Part of the trouble with talking about gender is that it encompasses a number of social / cultural / biological elements, which are often elided with one another for rhetorical purposes.
Let's take trans women in sports, for instance. The common refrain that trans women have an unfair advantage over cis women takes a grouping of trans women primarily defined by social identity and then places them in a context where we're talking about biology, whereas we can get a more accurate way of thinking about things by grouping trans women based on biology. What I mean here is, for instance, that it should be altogether uncontroversial that a trans girl whose body never experienced male puberty is well within the bounds for an athletic competition, whereas a trans woman who is not medically transitioning could fairly be said to have certain advantages. Then, it's simply a matter of thinking though and isolating the relevant features of a person for a certain category and being clear about the hows and whys.
In the case of sports, one standard i've seen is that trans women need to maintain a hormone profile within a normalized cis woman range for at least 2 years, with regular testing, and that trans men can compete in the mens category, regardless of hormone profiles. This is radically different than what people will say about how you can simply identify your way in to a given category, as hormones do actually change one's biology. Whether this is the correct standard or not is something that can be studied and debated without dehumanizing or attacking trans people.
It is worth saying that I, myself, am trans. I know that there are differences between myself and cis women- I call myself a trans woman, not a cis woman. My experience is colored by things like navigating medical and social institutions in ways that cis women do not have to. But neither can I accurately be called a man- my phenotype no longer looks quite male, my body has and continues to change, and my social role is one that is distinct from the men in my life, and is much closer to womanhood.
Things like harrassment and catcalling have begun to be a part of my everyday reality, and i doubt i'd have particularly good outcomes if imprisoned in a mens' prison. This is not to say that people can't tell I'm trans, but what that means in practical terms is that i'm treated closer to a woman than as a man, but not entirely as a woman.
What I want ultimately, is not a denial of reality, but an acknowledgement of the full and total reality of the gendered categories which I inhabit. To say that I am a man misses key and central parts of what my life is like, whether biologically, socially, or politically. It misses the radical ways that hormones have altered the texture, shape, sensations, and emotional quality of my life, the way that my friendships have shifted over time and both family and strangers alike treat me. It misses the clear and present dangers to myself and my community and the ways that those things shape my sense of personhood and solidarity with other struggles for fair treatment and bodily autonomy.
All this to repeat again- gender is a loosely defined aggregation of a large number of distinct and loosely correlated qualities, and i do not think that it is beyond reason to say that one may already have major overlaps with qualities other than those linked with one's birth gender, and that others can be meaningfully shifted. I will never have a uterus, but if i look and sound like a woman, am treated like a woman, and occupy a number of the social roles and realities of a woman, what is to be gained by pushing me into spaces and roles that are the domain of men?
With trans people, we can at least consider the possibility that it might be quite literally true that they are somehow, in some respect, more like the opposite sex to their assigned gender at borth; also, that it might be less literal and more metaphorical. With furries, we can be rather more sure that it just has to be a metaphor, and can't be literal.
With trans people, we might cxonsider:
a) male-female gender differences just aren't that large, compared to within group vsriance. Our intuition on the lines of "well, obviously, there will be statistical outliers" suggests that random variation might people some people nearer to the opposire gender on some measurement axes.
b) Significant minority of trans people also have genetic intersex conditions. Roughly about a few percent, I think. Way higher than the general population, but not a majority of trans people. When you're in the territory of "this person has some cells with XX and some with XY karotype", we casn be totally unsurprised if their prefered gender turns out to something other than their doctors guess at birth
c) autism. We dont know what causes it, looks kind of bioloigcal. Called "extreme male brain" why Simon Baron Cohen. We can feel ourselves totally unsurpised if something described as "extreme male brain" turns out to be strongly correlated with FtM trans people. Maybe whwtever autism is has something to do with the biology of sexual diffwerentiation.
Or, trans peoplem or some trans people, are speaking more metaphorically, But it might, maybe, sometimes, but literal.
Furries, on the other hand .... got to be some kind of metaphor, maybe for a difference or an alienatio that us not literally being a non-human animal.
The "statistical outliers" theory would probably predict lots of ~non-binary people ... if we are talking random variation resulting in statistical outliers in some high-dimensional space of personality charactertistics, most such outliers will not dead-on hit the mean for the opposite sex, but will be gender variant in some dimensions and not in others.
I am trans and before transitioning engaged a lot with trans-skeptical rationalists and was largely persuaded by the arguments offered and not being a transhumanist repressed for years. When I finally broke down and transitioned it did not feel like radical self authorship, it felt like relief from suffering facilitated by psychiatric medicine (HRT). I have since withdrawn a lot from discussing trans issues in rationalist spaces because nothing I read will change how I am living now that I have felt what I have felt and because I don’t feel like my own self reporting on the effects of hormones constitutes an airtight argument. Nevertheless I will leave this here in hopes that someone like the person I used to be will read it.
Prior to transitioning I engaged with trans skeptical rationalists and found their arguments compelling and the gender identity mysticism of the trans movement off putting. Not being a transhumanist I felt that my desire to be a woman was insufficient to demand social accommodation and stress my interpersonal relationships, so I repressed for years. I finally broke down and transitioned because I believed I had been wronged by my family in a way that absolved me of this obligation and entitled me to do something so selfish as to succumb to this socially accepted delusion.
I entered transition as a bullet-biting, self loathing, transhumanist but within two weeks on HRT my perspective on transition changes. I hadn’t thought of myself as dysphoric because I had not consciously linked this omnipresent irritation in my life to gender. I had not felt that I was suffering until I felt what it was like to live with it gone. I do not think I am capable of talking about it honestly in a way that is credible in rationalist spaces. It felt like what the hymns say the grace of god is like. It was holy. It was easy to be happy, to access joy, to connect with the people I loved.
The metaphors your essay draws on, tattoos, racial transition, furries, and Satome Westlake’s experiences emphasize changing the image of the body, not brain chemistry. In the first six months very little changed about my body. I was still presenting as male for work purposes and in most social environments, but so much of what it felt like to live in the world was different. My life before had been about analytical hyperstimuli of problem solving, arguing online and video games. Now I was ravenous for beauty. I woke up early to watch the sunrise and weep. I did an extended road trip alternating between art museums and national parks. I narrowly avoided having a public breakdown the first time I felt how good it was to make a small child smile on estrogen.
I disengaged from rationalist spaces. Mostly I had lost interest in arguing on the internet but also I felt misled. My experiences conflicted with what the arguments I found persuasive predicted. When I read trans people’s accounts of how profound the alleviation of dysphoria was before transitioning I discarded the people who reported these changes as either being deluded or simply saying what was politically convenient. Now I am in the maddening position of having no way of proving within the frameworks that I think make for good epistemology that what I say about the most powerful experience of my life is true and not politically motivated deception. I leave this comment mostly in the hopes that someone else who likes rationalist blogs and is questioning their gender will see it and know that this is one possible experience.
I don’t want to deny the diversity of experience people have on hormones. Satome-Westlake said he felt a bit weepy and had a slightly reduced libido. I have a trans friend who did HRT for years, liked some of the physical changes but decided they preferred their mental state on E. Some people like the mental changes but don’t feel they were as large or profound as I did. Still, there are many others who share my experience and who feel that being on the correct hormones has profound impacts on their mental health and allow them to be the version of themselves they most want to be.
I understand your article is meant to be supportive but there is a condescension and a presumption that trans people are deluded about how we are perceived woven throughout. Most of us are painfully aware that nature is not overcome, that acceptance of our identities is contextual, and that mostly we are humored where we are not despised. I do not know if my years on hormones shifted most of my mental and emotional traits into the ‘woman’ cluster in gender trait space and I can say for certain it has not shifted many of my physical ones. I can only report that whatever the magnitude of the change it has been incredibly valuable to me, and what makes overcoming nature only in part so painful is that I am punished by society for failing to overcome it in full.
Such a cool article! I love the transhumanist angle, you'd have a lot of fun watching Orphan Black I think if you haven't, very silly fun show.
My main pushback is that you still manage to overapply the word natural, particularly to concepts like "man" and "woman." The "natural" that is being worked against by somebody who desires to change their body is simply and entirely the physical form of that body. A "man" who desires to become a "woman" must navigate an entirely different multiplicity of categories and definitions that, while underpinned by and inextricable from the two natural types of human form, go far beyond them and become far more malleable as a result. The relationship between the natural and the artificial components of the idea we call a "gender" is ancient and complex, requiring a lot of theory to begin to untangle, but people have been doing that work for a while now!
Personally, there's not a huge difference to me between the girl who painstakingly changes her natural form, transforming from a traditionally masculine body into a traditionally feminine one, and the girl who rewrites her internal conception of her traditionally male body to the point where she is able to confidently look in the mirror and say "this body in front of me is a woman's body." I personally don't think I understand stopping there (because changing your natural form is, as you so rightly point out, badass), but I'll never begrudge anybody who does the strength and power of that statement. Ideas are technologies too, just as artificial as physical machines and just as potent in their ability to shape and change reality.
P.S - I understand your wariness on irreversible procedures for minors, it's one of the few issues related to transgender people that is actually fairly complex. I just wanna throw out that going through your body's puberty process removes a lot of options from your adult self too. And some of these kids really know for sure, it's worth figuring out how to tell when they do.
So, furries are the subject of a lot of jokes on the Internet.
Conjecture: sex is fundamentally ridiculous, and other people's kinks that you don't share are particularly funny. Hence, people who are not themselves furries think that a guy in a fur suit is just ridiculous.
AGP might be in a similar category, of a kind that most people (including a lot of trans people) just don't have. So out view on it is something like, probably someone has that kink, but most people don't, and its at least plausble that many trans people dont have ir. Even the proponents of AGP as an explanation tend to think that FtM's dont have it for example.. Though their reasoning may be highly fallacious, along the lines of:
a) women don't have sexual desires (arguably not true)
b) FtM transsexual are psychologically like cis women, in particular wrt (a). (Also, arguably not tue)
c) Therefore FtM transsexuals cannot be secually motivated.
Which is pile of dubious reasoning but maybe that's how some of the AGPproponents got to assuming it doesnt apply to FtMs.
Part of the trouble with talking about gender is that it encompasses a number of social / cultural / biological elements, which are often elided with one another for rhetorical purposes.
Let's take trans women in sports, for instance. The common refrain that trans women have an unfair advantage over cis women takes a grouping of trans women primarily defined by social identity and then places them in a context where we're talking about biology, whereas we can get a more accurate way of thinking about things by grouping trans women based on biology. What I mean here is, for instance, that it should be altogether uncontroversial that a trans girl whose body never experienced male puberty is well within the bounds for an athletic competition, whereas a trans woman who is not medically transitioning could fairly be said to have certain advantages. Then, it's simply a matter of thinking though and isolating the relevant features of a person for a certain category and being clear about the hows and whys.
In the case of sports, one standard i've seen is that trans women need to maintain a hormone profile within a normalized cis woman range for at least 2 years, with regular testing, and that trans men can compete in the mens category, regardless of hormone profiles. This is radically different than what people will say about how you can simply identify your way in to a given category, as hormones do actually change one's biology. Whether this is the correct standard or not is something that can be studied and debated without dehumanizing or attacking trans people.
It is worth saying that I, myself, am trans. I know that there are differences between myself and cis women- I call myself a trans woman, not a cis woman. My experience is colored by things like navigating medical and social institutions in ways that cis women do not have to. But neither can I accurately be called a man- my phenotype no longer looks quite male, my body has and continues to change, and my social role is one that is distinct from the men in my life, and is much closer to womanhood.
Things like harrassment and catcalling have begun to be a part of my everyday reality, and i doubt i'd have particularly good outcomes if imprisoned in a mens' prison. This is not to say that people can't tell I'm trans, but what that means in practical terms is that i'm treated closer to a woman than as a man, but not entirely as a woman.
What I want ultimately, is not a denial of reality, but an acknowledgement of the full and total reality of the gendered categories which I inhabit. To say that I am a man misses key and central parts of what my life is like, whether biologically, socially, or politically. It misses the radical ways that hormones have altered the texture, shape, sensations, and emotional quality of my life, the way that my friendships have shifted over time and both family and strangers alike treat me. It misses the clear and present dangers to myself and my community and the ways that those things shape my sense of personhood and solidarity with other struggles for fair treatment and bodily autonomy.
All this to repeat again- gender is a loosely defined aggregation of a large number of distinct and loosely correlated qualities, and i do not think that it is beyond reason to say that one may already have major overlaps with qualities other than those linked with one's birth gender, and that others can be meaningfully shifted. I will never have a uterus, but if i look and sound like a woman, am treated like a woman, and occupy a number of the social roles and realities of a woman, what is to be gained by pushing me into spaces and roles that are the domain of men?
With trans people, we can at least consider the possibility that it might be quite literally true that they are somehow, in some respect, more like the opposite sex to their assigned gender at borth; also, that it might be less literal and more metaphorical. With furries, we can be rather more sure that it just has to be a metaphor, and can't be literal.
With trans people, we might cxonsider:
a) male-female gender differences just aren't that large, compared to within group vsriance. Our intuition on the lines of "well, obviously, there will be statistical outliers" suggests that random variation might people some people nearer to the opposire gender on some measurement axes.
b) Significant minority of trans people also have genetic intersex conditions. Roughly about a few percent, I think. Way higher than the general population, but not a majority of trans people. When you're in the territory of "this person has some cells with XX and some with XY karotype", we casn be totally unsurprised if their prefered gender turns out to something other than their doctors guess at birth
c) autism. We dont know what causes it, looks kind of bioloigcal. Called "extreme male brain" why Simon Baron Cohen. We can feel ourselves totally unsurpised if something described as "extreme male brain" turns out to be strongly correlated with FtM trans people. Maybe whwtever autism is has something to do with the biology of sexual diffwerentiation.
Or, trans peoplem or some trans people, are speaking more metaphorically, But it might, maybe, sometimes, but literal.
Furries, on the other hand .... got to be some kind of metaphor, maybe for a difference or an alienatio that us not literally being a non-human animal.
The "statistical outliers" theory would probably predict lots of ~non-binary people ... if we are talking random variation resulting in statistical outliers in some high-dimensional space of personality charactertistics, most such outliers will not dead-on hit the mean for the opposite sex, but will be gender variant in some dimensions and not in others.
I am trans and before transitioning engaged a lot with trans-skeptical rationalists and was largely persuaded by the arguments offered and not being a transhumanist repressed for years. When I finally broke down and transitioned it did not feel like radical self authorship, it felt like relief from suffering facilitated by psychiatric medicine (HRT). I have since withdrawn a lot from discussing trans issues in rationalist spaces because nothing I read will change how I am living now that I have felt what I have felt and because I don’t feel like my own self reporting on the effects of hormones constitutes an airtight argument. Nevertheless I will leave this here in hopes that someone like the person I used to be will read it.
Prior to transitioning I engaged with trans skeptical rationalists and found their arguments compelling and the gender identity mysticism of the trans movement off putting. Not being a transhumanist I felt that my desire to be a woman was insufficient to demand social accommodation and stress my interpersonal relationships, so I repressed for years. I finally broke down and transitioned because I believed I had been wronged by my family in a way that absolved me of this obligation and entitled me to do something so selfish as to succumb to this socially accepted delusion.
I entered transition as a bullet-biting, self loathing, transhumanist but within two weeks on HRT my perspective on transition changes. I hadn’t thought of myself as dysphoric because I had not consciously linked this omnipresent irritation in my life to gender. I had not felt that I was suffering until I felt what it was like to live with it gone. I do not think I am capable of talking about it honestly in a way that is credible in rationalist spaces. It felt like what the hymns say the grace of god is like. It was holy. It was easy to be happy, to access joy, to connect with the people I loved.
The metaphors your essay draws on, tattoos, racial transition, furries, and Satome Westlake’s experiences emphasize changing the image of the body, not brain chemistry. In the first six months very little changed about my body. I was still presenting as male for work purposes and in most social environments, but so much of what it felt like to live in the world was different. My life before had been about analytical hyperstimuli of problem solving, arguing online and video games. Now I was ravenous for beauty. I woke up early to watch the sunrise and weep. I did an extended road trip alternating between art museums and national parks. I narrowly avoided having a public breakdown the first time I felt how good it was to make a small child smile on estrogen.
I disengaged from rationalist spaces. Mostly I had lost interest in arguing on the internet but also I felt misled. My experiences conflicted with what the arguments I found persuasive predicted. When I read trans people’s accounts of how profound the alleviation of dysphoria was before transitioning I discarded the people who reported these changes as either being deluded or simply saying what was politically convenient. Now I am in the maddening position of having no way of proving within the frameworks that I think make for good epistemology that what I say about the most powerful experience of my life is true and not politically motivated deception. I leave this comment mostly in the hopes that someone else who likes rationalist blogs and is questioning their gender will see it and know that this is one possible experience.
I don’t want to deny the diversity of experience people have on hormones. Satome-Westlake said he felt a bit weepy and had a slightly reduced libido. I have a trans friend who did HRT for years, liked some of the physical changes but decided they preferred their mental state on E. Some people like the mental changes but don’t feel they were as large or profound as I did. Still, there are many others who share my experience and who feel that being on the correct hormones has profound impacts on their mental health and allow them to be the version of themselves they most want to be.
I understand your article is meant to be supportive but there is a condescension and a presumption that trans people are deluded about how we are perceived woven throughout. Most of us are painfully aware that nature is not overcome, that acceptance of our identities is contextual, and that mostly we are humored where we are not despised. I do not know if my years on hormones shifted most of my mental and emotional traits into the ‘woman’ cluster in gender trait space and I can say for certain it has not shifted many of my physical ones. I can only report that whatever the magnitude of the change it has been incredibly valuable to me, and what makes overcoming nature only in part so painful is that I am punished by society for failing to overcome it in full.
Such a cool article! I love the transhumanist angle, you'd have a lot of fun watching Orphan Black I think if you haven't, very silly fun show.
My main pushback is that you still manage to overapply the word natural, particularly to concepts like "man" and "woman." The "natural" that is being worked against by somebody who desires to change their body is simply and entirely the physical form of that body. A "man" who desires to become a "woman" must navigate an entirely different multiplicity of categories and definitions that, while underpinned by and inextricable from the two natural types of human form, go far beyond them and become far more malleable as a result. The relationship between the natural and the artificial components of the idea we call a "gender" is ancient and complex, requiring a lot of theory to begin to untangle, but people have been doing that work for a while now!
Personally, there's not a huge difference to me between the girl who painstakingly changes her natural form, transforming from a traditionally masculine body into a traditionally feminine one, and the girl who rewrites her internal conception of her traditionally male body to the point where she is able to confidently look in the mirror and say "this body in front of me is a woman's body." I personally don't think I understand stopping there (because changing your natural form is, as you so rightly point out, badass), but I'll never begrudge anybody who does the strength and power of that statement. Ideas are technologies too, just as artificial as physical machines and just as potent in their ability to shape and change reality.
P.S - I understand your wariness on irreversible procedures for minors, it's one of the few issues related to transgender people that is actually fairly complex. I just wanna throw out that going through your body's puberty process removes a lot of options from your adult self too. And some of these kids really know for sure, it's worth figuring out how to tell when they do.
So, furries are the subject of a lot of jokes on the Internet.
Conjecture: sex is fundamentally ridiculous, and other people's kinks that you don't share are particularly funny. Hence, people who are not themselves furries think that a guy in a fur suit is just ridiculous.
AGP might be in a similar category, of a kind that most people (including a lot of trans people) just don't have. So out view on it is something like, probably someone has that kink, but most people don't, and its at least plausble that many trans people dont have ir. Even the proponents of AGP as an explanation tend to think that FtM's dont have it for example.. Though their reasoning may be highly fallacious, along the lines of:
a) women don't have sexual desires (arguably not true)
b) FtM transsexual are psychologically like cis women, in particular wrt (a). (Also, arguably not tue)
c) Therefore FtM transsexuals cannot be secually motivated.
Which is pile of dubious reasoning but maybe that's how some of the AGPproponents got to assuming it doesnt apply to FtMs.