Guest post: We’re stuck in our one and only restaurant
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Black and white thinking.
On the trans issue the thing I find most checkable in my thinking is what it feels like. Maybe the feeling is so intense, so agonizing, so impossible to get rid of, that…well, that what?
But at any rate, I can agree that I don’t fully understand what it feels like.
Neither can I. On the other hand, just because it feels like something doesn’t mean that’s what it is. People are not always the best judge of their own experiences. The explanations we reach for first might not be correct. We can be mistaken, or fooled; we can dream or hallucinate. Our subjectivity is no guaranty of accuracy or veracity; our proximity to the feelings and phenomenon might be the very source of our misperception rather than proof against it.
How can anyone feel that they “are” or “must be” something they’re not, and can’t ever be? I can understand that people feel terrible discomfort, but I don’t believe that they have any grounds to say “The discomfort I feel is because I’m really supposed to be, I really am the other sex.” How could they have any standard of comparison to make that claim? It’s like voting for the best restaurant in town when you’ve only ever been to one. Without eating at others, you can’t know there aren’t better. Well, when it comes to our selves we’re stuck in our one and only restaurant for life. The doors are locked, there’s no way out. I can only know what it’s like to be me. I will never have experiences as anyone but me. It’s like the old saying: “Wherever you go, there you are.” You can’t get outside of yourself. No taste tests, no test drives. You can use imagination and empathy to inform yourself, to imagine and empathize, but you can’t be someone else . Not really. Not ever. However distressed or agonized I might be, I can not believably claim that I feel this way because I’m not actually the only person I’ve ever been (and the only one I will ever be) able to experience. Certainly you can agree that my discomfort and distress are real without accepting my claims about their origin.
Amputees experiencing “phantom limb syndrome” are experiencing something, but it does not, can not involve a continued connection to the limb that has been removed. Similarly, people suffering from the mistaken belief that their arm is not their own, but some sort of alien or robotic imposter are indeed suffering, but not because their arm is not actually theirs. The arms are not the problem, and it would be cruelly destructive to patients to tell them that they were correct. Even without the neurological underpinning that we now have to explain these strange claims and perceptions, we would have been under no obligation to agree with the sufferers’ preferred, but impossible rationalizations for these sensations. Claims of being “born into the wrong body” or “being the other sex” are entirely internal and private; there’s no publicly accessible stump, or bodily contiguity we can point to to refute these claims, but I believe they are just as impossible as phantom or alien limbs.
Is there any reason to believe in a “gendered soul” that must be given priority over our material bodies, for which we have more than sufficient evidence? Are we really readmitting Cartesian dualism into neuroscience? It would be like reintroducing phlogiston into chemistry. Without very good evidence, it is reckless to carry on as if drugging and carving the only body we will ever have in order to conform to the unquestionable demands of a gender “entity” that likely does not exist, consitutes a “treatment” for anything. It is no more effective than clothing a phantom limb or amputating an “alien” one.
That’s a very good point, and there are real-life examples, people who I’ve actually met in real life. For twelve years, I lived near an excellent hospital specialising in psychological and neurological disorders, and as a local taxi driver I met many of the patients and their visitors.
The hospital had a section for people who suffered severe traumatic brain injury. These people were particularly interesting. As their brains healed and grew new connections, and they learned to do literally everything all over again they became totally different people. They had no memories of their previous lives; those stories and photos which their families and friends showed them might as well have happened to someone else. I’ve had parents crying in my taxi because the son or daughter they thought would die a few years earlier, from horrific accidents (for example, one hit a ploughed field at over a hundred miles per hour when his parachute failed to open; another was pushed off the footpath into traffic by a drunk) had returned to them a complete stranger. Marriages collapsed when wives who had sat by bedsides daily for months discovered that their husbands not only didn’t have any idea who they were, but were obviously hostile to someone they considered was lying to them about being a husband and father.
It was very sad. It seems that not only are we incapable of actually knowing what it is like to be someone else, we can’t even imagine what it was like to be ourselves when brain injury interrupts the process of personality building.
Last year I was talking to a woman who was relating what she believed to be a supernatural experience. She told it compellingly, and persuasively, and when she finished she asked me, as an atheist, for how I explain it. I explained that I don’t attempt to explain those sorts of experiences, because I just don’t have enough data or information input to do so. I emphasized that I didn’t question whether or not she had experienced it, but only that I would need far more time and literature search to find explanations for what she had gone through.
Being transgender is not an experience, it is an explanation for what some people experience. It’s a diagnosis, but it’s not based on anything more than a simple idea that can’t be formulated into a testable hypothesis.
I do not deny their experiences, but what I doubt and am skeptical of is their diagnosis, or their explanation for why they have those experiences.
I’ve had my own “supernatural experiences” but it took time to digest them and understand what happened, and find natural explanations. I fought the temptation to jump the first bus at the stop, and read the maps to find a route that would get me home. Then I got on the appropriate bus.
I’ve often wondered why the extreme intensity of the anguish felt by those who are convinced their mental-sex doesn’t fit their body is routinely assumed to support that assumption. A high level of obsessive rumination and fractured sense of self is generally associated with psychological pathologies, not with birth defects. The casual acceptance that “of course it would be a living nightmare to have everyone think you’re a boy when you’re really a girl” seems particularly unwarranted when those endorsing it are the kind of progressives who want to eliminate or minimize sex distinctions in order to have a society that judges people on the content of their character rather than the attribute of their sex.
The same people believe
“I have the mind of a woman in a man’s body and the disparity is destroying my mental balance.”
“That pink-brain, blue-brain nonsense is a myth conservatives use to justify sex roles — there’s so much overlap.”
“I need people to think of me as a woman, not a man, or I feel dehumanized.”
“We shouldn’t have different expectations for the sexes, just take people as human beings first.”
“When people treat me as a woman I feel so very happy, but when they treat me as a man I’m shattered.”
“Society needs to minimize sexism by no longer treating men and women differently.”
An intense, agonizing, inescapable feeling of an unfilled need for something you rationally reject doesn’t give me a lot of confidence on the self-diagnosis. That supporters don’t seem to notice this doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that they’re analyzing it properly, either.
Mike, that’s interesting. I have done a lot of literature search on these things, partially because students are always coming up with things I need to address as a science teacher. Some of it sounds astonishing to me, that you know there are demons because you woke to one sitting on your chest. Even after I learned about sleep paralysis, it seemed odd that would lead to such an experience.
Then one morning I couldn’t move when I woke up. I had sleep paralysis. I felt fortunate that I knew about it before I experienced it; that allowed me to interpret my experience accurately. I’m sure I would never have jumped to the conclusion that a demon was sitting on me, but I might have thought I had some serious condition. We filter such experiences through our expectations.
So when I’m up late at night, the light is off, and the house is quiet, I realize it is my brain fooling me when I see a shadow man come into my room, or when the dog jumps on the bed, since the dog sleeps in his den downstairs. I have enough knowledge to filter it through the lens of our brain doing weird things to us, especially when we are tired.
People with a filter that says there are demons will jump to a validation of their own preexisting belief.
It’s vaguely reminiscent of the cosmological argument. Assuming the argument is entirely valid and sound, it still doesn’t establish the existence of any particular deity. Likewise, assuming the absolute sincerity and torture of cross-sex belief doesn’t establish its veridicality. When I’ve pointed this out before, believers have responded that I’m missing the point, immediately pivoting from “therefore it’s true and TWAW” to “therefore we ought to believe that TWAW”. That is, our moral convictions should logically precede and determine our beliefs about the world.
This makes me queasy.
YES.
This is why I now avoid using the phrase “trans kids.” As with “transwomen,” this formulation concedes too much to gender ideology. If my reading is correct, most dysphoric kids desist; they grow out of it. If children are put on the “trans” path, the only thing they can grow into is patients. It’s another application of Dawkins’ caution against applying religious labels to children, which he compared to political ones, saying that one one never label someone a Conservative child or a Republican child. Well, “trans child” is religious and political. Activists talking about “trans kids” are claiming them as territory and using them as cannon fodder.
In the “war against trans kids,” trans activists themselves are responsible for much damage and injury. Republicans are certainly no true allies of feminists, and homosexual or gender-nonconforming children; they have their own goals and desires which do not necessarily align with the best interests of women and gay youth. The ones actually calling for a ceasefire are those clinicians following the path of “watchful waiting.” Trans activists have been successful in lumping these cautious professionals in with “conversion therapists” attacking homosexuals. The activists rightly see watchful waiting as an attack on trans activism, because it has the potential to cut off the flow of young, new recruits who are willing (or have been convinced) to sacrifice their flesh for the cause. Leaving these kids alone to grow through puberty to become healthier, whole adults reduces the power of the threat of “trans youth suicide” that is such a large part of the trans activist “argument.” It doesn’t look good for their side’s position if kids who are “denied gender-affirming care” come out the other end (i.e. grow up), happy and well adjusted (or at least less troubled than they were), without having been dosed with the snake-oil of “gender-conforming” drugs and amputations. It doesn’t pay to let prospective marks see that people who don’t buy your product are happier and healthier. Quelle horreur! Labelling it as something else that’s known to be dangerous will scare some away, but getting that misdirection enshrined in law is better still. Now that’s protectionism. Fuck the free market.
“Gender affirming” “care” is competing with watchful waiting for the minds and bodies of children. Practitioners promoting the “trans” pathway have something to push, whether it’s pharmaceuticals, surgeries, or both. Patients have an excellent chance of becoming lifelong customers, as they are ushered along their “gender journey,” a never-ending chase for a fantasy goal that’s always, and ever will be, out of reach. As I’ve said before, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” In contrast, those going the talk therapy route have little to sell but puberty. The end goal is independence and acceptance, however uneasy, of how things really are.
Once again, if I define “woman” as “whatever I happen to be” or “person who thinks or feels in whatever ways I happen to think or feel”, it follows trivially and tautologically that I am a “woman” in that sense (i.e. “I am whatever I happen to be”). If I claim to be what you are (and therefore belong in the same toilets, changing rooms, showers, sporting events, jails etc.), that is no longer just a claim about me. If I am what you are, then you are what I am. Thinking or feeling in ways xyz (best left unspecified) makes me the same as you only in so far and to the extent that you also think or feel in ways xyz.
I keep returning to the the old “what if I see blue the way you see red” problem. If there is no way to describe “ways xyz”, if there is no way to specify what I mean when I claim to feel like a “woman” (apart from “I think or feel like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like etc… etc.. ad Infinitum“), I can’t possibly know that anyone else who claims to feel like a “woman” is talking about the same thing. If Chase Strangio is a “man” then I’m not. If Chase Strangio claims to be what I am, it’s fucking disingenuous to go on talking as if this were all about trans people’s right to be “who they are”.
Daaaaaaamn you people are on fire today.
I want to guest post all of these, but it would look ridiculous to guest post 7 comments from one post, so I guess I won’t post any, because of wanting to post all. I CAN’T CHOOSE.
You’re running a damn writer’s salon here, Ophelia!
This is an important point. Many of us survive adolescence and come out the other side without being happy or well adjusted, but we are at least in possession of all or most of our bits (I even still have my tonsils, in spite of being a Baby Boomer). The fact that some young dysphoric children turn out to be dysphoric young adults doesn’t mean they are trans; it means they need a lot more help.
I am still body dysmorphic. Since I am 62, I have come to the conclusion that I may always be, but I deal with it. I cope with the everyday sensation that this is not my body. I am neither happy (at least not euphorically so) or well-adjusted (though well-adjusted enough to cope with the world in general), but neither am I delusional about the actual basic physical realities of who I am. I recognize the dysmorphia for what it is – a mental state, something not healthy, and something i am trying to work through. I don’t see it as meaning I am really not part of this body, and I certainly don’t see it as meaning that other people have to affirm it really isn’t my body.
Puberty may be worse if you have gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia; I have no idea, since I have never been a person who does not have that. I don’t even identify as a person who doesn’t have that. I can’t tell what it feels like to be someone content with their own body. If I pretend to do that, it is only pretending. It is only assuming what I think other people are feeling.
For a male to assume he feels like a woman means he needs some conscious idea of what a woman is, and also what a woman feels. It requires a sort of monolithic view of the sex, and it requires characteristics assigned to the sex that you can relate to as being a woman. In other words, it requires stereotypes, as so many of us have noted. You cannot believe you are a woman if you cannot identify what a woman is.
She’s running a refuge for people who have been tortured by the anti-intellectual attitudes of the world.
It’s a damn writer’s salon AND a refuge for people who have been tortured by the anti-intellectual attitudes of the world!
Reminds me of a CERTS commercial, “Two Mints in One!”
The total lack of awareness of how this affects women, whether it be on lesbian dating sites or in locker rooms, is a great indicator. “Reframing your trauma” is incredibly patronizing, and especially since their excuse is that they would be in danger in a men’s room.
Which they wouldn’t.
You omitted two words from the Certs commercial. It’s “Two, two, TWO mints in one.” They don’t make ads like that any more; there were giants in the earth back then.
Hey, your house, your rules.
They don’t and can’t know what a woman feels, so they are forced to resort to a pastiche of surface packaging that comes out of a costume trunk labelled “WOMAN.” They think this is all they need to do. “How do I look?” “FABULOUS!” Mission accomplished. Then they turn around and claim that’s what a woman is, and that their “womaning” is better than that of actual women who don’t tick off the boxes they’ve been so careful to collect and display. They seem to think that “passing” is “being”. No, passing just means you’ve evaded one level of safeguarding and protection in your quest to violate female boundaries, and you’ll use that “pass” as a ratchet to resist pushback, and to go further. “We’ve been using women’s toilets for years. You can’t stop us now!”
If anyone has the nerve to remind them that being female is a condition of material, biological existence, they will accuse them of “reducing women to body parts.” That’s rich coming from men who are denying material reality itself and predicating their “womanliness” on a shallow assortment of stereotypical wardrobe, posture, and mannerisms in order to stake their claim to female spaces. Woman are, among other things made up of “body parts.” They are not a hodgepodge of poses, clothing, and accessories. Just who is that’s doing the “reducing?”
I wonder how much of that just boils down to the fact that women have more scope for dressing up, wearing a costume, wearing things that are pretty, colorful, decorative, fancy, embroidered or bejeweled, striped or dotted or swirled – just generally more. Not a new thought, but…
Which is, of course, what a woman is – body parts. The rest of the package is social conditioning, heredity, learning etc. I’m not saying we’re born blank slates, but that we are defined by our body parts, and that’s fine.
What we as feminists have been protesting is not being defined based on our body parts (that’s a lecture I gave in class today, the genetics of sex). It’s that people assume having those body parts makes us inferior and unable to do things those with other body parts are allowed to do.
Now they are taking us in a regressive direction for their own fantasies/fetishes, and a lot of us are pissed that the work we, and our mothers and grandmothers, did is being erased.
Since many people who identify as transgender are quick to point out that they’re a mixture of both masculine and feminine traits it’s clear to me that something other than just adopting extreme stereotypes is going on for at least a fraction of the trans-identified. It’s as if they believe that sex is a sort of lens through which all experience must pass, subtly changing the nature of “being macho” into “being a tomboy.” The difference is absolutely critical because of how the self latches on to one and not the other.
It’s still stereotypes, but social ones can be as valid as the ones associated with sex. “I am in absolute agony because my being an effeminate gay man who enjoys both romantic comedies and rugby is being misinterpreted due to my female body. A boring girl who breaks the mold by watching rugby is nowhere near as complex and complete a character as I know myself to be.” Gender Dysphoria then plus an avatar in danger of being deleted.
And it’s both a floor wax AND a dessert topping.
[…] so the solution to my problem a few hours ago is […]
And yet, and yet, and yet, they will then turn around and talk about “people with uteruses”, or even “bleeders”. It’s almost like they recognize the need to have a word to refer to “adult human females”. (Add that to Sastra’s list of contradictions.) It’s like saying you can’t define a car as “a four-wheeled motorized vehicle” because not all cars have four wheels or a functioning engine, and not all vehicles with four wheels and a functioning engine a cars. Ours, for example, is a royal carriage. So instead let’s talk about “engine havers” or “gas burners”.
@Sastra,
Pass the Shimmer.
Well it’s okay if they do it. It lets them decouple the word “woman” from those strictly biological, exclusively female processes, organs, capabilities, and activities that TiMs will never have.* If the word “woman” is no longer used for the only group of humans to which it was traditionally applied, the one joined by the embodiment of those processes, organs, capabilities, and activities now being described without reference to their essential “femaleness,” then they figure “woman” is up for grabs. Squatters’ rights, right? That vacancy has been the result of your forcible eviction doesn’t enter into it.
If they can drain it of its original meaning, its connection to the female condition, then they can take it for themselves, despite the fact its only value for them comes by way of that traditional meaning. Redefining “woman” to exclude biological females renders the newly appropriated usage by TiMs pointless. It’s like breaking into a bank vault filled with a worthless currency that no longer buys anything. Women would need some new term with which to refer to themselves to the exclusion of all others. If women ever did that, TiMs would do their damnest to colonize that word too.
* That this decoupling is not applied equally to procedures and conditions exlusive to men, who are not replaced by body parts and bodily functions, rather gives the game away.
A lot of the stories that I read, including that of a personal friend, tell of young people that are uncomfortable with the gender expectations imposed on them by others due to their sex. My friend is a very sweet young lad who did not feel that he fit the hyper-masculine expectations of his father. He wasn’t into fighting or sport or any of those typical activities.
For him it was less of a case of “feeling like a woman” and more that he didn’t feel like a man and thus the alternative was that he must be, de facto, a woman.
We see the same with young girls wishing to remove themselves from patriarchal oppression.
If only the world would change its expectations then these vulnerable young people could be happier in their own bodies instead of wishing that they were something else.
The best tool for changing [doing away with] gendered expectations is feminism. It’s been sitting there in the garage all this time, if only the men could see it.