then the newer notion (in the first theory of gender you describe) that sex itself —formerly understood to be physical, biological reality related to the type of gametes your body is designed to produce — is socially constructed is just nonsensical.
If one chooses to believe that, one can’t understand it rationally — it takes on the character of religious belief, like a belief in transubstantiation or the Trinity. No one can clearly explain those concepts either, in a way that hangs together.
And then theory #2 you mention, yes, which finishes the work of reversing sex and gender entirely, and setting the whole thing on its head: “ there is also a quasi-biological explanation of gender, in which gender has a biological origin, but one that is somehow entirely separate from sex.”
So gender — formerly understood to be what you prefer to do, how you prefer to express yourself — is now thought to have a biological origin and as you say separate from sex. It’s the ideas in your mind about the type of body you’d like to have that are more important than the body you actually do have. Those ideas supposedly have a biological basis and are immutable (despite the fact that many people change gender expression over the course of their lives, and no people change sex.
So which is logically biologically based? A potentially changing and fluid idea of one’s gender, or the type of body one has? A well-informed seven-year-old child could tell us that.
BUT strangely, it’s a person’s sexual body characteristics that supposedly have to cosmetically change, so a “trans” person can match their body to their gender and be their true selves.
If we try to examine these ideas and understand them as a cohesive whole, they’re obviously nonsense. But the frustrating part is how few people examine these ideas or are willing to see (?) or admit (?) how bizarre and unhelpful they are.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
You're spot on as far as gender being a complex blend of nature and nurture; sexual dimorphism has real-world implications, and it has substantial layers of socio-cultural construction added into the picture.
Men are, on average, larger and more powerful than women. Testosterone renders us more aggressive. Men are, on average, more likely to be disagreeable/competitive than women. Men and women have different mating strategies with respect to mate choice and number of sexual partners. Women tend to be more interested in people, men in things and abstractions. Boys are more likely to engage in rough and tumble play than girls. Women are adapted for not only bearing children, but also for their feeding and care. The list goes on and on. These things are hardly surprising. If you were an alien biologist and came to earth knowing nothing of humans, but knowing a lot about other sexually dimorphic mammals (especially primates), you'd be able to predict an awful lot of human behavior.
It's interesting to note the relationships between males and females found in our closest primate cousins: we find a spectrum of dimorphism from gorillas to bonobos, with male gorillas at a 2:1 size difference with respect to females, chimpanzees at about 1.5:1, humans at about 1.2:1, and bonobos essentially equal in size. The behavior is what might be expected in terms of aggression and dominance. Among bonobos, males and females are living in the feminist utopia, male bonobos have zero ability to control females. Among gorillas, it's a patriarchal hellscape. We fall between bonobos and chimps; due to bodily dimorphism, the feminist utopia is perhaps not to be ours, but we're doing better than chimps! Male chimps can be really nasty toward females. It's interesting to note that dimorphism has decreased over the long haul of human evolution, there was a time in the deep past when it was more like 1.5:1, so things could be worse!
And yet, humans have enormous behavioral flexibility, we're not slaves to biology, and the symbols we use to enact/embody sex in our social lives are to some degree arbitrary. However, biology plays a role in the social construction, it's part of the raw material from which we construct the world we inhabit. Blue for boys and pink for girls? Totally arbitrary symbolism. Men depicted as warriors and women as nurturers? Not so much. Again, complex blend of nature and nurture.
Here's something else to note: the recent push to depict sex as existing on a spectrum, because a tiny fraction of humanity exhibits sexual abnormalities. It's like saying humans aren't bipedal because some people have no legs, or that humans don't have binocular vision because some have no eyes. We don't have to stigmatize people who do not fit within the sex binary, but it's folly to pretend that these are not exceedingly rare abnormalities (with 'normal' defined in terms of the condition observed among the vast and overwhelming majority of humanity). The whole maneuver is about deconstructing the binary at any cost.
A big part of the left wing project has long involved a focus on the welfare of the marginalized. That has grown to an obsession, and the current trend is to elevate the margins as morally superior, and to denigrate and tear down the culture of the majority. It's producing a lot of weird politics, with gender being just one example.
Old-school Western Marxists saw everything through the lens of economic class, with the proletariat being the key to the revolution. However, in the 60s and 70s, it became apparent that the proles weren't buying what they were selling, and so the radicals turned to organizing racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities as the key to the revolution. The current obsession with trans and racial identity has actually been a long time in the making. Radicals in the academy have been at this for a generation, the long march strategy has definitely been successful.
I’ve heard it floated elsewhere that as our culture has become more open and inclusive, progressives have had to struggle harder and harder to find things to be outraged about, or social justice issues to fight for, until as you said, yes, the very existence of a mainstream is the offense.
Having two legs is able-bodied privilege. Not having distress about your body is cis privilege. And those of us with two legs and no gender distress are somehow ... almost culpable for this, and need to make it up to everyone else.
It’s become very weird, and I say this as someone who’s spent my life on the far far left.
The stuff you shared about primates is fascinating. I’d love to learn more about it. I took one primate anthropology class in school and it was one of my top-three favorite classes maybe.
Thinking about humans as animals could be very helpful and instructive in today’s bizarre climate. It can help ground us in reality.
I think you are right. While some people may have problems, "transitioning" is not the solution. As I've said before, medical science is not capable of "transitioning" a man to a woman (or vice versa). The claim is akin to alchemy.
And what of the young people who feel some sort of discomfort with their biological gender? As you implied, that may be a problem for which we haven't found a solution. But I think that for whatever reason, the incidence of a serious problem is grossly exxagerated. That seems to be our current MO. Greatly exaggerate what MIGHT happen ( these kids will all commit suicide!) and ignore what actually happens.
Anecdotal at best, but I'm sure it influences my view:
I have twin stepdaughters. At about age 6, one of the twins instructed her father and me that she was no longer Lucy; she was a boy and wanted to be called Joe. So we tried to remember to call her Joe, and she corrected us each time we slipped up. We took it in stride and treated it as entirely normal. The "Joe" phase lasted about 6 mo.
She is now 43, happily married and the mother of 3 beautiful children. We sometimes laugh together about the "Joe" phase.
I shudder to think what might have happened to her if she were 6 years old today.
She would be Joe in school, Joe at church, Joe at the doctor, and ... with everyone telling her she was “really a boy” she’d believe it, then puberty would hit and there would be a crisis.
Me too! She is a lovely woman, a real joy in my life. It breaks my heart to hear of what people do to young children now, mostly it seems from their own fear of crossing conventional thinking.
I’ve commented before about the sexualization of young children. I was a young stepmom, maybe 26. My twin stepdaughters were very close, as twins often are.
I was stunned when they came home from 1st grade and told me they couldn’t hold hands at school, because “people will think we are lesbians”. 1st Grade! And they certainly did not learn that in our house!
This was mid 1980’s. It’s been going on for a very long time.
Thank you for this essay, which thoughtfully, sympathetically, and convincingly reframes the issue. Yes, there is real distress (with cause! no wonder so many young girls don’t like being sexualized by our culture!), but there are healthier and more effective ways to treat these kids than to act as though their “idiom of distress” is in fact a physical reality.
One quick addition to your group of OG-trans women is natal males whose moms took DES while they were in utero. My friend belongs to this group. An enormous proportion of these children grew up to be intersex and trans because of the extremely high doses of estrogen to which they were exposed as fetuses. My friend transitioned and has been completely happy and satisfied (she is the opposite of fragile and never gets upset if people accidentally misgender her).
Your essay also reminded me of something I heard Jesse Thorn say on a podcast the other day. Thorn is very outspoken about having a natal son whom they have been socially transitioning since she was three. Thorn presents as evidence that his child is “really trans” the following: she liked a cartoon bear who wore a skirt, and one time, when she was three, after Thorn’s wife said that girls could have penises, she said “I am a girl with a penis.” I really think that if there had been more to it than this thin gruel, Thorn would have said so, because I read about this in an essay he wrote about why they were transitioning their child.
Anyway, all that is background. Here is what he said the other day: his youngest child had made “fast spray.” He had filled a spray bottle with something or other and said that if you spray it on your feet, you can run faster. Adorable, right? Kids believe all kinds of sweet, silly stuff. Thorn was laughing at how funny and imaginative his kid was. And he was right! So why is the trans stuff deathly serious, requiring lifelong medical treatment, and not just childlike imagination? Or a child trying to please his mom by echoing something she said? The total lack of self-reflection was really striking to me.
Mari, as always, bringing the fascinating comments!
I did not know at all about the DES thing (of course I know a lot of other unfortunate things DES did) but now I’m fascinated to read and learn about that more. Usually I stay far away from the intersex / DSD issue, only because so many of those folks have begged NOT to be lumped in with trans people or trotted out as “proof” that sex is a spectrum. Depending on the specific disorder, many are wanting to live their (non trans) lives, and they feel they have a medical problem, which they want to handle privately, not a gender problem.
But — of course a trans person like your friend is highly relevant and her issue should be considered in the big picture of why some people are living happily and successfully as trans people.
If we can redefine “being trans” as something people choose to do because it makes their lives better — like Blaire White or your friend — and not some “internal state of being that always requires X, Y, Z” — we’d have such a better guide for handling this as a society, wouldn’t we?
For example, Blaire White has had lots of surgeries to enhance her appearance to be more feminine but is also really open about having kept her penis because she thought the surgery was too risky / would cause too much damage. (Smart, if you ask me.)
Even she — the poster child for “this is a successful transwoman” — doesn’t follow the expected cookie cutter response for what people expect of a transwoman.
I’m sure your friend has made her own set of choices for living her best life,
too, which are not identical to anyone else’s. They don’t have to be.
But the key is — we also understand that many, many people pursue this for reasons that obviously don’t make their lives better. In many cases transition makes their lives worse.
Trans is not this unwavering internal state of being. It’s a set of choices about how best to live your life happily. (Choices which, say, a three-year-old boy is completely unequipped to make.) We as a society are wrong to turn a blind eye to all the pain and suffering a fundamental misunderstanding of “being trans” is.
Exhibit A, Jesse Thorn and his little son. He liked a bear character with a skirt? He said he was a girl with a penis before he’s reached a developmental stage of understanding what makes boys and girls, boys and girls?
And the contrast with “fast spray” is so insightful — yes kids make up things all day long and that’s so healthy and creative. Why is the child taken at face value on this one thing? Why is this little boy’s life disrupted because a particular flawed ideology about gender is popular right now?
It pains me even to know about this. Even without medical or surgical transition, treating a boy child as if he’s a girl is a really powerful and damaging psychosocial intervention — which of course you know (preaching to choir) and I wrote a different post about why social transition is so damaging.
It’s just… a lot of people, often conservative people, casually throw around the term “child abuse” when they hear about something like this. The outcome is as bad as if someone were deliberately abusing him, yes, but it’s more complicated than that, when the parents believe they’re doing a good and healthy, even righteous, thing.
If a true believer in demonic possession were told she had to beat the demon out of her child, we wouldn’t be able to talk her out of that, either. But in that case at least the authorities would intervene.
For this little boy, who will intervene?
Obviously the parents don’t intend to be abusive. Thorn is open about what he’s doing and doesn’t perceive anything wrong with it.
So I don’t want to casually define this as child abuse — but it’s still behavior that is harming his child. A lot. Who can put a stop to it?
What do we do when we see that? What does a good person do? We’re not part of this family’s lives, so we can’t really say. When I’ve talked to people in my own life who are transing their kids, typically it hasn’t gone well unless they already had some misgivings. If the parents are true believers, they simply hear “blah blah blah I HATE YOUR CHILD, I’M A BAD PERSON, DON’T LISTEN, blah blah blah.”
But aren’t any people in Thorn’s life trying to help this kid? It’s distressing to think this kid is being so harmed, so openly, and no one is coming to the rescue.
The reason it’s next to impossible to break through the shell of them hearing “blah blah blah” is because everyone else — every school, every mainstream newspaper and magazine and podcast, every workplace, every major medical organization and medical journal, every progressive whom they know to be kind and inclusive and a champion of the underdog — will tell them they’re right.
And all these forces in society compound the damage. It would be one thing if only the parents did this wacky stuff and called him “she” and pretended he was a girl. But at school and church and everywhere he goes, his parents will carefully choose situations they know he will be called “she” and treated as if he were really a girl.
The damage is happening everywhere around this little boy, everywhere he goes. It’s painful to think about this innocent kid getting these messages all the time. At such a young age, he will likely fully internalize “I’m a girl” and integrate it into his beliefs about himself. With so many powerful forces at work, he cannot be expected to come to an independent realization when he’s six or seven or twelve: “Hey mom and dad, I’m a boy.”
And that is not his responsibility either, to save himself. He is a child.
So will they put him on puberty blockers when the time comes? Do they turn him into the next Jazz?
Who in this family’s life will be able to get the message across — with love — that they’re wrong and they’re hurting their kid, in such a way that they can hear and understand? Someone has to do it — someone in their lives whom they trust and know to be politically like-minded.
It’s interesting. In the last four years since I’ve been talking about this stuff more openly, it’s become about a million times more common to read views expressing skepticism of gender ideology and its effects. (Mostly among conservatives but also among progressives.) But it’s _not_ become a million times more common to talk about it openly in real life (I don’t think, anyway, based on what I can see IRL). The drive to be polite and preserve relationships is too strong in us: and of course that’s not something we _should_ dismiss or take lightly. Our relationships sustain us — we can’t just go around damaging them because we have a cause.
But I hope someone persuasive in Thorn’s life is able to speak to the family, convincingly and with love.
I agree with all of this. Unfortunately, I think Thorn is fully dug in: one of the members of the Mitchell and Webb British comedy team pushed Thorn, quite gently, in my opinion, about what he was doing to his child, and the backlash was just unbelievable (or all too believable, I guess). Mitchell had to make a public apology and was briefly cancelled, and Thorn gave a long, tearful talk at the end of one of the podcasts about the hundreds of emails of support he had received. He is not going to change his mind.
The heartbreaking thing is that to me--a highly compliant people-pleaser who as a child could imagine no hotter hell than to have my parents even slightly disapprove of me--it is obvious that Thorn’s child was just trying to comply with his mom’s suggestion, or test it out playfully. Right after she said girls could have penises, he said “I am a girl with a penis.” That is what kids do! They want to please their parents, and they will agree to all kinds of crazy things to make their parents happy.
When I was in 7th grade, I briefly dressed like a middle-aged businesswoman straight out of Dress for Success because that is the way my mom wanted me to dress. There was no lasting damage beyond a lot of teasing (and my mom quickly realized that other kids didn’t dress that way and let me wear jeans) but to me Thorn’s child is acting in exactly the same way as I did when my mom presented me with business suits and dresses for school--with compliance, because you don’t go against your parents, ever. This is one reason that parents ought to be very careful that they aren’t unconsciously pressuring their child into a path s/he hasn’t really chosen. It’s so easy to do; it happens all the time in other areas, and trans is no different.
“Thorn’s child is acting in exactly the same way as I did when my mom presented me with business suits and dresses for school--with compliance, because you don’t go against your parents, ever.”
Yes and the younger the child, the more true it is.
Wow the story about the cancelling and the long tearful talk about the support he received for harming his kid just makes my blood boil.
Just...infuriating that there’s no way through AND no one on earth can help this child.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
Very quick, top of the head and possibly inarticulate, comment since I'm rushing to get ready for a month of travel. There's a lot I'd like to think on and respond in a more meaningful way, but family calls.
I really like your framing here. It's helpful in defining the problem - which is required in order for us to find solutions or ways forward.
As we discuss idioms of distress, I find that we have too many people using them as signals for transition (which I believe you are arguing here). And those who use them as signals often set themselves up as gatekeepers of gender - taking the spinning wheel of confusion and experimentation around gender/identity/self-conception common to youth and locking it down as soon as it spins by "trans". Probably the least helpful approach to any meaningful care for the issues underlying gender dysphoria. Especially if we look at it through your framework (which I believe we should).
“ And those who use them as signals often set themselves up as gatekeepers of gender - taking the spinning wheel of confusion and experimentation around gender/identity/self-conception common to youth and locking it down as soon as it spins by "trans". ”
Agreed. In earlier generations our culture treated adolescence as a sort of dress-rehearsal for adulthood, a time of exploration and experimentation about “who you are” — and all of it was considered provisional and often temporary and changing. Changing a lot.
Of course this was all a cultural creation too — but it was a cultural creation that served a purpose.
Kids were thought to go through phases; and this was a normal thing.
Now as you say the whole process gets shut down and nailed down. You’re experimenting with gender or clothing or exploring your personality or sexuality? You’re TRANS. That’s a thing you ARE.
Can you imagine if parents and all of society in earlier decades did this to any other form of exploration?
In 1970s New York — you’re PUNK. That’s what you ARE. And everyone expects you to have your colorful hair and Docs and piercings forever.
No more exploration for you, Miss Punk!
Have a great one-month trip, whatever you’re doing! Thanks so much for taking the time out to share your thoughts here!
One thing I've noticed is a distinction between trans people who want to be a regular man or woman and those who making being trans a large part of their identity. I imagine that transitioning works much better for the first group.
Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
I've heard of her but I'm not familiar. I just noticed that, in the past few years, trans has moved from, like, people wanting to be the other sex to being its own thing. Like, some people don't want to be men they want to be trans men.
Interesting! I mean, if that were really the case for some people, they might be a lot happier, because being a trans man is a lot more achievable. Buck Angel is someone who is satisfied being a trans man.
Oct 26, 2022·edited Oct 26, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
I know I'm late commenting on this one, but thanks for writing this. As a trans widow, I can confirm that my sexually-motivated, mostly-straight ex-husband had gender dysphoria, something some people don't think happens in that cohort. He also acquired it late in life, despite not having it before--another thing people don't like to believe.
In my opinion the fact that anyone can get it makes it all the more urgent to ensure we aren't inducing it iatrogenically or giving it more weight than it deserves when it comes to how to address it.
Edited to add: I wrote this comment before I finished the article. Thanks for the shout-out!
“ the fact that anyone can get it makes it all the more urgent to ensure we aren't inducing it iatrogenically or giving it more weight than it deserves when it comes to how to address it.”
Yes yes yes.
We need to be shouting this from the rooftops.
I think SO many of our interventions, starting with completely loving and well-intentioned “affirmation,” are contributing to gender dysphoria, making it worse, and sometimes even creating it.
I think you raise a very important point. I remain alarmed at how little curiosity there is from the trans-affirming side as to *what* exactly causes someone to be trans. Medically speaking, establishing the pathology of a condition should be seen as a foundational step in being able to formulate a remedy. It's true that coming up with a solution to an ailment is still possible even without a clear understanding of the pathology (see e.g. entire history of medical field, and psychotropic drugs today) but this is quite obviously a less than ideal scenario.
To be fair, I don't believe anyone quite understands the "pathology" of same-sex attraction, but it also is not an "ailment" that requires any sort of remedy beyond just letting people live their lives. In contrast, a trans person who is for whatever reason being denied cutting-edge plastic surgery and experimental hormonal treatments is presented as existing on the precipice of a catastrophic breakdown. I don't doubt that trans people are suffering from some kind of distress, but I don't see how we are helping them with turning a blind eye to the root causes of their distress.
Hi! I'm not sure how to address you, but I've been a reader/subscriber since coming across "Trans Is Something We Made Up" and appreciate your insight and analysis.
I also have found it quite frustrating to see gender critical writers and journalists such as Shrier and Singal stop short of fully denouncing gender ideology by leaving space for a few "true," mythical "transpeople" that exist as such, rather than as trans-identified individuals. I'm not sure if their motivation for doing so is strategic (e.g., they may think that fence sitters would find categorical rejection of "trans" too hateful/harmful/insensitive/unkind/discordant with current scientific consensus etc.) or to preserve their own personal/professional relationships and reputation by avoiding coming off as transphobic extremists; however, in doing so, they nonetheless lend credence to gender ideology and hinder their own efforts to speak out against it. I agree wholeheartedly with you that "trans" is fabricated and sociogenic, and I believe that any acquiescence to gender ideology, however slight or well-intentioned, only reinforces and bolsters it.
Transition is a set of cosmetic procedures, which might or might not enhance your life.
"Blaire White is the rare person for whom transition seems to have enhanced life, but Blaire White also still believes she’s male and is happy with that — she transitioned and no longer has gender dysphoria. If, for example, someone misgenders her, she might think that person is rude, but her mental health won’t suffer."
Hi GS! I’m Dolly, but a lot of people here call me 21 or Salonniere. ;) Any form of address is fine — and thanks for the kind words and your support!
Yes!!! I’ve had the same thoughts about why (maybe) Shrier and Singal don’t go all the way, so to speak. Maybe they maintain the fiction of “true trans people” because it makes them look more open-minded (they don’t want to be lumped in with transphobes or extremists), or maybe because they fear that if they say there are no “true trans people” they will lose support.
Or you know, maybe they believe there are true trans people. Everyone knows at least a few trans people. Aren’t they “real”?
I conceive of them as people who had cosmetic surgeries to enhance their lives, but not as “being” substantially different from anyone else. Someone like Blaire White is just really committed to femininity and likes presenting that way. Good for her. I might not understand it, but any functioning adult should be free to make decisions about what to do with their body. Plenty of my mom-friends have had boob jobs or tummy tucks after having kids, and I don’t understand that either, but I support it if it makes them happy.
I don’t think any purely cosmetic surgeries are ethical or worth it in the cost-benefit analysis, but obviously a lot of people disagree. And they’re free to disagree!
One danger of maintaining the fiction of “true trans” and keeping that idea alive in our society ( and I might have written about this on Twitter but not necessarily here) is that every troubled teen with gender dysphoria is going to be absolutely sure that she is one of the “real ones.”
Then, every parent of a teen with gender dysphoria is going to have that impossible argument on their hands. You can’t argue with a delusional idea.
As long as our culture clings to the notion that anyone can “be trans” or “be the opposite sex on the inside” or “be in the wrong body” we’re going to have people who firmly believe it applies to themselves.
If that notion dies, and if it’s replaced by the idea that everyone just has the body they’re born with, and a few people choose cosmetic surgeries to make themselves look the way they want (but you’ve removed the special status of “being” anything in particular) then you’re just a boring capitalist consumer of cosmetic surgery, like an aging housewife. It’s hardly the unique or edgy image these kids crave.
I agree; Shrier, Singal, et. al. could believe there are "true trans" people themselves. No fault of their own, I suppose, but hopefully they come around or can be convinced otherwise (by writers such as yourself or through more thorough investigation on their own).
I messed up and accidentally posted my comment prematurely, which is why it ended in this quote from your article without any context:
"Transition is a set of cosmetic procedures, which might or might not enhance your life. Blaire White is the rare person for whom transition seems to have enhanced life, but Blaire White also still believes she’s male and is happy with that — she transitioned and no longer has gender dysphoria. If, for example, someone misgenders her, she might think that person is rude, but her mental health won’t suffer."
I meant to follow up and ask whether these types of cosmetic procedures even *should* be performed by medical professionals--whether or not they constitute, inherently, ethical violations and should be outlawed as such. Someone made a similar comparison here in the comments, but from my perspective, gender is to biology/medicine as alchemy is to chemistry. I believe that medical institutions and practitioners (of "gender medicine") are committing atrocities, despite being well-intentioned (though there may be a more salient profit incentive for some particularly morally-deficient individuals/institutions), and that this is the case for every individual subjected to "gender-affirming" "treatment" and "therapy" in the medical context. I don't believe that there is any benefit, medical or psychological, derived from such procedures to individuals suffering from gender dysphoria that truly resolves their underlying issues regarding their self-perception/conception; instead, I think these procedures are further contributing to a delusion that is incongruous with not only reality, but self acceptance. While many (most?) cosmetic surgeries (which I, too, find to be ethically-precarious, at best) are also likely instances of medical malpractice/rampant consumerism, they at least do not purport to change who the patient is fundamentally. "Gender-affirming" surgeries, on the other hand, set out from the start to somehow "transform" the patient into the opposite sex and reify any delusions regarding their self-identity that they have: once you go down that path, there's no viable way to "detrans" and you're almost guaranteed to live out the rest of your life maintaining the facade.
I have compassion and empathy for gender-dysphoric individuals (both old-school and new), but I don't feel that affirming what I can only describe as a pathological delusion (acknowledging that such a framing does sound harsh/insensitive, but perhaps necessarily so) is an honest expression of that empathy, nor do I feel it leads to any healthy, positive outcomes for them.
I think that individuals like Blaire White, Buck Angel, et. al., who appear to be happy and well-adjusted are only presenting as such at a superficial level and may very well feel compelled, much like Renee Richards, to maintain a "trans" facade without being fully committed to acknowledging its insubstantiality and explicitly voicing their regret. Otherwise, I believe they would drop the "trans" descriptor/self-identity and refer to themselves as their respective sex in a way that reflects who they actually are (with pronouns that correspond to their sex). If they were to feel that being "misgendered," or, perhaps, correctly-sexed, would be rude, then it seems they would still be suffering from gender dysphoria and their "gender-affirming" surgery was sold to them as a lie.
So yes, personally I find all cosmetic procedures (without a real medical or functional purpose) unethical. But most people would disagree.
Part of this is informed by the fact that a friend of the family, a healthy young woman, had (necessary) knee surgery, had a stroke and died. I would never take a chance on leaving my family for a cosmetic procedure. The cost-benefit is never there in my view.
I also think a lot of doctors in the US have a lot of debt, and quite honestly are often on the lookout for a cash cow. This gender stuff is a huge cash cow.
There’s no way to get inside someone’s head and say whether she’s truly happy or presenting a facade to the world. I can only go by what I see, but Blaire does seem like a happy person with a full life.
I don’t think every last trans person is secretly unhappy. I think most -- really the very large majority, almost all -- have serious mental health problems and those problems don’t go away with transition. I think transition is a dead end for nearly everyone, so much so that the world might honestly be better off if we banned any of the medical or surgical procedures. But... I hesitate to tell adults what to do with their own bodies. It’s a slippery slope.
The other slippery slope here is the insistence that we all must accept that people who have "transitioned" are now members of their chosen sex. It's a slippery slope indeed to try to force people to publicly affirm what they privately believe flies in the face of reality.
Oct 26, 2022·edited Oct 26, 2022Liked by The 21st Century Salonnière
"Some doctors in the 20th century tried to weed out autogynephilic men from being considered for transition, because they believed they had less successful mental health outcomes than gay men."
Maybe I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that transition wasn't even considered a "mental health" treatment back in those days, but a mere physical feminization of the body. "Autogynephilic" men were weeded out because they tended to be middle-aged and masculine and therefore wouldn't feminize very well. Young gay men who already "looked and acted" feminine were thought more likely to be pushed over that lower threshold with castration and a little makeup.
I suppose you could say that men who were happy with their level of feminization experienced better mental health, but that seems to me like a stretch of the definition of mental health, and again, more of a side effect than an intended result of hormones and surgery.
In fact, I believe the idea that transition improves mental health is part of a mythology that's grown up around the modern trans phenomenon, that was never there back in the day. I now see activists claiming that the "truly" trans brain "likes" to run on opposite sex hormones, as though the euphoria that's a known side effect of hormones proves that the patient is really trans--in addition to the more common modern claims that transition reduces suicidality (also unproven) and confers other mystical benefits.
As you maybe allude to here, we also used to say that one became trans because he had gender dysphoria (i.e., pursued steps to feminize because he felt dysphoric), while now we say one has gender dysphoria because he is trans (i.e., feels the distress because of some underlying brain-body mismatch). The latter provides a rationalization for medicalization whereas before it was pitched as one particular choice.
The history is a little murky and probably different doctors believed different things.
I had read that (at least some doctors) believed that the fetishists were not “really” transsexual, partly because they were straight masculine men before asking to transition. How could they “really” be transsexual unless they were feminine from childhood and attracted to men?
It seemed there was a belief that some people would be happy no other way, but the doctors wanted to make sure the patients were “really” transsexual, meaning they “really” believed they were female on the inside.
I think the middle-aged married masculine men didn’t meet any of those criteria: they didn’t fit the mid-20th-century idea of the “real” transsexual who would be “helped” by surgery.
There are stories though of AGP men memorizing talking points and telling a story in which they “always” played with dolls and preferred opposite sex playmates.
Today’s ROGD parents tell a similar story— their kids adopt a narrative of talking points that doesn’t match the parents’ memory of what their kid was like.
I agree that the gatekeeping was in place, and that doctors were more likely to transition young gay men than older straight men. I also agree that older straight men could (and still do) figure out what to say to game that system.
I just thought (and am still inclined to think) that that's because young gay men would look prettier than old straight men, with no ideas around "mental health" coming into the equation back then.
I know Blanchard at least did speak of "autogynephiles" having dysphoria, and if I remember right, has said in recent years that he never meant to suggest that some of these men were more "true" trans than others. I know he wasn't the only player in that world, though.
It also seems to me that most old-school transsexuals knew they weren't "actual" women; that seems like a recent development too. Many were immersed in gay culture and still called themselves gay, while the "girl" and "mary" stuff was campy and part of drag queen culture.
I haven't seen evidence of doctors considering anything other than aesthetic results (and maybe dating future) when deciding who should transition, back in those days. I'd be interested in seeing what you've read on that.
I’ll try to dig up an old article that went into this kind of in depth and I’ll try to come back and link it here. I’ve not got my stuff all that well organized!
So I’ll email you three pdfs. One from the 1950s Worden & Marsh, one from the 1970s Fisk (this one describes the need to differentiate between people who believed from earliest childhood that they were “really” girls versus people who get an erotic thrill from crossdressing, although Worden & Marsh notes how their stories of this “I was always this way” narrative are superficial and suspiciously similar), and one of the 1980s, Billings & Urban.
It’s interesting how the views have changed over the decades.
This is a great article with so many good points. I wonder if people like Jesse Singal and Abigail Shrier are using their statements about “true gender dysphoria” as a way of communicating , “I’m not an extremist who hates these people and I see nuance. Please be open to the points I’m trying to make.”
Also, I’m new here so you may have already talked about this in another post, but have you read Ethan Watters book Crazy Like Us? He talks about a culture”s symptom pool from which a person can “choose” how to express distress. It fits so perfectly with the idea of idioms of distress. Thank you for sharing that concept and the article about it
I don’t think the medical community can reform itself. There’s too much money to be made, and too many self-righteous faux social justice points to be won by spouting off the correct platitudes even when they make no sense. It would be a lose-lose to them to reform themselves. And individual doctors who question this stuff seem to think it sufficient to keep their heads down and try to stay out of it themselves. No one wants to destroy their career or be thought a bigot, so many critics stay quiet.
I think the only thing that will put a stop to it is:
1) A massive financial disincentive in the form of a spate of big and successful lawsuits against the people providing this “care.” Just yesterday I saw a tweet from some law firm that is looking to represent people who were harmed by puberty blockers. Good.
2) A critical mass of publicly critical detransitioners, so big that everyone else can’t ignore them anymore. We have so many detransitioners talking about how they were led down a harmful path with no oversight or pushback from any of the professionals they encountered.
Of course not, right? That’s was “affirmation” is— you let the patient self-diagnose and choose whatever treatments they think they want, based on happy stories they’ve read online. Where else in the field of medical and mental health would affirmation and letting the patient choose the treatment end well? If you did that, every person with a phobia would choose to avoid the thing they’re phobic of, which is precisely the way to make a phobia worse not better.
That self-diagnosis and self-treatment and affirmation all create a huge disaster is not surprising: but…we have to wait for the world to figure it out. Several European countries are reversing course. I assume we will too. Eventually.
It's good to hear that there might be winnable malpractice claims. The doctors/psychologists etc are the people whose minds need changing and who should bear the brunt of fixing this. Not the young people or their parents.
But as a practical matter, I think it’s a few of the feisty kids and their feisty “won’t take no for an answer” parents who will be doing the heavy lifting to make things better.
Was that a fascinating interview or what? I’d really like to have coffee with Shannon and talk to her at length about it (except you know, it might be painful to talk about it).
It just fascinates me that someone who seemed to be in a happy functional marriage, a real partnership where they shared interests, where she was even open to his kink (before it got out of hand), managed to have it fall apart. Like completely fall apart, disastrously fall apart.
It really did seem analogous to an addiction destroying a marriage — whether the addiction is alcohol , gambling, whatever. I do believe for some people autogynephilia takes on the characteristics of an addiction.
It’s not very progressive-sounding to say, but I think there’s such a thing as porn addiction, where you need weirder and more intense things to satisfy it.
In the 70s and 80s (when old-school trans people were so very rare) how much access did people have to transgender porn, sissy porn, etc? Probably very very little. And it would have probably been mostly still images.
Now you can watch it, in video format, 24/7.
In the 70s and 80s, how much access did these guys have to men who shared their interests and would role play with them? Probably… basically none.
But now you have the internet: you can pretend to be a woman. You can have pretty feminine avatars. You can have people online treat you as a woman (maybe even believe you are a woman). And you can have people talk sexually
to you as if they think you’re a woman. If you really get a thrill out of it, you can find people to role-play with you all day every day.
It’s so much easier to satisfy this kink—but to anyone who is at all vulnerable to becoming addicted / obsessed by it, all this availability to see porn and act out the fantasy at any time surely is similar to a future alcoholic working at a bar with unlimited free drinks.
You might not have become an alcoholic at all without the availability of unlimited free drinks—but if you’re wired to become an alcoholic, the unlimited free drinks are going to cause you a problem.
And yes it does sound like Shannon would have stayed if he had kept any of their old shared interests or activities. What was so, so sad to me was that there was nothing left of this guy but an empty shell of misery and trans obsession.
And yet we still have all of society endorsing transition for anyone who wants it, and thinking it’s a matter of DEI and “rights” instead of poor mental health and obsession.
I agree, a fascinating story. It sounded like the online activism convinced Jamie that his mental and emotional well-being depended on being perceived as a literal woman, and then everything became a trigger. Not passing caused meltdowns.
But it wasn't just about others' perceptions -- he also suffered when other people weren't even involved: He wouldn't sing because his voice sounded male. He wouldn't go hiking because the clothes made him feel masculine. Anything that reminded him of the truth caused distress. The online world was the only place where he could escape it.
I liked your use of 'sociogenic illness' as an explanatory framework when you first put it out on this substack, I think you've done a fantastic job of fleshing it out! A few things that occurred to me as I was reading: we have two theories of gender floating around on the left. There is the notion of gender as a purely social construct that underpins systemic oppression (a notion that has now crept to include sex itself as well), and there is also a quasi-biological explanation of gender, in which gender has a biological origin, but one that is somehow entirely separate from sex. I'm not sure how either could happen in a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic primate, but whatever.
The former is part of the radical, neo-marxian assault on all that is Western modernity; the latter a sort of psuedo-scientific flanking maneuver conducted by people who can't quite swallow the anti-scientific radicalism of so much 'social theory,' but still feel the need to deconstruct gender for the sake of the revolution.
As for me, it doesn't seem terribly surprising that a creature such as us would come preloaded with some minimal instructions for identifying and attracting mates to reproduce with (just like every other frickin' critter on earth), and that such instructions would work pretty well for most everyone, as nature doesn't play games when it comes to successful reproduction, but then again, I'm a crotchety, science-loving old geezer with a marginally useful PhD in anthropology (which includes a background in archaeology and human ecology and evolution), so my understanding is a bit warped on this topic.
I totally agree that the definition of gender dysphoria has become ossified for critics. 'Idiom of distress' is another fantastic intuition you've had here--it's been clear to anyone who's been reading up on this that gender dysphoria was already a mixed bag way back in the 20th century. Now it's more like a big tent than a mixed bag, and it just keeps growing! Gender dysphoria is a belief for which a sort of convergent cultural evolution has been occurring, and now, all paths lead to trans. The problem the critics have had is mistaking description for explanation (and basically letting go of explanation). Basically, it was already a fuzzy category, but as you've noted, today's critics have been too focused on the changing demographics, rather than the actual mental illness itself. And, one can understand why: it's a hornets nest. If one can do something to get folks to think twice before transitioning kids, why get bogged down with swarms of angry hornets? There's not much pay off in it, and A LOT of danger. Better to throw a diagnostic rope around gender dysphoria without going near any alternative explanation. In fact, maybe they're really just throwing the left a bone, perhaps conceding tactically, rather than out of any firm commitment. Again, what's the percentage in suggesting the whole thing is essentially a mental illness in today's political climate (unless you're Matt Walsh, but the avowed right has other parameters to consider)?
The comparison to eating disorders is another profound insight, and the link there to the phenomenon of social contagion. We don't like to think of mental illness as something we can catch, but oddly enough that's just the human culture instinct at work (albeit in a rather extreme example): we catch other people's behavior literally all the time, it's practically the essence of human behavior, it's our primary survival adaptation, that's how culture works! Indeed, if we didn't catch it unconsciously (although we can do so consciously as well), the culture instinct wouldn't be nearly as effective. The question is one of susceptibility, not of whether such contagion can occur. And what you've done a brilliant job of capturing are the distinct social pressures that have led very different demographics to 'catch' a similar affliction! Another example of this phenomenon is the Tourette's thing on TikTok (also autism, OCD, and myriad other ailments). Catching mental illness (aka self-diagnosing) is all the rage with the kids these days! And for exactly the reason you've identified for the awkward straight 'trans' kids: being mentally ill beats the hell out of being boring and evil! And for gay/lesbian kids dealing with homophobia, it's easier than the alternatives (look at Iran, this is still going on there, it helps the mullahs sleep at night!).
If you don't already have a graduate degree in anthropology, you should know that your analysis is truly insightful! If I was on your dissertation committee, I'd fear for your viability in the academic job market, but I'd applaud your amazing analytic chops. Kudos for a fantastic piece of work!
Thank you for these really interesting ideas, EB—and the very kind words! I’m thrilled to have an anthropologist reading and weighing in. Absolutely delighted to have your thoughts and input, so thank you for reading and commenting!
I think you’ve identified something so important:
“we have two theories of gender floating around on the left. There is the notion of gender as a purely social construct that underpins systemic oppression (a notion that has now crept to include sex itself as well), and there is also a quasi-biological explanation of gender, in which gender has a biological origin, but one that is somehow entirely separate from sex. I'm not sure how either could happen in a sexually reproducing, sexually dimorphic primate, but whatever.”
Yes! The first one, I guess, was well-intentioned and had some merit (when applied narrowly to gender role expectations). It was useful in the 60s or 70s, say, when women were expected to have helping roles (like moms, nurses, office workers) and men were expected to be the scientists and thinkers, to point out that our gender role expectations are just that — expectations, and not biologically determined laws of nature. Women can be thinkers. Men can be nurses.
But even then there was a weird thread running through that idea that _all_ of this was socialization, and as you say, the root of oppression (almost as if women’s oppression were a plot against them, and not an artifact of biology, where women are tied to infant caretaking and are physically weaker, which makes them more vulnerable and therefore tends to make them dependent on the protection of men, who in turn might feel entitled to a subservient relationship). That’s not right or fair of course, especially in the modern world, but you can see how it developed without anyone trying to actively oppress women.
You would think the idea that gender roles are _all_ socialization would be undermined by the real-world results of trying to raise kids in a gender-neutral way. My own anecdata is that I raised both my kids with all sorts of toys and activities available to them. But the boy preferred superheroes and more active play. The girl preferred dolls and more cooperative play. And a lot of friends have had similar experiences.
As you said, “it doesn't seem terribly surprising that a creature such as us would come preloaded with some minimal instructions for identifying and attracting mates to reproduce with (just like every other frickin' critter on earth), and that such instructions would work pretty well for most everyone, as nature doesn't play games when it comes to successful reproduction.”
Exactly, right? And why is this so hard to understand, given what we know about sexually dimorphic animals?
But then the newer notion (in the first theory of gender you describe) that sex itself —formerly understood to be physical, biological reality related to the type of gametes your body is designed to produce — is socially constructed is just nonsensical.
If one chooses to believe that, one can’t understand it rationally — it takes on the character of religious belief, like a belief in transubstantiation or the Trinity. No one can clearly explain those concepts either, in a way that hangs together.
And then theory #2 you mention, yes, which finishes the work of reversing sex and gender entirely, and setting the whole thing on its head: “ there is also a quasi-biological explanation of gender, in which gender has a biological origin, but one that is somehow entirely separate from sex.”
So gender — formerly understood to be what you prefer to do, how you prefer to express yourself — is now thought to have a biological origin and as you say separate from sex. It’s the ideas in your mind about the type of body you’d like to have that are more important than the body you actually do have. Those ideas supposedly have a biological basis and are immutable (despite the fact that many people change gender expression over the course of their lives, and no people change sex.
So which is logically biologically based? A potentially changing and fluid idea of one’s gender, or the type of body one has? A well-informed seven-year-old child could tell us that.
BUT strangely, it’s a person’s sexual body characteristics that supposedly have to cosmetically change, so a “trans” person can match their body to their gender and be their true selves.
If we try to examine these ideas and understand them as a cohesive whole, they’re obviously nonsense. But the frustrating part is how few people examine these ideas or are willing to see (?) or admit (?) how bizarre and unhelpful they are.
You're spot on as far as gender being a complex blend of nature and nurture; sexual dimorphism has real-world implications, and it has substantial layers of socio-cultural construction added into the picture.
Men are, on average, larger and more powerful than women. Testosterone renders us more aggressive. Men are, on average, more likely to be disagreeable/competitive than women. Men and women have different mating strategies with respect to mate choice and number of sexual partners. Women tend to be more interested in people, men in things and abstractions. Boys are more likely to engage in rough and tumble play than girls. Women are adapted for not only bearing children, but also for their feeding and care. The list goes on and on. These things are hardly surprising. If you were an alien biologist and came to earth knowing nothing of humans, but knowing a lot about other sexually dimorphic mammals (especially primates), you'd be able to predict an awful lot of human behavior.
It's interesting to note the relationships between males and females found in our closest primate cousins: we find a spectrum of dimorphism from gorillas to bonobos, with male gorillas at a 2:1 size difference with respect to females, chimpanzees at about 1.5:1, humans at about 1.2:1, and bonobos essentially equal in size. The behavior is what might be expected in terms of aggression and dominance. Among bonobos, males and females are living in the feminist utopia, male bonobos have zero ability to control females. Among gorillas, it's a patriarchal hellscape. We fall between bonobos and chimps; due to bodily dimorphism, the feminist utopia is perhaps not to be ours, but we're doing better than chimps! Male chimps can be really nasty toward females. It's interesting to note that dimorphism has decreased over the long haul of human evolution, there was a time in the deep past when it was more like 1.5:1, so things could be worse!
And yet, humans have enormous behavioral flexibility, we're not slaves to biology, and the symbols we use to enact/embody sex in our social lives are to some degree arbitrary. However, biology plays a role in the social construction, it's part of the raw material from which we construct the world we inhabit. Blue for boys and pink for girls? Totally arbitrary symbolism. Men depicted as warriors and women as nurturers? Not so much. Again, complex blend of nature and nurture.
Here's something else to note: the recent push to depict sex as existing on a spectrum, because a tiny fraction of humanity exhibits sexual abnormalities. It's like saying humans aren't bipedal because some people have no legs, or that humans don't have binocular vision because some have no eyes. We don't have to stigmatize people who do not fit within the sex binary, but it's folly to pretend that these are not exceedingly rare abnormalities (with 'normal' defined in terms of the condition observed among the vast and overwhelming majority of humanity). The whole maneuver is about deconstructing the binary at any cost.
A big part of the left wing project has long involved a focus on the welfare of the marginalized. That has grown to an obsession, and the current trend is to elevate the margins as morally superior, and to denigrate and tear down the culture of the majority. It's producing a lot of weird politics, with gender being just one example.
Old-school Western Marxists saw everything through the lens of economic class, with the proletariat being the key to the revolution. However, in the 60s and 70s, it became apparent that the proles weren't buying what they were selling, and so the radicals turned to organizing racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities as the key to the revolution. The current obsession with trans and racial identity has actually been a long time in the making. Radicals in the academy have been at this for a generation, the long march strategy has definitely been successful.
Very very weird politics indeed.
I’ve heard it floated elsewhere that as our culture has become more open and inclusive, progressives have had to struggle harder and harder to find things to be outraged about, or social justice issues to fight for, until as you said, yes, the very existence of a mainstream is the offense.
Having two legs is able-bodied privilege. Not having distress about your body is cis privilege. And those of us with two legs and no gender distress are somehow ... almost culpable for this, and need to make it up to everyone else.
It’s become very weird, and I say this as someone who’s spent my life on the far far left.
The stuff you shared about primates is fascinating. I’d love to learn more about it. I took one primate anthropology class in school and it was one of my top-three favorite classes maybe.
Thinking about humans as animals could be very helpful and instructive in today’s bizarre climate. It can help ground us in reality.
I think you are right. While some people may have problems, "transitioning" is not the solution. As I've said before, medical science is not capable of "transitioning" a man to a woman (or vice versa). The claim is akin to alchemy.
And what of the young people who feel some sort of discomfort with their biological gender? As you implied, that may be a problem for which we haven't found a solution. But I think that for whatever reason, the incidence of a serious problem is grossly exxagerated. That seems to be our current MO. Greatly exaggerate what MIGHT happen ( these kids will all commit suicide!) and ignore what actually happens.
Anecdotal at best, but I'm sure it influences my view:
I have twin stepdaughters. At about age 6, one of the twins instructed her father and me that she was no longer Lucy; she was a boy and wanted to be called Joe. So we tried to remember to call her Joe, and she corrected us each time we slipped up. We took it in stride and treated it as entirely normal. The "Joe" phase lasted about 6 mo.
She is now 43, happily married and the mother of 3 beautiful children. We sometimes laugh together about the "Joe" phase.
I shudder to think what might have happened to her if she were 6 years old today.
She would be Joe in school, Joe at church, Joe at the doctor, and ... with everyone telling her she was “really a boy” she’d believe it, then puberty would hit and there would be a crisis.
I’m so glad she grew up 30-some years ago.
Me too! She is a lovely woman, a real joy in my life. It breaks my heart to hear of what people do to young children now, mostly it seems from their own fear of crossing conventional thinking.
💯
This is why I’m so passionate about this topic.
I’ve commented before about the sexualization of young children. I was a young stepmom, maybe 26. My twin stepdaughters were very close, as twins often are.
I was stunned when they came home from 1st grade and told me they couldn’t hold hands at school, because “people will think we are lesbians”. 1st Grade! And they certainly did not learn that in our house!
This was mid 1980’s. It’s been going on for a very long time.
Oh my gosh!!! :(
So sad that little children, even back then, had those concerns.
Thank you for this essay, which thoughtfully, sympathetically, and convincingly reframes the issue. Yes, there is real distress (with cause! no wonder so many young girls don’t like being sexualized by our culture!), but there are healthier and more effective ways to treat these kids than to act as though their “idiom of distress” is in fact a physical reality.
One quick addition to your group of OG-trans women is natal males whose moms took DES while they were in utero. My friend belongs to this group. An enormous proportion of these children grew up to be intersex and trans because of the extremely high doses of estrogen to which they were exposed as fetuses. My friend transitioned and has been completely happy and satisfied (she is the opposite of fragile and never gets upset if people accidentally misgender her).
Your essay also reminded me of something I heard Jesse Thorn say on a podcast the other day. Thorn is very outspoken about having a natal son whom they have been socially transitioning since she was three. Thorn presents as evidence that his child is “really trans” the following: she liked a cartoon bear who wore a skirt, and one time, when she was three, after Thorn’s wife said that girls could have penises, she said “I am a girl with a penis.” I really think that if there had been more to it than this thin gruel, Thorn would have said so, because I read about this in an essay he wrote about why they were transitioning their child.
Anyway, all that is background. Here is what he said the other day: his youngest child had made “fast spray.” He had filled a spray bottle with something or other and said that if you spray it on your feet, you can run faster. Adorable, right? Kids believe all kinds of sweet, silly stuff. Thorn was laughing at how funny and imaginative his kid was. And he was right! So why is the trans stuff deathly serious, requiring lifelong medical treatment, and not just childlike imagination? Or a child trying to please his mom by echoing something she said? The total lack of self-reflection was really striking to me.
Mari, as always, bringing the fascinating comments!
I did not know at all about the DES thing (of course I know a lot of other unfortunate things DES did) but now I’m fascinated to read and learn about that more. Usually I stay far away from the intersex / DSD issue, only because so many of those folks have begged NOT to be lumped in with trans people or trotted out as “proof” that sex is a spectrum. Depending on the specific disorder, many are wanting to live their (non trans) lives, and they feel they have a medical problem, which they want to handle privately, not a gender problem.
But — of course a trans person like your friend is highly relevant and her issue should be considered in the big picture of why some people are living happily and successfully as trans people.
If we can redefine “being trans” as something people choose to do because it makes their lives better — like Blaire White or your friend — and not some “internal state of being that always requires X, Y, Z” — we’d have such a better guide for handling this as a society, wouldn’t we?
For example, Blaire White has had lots of surgeries to enhance her appearance to be more feminine but is also really open about having kept her penis because she thought the surgery was too risky / would cause too much damage. (Smart, if you ask me.)
Even she — the poster child for “this is a successful transwoman” — doesn’t follow the expected cookie cutter response for what people expect of a transwoman.
I’m sure your friend has made her own set of choices for living her best life,
too, which are not identical to anyone else’s. They don’t have to be.
But the key is — we also understand that many, many people pursue this for reasons that obviously don’t make their lives better. In many cases transition makes their lives worse.
Trans is not this unwavering internal state of being. It’s a set of choices about how best to live your life happily. (Choices which, say, a three-year-old boy is completely unequipped to make.) We as a society are wrong to turn a blind eye to all the pain and suffering a fundamental misunderstanding of “being trans” is.
Exhibit A, Jesse Thorn and his little son. He liked a bear character with a skirt? He said he was a girl with a penis before he’s reached a developmental stage of understanding what makes boys and girls, boys and girls?
And the contrast with “fast spray” is so insightful — yes kids make up things all day long and that’s so healthy and creative. Why is the child taken at face value on this one thing? Why is this little boy’s life disrupted because a particular flawed ideology about gender is popular right now?
It pains me even to know about this. Even without medical or surgical transition, treating a boy child as if he’s a girl is a really powerful and damaging psychosocial intervention — which of course you know (preaching to choir) and I wrote a different post about why social transition is so damaging.
It’s just… a lot of people, often conservative people, casually throw around the term “child abuse” when they hear about something like this. The outcome is as bad as if someone were deliberately abusing him, yes, but it’s more complicated than that, when the parents believe they’re doing a good and healthy, even righteous, thing.
If a true believer in demonic possession were told she had to beat the demon out of her child, we wouldn’t be able to talk her out of that, either. But in that case at least the authorities would intervene.
For this little boy, who will intervene?
Obviously the parents don’t intend to be abusive. Thorn is open about what he’s doing and doesn’t perceive anything wrong with it.
So I don’t want to casually define this as child abuse — but it’s still behavior that is harming his child. A lot. Who can put a stop to it?
What do we do when we see that? What does a good person do? We’re not part of this family’s lives, so we can’t really say. When I’ve talked to people in my own life who are transing their kids, typically it hasn’t gone well unless they already had some misgivings. If the parents are true believers, they simply hear “blah blah blah I HATE YOUR CHILD, I’M A BAD PERSON, DON’T LISTEN, blah blah blah.”
But aren’t any people in Thorn’s life trying to help this kid? It’s distressing to think this kid is being so harmed, so openly, and no one is coming to the rescue.
The reason it’s next to impossible to break through the shell of them hearing “blah blah blah” is because everyone else — every school, every mainstream newspaper and magazine and podcast, every workplace, every major medical organization and medical journal, every progressive whom they know to be kind and inclusive and a champion of the underdog — will tell them they’re right.
And all these forces in society compound the damage. It would be one thing if only the parents did this wacky stuff and called him “she” and pretended he was a girl. But at school and church and everywhere he goes, his parents will carefully choose situations they know he will be called “she” and treated as if he were really a girl.
The damage is happening everywhere around this little boy, everywhere he goes. It’s painful to think about this innocent kid getting these messages all the time. At such a young age, he will likely fully internalize “I’m a girl” and integrate it into his beliefs about himself. With so many powerful forces at work, he cannot be expected to come to an independent realization when he’s six or seven or twelve: “Hey mom and dad, I’m a boy.”
And that is not his responsibility either, to save himself. He is a child.
So will they put him on puberty blockers when the time comes? Do they turn him into the next Jazz?
Who in this family’s life will be able to get the message across — with love — that they’re wrong and they’re hurting their kid, in such a way that they can hear and understand? Someone has to do it — someone in their lives whom they trust and know to be politically like-minded.
It’s interesting. In the last four years since I’ve been talking about this stuff more openly, it’s become about a million times more common to read views expressing skepticism of gender ideology and its effects. (Mostly among conservatives but also among progressives.) But it’s _not_ become a million times more common to talk about it openly in real life (I don’t think, anyway, based on what I can see IRL). The drive to be polite and preserve relationships is too strong in us: and of course that’s not something we _should_ dismiss or take lightly. Our relationships sustain us — we can’t just go around damaging them because we have a cause.
But I hope someone persuasive in Thorn’s life is able to speak to the family, convincingly and with love.
I agree with all of this. Unfortunately, I think Thorn is fully dug in: one of the members of the Mitchell and Webb British comedy team pushed Thorn, quite gently, in my opinion, about what he was doing to his child, and the backlash was just unbelievable (or all too believable, I guess). Mitchell had to make a public apology and was briefly cancelled, and Thorn gave a long, tearful talk at the end of one of the podcasts about the hundreds of emails of support he had received. He is not going to change his mind.
The heartbreaking thing is that to me--a highly compliant people-pleaser who as a child could imagine no hotter hell than to have my parents even slightly disapprove of me--it is obvious that Thorn’s child was just trying to comply with his mom’s suggestion, or test it out playfully. Right after she said girls could have penises, he said “I am a girl with a penis.” That is what kids do! They want to please their parents, and they will agree to all kinds of crazy things to make their parents happy.
When I was in 7th grade, I briefly dressed like a middle-aged businesswoman straight out of Dress for Success because that is the way my mom wanted me to dress. There was no lasting damage beyond a lot of teasing (and my mom quickly realized that other kids didn’t dress that way and let me wear jeans) but to me Thorn’s child is acting in exactly the same way as I did when my mom presented me with business suits and dresses for school--with compliance, because you don’t go against your parents, ever. This is one reason that parents ought to be very careful that they aren’t unconsciously pressuring their child into a path s/he hasn’t really chosen. It’s so easy to do; it happens all the time in other areas, and trans is no different.
Yes!!! So so true!
“Thorn’s child is acting in exactly the same way as I did when my mom presented me with business suits and dresses for school--with compliance, because you don’t go against your parents, ever.”
Yes and the younger the child, the more true it is.
Wow the story about the cancelling and the long tearful talk about the support he received for harming his kid just makes my blood boil.
Just...infuriating that there’s no way through AND no one on earth can help this child.
Also I just want to add — the mental image of little Mari dressed for success is funny, but I’m so glad your mom backed off of it quickly! 💖
Very quick, top of the head and possibly inarticulate, comment since I'm rushing to get ready for a month of travel. There's a lot I'd like to think on and respond in a more meaningful way, but family calls.
I really like your framing here. It's helpful in defining the problem - which is required in order for us to find solutions or ways forward.
As we discuss idioms of distress, I find that we have too many people using them as signals for transition (which I believe you are arguing here). And those who use them as signals often set themselves up as gatekeepers of gender - taking the spinning wheel of confusion and experimentation around gender/identity/self-conception common to youth and locking it down as soon as it spins by "trans". Probably the least helpful approach to any meaningful care for the issues underlying gender dysphoria. Especially if we look at it through your framework (which I believe we should).
Yes I love how you put this:
“ And those who use them as signals often set themselves up as gatekeepers of gender - taking the spinning wheel of confusion and experimentation around gender/identity/self-conception common to youth and locking it down as soon as it spins by "trans". ”
Agreed. In earlier generations our culture treated adolescence as a sort of dress-rehearsal for adulthood, a time of exploration and experimentation about “who you are” — and all of it was considered provisional and often temporary and changing. Changing a lot.
Of course this was all a cultural creation too — but it was a cultural creation that served a purpose.
Kids were thought to go through phases; and this was a normal thing.
Now as you say the whole process gets shut down and nailed down. You’re experimenting with gender or clothing or exploring your personality or sexuality? You’re TRANS. That’s a thing you ARE.
Can you imagine if parents and all of society in earlier decades did this to any other form of exploration?
In 1970s New York — you’re PUNK. That’s what you ARE. And everyone expects you to have your colorful hair and Docs and piercings forever.
No more exploration for you, Miss Punk!
Have a great one-month trip, whatever you’re doing! Thanks so much for taking the time out to share your thoughts here!
One thing I've noticed is a distinction between trans people who want to be a regular man or woman and those who making being trans a large part of their identity. I imagine that transitioning works much better for the first group.
Interesting observation! Now that you mention it, Blaire White falls in that group.
I've heard of her but I'm not familiar. I just noticed that, in the past few years, trans has moved from, like, people wanting to be the other sex to being its own thing. Like, some people don't want to be men they want to be trans men.
Interesting! I mean, if that were really the case for some people, they might be a lot happier, because being a trans man is a lot more achievable. Buck Angel is someone who is satisfied being a trans man.
I know I'm late commenting on this one, but thanks for writing this. As a trans widow, I can confirm that my sexually-motivated, mostly-straight ex-husband had gender dysphoria, something some people don't think happens in that cohort. He also acquired it late in life, despite not having it before--another thing people don't like to believe.
In my opinion the fact that anyone can get it makes it all the more urgent to ensure we aren't inducing it iatrogenically or giving it more weight than it deserves when it comes to how to address it.
Edited to add: I wrote this comment before I finished the article. Thanks for the shout-out!
“ the fact that anyone can get it makes it all the more urgent to ensure we aren't inducing it iatrogenically or giving it more weight than it deserves when it comes to how to address it.”
Yes yes yes.
We need to be shouting this from the rooftops.
I think SO many of our interventions, starting with completely loving and well-intentioned “affirmation,” are contributing to gender dysphoria, making it worse, and sometimes even creating it.
Dolly...when you write about this particular subject, I always learn something new about it. Props for that.
Thank you so much, M!
I think you raise a very important point. I remain alarmed at how little curiosity there is from the trans-affirming side as to *what* exactly causes someone to be trans. Medically speaking, establishing the pathology of a condition should be seen as a foundational step in being able to formulate a remedy. It's true that coming up with a solution to an ailment is still possible even without a clear understanding of the pathology (see e.g. entire history of medical field, and psychotropic drugs today) but this is quite obviously a less than ideal scenario.
To be fair, I don't believe anyone quite understands the "pathology" of same-sex attraction, but it also is not an "ailment" that requires any sort of remedy beyond just letting people live their lives. In contrast, a trans person who is for whatever reason being denied cutting-edge plastic surgery and experimental hormonal treatments is presented as existing on the precipice of a catastrophic breakdown. I don't doubt that trans people are suffering from some kind of distress, but I don't see how we are helping them with turning a blind eye to the root causes of their distress.
I completely agree— I don’t see how we are helping either; and in many cases I think we are hurting people with misdirected efforts.
Hi! I'm not sure how to address you, but I've been a reader/subscriber since coming across "Trans Is Something We Made Up" and appreciate your insight and analysis.
I also have found it quite frustrating to see gender critical writers and journalists such as Shrier and Singal stop short of fully denouncing gender ideology by leaving space for a few "true," mythical "transpeople" that exist as such, rather than as trans-identified individuals. I'm not sure if their motivation for doing so is strategic (e.g., they may think that fence sitters would find categorical rejection of "trans" too hateful/harmful/insensitive/unkind/discordant with current scientific consensus etc.) or to preserve their own personal/professional relationships and reputation by avoiding coming off as transphobic extremists; however, in doing so, they nonetheless lend credence to gender ideology and hinder their own efforts to speak out against it. I agree wholeheartedly with you that "trans" is fabricated and sociogenic, and I believe that any acquiescence to gender ideology, however slight or well-intentioned, only reinforces and bolsters it.
Transition is a set of cosmetic procedures, which might or might not enhance your life.
"Blaire White is the rare person for whom transition seems to have enhanced life, but Blaire White also still believes she’s male and is happy with that — she transitioned and no longer has gender dysphoria. If, for example, someone misgenders her, she might think that person is rude, but her mental health won’t suffer."
Hi GS! I’m Dolly, but a lot of people here call me 21 or Salonniere. ;) Any form of address is fine — and thanks for the kind words and your support!
Yes!!! I’ve had the same thoughts about why (maybe) Shrier and Singal don’t go all the way, so to speak. Maybe they maintain the fiction of “true trans people” because it makes them look more open-minded (they don’t want to be lumped in with transphobes or extremists), or maybe because they fear that if they say there are no “true trans people” they will lose support.
Or you know, maybe they believe there are true trans people. Everyone knows at least a few trans people. Aren’t they “real”?
I conceive of them as people who had cosmetic surgeries to enhance their lives, but not as “being” substantially different from anyone else. Someone like Blaire White is just really committed to femininity and likes presenting that way. Good for her. I might not understand it, but any functioning adult should be free to make decisions about what to do with their body. Plenty of my mom-friends have had boob jobs or tummy tucks after having kids, and I don’t understand that either, but I support it if it makes them happy.
I don’t think any purely cosmetic surgeries are ethical or worth it in the cost-benefit analysis, but obviously a lot of people disagree. And they’re free to disagree!
One danger of maintaining the fiction of “true trans” and keeping that idea alive in our society ( and I might have written about this on Twitter but not necessarily here) is that every troubled teen with gender dysphoria is going to be absolutely sure that she is one of the “real ones.”
Then, every parent of a teen with gender dysphoria is going to have that impossible argument on their hands. You can’t argue with a delusional idea.
As long as our culture clings to the notion that anyone can “be trans” or “be the opposite sex on the inside” or “be in the wrong body” we’re going to have people who firmly believe it applies to themselves.
If that notion dies, and if it’s replaced by the idea that everyone just has the body they’re born with, and a few people choose cosmetic surgeries to make themselves look the way they want (but you’ve removed the special status of “being” anything in particular) then you’re just a boring capitalist consumer of cosmetic surgery, like an aging housewife. It’s hardly the unique or edgy image these kids crave.
The idea of “being trans” needs to disappear.
Dolly it is! :)
I agree; Shrier, Singal, et. al. could believe there are "true trans" people themselves. No fault of their own, I suppose, but hopefully they come around or can be convinced otherwise (by writers such as yourself or through more thorough investigation on their own).
I messed up and accidentally posted my comment prematurely, which is why it ended in this quote from your article without any context:
"Transition is a set of cosmetic procedures, which might or might not enhance your life. Blaire White is the rare person for whom transition seems to have enhanced life, but Blaire White also still believes she’s male and is happy with that — she transitioned and no longer has gender dysphoria. If, for example, someone misgenders her, she might think that person is rude, but her mental health won’t suffer."
I meant to follow up and ask whether these types of cosmetic procedures even *should* be performed by medical professionals--whether or not they constitute, inherently, ethical violations and should be outlawed as such. Someone made a similar comparison here in the comments, but from my perspective, gender is to biology/medicine as alchemy is to chemistry. I believe that medical institutions and practitioners (of "gender medicine") are committing atrocities, despite being well-intentioned (though there may be a more salient profit incentive for some particularly morally-deficient individuals/institutions), and that this is the case for every individual subjected to "gender-affirming" "treatment" and "therapy" in the medical context. I don't believe that there is any benefit, medical or psychological, derived from such procedures to individuals suffering from gender dysphoria that truly resolves their underlying issues regarding their self-perception/conception; instead, I think these procedures are further contributing to a delusion that is incongruous with not only reality, but self acceptance. While many (most?) cosmetic surgeries (which I, too, find to be ethically-precarious, at best) are also likely instances of medical malpractice/rampant consumerism, they at least do not purport to change who the patient is fundamentally. "Gender-affirming" surgeries, on the other hand, set out from the start to somehow "transform" the patient into the opposite sex and reify any delusions regarding their self-identity that they have: once you go down that path, there's no viable way to "detrans" and you're almost guaranteed to live out the rest of your life maintaining the facade.
I have compassion and empathy for gender-dysphoric individuals (both old-school and new), but I don't feel that affirming what I can only describe as a pathological delusion (acknowledging that such a framing does sound harsh/insensitive, but perhaps necessarily so) is an honest expression of that empathy, nor do I feel it leads to any healthy, positive outcomes for them.
I think that individuals like Blaire White, Buck Angel, et. al., who appear to be happy and well-adjusted are only presenting as such at a superficial level and may very well feel compelled, much like Renee Richards, to maintain a "trans" facade without being fully committed to acknowledging its insubstantiality and explicitly voicing their regret. Otherwise, I believe they would drop the "trans" descriptor/self-identity and refer to themselves as their respective sex in a way that reflects who they actually are (with pronouns that correspond to their sex). If they were to feel that being "misgendered," or, perhaps, correctly-sexed, would be rude, then it seems they would still be suffering from gender dysphoria and their "gender-affirming" surgery was sold to them as a lie.
You raise some really interesting stuff!
So yes, personally I find all cosmetic procedures (without a real medical or functional purpose) unethical. But most people would disagree.
Part of this is informed by the fact that a friend of the family, a healthy young woman, had (necessary) knee surgery, had a stroke and died. I would never take a chance on leaving my family for a cosmetic procedure. The cost-benefit is never there in my view.
I also think a lot of doctors in the US have a lot of debt, and quite honestly are often on the lookout for a cash cow. This gender stuff is a huge cash cow.
There’s no way to get inside someone’s head and say whether she’s truly happy or presenting a facade to the world. I can only go by what I see, but Blaire does seem like a happy person with a full life.
I don’t think every last trans person is secretly unhappy. I think most -- really the very large majority, almost all -- have serious mental health problems and those problems don’t go away with transition. I think transition is a dead end for nearly everyone, so much so that the world might honestly be better off if we banned any of the medical or surgical procedures. But... I hesitate to tell adults what to do with their own bodies. It’s a slippery slope.
The other slippery slope here is the insistence that we all must accept that people who have "transitioned" are now members of their chosen sex. It's a slippery slope indeed to try to force people to publicly affirm what they privately believe flies in the face of reality.
"Some doctors in the 20th century tried to weed out autogynephilic men from being considered for transition, because they believed they had less successful mental health outcomes than gay men."
Maybe I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that transition wasn't even considered a "mental health" treatment back in those days, but a mere physical feminization of the body. "Autogynephilic" men were weeded out because they tended to be middle-aged and masculine and therefore wouldn't feminize very well. Young gay men who already "looked and acted" feminine were thought more likely to be pushed over that lower threshold with castration and a little makeup.
I suppose you could say that men who were happy with their level of feminization experienced better mental health, but that seems to me like a stretch of the definition of mental health, and again, more of a side effect than an intended result of hormones and surgery.
In fact, I believe the idea that transition improves mental health is part of a mythology that's grown up around the modern trans phenomenon, that was never there back in the day. I now see activists claiming that the "truly" trans brain "likes" to run on opposite sex hormones, as though the euphoria that's a known side effect of hormones proves that the patient is really trans--in addition to the more common modern claims that transition reduces suicidality (also unproven) and confers other mystical benefits.
As you maybe allude to here, we also used to say that one became trans because he had gender dysphoria (i.e., pursued steps to feminize because he felt dysphoric), while now we say one has gender dysphoria because he is trans (i.e., feels the distress because of some underlying brain-body mismatch). The latter provides a rationalization for medicalization whereas before it was pitched as one particular choice.
The history is a little murky and probably different doctors believed different things.
I had read that (at least some doctors) believed that the fetishists were not “really” transsexual, partly because they were straight masculine men before asking to transition. How could they “really” be transsexual unless they were feminine from childhood and attracted to men?
It seemed there was a belief that some people would be happy no other way, but the doctors wanted to make sure the patients were “really” transsexual, meaning they “really” believed they were female on the inside.
I think the middle-aged married masculine men didn’t meet any of those criteria: they didn’t fit the mid-20th-century idea of the “real” transsexual who would be “helped” by surgery.
There are stories though of AGP men memorizing talking points and telling a story in which they “always” played with dolls and preferred opposite sex playmates.
Today’s ROGD parents tell a similar story— their kids adopt a narrative of talking points that doesn’t match the parents’ memory of what their kid was like.
There are so many aspects to this stuff.
I agree that the gatekeeping was in place, and that doctors were more likely to transition young gay men than older straight men. I also agree that older straight men could (and still do) figure out what to say to game that system.
I just thought (and am still inclined to think) that that's because young gay men would look prettier than old straight men, with no ideas around "mental health" coming into the equation back then.
I know Blanchard at least did speak of "autogynephiles" having dysphoria, and if I remember right, has said in recent years that he never meant to suggest that some of these men were more "true" trans than others. I know he wasn't the only player in that world, though.
It also seems to me that most old-school transsexuals knew they weren't "actual" women; that seems like a recent development too. Many were immersed in gay culture and still called themselves gay, while the "girl" and "mary" stuff was campy and part of drag queen culture.
I haven't seen evidence of doctors considering anything other than aesthetic results (and maybe dating future) when deciding who should transition, back in those days. I'd be interested in seeing what you've read on that.
I’ll try to dig up an old article that went into this kind of in depth and I’ll try to come back and link it here. I’ve not got my stuff all that well organized!
So I’ll email you three pdfs. One from the 1950s Worden & Marsh, one from the 1970s Fisk (this one describes the need to differentiate between people who believed from earliest childhood that they were “really” girls versus people who get an erotic thrill from crossdressing, although Worden & Marsh notes how their stories of this “I was always this way” narrative are superficial and suspiciously similar), and one of the 1980s, Billings & Urban.
It’s interesting how the views have changed over the decades.
This is a great article with so many good points. I wonder if people like Jesse Singal and Abigail Shrier are using their statements about “true gender dysphoria” as a way of communicating , “I’m not an extremist who hates these people and I see nuance. Please be open to the points I’m trying to make.”
Also, I’m new here so you may have already talked about this in another post, but have you read Ethan Watters book Crazy Like Us? He talks about a culture”s symptom pool from which a person can “choose” how to express distress. It fits so perfectly with the idea of idioms of distress. Thank you for sharing that concept and the article about it
Yes! I mentioned that book in “Trans is Something We Made Up”! Great book.
As you propogate this thoroughly reasonable description of matters, who are the decision-makers who could help reduce this harm?
I hate seeing the criminal justice system used. Are there possible malpractice plaintiffs? Can the medical community reform itself on this?
I don’t think the medical community can reform itself. There’s too much money to be made, and too many self-righteous faux social justice points to be won by spouting off the correct platitudes even when they make no sense. It would be a lose-lose to them to reform themselves. And individual doctors who question this stuff seem to think it sufficient to keep their heads down and try to stay out of it themselves. No one wants to destroy their career or be thought a bigot, so many critics stay quiet.
I think the only thing that will put a stop to it is:
1) A massive financial disincentive in the form of a spate of big and successful lawsuits against the people providing this “care.” Just yesterday I saw a tweet from some law firm that is looking to represent people who were harmed by puberty blockers. Good.
2) A critical mass of publicly critical detransitioners, so big that everyone else can’t ignore them anymore. We have so many detransitioners talking about how they were led down a harmful path with no oversight or pushback from any of the professionals they encountered.
Of course not, right? That’s was “affirmation” is— you let the patient self-diagnose and choose whatever treatments they think they want, based on happy stories they’ve read online. Where else in the field of medical and mental health would affirmation and letting the patient choose the treatment end well? If you did that, every person with a phobia would choose to avoid the thing they’re phobic of, which is precisely the way to make a phobia worse not better.
That self-diagnosis and self-treatment and affirmation all create a huge disaster is not surprising: but…we have to wait for the world to figure it out. Several European countries are reversing course. I assume we will too. Eventually.
It's good to hear that there might be winnable malpractice claims. The doctors/psychologists etc are the people whose minds need changing and who should bear the brunt of fixing this. Not the young people or their parents.
Exactly! I agree.
But as a practical matter, I think it’s a few of the feisty kids and their feisty “won’t take no for an answer” parents who will be doing the heavy lifting to make things better.
Was that a fascinating interview or what? I’d really like to have coffee with Shannon and talk to her at length about it (except you know, it might be painful to talk about it).
It just fascinates me that someone who seemed to be in a happy functional marriage, a real partnership where they shared interests, where she was even open to his kink (before it got out of hand), managed to have it fall apart. Like completely fall apart, disastrously fall apart.
It really did seem analogous to an addiction destroying a marriage — whether the addiction is alcohol , gambling, whatever. I do believe for some people autogynephilia takes on the characteristics of an addiction.
It’s not very progressive-sounding to say, but I think there’s such a thing as porn addiction, where you need weirder and more intense things to satisfy it.
In the 70s and 80s (when old-school trans people were so very rare) how much access did people have to transgender porn, sissy porn, etc? Probably very very little. And it would have probably been mostly still images.
Now you can watch it, in video format, 24/7.
In the 70s and 80s, how much access did these guys have to men who shared their interests and would role play with them? Probably… basically none.
But now you have the internet: you can pretend to be a woman. You can have pretty feminine avatars. You can have people online treat you as a woman (maybe even believe you are a woman). And you can have people talk sexually
to you as if they think you’re a woman. If you really get a thrill out of it, you can find people to role-play with you all day every day.
It’s so much easier to satisfy this kink—but to anyone who is at all vulnerable to becoming addicted / obsessed by it, all this availability to see porn and act out the fantasy at any time surely is similar to a future alcoholic working at a bar with unlimited free drinks.
You might not have become an alcoholic at all without the availability of unlimited free drinks—but if you’re wired to become an alcoholic, the unlimited free drinks are going to cause you a problem.
And yes it does sound like Shannon would have stayed if he had kept any of their old shared interests or activities. What was so, so sad to me was that there was nothing left of this guy but an empty shell of misery and trans obsession.
And yet we still have all of society endorsing transition for anyone who wants it, and thinking it’s a matter of DEI and “rights” instead of poor mental health and obsession.
#UnlimitedFreeDrinks
I agree, a fascinating story. It sounded like the online activism convinced Jamie that his mental and emotional well-being depended on being perceived as a literal woman, and then everything became a trigger. Not passing caused meltdowns.
But it wasn't just about others' perceptions -- he also suffered when other people weren't even involved: He wouldn't sing because his voice sounded male. He wouldn't go hiking because the clothes made him feel masculine. Anything that reminded him of the truth caused distress. The online world was the only place where he could escape it.
Yes what a great point: he couldn’t even escape from himself. The part about him not singing or hiking (or…anything!) anymore made me really sad
Dolly! I am down for a coffee and chat!
Let’s stay in touch! I hope our paths cross!!