Ideology or Biology?

Thankfully, there’s a biologist living just a couple of doors down from me who I call upon from time to time to tell me whether the animal in my back yard is either a cat or a dog. It’s important that we get expert opinion. Where would we be without it?

But, I say, what if the cat identifies as a dog?

He looks at me funny and asks if I’ve been watching too much Matt Walsh on YouTube.

Basic questions of biology seem to plague us these days. And, according to most government propaganda, we’ve just lived through a deadly plague in which biology had a prominent role (technically speaking, it was Biology™ and not biology which played a role).

As I understand it, there is pending legislation in Florida that is centred on the ‘trans’ issue as it pertains to kids. It’s not important, at least for my purposes here, to understand what the legislation actually says, or to question whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. What caught my jaundiced eye was the reaction to it. This, along with another tweet, capture something, a zeitgeist, that would seem to me to have somewhat profound implications for our understanding of biology.

There’s lots to pick apart in the phrase “You’re erasing our trans babies” but the first thing that strikes me is the assumption of a property called ‘trans’.

I’m going to make an assumption too. I’m going to assume that this alleged property is binary; you either are, or are not, trans.

I don’t know what it would mean, for example, to be only ‘half’ trans, or what a ‘degree’ of ‘transness’ would be.

Given that the speaker is talking about the property of trans applied to babies, I think we can think of this in terms of a binary. Otherwise we might have a situation like “this one’s come out wrong, doc. It’s only half trans”.

In maths we can describe things using functions. The idea here is that we put in some input into our function ‘machine’ and it spits out an output. There are various ways of treating functions in maths in a much more sophisticated way than this - but this simple view of a function as a kind of input/output box is sufficient here.

It’s a useful idea in physics. Often we’re interested in some property (like temperature, for example) and we want to know how this varies with position. So, if we had some square metal plate in a machine we might start at some corner and want to know what the temperature is at some point 2cm along one direction and 3cm ‘up’ from that. We might write the temperature ‘function’ as T(x,y) so that T(2,3) would give us the temperature at our chosen location. Here, the inputs are x = 2 and y = 3 and the output of the function is the temperature at this location.

So, ‘trans’ is like a binary function - there are some inputs (biology, society, upbringing, etc) and the value returned will be either 0 (not trans) or 1 (trans).

I’ve used this kind of function to model a pandemic wave in previous articles. Here’s how it can be written mathematically and represented graphically

In mathematical terms, then, we can represent the ‘trans’ function as T(a,b,c, . . .) where there are various inputs (labelled as a, b, c and possibly more). Given the right set of inputs the function will return a value of 1 to indicate that ‘trans’ is present.

Let’s imagine there are (at least) 3 inputs we can have - and, crudely, we’ll represent these inputs with just 3 letters so that

b : biological environment
s : social environment
p : parental environment

Our function would then look like T(b,s,p). It’s only a representation of ‘reality’ that we use to clarify our ideas at this stage.

The current assumption of the gender activists is that ‘trans’ is some innate property of an individual (sometimes referred to as a ‘gendered soul’ or innate ‘gender identity’).

The mathematical representation of this assumption is

T(b,s,p) = T(b)

In other words, the property of trans is independent of the social or parental environments. It doesn’t matter what ‘values’ we input for s or p. We might (a bit sloppily) even use the language of correlation here - the output value for T is not correlated with the input values of s or p.

Is this ‘independence’ assumption true?

This is a hugely important question isn’t it?

The evidence would suggest not. Early studies on kids with some degree of ‘gender’ discomfort or confusion showed that the vast majority (probably more than 80%) when ‘left to their own devices’ in a loving environment ended up being comfortable in their own bodies (and with their own sexuality) after puberty.

Later studies have shown that when an ‘affirming’ environment is adopted, when adults interfere somewhat, that over 90% go on to be ‘trans’. It’s like the property of trans can get ‘baked in’ by the environment in which the kid develops.

If ‘trans’ was independent of nurture then both sets of studies would have the same overall result. We can therefore conclude that trans is not, wholly, an innate property determined by our ‘biology’.

We might quibble about whether these studies are high quality, or methodologically flawed in some way - and such quibbles might have some legitimacy. The problem is that, these days, it would be considered unethical not to go down the ‘affirming’ route.

It would be trans erasure.

Is trans ‘erasure’ good or bad?

It’s a provocative question, but I want to present two (hypothetical) scenarios. Let’s imagine the following two options.

Option 1 : ‘affirming’ approach leading to extensive surgical and (lifelong) pharmaceutical interventions. Happy and at peace adult as a result.

Option 2 : ‘conversion’ approach - a year or so of counselling/therapy that leads to a happy and at peace adult with no surgical or pharmaceutical interventions required.

Yes - hypothetical, because we don’t know how to do this kind of ‘therapy’ for option 2, but let’s suppose we could.

Which parent in their right mind would choose option 1 here?

Option 2 (if it existed) would ‘erase’ trans altogether .

Would we consider this to be a good or a bad thing?

I certainly would consider this to be a good thing. If option 2 was a viable option then I’d be all in favour of ‘erasing’ the trans - simply because it’s a profoundly less harmful treatment - even though we have (hypothetically) assumed the results are the same; a happy and well-adjusted adult.

Within our hypothetical imaginary world, then, the answer is clear to me; trans-erasure (as specified above, purely within the confines of our hypothetical imaginings) is a good thing.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in such a clean-cut imaginary world and things are a good deal more messy and complicated.

The point here is that, in such a hypothetical world, every (sane) parent would choose the ‘trans erasure’ option - the alternative is not the best option here for the child.

The only justification, then, is that we would choose option 1 if and only if, the alternatives led to a worse outcome.

What a lot of the ‘trans’ debate is really about is the correct cost/benefit analysis.

One thing I will say here is that when the possible (likely?) outcome of an ‘affirming’ approach is drastic (irreversible) surgery and lifelong medication, we’d better be bloody certain we get the cost/benefit consideration right.

I’d want more than a few ‘studies’ or ideological slogans to inform our approach here. A sober and objective collation of every last scrap of evidence, continual research, and ultra-vigilance is required before we put our kids through this kind of life. If it still turns out to be the ‘right’ approach - then so be it, but I don’t think we’re even close to having the standard of evidence necessary here.

Forced Puberty?

You what? The second tweet above blithely throws this term out. The real question, of course, is whether or not puberty is an important developmental stage. What are the consequences of delaying (or preventing) it?

If your biology has ‘assigned’ you the property of male, at birth, then the only puberty you can possibly go through is a male puberty. You can be inwardly female as much as you like - you will never go through a female puberty.

You can delay or prevent puberty - but you can’t experience the puberty of the other sex.

This notion that puberty is, somehow, ‘optional’ is an ideological position that will have biological consequences.

I think there’s even less of an adequate cost/benefit analysis for this.

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If we’ve learned one thing from the clown show that was covid, it’s that our governments, ‘experts’ and health professionals were more than willing to adopt widescale experimental practices without any cost/benefit analysis at all.

Do lockdowns work? The position was : No idea. Never done one before. Let’s do the experiment and see what happens.

Did any government, other than perhaps that of Sweden, do even the most rudimentary cost/benefit analysis here? The kind of cost/benefit analyses that were important components of the (ditched and ignored) pandemic preparedness plans?

They just didn’t give a shit. It was all about image - being seen to be ‘in control’ and doing the ‘right’ thing in the face of some low to moderately serious virus.

People died as a result of their popularity contest. We’d have been much better off in terms of lives lost if we’d simply done nothing at all.

What chance, then, do we have when it comes to something like ‘trans’ that our ‘experts’ are going to be using (or even doing) the right cost/benefit analyses?

Not much, I would suggest. It’s become far too much of an ideological battleground, rather than, as it should be, a biological battleground.