This is article 23,453 in my continued attempt to understand what “trans” is all about.
I should point out, before I begin, that my beef with all of this is the ideology and not the people. Unfortunately, we’ve arrived at the position today where these two distinct things get conflated by the ‘woke’; one cannot criticize the ideology without being seen as some toxic hateful being.
In a way, this is entirely understandable. After all, for most people who have deeply-held beliefs, they identify with those beliefs. These beliefs become intertwined with someone’s sense of who they are. Thus someone could say “I am a socialist”, or “I am a Christian” and attacking the core beliefs which go into socialism or Christianity becomes an attack on their perceived identity.
In this way, attacking any belief which is seen as an important component of identity by an individual could be given the “toxic and hateful” label.
Everybody, barring those extremely rare instances where someone suffers from a genetic anomaly where something has gone awry with the development process, is born either male or female. The very small sub-set of so-called intersex individuals has nothing at all to do with trans.
In its traditional sense, before the trans umbrella became a thing, someone who was trans had been born as either male or female (i.e. not intersex), but wanted to become the other - or felt that they were the other in some inner sense.
Notice that in this traditional view of “trans” there is an implicit sense of the thing that activists abhor; trans erasure.
Consider the following question asked to someone who is viewed in this trad trans way:
Would you have rather have been born as female (male) instead of having been born as male (female) and having to transition?
How many would answer that they were happy with the way they were born and happy to transition? And that this was the preferable option?
The trad trans view, I would maintain, would be overwhelmingly that they would wish things to have been different for them - that Nature had got it right in the first place. In other words, fundamentally, they don’t wish trans to be a ‘thing’ at all. What is this if not trans erasure?
The issue that has increasingly taken hold today is quite the opposite. It’s the celebration of ‘trans’ as an identity in and of itself. Weirdly, being trans is seen to be a good thing - at least that’s the impression that most activists seem to give.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
The whole notion of trans, and implicit in the word itself, is that something needs to change. That change might be what is termed social transition or it could go all the way up to surgical modification and a lifelong regimen of pharmaceutical products.
The question needs to be asked - what are you trying to fix here?
If everything’s working just fine then what is the purpose of an intervention, however harmless or reversible it is claimed to be?
There is no sense of “you’re perfect just as you are” here, because manifestly this is not the case.
This poses something of a dilemma for the activist because if everything was hunky-dory then what’s the point of all of the changes to lifestyle and/or body?
This is particularly pertinent with bodily changes - which encompass things like chest binding, pharmaceutical interventions, and surgical interventions.
Changes to lifestyle can be “explained” away with notions of gender and disassociating one’s bodily sex from one’s perceived gender. But how is one to “explain” any bodily modification without acknowledging that something, somewhere, has gone wrong?
What it is that has gone wrong is hotly contested. Is it the body? Is it the mind? Is it both? And, of course, what’s the difference between the mind and body anyway? But you don’t fix something that hasn’t broken in some way.
What happened before the Big Bang?
The universe is supposed to have started as some ultra-dense, ultra-small, thing. The implication of an expanding universe is that it expanded from something, and that something is taken to be the Big Bang.
I’m not going to try to defend the Big Bang theory here, but I will say that any interpretation of what went on is all a bit futile until we have some kind of way of properly incorporating gravity within a quantum framework.
But there’s a question that very often gets asked; what happened before the Big Bang?
In the standard view of relativity theory this question is meaningless, because time and space are not distinct and independent entities. In this picture, space and time were both created at the moment of the Big Bang. There was no before, because time itself did not come into existence until that big “let there be light” moment.
We could ask a similar question; what happened before the trans bang?
Is there a moment when someone “becomes” trans? What were they before this moment?
Many trans activists would reject such a question and make the claim that someone has “always” been trans. Many people talk about realising they were actually trans at some point in their lives; there was this trans person inside all along, they just didn’t realise it.
Activists are more or less forced to adopt this position because it’s the only way the ideology really “works”. Detransitioners are, in this perspective, merely someone who thought they were trans but actually weren’t. Thus we have that “genuine” trans people were not confused about who they were, but detransitioners were.
Detransitioners are thus excluded, marginalized, and discriminated against by the activists.
If there’s a point at which you can “become” trans, sort of transing into trans, then the state of the individual before that point was non-trans.
Thus, like gender fluidity, we’d have to accept the notion of trans-fluidity if there was such a thing as a point in time in which one “became” trans.
Notice that there is an implicit binary here. There is no sense in which one can be 25% trans and 75% non-trans - such a notion would imply the the possibility of the existence of a point in time where one makes the transition from non-trans to trans.
The Inflationary Universe
At some point after the Big Bang it is also supposed there was a period of inflation. We’re not talking gas prices here, but a period in which the universe underwent a rapid expansion after the Big Bang. This is supposed to have happened, and finished, way, way, way, way before even the first nanosecond had seen the light of day, so to speak.
I’m not an astrophysicist and so my detailed understanding of this is practically non-existent, but I think I’m right in saying that this cosmic inflation theory was a kind of an ad-hoc assumption that helped to “explain” the large-scale structure of the observed universe.
A similar thing has happened with gender; we’ve had a period of massive inflation.
The original idea of gender was as a term that was meant to capture the more “performative” and “societal” aspects of one’s sex. People have likened sex to the hardware, and gender to the software.
This doesn’t really make a lot of sense as an analogy either, but one thing is quite clear. For many years after this gender term was coined we all went along with only 2 of them. All of a sudden there was this enormous inflation of the things and we now have a whole slew of “genders” beyond those of merely man™ and woman™.
This is the picture we have today, complete with a stereotypical colour scheme
I’ve used the trademark symbol here to distinguish between Men (sex) and Men™ (gender) which are taken to be two different things.
So, someone is born as either male or female, and to each is “assigned” a gender - usually a kind of self assignment in which someone declares themselves to be one of these umpteen possible genders. Or one could self-assign as gender-fluid which is a gender with no fixed gender, except itself1.
Are they choosing a gender that suits them, or just recognizing an “innate” property?
If gender-fluidity is “innate” then it is an innate property by which one changes between different “innate” things.
Is gender a thing we “are”, or a choice we make for ourselves?
Is a so-called gender journey a process of discovery, or a process of volition?
Can we trans to trans?
Medical Testing
The more I try to disentangle this gender and trans ideology the more I come to the conclusion that there is no physical, material thing known as trans. It’s something that exists in “head space” rather than an objective, material property of the world2.
There’s a problem here. Is being trans an idea, like being a Muslim, or is it an objective property with independent existence outside of our own thoughts?
Being a man or a woman is not an idea - it’s an objective, material thing.
If trans were the same, then there’d be some medical test we could do. And therein lies a huge problem for the activists. What if we could test for this property of ‘trans’? Would we still agree that “gender affirming care” was the right thing to do if someone is tested and found to be non-trans?
And even if we could, for example, point to some difference in brain structure (I understand that there’s a small but statistically significant difference in ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ brains according to some studies) could we be certain that this is causative and not just an association. And, more importantly, could we be certain of the direction of causation?
If we used this small difference (which is an average trend) as a ‘test’ for gayness, then many gay people would fail it.
Arguing that there is biological difference between non-trans and trans is a potential minefield for the activist.
Where Does All This Leave Us?
As ever with the trans issue - with vastly more questions than we have answers.
This is not a good state of affairs. People’s lives are being affected, and in some cases very seriously, based on an ideology for which there are more questions than answers. This is no foundation at all upon which to mandate some alleged “gold standard” of “treatment” like gender affirming care.
Even describing it as a treatment, even putting it in a medical context, is an acknowledgement that something needs a medical intervention to fix. Putting it in a (genuine) psychiatric context is not allowed - because psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are not allowed to treat this as anything other than a case of affirmation. Their role is not to treat, but to agree with their patient, and to help their patient be happy with a pre-ordained conclusion; a conclusion that is not arrived at through a process of therapy and counselling. Any such explorative psychiatric investigation is deemed to be “conversion therapy”.
My genuine wish is for people to be able to live their best possible lives, free from discrimination and injustice - and this includes trans and non-trans individuals. Yes, it’s a hopelessly naïve and idealistic notion.
My concern is that gender and trans ideology is harming more people than it is helping. Until we have all of this figured out we need to be massively more cautious than we are being right now. Thankfully, in Europe, several countries have started to adopt this more cautious approach and are beginning to roll back on some of the “certainties” expressed by the trans activists.
One notes the self-referential aspect akin to Russell’s paradox here. The classic example of Russell’s paradox is to consider a group of (male) barbers who only shave those who do not shave themselves. If one of these barbers does not shave himself then he must shave himself because he’s a barber who shaves people who do not shave themselves - and he’s one of them.
One could argue, trivially, that our thoughts are generated by physical, material things (our brains) and so there is a biological basis to trans. In which case there’s a biological basis for being Muslim, or being Communist.
I think Lewis Carroll described this conundrum in 1871, long before the trans movement was even a gleam in some freak's eye:
Alice laughed. `There's no use trying,' she said: `one CAN'T believe impossible things.'
`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ...'
I am still on Team Alice. The Red Queen remains the "cause of all mischief."
Like you say Rudolph at least some countries in Europe is making changes thankfully. Here in the U.S. there is a lot of money involved so the pace of change is slower. Some states have taken action to protect children and though challenged in court the state laws are holding up. On a lighter note I’ve used ‘gender fluid’ to my advantage. On the first tee when I golf I declare myself a woman to use the ‘up’ tees to shorten the length of a hole. After putting out on 18 I declare myself a man and move on with life.