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The Gender Non-Conformity Cop-Out
I’ve been thinking about this post for a few days, but what prompted me to write it now, rather than this coming weekend, is a delightfully wrong-headed piece by our very own and much-loved Fred Cole. So, while this isn’t a rebuttal to Fred’s piece, I’ll nonetheless dedicate it to him.
To Fred
There. On with the show.
My argument is that transgender individuals are, by and large, being lazy and rude, and we do them a disservice if we don’t correct that behavior. Let me explain.
There are only a relative handful of people who are actually sexually ambiguous. A tiny fraction of them are biologically ambiguous, true hermaphrodites having both male and female genitalia. The rest are outliers on the natural scale of masculine and feminine morphology: men with fine bones, delicate features, high voices; women with heavier bones, more rugged features, deeper voices. For the most part, people who are outliers can still present themselves as their correct sex; a relative few may prefer to either remain ambiguous or simply present themselves as the opposite sex.
This isn’t new. There have always been effeminate men and masculine women. They haven’t always been treated well, and I think that’s something which really does call for compassion and courtesy.
That doesn’t explain Caitlyn Jenner*, nor the young lady who works at my local hardware store sporting a button which reads “My pronouns are: he/him/his.” Nor does it explain most of the newly sexually ambiguous, all the men and women, boys and girls, who are perfectly obviously identifiable by their true sex, but who would rather be identified as something else.
What does explain these people? Various things, I’m sure: some undoubtedly enjoy the attention, others get a thrill out of the cross-dressing and role playing, still others are dissatisfied and hope a dramatic change will improve their lives.
But I think most of the “gender non-conforming” are simply being lazy.
Non-conformity has always been a cover for laziness: nonconformity means that the normal rules don’t apply to you, and you don’t have to live up to other people’s expectations or standards. It means exempting yourself from judgment, not playing the same game as everyone else, not being measured by their yardsticks and possibly found wanting.
Tune in, turn out, drop out. Because if you aren’t in the rat race, you don’t have to run — and you can’t lose.
Live Up to Your Sex
Men and women really are different, both in terms of their physical capacities and their emotional natures. Men and women want different things; they are biologically primed to value different things. They have different strengths and vulnerabilities. Why? Because gestation. Because a man can have a thousand children and never think twice, but a woman can’t have a single one without devoting a substantial fraction of her life to it.
I hope this isn’t news, that evolution has produced two very different creatures in men and women, and that five years of Gender Studies at UC Berkeley, no matter how confusing, can’t unmake what adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine have quietly conspired to create.
The phrase “be a man” means something. It means do the hard thing without complaining. Don’t leave it to someone weaker and more vulnerable to do what a lifetime of testosterone has prepared you to do. Step up, man up, do it, and move on.
We don’t really have a similar phrase for women: it isn’t a matter of honor for a woman to “be a woman,” not in the same sense. Women are weaker, and aren’t expected to be heroic, to come through in a clinch, as men are. Less feminine woman have rarely been the target of (unkind, I admit) mirth in the same way that effeminate men have been. But we still have expectations of women: that they’ll be more sensitive and nurturing than men, that they’ll possess an aesthetic sense lacking in the coarser half of the species, that they’ll be more civilized and refined, less vulgar and, in general, less physical.
The point is that there are standards for being a man or a woman. There are expectations, and people are to varying degrees judged by how well they meet those standards. It isn’t particularly fair, but there it is: if you’re a man, you’re expected to behave like a man and we’ll tend to think less of you if you don’t; if you’re a woman, we’d like you to act like one. You’re one or the other and, while we know you didn’t get to pick which, you’re stuck with it: play the hand you’re dealt and try to do it well.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. But that takes effort, and effort is… hard. If you offer people an alternative to effort, they’ll be tempted to take it, even if it leads to a mediocre and sub-par life. (That’s part of evolution too, unfortunately.) So if you tell young people that they can be “gender nonconforming,” and that that’s natural and no big deal and perfectly okay — cool even — then some are going to see that as a nice way of avoiding the burden of rising to sexual expectations, of being manly if they’re male, or appropriately feminine if they’re female. Nonconformity means not having to try, and never falling short.
It isn’t brave, it isn’t wise, and it isn’t a path to a good, full life. But, increasingly, it’s safe and easy.
Let’s encourage our young men to be men and our young women to be women, and not indulge the temptation to seek an easy end-run around traditional and sensible standards of masculine and feminine behavior. Let’s stop pretending that gender is other than sex, and that it’s a choice — or that non-conformity is, usually, other than lazy self-indulgence.
* Caitlyn Jenner is his legal name, and I’m happy to call him that. It’s a silly name for a man, but then he’s a silly man.
Published in Culture
I don’t think it’s humor. It’s just a recognition that our names, unlike our biology, are entirely changeable by a recognized legal process. No court can change your chromosonal makeup, but it can change the name by which you are known with the stroke of a pen. Moreover it is customary for us to modify our names to a degree informally. My legal name is Michael. Many people call me Mike. A few even Mikey (yes, I actually have friends). Mr. Rand’s legal name is Edgar. He goes by Ted, and most people don’t even know his legal name. It’s all good.
But isn’t that what we are doing with the transgendered thing? There’s a push to make it viewed as normal, when for a long time it wasn’t normal. So am I justified in my skepticism that this shouldn’t be seen as a mental disorder? Am I justified in being skeptical in a 5 year old really feeling other than what they were born as?
I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here. But Fred obviously does. So who is right on this? And why should we be just giving up without an pushback at all?
My honest answer is, I don’t know. But I do know that the phenomenon is widespread enough to merit a little open-mindedness. If enough people say “this is what I am, this is what I feel” there might be something going on that, while outside of your experience (and mine), is quite real nonetheless. And in a free society I think that is really important because social order requires that we make some efforts to accept and accommodate difference. Not always. We have to draw lines and we have to figure out where they are. “I identify as an ax murderer” isn’t going to fly. But when a decent sized group of people tells us we’ve been missing something real about the human condition to their severe social, economic and psychological detriment, it behooves us to listen and investigate without prejudgment.
Yet I don’t think there’s very many people who disagree with the push for normalizing it who don’t actually believe people feel this way.
I have said that the push to normalize this and embrace this feeling can quite frequently result in overlooking some serious psychological trauma that needs to be addressed. By not addressing it and assuming that all we need to do is embrace it, we are ignoring other serious things – and this is evidenced by the constant rate of suicide pre- and post-surgery.
I can quite easily say that I believe they do feel that way. But I think they should be in therapy, not getting body parts cut off. And if body parts really must be cut off, then altering society’s workings to accommodate them is a no.
It is very confusing, so I acknowledge your “I don’t know.” There are hurting people here. That is evident to me. What isn’t evident to me is that encouraging the dysfunction is a loving response to it.
Yes, and in the long term, I think that skepticism is going to win out, even among those in the blue tribe, including those willing to accept adults who have transitioned. Most children with these feelings, even when they have them for good reason, grow out of them by finding a way to come to terms with the bodies they were born with.
Conservatives already treat parents who encourage their kids to adopt the opposite sex’s gender norms as parents committing Munchausen by proxy. And even really, really Progressive parents with genuinely nonconforming kids have an interest in helping their kids conform rather than deviate. (Some ultra-Progressive parents I know have a little boy with autism who’s so uncomfortable in clothes that, as a compromise between him running stark naked about the house and him at least wearing clothing, he can wear muumuus in the privacy of their home for comfort. They will not, however, let him outside the house in his “dresses” because they know he’ll get teased, and life is hard enough for him already.) Most parents, even parents with bad politics, want what’s best for their kids, and I think it’ll become pretty clear that giving kids a chance to grow out it is best, even if a few grow into adults who do transition.
I want to stipulate that in all of my comments on transgenderism, it is completely with disregard to hermaphroditism or inter-sexed individuals. That is a completely different case that I have completely different opinions on than the psychological problem of gender-dysphoria with a healthy and functioning physical body.
I agree with your last sentence – that it isn’t necessarily obvious. But the rest of this comment risks amateur psychologizing about people you don’t even know.
Like a lot of questions in public policy, it boils down to “who gets to decide”? And as conservatives, we tend to favor subsidiarity – pushing decisions down to the lowest level possible where the richest information is. In this situation, to me that means respecting the decisions of people experiencing this phenomenon and the doctors they consult. The alternative is the kind of uninformed speculation from a distance that a lot of people are engaged in. The patients and the doctors might still turn out to be wrong. We really may discover 20 years from now that this was all a mass psychosis. I don’t know. But they’re still the ones with the information and the aligned incentives to be in the best position to at least try to get it right.
And a word about the suicide rates, because this is something from which I know, as a gay person. Trans people still suffer awful social stigma and ostracism, even after transitioning. If you’ve never been this kind of minority, you probably can’t appreciate how absolutely soul crushing that is. I’m a firm believer that the inordinate suicide rate – like the rate for gays has historically been – is far more a function of the stigma and isolation imposed from without than it is from the condition within. I believe social acceptance and “normalization” are precisely the proper treatment for the suicide rate.
Remember the time on the Flagship podcast a couple years ago when (I think it was) Peter referred to James Lileks as “Jim”?
You could feel the chill through the speakers.
“Severe”?
I do believe you when you say that you are romantically attracted to men. The more difficult issues are: (1) why; (2) whether this is changeable; and (3) if so, whether there should be any social pressure applied toward such change.
I believe that we are very complicated creatures. We often don’t understand our own motivations, nor do we understand the mixture of environmental influences and our own choices that cause us to develop in certain directions. This applies to me as much as it applies to you. I don’t really know why I wanted to marry a pretty gal and have a bunch of kids. As Spock’s dad said, it seemed the logical thing to do at the time.
I believe that we do know that homosexuals are not “born that way” in a simple way, though there may be some genetic predisposition. The Swedish twin study (here), 10 years ago, established that the nonshared environment was the dominant factor, and did not find a statistically significant genetic effect at all. (This does not mean that there is not a genetic component, just that no such component has been proven by this study. A larger sample might find statistical significance on genetics as a relatively minor factor.)
Thus, you may well not understand the environmental factors — some imposed on you, some the result of your own choices — that led you to be the way that you are.
The OP suggests one explanation, though it applies it to transgenderism rather than homosexuality. It seems plausible to me, at least as a partial cause. I think that there is also a danger that, if nontraditional behavior becomes more accepted, we will see an increasing prevalence of such behavior. The teenage years, in particular, are very difficult for most people, and it is very plausible to me that people will adopt all sorts of strange or nontraditional habits if norms are enforced less strongly.
I submit that the shocking rapidity of the transition from SSM being a debated issue (and generally losing, though gaining some ground, before the SCOTUS ruling), to the cake-baker issue, to the current transgender craziness, indicates that we are on a steep and slippery slope.
Should this reasoning also be applied to so-called conversion therapy?
“Severe” is an understatement. I don’t have a word that does it justice.
Is it really so wrong to tell people “Shut up and conform”?
Depends on what they’re being expected to conform to, no? If I had just “shut up and conformed” more, I would have been more of a “slut”, not less, and conservatives are generally kinda opposed to “slutty” young women.
Agreed with a major caveat: there is a point even now where these decisions run into other longstanding public policy which is already based on contradictory assumptions. Like bathroom policies; like letting boys (trans women) wrestle against girls in high school and college sports; like freedom of association; like prioritization for things like foster families and adoptions. I don’t think this will keep for twenty years when we have much more solid data and trends.
Yes, of course. If someone believes they can benefit from conversion therapy, they should be free to try it. I don’t think that’s controversial. What is controversial is the question of parents making these decisions for their children. Children who are subjected to conversion therapy are usually subjected to it against their will. There subsidiarity (to the extent you can apply it to children) suggests deferring to the child, not the parent, though I grant you that as between the parent and the state, it would prefer the parent.
Moreover if you read their stories, children subjected involuntarily to conversion therapy experience it as abuse and torture. They are seriously scarred by it and it literally virtually never works. Stockholm syndromed people come out of it claiming to be cured for a year or and two then recover from the trauma and revert.
So these questions become a lot harder where children are concerned. They’re not fully competent to make decisions. We all know that. And in some cases, decisions that are both regrettable and irreversible can be made (more of an issue for trans people, where medical interventions can be involved). But some parents, even if well motivated, can also be woefully uninformed. Jehovah’s witnesses won’t let a child receive blood. So there’s probably a role for the state, at least in extreme cases, and however regrettable, to be able to intervene to prevent abuse.
I’d like to write a reply, but I’m having trouble understanding how my comment triggered this response. Obviously, we misunderstand each other.
My position is that a big-tent definition of manliness (and womanhood, for that matter) is preferable to a small-tent one. How, exactly, does this equate to outright androgyny and Huxlean social engineering?
This is more a libertarian position, though a good one. As conservatives, we tend to favor the presumed wisdom of history and tradition.
I worry that the entire psychological profession is dominated by ideologically possessed corruption. Not necessarily every psychologist, but the profession, which limits what practitioners can do. For example, the declassification of homosexuality as a disorder was, in my view, an entirely political matter, and a radical one at that. The dishonesty of the APA, and its inability even to distinguish between scientific fact and moral judgment, is quite appalling.
Thus, I am disinclined to respect the “doctors they consult.” I would like to hear from Bryan Stephens about this, as he is a pro in this area.
Specifically, I believe that there are a very small number of people with genuine gender dysphoria. I suspect that there are far more people claiming “trans” identity of some sort for a variety of less substantial reasons, and perhaps sometimes for quite bad reasons.
Then there is a radical Leftist political movement that is actually driving the issue, with little or no support of actual trans people. I’m starting to see even pretty far Left people getting fed up with this (both Weinstein brothers, Joe Rogan, Heather Heying, and Douglas Murray — yeah, I know, Murray is a centrist overall, but he is pretty far to the Left on sexuality issues).
In theory and in aggregate, yes. Otherwise, “kinda” is the operative word.
To illustrate: I’m also opposed to gluttony. But that second (and third) row of Samoas is surely an exception I can handle sometimes. Though everyone else should probably satisfy themselves with just one or two cookies if any at all.
I agree it shouldn’t be controversial. In practice, it does seem to be, even for adults. “Don’t even try, even if you want to,” often seems to be the received wisdom.
Teenagers are conformists par excellence.
They merely exchange one type of conformity (conformity with parents’ rules) for another, usually inferior one (conformity with the norms established by their semi-barbaric peers).
No question. We can agree that we should acknowledge the reality of transsexualism and respect the choices made by patients and doctors about appropriate treatment and remediation and that tells us absolutely nothing about who should be allowed to shower with your daughter after gym class. When it’s a person making decisions for themself it’s one thing, when it reaches an arena where the interests of others are impacted, different questions are appropriate to ask and different interests considered and balanced. I’m in 100% agreement.
But as I said earlier, attitudes like those in the OP probably encourage trans people to disregard these interests because they’re most loudly expressed by people like the OP author who would write trans people out of existence entirely anyway. Why respect the interests of someone who doesn’t respect yours? What’s good for the goose . . . .
If you want to pursue a discussion with me, you’re going to have to start by apologizing for saying I have a “disorder.” Not all of this looks like nonsense to me. But I don’t care to talk to people who insult me.
The various legal attacks on conversion therapy aren’t limited to its involuntary use or its use on minors. For example, California, I believe, will pull a therapist’s license for engaging in the practice with any patient. And anecdotal evidence of some patients harmed by the practice should not serve as a basis for banning it. The choice of therapy is a decision best left, as you say, to the patient and doctor. It seems to me that the greater state interest would lie in the prevention of mutilating surgeries.
Its not really you, per se.
But Male and Female, man and woman, and gender-norms (as cultural constructs) do have their usefulness.
Your comment seemed to imply that as long as we leave male and female (the biological) alone, that all the rest can be tolerated.
Again, I generally agree with that statement… except… <enter my mind dump here>
Where the patient consents, I agree with you. My objection to it (aside from my personal doubts about its efficacy) are limited to its involuntary use. That’s where I think public policy and the state have a role.
EDIT: By the way, as a libertarian I’d extend that to other medical interventions as well. I just don’t believe the state has any great monopoly on wisdom. I’d prefer to rely on professional organizations to grant certifications that people relied on in evaluating expertise. Of course the American Psychological Association might decline to certify conversion therapists and that’s fine. It wouldn’t be a licensing matter. As a patient, I could choose whether I wanted a therapist certified by the APA or the CTA (Conversion Therapists of America). Generally speaking, consumers would figure out who to rely on.
Those slutty little Samoa cookies! But as long as they’re sluts just for you…
They should take notes from the virtuous trefoils. No one wants to eat the whole sleeve of those. The girl scouts should probably just stop making the Samoas for the public good. But they should definitely leave the recipe with me for safe keeping.
Thanks for this, @Henry Racette! I have never felt the need to refer to Caitlyn Jenner; and haven’t spared a thought for Bruce of that surname since 1976. (Did the IOC revoke/retain his medalist status?) (Some here and on other posts have referenced the appending of “T” to the “LGB” acronym as a sort of categorical error…Interesting.)