On Transitions, Freedom of Form, and the Righteous Struggle Against Nature

What is natural is not what is right

I.

One of my favorite authors on trans issues is M. T. Saotome-Westlake. For those unfamiliar, he's a self-described autogynephilic man who writes about what he terms the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—his love of the image of himself as a woman.

The end of his reply to Scott Alexander's post on category boundaries has lingered in my mind since I read it. I will quote very briefly, but I encourage those unfamiliar to read the last section in full, in which Saotome-Westlake responds to and riffs off of Scott Alexander's assertion that it is kind to go along with a deluded man's fiction that he is Emperor of San Francisco:

"It's not wrong, is it?" he eventually says. "To want to rule, to want to be Emperor?"

"No," you say, "it's not wrong to want it." ... "But I'd be lying if I told you it was going to be easy."

I'll return to that story at the end of my piece.

II.

Let's talk about Nature: red in tooth and claw, that which makes life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Even granting life to Nature, though, gives too much credit. Look around the universe. All evidence to this point suggests we are either alone or very well isolated from other complex life. Want an clear picture of Nature? It is the void of space, empty and lifeless. It is dust drifting away from dust. It is very slow decay.

Nature is the default, what happens without interference. And life? Life is interference.

There exists a frame I was able to lean on when I worked to make myself believe in the Christian conception of God: every flaw, every imperfection, every ounce of cruelty in Nature is contained within an immaculate divine plan providing reassurance that what is broken now can become unbroken in eternity.

Lacking that reassurance as I now do, I am left staring out at the nature of Hobbes and Lord Tennyson, the nature in which it is stunning chance when life shines through the bleak normality of lifelessness, decay, and emptiness.

It is against that backdrop that I view the dual project of life writ large and humanity—that singular life prideful enough to overtly defy Nature. I see in every life a quixotic, doomed struggle against this decay that, should it prove successful, leads to further quixotic, doomed struggles on towards eternity. And I see as the sum of that an incredible triumph against Nature: a planet teeming with life, and one that people have shaped for better and worse in our own image. Every step we call progress was won in bitter combat with Nature, and those fights have formed the backbone of our collective mythology from Prometheus to the moon landing.

To riff off of Christian scripture and Ozy's memorable tagline, those of us without conviction that a supranatural Divine will save us must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, committed towards the gradual supplanting of the natural by the good.

Defaults, though, are the default for a reason.

Defiance of Nature is hard. It took thousands of years for humans to defy its edicts enough to develop agriculture, and thousands more to create a world where most could avoid farm work. Everyone's efforts are doomed, at some point, to fail, and the most ambitious efforts fail faster and more spectacularly. Every triumph against Nature has come from taking it seriously. Without a realist's eye towards exactly how and why the default exists, interference is yet more doomed than otherwise.

III.

Given the title, I'm sure you can see where this is going. I'd like to talk about transition.

Species transition, of course. I hope you expected nothing less from me.

Freedom of Form is a nonprofit that eagerly occupies the slippery slope conservatives half-joke, half-worry about and sensible liberals and leftists treat as the absurdity it obviously is. Their goal is to work towards a world where furries can become their fursonas and otherkin can become the animals they dream of being. Practically speaking, they examine the mechanics of the body and what it would take to add or change functionality to bring people closer to outlandish forms.

And, conceptually, they have my enthusiastic support.

In this, I do not mean to endorse them as specifically or uniquely competent, or particularly likely to reach their goals. They are a group of amateurs in many ways before their time, staring down complex long-term problems. Nor do I foresee a world in which I would use tools they built for myself; outside soft sci-fi zero-cost transformation scenarios, I have no interest in body modification of any sort and flinch at even the thought of getting a tattoo. I'm quite happy with my form as it is, thank you very much.

But interesting things are rarely done by people who resign themselves to Nature. I expect early attempts to overcome it to fail, perhaps in disturbing ways. I expect the processes Freedom of Form champions to remain inconsistent, costly, and difficult for a long while yet. But this seems to me to be a productive sort of struggle: examine the human body as a machine existing within Nature, understanding precisely how it functions, and working to expand on that function.

I cannot help but think that real progress towards the eccentric goal of species transition would necessarily bring with it a range of innovations useful or compelling to a much wider crowd. Every step between the present impossibility of anything resembling species transition to the science fiction world in which such transition is commonplace and simple contains a wealth of insights about our bodies and our world, and people willing to proceed while those steps remain experimental are taking a personal risk with potential for significant positive public impact.

Inasmuch as people see something in Nature they oppose and use it to spur them on towards understanding and perhaps eventual triumph, I stand in unambiguous support. I believe Freedom of Form is before its time, but its principles are by and large sound: people should have the freedom to become who they hope to the extent possible, including extreme changes so long as they do not reduce overall function.

To the extent the foundation's approach resonates with me, it is in its practicality. People lose me with claims that they really are, in some sense, dragons or wolves, or that they have 'alters' who are gryphons that they must accommodate. But if someone is to claim that, I will take them much more seriously should their approach be "if my perception and physical reality are misaligned, I will understand and then work to alter physical reality" than should it be "if my perception and physical reality are misaligned, I will ignore or deny distasteful reality." Should their approach be something akin to: “I understand I am not yet this, but I have every intention to become so”, I find myself impressed and typically in full support.

Nature is to be overcome, not to be ignored. To overcome Nature is a worthy task. To deny it is cowardice.

(As a final disclaimer, this endorsement of their approach applies only to their principles in the case of independent adults. Questions around childhood transition of any sort are out-of-scope for this piece and require weighing substantially more trade-offs; I have elected to focus on the central case. I do not believe children should proactively remove options from their adult selves and am wary of all medical forms of childhood transition, coming down in unambiguous opposition if they lead to sterility.)

IV.

I believe in moving towards a world where people can become, very literally, who and what they hope to be. Life is fleeting and I trust neither myself nor others to ascertain that people could not possibly want to be what they say they do, or to determine that they will not be happy should they try. I am happy to live in a world with eccentric dreamers certain that something is wrong with Nature and ready to throw their lives into defying that wrongness.

So why do I find myself so often wary of the social left and their project of transformation, whether it be via gender ideology, polyamory, queer culture, or more extreme positions like this? Why do most leftists, even, adamantly oppose the concept of race transition?

My wariness, and I believe much in this vein, comes from a persistent feeling that people let what ought to be cloud their vision of what is. Nature is to be defied, but to be defied successfully must be understood. A man who jumps off a cliffside fully convinced of his immortality is no less dead for his sincere belief that he will live. Should someone proceed based on a mistaken understanding of themself or Nature, they are likely to hurt themself and others in the process.

Perhaps it reflects a failure of imagination on my part, but I find Saotome-Westlake's thoughts much easier to absorb and understand than those of most trans or trans-adjacent people, because his theory of reality seems to cleave closest to my own understanding. I don't believe he speaks for anywhere near the experience of all trans people, but I do believe he is going through the same fundamental set of internal experiences as many who decide to transition as a result. That his stance does not flatter himself, too, makes it easy to believe.

It would be much, much easier for Saotome-Westlake to embrace the same frame as most put around that experience: gender euphoria as an indication that, in some fundamental way, he is and has always been a woman. Transition in order to capture the immutable essence of who he is. So forth. Being trans is unpopular enough; by framing himself the way he does, he loses not only those who look at every trans person as a potential sexual predator or freak—who would certainly not be mollified by an explicit admission that much of his own motivation towards experiments with transition is inextricable from sexual feelings—but also those who fully embrace the frame that they have always been women, just waiting to understand it.

I am not trans, but—as has recently, for better or worse, become public knowledge—I can accurately be called a furry. I know, I know—not precisely comparable. But they're not precisely not comparable, either. It's tempting to embrace the framing that sexuality has only a vague connection to the furry fandom, but that narrative is untenable given the extent to which furries report some degree of sexual motivation. More, settling on a tidy "it's just a hobby like any other" frame robs one of the opportunity to explore more compelling theories on the phenomenon, as with this from /u/DuplexFields. In my own case, the way I instinctively leaned towards furry art (and, in moments I felt were weak and shameful, "art") around puberty has given me a lot of pause for thought around the way I tried to build mental barriers around sexuality to align with Mormonism and the peculiar ways those barriers fall. Most furries don't actually want to be anthropomorphic animals... in the world as it stands. But could that change in line with where the Freedom of Form foundation is already looking as technology advances and options expand? Hard to imagine otherwise, and hard for me to imagine that conversation playing out in a way fundamentally distinct from the conversation around trans issues.

I am drawn towards people who strike me as unusually adept at presenting their own internal experiences in a way that rings accurate. I understand, when I read Saotome-Westlake's writing, his desire to be a woman in a way that I don't always understand others' accounts of the urge to transition. This is not to say that his is the only accurate, honest, or appropriate approach, but it stands out to me.

V.

Part of the trouble is that once one settles on a counter-melody framing on something controversial like this, they become, in part, a tool for hostile interests to wield against those like them. When someone's primary interests lie in women's sports, or maintaining single-sex spaces, or safety in women's prisons, questions of how to handle trans people emerge only as a potential threat to their interests, and someone like M.T. Saotome-Westlake who frames his own transgender-akin feelings in the language of autogynephilia serves as evidence to marshal in attacking that threat. Someone who finds furries unsettling will not likely be dissuaded in that feeling by idle pondering about how looking at pictures of gay anthropomorphic wolves during puberty may have rewired young brains. You see this as well when groups separate themselves from more fringe ones along similar paths—if species transition can be used as a weakman to batter people interested in gender transition, there's an incentive for trans people to separate themselves from that more outlandish concept.

I believe many of the narratives that emerge around these topics are threat-response narratives, not fundamentally truth-seeking narratives. People accurately note opposition to their strongly-felt desires, and look for ways to frame those feelings that are the most acceptable to the greatest number of people. Others hop on, seeing the greater social success of those strategies. It doesn't take too long, with sufficient social incentives, to convince yourself that a threat-response narrative is simply true—or at least true enough—and for the original questions to be left by the wayside.

But Nature is cruel and unforgiving, and questions left by the wayside return as spectres down the road. If the case for gender transition relies on claims that you are already, at your core, what you desire to be, you are likely to overlook or elide details, to use motivated reasoning in pursuit of those claims. "Trans women have no advantage in women's sports", I believe, is the most widely agreed on example of motivated reasoning in that domain, though "widely agreed" here is very far from unanimous. If "there is an element of social contagion in these phenomena" becomes wielded as an argument by hostile interests, the threat response solution is to reject the argument outright. So forth. But to the extent any one of those frames contains truth, an accurate accounting of the phenomenon and response to it must grapple with that truth.

The goal is and must be to overcome Nature in truth, not merely to convince oneself that Nature has been overcome.

VI.

Technology complicates and enriches the debates around alternatives to the traditional path through life. How much more interesting the gay marriage debate could be, when two women or two men become able to have biological children together! How peculiar parts of the debate around trans issues will become when tools like uterine transplants become realistic, or when yet deeper changes become understood. How much wilder, still, the debates when people become truly capable of becoming something other than fully human.

I believe people with radical, transformative aspirations must be brutally honest about the toll Nature extracts from all. It is easy to build a group on threat-response narratives designed to resist hostile scrutiny, to push away those who sing the counter-melody. This approach is understandable in the wake of serious overt hostility: many adamantly oppose the idea that people should defy Nature and choose to transition or take other unusual approaches to life. But "understandable" is not the same as "ideal". To overcome Nature we must understand it, and part of that must be the understanding that defying Nature is difficult and carries heavy costs.

Here, finally, we return to Saotome-Westlake's parable of the deluded Emperor Norton of San Francisco. Is it kind to leave someone to an untruth in order to make them happy? I am not convinced. But I am yet less convinced that the right move facing someone with strongly felt desires and a poorly conceived framing of those desires is to assert that they cannot legitimately want what they want. I feel Saotome-Westlake's approach is, in the end, the most humane one: If Emperor Norton is to be taken seriously as an equal, and not just humored like a small child, one must be able to state plainly that he is not in fact an emperor.

But if Emperor Norton's desires and the edicts of Nature are misaligned, consider the possibility that it is not Emperor Norton who is wrong. And if someone is willing to move heaven and earth to become who they are certain they ought to be, I cannot help but respect them and support them in their quest.

All the best.