Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Thoughts from a Former Dysphoric
When I was a little girl, I wanted badly to be a boy. Boys got to play the games I wanted to play and had an exclusive claim on the adjectives I hoped to apply to my adult self, such as courageous, honorable and adventurous. I was in the wrong body to be what I wanted to be.
I shudder now to think what would have happened to me had my parents been encouraged, by childrearing experts and the general culture, to take me seriously when I vociferously and persistently declared my desire to be a boy.
My discovery of feminism cured my gender dysphoria. The problem, as the ’70s-era feminists defined it, wasn’t that my female body and individual personality were mismatched, but that the definitions of female and male were unnecessarily and irrationally narrow and pinched.
Feminism declared that I could play baseball and cops ‘n’ robbers, dream of any number of interesting and noble futures, be completely myself, and yet be a completely normal female too. This was liberating.
Naturally, feminist theory didn’t solve all the problems of embodied female life. Biology is what it is: I still had to endure menstruation; rape was a seemingly omnipresent threat (the statistics are a whole lot better now, FYI), and, when the time came, the physical and emotional demands of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childrearing definitely got in the way of my becoming a rodeo rider, relief pitcher for the Orioles, or an FBI agent.
Well, that’s life.
Which is to say; that’s biology. And it is biology that the transgendered are struggling so desperately against, which essentially means they are mad at life itself. Or, specifically, that part of life that is most relentlessly gendered because genitals=genesis=genes=generation=regeneration … the original and still the best explanation for why little boys have lingams and little girls have yonis.
Yes, we humans are astonishingly plastic but remain, nonetheless, sexually dimorphic mammalian creatures. Just like chimpanzees, chipmunks, and Chihuahuas, we reproduce by means of sexual intercourse as it is enacted by persons defined as male and female by anatomy and chromosomes.
Clearly, human beings can decide not to reproduce — traditionally, by refraining from heterosexual intercourse but also by using our minds to invent workarounds. We can be involuntarily sterile, for that matter, but the essential anatomy and physiology that distinguishes — absolutely — male from female, and the purpose for that distinction remains. Celibate nuns and lesbians still menstruate and ovulate; gay men and men who believe themselves to be women nonetheless produce sperm.
As a little girl, I wanted to be what I imagined a boy was. Having never been a boy, I didn’t really know. And, I would posit — with all due respect and much, much sympathy — that a man cannot be or become a woman, or genuinely experience life as a woman. He can only experience life as he imagines a woman experiences it.
Why, though, can he do this? Why can the impression that a man — Caitlyn Jenner, say — actually is a woman be so incredibly powerful?
As a working hypothesis, the disorders of our minds arise out of our mental capabilities. There has to be an ability that precedes the disability. I nominate empathetic imagination as the ability gone awry in the transgendered mind.
During the Olympics, I watched a figure skater fly around the ice and leap into the air, spinning then landing lightly on one blade and swirling away: I didn’t just apprehend it with my eyes and mind, I felt it in my body. For long seconds, it was as if all I’d have to do is leap up from my comfy chair, throw on a pair of skates and my limbs would know how to do that magical thing.
Indeed, this may be why we are capable of finding joy in watching sports (or, for that matter, porn) because we can imagine ourselves into other bodies. Heck, we can imagine ourselves into the bodies of animals: the best equestriennes, dog trainers, and lion whisperers are surely those who teeter on the edge of identifying “as” rather than merely “with” their animals.
As an adult, I am a happily female mother of six adult children who looks forward with stereotypical eagerness to being a grandmother. And yet, I work primarily and gladly with men — specifically the courageous, honorable, adventurous men who work as game wardens in the Maine woods. I am frequently, and very comfortably, the only woman in a roomful of people and often the only woman for miles of snowy, woodland “around.”
The imaginative empathy that allows me to be with them might be on the continuum with that which once demanded I be them, no?
Activists who scornfully declare that a white, straight, middle-class man cannot possibly understand what it is like to be black, gay, poor, or female … are wrong.
That’s what the transgenderism “movement” demonstrates — not that we can or should determine our own gender (or race or whatever) “identity,” but that human beings are indeed capable of profound empathetic imagination. Because we can imagine ourselves into our neighbor’s lives, God’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is difficult … but it’s not actually impossible.
The transgendered provide perhaps extreme demonstrations of what is our common and sacred gift. Tyrants of various stripes urge us to suppress that talent — don’t feel sympathy for the deported Jews! Don’t imagine yourself an occupant of that basket of deplorables! Christ, however, asked us to nurture and encourage our capacity to truly see, truly understand and in some sense, at least for a long second, be and therefore truly love: it is the gift of which he was both giver and exemplar.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
I learned that technique from my uncle – he noted its labor-saving benefit. I thought I was just being lazy, but you have pointed out it makes me a wonderful human being! Yeah! Just like the re-using stuff that my mother taught me to be frugal turns out to be virtuous planet-saving!
Yes, that’s why I think of it as “empathy” rather than simple similarity. There are very good reasons for, say, police widows to have a chance to talk to other police widows. We’ve all been through something roughly similar, and can say “did you do X?” and get a whole bunch of rueful nods.
Still, I think that you, Ed G., can imagine what it is like to be a police widow. That doesn’t mean you know, it just means you are willing to enter into a completely different experience, try it on for size, and come to certain—probably fairly accurate—conclusions.
This touched on issues I’ve been pondering, and hopefully this is a cogent question;
If Gender Dysphoria is, as it sounds a psychological condition/diagnosis, then from a medical perspective, how is drastic, irreversible surgery an acceptable treatment these days, especially for pre-adolescents? (not including birth defects)
On a different note – C.S. Lewis was brought up, and in the comments of this thread we have seen mention of “The Four Loves” about which he writes; the different words the Greeks had different forms of love – storge, philia, eros, agape. I figured if we covered two, we might as well cover all four.
Storge is the empathetic love that comes from familiarity – Frodo and Samwise had a horrific experience, with only each other for support. Few others would understand, like the WWI soldiers Tolkien knew. The love of family. It could also be summed up in one of the last lines of the Pilot episode of Justified, “we dug coal together.”
Philia – the love of friends, not sexual. Eros – the sexual bond, or “being in love”
But these three have limits of one type or another, or can be damaged by actions or circumstance, and that brings us to:
Agape – unconditional love, one that does not change with circumstance. The comment was made
(Emphasis mine) I contend that it wasn’t empathetic love that led to His sacrifice. It was Agape. It was Grace.
If only English had kept 4 different words….
I didn’t mean to make a strong argument, only that the idea of not knowing unless you’ve experienced it has some truth to it. So does your point. Yes, I can conceptualize and empathize; no I cannot enter the widow’s experience but I can conceptualize and empathize with her and I can comfort and aid. No, not all police widows’ have the exact same experience, but their experiences in the context of dealing with husbands killed in the line of duty are more similar to each other than my conceptualizing and empathizing can be and so therefore can be of more practical use (maybe). Does that mean that outsiders have nothing valuable or useful to add on a subject? No. Does that mean reason can’t be applied without the direct experience? No. Does that mean direct experience overrides and excludes all else? No.
Just thinking out loud.
This is an extremely cogent question.
I do not know the answer for certain, but the answer I have read on other corners of the Internet is that having the surgery reduces the feeling of Gender Dysphoria. That is, if you can imagine Gender Dysphoria as the sensation that the body you were born into is revoltingly, horrifyingly wrong to the point where you can’t function normally, having the surgery kind of fools you into not feeling this way, because you perceive yourself as being less dramatically wrong. This was from a firsthand account I read of someone who actually had the surgery describing their feelings, so it’s definitely anecdotal.
Your milage may vary on whether or not this should be an acceptable medical practice. I think it’s totally bonkers; other people have delusions that feel powerfully, frustratingly, debilitatingly real, but we don’t insist on making the rest of society pretend that those delusions are true. We give those people therapy, drugs, or both. I have never heard a coherent explanation for why delusions about gender should be treated differently, aside from maybe not really knowing what drugs to give.
That said, I don’t think anyone recommends the surgery for pre-adolescents. The recent fad has been to start giving pre-adolescents drugs, but I still think they need to be adults to do the surgery. It’s also a fad that pediatricians are pushing back against pretty hard.
I wanted to be a Tomboy… I tried. But not only was I a girl… but a terribly uncoordinated girl… Being a Tomboy was cool… I just wasn’t one. I spent some time in fourth grade pretending to be a star baseball player in my room where no one could see. I liked girl stuff… my heroes were Amelia Earhart and Sacajawea… But I had none of their strengths… I just admired them, and played with dolls. In PE when we actually played softball… I sat in the grass of left field and daydreamed… no way was that ball coming anywhere near me, if I could help it!
I find the fad of transgenderism troubling, because it seems to put a stop to exploring your strengths and weaknesses and defining yourself, by yourself… finding realizations… and discovering the coolness of being who you are.
Frankly, some of this seems like child abuse to me.
And the “coolness of being who you are” … involves biology, family, environment and temperament.
And it has almost nothing to do with sexual preference, especially in childhood. That is lie directly from Satan.
In the case of God, we only need one…See 1 Jn. 4:7-8. He loves us totally, intimately/passionately/jealously – in all of these ways…We have to cultivate each – and can’t seem to do more than one at a time.
Anecdotal, but accurate in the sense that the goal of these alterations really is to function more normally.
Well now… I had older family members, growing up, where the easiest way to keep the peace was to not try to argue their delusions.
Personally, I think most of us have delusions, of one sort or another, and delusions can even be functional. For example, mild delusions of competence are pretty functional: people seem to perform at their best when they believe they are somewhat more competent than they really are.
Well… there’s the hair dryer incident… in our family, the Tylenol incident, too… (And Emperor Norton…)
Yeah. I don’t dispute the intended goal, or the truthfulness of the speaker, I’m just pointing out by saying “anecdotal” that n=1 and it was a description of something relatively intangible.
Well, sure. But I think there are key contextual difference between that and what I meant to lament:
Do those qualify as delusions? I mean, I was thinking of things like believing that you’re really the second coming Jesus, or that passing car headlights are sending secret messages from people who are trying to kidnap you. Like, schizophrenia.
I regret I only have one like to give for the hair dryer incident story.
I don’t see why they shouldn’t. “Delusions of adequacy” is a popular phrase – people decide that other people are suffering from such delusions all the time.
“Delusion” is above all a pejorative, not something with an agreed-upon clinical definition. What’s called “delusions of reference” are very common, for example, and only a problem when they begin interfering “enough” in a person’s life. And, just for funsies, what’s called “delusional jealousy” is labeled “delusional” even when it happens to be true:
Many atheists sincerely believe the religious are delusional. The religious may sincerely believe that atheists are delusional (“Atheist Delusions” is a fine read, incidentally). Not everyone on the right calls those on the left “delusional” just as an empty taunt: many on the right mean it sincerely. Likewise many on the left mean it sincerely when they call those on the right “delusional”. “Delusion” is a great way of saying “your beliefs are obnoxious to us”, dressed in the garb of “we can prove your belief objectively false with our superior evidence” (even when we actually can’t).
Many delusions are thought of as coping mechanisms. If I recall correctly, that’s how Freud treated them in “Civilization and Its Discontents”. In particular, “delusions” were coping mechanisms that Freud personally found ridiculous, like religion. Freud, for better or worse, still casts a long shadow.
This gets to the heart of the matter, I think. The threat of laws makes it easy to entangle the question of how free individuals ought, as a matter of manners, to indulge each others’ eccentricities with whether people ought to be punished by the state for not indulging those eccentricities.
We’re still largely a free society, but the state looms ever larger in people’s lives. Given the state’s existing regulatory overreach, it’s unfortunately not ridiculous for politically-organized groups of eccentrics to petition the state for special consideration. Consider, for example, emotional support animals:
There’s an official federal procedure for requesting housing accommodations like an exemption from a landlord’s “no animals” policy – in which case, there aren’t any “no animals” policies anymore, but instead “animals only if you go through this elaborate song and dance to certify them” policy.
For example, if after your grandma dies and you’re hospitalized for depression, you inherit her dog, who makes you less lonely in your grief, and you call your inheritance a “service animal” in order to keep it despite your landlord’s objections, are you committing fraud? The woman who did it believes she’s committing fraud. On the other hand, she really has struggled with excessive sadness (most people don’t have to be hospitalized for it as she was) and the dog helps. The fraud doesn’t seem to be in the claim that her dog helps her cope – it seems to – but in the claim that her dog’s help gives her a right to override others’ otherwise-reasonable policies. The presence of laws governing this turns what could be sympathetic behavior (a grieving woman begging an exception to let her eccentrically keep a dog where dogs aren’t typically allowed) into unsympathetic behavior (she’s no longer begging, but commanding, and even she feels like a fraud doing it).
Not, of course, to be compared to being attracted to your contemporaneously-aged stepmother – and extending your young adult angst to everyone, of any age. Of course, cleverly inverting this so it can be applied to wealthy, bored Viennese older women was a master-stroke. P. T. Barnum had nothing on Sigmund Freud.
An elegantly simple way to resolve a symptom of obsessive behavior which was severely impacting her life. I hope the ones opposed to the suggestion would agree to that, even as they debated about whether her obsessive behavior disorder had actually been treated.
I notice, though, that no one recommended that she have treatment to permanently remove all of her hair so she would no longer require the hair dryer.
Thank you. I see articles about elementary age “transgender” kids, where the parents and/or the school is acquiescing, but I don’t see any mention of the disapproval of the medical community, so I guess I extrapolate to a worst-case scenario.
Why escalate when it’s not necessary? The hairdryer, specifically, was the problem, not the hair. On the other hand, if the person treated had been a man continually distracted by his hair to the point of dysfunction, it might be reasonable to ask him, “Have you tried rocking the bald look?”
Despite the increased visibility of transgender issues, and the concern that celebrating transitioning will cause some people to transition who wouldn’t otherwise, people who don’t share our politics haven’t gone completely round the twist, and it remains normal to try the least drastic measures first. Though there’s some controversy about the exact figures, it’s normal for gender-nonconforming kids to not transition, and it’s perfectly possible to reach the level of unhappiness Joe P describes here while concluding the answer should be acceptance (however grudging) of the body one was born with rather than any kind of transitioning.
On the “upside” of your suggestion, I guess, is that shaving a woman’s head has a long and storied history of marking her out for shame.
Absolutely, and that is the source of my question. Is drastic surgery an acceptable escalation for something psychological, no matter how often it is done?
I’m not sure now to respond to this. Maybe it was a poor analogy, but the reason for it was to show that no one recommended an extreme and irreparable way to obviate the need for the object of the obsession (the hair dryer) in that situation; no more, no less. I’m relatively new here, so I apologize if I have misunderstood.
Thank you for your other comments
The salient question seems to be, “Acceptable compared to what?” If the choice really is between a drastic surgery and a (possibly very short) lifetime of suicidal ideation or antipsychotics, the surgery might actually be the less-bad option. (This is not to disparage antipsychotic drugs, but to note that they’re often poorly tolerated, and it’s possible a gender dysphoric person would be more employable, etc, by transitioning rather than resorting to lifelong dependence on antipsychotics, if those were the only two remaining options.
Of course, whenever someone claims that all the other, less-desperate options have been exhausted, other people will naturally wonder whether all other, less-desperate options really have been exhausted. Did the less-desperate options really get a fair trial? Should the desperate person give them one more try before committing to something as drastic as transitioning, especially surgical transitioning? (And another “one more try”? Etc.) Which of us wouldn’t, if a loved one were contemplating transitioning, ask just these questions? But once the transition (if it happens) is done, is it better to give the person’s choice the benefit of the doubt – that the transitioned person did duly consider the downsides and exhaust other options? Is transitioning like divorce in that respect (divorce being drastic surgery on a family unit rather than drastic surgery on an individual) – something best viewed as a last resort, but a done deal once it’s done?
My own apologies for the excessively wry remark at the end. Sometimes shaming tactics do work on mental-health patients, and cutting off a woman’s hair is a classic shaming tactic, but you’re right that it was odd of me to mention it.
Among the problems I have with the full “transition” including surgery is that I understand that the rate of suicidal thoughts and actions are just as high post-transition. So at least statistically, surgery is not actually fixing the actual problem (my understanding also includes that people who have the issue tend to have other psychological challenges as well).
I had occasion, once more, to discuss the difference between an eccentricity and a mental illness or disorder. My basic definition is that a disorder/illness is painful to the patient and gets in the way of the patient’s ability to live his or her life. We can get quibbly about both of these, but they work reasonably well most of the time.
Autism, OCD, narcissistic personality disorder, manic-depressive disorder…their characteristic symptoms can generally be seen as extreme versions of otherwise benign and even beneficial traits. The gold-standard goal of therapy and pharmacology surely is to reduce the illness to the level of eccentricity, where it is not painful and does not interfere with the living of a good and meaningful life.
I can only assume that true gender dysphoria is a far more intense version of the unhappiness and restlessness I experienced as a kid. As we’ve seen from testimony here on this thread, there is a version of transgenderism—a heightened sense of gender fluidity and an increased intensity in what I’m positing is the capacity for cross-gendered imaginative empathy—that is a kind of talent.
The question isn’t whether people with the extreme version should be shamed or shunned of course. The question is how best to treat any given individual so as to reduce the pain and increase the ability to live happily, productively and comfortably.
And in a way, the solution defines the problem doesn’t it? Extensive surgery and large doses of potentially toxic hormones are how lethal diseases like cancer are treated, because the alternative is death. Lobotomy recommended itself to doctors in the old days because they couldn’t figure out how else to alleviate the intense suffering of frantic, irremediable depression.
I’m okay with alleviating suffering. I’d be willing to believe that altering the external body to match the internal sensation is the only way (at the moment) to do this.
But it begs the question—Is transgenderism a dreadful disease? Or is it a naturally occurring “difference” that only a bigot would find problematic?
LGB people don’t need heroic medicine in order to live reasonably happy, productive and meaningful lives. Caitlyn Jenner apparently did.
Yes, and imagine the pain, having gone through both chemical and surgical transition, and still having the same extreme unhappiness and disrupted life.
My heart breaks for the unhappy, but it seems these people may be undergoing experimentation. What data is there to support the success of the treatments?
Either way it’s naturally occurring. That fact doesn’t help us much. I would lean towards not aiding delusions (painful as they may be) by effecting physical changes, particularly permanent physical changes. In any case, I think the bigger problem here is how this has entered the legal mainstream and what treatment and posture is mandated in some cases. Like C16 in Canada, it’s quite a dangerous and authoritarian step to compel people to use particular speech; it’s dangerous to outlaw disagreement on this question.
Electroshock therapy is still recommended, especially for pregnant women, and it’s a pretty invasive procedure (general anesthesia, risks of amnesia and other cognitive loss). I mentioned before why it seemed plausible to me that potentially-toxic hormones might be better than some potentially-toxic psychiatric meds.
Is autism?
A quote from a comment on a trans website that illustrates what I bring up in #81 and 82:
” Too many don’t want to understand that there’s nothing inherently wrong with being transgender, that if people were left alone and stigma not applied, that most people who are trans would be just fine. Instead, since they themselves have never felt this way, being transgender is just a “conceit” and not a real thing.”
The context of the comment is a discussion of transgendered people who regret the surgery.
The bolded comments seem inherently incorrect—clearly there’s something “wrong” with someone who is transgender, in the sense that he or she feels that he or she is in the wrong body. A person with gender dysphoria doesn’t want to be left alone in a stigma-free world; he wants doctors to change (or correct) his body so that it conforms to his sense of himself as a woman.
I’ve had a few people tell me that, were it not for the fear and loathing inspired by scenes in “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” doctors would consider electroconvulsive therapy a first-line treatment, especially for pregnant women, the elderly and others, precisely because it seems to work well and doesn’t affect an unborn fetus or inflict the side-effects that anti-depressants (especially in higher doses) can. And yes, the ferocity of the illness justifies the risks of the treatment—that’s my point.
I think any severely depressed person would agree that there is something inherently wrong with being depressed. It’s very painful, and debilitating, so much so that sufferers will do all sorts of crazy things (including suicide) in order to escape it. They would love to be cured completely.
If there is nothing inherently wrong with being transgendered, why do those who have it need “care” (that milky little euphemism Planned Parenthood is so fond of ) and, more particularly, why do they need such dramatic and risky forms of care? And…what would a cure look like?
As I said, I’m okay with offering any treatment that works to a person who is suffering; the question here is the nature of what is being treated. A consideration of which must be mostly philosophical in the absence of definitive science (science not being, in this case, permitted by the bien pensant ).
Definitely. And this is an important distinction, because it’s one thing to say “here is a person suffering; what can be done to help?” I’m quite another to say “okay, everyone in Canada now has to agree with this completely brand-spanking-new, not even fully-fleshed and lets-face-it nonsensical definition of sex…on pain of being shunned or even arrested as a horrible person.”
Hence my question above, “Is autism?”
If there is nothing inherently wrong with being autistic, why is it so often necessary to make extreme and disruptive accommodations for autistic people? And yet the neurodiversity and autistic rights movements claim both that there’s nothing wrong with autism and that autistics deserve a lot of special care. I think the logic is that autism isn’t the disease, the disease is poor coping that stems from insufficiently supportive and accepting intervention. And I think that’s the logic trans advocates are using: the disease isn’t the trans identity itself, but all that happens when the identity can’t be supported and accepted.
I find debates about what constitutes the real disease a little beside the point, but it’s not lost on me why the autistic might not want their autism thought of as their “disease”, while non-autistic people, distressed by autistic behavior, may find something quite repugnant about not treating autism as a disease to be cured. There are also autists who do think of their autism as a disease, and non-autists willing to treat autism as something other than a disease. But I can see why autists, overall, have more interest in thinking of themselves as simply different, rather than diseased.