Born in the wrong body
Tanith Lloyd posted a letter to a friend who thinks trans women are women a couple of days ago.
I recently sent you an article by a lesbian who has been documenting homophobia within trans activism. You, my otherwise compassionate, patient and warm friend, replied with “sorry, not interested”. You told me that you didn’t want to read an article which referred to transwomen as ‘male’. You said that transwomen suffer from an “accident at birth” — transwomen are women born in the wrong body.
Seeing my principled friend (with a first-class undergraduate and a masters degree) actively adopt such a bizarre, anti-materialist and anti-scientific position really worries me. How can ‘you’ be ‘born into’ a body? You are a body. The ‘born in the wrong body’ idea goes beyond poststructuralist ideas about gender onto quasi-religious terrain. How can anyone have an innate, pre-experience knowledge of what it means to be the other sex? What does that even entail? Being male or female refers to your reproductive sex. To argue otherwise is akin to arguing for gendered souls.
It is, in short, dualism, and let’s not go there.
It’s reminiscent (as I think I’ve mentioned before) of those excitable people a couple of decades ago who talked about immortality via uploading our minds into computers. Wtf? That’s not immortality, it’s a nightmare.
Being ‘trans’ is no longer characterised by the material state of having surgically changed your body, but is now characterised by an immaterial, subjective sense of self. Is Danielle Muscato a woman? How about Stonewall activist, Alex Drummond? Again, where do you draw the line? Is it based on ‘passing’? Do women have to look a certain way? What about Jess Bradley, NUS trans spokesperson, who has been suspended from their position for allegedly flashing ‘her’ erect penis in public? Is this a female crime? Are we as a society prepared to accept that it is now possible for a woman to flash her erect penis in public? To extend this further: are we to now accept the possibility of a woman raping another woman with her penis? If nothing else, this is a huge assault on female solidarity and trust.
All the more so because of the relentless and out of control abuse of women who don’t fall into line with the dogma.
Don’t you know that materialism is just white-male-cis-eurocentric-hetero trash, and empiricism is violence? Do you want to check yourself into your nearest post-post-postmodernist reeducation centre (called ReEdUrself, natch)?
Seriously, the *most* materialist paradigm in which these attitudes could be consistent is one in which there are manifestly, distinctly ‘female brains’ and ‘male brains’, which is…the sort of thing that feminism’s supposed to be against, innit?
It is dualism, and people who should know better are buying it.
As for gender dysphoria: supporters of this tripe need to understand that not everyone with gender dysphoria is trans, and trans activists will shout at you if you make the mistake of assuming all trans people suffer from gender dysphoria.
As for brains, La Scapigliata dissects trans framing of brain science here:
https://lascapigliata8.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/transactivists-war-on-reality-what-they-think-studies-show-vs-what-studies-actually-show/
“How can anyone have an innate, pre-experience knowledge of what it means to be the other sex? ”
This is what I’ve wondered, too. I don’t have any experience of being anyone other than me. I have no standard of comparison other than my “me-ness.” It’s not like I have access to another way of “me” that I could possibly “prefer” like a more comfortable pair of shoes or one ice cream flavour over another. Perhaps I might be unhappy from time to time with how I feel or behave and try to change those feelings or behaviors, but I can’t put on another “me.”
Like P.Z. Myers?
YNNB – hit it on the head. I don’t know what it is like to be male, or black, or short, or suffer from lupus, or be a lemur, or hate pizza, because I am not any of those things. There is not one way to be any of those things (well, maybe hating pizza, or being a lemur…are there different lemur identities?). We are each who we are in our own way, and the body we are in is merely part of that us-ness. If we do not like our body, we can have surgery, we can diet, we can eat more, we can do some things to change it, but to insist that means we are exactly the same as if we were born in a different body and brought up as a different person is just…I don’t know, incomprehensible to me as a scientist. I thank goodness right now that I am a Botanist. I have never yet heard a rose insist I consider it a dandelion, or a Virginia Creeper insist it is really a water lily.
We attach so much important to sex and gender, because society is determined to sort us into little packets of “him” and “her”. We have gender reveal parties for children who will not be born for months, starting the identification of little he or she before they are even born. We segregate kids toys and kids clothes by sex/gender/etc as if it matters whether Suzy plays with blue Play-Doh or pink Play-Doh, or whether Johnny wears a tutu on Halloween. We identify everything as “girl” or “boy”…so people begin to think if they want what the other side has, it means they are in the wrong body. It never occurs to any of them that they might have the “right” body, but be in the wrong cultural paradigm.
And it’s getting worse. Yes, when I was a young woman in high school, I was expected to take Home Eco and Shorthand/Typing. No, young women today are not pressured as much to take those, and are allowed to enjoy Chemistry or Shop if they wish. But some things have definitely gotten worse. Gender segregation seems to be running amok now, at least in terms of society’s interpretations, with the d**n “Male brain, female brain” nonsense and the “Women as nurture, men as logic” stupidity. (By the way, I, though born in a female body, am the exact opposite of naturally nurturing. I am naturally prickly, and I don’t really like kids…kittens, yes. Children? Sorry.). It is so entrenched in our minds that there is a “female way” and a “male way” that people believe it. How could it be that so many women like pink, unless pink is naturally a female color? Duh. It’s called “cultural meme”.
So, yeah, claim you know what it is like to be a woman all you want. But don’t insist…demand…violently coerce…me to believe that you have that special knowledge unless you have lived the reality.
I’m not even entirely sure that being a man entitles me to truly understand other men. I certainly look at the behaviour of many men with emotions ranging from admiration, to bewilderment, to disgust and everything in between or orthogonal to those. And before some smart arse says I must be feminine, that ain’t so either. Mind you, it’s a not often women move me to feel disgust at their actions (by comparison to men). That could mean many things.
Yup. Among others.
Myers, like a lot of scientists who pontificate on this matter, is not a human biologist and it’s never clearer than when he wades into those waters. He conflates heterogeneity in sexual characteristics in animals with the much fuzzier realm of human sex and gender and it’s nonsense because animals don’t have a gender identity. Just as they can exhibit what we would call ‘homosexual’ behaviors but animals can’t have an orientation identity.
A friend of mine, now sadly deceased, was trans, back when such individuals were referred to as transsexual. She wanted to have reassignment surgery, but it was very difficult to access in those days and she was treated very badly by the medical professionals who interacted with her. She used to describe her feelings about her body parts as though they were alien and it made me wonder. There’s a disorder known as body dysmorphia, a very distressing condition when individuals feel like a body part (such as a hand, say) wasn’t actually theirs and their feelings of revulsion and rejection get so unbearable that some opt to have the offending part removed (not always surgically). It always seemed to me that there might be some overlap, biologically or psychologically, between those two conditions, although I doubt anyone would dare research a question like that now.
So to reference something Lady Mondegreen said upthread, what does it mean to be trans and not have gender dysphoria? Or to be GD and not trans? I’ve heard that said before and it just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Once you rule out anatomy (men’s bodies exhibit this anatomical plan, women’s this one) and cultural patterns of behavior (etc.), I’ve never understood what you’re left with. Someone’s properly a woman not because of her biology or even because she’s more comfortable with stuff that women are “supposed to be” comfortable with or because the world around her regards her as a woman and treats her “accordingly,” but because of her… woman soul?
Even women don’t know “what it’s like to be a woman” because each of us is just one, and it’s not reasonable to assume we can isolate some “something it’s like to be a woman” and know that’s what it is and know that all other women share it.
Me too.
I was trying to explain this to my son one day. I told him I don’t know what it feels like to be a woman, I only know what it feels like to be me. I happen to be a woman, but that doesn’t mean this is what it feels like to be a woman. It just means it’s what it feels like to be me.
Quite so. We all forget that of course and merrily generalize about what it’s like to be an American, an athlete, an architect, whatever – but we can’t actually know.
Lady Mondegreen and iknklast – dualism? Maybe I don’t fully grasp the idea, but this strikes me as a new essentialism.
Dualism in thinking there’s a “gender identity” or “female/male mind” or “soul” separate from the body. Mind-body dualism as in Descartes.
Thank you, Ms. Benson, that makes sense. It is also frightening.
Well…how can anyone have an innate, pre-experience knowledge of what it means to be ANY sex?
We have this shockingly vague term, ‘trans,’ into which people are being relentlessly shoehorned. Would we even have this mess going on if we weren’t in an escalating period of gender-apartheid? Bronze Age patriarchy is rumbling along under the thinnest veneer of post-modern woo.
It all comes down to there having to be a ‘female brain’ or a ‘male brain (spirit/soul/whatever) for this concept to make any sense at all, and therein lies the conflict no one playing along wants to look at.
My take on PZ and the FtB folks is that they have a vested interest in making this new generation which is sold on the ‘wrong body’ concept happy with their brave new world.
Really not sure how that could be as PZ and the rest are old enough to remember when “Girls will be Boys and Boys will be Girls…” who almost all eventually settled into a boring middle age.
IMHO, no Gender Studies course should be complete without a couple weeks’ critical analysis of Glam Rock. and the music leading up to it.
I’m reminded of one of my doctoral thesis examiners who liked to ask candidates to explain why they used the term “sex” rather than “gender” when describing their animal subjects. In retrospect I’m pretty sure my eyeroll was visible and not just in my head as I stated that I sexed them primarily based on the visible presence or absence of testes and hadn’t asked my subjects which social role they preferred.
I do have to wonder what consequences such a statement would have nowadays
ibbica, #18:
I often wonder what reaction there’d be to a re-release of The Kinks’ Lola or Aerosmith’s Dude Looks Like A Lady.
I agree that it’s not clear what being trapped in the wrong body could be unless dualism is true, which it is not.
I wonder what is going on when someone is trans. Maybe it’s a question for Psychology. I wish this whole row would simmer down so the topic could actually be researched and understood properly without fear of reprisals. We’re not there yet.