Guest post: Medicine is not a tool to exalt gender identity
Originally a comment by Artymorty on All aboard the gender train.
What is it with everyone suddenly deciding that the naturally diverse ways humans express “gendered” interests are suddenly not just interesting, but specifically, medically interesting? It’s weird enough that we’re all suddenly obsessed with everyone’s gender “nonconformity” when at most we should just casually acknowledge that gender expression is a thing that matters to some people more than others, that different people have different gendery tastes and that’s perfectly normal, then move on. But in this crazy time we’re in, people seem to think the only way to give “gender” the weighty aura of seriousness it supposedly deserves is to put it under a medical spotlight. How is it they’ve completely forgotten that medicine is a tool to cure illness, not to exalt identity?
Just a few hours ago I was swatting away someone who’s been pestering me with his pet theory that homosexuality is actually a symptom of total femininity in males/masculinity in females, which itself is a symptom of an intersex brain condition, which means all homosexuals are actually trans people who are “really” of the opposite sex, which means they should have all had their bodies medically modified to fix them. I noticed he put a Christian cross in his Twitter bio, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s got some relevance here: his kind of “you’re actually broken and should be fixed” wordage is exactly what anti-gay Evangelicals like “trans kid” Kai Shappley’s parents and televangelist Pat Robertson have been spouting lately.
But “you’re actually broken and should be fixed” is also a core belief of people like the looney tunes at Yale Medicine, who see themselves as crusaders for the so-called “queer community.”
One group says: “I’m so anti-gay I have to help you find your proper place in society by obsessing over your gender expression and helping you change your body to ‘match’ it.”
The other group says: “I’m so pro-queer I have to help you find your proper place in society by obsessing over your gender expression and helping you change your body to ‘match’ it.”
The end result is the same. Exalting one’s “queerness” with medicine sometimes just means curing one’s homosexuality. I guess the word “queer” never lost its original pejorative sense, because being anti-gay and being pro-queer lead to the same result, and it’s not good for gays.
I think the gender ideology is a direct descendant of Christian tradition with its body-hatred, exaltation of the mind over body etc. Very cruel, actually.
We should counter it by saying loud and clear: Our bodies are beautiful the way they are; our sexual attraction is a beautiful thing if it is based on mutual respect for our partner.
Also we should be pointing out loud and clear that we all have both masculine and feminine principles in our psyche. So if our bodies were to match our psyche we would all be hermaphrodites!
Just idly speculating now, but I think that advances in both plastic surgery (starting during WWI with the treatment of disfiguring wounds) and endocrinology (later in the 20th century) were what made it possible for trans-sexualism to come into being. Then with the emergence of psychotherapy, which had an emphasis on the inner life of a person, it allowed someone like Christine Jorgensen to make their fantasy of becoming a women become realized in the form of secondary-sexual characteristics that mimicked females. I don’t think we’d even have the concept of gender dysphoria becoming widely accepted without the technological advances that have enabled it to be, um, treated.
Personally, I think the predilection of humans to have sexual fetishes (in particular male ones) is what underlies the desire to want to be the sex you aren’t. It used to be that cross-dressing was the only available means to achieve that, but now surgeons can yeet teets and do phalloplasty, or take penile or rectal tissue to form a pseudo vagina and boob jobs are a dime a dozen. What a brave new world indeed.
I like that you made a direct comparison between being anti-gay and pro-queer. They’re set up as being SO diametrically opposed that they COULDN’T POSSIBLY have anything in common. Your comparison actually highlights the fact that queer ideology is just another vehicle for patriarchal ideals (misogynist, homophobic, etc.). The question I’m asking myself is: did these ideals infiltrate the “left” and the gay community or were they always there and now we’ve just gotten to Peak Internalized Homophobia/Misogyny. I’m inclined towards the latter. I think patriarchy is extremely adaptable (which is why it’s existed for thousands of years) and every time women make a little bit of progress, it’s repackaged and sold in a way that makes it more attractive to a wider market and makes it almost impossible to identify and oppose.
@Sarah Barratt #2
And what are these masculine and feminine principles?
Inconvenient Woman @ 4 – I think so too. It’s not as if patriarchy ever went all the way away, to put it mildly.
It underscores why the theocratic regime in Iran is so savagely oppressive towards homosexuality, yet tolerates transgender individuals, subject to the proviso they undergo reassignment surgegy.
So interesting! I just posted a series of butterfly photos from my garden at uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com.
I know from the 1 datum of my ex-husband, (“Neddy” in my memoir, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow, iuniverse, 2022) that the sexual orientation part of “gender dysphoria” is quite unstable. In the diaries I discovered exactly 30 years ago, he was seeking the attention of men (he assumed were straight?) in The Village, where he was cross-dressing while sitting on bar stools and waiting to see what might happen. I heard he had a couple of dates with a man after the divorce, but shortly thereafter he found a vulnerable younger woman, who identified as lesbian, and invited her to live with him and he’d pay off her college debts. (which he did instead of paying child support)
The “affirmative therapy” seemed to center around the color schemes chosen for hair, nail polish, make-up and outfits. I mean it. When I went in to see one of them during the final denouement, she kept crowing about how happy-making it would be for me to “go shopping as girls” while Neddy “transitioned.” During which, by the way, he might act like a teenager. I wanted to slap her into consciousness–we had 4 and 7 year old sons who didn’t need a teenager for a father. Thanks, Arty! from Ute Heggen
Inconvenient Woman:
They were always there. People didn’t really stop thinking according to patriarchal, misogynistic, or homophobic patterns. Skeletal rules were overlaid on top of them, limiting their scope and ability to manifest, much as rules limited the expression of racism but not the incidence of racist attitudes. What happens when the normal, obvious avenues of expression are closed off? New, covert ones are found or created, resulting in something of a black market for whatever it is that you want to eliminate. Having nowhere else to go and no dialectic contact with reality or the greater part of society, the thing becomes increasingly refined, extreme, and potent. Until it escapes, and no one is prepared to deal with its new form.
What if it’s not really about gender at all, but about identity? That’ what’s “broken” isn’t some critical match between gender and body, but a sense of being coherent, of fitting in to the social order and being seen?
One persistent thread running through all the sexist masculine/feminine “boy on the outside, girl on the inside” bs is that, on the whole, trans people are still gender nonconforming. Many of them consciously and unconsciously reject a good portion of the stereotypes of the gender of their True Self and are still the typical mosaic of abilities and affinities they were before. I think that’s one reason why they stubbornly resist seeing the misogyny and homophobia inherent in Queer Theory. They don’t really give a damn about Queer Theory per se. What they see is that after the former Ada gets a double mastectomy, the revealed Eliot still likes doing their nails and silly rom coms and this doesn’t so much “queer the system” as cement the idea that what Ada/Eliot is, persists under pressure. They matter. They are seen. They must now truly belong to a community, and to themselves.
Trans ideology is the ephemeral culture-bound phenomenon that channels more universal human problems. One problem is gender nonconformity and making sense of it, yes. But beneath that may be the fear of not fitting in any way, of not making sense of who you are: not a broken body that needs fixing, but a broken identity that needs to undergo the extreme rituals that validate the patient’s need to feel real. Medicine which doesn’t so much exalt identity, as substitute for a rite of passage into self-acceptance.
Maybe.
Sastra, I too find the idea compelling that alphabet nonsense is sometimes a substitute for the loss of ritual, particularly rites of passage. Renaming the condition to gender dysphoria obscured what was right there in the name: It is an identity integrity disorder.
Artymorty, you’re not the only gay man I have encountered who finds “queer” to be the antagonist of “gay.” My friend S. says if a fellow says he’s “queer,” he doesn’t even want to be in the same room anymore.
I really like how Inconvenient Woman unpacked even more how Queer Theory became misogynist and homophobic theory:
It’s like the marvelous facility of recuperation of contemporary capitalism. Any attempt at an anti-consumerist or anti-capitalist movement will quickly be printed on t-shirts sold on Amazon and expensively reimagined in music videos flogging targeted ads on YouTube.
So fighting against the patriarchy becomes Fighting Against the Patriarchy (TM), sold for the profit of … patriarchs. This is how you get rich white men in skirts insisting that they’re the most oppressed people in the world and nobody is allowed to disagree with them or even call them men. Actual gay people, or lesbians, or poor people? They’ve been told just what they can suck, again and again. The Lady Dick of the Patriarch.
The longer I have to encounter this ridiculous cult of gender and its founding dogma, the more I see it as an offshoot of Men’s Rights Activism, rather than an offshoot of its antithesis (the gay rights movement). It’s Men’s Rights going where they have never gone before, to the point of the eradication of all women’s rights. Beyond that, they expand towards the colonization of any other rights that might exist, until no other rights go unmediated.
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