Guest post: You’re stuck with your own grass
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Replacing outdate diagnostic categories.
Obviously, a man does not – indeed cannot know what it feels like to be a woman: I, for example, can only know what it feels like to be me, but the ideology says otherwise.
Exactly. I can’t extend my own experience to other men, let alone women. Me is all I’ve got. I have no other frame of reference. I happen to be male, but I can’t claim any expertise in “maleness” or “being a man.” I assume some degree of similarity and commonality with other humans, in that they will have their own subjectivities, but I can’t know what those subjectivities are. I am bound by and to my own experience. I can’t claim that mine is better, or different, or wrong, as I can’t “try on” anyone else’s in anything but a limited, imaginative way, through, say, reading the thoughts and perspectives of others. But this is more like getting a postcard, not even being a tourist. It’s a message from outside, not a personal visit. And you certainly can’t live there. You can get a feel for it, but you can’t know it.
To claim that one is something they’re not (and can’t be) is, quite apart from impossible, presumptuous and wrong-headed. “Gender identity” presupposes some essential “maleness” or “femaleness” of perception, perspective, or personality that is independent of both the sexed body, and the individual, offering some interior standard of comparison to judge against from within the self. How else can they say “I’m not A, but B”. How can you know this if you have never been a B and can never be one? You can’t step out of A, or into B. How would you know? It would be like me wondering if how I see a given shade of blue is the same as everyone/anyone else’s perception, and confidently claiming my own perception is wrong.
Amputees who have “phantom” limbs have experience of once having had the now missing limb. Someone who is now old has had experience of once having been younger. They have relevant experiences that allow them to compare and judge these two states of being and perception. (Whether their memories of these states of being is accurate might be another question, given the cliche of polishing, embellishing, and remaking our own histories, wherein “When I was young, we had to walk twenty miles to school every day, uphill in both directions!” is another question.) These are comparisons we can have license to make because they’re part of our personal histories. They’re in our CV. Being the sex one is not isn’t. There is no relevant experience that can allow you to claim another state of being. This is not to say that those few with actual dysphoria are not experiencing discomfort and suffering, but the cause is not being “in the wrong body.” The cause must be something other than a supposed “incongruence” between Soul and Body. Descartes is dead: long live Zombie, Gender Identity Descartes.
You are the body you’re “in”. You can’t visit other bodies to see if their grass is greener. You can see how the other half lives, but you can’t be the other half. Not for an instant. You’re stuck with your own grass, weeds and all. “Treating” your lawn with napalm is not going to make it any greener. Quite the opposite in fact. Attacking the body seems to be a poor choice for dealing with something that seems to be, on the face of it, purely psychological. This is “mind over matter” taken to a destructive extreme. Wasting time, energy and lives on “treatments” that can never work, can only postpone or prevent solutions that can actually alleviate the mental suffering that sterilization and mutilation never will.
Bravo, not Bruce. As someone who suffers from body dysmorphia, I can be sympathetic with those who genuinely have a sense of not belonging to their body, but even in that case, I can’t know what they are feeling. My body dysmorphia is my own. I have a sense of my body and myself (which I realize are the same), and I don’t know if anyone else’s sense of being wrong in their body is the same as mine.
In my case, my dysmorphia led to years of anorexia that was killing me slowly. Altering the body seems to be an instinctive response to feeling wrong inside your skin, but in my case, it was no more useful than in theirs. I became so thin I was verging on transparent (in a figurative way, of course), but I still felt wrong in my body. When I defeated my anorexia, I gained weight. At a good weight for my height, I still felt wrong in my body. I gained too much weight, and became seriously overweight, and still felt wrong in my body. I am now losing weight again, rapidly, and I still feel wrong in my body. The only option is to change my thinking, not my body. Nothing I have done or can do to it can make me feel right in it, and I may never feel like my body is me. I don’t look in the mirror, because I see a stranger looking back, and a stranger I dislike (sort of an oxymoron; why would I dislike someone I don’t know?). I continue to work on it, and maybe someday I will feel right again. But no tinkering with the body has ever made it feel right to me.
It is a devastating feeling to be wrong with your body. I have never felt at home anywhere I lived, and I suspect that is because I don’t feel at home in my own body. (I just realized that, just this exact moment, so if that leads to a breakthrough in my treatment, thank you not Bruce for your cogent comment.) One thing I do not insist on is that other people accept that I am not me, that my body is not me, that my ‘soul’ (which I’m sure I don’t have anyway, I just have a self) is something else. No one ever affirmed my sense of being overweight (at 5’10”, I weighed less than 100 pounds). No one ever affirmed my sense of being someone else. I didn’t ask them to. My therapist would not have done that, because it would have been a detriment to treatment. He worked me through my anorexia. He worked me through my suicidal thoughts. He worked me through years of abuse and terror as a child. Thanks to him, I can now function in the world. But I am now going to a therapist again; she is trying to work me through thinking my body is wrong. She has not suggested I change my body. She has not suggested I am really the opposite sex. She has simply started working on getting me to realizing that the body I walk around in is mine, it is the right body for me, and so forth. For this, I am appreciative. The moment she suggests surgical molding of my body to my subjective sense of self, I will find a new therapist.
iknklast; thank you for your kind words. If what I have written is in any way helpful for you, I couldn’t ask for any better result. I’ve never really thought of my words ever being helpful in this way before; I’m just working things out and clarifying my thoughts as I go along, as they are spurred and stirred by what others here have thought and said here on B&W. I cannot imagine what it’s like to go through what you have endured. I have had no comparable experience. I hope you find some measure of peace and comfort for and with yourself.
Sounds like you have had, and good therapists. Good.
The lazy, facile, assembly line, cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all “diagnosis” of “transness” short circuits seeing the patient as an individual, and finding out the actual, unique combination of factors that have led to their suffering. I remember seeing a genderist’s PowerPoint slide showing a huge range of supposed trans “symptoms”, which (if I recall) included both having and not having dysphoria. “The answer is Trans. What was the question?” The hallowed Identity is always Right and Perfect, the body always wrong and subject to correction and punishment. It’s just “Take these blockers/hormones and call me in the morning to book your appointment for gender affirming surgery.” It’s professionally sanctioned blindness, the first thoughtless step leading to a disastrous, lifelong path to unaddressed misery and medical debilitation. Goodbye comorbidities, goodbye talk therapy, goodbye desistance. Hello Gender Industrial Complex.
Patients are gifted with the burden of seeking, finding, and maintaining Trans Euphoria. Failure to achieve euphoria redounds on the patient, not the flawed, impossible diagnosis proffered to them of being trapped in the wrong body. The failure of “treatments” and “procedures” to produce results that are impossible to begin with is not the fault of the ideology, but the unrealistic expectations of the patients themselves. It’s their own fault if they buy into the promises and hype, their sunk costs leading them to the next stage of the “journey” they’ve been sent on. Just like the failure of a miraculous answer to prayer can always be laid at the supplicant’s lack of faith, rather than the non-existence of god.
The goofy, sci-fi cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension has a particular line that has always stayed with me: “Wherever you go, there you are.” It doesn’t matter how much you change your surroundings, your inner world; your inner problems are always there. Genderism ignores this insight while trying to change the body, which it treats as landscape (and an alien one at that) to be modified to better suit the supposed “identity” inhabiting it. But that imputed, unhappy, dissatisfied “identity” shuts down other possibilities, other diagnoses, and other treatments. It’s a thick, sloppy coat of paint hiding mental issues that need addressing, but which will be ignored in favour of the ideological insistence of “gender incongruity”, which is not seen as a mental disturbance or disorder at all, but a prescription to resculpt the body, regardless of the consequences.
iknklast:
It would appear to me that you have that precious inner resource called insight, and a hefty helping of it, too. (Why am I reminded of that inscription on the ancient Greek Temple of Delphi: ‘Know Thyself?’*)
I will be 86 come May 2026, and am only now realising the impact that the internal dynamics of my family of origin had on my life. My mother in the 1930s, was a professional radio announcer employed by a radio station based in Katoomba, high in the Blue Mountains near Sydney. She chaired discussions involving lonely farm and station wives from all over western NSW, and had many of them writing to her. A common remark of theirs was on the way her broadcasts had made their lives far less lonely and more tolerable. She also worked for a while as private secretary (in succession) to two influential writers of the day, and wrote novels in her spare time, yet had had only a primary school education herself. My father, by way of contrast, had to labour mightily when preparing a shopping list.
When I was 10, I heard a commotion in the dining room downstairs, and raced down there to find my father laying into my mother with his bare fists. (He had a girlfriend on the side, I later learned, and wanted to leave my mother and shack up with her, taking me with him. He had a job which required him to work at night, so he was asleep during the day, anyway.) That would have left my mother in charge of the family home, with only my seriously mentally retarded sister to take care of and to keep her company. So, she took to the bottle and became an alcoholic; which seriously impacted her relationship with me. I became a wooden-hearted loner, only rescued out of that by the woman who became my wife, going on 50 years ago.
So in the Insight Stakes, I would lay money on you as a leading contender.
* AI: “The phrase “Know Thyself” (Gnothi Seauton) was famously inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, encouraging introspection and self-reflection to understand one’s own character, strengths, and weaknesses. Though traditionally attributed to the Seven Sages of Greece or Apollo himself, it was likely a popular proverb that became a core tenet of ancient Greek philosophy, notably embraced by figures like Socrates. The maxim has been interpreted as a call to a lifelong pursuit of wisdom and self-knowledge through an examined life, rather than as a simple instruction.”