yevaud
FEBRUARY 3, 2017 AT 8:19 PM REPLY
OK, so I need to rant. You can skip this comment if you’re just not up to it.
On the subject of transgendered individuals, I’m probably more harsh than most people who could be mistaken (IRL) for a progressive.
Before I launch into my diatribe, I want to affirm my belief that individuals should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want (within the limits of respecting others’ rights). Therefore, I would never stand in the way of an individual adult’s desire to undergo hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or sex-reassignment surgery (SRS). Also, for any real-life individual who had something to offer me in the way of friendship, I would never let my opposition to the phenomenon of transgenderism stand in the way of that friendship. People who like and respect each other can differ on important issues.
Here goes.
First, the phenomenon of transgenderism conflates sex with the more-or-less silly concept of “gender”, which is a label assigned to a particular cluster/mode of behaviors and neurochemical patterns, where the multivariate distribution of these behaviors and patterns is roughly bimodal but by no means deterministic. In other words, it totally ignores the fact that it is reasonably easy for an individual to display behaviors or thought processes that are nontypical for their sex, even though such a person is unambiguously a member of that particular sex. I state this while still affirming the fact that many behaviors *are* correlated with sex, in the stochastic sense I just described. In yet other words, it is a massive failure of understanding probability theory as it applies to psychology, exploited in a way to rigidly affirm narrowly-defined sex roles. As Jasun has remarked, it also represents a failure to understand that ego is a function of physicality, not independent of physicality. This odd fixation with narrowly-defined sex roles comes ultimately at the expense of cis-gendered homosexuals, who often do find themselves displaying some behaviors that are atypical of their biological sex (thus lying further away than heterosexual individuals from the two modes of this multivariate distribution of behaviors/patterns).
Second, I find it odd that so many MTF transfolk self-identify as lesbians. The proportion of such MTFs is much much higher than would be the case if transgenderism and homosexuality were truly independent. This leads me to suspect that for most or all these MTFs, what is really going on is autogynephilia. This observation would lend credence to the claims of TERFs that MTFs are simply seeking access to female-only spaces (in multiple senses of this phrase). Another observation that supports TERFs’ criticisms is the collective temper-tantrum thrown by MTFs over their rejection as sexual partners by cis-gendered lesbians (google “cotton ceiling”, NSFW/NSFL). The remainder of MTFs are not much better: gay men who want to slip in under the radar with straight men, hoping to score some of that sweet, sweet heterosexual cock. I don’t have much to say about FTMs, other than they mostly seem like angry man-hating lesbians (aside perhaps from Buck Angel, who delights in gay male sex and, all things considered, is not unsexy).
Given that straight men don’t like being tricked in sleeping with XY bodies, and given that lesbians find “lady dick” repulsive, MTFs are setting themselves up for a lifetime of disappointment and unhappiness. Some studies show a non-negligible proportion of individuals who undergo HRT/SRS end up regretting it. Thus my third point: the path of the transgendered individual has a high risk of leading to profound unhappiness.
Which leads to my fourth and most important point: why are certain people pushing this on children? Who benefits? Surely the endocrinologists and plastic surgeons who “treat” these folks. Also perhaps some deep state actors who benefit from the confusion this sows in the general culture and the unhappiness it inflicts upon individuals (although admittedly a very small minority). While I understand the argument that pre-pubescent HRT can prevent or mitigate unwanted secondary sex characteristics, it completely ignores the fact that children are generally not entrusted with the wisdom and insight to make such life-altering decisions. FFS, it is assumed that children cannot even consent to one ordinary sexual encounter (a fact that is sometimes used to inflict harsh punishment on 18-year-old boys who have sex with their 17-year-old girlfriends). Even an unwanted sexual encounter at a young age is presumably less harmful than years of HRT that are later regretted (and this is not to discount the extreme negative consequences of pedophilia, so please don’t misunderstand me here).
Anecdote: as a prepubescent boy lacking a male role model and on his way to becoming a gay man, I may have displayed enough gender atypical behaviors to be considered a candidate for prepubescent HRT. I later “butched up” and am now fairly indistinguishable from a heterosexual (though perhaps slightly nerdy) male in body language and behavior. As an adult I fully 100% identify as male.
Fifth point: piggy-backed onto the transgender phenomenon is the non-binary/gender-polymorphism nonsense, which itself is tied to the insistence that we adopt nonsense pronouns, along with a will to use the power of academic standards and corporate HR departments to enforce this attack on language. Again, this is a misunderstanding of the stochastic nature of sex-specific behaviors, an attempt to find a large number of infinitesimal clusters among the two very distinct modes in the distribution of human behaviors. What is the value of such extreme engineering of language and subsequent policing, to accommodate what are largely delusions held by a small minority of the population? E.g., the term “expectant mothers” is now considered to be offensive to transfolk. Again, who benefits from this?
And six, perhaps my most incendiary point: the whole thing leads to an uglier world. How many transgendered individuals truly *pass*? Not many, to judge from my experience on the street and also photos I see online from time to time (of course to be fair I would never know if, IRL, I ran into a transgendered individual who *did* pass). Another anecdote: a few weeks ago at the supermarket (in my suburban neighborhood) I saw a creature with a very mannish face framed by purple hair, sitting on top broad shoulders, flanking a chest to which were attached two objects roughly the size and shape of tennis balls. There were some other unfortunate fashion choices involved. The eyes, they burn!! Obviously it was not this person’s job to satisfy my aesthetic needs, just as it’s not my job to drastically alter my use of language to indulge in this person’s personal fantasies, but why are we encouraging this in the larger culture? FWIW, I find a great many variations in the male form aesthetically and sexually appealing, including 60-something-year-old pre-HRT/SRS Bruce Jenner, who now as “Caitlin” just looks like some very strange and clownish humanoid creature. So I am not a nazi about looks, but I do find more natural presentations to be beautiful (even paunchy middle-aged guys), much as I prefer the woods to city environments.
I also find the whole thing kind of an attack on homosexuals, who are of course expected to fall in lockstep to advance the cause, sticking the “T” on the end of the “LGBT” cause.
Again, I would never stand in the way of an individual’s choice to undergo HRT/SRS, and out of politeness I will abide by an individual’s choice of pronouns, among the two historically established sets. But as the next moral cause I am expected to adopt and push tirelessly for : yeah/no.
I do have compassion for individuals who find themselves struggling to understand why they feel out-of-step with their social environment, who are willing to do *anything* to gain a sense of acceptance (both self-acceptance and acceptance by others). However, I think these people are better served by learning to accept themselves as non-neurotypical without undergoing massive physical changes to conform to a giant cultural error.
Jasun Horsley
FEBRUARY 3, 2017 AT 9:10 PM REPLY
Yep to most if not all of that. BUT, for all the countless solid cases that can be made against Transgendering as in any sense socially progressive, much less psychologically healing, I am inclined to see these as secondary to a seemingly inescapable fact. The entire TG model is based on an unquestioned (and also unexplained) proposition: that there is “something” that has sex that is being born “into” a body of incompatible sex to it.
No one has posited what this “something” is. The closest attempt so far seems to be “the brain,” as if the brain: a) had sex or gender; and b) could be separated from the body, like something that is inserted inside the body at the last minute and that occasionally gets mixed up on the factory line. The obvious alternate to the brain as a sexed-identity-carrier is soul; but of course the new liberal mindset cannot talk about soul, because soul is a religious concept. Also because the notion of a soul having sex (i.e., reproductive organs) is essentially oxymoronic.
My point here is that what troubles me most of all about Transgender as a social movement (& as an individual choice) is that it is based on an easily demonstrable fallacy ~ or at the very best, an entirely unestablished hypothesis ~ and yet, this false or un-established premise goes almost entirely unremarked on. Why? I think it is because, to the constructed identity (a.k.a. narcissistic ego), there is no God but It, no Other at all, least of all an Other than threatens its sovereignty. It is literally unthinkable that anything but It and Its desires could exist, ever. And so we have these runaway narcissistic infants in adult bodies and in positions of power, projecting that same narcissistic-ego-construct-identity onto their own, and other people’s, children, even onto newborn babies, and assigning them with some sort of willful identity-self that must, at any cost, be granted its every desire, in order to avoid suffering at all costs.
The final irony, as Holly & Yevaud point out, is that the first victims of this narcissistic, other-negating ego plague (besides children, I mean) are previously maligned minorities such as homosexuals and autists (& even women), who are now (however subtly) being forced into the newly established cultural stereotypes of male and femaleness, to better serve the sociopathic expanding corporate agenda of the Big “I” Faceborg Self-Love Death Machine.
So yeah, the time to rant is at hand. For all the good it will do us, ha ha.
yevaud
FEBRUARY 3, 2017 AT 11:13 PM REPLY
If one is going to confine oneself to strictly materialist/reductionist narratives (and it is sometimes useful to do that, because it does cut through some forms of bullshit, even while it adds others), it is plausible that brains can have their own sex/gender. In the sense that I described above, there are two broad patterns of neural connectivity, one roughly corresponding to males, another to females (evidenced by different distributions of white/gray matter, if you want to get anatomical). So a coherent argument could be made that transfolk have the neural wiring pattern that is more typically associated with the opposite set of genitals. I’m OK with that. The problem with that is that cis-gendered homosexuals also have atypical neural wiring. And, as has been remarked above, autistic folk have yet different neural wiring.
So why can’t we just admit and accept that there is neurodiversity? Why enforce a very narrow set of patterns?
And, not to beat my favorite … horse, it begins to feel like any neurodiversity I may display might condemn me to forced surgical mutilation, just to ensure that all genitals match the brains they are attached to. It feels oppressive, even a bit totalitarian, to insist that every neural pattern be immediately legible to the outside world.
Somewhat of a tangent: another thing that pisses me off about the argument “I’ve always felt like I was a man in a woman’s body”: how the fuck would you know what it feels like to be a man, never actually having been one anatomically?
yevaud
FEBRUARY 3, 2017 AT 11:22 PM
The other thing I forgot to mention (and here is where materialist/reductionist narratives start to go off the rails) is that there is a kind of neurochemical essentialism involved in assigning ontological status to white/gray matter distributions. Yes, it’s demonstrably true that neural connectivity associates with specific patterns of thoughts and behavior. But what is the direction of the causal arrow? The kinds of studies that can establish causal direction are impossible with fMRI, not only because of expense but also due to ethical considerations.
So it could very well be that the brain *becomes* female in response to the social environment, instead of *starting out* female *before* exposure to the social environment. Nobody wants to go there because it calls into question the underlying assumptions we have about the extent to which biology really is destiny.
Jasun Horsley
FEBRUARY 4, 2017 AT 9:51 AM REPLY
Somewhat of a tangent: another thing that pisses me off about the argument “I’ve always felt like I was a man in a woman’s body”: how the fuck would you know what it feels like to be a man, never actually having been one anatomically?
That’s a home run of an argument, again zeroing in on this assumed, never questioned, and never defined “identity-self” that has sex and yet no genitals!
Holly
FEBRUARY 4, 2017 AT 9:34 PM REPLY
Re: neural wiring/neurochemical differences – the only way the “brain sex” argument really works is if you talk about hormones. This is why I tend to ignore the vagina = female, penis = male discussion, in favor of talking about testicles and ovaries. These days vaginas and penises can be “made” – but you cannot replicate testicles or ovaries and their function.
The trans movement acknowledges biological sex by admitting the use of, and even medical necessity for, hormone replacement. Allowing trans people access to synthetic hormones is a part of the trans campaign. However, these synthetic hormones can never replicate the hormonal experience of a man with testes or a women with ovaries. And, of course, once you start down the HRT road, especially if you have testes or ovaries removed, you are on those drugs for life (huge boon for the pharmaceutical industry), plus you’re sterile (great move for the eugenics lobby). Now not all trans people transition – with surgery or hormones – but we can see that there’s a push to make this more accessible to the point that it will become an anomaly for a transperson to not choose to do this.
Hormones, however, are not actually male/female in that men have estrogen (the quintessentially “female” hormone) and women have testosterone (the quintessentially “male” hormone). This becomes pretty interesting when you consider how they decide whether a woman/intersex person can compete as a man in sports – it had been dependent on testosterone levels but of course, in keeping with the culture, it should be based on whether you say you’re a man or not (who cares what your biology suggests). Then there are the environmental hormones that impact and change your hormonal patterns, which you are exposed to in the uterus and from birth. Interestingly, there’s a debate amongst PCOS sufferers (women who do not ovulate regularly) about whether they’re more likely to be lesbian. If you don’t ovulate regularly you will have different hormonal patterns to those women that do.
I find when discussing this with advocates for the trans movement a good tactic is to state “I am not a cis woman” – their assumption is always that you are gender queer or trans, which seems to cause them to recalibrate their thinking somewhat, long enough to entertain your thoughts on the issue. Of course, what is meant is that the term “cis” is BS and calling someone cis without asking if they “identify” as such, under their own rules, is “misgendering” – which, as we are told, is actually “violence.”
There is nothing progressive about the trans movement, to my mind, in fact it’s deeply regressive – a boy child that likes to grow his hair long, plays with dolls, or puts on a dress is now a trans person who must be helped to “become” a girl. A girl child who doesn’t like pink, plays with trucks, and wears jeans and tee shirts is a trans person and must be helped to “become” a boy. What if they’re not helped? Well, we are told, they will kill themselves inevitably. If you repeat that enough it will become the reality desired – we are teaching people that to not transition is dangerous, a cause for suicide.
And if we don’t confirm the identity of the self-identified trans person as chosen woman or man? That is also dangerous. Not confirming their identity = death. Feeling excluded, not “seen,” by those around you – whether that’s because someone uses the wrong pronoun or women are talking about their vaginas and you’re a woman, you think, but you don’t have a vagina – well, that = death.
Big I Faceborg Self Love Death Machine, indeed.
KK Deluxe
FEBRUARY 5, 2017 AT 8:52 AM REPLY
” And, of course, once you start down the HRT road, especially if you have testes or ovaries removed, you are on those drugs for life (huge boon for the pharmaceutical industry), plus you’re sterile (great move for the eugenics lobby). Now not all trans people transition – with surgery or hormones – but we can see that there’s a push to make this more accessible to the point that it will become an anomaly for a transperson to not choose to do this. ”
Yeah….this scenario is something to investigate. It pulls a couple threads of the “conspiracy” sweater.
Look at it from the $$$ angle, how many “transpeople” (existing and potential) are there in total as a market?
Are there enough to make it “work” as a purely greed based ploy?
Or is this a deliberate large scale backdoor funded study of some sort?
Is it part of the “we’re gonna trancend to cybernetic godhood real soon now” project?
I also see an element of vanity in all this. Like, if there weren’t enough cash sloshing around in “advanced” (degenerate?) society, people couldn’t pursue the surgery etc. etc. The cash is there so turn yourself into a pink pony if it “feels good”. Ain’t nobody got time for that crap if you are living in a refugee tent LOL.
