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Is a Sense of Being Trapped in the “Wrong” Body Always a Delusion?
It came as a surprise to me to hear that Camille Paglia calls herself transgender, and more surprising that Ricochetti might be OK with it – more specifically, that there might be those who are OK with it when Paglia does it but not OK with it when others do it. It’s possible that what makes it OK for Paglia is that she’s not “gender dysphoric” – “She fully embraces her identity, both physical and mental,” and is “self-confident and passionate” about it, as @cm put it. This piques my interest, I admit, and in a way that goes beyond the merely academic.
If “gender dysphoria” is taken to mean “unease with the sex you were born into,” well, then I have a fair amount of experience being gender dysphoric. In my case, there now seems to be a reasonable explanation for it: a congenital defect whose severity would be considerably mitigated if I were born male – moreover a defect not identified until this year, so that I’ve spent most of post-pubescent life sensing (correctly, it turns out) that my body was somehow wrong and that being born female heightened this wrongness, while also having no socially-acceptable reason to give others for why I sensed this.
Had my 16-year-old self taken this quiz, for example, it would have told her “you have signs of Gender Dysphoria” and advised her to consult a professional. I imagine the prospect of an impressionable teen running across such a quiz and believing it is a frightening one for parents, especially conservative parents. Especially since “gender dysphoria” doesn’t just mean unhappiness with being the sex you were born into, but has been conflated with the positive desire to transition to the other sex:
I suppose most of us suppose that most youths can’t escape adolescence without having felt at least a little unease about their sex characteristics. Especially girls – there’s a reason the English-speaking world nicknamed the curse “the curse.” Yet when you look up “gender dysphoria” on Wikipedia, you read that people who have it aren’t just unhappy, they’re transgender.
Conservatives are quite reasonably suspicious of such a designation. How can it be that everyone who has been unhappy – even deeply unhappy – with the sex characteristics they were born into could be transgender? Of course it can’t be so. Indeed, the prospect is so absurd that it’s no wonder that some conservatives have become quite wary of profound unhappiness with this aspect of bodily life. A dissatisfaction that goes deep enough that ridding yourself of your genitals and sex hormones begins to sound appealing? Why, that must be delusional!
It’s not necessarily, though. And if we wish to get youths to listen to us when we try to talk them out of regrettable attempts to sexually re-engineer their still-growing bodies, we should be honest that unhappiness over sex characteristics so deep that ordinary people have difficulty relating to it, or even accepting it, does exist, and can have biological causes. It did in my case.
Even at 16 (well, before 16), I was a curmudgeon. So I doubt my teenage self would have heeded advice to “seek professional help” about being “gender dysphoric,” much less that I could have been persuaded to transition, rather than just joke about transitioning. But joke I did (perhaps I was unintentionally ahead of my time in edgy humor here), and of course the joke was straight gallows humor – about as funny as a heart attack.
Knowing how seriously I was joking, I can quite easily picture the risk that pressure to transition puts on youths who might otherwise grow out of their misery, or who might at least find some way of coping with it in the body they were born into. But I also know the pressure people face to dismiss what’s really happening to them and to their bodies as “delusions” just because it doesn’t fit in with people’s expectations.
After all, I had my young self convinced for quite a while that I was “delusional” for experiencing my body as my body really was. I was prepared to believe misery of the body was “merely” a manifestation of some misery of the soul. In my more hopeful moments, I could think of the misery as atonement for my sins – if not for sins of commission (of which, looking back, it seems I had fewer of than the typical teenager), then for sins of omission: I didn’t/wasn’t ________ enough, and so I deserved what I got. Perhaps it sounds strange to label self-accusing “I deserve this” moments hopeful, but consider the alternative: if the misery wasn’t atonement, what meaning did it have?
For this and other reasons, perhaps, I found in my youth that church – even the mainline, politically liberal church I attended – gave my life a structure my natural family couldn’t. Natural family (even an exemplary natural family) may fail as an organizing principle for someone whose only experience of the “gift” of sexual maturity is as a “curse.” The church family, fortunately, is not a natural family. You’re not born into it, but adopted; you don’t add to it through your physical fertility, but through other means.
Many with stigmatized sexual and gender orientations speak of finding a community not based on the natural family that “adopts” them into its “family” when they find themselves unable to relate to their natural family. For me, that community was church, not so much church as a social outlet, but as a liturgical bond. (Having recently heard that transgender economist Deirdre McCloskey is also a Christian leaves me wishing I could ask her if church served as a similar sort of adoptive family for her.) Just knowing, for example, that the William Cowper who wrote so many of the hymns in my church hymnal was the same William Cowper who wrote the poem “Hatred and vengeance,—my eternal portion” helped church feel like home to me in a way the family home couldn’t. In church, I could hope that, even if “Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all / Bolted against me,” maybe God wouldn’t.
Of course, it’s widely supposed that Cowper himself was no more than delusional when he wrote that bit of verse. But I know now that I was not. Moreover, I now know that trying to explain away my discomfort in my own skin as mere “delusion” was not just unrealistic and unjust, but ultimately destructive. The meaning I got from continually hoping the misery was no more than some subconsciously self-inflicted (and well-earned) penance came at a steep cost. Losing that meaning is saddening, actually – I still miss it – but for me, the real delusion would be believing that what I felt obligated to dismiss as mere delusion was merely delusion when it wasn’t.
For that reason, I’m hesitant to dismiss others whose struggles with their body, though quite different from my own, still strike an unsettlingly familiar chord with me. It’s possible to avoid dismissing a sense of mismatch between the soul and the body’s sex characteristics as “delusional” while also urging youngsters who sense such a mismatch to wait and see if they can make peace with the body they were born with rather than re-engineering it at a tender age.
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Hence my use of the words “at least vaguely resembling” rather than words like, say “rigid”.
There still are innumerable small ways in which girls are expected to “be girls” – girls are expected to socialize a certain way, to register emotions in a certain way, to think a certain way, to organize themselves a certain way. As far as I can tell, they’re expected to do these things this way because a lot of girls do, in fact, do them more-or-less this way.
I know I’m not the only Ricochetta of the female persuasion to confess to not having understood girls in her youth, despite physically being one. “Tomboy” stuff was fine for girls of my generation to do, provided you also knew how to “be a girl”. Simply being outdoorsy and preferring Physics class to English, as I did, was not by itself “ungirly”. Finding you dreaded collaboration with other girls on a physics problem because you couldn’t understand how their brains worked comes nearer the mark, but even that’s hardly the whole story.
“Being a woman” is frankly an elaborate pantomime for me. It’s a pantomime I’ll do because the alternative seems like an even bigger hassle, but it’s not “natural”. And as far as I can tell, this is the result conservatives want – that is, conservatives want to help the misfits learn to more or less put on a convincing pantomime show in order to have a well-ordered society. I’m not knocking it, but if you want the misfits to learn the pantomime, it occurs to me it can help to acknowledge to them that yes, there is in fact a pantomime going on.
The point that there is a distinction to be made between gender dysphoria and transgender is a good one. Both are deserving of our compassion, of course, but for those who truly believe that they should be (or are) the opposite sex, indulging them by supporting their denial of reality isn’t helping them.
I think a useful step here for conservatives is to remember that there is value in treating people as individuals, and not just as members of some identity group that defines them. Individual circumstances vary, after all, and blanket statements that assume everyone who is gender dysphoric is delusional aren’t all that helpful. We can’t let the left force us into extreme positions just to balance out their extremes, otherwise we become the caricatures that they think we are.
I wonder if your situation is partly, not all, of course, due to our idea that men are logical and good at STEM, while girls are more in tune with their emotions, and “Math is hard!” You obviously have a brain more like what we think of as a man’s brain. It’s a shame that the broader society’s views on how a man should think and act and how a woman should had to cause such pain and strife for you. The fact that you happen to be physically beautiful probably didn’t help matters.
I so agree with @nickh ‘s comment #32 above. There most likely actually are individuals with a true biological situation as opposed to a need to be trendy. But the Left’s selfish way of using them as part of the agenda muddies the waters and causes most people to reject the whole idea out of annoyance.
Hmmm. I put it as “being odd” – once I figured out just how odd I was/am. And, yes, the realities of life are that it is often more fruitful for the odd to figure out how to simulate “normal” than to expect the rest of the world to bend to accommodate us (and “us” is a weird term, in this case, because we are all odd in our own particular ways). Not very happy for the odd – but then that just makes us more appreciative of those people we meet who do like us in our more “comfortable” state.
Yes, but we do tend to let people make bad decisions, as long as it’s their own. If they decide something and also decide they are not interested in expert advice, it’s usually viewed as permissible to allow that decision to stand.
My 2 cents FWIW. I had an older brother and until I was in my teens wished with all my heart I was born a boy. He had all the privileges, and I had none. However, he would let me play with him, Lincoln logs, train set, match box cars, erector sets, etc. I was never given any of these toys, as mine were always coloring books or paper dolls. I was considered a “tomboy” and my grandmother did her best to belittle my feelings about climbing trees, exploring the forests, and playing with my brother’s toys.
Then I started developing into a girl, with breast and menses, and my adored brother started teasing me about becoming a “girl” and would pinch my newly developing breast. I hated even more being a girl. Then during my 13th-14th years my dad stepped in and taught me to sing and dance, and to develop lady like manners and behaviors. By the time I was 16 I accepted that I would never be male and had adjusted to being female. Except for the discrimination in pay, I’ve never regretted doing so.
I think all boys and girls go through periods of adjusting to being male or female. I gave all of my grandsons Barbies and Ken dolls to play with, and even some action male and female dolls when they were still small. By ages 8-10 they were into rockets and make believe volcanoes. Today all 4 of them are fully male. And, I have given some of my “Collectable” Barbies to my grandsons, then suggested they sell them, and they rejected the idea. They prefer to keep the dolls.
Isn’t it obvious by your screen name?
I’m not sure it’s so much logical-vs-emotional as, at least in my case, spatial-vs-social. Your being a visual artist, you might relate.
Being an avid reader, I’ve gotten pretty good with reading and writing through long acquaintance, but my “mentalese” is still more “seeing” than “speaking” – words are the afterthought, the artifice (one reason wordplay is fun for me – the play is artifice). But yes, by some measures, skill-wise and personality-wise (if you believe Meyers-Briggs categories mean something, my category is only roughly 1/5 female, according to the source I checked), I’m more “stereotypically male”.
Well, this again is artifice, and had to be learnt. The congenital defect I mentioned comes with some unbeautiful effects which artifice mitigates. Oh, not plastic-surgery artifice (any kind of surgery, including plastic, has worse outcomes with this defect), but the artifice of keeping the right things hidden and so on. As Adam’s Curse puts it,
Only, you’re not just born with the knowledge, are you? Nor does everyone acquire it unconsciously through cultural osmosis. Sometimes it’s something which must be deliberately learnt.
“Let,” yes. The bad decisions of adults are their own to make. We aren’t (or shouldn’t be) required to applaud.
I think this, too, yes. And there seems to be considerable variation in adjustment, from “normal” to “normal people wouldn’t understand”. I recently read elsewhere,
This is a more an add on to your comment rather than an argument with it.
It depends on your definition of “help.” For some trans people (and this is probably a minority), it’s obvious that transitioning helps them in the sense that it makes them a more highly functioning member of society who’s less likely to kill themselves. Occasionally, radically changing your body might be the least bad course of action. The insistence of some people to plug their ears and yell that they refuse to complicate their two bin model of human gender can be frustrating. Saying one experiences life as a different gender than their chromosomes usually program for is simply not a denial of reality. It’s informing you of the reality of their brains. They don’t deny what chromosomes they have or what genitals they have.
What if a transgendered person simply admitted they were their biological sex but they prefered to live life more like the opposite sex and they ask that you indulge them by playing along as a courtesy. Does this really violate some objective truth that some people can’t bring themselves to cross? Because it seems to me that if it’s presented as I did above there’s zero refusal of reality.
I think it is also more than that. As conservatives we believe that traditional social mores contain true wisdom, which means that before we just throw mores away as just bigoted, we should be sure that the traditional social mores on transgenderism (social disapproval but tolerated, stereotype of possible mental delusion, but not rising to the level of criminality or need for forced psychiatric care*) don’t contain true wisdom. i.e. General social disapproval prevents individuals with marginal cases of transgenderism from making life choices that would make them less happy in the long run, than learning to live with their discomfort with their own body.
The problem with the current SJW campaign is that it might end up making more people unhappy than it helps.
*This is a long running set of social mores, Romans had these issues.
Obviously. So attack the people who are suggesting you applaud rather than the idea of transgenderism itself.
I would agree with that. From what we have observed the incidence of people (including children) declaring “transgenderism” has skyrocketed in just a couple years. So it is obvious that the SJW campaign has induced individuals to make decisions as to how they are going to present themselves publicly that they wouldn’t have only a couple short years ago. The conservative argument is that this might not be so good in the long run for society and in particular the individuals themselves.
A talk show host I listen to on occasion has an expression: “Shut up and conform”. Not valid in all situations, but good advice generally.
If the “idea” forces me to say things I know to be false or else be called a bigot, then the idea is to be attacked.
That’s how I’ve felt about it, when faced with a transitioning person. (Along with feeling sad about the feelings this person must have had, to lead him >> her to this drastic step.)
I will not nod, quietly, every single time an activist for transitioning advances patent nonsense.
And I will, to the best of my ability, push back against the thinking that encourages nonadults to undergo radical medical treatment in furtherance of transitioning.
Certainly, there’s just being odd, something many of us can relate to. I agree it’s often more fruitful to create some simulacrum of normalcy. Indeed, that’s why I wrote this post. It seems a very small number of people may be odd enough that they’ll actually do a better job of simulating normalcy if they try to pass as the opposite sex. Vastly larger number are better off making do by learning to “pass” as the sex they were born into. For “normal people”, this might sound strange – why would someone need to learn to “pass” for what they already are?
Because the roles of the sexes aren’t just innate, they’re also learned. It’s both.
I wonder if conservatives these days are too scared to fully acknowledge the “not innate” part, scared because that which is not innate could be tinkered with. They see the other side wanting to tinker, which makes any argument illegitmizing tinkering look appealing.
But if sex roles were just innate, there would be no need to learn them in order to seem normal. And it’s pretty clear that treating manhood and womanhood as things that just happen, rather than roles that can be learnt, doesn’t work out so well for a lot of youths. Indeed, not treating them as roles that can be learnt seems one reason why youths who don’t pick up on their role naturally might start to wonder if they’re not really the sex they were born into.
I don’t quite see this. Certainly, we recognize that the behaviors and attitudes that we think of as the attributes of being a good human being are learned. We also know that group tendencies do not specify individual characteristics. So why would it seem to you that we assume that the characteristics of a “good man” or a “good woman” are innate rather than learned?
(We rarely use the term “good woman” these days – certainly much less than we use the term “good man.” I wonder why?)
That’s fair. My main concern is helping people have a better understanding of what transgenderism actually is with the hopeful effect that they will respect their feelings instead of trying to tell them they are delusional and say they’re helping in the process. Delusional would be them saying that they don’t have a penis when they do or saying they have different chromosome than they have. Telling you about their actual mindstate is not a delusion. You telling them that their mindstate is false is closer to a delusion than them experiencing transgenderism.
The sexes are innate. The roles of the sexes have an evolutionary biology basis (innate) and cultural basis (learned). Both are important and even though the cultural basis for sex roles is learned doesn’t mean it is arbitrary and can just be changed without consequences. There is a lot of wisdom in culture.
The truth is that for homo sapiens culture is an evolutionary adaptation.
I agree with what I bolded. That is why I think over-emphasis on innateness does conservatism a disservice.
The costs to transitioning (primarily social, but also financial) have plummeted in the past few years thanks to social, institutional, and medical changes. The legal barriers have been substantially reduced; in particular, the government is less likely to demand genital surgery. The benefits have dramatically increased; today’s transitioners are more likely to be able to pass. Post transitioning support is better than it was. While increased awareness of the possibility of treatment is definitely an important driver, one would expect that the changes in incentives would lead to a change in the numbers even absent SJWs.
Given that the innate qualities referred to are often matters of biology that are demonstrably and measurably altered by transitioning, it’s hard to overstate how mistaken it would be to overstate their importance as part of an argument against the reality of transitioning. If something is an innate matter thanks to the direct effect of chromosomes, that’s pretty important, but it’s not as common as people think.
I am not sure what you’re saying here. Of course the hormones involved make a huge difference.
My congenital condition is considerably worse, for example, for not having a man’s testosterone levels to increase muscle mass to the point where it dramatically mitigates the condition. I can be muscular “for a girl” (and before pregnancy spent most of my life in that state), but it’s still not the advantage I would get from having a man’s muscle mass.
There’s also increasing evidence that women get more autoimmune diseases than men do not just because women are “weaker” in a vague sense, but because female fertility works by having the female’s endocrine and immune systems continually banging open and slamming shut one anothers’ doors month after month like some massive French farce.
I ackowledge these biological differences. But I am living proof, at least to myself, that you can experience these biological phenomena in no uncertain terms and yet be about as adept at social mimicry of your own sex as this:
It seems eminently possible to experience the full hormonal effects of your gender in gruesome detail while still nonetheless struggling to “act your gender”.
I’ve noticed that a lot of men that go through with at least some level of transitioning (anything from drag to full-out reallignment surgery) are on the autism spectrum. Same for furries, and otherkin. Not saying that anyone who does any of these things has autism, but it’s just my anecdote.
The tests said I don’t like boys, but they were uncertain if I liked girls. I’m not quite sure what to make of that, besides that the tests are bad and don’t ask the right questions.
I for one feel great sympathy for these unfortunate people, and I’m all for more understanding of them. But when they try to fire people, kick them out of school, and even put them in jail for not using the correct pronouns when addressing them, it causes much of my sympathy to fly out the window.
Is that literal-mindedness, though, or the appeal of being able to acknowledge that mannerisms can be learned?
I’m not autistic. I’ve spent a good deal of my life, however, shy and awkward enough to “pass for autistic”. So as you might expect, I’m not great at learning appropriate social mannerisms through mere cultural osmosis: for me, it takes work.
These days, there’s been an explosion of niche subcultures for shy nerds. I’m an outsider to all of them, but I know people in several of them. One of the appeals of those subcultures seems to be that the need to learn mannerisms in order to operate in them seem pretty blatant. Every human who adopts the mannerisms of a nonhuman animal, for example, is very obviously adopting a mannerism. It’s also my understanding that people who transition from one gender to another, or who just like to dress up as the other gender from time to time, often get explicit lessons in the comportment of their target gender.
What these mannerisms have in common is that they’re learned, and everyone treats them as something to be learned, not as something you should “just have” if you’re a “normal person”.
We used to have “comportment” lessons, at least for young ladies – opportunities for young ladies to explicitly learn the pantomime of being a young lady. There are fewer of these now, though, which seems to do a disservice to those who aren’t naturally good at picking up on this pantomime. Nerdy guys gravitate toward “pickup artistry” because it’s a set of explicit (if not always beneficial) comportment instructions for guys. I am sensing a pattern here…