A lot of gender dysphoric people don’t transition.
In fact, based on the anecdotal evidence of people I’ve interacted with, I’d guess that only about half of gender dysphoric people transition.
Note that by “gender dysphoria” I mean not the various limited definitions invented by trans people on the Internet, but the actual, clinical definition in the DSM-V:
A. A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, of at least 6 months’ duration, as manifested by at least two of the following:
1. 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).
2. 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).
3. A strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender.
4. A strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
5. A strong desire to be treated as the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).
6. 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).
B. The condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.
Now, some of the gender dysphoric people who don’t transition really ought to transition. I am certain every trans person has had the experience of talking to a friend and wanting to shake them and say “YOU’RE A GIRL! YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU’RE A GIRL AND IF YOU STOP THINKING YOU’RE A BOY THIS WILL ALL BE FIXED!”
However, I’ve met a lot of gender dysphoric people who wouldn’t be served by transitioning. Some of them have practical objections. For instance, I’ve met people who find that their gender dysphoria is mild enough that they feel treating it would be outweighed by the transphobia they’d face. Other people experience physical dysphoria that it’s not currently possible to fix: for instance, they may feel dysphoric about not having erections, but they’d also feel horribly dysphoric about having chest hair.
Another very common category is people whose experienced gender is “I do not want to see or be seen by gender”. They may feel deeply dysphoric in highly gendered spaces like a Girl’s Night Out or Women in STEM group. However, transitioning to the other binary gender would give them a different set of highly gendered spaces, and presenting as nonbinary means that your gender is quite unusual and therefore the most salient thing about you to most people you meet. For this reason, they often wind up identifying as cisgender.
I think trans communities on the whole need to be more aware of the existence and needs of gender dysphoric non-transitioning people. Our gender theory should allow space for people who are gender dysphoric but don’t want to transition. We should let them talk about their experiences without immediately jumping in with “so, you’re trans, though.” This will help both gender dysphoric people who don’t want to transition and gender dysphoric people who’ll end up transitioning– being trans is scary! It’s a lot easier when you can articulate your experiences without committing to the huge life step of transitioning.
Furthermore, we need to be conscious of competing access needs. Certain recommendations to make spaces more accommodating to trans people– “everyone go around the room and state your name and pronoun!”, “ask everyone you meet what their gender is!”– tend to bring gender into the forefront. That’s unwelcoming to non-transitioning gender dysphoric people, who have to misgender themselves. And it’s really unwelcoming to “I do not want to see or be seen by gender” people, because it’s suggesting that one of the things that causes them gender dysphoria should be socially mandatory. In general, I think we should be cautious before making a big deal out of people’s genders, and if we do offer an ability to opt out (for instance, making it clear that people do not have to give a pronoun if they don’t want to).
Thing of Things 
Thank you for this. Very well articulated.
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Oh yeah. Count me in. Somewhat serious dysphoria about several of my (primary and secondary) sex characteristics, mild dysphoria about gendered treatment. Never going to “transition”, whatever that would mean. I think getting gendered treatment as the “opposite” gender from my assigned gender might be nice at first but the novelty would wear out quickly and I’d probably be even more dysphoric in the end. I’m trying to avoid situations where I would get strongly gendered treatment. Maybe doing some cosmetic body modifications when I have the money.
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I’m not sure how people who care a lot about gender and people who want it to be a non-topic can share space comfortably. Any thoughts about what might work?
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That is a problem. You have people for whom it is really important that their correct identity is recognised and used, and people for whom it’s not a huge big deal, and people who really don’t care one way or the other, and people (like me) who don’t want to know, don’t want to talk about it*, if you want me to call you “she/he/ze/xie” that’s fine but I do not want the Official Workplace Policy where everyone is herded into the conference room and HR makes us all stand up and state our preferred pronouns.
I don’t know how to balance all these out, other than that people who really really are upset about it get to ask for and have preferred pronouns but in some way this can be made not a big deal for everyone.
*Not because I don’t care about your discomfort or suffering but because I don’t want to talk about my own personal life at all. Honestly, I’d really prefer if we could settle on a neutral pronoun like on (unfortunately, “one” in English has that silly Talking Like Royal Family connotation so it’s not usable) for everyone and none of this “are you he/she/it/they/both/neither/neuter” merry-go-round.
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Is there a name for the set of people who would or has benefitted by transitioning? I’ve generally used ‘transgender’, but it’s also used in other way (as an umbrella term and to refer to people who have transitioned).
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This sums up my experience too. Highly gendered spaces (either for women or for men) freak me out. As a person who is very much about “I do not want to see or be seen by gender” and also as somebody with mild dysphoria I find this relatable. Also in my country transitioning as a non binary person is imposible. The doctors would not allow it (I know I asked around). It hurts bc I realy want to , but the cost would be too great(both in literal money and loss of social suport) And I will have the same problems as the other binary gender with the expection that at least I am used to this and I know how to manage it
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But this would imply that someone could identify as a gender other than the one assigned at birth, but benefit from learning to set that down and live as cisgender. The trans community has a strong ideological need to prohibit people from even thinking that.
Denying competing people’s needs in hopes of advancing one’s own is like, 99% of what the trans activist community does with its time.
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Huh, when I look at the National Center for Transgender Equality, I notice it seems to be spending its time on changing Facebook’s authentic name policy, making it easier to update ID cards to have one’s actual gender, supporting refugees, advocating for trans women not to be placed in men’s shelters, advocating for criminal justice reform for trans people, and trying to end transgender health discrimination. None of these seem to be obvious cases of competing access needs to me. Can you provide a source for your argument?
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Your own posts claiming that straight men who feel that sex with or attraction to trans women is incompatible with their sexuality are just empirically wrong about the nature of their own sexual orientation?
The rise and fall of the gender bread man, and the reasons the fall was so inevitable that I predicted exactly how it would occur the moment I saw it for the first time?
As a social movement, it has pathologies.
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Even granting for the sake of argument that those are both people ignoring competing access needs, they are about one percent of the trans movement, the vast majority of which seems to be concerned with things like housing discrimination, job discrimination, and health care. Even just within the subset of People Talking About Trans Issues On The Internet, Huffington Post’s Transgender section (which seems to be fairly mainstream in such matters) is mostly focusing on trans people’s right to use the bathroom, familial rejection of trans people, trans people running for office, representation of trans people in the media, etc. I fear you may have fallen victim to the availability heuristic.
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You’re using the specific nature of object level goals to redirect away from the implications and effects of the rationales, arguments, and strategies typically offered in support of those object level goals.
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@patrick — What the hell are you even talking about? Yes the trans community goes through a lot of dumb cycles about gender theory, cuz gender is complicated and no one understands it. Which, whatever. If you’re an Internet-ideaspace-nerd, then you’ll be exposed to that stuff, but you’re in a fucking bubble. Most trans folks don’t give a shit about that “genderbread” stuff. They care about jobs and housing. They care about sex worker’s rights, cuz so many of our friends do sex work. They care about ID laws, cuz changing our IDs and documents turns out to be a big deal in how we live our day to day.
You realize that your average trans woman spends about zero time arguing with TERFs about Judith-fucking-Butler, and plenty of time dodging cops who want to hassle her, or jock-bros who want to kick her ass?
Good grief.
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I do see the good intention behind “Ask everyone you meet what their gender is!” but on the other hand, it’s horribly intrusive. Should I then follow up by asking their sexual orientation, current romantic status, and preferred kink?
As somebody who hates with a passion those “icebreaker” things where it’s “Now we’ll go round the circle and everyone introduce themselves and say a few things about yourself” – I can barely bring myself to tell people my name (note: and my real life name is not any of the ones I use online) – so “everyone go around the room and state your name and pronoun” would elicit “The fuck I will, it’s none of your goddamn business”.
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I think in this issue it’s important to remember what transition actually is – i.e. among other things, not magic. If someone postpubescent feels horribly dysphoric about being too tall or too short for their gender, transition isn’t gonna help it at all. Similarly, if someone experiences social dysphoria, and wants to pass as a cis person of their gender, transition only makes sense iff it’s gonna help in this, but not otherwise – people who are willing to pick up on gender presentation cues, and use that as a heuristic for gender instead of the obvious birth sex are probably gonna do that regardless of one’s body fat distribution – so unless transitioning actually increases passability, it’s gonna do little to relieve social dysphoria.
With that in mind, it seems rather odd and unpleasantly essentialist to conclude that even everyone who identifies with a binary gender different from the one they were assigned as birth should go with the exact set of medical procedures we call transition.
I hate this sooooooo fucking much. I mean, I’m willing to tolerate it, since clearly with my preferences and mental quirks I’m in a vast minority of people who aren’t quite cis, and for most this works well, but fuck! In the world where people are so concerned about maintaining the security of women-only safe spaces, by asking people to refer to me as a woman, I’d be claiming access to them, and it’s a rather massive step I can’t easy backpedal on – not without a massive social cost of doing so. And once I do so, people would expect me to transition as well, and I’d have to explain why I’m not doing so. Asking to use gender-neutral options has a bit less of a social cost, but it has cost for me, since I need to learn all the new non-trivial ways to speak about myself, which is particularly hard in languages that aren’t even remotely as gender-neutral as English. And asking people to use “he” with my own tongue, knowing that I could to otherwise, but don’t, feels roughly the same way as saying “yeah, sure, I’m donating both my kidneys right now, I’m cool with that”.
It’s so much easier to live with the plausible deniability of “I didn’t ask you to call me `she’, you started it, so I’m not accountable for that”.
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This is false.
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Oh geez thank you thank you thank you. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone suggest that the way I experience gender is a real and valid thing.
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“I am certain every trans person has had the experience of talking to a friend and wanting to shake them and say ‘YOU’RE A GIRL! YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU’RE A GIRL AND IF YOU STOP THINKING YOU’RE A BOY THIS WILL ALL BE FIXED!’ ”
Since I’ve never had an interaction like this before (or I probably wouldn’t notice if I did), could you explain what sort of problem a friend might have that would lead you to believe they’re a girl?
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“Gosh, I really hate my body! I wish I were pretty, the way girls are. It would make me so happy to get to have breasts and a vagina! Ugh, but I’m a cis man, so I can’t.”
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Gosh, I really hate my body! I wish I were pretty, the way girls are. It would make me so happy to get to have women’s shoe size below 10, be at least half a foot shorter (and not just for fitting into my favorite dresses and wearing heels without bumping into doors, but also for not feeling squeezed while flying or driving), in general have proportions that don’t commit me into wearing either poorly fitting or custom-made clothes, and have shoulder width that doesn’t make me look like Hulk, but it’s 2015, not 2115, so I can’t 😦
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Could we go ahead and maybe spend more effort shaking those people and saying “YOU’RE A GIRL!” etc.? I mean, a lot of them are just victims of the popularization of The Narrative, which implicitly tells them that if they didn’t always know they can’t really be trans, and other things like that, so the shaking would do them some good. (Certainly, this was my experience.)
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Probably to some people it sounds like you’re exaggerating, but this was literally me ten years ago. So thank you.
Unfortunately, I don’t think shaking me and pointing it out would have helped. I managed to build structures of denial strong enough to stave off my own brain yelling at me to transition, you think I’d have listened to yours? Please.
It’s a problem. So what would have helped? In retrospect, probably the best thing would have been lots of positive media representation of trans people (things like Transparent).
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What would have helped me would have included representation of the diversity of trans subjectivity and trans experience, both in the media and in activist (read: well-meaning ally) discussion of trans issues. Also, people trying to educate audiences not pitching every single thing in a way that felt like it started with an implicit “unlike all of you cis people…”
Also some explicit acknowledgement of the cis-by-default ‘doesn’t everybody just feel this way?’ phenomenon.
But shaking me, accompanied by saying explicitly things like “It’s okay if you don’t have lots of memories of stereotypically girly interests from when you were five. It’s okay if you aren’t already committed to a particular system of social analysis and metaphysics of gender. It’s okay if your story is different. It’s okay to be confused. It’s okay not to be sure.” – That sure would have been better than nothing.
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What @R Stuart-Cohen said. I wish I had understood the diversity of trans experience. I grew up knowing only the “default trans narrative,” and cuz that didn’t fit me, I assumed I wasn’t really-real trans and that I shouldn’t transition. So yeah.
Anyway, I think a trans person saying to me, “Oh, you’re totally trans, hon. Girl-up, you’ll be happier” would have helped me.
I mean, not right away. It’s not like I’d go start HRT the next day. (Unless I did. Who knows.) But all the same, no one said that to me.
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Thank you for this post.
I probably have a particularly weird way of dealing with my cisphoria (I stick it all into an alter-ego I mostly use in kink) but this really resonates.
Being a BDSM alter-ego has its advantages, like the ability to respond to any question about your pronouns with ‘who the fuck gave you permission to refer to me in the third person?’
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Well said, thank you.
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This is connected with part of something that’s long bothered me about lines of argument like the following (taken from Julia Serano’s generally excellent Whipping Girl):
“I do believe that it is possible for cissexuals to catch a glimpse of their subconscious sex. When I do presentations on trans issues, I try to accomplish this by asking the audience a question: ‘If I offered you ten million dollars under the condition that you live as the other sex for the rest of your life, would you take me up on the offer?’ While there is often some wiseass in the audience who will say ‘Yes,’ the vast majority of people shake their heads to indicate ‘No.'”
There are some obvious explanations of that one outlier other than them just being a wiseass, and I don’t think it really benefits the trans(*) and/or gender dysphoric community at large to implicitly or explicitly deny or erase the possibility of such motivations.
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Strange. 30% of rationalists are fine with the idea, even if they aren’t offered any money.
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And it just so happens that the percentage of trans people in rationalist communities is like 100 times above that in the general population, so…
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More like 4 to 12 times.
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IIRC the question was something like “if you have magically woke up as a person of your inverse biological sex, would you be okay with that?” And that’s different from “you accept these 10 M$ and now you have to live as a different sex with the body you have right now and you’d have a lot of problems with marriage and family and children and transphobia and (maybe I don’t really know) some legal stuff”. I’m mostly okay with the first (there would probably be some difficulties but also some important experiences I wouldn’t be able to get otherwise at first, then it all would probably fade into “normal”). The second, not so much.
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I’m referring to Eliezer’s, not Ozy’s question.
“The Great Friendly Thing comes to you and says, “You know, on net, Earth will probably be better off if someone of your gender switched sex. It’s not *vital* that you switch or anything, but if it was just as okay with you, I’d rather swap you. But please don’t feel obligated – it wouldn’t be a net good if you were actually unhappy with the decision, it’s not worth you feeling uncomfortable about saying yes.” What do you say? You can assume all problems regarding sexual/romantic attraction and judgement from society are gone.”
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What I was saying is that Elieser’s question is very different from Julia’s. There’s no “assume all problems regarding attraction and judgement are gone” clause in Julia’s question, and in Eliezer’s you get to be changed by a Great Friendly Thing, not just have to live your life as if you’re a different sex when you still have your regular body.
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Any difference caused by “assume all problems regarding attraction and judgement are gone” seems to me to be a problem with Julia’s, rather than Eliezer’s question.
“in Eliezer’s you get to be changed by a Great Friendly Thing, not just have to live your life as if you’re a different sex when you still have your regular body.”
How large a difference do you think this makes?
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I should make a new gender survey to compare these two…
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I don’t know about other people, but for me it’s a difference between “oh, okay, sounds fun” and “just no”. I’m not sure a person in Julia’s question is allowed to have children, for example.
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Do we actually know what Julia meant by “as the other sex”? Surely she meant, you know… Having a different sex, not “you must live as another gender with no modifications to your body”; seems like she might have meant something similar to Eliezer, but obviously without the stipulations about romantic attraction and judgment from society.
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I bet it’d be clearer if we’d been to one of her presentations where she asked.
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Thank you!
Hell, even broadly recognizing that this is Actually A Thing rather than “That’s Cis Privilege, SHUT UP!” would be an improvement. >.>
(Or maybe it has *been* an improvement, and the early experiences just left such an intense impression on me that I’ve avoided spaces where I might find that out).
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I didn’t understand everything you wrote here. For example, ” That’s unwelcoming to non-transitioning gender dysphoric people, who have to misgender themselves.” It seems like you’re conflating nonbinary trans people who do not physically transition, and dysphoric people who more or less live a “cis” life. Is that correct? Your whole article reads as if there are three classes of dysphoric people: trans men, trans women, and dysphoric others. There are tons of nonbinary people who experience gender dysphoria and also do not necessarily transition, for many many reasons or no reason at all. They often do identify as trans, no ifs, ands, or buts.
I identify as nonbinary, lean male, am dysphoric under the old DSM definition, and have mostly not pursued transition, which is my choice. I not only made this choice of my own free will and not out of fear of harassment, but I don’t provide a reason for having made it. No explanation is required for a choice to not transition. I may or may not know why I made this choice. But it should not be seen as remarkable.
Best wishes.
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Oof, as a gender dysphoric person that probably will never transition, this was a soothing read. I have a lot of trans guy friends who I cant vent to about dysphoria because they jump right away to telling me I’m so valid and can transition whenever I’m ready and they remember when they were like me. But unfortunately there is no surgery or treatment that exists that would fix any of my gender problems without introducing a variety of new and exciting gender problems that I wouldn’t even have any practice dealing with, so I just end up stubbornly refusing to identify as anything and being kind of crabby about it. That’s life I guess!
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