Threads That Weave Together Our Cultural Understanding of "Being Trans"

In a recent comment to “What Do I Mean by ‘Trans Is Something We Made Up’?”, salon guest PeterM asked:

It doesn't seem to me that before the trans phenomenon exploded that our culture was particularly uncomfortable or hostile to gender non-conforming behaviour. Since the 1960s we've seen acceptance of cross-gender behaviour and expression grow, so why such an extreme reaction now? Some have suggested there is a socio-political agenda involved, that is, the "queering" of society. How do the two fit together, or can you explain this differently?

And I replied:

These are great questions / thoughts, PeterM!

I think there are many cultural threads all coming together to create this phenomenon, not so much a deliberate agenda driving it, although politics is definitely _one thread_ (or perhaps a couple different ones).

In other words, some people probably do have an agenda — just as we all do, right? My “agenda” is to make sure we have better treatments for unhappy people, and better ways for them to be happy with themselves, fit in and be accepted — but to the extent people with a “queering” agenda have any influence, their influence would not be possible without all these other threads.

I started to write a full answer to you here, explaining how I see the various cultural threads coming together to create this phenomenon, but then it was getting really long and I can’t do it justice in a comment-reply. Instead, I plan to address this in a future post!

So, here we go.

First: Everything Happens in Its Cultural Context

Nothing happens in a cultural vacuum.

Here in the US, if we have a serious illness, we typically go to a doctor for help, and not, say, a faith-healer. Why? Because we’ve been taught our whole lives that that is what you do. By the time we grow up and have to make a decision about what to do when we’re sick, we’ve experienced a whole lifetime of having been brought to doctors and not faith-healers. We follow the rules.

Likewise, if we want food, we might go to the grocery store or farmer’s market, or we might supplement our food supplies by gardening or hunting in season, but we won’t roam the streets of Cleveland looking for edible roots to dig up or acorns to harvest, nor will we shoot people’s pets for meat. Why? Because we’ve all been taught ways to get food in our culture.

Even if we’re suffering with psychosis, the shape our mental illness takes will depend on our culture. Someone in the US is likely to think the Christian God is speaking to him, or maybe the (Christian or Christian-adjacent) notions of “the devil” or “demons” or “witches” — but not, say, Zeus or Thor or Scandinavian housespirits. Many Americans live in a cultural context where Christian concepts, and not ancient Greek or Scandinavian ones, are meaningful. Their cultural context directly influences the form their psychosis takes.

So let’s start with these two points of understanding:

(1) Much of what we think, do, experience, or decide is built upon layers and layers of our socialization and learning from other people who inhabit and share our culture, people who transmit that culture to us, generation after generation.

(2) Anything new, like our 21st century Western conception of “being trans,” grows out of an existing cultural context — from many existing threads of meaning and understanding and belief, which other people in other times and places do not, would not, and could not share.

Here are some of the cultural threads I see at work in our 21st century Western notion of “being trans.” I hope readers can identify others and share them in the comments.

The “Be Yourself—Sort Of” Thread

On the one hand, in the 1970s and 1980s there were public service messages during Saturday morning cartoons to “be yourself.” There was an understanding that some girls liked trucks and Legos and some boys liked dolls and dress-up. Parents were encouraged to let kids choose the toys and activities that interested them — although let’s be honest: there were more girls in Little League than there were boys in ballet. Androgyny was briefly cool (Annie Lennox / David Bowie).

At the same time, though, if you think about it, our culture paid lip service to those things, but really, no one ever celebrated a really butch woman or very feminine man. Lennox or Bowie “got away with it” because they were still conventionally attractive and appealing. Lennox was a beautiful feminine woman with short hair. Bowie was a handsome masculine man with eyeliner and outrageous outfits.

I think to a large extent many people, at least in the US, never fully embraced or accepted as perfectly normal a very masculine girl/woman or a very feminine boy/man. There’s a sense in which many people in our culture experience a vague sense of un-ease, or believe there’s something undesirable with that way of being.

It’s definitely true that, unlike Samoa, we don’t have prescribed social roles or an understanding of “this is just one way to be normal and here is how we embrace you and make room for you to fit in.” If you’re a very masculine woman or a very feminine man, you really don’t quite fit in — there was never quite the acceptance, even in the 70s and 80s, that there seemed to be on the surface.

Culturally, a very masculine woman or a very feminine man is still less than “ideal.” In our culture, if you’re the parent of a very masculine girl or a very feminine boy — or indeed a child who is very different in any way (too precocious, too physically active, too noisy, too quiet, too quirky, too outspoken, too sensitive, too… unusual), you might feel a sense of alarm, not because you don’t love and accept your children exactly how they are, but because you suspect that society won’t deal kindly with them.

The “We Buy Solutions” Thread

How do we handle, in our culture, something that is less than ideal? We buy something to fix it.

If you have an old car that runs perfectly well, but it’s not as shiny as it was, and it doesn’t have all the modern features, none of your friends and neighbors will praise you for keeping it year after year. Your friends and neighbors will praise and congratulate you, though, for buying a new one. So what do people do? Most people, if they can afford one, will buy a new car when the perfectly good old one is…old.

If you have breasts that are sagging from breastfeeding and age, no one will praise you for accepting your natural aging body (and they certainly won’t praise your sagging breasts). They will praise you for buying a well-fitting bra that hauls your breasts into place. They will praise you for buying a surgery to move those breasts back up where they “belong.” In fact, subjecting yourself to surgeries like this is widely viewed in our culture as a form of self-love or self-care.

In our culture, there’s a belief that if you can buy a solution (to your old car, to your sagging breasts, to your “imperfect” child), it’s practically your obligation to do so. Living with your old car, sagging breasts, and imperfect child is almost an affront to others. At the very least, it confuses people and makes them uncomfortable.

The “Not Just Solutions — But Quick Solutions” Thread

Several years ago, when the DSM (the diagnostic manual used by US mental health professionals) was being revised, the so-called “bereavement exclusion” for major depressive disorder was removed. Until that time, there was a belief that people who were recently bereaved were appropriately depressed and had to have time and space to work through it.

With the DSM-5, there was an evolving belief that people who were bereaved needed quicker “help,” the same as anyone else who was depressed.

PsychCentral spun this in a positive way:

“By removing the bereavement exclusion, the DSM-5 says this: a person who meets the full symptom, severity, duration and impairment criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) will no longer be denied that diagnosis, solely because the person recently lost a loved one.”

So if your spouse dies, the funeral is over, and the casseroles have stopped coming, there’s very much a belief that the appropriate thing to do is to move on — and if you’re still depressed, you need “treatment” for your “depression.”

In our culture, we want quick solutions, even to grief. If you’re still grieving a few weeks later, your family will start to worry. You’ll be diagnosed with a major depressive disorder and offered medication.

Our cultural desire for quick fixes means that taking a year or two or three to go through the grieving process after the loss of our spouse is just not considered healthy or appropriate. You are expected to feel better, pronto. Take this pill.

Just like replacing your old car, feeling better after the death of your spouse is nearly considered an obligation if you can do it. You’ll be praised for being able to “move on.” Quickly.

The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment Thread

We are so steeped in this in the West that it’s truly the water in which we swim. In our culture, at least until very recently, everyone agreed that the scientific method was the best available way to approach truth and that empirical data should inform our understanding of the world — ideas that arose in the late 1600s.

Out of the Scientific Revolution grew the more wide-ranging Age of Enlightenment, in which many ideas arose and then stuck around for hundreds of years — the focus on science as a means of understanding the world led to the notion that religious tolerance was important, as was individual liberty and free-thinking.

Why? Well, how do you get anywhere, studying how the world works, unless you encourage people to float new ideas and test them out? And if you can’t scientifically test certain things, like the truth of someone else’s religion, how do you know that yours is right and everyone else’s is wrong?

The ideals of freedom and liberty, which were then enshrined in our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution, grew directly from this age. Those ideas still mean a lot to us in this culture.

Some say that “science” became a religion of its own, replacing more traditional forms of religion — others say it’s still the best way we have of understanding the world around us. (Without science we wouldn’t have cars, planes, central heating, electric lights, refrigeration, polio vaccines, or iPhones.) But there’s no doubt that in our culture we are taught to revere science and what it teaches us about the world.

So if we read in a trusted media source that something is true because scientists (doctors, psychologists, other experts) say it’s been shown to be true via experiments (“science”) then most of us in our culture will tend to believe it’s true without investigating it ourselves. It’s science.

The Civil Rights / Progressivism Thread

This is perhaps really a sub-thread or offshoot of the Enlightenment thread, but I think in our times it deserves its own mention. The Enlightenment ideals included the notion of constant progress or improvement. Indeed, one could argue that the Founders of the United States set up, by design, what they knew to be a very imperfect nation that would be successful in making ongoing improvements.

For example, in the beginning of our national experiment, only white male property owners could vote. Now, every adult citizen can vote.

Even with today’s imperfections, in the United States the status of women, of lesbian and gay people, of religious minorities, of various ethnic groups is greatly improved from “the old days.”

As part of our national narrative, we have a deeply felt cultural belief in an ongoing idea of progress and improvement. We have a cultural belief that new ideas — especially “scientific ones” — are better than old ideas.

But remember from an earlier post, that’s not necessarily true. In the mid-twentieth century, breastfeeding went out of fashion, and formula was considered to be a modern scientific improvement. That turns out not to have been borne out by later research.

We need to understand that we, culturally, are very prone to equate new ideas with progress, and especially if we link them to “civil rights” — how could “more rights” be bad?

Remember though that “rights” are not absolute either — nor do they exist in a vacuum. Your right to do anything you want with your property is not absolute if it includes digging a pit and filling it with toxic chemicals that leach into your neighbors’ wells. “Rights” need to be weighed and balanced if they adversely affect other people.

We have cultural beliefs that “new” equals “better” and “rights” are “simple and good.”

The Postmodern Thread

This is the thread I know — purposefully — the least about, and perhaps some readers can flesh this out.

In one of my many professional lives, I edited a lot of books for academic presses, and my least favorite were the “postmodern” books on “theory.” Why? Because I’m convinced they said nothing. The sentences didn’t make sense, the paragraphs didn’t make sense, and I suspect it wasn’t because I was stupid and couldn’t comprehend the lofty ideas. My perception was these books were some kind of academic version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a “blah blah blah Foucault” refuge for people who could neither think nor write anything of value. So, full disclosure: I’m clearly biased.

But I’m not the only one who believes that the humanities delved into a pit of meaninglessness and banality somewhere around the early 90s from which they have yet to emerge. You can read, for example, about the Sokal hoax, in which a physicist submitted a nonsense article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to an academic “cultural studies” journal, which was accepted for publication in 1996.

More recently, the Grievance Studies affair in the late 2010s highlighted that it was still quite possible to get complete nonsense “peer reviewed” and accepted for publication at a certain type of postmodern journal, with titles such as “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” As described in the linked article above, one of the three instigators of the Grievance Studies affair, Helen Pluckrose,

…suggested that fields such as postcolonial theory and queer theory could be called "applied postmodernism" in that they sprung up largely in the late 1980s as a means of pushing the gains of the civil rights movement, gay rights movement, and liberal feminism from the arena of legislative change and into the territory of changing discourse. She argued that these fields adapted postmodernism to suit their activist agendas. From postmodernism, they adopted the idea that knowledge is a social construct, but at the same time they held to the modernist view that "no progress could be made unless some things were objectively true." Thus, the "applied postmodernists," Pluckrose argued, insisted that "systems of power and privilege that oppressed women, people of colour and the LGBT" are objectively real and could be revealed by analysing discourses. At the same time, she argued, they retained postmodernism's scepticism toward science and objective knowledge, its view of "society as a system of power and privilege" and "commitment to the belief that all imbalances are socially constructed…”

Pluckrose described herself and her collaborators as being "left-wing liberal sceptics." She stated that a core reason for why they wanted to carry out the project was to convince other "leftist academics" that there was a problem with "corrupted scholarship" in academic fields that were "based on identity politics and postmodernism." She argued that in rejecting modernism, much postmodernist-derived scholarship was also rejecting science, reason, and liberal democracy, and thus undermining many important progressive gains.

Whether or not you agree with Pluckrose on the details, it does seem to be true that in recent decades a strange and confusing melding of modernism-postmodernism — a “postmodernism that wants to have it both ways” if you will — has taken hold first in academia and now has seeped into our cultural consciousness.

It seems we believe some conflicting and fuzzy notions now. In some ways, we’re supposed to believe in rock-solid objective truths, such as “systems of power and privilege are objectively real” but at the same time, we’re supposed to uphold everyone’s subjectivity about their experiences, which is not in line with (our also dearly held belief in) science. If a woman tells you something was sexist, everyone is expected to believe her. If a POC tells you something was racist, everyone is expected to believe him. If a child tells you that he’s really the opposite sex “on the inside,” everyone is expected to believe him — and by the way, 2 billion years of evolution to the contrary, sex isn’t real anyway: it’s a social construct, dummy.

Why? Because people who are very invested in gender have said that’s their truth, and who are you to question someone else’s truth?

The postmodern thread in our culture is what allows the proposition “X is a social construct” which we currently accept as true — because we’re sophisticated, so we know everything is relative, right? Everything is subjective. Everything is what the person affected says it is. Who are we to say different? If we say different, we are by definition unsympathetic, we are failing to “validate” someone, we are being “oppressive” — how can we dare to say what a person who claims to be in pain is experiencing?

(Spoiler: We can’t say what someone else is experiencing, but an experience isn’t necessarily the objective truth. Your cat is hurt whether you tripped over him in the dark or whether you kicked him in anger. It still matters whether you tripped over him or kicked him. It even matters to the cat.)

In a way, it feels culturally natural to us to elevate the underdog in this way, and to amplify the voices of people who say they’ve been marginalized and hurt. It meshes with our Enlightenment beliefs in progress and improvement.

We are at a cultural moment, though, where our culture thoroughly promotes the postmodern truth of subjectivity and thoroughly promotes the Enlightenment truth of objectivity, and it’s made us very confused, because those notions are often in conflict. The outcome is a muddled mess of sloppy beliefs.

A Note on “Queering”

A quick side-trip on the notion of “queering” (a subset of postmodern thought, whence arose “queer theory” and the rehabilitation of the word “queer” to mean something positive, even though earlier generations understood it to be a slur).

I could go on a long tangent here, but let’s let Wikipedia sum up some of the meanings for us:

Because the idea of queering comes from the term queer, it has a wide variety of definitions as well as uses. For example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a foundational theorist of queer theory says that queer can mean "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps…and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically." Literary critic Michael Warner offers this definition: "Queer gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual." Judith Butler, another theorist credited with the founding of queer theory, talks about queer as being an act that can be performed. In a more current context, methods of queering extend beyond critiquing literature to examine topics from popular culture to more abstract topics like theology and time. In her essay about the benefits of queering theology, Thelathia "Nikki" Young, says that queering is a way to "[deconstruct] the logics and frameworks operating within old and new theological and ethical concepts." In addition to these deconstructions, she argues that queering "dismantles the dynamics of power and privilege persisting among diverse subjectivities.

Get the idea? And this is my complaint with the postmodern project generally: “Queer” (or any other term) can literally mean anything you want it to mean, anything you decide it means: it’s another monument to subjectivity. With this level of subjectivity floating around in our culture and deemed acceptable, what can you not say is true?

The Social Dilemma / Outrage / Social Media Thread: “You’re With Us or Against Us”

I’ve recommended that people watch the documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) so often that you’re surely sick of hearing it.

In a very short time, social media has had an enormous effect on our culture: it’s changed, profoundly, the way most of us view the world and the way we view opposing viewpoints. I don’t think it would be possible to overstate or exaggerate this point.

The butchered, TL;DR version is this: Social media benefits from selling accurate information about us, and selling things to us. Social media companies therefore want to understand our preferences and to keep us engaged as long as possible on their sites. The best way to keep us engaged on the sites is by (1) telling us what we already believe (news that agrees with our existing points of view) and (2) provoking outrage and fear by telling us what those monsters on “the other side” are doing.

So yes, Donald Trump was a jerk, and he was completely unsuitable to be our president. But Trump Derangement Syndrome was a real thing, and completely out of proportion to reality. Even now that Trump’s gone, some formerly rational friends and acquaintances are still obsessed with Donald Trump.

While “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” has always been a thing — remember post-9/11 George W. Bush using that to shut down dissent for his Middle Eastern wars? — this notion has reached new heights in the social media age.

Our culture has recently taken tribalism to new heights. If you are on “our side” (whichever one that happens to be), you agree with every point and subpoint of “our side’s” beliefs. If you disagree, you are not simply a decent person who disagrees about something. You are a Bad Person.

In our culture, the Enlightement idea that good people do often disagree and can hash out ideas and come to new and better understandings was formerly deeply understood and unquestioned. The salon — where I stole the idea for this 21st-century electronic salon — was an Enlightenment invention: people would have spirited disagreements and learn from each other.

Social media has replaced that, and now we as a culture believe something much worse. People who disagree with you are bad people.

There’s a reason people write me and tell me how much they appreciate this project but they don’t want to be seen commenting. I can’t blame them, can I? I stick with a nickname, and even my “real” name in the copyright is a pen name. No one wants to lose their job because they explore unpopular ideas.

Politics of the Powerful Thread: Wanting to Look the Best for the Least Money

Politics is a reflection of our culture too. If we want to grossly oversimplify, cultures typically have a politics of the powerful and a politics of the powerless.

The politics of the powerful is often an amoral politics. The powerful are often sitting on heaps of resources, and they didn’t amass those resources by looking out for the powerless. Their politics are often a politics of expedience — how can I look good and maintain the support of the people without parting with any of my money or power?

In our times, cultural values being what they are, the politically powerful have latched onto “social justice” as a way to look good but spend no money. Look at every major corporation or university. You will see plenty of DEI trainings and diversity committees. You will plenty of stickers and email signoffs declaring pronouns. You will see requirements for “diversity statements” from job applicants. But you will see no calls for “justice” that would improve people’s material conditions, such as increased wages or better pensions.

The politics of the powerful is all about looking good — in line with current cultural values — for the least expense.

Politics of the Powerless Thread: Grabbing What You Can

If you’re doing OK financially and you see a wallet with $1,000 on the ground, you have the luxury of doing the right thing with no negative consequence to yourself: You can easily return it to the owner. If you’re worried about being evicted and you come across a stray $1,000, you’re more likely to keep it for yourself. There’s no big surprise there.

The politics of the powerless is often also an amoral politics — it’s about grabbing what you can, when you can, whether it belongs to you or not.

Suppose you’re a woman who wants to pursue a STEM career. Maybe in the 1960s this was frowned on or discouraged, but today, HR departments are eager to snag the “diversity hire.” And yet the narrative goes that women in STEM are still at a big disadvantage and need a leg up. Does it make sense, if you’re a woman, and you suspect you were slightly underqualified for a job you’ve been offered, to turn down the job? Would it make sense to make now the moment you take a stand and demand that large corporations return to meritocracy? No, you just want this job.

Pulling It All Together: Being Trans in the 21st Century West

How do all these disparate threads weave together to form our cultural notion of “being trans”?

First, you have some people who don’t quite fit in. Maybe they’re gender nonconforming. Maybe they’ve always been on the fringes in other ways — perhaps they’re quirky or socially inept or bullied.

You have a culture that says everyone is OK just as they are — but not really. There’s a level of discomfort with people who are different, and there’s not a specific cultural niche (like the fa’afafine) where they fit.

Our culture tells us we can buy a solution to any problem—in fact, if we can, we should. People who are dissatisfied with how they look or how they feel about themselves go to doctors or mental health professionals. So do our “trans people.” Traditional Samoans don’t do this because they’re not unhappy with themselves. But in our culture, the doctors and the psychologists will help you.

Our culture also tells us that the solutions need to be quick. In earlier times, adults who wanted to transition were subject to years of therapy, trying out the role, “gate-keeping.” In earlier times, parents were told that “watchful waiting” for kids who said they wanted to be the opposite sex was best. Like grieving a spouse, that process of watchful waiting almost always resolved with the child coming to terms with reality and moving on with life, but that sometimes took years. In our current cultural context, “years” is not soon enough!

We have to transition people right now. There is no time for exploratory therapy. We can immediately give them the solution they want. If they’re adults, they can get hormones after a 30-minute appointment. If they’re kids, we can immediately give them what they want by socially transitioning them. When they hit puberty, we can give the customer the puberty they want with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgeries.

This is science, you see. It’s progress. It’s new, so it is better than what we had before. The media has told us so, and if Jack Turban’s press release says something completely opposite to what is substantiated in his latest paper, no one will read it anyway. We know that science and progress are the right thing.

All those medical societies can’t be wrong. (The topic of a future post.)

At the same time, we know that everyone’s subjective experience is the right thing too. Children can tell us what they know to be true about themselves. They know who they are, deep inside. You are not the child, so who are you to argue with her? The child is the oppressed, marginalized minority, and if you don’t understand that, you are the oppressor and a bad person. The only correct thing to do is affirm, affirm, affirm.

Surely you can see that sex is a social construct? How do we know? People who are suffering say that it is. If you disagree with suffering people, you are a bigot and a bad person. You are part of what is making them suffer. You must go along with this.

Every large organization, every nonprofit, every university, every school system in our culture agrees, too. People are who they say they are. Put on your pronoun sticker and shut up. It’s really the only right way to be.

Marginalized queer people agree. People are who they say they are. Let healthy children wear damaging binders, take risky medications, and get their breasts removed. Let a person with a penis onto the women’s cycling team and the women’s swim team. That’s what these unfortunate, oppressed, politically marginalized people want. Give them what they want. What are you, sitting in your lofty perch of privilege? Some kind of monster?