I’ve asked people for demonstrable evidence that our inner beings can and do reflect the properties of the sex that is not our body’s phsyical sex. And in the true social media tradition, respondents post a bunch of links without discussing the nature of the articles and how they answer my challenge. I know what they’re doing, and it’s something we call can do. They are using their search engine of choice to enter terms such as “proof of transgender” and sharing the first links that come up.
I have a high standard for the sort of proof that will overcome my resistance to the idea of Gender Identity defining whether we are men or women, and a quick Google search is not going to meet that standard. The reason that I have a high bar is that a reality of Gender Identity would very much overturn all that I know about sex, sex class, sex roles, and the very basis of patriarchal society. A blog article at Scientific American about Differences in Sexual Development (DSD) and the fact that some amphibians and fish respond to population pressures by changing sex does not convince me that people have an innate Gender Identity that is to be considered socially superior to their sex.
I am quite often shown data and articles about Gender Dysphoria as evidence that people can be and are trans. And Gender Dysphoria is real, I have little doubt of it. There are cases of people of either sex who are so distressed that they do not have the body of the sex they think they should have, that their lives are very difficult. According to the American Psychiatric Assocation, the DSM (Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from the Fifth Edition Text Revision) has very definite diagnostic elements in confirming gender dysphoria:
The DSM-5-TR defines gender dysphoria in adolescents and adults as a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and their assigned gender, lasting at least 6 months, as manifested by at least two of the following:
A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and primary and/or secondary sex characteristics (or in young adolescents, the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
A strong desire to be rid of one’s primary and/or secondary sex characteristics because of a marked incongruence with one’s experienced/expressed gender (or in young adolescents, a desire to prevent the development of the anticipated secondary sex characteristics)
A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender
A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
A strong conviction that one has the typical feelings and reactions of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)
In order to meet criteria for the diagnosis, the condition must also be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
While these are descriptive diagnostic guidelines, and I am not a psychiatrist, this does not provide any sort of evidence for transgender minds. The wiggle room terms “marked” and “strong” don’t convey and sort of testable threshhold that science can use to build a hypothesis of transgender. It does help to discuss the issue with the patient, but for a skeptic who needs to be convinced of this, it’s not much better than seeing some big footprints in the forests of Oregon and taking them as proof of bigfoot. Questions remain unanswered.
My main difficulty is that the idea of a gendered soul has too many elements of what Tom Clark refers to as a “contra-causal” free will. The idea of free will depends on a soul that contains our “self,” an entity that can survive our body so that when we die we remain to go on to whatever is next in our religious journey. It might be reincarnation, it may be Hel or Valhalla, Heaven or Hell, or Oblivion. The issue is that the soul does not require the phsyical presence of a brain to support it.
In all the reading that I have done of the descriptions by people who believe that they are transgender, this element of a gendersoul is necessary for a male body to house a female mind or for a female body to house a male mind. The gender dysphoria diagnosis is a description of a level of emotional stress that must be treated, and in many cases has been treated by a superficial transformation of the primary or secondary sex characteristics to create the appearance that the sex has been modified to match a person’s perceived sex.
While there have been attempts to explain how a gender identity can be formed in a body, they don’t seem to be very convincing.
I’ve been shown evidence, and it’s credible, that during pregnancy there are events that can happen in hormone exchanges between a mother and the fetus. In female fetuses, this may lead to masculine features in adulthood. But, that’s not proof that one can be made transgender, it’s a description of how women can develop masculine features as adults. And the transgender claim is that a gender identity is separate from how one’s body presents. We also know that masculinity and femininity are based on social perceptions of what members of each sex should look like. They aren’t absolute markers of sex.
There are other proposed proofs of gender identity. One of them is a study of MRI’s that purported to show that the brains of transgender individuals resemble the brains of the sex that they believe themselves to be. Transwomen have been shown to have “ladybrains,” in other words. There are some obstacles to acceptance in this, and my objections are not based on an in-depth knowledge of neuroanatomy. One objection is that in order to accept this as evidence, one needs to accept the physical explanation that women have ladybrains. I personally know people who were very angry with Lawrence Summers and mocked him for claiming that the reason that there are fewer women doctoral candidates is due to brain structure differences. Some of the same people later told me that this MRI study is proof of transgenderism. So, ladybrains are convenient for some situations, then aren’t they?
Dr. Gina Rippon is an actual neurophysics researcher, and has done studies into how brain shapes are affected by sex. It turns out that the differences between the phsyiology of the brains of the two sexes are only recognized in size. Men’s brains are slightly larger (bimodally, not absolutely.) The reports of the study that showed that trans brains are like those of their desired sex were not controlled for sexual orientation, and many features that show marked differences are more parsiminiously linked to neuroplasticity than to a disembodied gender identity.1
So, it’s very difficult to find a cause for Gender Dysphoria and I see no reason to accept a supernatural cause for it, but I suspect it has much to do with the emphasis on gender roles and how such males fit into the expectations that they should be masculine. Gender non-conformance is easier to understand, and likely very natural as the range of human personalities is readily observed. The expectation that we are meant to fit into the confines of two sets of gender, masculine and feminine, is going to be met by rebellion in the form of girls and women who do not want to have their life goals and desires limited to subservient roles. In males, many men do not want to be restrained by gender, either. Our interests and likes aren’t necessarily all in line with the mythical “alpha male” ideal that we are all supposed to strive for, and we either mask it and hide our true nature in order not to be bullied as “pussies” or “fags.”2
When I first started hearing about “bathroom bills” to prevent boys from accessing girls’ restrooms, much of the press emphasized conservative Christians claiming that boys would take adantage of it in order to access girls whose privacy is exposed for easy view. I dismissed those concerns, thinking that it was absurd that boys would go to all the risk of being bullied for being pussies just to have access to girls in vulnerable positions.
Yes, even in my early fifties, I was naive about such things.
I was not aware of autogynephilia. I was also not aware of the transbians, or men who declare themselves to be women in order to pressure lesbians to date them, but that’s the topic for another day related to the homphobia inimical to transgenderism. There are also men who will do anything to have unfettered access to vulnerable women. These predators think nothing of pretending to be trans so that their predatory nature is now acceptable and defended by women, yes, even those who call themselves feminist.3
Autogynephilia is a fetishistic desire to not only dress refer to oneself as the other sex, but to be seen as the other sex by everyone else. Cross-dressing is an example of this, but there are many men who do this in privacy without involving anyone else. Autogynephilia as a social force demands that we all accept and validate such individuals. This is where the idea comes that we must respect people’s claims for specific pronouns when we refer to them as a third person. Hearing people refer to them as “she” validates a man’s perception of himself as a woman. It’s not only his imagination, other people see it as well.
Erection achievement unlocked!
Many of these men consider themselves superior to women, that they are prettier, that they do girl things better than women and that they would make better sex partners for men. I read the OkCupid profile ten years ago of a “t-girl” that listed several attributes that would make him a better girlfriend than a woman would. One of them is better knowledge of what feels good in pleasing a man, and yes, that would be true for a man but I wonder how a female Gender Identity would know that. Some signals are crossed there, right?
Trans activists want to deny that AGP exists, and will often say that the idea has been “debunked.” I think that anyone who wants to see the devastation that is wrought by these men can read the stories that trans widows have written of their lives with husbands who declare several years into their marriage that they are actually trans. If you want to research further, check into Trans Widows Voices. But, you need to go into the site only when you have the strength to bear very difficult histories of women who’ve been abused emotionally in service to the needs of their husbands’ need for validation.
These widows are reviled by transactivists because their stories reveal that transgender ID males are oppressors and not the oppressed. In order to maintain the fiction that trans ID males are the “most oppressed people” they need us to believe that:
They suffer from Gender Dysphoria and have been under great emotional stress since childhood. While I accept that there are true cases of GD, I don’t accept that it’s as widespread as the rapidly growing number of trans ID males.
That they are actually woman due to an innate Gender Identity, and this is manifest in GD.
They have been in the closet over this since childhood and it is brave for them to step out, as brave as for lesbians and gay men.
Gender Dysphoria provides cover for men who exhibit autogynephilia. This allows for something that should remain a private fetish to become a public one, and one that must be appeased in because of diversity initiatives. We shouldn’t accept this, because that then allows men who just want access to women to claim to be trans, and sympathy for those with GD is a reason that most people think that it’s merciful to accept that a gender recognition certificate is equivalent to sex. The non-quantifiable nature of the traits described in the DSM allow the slipperiness needed for men to claim GD when they are not in the throes of such psychological pain.
With all the rights and privileges accorded therein, as the MRAs realize their dream of driving women out of the public square again
Here’s me, wary of sliding into the conspiracy thinking, but I can’t help but saying:
“It’s all connected, don’t you see?”
As a skeptic, I am trying to avoid that, but it’s become more difficult the harder I try.
Like Rippon, I was born a twin. She had a brother, and I had a sister. Her brother was favored by her parents and sent to better schools while she was sent to a school for girls that didn’t have any science classes. I was given the benefit of the doubt to be more intelligent by our teachers, and was given better grades through school while she learned how to work in order to be rewarded for her grades. She made it through college due to this in four years, while it took me forty years. I salute her memory.
It’s always struck me as odd, but demonstrable of the contempt that men have for women, that the insults hurled at less than manly men refer to body parts of women that we want to access to make us feel good. That men call each other fags as insults also seems to confirm my belief that hatred for homosexuals is based on gender expectations more than actual sex acts.
It’s not my place as a man to say what “real feminism” is, but I can strongly agree with those feminists who do not accept than transwomen are actually women. It’s pretty clear that there is a conflict that’s not resolvable in accepting that men are part of the “all women” inclusivity that has perverted the concept of intersectional feminism.
AGP males have succeeded in camouflaging themselves through forced teaming. I see little in common between them and children and teens who are "genuinely dysphoric" though the actual meaning and underlying cause of the latter still seems uncertain. The DSM definition noted above doesn't really do a lot to clarify things, either. "Gender" has way too many meanings, and trans activists will exploit the resulting imprecision and confusion to their advantage, slipping between the meanings at will without announcing they are doing so. There are at least four meanings that I can see that have been attached to the word "gender:"
1) As a substitute for the word "sex", used by those who are uncomfortable with the word sex and its connection to the sex act itself. Used in this way, it is intended as a simple substitution, with no metaphysical baggage implied or intended. I've seen books and articles discussing animals, using "gender" instead of "sex."
2) The sex-specific roles and expectations and limitations society loads onto men and women, "sugar and spice" vs "snips and snails."
3) The concept of an innate sense of self as being a man or a woman, a "gendered soul" that is independent of the physical body.
4) The particular instantiation, example or "flavour" of a given person's "soul" . Apparently there are scores of them.
The last two are the problematic ones.