Religion, Transphobia and Category Errors

Great Debates
81

Most nations are filled with those, and all that is motivated by being human.

It is human greed, intolerance, xenophobia etcx behind all that. Look at the greatest tragedies of the 20th Century- Nazi Genocides- Hitler and crew were not doing their stuff based upon religion. Stalin’s purges and the genocide of the Ukrainians- Stalin and his communists were anti religious. Communist Chinas purges, Uygur genocides and mass starvations. Pol Pot- another communist genocidist. All due to politics, not religion.

82

It’s not accurate. It’s subjective. If it was accurate people who were not interested in transitioning could identify people interested by looking at their bodies. They can’t. There’s no accurate, external group of people in a birth gender who are trans. Only an internal group.

Now unlike something like anorexia, where the individual can be said to be wrong about the health of their own body, there is no value component favoring one gender over the other. That is neutral. The impact on the individual is the cost and medical requirements of the transition and the fact that it eliminates the opportunity for reproduction post transition.

83

I’ve read this four or five times now, and I have no idea what its trying to say.

84

I believe @Jay_Z may have misunderstood the referent for the accurate vs inaccurate view of the body. Obviously the trans person is accurately viewing their physical body as it is which is a mismatch compared to how they feel inside. I believe @Jay_Z is saying the physical body does not match the internal feelings of the trans person and thus it is not being viewed accurately.

85

Those are not antonyms. And one does not exclude the other.

86

This is typical of people who defend religion. They can’t stand to admit how destructive religion is, so they demonize humanity. Because they’d rather hate their own species than admit that religion is anything other than a source of good. It’s one of the reasons I consider religion fundamentally hostile to humanity.

Also, it’s still an attempt to ignore how comparing religion and transgenderism doesn’t work, and demonizes the latter.

87

I’m going to use this as my reply anchor, but I did read all the detailed replies to my last post, and I think this section of the thread is getting off track and I’m going to try to re-orient.

All of those various explanations or thought experiments are things I’ve seen before, and we could go down the well-worn track of talking it all through and explaining back and forth but that probably wouldn’t be useful. Because the underlying problem is not my failure to understand how the gender-identity-based system makes sense. I think you’d all be totlaly fine with it, so long as I was consistently using the system. And I’m not.

So … I’m fairly confident in saying that most people on this board live in a world where using gender-identity-based classifications is just what you do. It’s the sign of a good person - good people use other people’s verbal expression of gender identity as a way of telling who is a man and a woman, bad people consider men to be male people and women to be female people.

In that world, the only possible reason why someone would use the sex-based system rather than the gender-identity based system would be intentionally to hurt people who want to be called by a gender id. So that’s the only interpretive grid people have to understand things like executive orders that there are only two sexes.

But I don’t live in that world any more. The various reasons include that the gender identity framework doesn’t make logical sense to me, but also that I’m in a position to see people who have been damaged by the gender identity system, and also that throwing out the advice of LGBT orgs about how you should deal with trans kids and doing the complete opposite has worked out pretty well for my family so far.

Really the main thing I want to say in this thread is that there’s a lot of catastrophising language used on this board about people who use the sex-based system, and I think it causes unnecessary panic. Someone saying that they perceive all the physically male people as men is just someone using a classification system. That classification system persists, is simple, widely used and backed by evolved abilities we all have from infancy.

Even if people in progressive-land don’t understand why other people are using the sex-based system, it’s not going away. Using it is not saying that trans people don’t exist, wanting trans people dead or any of the other emotive phrases that are often used on this board. It’s just a useful classification system.

88

No, I’m talking about an objective perception. As @Slight_Off_Hand said, I think you’ve missed something important. (I thought this might happen, and even went back and edited it to try to head this off, but alas…)

I don’t mean gender dysphoria is something that can be perceived objectively from outside. There certainly is an element of internal feeling-state that must be accounted for. But it’s a different element than with body dysmorphia.

The objective perception I’m talking about is something like “I have a hairy face”.

But isn't 'hairy' a subjective judgment?

I suppose one could quibble over whether “hairy” is too subjective, but if you have that urge, please stifle it for now. We all know how to visually distinguish someone who has facial hair—a visible beard, or the need to shave regularly to prevent a visible beard from forming—from someone who doesn’t. It’s just an example, anyway.

Someone with body dysmorphia might see their face in the mirror and think “Ugh, I’m so hairy”, and then spend an hour meticulously plucking or shaving or whatever in an attempt to get rid of it. But if you were standing there next to them the whole time, you’d wonder what they were talking about. Maybe they had one or two dark hairs and a bit of peach fuzz on their lip, but nothing very noticeable. Most people wouldn’t agree that they had a hairy face to begin with.

Someone with gender dysphoria might also see their face in the mirror, think “Ugh, I’m so hairy”, and then spend an hour meticulously plucking or shaving or whatever in an attempt to get rid of it. The difference is that they actually did have a hairy face. Most people would agree with their perception. If you were standing there next to them the whole time, you wouldn’t wonder why they thought they were hairy, although you might wonder why it bothered them so much.

I think that’s neither here nor there. The value component isn’t a necessary part of either body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria. If you perceive your body as being fatter than it really is, that’s dysmorphia whether you’re underweight or overweight.

There certainly are costs, although those can be minimized by starting early enough that there’s still time to prevent most of the effects of natal puberty instead of having to counteract them surgically.

But “eliminates the opportunity for reproduction” is an overstatement: you can freeze sperm/eggs beforehand, and in many cases, you can stop hormones for a while to regain fertility (assuming you still have the parts). And of course, some of us never wanted to reproduce in the first place, in which case not having to worry about contraception (once you no longer have the parts) is a benefit, not a cost.

89

Are you going to share details?

90

Yes, if you want.

So, I’m going to be vague about the first one of these stories because it was told to me in confidence, and I only got to hear it in the first place because I try to talk to as many people as possible in a neutral sort of way.

Story 1 - friend of mine had a (female) child start identifying as a boy at a similar sort of time to my middle child (the conversation was some years later though, after everything had gone to hell). And, being a good ally, of course she immediately went round to the local youth gender services where they told her it was vitally important that she start calling her child a boy name, expunge all thoughts of her child being a girl, get child connected with local LGBT groups and so on. At which my friend was confused because … wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of assessment? This is all so quick, and my child doesn’t act like a boy. She did her best with it over the next few years but she couldn’t really manage to believe the stuff she was meant to believe. I think from her pov she was doing her best not to let it show but it’s hard to judge how well you’re actually fooling close family members about your real opinions. Child spent the next few years being not very happy, eventually had a blowup because friend said ‘but … there are some circumstances where your sex rather than your gender identity matters, right?’ at which point she was told she was a transphobe and a bigot, child left home, and hasn’t been in contact since.

Story 2 - this is from someone in my parents’ group. Child who’d been happy in primary school, but had a tough time settling in to high school. Very unhappy, anorexia, anxiety attacks. Lots of ‘allyship’ in the school, high level of LGBT education, and after about 6 months child says to mum ‘hey, I think maybe I’m not happy because I’m actually a boy.’ Mum (single mum) finds local therapist, therapist says ‘well, we need to support your child’s gender identity above all’. Mum keeps trying to get them to focus on the anxiety, self-harm, anorexia. Therapist keeps bringing it back to gender. All through this, child and mum still have a decently close relationship, though there’s strain because mum is honest that she doesn’t think gender is really the problem. After a number of hears, child suddenly has a big mental health crisis/revolution revolving around ‘crap. I’m not a boy. I’ve NEVER been a boy. This is all rubbish. How did I possibly come to believe that?’. Child is extraordinarily angry at all the therapists and school welfare workers who didn’t help her actually come to terms with her female body. But … she still hates having a female body and has no tools to deal with that feeling. Is currently taking T, which she started after she came to the conclusion that she wasn’t a boy, because even though she knows she’s a girl she can’t tolerate other people seeing that she’s a girl. Still living at home but distant from family, not in education or a job, nobody knows what the roadmap is from here.

Story 3 (me) - Child came out at 16 with the ‘hey I think maybe I’m really a boy and I want to be called by he/him pronouns.’ This is just after Covid, where child had had the worst possible time with at-home learning, in context that our home town had some of the longest lockdowns in the western world. Us: think ‘that’s extremely weird, this child has been particularly notable for being by far the most feminine in the family. But … uh … okay? We guess?’. Start reading and researching, beginning with Shrier, whose description of ROGD fits child perfectly. We’re all honest with each other about stuff, which boils down to “hey, actually we think maybe ‘being a boy on the inside’ just isn’t the sort of thing that can happen, but … we did give you permission to get called he, so I guess that stands”. We’ve never gone near an LGBT-anything. Child finished school successfully, is happily doing well in a diploma course, everyone has good relationships in the family. Child has decided maybe they’re not a boy after all, but ‘non-binary he/they’. We shrug. Siblings/friends use ‘he’ or ‘they’, cousins and grandparents use ‘she’ (we all agreed to this so as not to confuse the littlest cousin) , I don’t use pronouns of any sort. Child and I had a big discussion over coffee and brownies a few months ago and concluded that it wasn’t necessarily a problem between us that I’m a big time Terf who goes around leafletting to get male people out of womens sport, prisons and changerooms, because child isn’t really invested in that. Basically it’s a case of “well I do know I’m female, just don’t remind me that I’m female” (my interpretation, not child’s actual words)

Basically I have no particular confidence in the gender industry, and nothing that I see about me as time goes on is leading me to increase in confidence.

91

That seems like the most important part of this story: she doesn’t want to call herself a boy, but she still wants to transition.

“Maybe I’m not really an [opposite sex] deep down, but if it turns out I’m wrong about this, at least I’ll still get an [opposite sex] body out of it” is functionally equivalent to “I should have an [opposite sex] body because I’m really an [opposite sex]”. The difference is just labels.

Do you know of any success stories, where therapists or school welfare workers actually have helped someone “come to terms” with their [birth sex] body? Because a lot of trans people try very hard to do that, and only transition once they realize it’s not going to work.

92

In my parents’ group, which currently has about 40 families in it, three girls have just ultimately given up thinking of themself as a boy, and are now fine with themselves as girls (well, women, since the process took a few years each time). Some of these involved therapists, some not.

One boy was taking estrogen for 2 years, then he moved away for uni. The family approach was similar to mine - ‘oh hey, we don’t think you’re an actual girl but we still love you anyway’. Once he was away from both his trans friends and his parents, he went back to his birth name and is now happily just being an ordinary bloke

93

BTW - not going to be replying to this or other threads for a few hours. Family on doorstep

94

Fine as in whatever bothered them before has stopped bothering them, or as in they’ve decided to live with it?

95

As in they’re just relaxed about having female bodies and living normal lives

96

That’s not really an answer. I was relaxed about having a male body and living a normal life too. Didn’t make me any less trans.

97

In French, roche is feminine. But then rocher is masculine. For that matter, pierre is feminine, but Pierre is masculine. Ô là là, les français!

98

Vive la difference!

99

Sorry if this question comes off as stupid or uninformed, but I was very much under the impression that gender dysphoria produced intolerable discomfort, and it was the intensity of this discomfort that justified the radical hormonal and surgical interventions which are now at the center of so much controversy (“Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?” etc…). I genuinely didn’t think it was possible to be trans and be relaxed about the sexed body you were born into. I thought being decidedly un-relaxed about that was a necessary condition for being trans. Is that not the case? If not, do you have any thoughts on what percentage of transgender women you think share your relaxed attitude to the sexed body they were born in?

100

It’s a fine question. I was under that impression myself too, for a long time.

I wrote a little bit about my experience over here, and the article I linked earlier captures my thoughts about being male pretty accurately. https://genderdysphoria.fyi/ has a rundown of many different ways gender dysphoria can manifest.

What I felt toward my body was mostly kind of a negligent indifference, like how you might feel about a hotel room on a business trip: it gets the job done and that’s all that matters, and if you don’t treat it with the same care as you would your own house, so what?

I didn’t care how I looked or what anyone thought of me. I’d go days or even weeks without shaving, and several months between haircuts. I picked a facial hair style in high school and kept it forever, because changing it never seemed to make anything better or worse. I did the bare minimum to maintain my health.

I’d wear whatever clothes were on top of the pile. All my shirts were at least one size too big, because I hated the feeling of anything form-fitting on my chest or shoulders: it wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was also inexplicably embarrassing. In fact, my whole wardrobe was like that: baggy stuff that concealed the shape of my body, as if my body was shaped wrong and I didn’t want people to see it.

None of that seemed like a red flag at the time, because I was a nerdy west coast tech guy. I was supposed to be a slob, right? So it was a surprise when it all changed as soon as I started to see myself as more feminine.

Hard to say, especially since those attitudes tend to evolve as someone transitions, and all the trans women I know are already some distance into that process.