Part 1 – The History of Transgenderism: r/theschism, r/BlockedAndReported, themotte.org
Part 2 – the Causes and Rationalization of Transgenderism: r/theschism, r/BlockedAndReported, themotte.org
Part 3 – How Transgenderism Harms Women And Children: r/theschism, r/BlockedAndReported, themotte.org
Part 4 – How Transgenderism Took Over Institutions And How Some Women Are Fighting Back: r/theschism, r/BlockedAndReported, themotte.org
Part 5 – Conclusion and Discussion: r/theschism, r/BlockedAndReported, themotte.org
I had said in my last post that I wished to review a book that promised to be more red meat for the people here. But I had not expected to be posting this so soon, I thought I might find my book of choice boring enough to last me a month. Instead, I found myself engaged so deeply that I binged the entire work in a few days.
Helen Joyce is an Irish journalist and executive editor for “events business” at the Economist. She’s currently on sabbatical to do some work for Sex Matters, a UK non-profit that advises the public on the importance of biological sex as a category when making policy. In July of 2021, she published Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. It purports to be a general book about the history of transgenderism, trans activism, and the issues that trans women pose to cis women.
It is the first one that we will focus on this post.
The Girl From Denmark
For Joyce, the story begins with Einar Wegener. Wegener was a Danish man born in 1882. He was an artist and married to Gerda Wegener. As the story goes, Gerda was convinced by Anna Larssen to have Einar take Larssen’s place for some modeling because the latter was running late. Wegener’s modeling for his wife was kept a secret for years. “Hardly anyone knew that Gerda’s sultry, sloe-eyed model was her cross-dressing husband,” Joyce writes. Eventually, the couple moved to Paris, but Einar was not the only person involved now. A new figure, named Lili, began to introduce herself as Gerda’s sister.
It was, you may have guessed, Einar. Over time, he seems to have grown weaker compared to the “woman in this body”, suggesting a battle in the mind over which identity was the real one. Doctors at the time diagnosed him as mad or homosexual. But this did nothing to resolve the conflict, and Einar was determined to either make Lili a reality or simply end his own persona.
In 1930, that opportunity would come at the hands of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin and its founder Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld believed that people were all bisexual, but not in the sense that they were attracted to both, rather that they were both. This was naturally attractive to the ailing model because it allowed for the possibility that you could move from one sex to the other with enough work. He was willing to operate on Einar.
The surgeries were grueling and saw the removal of testicles and penis, then insertion of ovaries, and finally the construction of a “natural outlet”. This last part is not necessarily clear as the Nazis burned the institute’s records in 1933, leaving only Lili's memoir Man Into Woman. it would probably have been a neovagina or attempted womb transplant.
In any case, Einar ceased to exist in the operating room, and Lili was manifested into reality. Things could not have been better after the surgery, it seemed. The King of Denmark gave Lili a new passport that defined her sex as female and annulled her marriage to Gerda. She went on to get engaged to an art dealer.
Sadly, Lili would die before the marriage in September 1931 due to heart failure. But she wrote that she had found her 14 months of life as Lili to be a “whole and happy human life”.
Joyce commends Hirschfeld for his forward-thinking nature and willingness to support franchising women and supported decriminalizing homosexual relationships between men (he was himself gay), but excoriates his views on what it means to be a female. She suggests that his views had a conspicuously shaped hole named Charles Darwin. For Joyce, Darwin had conclusively demonstrated that there was no meaningful definition of sex apart from that about reproduction. She accuses believers in Hirschfeld’s model as being sexist and simply accommodating the existence of women scientists, poets and leaders by claiming they were simply being less womanly.
Lili does not get off scott-free either, Joyce relates passages from her memoir that suggest some unconscious sexism in her mind. Lili believed her validation as a woman would come about by having a child. She self-described as the character opposite to Einar: thoughtless to his thoughtfulness, illogical to his ingenuity, superficial to his sagacity. The last fulfilment of being a real woman, according to Lili, was to have a “sterner being, the husband” to protect her in life.
Lili's importance to this topic will become clear eventually, I promise.
“What American Woman Wouldn’t Be Happy?”
Following this lengthy account come yet another, this time about Christine Jorgensen, formerly known as George Jorgensen. Jorgensen was a 26-year-old New Yorker who went to Europe in 1950 to get treatment for “men like him”. The 1930s and 40s had seen the rise of synthetic sex hormones and antibiotics, with some doctors now claiming it was possible to move males to the female end of the spectrum. Jorgensen would return in 1952 having undergone castration, penectomy, and plastic surgery for his external female genitalia.
Crucially, however, the doctors who treated him did not regard themselves as making him the opposite sex. They saw him as a man so beset by “transvestism” as to be unable to live without presenting as a woman. Christine was the one who claimed to be a woman to the media (the title of this section is a paraphrasing of what she told reporters). The media that covered the story, and their readers, ate it up. They praised the results and cast no doubt on Jorgensen’s claims about what sex was or about her own intersex condition.
But for all the many requests that the doctors who did the operation received, all were turned down. Instead, Joyce argues, an enterprising fraud and German endocrinologist would take up this task. That man’s name? Harry Benjamin.
To be clear, I don’t see any evidence that Benjamin didn’t believe what he said, and Joyce doesn’t directly argue this either. But the references to his quack background seem chosen to imply as much.
In any case, Benjamin was an outspoken advocate for using hormones and surgery to treat “transsexualists” as opposed to most doctors of the time who would have use electric shocks or mega-doses of the original sex’s hormones to “cure” the desire. In 1963, he took on a patient named Rita Erickson and transitioned her into Reed Erickson. Erickson was grateful and funded him for several research symposia. Erickson also went on to fund the Erickson Educational Foundation, which primarily focused on funding studies into transsexualism, as well as the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.
In the following decade, other major medical centers would open up programs of a similar sort. Thus began a slow but continuous effort by doctors and researchers who would go on to be authorities and gatekeepers. They did their best to accommodate their patients. In 1979, they would all get together and found their own professional association, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association.
Or, as you may know it after 2006, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Putting Your Money Where Your Benjamin Is
The history of transgenderism cannot be explained without talking about the man who coined the term “gender”. John Money was a Harvard psychologist from New Zealand who popularized the sex-gender distinction that people use even to this day.
Briefly, Money is the reason we talk about gender at all and make the distinction between sex and gender. For him, a woman or man was defined by taking on certain roles, which they were socialized (taught by others) into accepting. But some people were atypical for their sex and took on the roles of the other sex more easily/naturally. In other words, gender was what your roles were, and sex was your body.
Joyce describes their meeting as a moment when the stars aligned. You had Benjamin on one hand who believed that sex was a spectrum and people could move between the two ends, and Money on the other who believed that men and women were defined by what roles they took on, not by their bodies. Combined in a manner akin to Dragon Ball Z’s Fusion Dance, they created a powerful new theory of what caused cross-sex identification, what it meant, and what to do about it.
This can be found in Bejamin’s work The Transsexual Phenomenon. In it, he gave Hirschfeld’s depiction of a sex spectrum and described transsexuals as people suffering from a mind-body mismatch. He would also nod to Money’s ideas about “gender feeling” (a collection of feelings, attitudes, and desires). If this feeling was settled and mismatched to the body, then the body had to give.
We will discuss Money, his work, and his impact in a later post.
Handling Edge Cases
I mentioned previously that Lili Elbe had been granted a new passport by the Kingdom of Denmark that stated her sex as female. But, as Helen Joyce asks, what did this really mean to the people who made such decisions?
She relates the case of Corbett v. Corbett as a telling example in far more detail than really necessary. Arthur Corbett wanted his marriage to April Ashley annulled on the grounds that she was a trans woman. Corbett did not look totally good in this case, to be clear, as he was someone who broke up his previous marriage because he was obsessed with Ashley and only demanded an annulment when she started asking for the deeds to their house. The judge in that case delivered the following remarks (somewhat paraphrased) to a devastated Ashley.
Intercourse using the completely artificially constructed cavity could never constitute true intercourse…the respondent is not, and was not, a woman at the date of the ceremony of marriage, but was, at all times, a male.
Joyce characterizes the response by officials and governments in the first half of the 20th century as trying to resolve some small number of anomalous cases with varying amounts of compassion and logic. The British government of Ashley’s time (the 1960s) believed that no operation could change sex, so even if the NHS would perform sex-change operations, it would not allow the recipient to go about being treated as a woman by the government.
But why said governments went about it how they did is an important question, and Joyce attributes this to two factors: the rise of bureaucracy and the shift in what defined womanhood.
Firstly, there was always a legal significance to being a man or woman: voting, inheriting, or even controlling money was dependent upon this. But no laws defined sex because it seemed pointless. Everyone could just see and make an accurate assessment, and the few who cross-dressed or passed as the other sex could be seen by their naked body.
This obviously changed with Lili Elbe, who would not appear male under nudity. But the less obvious influence was the rise of government documentation that listed sex. If you showed these, they would count as proof that you were a man or woman. To someone who was trans, these documents were sought after as another bit of proof to help get society to validate the new identity. Persuading bureaucrats was now a useful goal.
Secondly, what it meant to have womanhood, or be a woman, changed significantly between Jorgensen’s return in 1952 and her death in 1989. For doctors, journalists, and lawyers who were involved with this topic, it was no longer about having a body that could under normal circumstances get pregnant. Now it was about being able to “receive” in heterosexual sex and an inner sense of being “female”.
At first glance, this does not sound too bad, but without reference to reproduction, Joyce argues that being a woman became more individualistic over communal. Reproductive service was about your role in your species, sexual service was about your role to your husband.
This, she argues, was the birth of “gender identity”.
The Role Of Leftist Thought
Joyce, surprisingly enough, does not really delve deeply into the role played by broader left-wing ideology in supporting and even promoting transgenderism. She does spend some effort to address what she calls “social justice” or “applied postmodernism” (AP). As she tells it, AP rejects objectivity, logic, and reason. Here, language prescribes instead of describes, meaning oppression springs from discourse. The focus on letting individuals reign supreme in defining themselves fits mind-body dualism perfectly, since it means being a man or woman can never be gatekept.
But to convince others of this, you have to deny the objectivity of sex and instead insist that gender identities are the real thing. Judith Butler, described as the most influential gender theorist, has argued that sex and gender are not distinct and are both socially constructed. Tellingly, Butler defines transness as the mismatch between what society tells you to act as and what you know about yourself (notice the framing of society oppressing individual expression). Doctors, she argues, engage in performance when they register a baby’s sex, changing social reality by their very words.
Joyce discusses the terms AFAB/AMAB (assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth) and argues that they deny any argument that man/woman might be gender and male/female can be kept for sex. Instead, she argues, TRA ideology takes these terms to mean you are female or male should you define yourself that way.
This was a bold claim to me. I had even recently argued, among other things, that I did not know how many TRAs (trans rights activists) believed that a trans person was by nature the sex they identified as. Joyce would tell me that my definition of “sex” includes immutability, and I think that it a good definition of my position. I do not think we should define sex as anything other than what your natal body’s reproductive pathways are, but I remain open to arguments to the contrary.
With that said, I think Joyce has pointed to a gap in my own thinking. I had assumed that when terms like AFAB and AMAB are used, TRAs understood sex mostly as I did. But if they follow ideas like Butler’s, then sex and gender are both malleable to the extent that yes, TRAs would tell you they are actually the same in terms of body as people of the sex they identify as.
As for how widespread this idea is, I’ve found the following.
-
Here are 3 studies published in 2017 and 2018 that use male/female as one would traditionally use man/woman.
-
Wikipedia defines trans women as having a “female gender identity”.
-
A 700 person Twitter poll from 2018 where about 50% said that trans women are female.
There is more, of course, but I think these at least suggest the idea sex and gender are to some people mutable. I’m still not clear on how prevalent this view of sex is, but I think it is at least not insignificant.
I’m a bit frustrated that Joyce doesn’t go further into the role of left-wing thought in the intellectual and ideological support for transgenderism. I think it would be worthwhile to discuss what drove, and arguable drives, left-wing support for glorifying all forms of individual expression. I myself covered one such motivation here.
That’s all for this post. Next time, we’ll go over the harm Joyce attributes to the version of pro-trans ideology that has come to define what it means in 2023 to be supportive, and maybe some other stuff as well. I hope you enjoyed!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To the best of my understanding, this distinction was introduced, or at least popularized, in the mid-20th century by Simone de Beauvoir. In a nod to horseshoe theory, the people who seem to most resist this in my experience are conservative people who make no distinction because they think social and biological roles are intertwined, and trans advocates who make no distinction because they object to the use of any language that helps to distinguish transsexuals from the biological categories they are emulating.
It seems to me that the trans movement is deeply committed to doing the opposite of tabooing their words. They're not the only ones--I think a lot of the political left, along with many conservative religious groups, flee from clarity a lot. My own prejudice is that this is because they know, at some level, that linguistic clarity undermines their ingroup activism. But Scott Alexander has written occasionally about preserving disclarity in ways that may help to arrive at a slightly more charitable take. Maybe.
Horseshoe theory is such a good way to describe the convergence. I myself try to maintain a distinction between man/woman and male/female but even someone as pathologically fastidious about words as me fails regularly.
More options
Context Copy link
For me, I've long felt that the very concept of being "trans" depends on sex and gender being distinct concepts, which is why I'm so confused when I encounter trans activists insisting that they're one and the same. What on earth does "trans woman" mean if not "a person with a female gender but a male sex"?
If the "intersex brain" hypothesis had any validity (the idea that trans people are intersex individuals where the primary physical feature affected is their brains, which are more similar to their identified sex), then I could imagine defining a trans woman in those terms. That is, we could decide that an intersex (leaning feminine) brain in an otherwise masculine frame is the "tie breaker" for sex determination, and that such a person is female with a condition affecting the rest of their body, which requires treatment to get it in line with their intersex brain.
The only issue with this, is that I'm given to understand that current brain science doesn't confirm the intersex brain hypothesis, and that even the positive results in this field are questionable, since there's lots of brain regions, and it doesn't take that much statistical maneuvering to find a single brain region in a sample population that is more similar in transwomen and ciswomen than it is to typical cismen.
More options
Context Copy link
What I've seen seems to suggest they believe that someone can have an image or view of themselves that is deep-seated and internalized which corresponds to a "female gender identity". Note the use of the word "female", not "womanly" or something similar.
I think a big confounder here is how often trans people lie to doctors. It's not hard to find the criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-V-TR and just memorize the script to get the treatment you want. I don't have a time stamp, but I believe Abigail Thorn talks a little bit about it in this video.
It's really unclear to me, if any testimony from trans people themselves should be taken to be an accurate description of their internal experiences, or a script they learned to tell doctors and the public that optimizes for acceptance and ease of understanding. They might hold a more complicated position that they don't share because it would undermine their claims.
I'm socially liberal enough that no matter what the actual underlying case may be, I can justify pronoun hospitality, nickname hospitality, and access to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgeries. But I'm not sure if something like Blanchard's typology, or social contagion theory, or something-something autism turned out to be the underlying cause of transgenderism that the general public would agree. If it turned out that the vast majority of trans people have brains more similar to their sex assigned at birth on the whole, and that became a widely known truth, I don't know what fate would await trans people at the hands of larger society.
jfc I can't watch five seconds of thing without losing my lunch. WTF is wrong with these theatric propaganda spewing youtubers who all end up deciding they're women?
More options
Context Copy link
So you would support hormones and surgeries for transgenderism caused by social contagion? That sounds interesting, could you flesh that out?
I'm not sure I have anything profound to say here. To use a non-trans example, I suspect the desire for tattoos and certain forms of cosmetic surgery are plausibly a result of "social contagion", and I still don't see much point in the State being wielded as a weapon to stop people from doing these things, even acknowledging that some percentage of people who seek out either of these will regret it.
The first results I found on Google claim that 65% of women regret getting plastic surgery, and 78% of people with tattoos regret at least one of them. I can speculate a number of reasons a person could regret a surgery or tattoo. Perhaps it was a botch job, perhaps people who are dissatisfied enough with their looks to want cosmetic surgery or a tattoo are also likely to be self-critical enough to never be satisfied with how they look. Perhaps they become conscious of lost job opportunities, or loss of status and respect in their social circles. The potential reasons are endless, and I'm sure the articles I linked go into many other reasons for this regret.
Basically, I'm not a paternalist. I think giving people the freedom to figure out what their version of the good life looks like, inevitably creates the freedom to ruin their own life as well. There are lots of ways people can ruin their own lives: Sometimes it looks like taking up smoking, sometimes it looks like becoming obese, sometimes it looks like obeying your parents when they order you not to go out of State to the great college you got a full ride scholarship to, sometimes it looks like being so stubbornly independent that you refuse to ask your family for help even though they would happily solve several of your problems in an instant. Etc., etc.
Obviously, this is easiest to apply to adults. Certainly, I don't think any trans adult with the money for it should be denied the ability to seek out surgeries and treatments available to cis people. If we give cis men over 35 the ability to get put on testosterone, why not trans men? If we let cis women get boob jobs, why not trans women?
More caution is obviously called for when it comes to minors. There's a lot of concerns with regards to unknowns, and the elephant in the room is that going through only the puberty of their identified sex is probably the best guarantee of a "normal" life living as the opposite sex. Ideally, I'd like parents, doctors and the child to weigh all options, be presented with all possible information, and to unanimously agree on a course of action for a trans child.
If being trans is mostly social contagion, I would like that to be widely known and to be weighed when making these decisions. The social contagion hypothesis doesn't mean that the desire to transition can easily be brainwashed away, or that we have reliable ways to make the socially contaminated people happy once they've gotten the idea they're trans into their head.
Even when it comes to tattooing, I'm sure there are kids raised by tattoo-averse parents, who are told all their life that they'll be disowned if they ever get a tattoo, who wait until they're financially independent and of the age of majority and get a tattoo anyways. In fact, I know such people exist, because my sister is one of them. Having graduated college - paid for by my parents, she now has several tattoos, much to my dad's displeasure.
I'm sure there's a non-zero regret rate for transitioning. Many people who transition will regret it, or will regret at least some of the procedures they seek out. Some will require additional surgeries to correct those regretted surgeries. Perhaps it would be good to nudge people away from bad outcomes, and to somewhat gatekeep transition, to limit the amount of people who regret it. But in the end, I think the strength of our society has been in allowing people enough freedom for good outcomes, while accepting the bad ones as acceptable loses. Sometimes, the family black sheep really will be happier with a tattoo and piercings, and sometimes the weird girl who always felt pushed around her entire life really will be happier living in the role of a man. I don't presume to know ahead of time which outcome a person will have.
I dont think regret particularly matters, because its a backwards-looking measure. Its possible that youll regret all or none of the possible decisions, after you actually make them.
Its more about the idea of the "real self", and how the social environment needs to "let it develop". This is common among liberals and especially in the trans discourse, so I was surprised by you position seeming to give it little weight.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've actually heard the opposite: that, ironically, trans memoirs are actually surprisingly open things like autogynephilia, while activists insist on tarring and feathering Blanchard and suppressing the very idea.
I've seen only one example of it, quoted by another feminist, but I can't really say I know for sure since trans memoirs...aren't a priority.
It wasn't a memoir, but Andrea Long Chu in her book "Females" does mention that she was into sissy hypnosis before she transitioned, and she blames it for making her trans. However, that whole work seems written to be provocative not necessarily to state the truth, so I'm not sure if she was trolling or not. I'd be curious if you could remember the names of some trans memoirs that mention AGP?
I looked up the one concrete example of someone bringing this up and the person she cited was Long Chu, but an article instead of her book it wasn't so much about sissy hypnosis as transitioning for things like benevolent sexism and female clothing.
Can't think of another example offhead, sorry.
Haven't read it, but Anne Lawrence's book "Men trapped in Men's bodies" has "first-person narratives collected from 249 autogynephilic transsexuals over a period of 13 years". I have read the excellent "Galilleo's Middle Finger" by Alice Dreger, which refers to Anne Lawrence's work extensively.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is only going to become more of an issue as telehealth takes hold. I've gotten a telehealth subscription for some...ahem...fun drugs and it took comically little effort to get a prescription for whatever I wanted. I even got one thing, decided I wanted the other thing, and went back and more or less asked for that instead, and got it handed right to me. Prescription medicine by digital chat is a joke, but it's just going to keep going until it stops being funny.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link