Guest post: A twisted and contorted commitment
Originally a comment by Sastra on Imagining way too many possibilities.
If someone claims to be sexually attracted to members of their own sex and behaves accordingly — demonstrates romantic attachments and physical intimacy with members of their own sex— that’s pretty damn straightforward (so to speak.) We don’t have to question whether sex exists, wonder what a man or woman is, rewrite evolutionary biology, or exercise huge amounts of trust in their subjective reliability in “knowing their own sexual orientation.” Catch a couple of teens canoodling under the bleachers and there’s the objective diagnosis. Sexual attraction isn’t complicated.
Someone claiming to be the opposite sex in their mind would be equally straightforward, if all we were looking at were their personal feelings and beliefs. Instead, we have to overhaul pretty much everything, from epistemology to ontology to biology to psychology to feminism. “Affirming trans identities” isn’t just problematic because of the medical commitments being made on behalf of young children and teens. It’s a twisted and contorted commitment made on behalf of pretty much everything.
I can understand why teachers and others consider transgender claims and see a superficial resemblance to being gay or lesbian. But only years of looking at religious, paranormal, and pseudoscientific beliefs helps me catch a glimmer of understanding concerning how they seem to be able to stop looking so easily. It’s fascinating, in a macabre, depressing sort of way, I guess. And it’s wrong enough and testable enough that it may eventually be looked back on in surprise.
Sometimes people, especially young people, are sincerely mistaken about their sexual orientation. And sometimes people experiment but it doesn’t work out. I wouldn’t assume anybody is mistaken, but I don’t think it’s quite as simple as (for example) “this woman said she was a lesbian and then kissed another woman, so she absolutely must be a lesbian.” For example I’m bisexual and I can tell you a lot of people only figure out they’re bisexual after a while.
@Anna;
That’s a good point. Someone could think their entire orientation was gay by misinterpreting how typical a particular interest was, just as someone could mistake a temporary infatuation for genuine love. They’re not mistaken about feeling some emotion, just how to interpret it within a larger framework.
I have seen TRAs admit that some young people could indeed be mistaken about being trans. They’re experimenting, or exploring, or what have you. TRAs pretty much have to admit this, since it’s fairly common for kids to change their minds and the “if someone thinks they’re trans, then they are” dictum can’t be applied indefinitely and so won’t be accepted by all advocates. But, unlike same-sex attraction, persistence and consistency doesn’t help establish transgenderism as a genuine orientation because it’s no longer just a matter of what individuals can believe, feel, and do. There’s that huge mound of baggage it carries.
A man who spends a lifetime having only other men as sexual partners is an example of homosexuality; a man who spends his whole life fervently believing he’s a woman isn’t an example of transgenderism unless he really IS a woman. And here we go …
Right. It continually amazes/enrages me that we’re being asked, over and over, to accept the least parsimonious explanation conceivable. Come on, skeptics, you should be all over thi…. oh.