[Note: In this piece, “female sex” and “male sex” are used to refer to the clusters “people who have ovaries, uteruses, vaginas, breasts, no beard, estrogen-dominant hormone systems, XX chromosomes, etc.” and “people who have testicles, prostates, penises, flat chests, beards, testosterone-dominant hormone systems, XY chromosomes, etc.” While I agree that these terms are cissexist, I am unaware of any equally clear terms.]
[Content warning: transphobic violence]
As we all know, I love answering questions, so I thought I would answer some questions asked by the Gospel Coalition about transgender people.
- Do transgender theories undercut or contradict the idea that sexual orientation is unchangeable?
I don’t think so.
First, while there are many cases of people staying in relationships with their partner even after their partner came out as trans, there are also many cases of such relationships ending in divorce. Even many relationships that stay together become sexless, platonic, yet deeply committed friendships. Among cisgender people, mixed-orientation marriages exist and, even though it’s difficult, some are quite happy. If that doesn’t disprove the fixity of sexual orientation, then the existence of monosexual people who stay with their trans partners should not either.
Second, many heterosexual women– in my experience– are not literally solely attracted to people who identify as men, present as men, and have male primary and secondary sexual characteristics. It is quite common for heterosexual women to be attracted to people with testosterone-dominant hormone systems, regardless of identity, or to people who identify as men, regardless of body type, or people who present as men, regardless of self-identification or sex. If a woman is attracted to people with strong jawlines and penises, she may very well continue to be attracted to her trans female partner. But that doesn’t mean her orientation has changed. She is still orientationally attracted to people with strong jawlines and penises.
Third, many people are Kinsey 1s and Kinsey 5s– that is, they have incidental attraction to people of one gender, but very strong attraction to people of another gender. Kinsey 1s and Kinsey 5s often round themselves to straight or gay (respectively). But if a Kinsey 1 woman dates another woman (whether cisgender or transgender), this doesn’t mean her orientation has changed. Her orientation is as it has always been– “attracted to few women and a lot of men.” If she happens to date one of the few women she’s attracted to, that doesn’t change anything.
Fourth, love is weird. There are many, many women who are not attracted to or even vaguely repulsed by old, fat, and bald men in general, but who find the one specific old, fat, and bald man they love to be the sexiest man alive. Is it that strange to suggest that some people might be not attracted to men in general, but who continue to think the person they love, who came out as a trans man, is the sexiest person alive? That doesn’t mean that sexual orientations typically change in general– although I am now envisioning a trans-positive ex-gay program that revolves around getting gay men to fall in love with self-closeted trans women.
Fifth, yes, some people experience orientation change (although they usually don’t have much volitional control over whether they do– trying to change your orientation yourself is very hard and doesn’t really work). No doubt some people experience orientation change after their partner comes out as trans. That does not change the fundamentals of the pro-LGBT argument, which is that there is nothing wrong with being gay, whether or not you chose to be it.
2. If gender identity is fixed and unchangeable, why do many children who experience gender dysphoria lose these feelings after puberty?
It is very unclear to me how common desistance is. Estimates range from 66% to 88% of gender dysphoric children. However, some trans advocates argue that essentially no truly gender dysphoric children desist; high desistance rates are because, before the DSM-V, the diagnosis of gender identity disorder was given to, say, boys who identified as boys but who liked wearing dresses and playing with dolls, because of sexist ideas about what boys should do. Of course, there’s nothing surprising about a boy with a male gender identity continuing to have that identity as he grows up. I am not sure that given the current state of the evidence one can come up with any firm opinion on how many gender dysphoric children will desist.
But let us assume for the sake of argument that desistance is quite common. Even under the most extreme estimates– if 88% of gender dysphoric children desist– then gender dysphoric children are forty times more likely than the general population to be gender dysphoric adults. In this case, gender dysphoria in children and gender dysphoria in adults are best understood as distinct yet closely related conditions.
It is not surprising that puberty might cause a change in gender dysphoria. Hormone replacement therapy often causes relief of dysphoria even before the hormones have had any physical effect; this suggests that gender dysphoria is linked to sex hormones on some important level. Puberty, of course, is one of the largest changes in sex hormones that a person experiences; it seems quite plausible such a change would ease dysphoria in some people and cause it in others. Some anecdotes suggest that other hormonal changes can ease dysphoria: for instance, Catholic blogger Melinda Selmys finds that her dysphoria lightens when she is pregnant or breastfeeding.
However, this model does not suggest that gender dysphoria is not de facto permanent for post-puberty gender dysphoric people. Male-sexed people will not experience a change in sex hormones as large as that of puberty. Female-sexed people may experience pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause. However, many female-sexed gender dysphoric people do not want to be pregnant or breastfeeding for the rest of their lives. Even if menopause may get rid of dysphoria for some female-sexed people, that still means a female-sexed gender dysphoric person will be gender dysphoric for half their life with only the faintest hope that menopause will ease their suffering. Therefore, this argument does not imply that transition treatment is a poor choice for most people.
The Gospel Coalition’s article includes a highly speculative comment by Alice Dreger that perhaps affirming a child in their transgender identity decreases the chance that they will desist. Of course, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case; we can’t even figure out how common desistance is! The potential risk that affirming a child’s transgender identity will cause them to be a happy trans person instead of a happy cis person must be weighed against the certainty of the harm that gender dysphoria causes to gender dysphoric children. I think there should be further research into gender dysphoric children, and in the meantime the most sensible stance is affirming the child’s transgender identity while explicitly embracing the possibility that they may grow up to be a cisgender adult.
3. When a person feels a disjunction between one’s sex at birth and one’s gender identity, why is the only course of action to bring the body into closer conformity with the person’s psychological state, rather than vice versa?
No treatment has yet been developed to change a person’s gender identity. It is somewhat difficult to prescribe a treatment that doesn’t exist.
That said, some people do choose to manage their dysphoria without transition. Melinda Selmys, whom I mentioned above, is one. Angus Grieve-Smith handles his dysphoria through crossdressing. Some detransitioned women are still gender dysphoric, and handle it through exercise, meditation, creative work, and self-acceptance.
Of course, it’s quite common for people to make mistakes about what the best way to handle their own dysphoria is. Many transitioning transgender people spent years or decades trying to manage their dysphoria without transition, and discovered the experience was hellish; they tend to shudder reading about experiences like Melinda’s or Angus’s or 23XX’s, assuming that they are in as much pain as we were in their shoes. Gender dysphoric people who detransitioned often have equal regrets about their transitions and warn transitioning trans people that they’ll experience the same pain the detransitioners did.
There have been no randomized controlled trials of transition for relief of dysphoria. No, the Swedish study— cited in the article– is not a randomized controlled trial of transition. The gender dysphoric people in that study were compared to controls who were not and had never been gender dysphoric. Gender dysphoric people obviously do not have the option to become a person with no history of gender dysphoria.
Of course, there have also been no randomized controlled trials of alternatives to transition for relief of dysphoria.
In the absence of such studies, I think there is no responsible option except carefully and thoughtfully considering your choices, talking with trusted friends, trying out options which are easy to reverse if you don’t like them, being cautious about hard-to-reverse choices, and then making the decision that seems to you like it will be best.
At this point many people may suggest that gender dysphorics who are uncertain about whether to transition should talk to a therapist. While that would be nice, few therapists have any sort of expertise in transgender issues at all. In my personal experience as a transgender person, my therapists have never consistently passed such low bars as “knows what a nonbinary person is” and “understands the effects of HRT on the human body.” If I have to pay my therapist to spend fifty minutes being her Transgender Continuing Education class, I very much doubt they will be able to have any sort of useful opinion on the merits of crossdressing versus social transition. Therapists who do have expertise in transgender issues sometimes hold to unscientific and unjustified beliefs, such as the idea that if you didn’t like trucks as a four-year-old testosterone can’t possibly be the best choice for you as an adult. Some therapists push people to transition, whether or not it’s the right choice for them. Other therapists view any admission of doubt about transition as a sign that you are not a true transgender person, and will refuse you hormones or surgery.
But I think this question gets at some deeper issues which are highlighted by the article’s objection to people with bodily integrity identity disorder who want surgery to blind them or remove a limb, as well as their description of medicine as a field in which “the purpose of treatment is to restore bodily functions and facilities that are ordered towards certain ends.”
Unlike the author, I am a disability rights advocate and transhumanist. I do not believe the purpose of medicine is to restore bodily functions and facilities that are ordered to certain ends. I believe the purpose of medicine is to allow people to exercise their bodily autonomy. Of course, many people will choose to exercise their bodily autonomy to cure pneumonia, get prosthetic limbs, and get flu shots so they don’t spend a week puking. But if a Deaf person chooses to remain Deaf, an intersex person rejects normalizing surgery, or an autistic person chooses to continue to practice autistic ways of relating, I don’t think medicine has somehow failed; those are all individuals exercising their autonomy. I find nothing strange about a woman seeking birth control when she’s twenty and infertility treatment when she’s thirty; both allow her to choose how her reproductive system will work. I support breast implants and reductions, nose jobs and laser hair removal, as ways of letting people decide what they will look like. And I see nothing wrong with either a trans person seeking bottom surgery or a person with bodily identity integrity disorder seeking to remove a limb.
In addition, I am a utilitarian. As such, I tend to have qualms about treatments intended to change people’s terminal values; I worry this would naturally lead to a sort of wireheading, in which we change people’s terminal values to ones that are easy to fulfill. Of course, sometimes value change is necessary, as when a terminal value causes a great deal of distress to oneself or others. But I think it is something to be approached with care and caution, and I would feel uneasy if value change were the first line of treatment for gender dysphoria. The author no doubt disagrees with me here, as he believes in God and thus an objective grounding for human flourishing outside of human values.
4. Is the higher rate of suicide among transgender persons due primarily to the inner tensions of experiencing gender dysphoria as a disorder, or are these acts motivated primarily by societal rejection?
According to one of the largest surveys of transgender people ever conducted, experiences of discrimination are correlated with suicide attempts. Participants who experienced discrimination at school, at work, in housing, in health care, or by law enforcement were more likely to have attempted suicide. 69% of transgender people who experienced homelessness due to being transgender have attempted suicide. Those who were sexually assaulted at school due to being transgender are at particularly high risk: 73% of those assaulted in elementary school, 73% of those assaulted in middle school, 69% of those assaulted in high school, and 78% of those assaulted in college. 68% of those physically assaulted in high school, 68% of those physically assaulted in college, and 65% of those physically assaulted at work due to anti-transgender bias have attempted suicide. 65% of those who experienced domestic violence from a family member due to being trans have attempted suicide. 70% of those sexually assaulted by police officers have attempted suicide.
Perhaps we would be less likely to attempt suicide if people stopped assaulting us.
And, sure, maybe we’d still have an elevated rate of suicide, even in a world without transphobia. But I feel like not being assaulted anymore would be a good start.
Of course, “wondering out loud about the significance or meaning of gender” (to quote the article) is not assaulting people. But transphobic beliefs do provide the societal context that eventually results in anti-transgender discrimination and assault. Talking about how transition is harmful is part of what leads a family to decide that screaming at and rejecting their child is the only way to keep them from making a horrible mistake. Talking about how men are just naturally one way and it’s shameful for them to behave differently is part of what leads elementary schoolers to throw rocks at the little boy who wants to watch My Little Pony. Talking about how having sex with a trans woman is basically like having sex with a man, and having sex with a man is the most disgusting thing possible, is part of what leads cis men to resolve their confusion about being attracted to trans women by murdering them after sex.
And social support matters! Trans people who have strong relationships with their families have a below-average rate of suicide attempts (33%). So do transgender people who are neutral to comfortable with reporting assaults to police. Acceptance of transgender people– at least if you’re the family member of a trans person or a police officer– is a clear, practical step towards reducing the transgender suicide rate. Yes, it’s effortful to make sure you use the right pronouns, but the benefit to transgender people’s mental health is clear.
5. Why are the strongest critics of “gender binaries” the most likely to support gender stereotypes on display in transgender celebrities?
For transgender people, particularly transgender women, there’s often an unfair double bind. If a transgender woman goes about in jeans and a T-shirt with no makeup, she’s told that she’s not putting any effort into her transition. If a transgender woman goes about in a dress, heels, and a full face of makeup, she’s told that she’s conforming to gender stereotypes and real women don’t wear dresses all the time.
People have unfair and unrealistic standards for transgender celebrities. Caitlyn Jenner is a Republican reality TV show star. Neither group is particularly known for their deconstruction of patriarchy. When Kylie Jenner dresses like this, no one says shit:
When Ann Coulter dresses like this, no one says shit:
But when Caitlyn Jenner dresses like this:
Suddenly everyone is up in arms about how sexist she’s being. Somebody should go tell Ann Coulter that it’s very wrong to imply that you have to wear dresses to be a woman. She probably just has the long blonde hair because she’s internalized that women are all bimbos! And don’t get me started on Kylie Jenner. Clearly the only possible reason that she could be wearing that top is because she thinks that women are only women if they’re performing for the male gaze. And what’s with that makeup? Lots of women don’t wear makeup, Kylie! You don’t have to prove you’re a woman by drawing on your eyebrows!
Several of the points discussed in the explanation of this question are absurd. Of course some people– both cisgender and transgender– identify strongly with a particular gender, and that is not somehow anti-feminist of them. Of course it is wrong to assume that someone else is not really trans just because they don’t look trans enough to you.
But I want to talk about one point which the quoted feminist, Elinor Burkett, brings up more closely. She questions why Caitlyn Jenner, who presented as a man for most of her life, should be allowed to define womanhood. Presumably only cis women (and perhaps trans women who have presented as female for a long time? it’s unclear) should define womanhood. I am not sure how Burkett plans to do this: opinion poll? That would be unfortunate for her; the vast majority of women in the world have a definition of womanhood which– while not necessarily trans-inclusive– is far more regressive and gender essentialist than Caitlyn Jenner’s. Most women worldwide do think that female brains are inherently different from male brains. The solution, I think, is not to fuss about who is “allowed” to define womanhood, but instead to attempt to come up with a useful definition for the particular purposes we are discussing it.
Burkett argues that “being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.” She explicitly rejects a definition of womanhood grounded in breasts and vaginas (and, presumably, in uteruses and XX chromosomes) as reducing women to their bodies. However, her definition opens itself up to two criticisms.
First, exactly how many gendered experiences does Burkett have in common with a subsistence farmer in India? Did Burkett’s father have to pay her a dowry for her to get married? Did she have a sister who was aborted because she was a girl? Was she fed less than her brothers? Did her parents not send her to school because they wanted to protect her virginity? If the answer is “actually, Burkett doesn’t share many gendered experiences other than the purely biological with female subsistence farmers in India”– which I think is probably true– then by her own argument either she or female Indians subsistence farmers are not really women. This seems somewhat silly.
Even in our own culture, experience of womanhood is very diverse, as an intersectional perspective shows. A developmentally disabled woman may find that she is desexualized and degendered, as part of being treated as a child due to her disability; does her desexualization and degendering mean that she is, in reality, not a woman? A butch lesbian may never have experienced the courtesies associated with being read by straight men as an appropriate object of desire; does that mean she is not a woman?
Second, many transgender women do, in fact, accrue the experiences, endure the indignities, and relish the courtesies of being a woman in a culture that reacts to them as one. Any trans woman who passes does, as do non-passing trans women in trans-positive environments in which they are considered to be women. Even non-passing trans women in trans-negative environments are not read as men and given the privileges of men; they are read as weirdo freaks. Why is one’s past experience of gender– often an experience years or decades in the past– prioritized over one’s current lived experience?
Similarly, gender dysphoria impacts many trans people’s experience of gendered socialization. Society says “you are a woman, so you are like this and you should do these things.” Many cisgender girls feel dissonance when they don’t want to do what they are supposed to do or when they aren’t like what society says they are like. But many transgender men feel dissonance about the statement “you are a woman”– even long before they articulate their gender identity to themselves! They want to do the things men do, have the traits men have, cultivate the virtues men cultivate. Many young transgender men feel a sense of pride in how many sexual partners they have, or in their ability to lift heavy things, or other accouterments of masculinity which are stigmatized for women. Trans bros exist! Of course, that isn’t the same as growing up a cisgender man. But it is an experience which is in some ways more similar to growing up a cisgender man than growing up a cisgender woman.
6. Why must one’s self-declared gender identity be accepted without question, while other forms of self-identification can be exist?
The reason that people dismiss ‘transracial’ identity is that every self-identified transracial person has turned out, upon closer inspection, to be either a troll attempting to discredit transgender people or Rachel Dolezal.
Rachel Dolezal herself has a history of lies and fraud: for instance, she faked hate crimes against herself and falsely claimed to have lived in South Africa. It seems to me much more plausible that she, a person who lies about many other things for self-advancement, pretended to be black for career purposes and came up with a transracial identity after she was found out. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a prospective identity have one representative who is not a con artist.
The article then talks about otherkin and Stefonknee, a trans woman who engages in ageplay in which she is a six-year-old girl, both of whom actually seem to have non-fraudulent reasons for their identities. (Although Stefonknee appears to use ageplay as a coping mechanism for mental illness, rather than actually believing she has a six year old’s soul.)
It is hard for me to get into a state of mind where I’m bothered about opposing otherkin or Stefonknee in the first place. As long as they’re happy, who cares? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my bone. I would certainly never discriminate against an otherkin or Stefonknee and I am happy to do any little courtesies that would make their lives more comfortable, such as referring to an otherkin as a “being” instead of a “human”. If body modifications help otherkin or Stefonknee feel more comfortable in their bodies, I think they should get them. While I don’t have a great knowledge of health-care economics, I see no problem with insurance or government-funded health care covering such body modifications if it is a cost-effective way to achieve more quality-adjusted life years. (And not if it is not, of course.) Life is too short to spend my time sticking my nose in other people’s business.
Psychology is a really confusing field. I don’t think we actually understand it well enough yet to go “in fact, it is completely physically impossible for people to develop dysphoria about being animals.” Maybe they do! And until the day when we understand psychology that well, I’m not going to be invested in “opposing” any particular identity.
7. Without a settled definition in our legal system for transgender, how can we avoid all sorts of problems, including bathroom access?
If someone is harassing others or invading their privacy in the bathroom, then of course they should be removed. But I think that allowing people to use the bathroom of their choice is obviously the correct perspective, even if you only care about cisgender people. Cisgender women have already been mistaken for transgender and harassed. Many people are mistaken about the wide variety of bodies that cisgender women can have. Do you really want a Sikh woman who has a beard due to polycystic ovary syndrome to be excluded from the bathroom because dumbasses don’t know that some cis women can grow beards?
But to address the main point: trans activists are pushing a very clear and concrete definition for transness. It’s “if a person says they’re trans, then they’re trans.” It is hard to be mistaken about this definition!
The author seems confused about how something can be both a medical condition and something a person has if they say they do. But this is actually very common for mental health disorders! For instance, look at one of the standard screening tools for depression. Here are some of the answers that will get you four points for being depressed:
- “I am so sad and unhappy that I can’t stand it.”
- “I feel the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve.”
- “I am dissatisfied and bored with everything.”
- “I hate myself.”
Basically, about half the questions on the Beck Depression Inventory are different ways of phrasing “are you depressed?” and then if you say “yes” the BDI will reveal that you are depressed. Truly a triumph of medical science here.
And it gets worse! In my experience, primary care physicians usually don’t bother with trying to come up with different ways of asking if you’re depressed, they just ask you outright and then write an SSRI prescription.
Of course, depression and transness are treated differently from a medical perspective. Psychiatrists will often say things like “have you considered that the reason you hate yourself and want to die is that you’re depressed?” when the person has not thought of this at all, and they will also say things like “even though you say you’re depressed, based on your history of running off to Reno to take cocaine and gamble away your life savings I think you actually have bipolar disorder”. Conversely, transness is pretty much always self-diagnosed, and it is relatively rare for trans-positive doctors to say that you actually have a different thing unless you are literally a psychotic person with delusions of being male.
The reason that transness and depression work differently is mostly that trans people don’t trust doctors, because doctors went through a long period of trying to figure out who was Really Really Trans based on Science. “Sorry, you wore pants, women don’t wear pants. Denied.” “You admitted being attracted to women and as we all know lesbians don’t exist. Denied.” “You played with trucks as a kid and little girls don’t play with trucks. Denied.” “You’re not hot enough, and as we all know women are all hot. Denied.” “Please tell me all about your sex life. It is very important that we make sure you have a properly feminine sex life after you’ve transitioned. Tell me, what do you think about when you masturbate?”
Probably depressed people would also be suspicious of this whole psychiatry thing if for a couple decades you couldn’t be diagnosed with depression unless you also wore solely black, wrote reams of terrible free-verse poetry, and listened to The Smiths, and also if depression diagnosis regularly involved people asking about your masturbation habits for no reason.
But the main point stands. There is no blood test for the vast majority of mental health conditions. They are diagnosed based on self-report. Either you think all mental health conditions are invalid and unreal, or you accept that gender dysphorics are, in fact, accurately reporting our gender dysphoria. Those are the options.
Thing of Things 
“And I see nothing wrong with …. a person with bodily identity integrity disorder seeking to remove a limb.”
This kind of extreme commitment to a single moral principle over any and all other values really bugs me. I know it’s uncivil, but I can’t help but accuse you of adopting it as an axiom of convenience. To me it sounds like a certain kind of libertarian with their “nonaggression” and “homestead” principles.
Hey dorks! Just admit that a commitment to liberty and against government power is your overriding political priority! Stop trying to construct an entire foundation for a rational system of ethics based on that! Stop biting bullets you don’t need to bite! Your concerns are parochial compared to moral foundations and your axioms are ridiculous. Go read “The Problem of Social Cost” by Ronald Coase!
These extreme commitments aren’t just wrong, they’re incoherent. The harder you commit to one vale, the easier it is to construct examples that show you can’t even define that value without reference to other values.
Body autonomy is great, but when you go so far as to say there’s nothing wrong with people hacking off their own limbs and that doctors should help them because AUTONOMY, I just can’t take it seriously. I could accept it as the lesser evil. Maybe if doctors don’t help them they’ll do it themselves and die of gangrene. But “nothing wrong”!?. No, that’s insanity.
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I honestly don’t understand what’s wrong with people removing their own limbs. What moral principle does it contradict? Aesthetics? Yes, I also consider people with intact limbs more aesthetically pleasing but it seems far less important than autonomy and non-suffering.
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The big problem is that removing the limb in question rarely actually makes sufferers of BDD any happier.
If that wasn’t the case, I would say that it was probably morally justifiable to do so. Same if we had a good way of reversing an amputation.But currently the most likely thing to happen if you remove the limb of someone who requests that they remove your limb is that they don’t get any more comfortable, and they’re now down a limb.
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This was BIID, not BDD. People with BIID often become much happier once the limb is removed.
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At some point you have to just admit that someone is so mad or deceived or otherwise of diminished capacity and free will that their “preferences” lack legitimacy. People who want to remove limbs because they just don’t like them are clearly well into that category. Some choices are so obvoiusly self destructive that the very act of attempting to make the choice is strong evidence against it being a free choice in the first place.
What if someone has a burning desire to be fed to lions?
Who is it ethical to furnish heroine to? Addicts? The developmentally disabled? Children? How young?
We can make the examples as extreme as you want, eventually you’ll have to admit the principle that some choices are so obviously the wrong choice that they are presumptively unfree as choices. And once you accept the principle I don’t see how you defend “I wish I didn’t have this arm”.
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Can you describe what exactly you mean by self-destruction here? For non-lethal choices, do you describe things that you expect people to regret in future as self-destructive?
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I don’t mean anything technical by it, I mean it it’s ordinary colloquial sense. “Self destruction” is things people will regret, things they would regret if they were in their right mind, the physical destruction of ones body or health, the destruction of the mind, etc. We speak of drunks and addicts as “self-destructive”. It seems to me that seeking a completely unnecessary amputation is self destructive in the same sense.
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Lawrence, you keep using words like “clearly” and “obviously” about things that to me are neither clear nor obvious. If you wish to persuade me, you have to spell out the actual argument.
Why do you think people who want to remove limbs are “mad” or “deceived” (what does it even mean to be “mad”)? I think regret is a good criterion here, like others comments have said. After having their limb removed, do they regret it or become content? If they regret it then the desire to remove the limb was irrational. If they are content, then their preference is entirely consistent.
Examples that involve death (like being fed to lions) are more complicated since the person will not be alive to tell us whether they regret it. However, it is known that many people who attempt suicide but fail, regret the suicide, which is a good reason why shouldn’t let people commit suicide on a whim (but should let them do it if their decision is stable after enough calm deliberation).
Children are a special case, both because we know their preferences are unstable and because they have diminished capacities to predict long-term consequences of their actions. The latter is another good test: Do people who want to remove their limb have a good notion of what life without a limb would be like? If they don’t have such a notion and are moreover incapable of forming it, then it would be a good argument that their stated desires are irrational. However, if they can model the future without a limb about as well as a well-informed outside observer of average mental faculties, then their choice is well-informed.
I completely reject the principle that some choices are “so obviously the wrong choice.” I think that the concept of a “right choice” is strictly subjective and the only meaningful questions are whether the person’s choices are consistent and well-informed. I see no grounds whatsoever for dismissing preferences of the latter kind (as long as they are not harmful to other people, of course).
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Lawrence – I don’t think that you can use self destruction to mean both “things people will regret”, and “things they would regret if they were in their right mind” when you’re talking about a group of people who (according to tailcalled above – I haven’t fact-checked it, but it sounds plausible) are often happier after doing a thing that one would expect anyone in their right mind to regret. (Or, you can, but only by acknowledging that one was mistaken about anyone in their right mind regretting it)
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I think an argument can be made on the grounds of utility, in the sense that one’s physical abilities with two limbs is greater than without. (Likewise, if transition renders one sterile, it would count as a disutility in this model.)
So it comes down to a question of how much you value people’s preferences/autonomy, how well you can predict if a physical-ability-reducing-surgery will actually satisfy the person / eleviate suffering enough to outweigh the utility of the ability to be removed, etc.
I don’t think most reactions to this sort of thing are based on that and are instead kneejerk horror or disgust or some such. I don’t really understand it and feel like I’d risk insulting people to attempt an explanation of what’s happening in their heads.
I once read excerpts from an article on the “negative effects of castration”. They mentioned that orgasm and masturbation generally become decreasingly doable, in such a tone that they implied this was obviously a huge terrible loss. These were the opinions of doctors, IIRC. …
… Then I read the comments and, lo, eunuchs and wannabe eunuchs agreeing that these are important things to keep in mind and discussing ways to mitigate the losses and risk of depression. I suppose I forgot for a minute that people can have BIID about their genitals and still be sad that it trades off against sexual function. (I’m an idiot.)
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@tailcalled (genuinely curious) do we have a way to distinguish between these two groups other than performing the surgery and asking how they feel about it afterwards?
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“Lawrence, you keep using words like “clearly” and “obviously” about things that to me are neither clear nor obvious. If you wish to persuade me, you have to spell out the actual argument”
I use the words “clearly” and “obviously” because my purpose is to defend the barricades of common sense against extreme commitments to ethical axioms.
But I did give an argument. The argument is: the autonomy principle is strong enough to imply that there’s nothing wrong with giving heroine to addicts, which is crazy, therefore the autonomy principle is wrong, or at least must be balanced against other values.
You can respond:
* that’s not crazy, giving heroine to addicts is perfectly fine.
* no, it doesn’t imply that, here is why helping people do what they want to their own bodies is perfectly fine for amputations but not perfectly fine for heroine
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I do actually think there’s nothing wrong with giving heroin to addicts. The question of giving heroin to non-addicts is way thornier.
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“I completely reject the principle that some choices are “so obviously the wrong choice.””
Really? You completely, absolutely reject it? Your commitment to verbally expressed preferences is absolute?
What about the heroine addict?
How about this: we’ve got a guy with a split brain. The half of the brain with command of the verbal faculties says he’s perfectly happy, but we can see with advanced futuristic neuroimaging tech that the other half of the brain is in constant agony and wants to die. Verbal brain says “I prefer to stay how I am”. We have advanced surgery tech and we can safely remove the miserable half with almost no risk to the verbal half. Stipulate that this would not affect the workings of verbal brain at all. What do we do?
Or this: Evil bio engineers design a genetic mod that will turn humans into willing slaves. Willing mothers decide to use this mod to raise slave-children. They go work horrible lives in salt mines and willingly give their money to the bio engineers and the willing mothers. They are miserable and their life is painful and short. But if you ask them they say they do willingly. Is this perfectly fine or some kind of horrible crime?
I think you’ve got a much stronger argument that I’ve somehow misapplied the principle to amputations than that the principle is to be rejected in every case.
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Lawrence, saying that your position in an argument is “common sense”, while implying that the other position is “obviously” ridiculous is bad practice. It doesn’t add any useful information and invokes anger in proponents of the other side. If you wish to have a productive discussion, please avoid this language. Alternatively, we can just stop.
Now, about those addicts. IMO, the key questions are “If we prevent the addict from accessing heroine, will the addict thank us later? If we allow the addict access to heroine, will they regret it later, to the extent that they wish someone would have overridden their autonomy at the time?” If the answers are positive then we are justified in preventing access to heroine. If the answers are negative then we should respect the addict’s autonomy (modulo the effect this would have on other people).
I didn’t specifically mention *verbally* expressed preferences. The important thing is the preferences that actually exist inside the person’s mind. Usually verbal utterances are strong evidence about those, but obviously there are exceptions (e.g. people that are mute). This also solves the puzzle about the split brain. Maybe you think that people who want to remove their own limbs are lying about their preferences, but I would like to see strong evidence for that: a priori it seems unlikely (more precisely, if they *are* lying then I wouldn’t expect them to go through with the surgery, so we have more information than just verbal utterances).
If someone engineered a mind with strange preferences then we should indeed take these preferences seriously. A different question is whether engineering such a mind is a good thing in the first place.
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@ozymandias
OK yes, yay harm reduction. Do you approve of giving them as much pure heroine as they ask for, whenever they want it?
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@Vadim Kosoy
On language, I really don’t see how I can make my argument at all from inside the straightjacket you want me to wear.
I want to convince you that an abstract principle is too strong, on the basis of that it’s application to an individual case leads to absurdity. How would you have me say it that would not make you angry?
Also, are you primarily concerned with defending the principle, or the case?
If it’s the case, well, maybe I’m just under-informed about the specifics. Maybe BIID is a lot more like trans than I realize. Maybe there’s lots of data of people getting amputations and 10 years later they say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them. Maybe my “this is crazy” just has to melt in the face of clearly demonstrated harm reduction. If so that’s the argument you should make.
But if it’s the principle you want to defend I want to stick to my “obviously” and “clearly” and “common sense”, because I can just cook up more and more extreme examples all day long.
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You know what, I thought about it some more, and I came out of the gate way too aggressively against amputations. I don’t actually care about amputations, It just struck me as so obviously ridiculous that it was as good a place as any to plant a flag. For all I know it’s fine. It all depends on the details of the psychology of people that want to remove their limbs and what other options are actually available to them. None of which I know jack shit about.
The only thing I really wanted to do was push back against “body ideology trumps EVERYTHING” ideology, which I think is awful and wrong for the same reason libertarian “property rights trump EVERYTHING” ideology is awful and wrong. But It may be the case that I actually just agree with body autonomy people on every practical question that comes anywhere near the Overton window, in which case trying to plant a flag on a particular issue like amputations is just going to result in me (a) getting informed about amputations, (b) pissing you off without actually making my point.
So, if you want to debate amputations further I’ll just concede you’re probably right, but if you want to debate the abstract principle that autonomy and preferences are the measure of everything then let’s debate that.
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“(Likewise, if transition renders one sterile, it would count as a disutility in this model.)”
I don’t know if we can necessarily say that that’s true, given the trouble lots of people go to to become temporarily or permanently sterile. Particularly for people with uteruses, in which conceiving can itself be a difficult-to-reverse physical change leading to pregnancy and birth, which can be highly unpleasant and have long-term health consequences up to and including death. I would argue that even in that model, for someone with a uterus it’s not possible to clearly state which condition has greater utility between:
a) Fertile (therefore at risk of conceiving, and needing to direct resources and experience some disutility in controlling that risk)
b) Sterile (free of this risk, but unable to choose to become pregnant)
Therefore the condition with greater utility is whichever is the free and considered preference of the person whose body it is. How highly they personally rate the utility of retaining the option to have biological children, and how negatively they rate the risk of unintended pregnancy and the ongoing efforts needed to reduce that risk.
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Lawrence, regarding language, I don’t object to reductio ad absurdum in general. It’s just that reductio ad absurdum makes sense when you have some expectation of your opponent agreeing that the example in question is absurd. If your opponent already said they believe in some specific example X, then you can’t do reductio ad absurdum by saying “X is absurd.” That said, arguing too much about discourse norms is in itself a risk to the productivity of the discussion.
I’m also more interested in abstract principles than the specific case of limb amputation. And yes, I believe that “autonomy and preferences are the measure of everything,” in the sense that you should only violate someone’s autonomy when either (i) this someone is a danger to other people or (ii) you are reasonably confident that you acting according to their own preferences (which roughly means that they would thank you for it given (a) sufficient time to deliberate (b) the same information that you have and (c) sufficient ability to infer facts about the physical world).
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“you are reasonably confident that you acting according to their own preferences”
There’s the sticking point. *whose* preferences? Normally it’s clear enough and we don’t have to worry about that question. But if you’re going to involve evil bio-engineers that manipulate preferences, or for that matter very strange and unusual medical conditions that manipulate preferences, then the of “whose preferences” stops being obvious.
For example lets say the evil bio-engineer kidnaps you and alters your preferences to turn you into his slave. We arrest the engineer and throw him in jail but in your altered state you refuse treatment to put you back to the way you were. What do we do?
Or lets say it’s discovered that BIID is caused by a certain kind of otherwise benign tumor. The tumor can be removed and BIID will be cured and it’s safe and there’s no side effects. The patient still wants an amputation. If we amputate they’ll be happy and say it was what they wanted. If we remove the tumor they’ll be happy and say it was what they wanted. Who’s preferences do we respect? The tumor-addled mind or the “normal” one?
Or again what about the heroine case? What if they just want to keep getting high and they’ll keep wanting that indefinitely, until they waste their whole life. How can you avoid saying we should just help them do it?
What all these examples have in common is that the usual attitude we have towards the self, that it is a unitary black box, is broken. As soon as you start seeing the mind as something with parts or something that can malfunction, “preferences are the measure of everything” breaks down into contradictions. We need other values besides preferences to figure out what the true preferences are in these situations.
And this problem is in no way unique to preferences. Any value that you try to elevate as supreme above all others will break down like that when you look at the fuzzy grey areas of the categories used to define the “supreme” value. And you’ll need to at least implicitly use other values to adjudicate what the “supreme” value actually means in the ambiguous cases. So the supreme value is not really supreme at all.
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Suppose it is possible to apply some process to the mind of Alice, such that their mind goes from state B to state A. We are trying to decide whether applying this process would be in Alice’s best interests. There are two questions we can ask:
1. If Alice remains in state B, will they be content with the choice, or will they regret refusing the transition to A?
2. If Alice transitions to A, will they be content with the choice, or will they regret not staying in state B?
If the answers to both questions point towards the same preferable state, then Alice has an unambiguous preference. If this preference contradicts Alice’s current opinion about the transition process, then we may consider violating their autonomy, although (importantly!) we should think whether the positive value of enforcing the better (from Alice’s perspective) outcome outweighs the negative value of violating Alice’s autonomy (again, from Alice’s perspective, i.e. we should think about the value Alice places on their own autonomy).
On the other hand, if the answers to questions 1 and 2 point towards *different* states, then Alice-A and Alice-B are effectively different people with different preferences. One way to solve the dilemma is via the value of continuity: ceteris paribus, killing a person and replacing them by a different person is bad, therefore Alice should remain in state B (this seems to be the correct conclusion both in the case where each Alice wants to be the other Alice and in the case each Alice wants to be themselves).
Now, consider an even more complicated situation: Alice was originally in state A, then some process caused them to transition to state B. Again, if questions 1 and 2 have consistent answers then there is no problem. If questions 1 and 2 have inconsistent answers, then the situation is less clear. It is less obvious that invoking continuity as before is correct, since one can argue that the Alice-A is the original Alice and therefore has priority.
Moreover, you are right that in some extreme cases this model breaks down. Namely, suppose that Alice-A is a more or less ordinary human whereas Alice-B is a completely alien mind. In this case, the value of the life of A is much superior the value of the life of B, to the extent that it might be justifiable to murder Alice-B and replace them by Alice-A. However, there are two points to bear in mind here:
(a) For game theoretic reasons, it might be required to cooperate with the alien race represented by Alice-B and sacrifice Alice-A for this cooperation.
(b) This extreme case is indeed very extreme since even people with very strange preferences (such as removing their own limbs) are still very much within the “human” cluster of mindspace.
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I think removing a limb could be treated a bit like suicide. I can support euthanasia, but not think doctors should prescribe cyanide too all suicidal people. Medical transitioning seems like more of a deliberate choice.
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[cw transphobia]
This seems uncharitable in that you don’t seem to even consider the possibility that Ozy actually believes this.
Like, I can’t speak for Ozy, but for me personally a big part of my true emotional rejection of transphobia (and homophobia, for that matter) is that I think it’s stupid to tell someone who wants to do a certain thing with their body that they shouldn’t do it Because That’s Not What Your Body Is For. Like, who decides what your body is For? Why should anyone decide that other than you, yourself? I have very much the same reaction to your arguments in this thread as I have to people who say that “trans people undergoing physical transition are just mutilating themselves and messing up their bodies” – who cares? Why should I let someone else’s aesthetic preferences about my body determine what I do with my body? It feels like you’re trying to build morals out of aesthetics and it feels every bit as bullshit as when people talk about “natural law” as a reason why homosexuality is wrong or whatever.
I’m not biting any bullet here; I don’t really even have bodily autonomy as a sacred value – like, I’m fine with some drugs being illegal if that actually leads to better outcomes overall, for instance, where “better outcomes” mostly means things that generally lead to people being happier. To me autonomy is a useful tool for usually making people happier. The thing that actually makes me disagree with you here is that I don’t think anything else overrides happiness. It’s incoherent to say “your preferences are illegitimate” because there’s no source of legitimacy other than what will make you happy.*
If people who want a limb removed tend to be wrong that removing the limb will make them happy, then that’s a good reason not to fulfill that preference. But if they tend to be right, then I think it is correct to do so. Especially if there’s no known way to make them stop wanting that. (But even if there is, I think a lot of people would strongly prefer not to self-modify that much.)
I think if you don’t accept this, then the only thing determining whether you accept gay and trans people is, basically, aesthetics – do you happen to intuitively perceive transition as a normal and legitimate thing or a strange unnatural and bad thing? (I do think that this is basically the case for most people, and the greater degree of acceptance these days is mostly about these intuitions changing for people.) Or perhaps that only sufficiently common preferences should be considered legitimate (then again whether you accept gay and especially trans people depends on where your cutoff is).
*I realize that at some point “happiness” gets confusing and slightly incoherent itself, hence all the debates among different kinds of utilitarians about what precise metric to maximize – I don’t have a rigorous definition myself of what exactly I want to maximize but I think the general idea is pretty clear
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“This seems uncharitable in that you don’t seem to even consider the possibility that Ozy actually believes this”
Oh, I think ve does believe it. I think those libertarians believe their stuff too. I just think they’re over-commiting to specific principles.
I think you’ve hit on the strongest argument against my position, which is “you have no principled way to distinguish between trans people getting HRT and people seeking amputations”. Likewise my strongest argument is “you have no principled way to distinguish between amputations and wireheading”.
I don’t think my arguments apply to gay people or trans people that aren’t on HRT or getting surgery. My argument isn’t “this is what your body is for, you are using it wrong”. It’s “you are physically destroying yourself, and that’s so crazy I don’t trust it it is your real preference”. Having gay relationships or presenting as another gender doesn’t physically destroy bodies and there’s no reason to regard it as presumptively crazy. Then again we could construct grey area cases between “use” and “destruction” if we wanted to, so it’s not entirely clear cut.
So how do I distinguish between trans body modification and amputations:
* You’re right that regret counts for a lot. I don’t know what the data is on amputations, but most trans people do not regret it. But regret isn’t everything. Wireheads feel no regret.
* Trans body mods are very analogous to the sort of aesthetic and reproductive choices we let everyone else make. The only bodily function that might be severely impaired is sex and reproduction. I don’t see how this is different than cosmetic surgery, tattoos, vasectomies, etc.
* Trans body mods to not have the primary effect of making a person physically disabled. I feel a certain indignant moral outrage at the idea. I once read an article about people who intentionally contracted AIDS, because they were jealous of the AIDS patients. I kind of suspect the whole thing was made up, but this amputation thing arouses the same kind of reaction in me. They aren’t just wrecking themselves. They’re obliging other people to accommodate and take care of them.
How can amputations be distinguished from wireheading:
* If people who want amputations are made subjectively miserable by being attached to their limbs, but could actually live and function happily if that one impediment were removed, then it can be seen as harm-reduction, not just preference-fulfilling. Wireheading is pure preference fulfilling and completely destroys the person.
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Removing a cancerous tumor “physically destroys” a part of oneself too, but I rarely see that described as self-destruction.
I don’t see any fundamental difference between a body part, a hammer, and a cell phone – they’re all tools which let their user interact with the world in certain ways. If the cost of owning a given tool is higher than the benefit of having it, the rational thing to do might well be to go without it. Ideally, someone making that determination should take all relevant information into account, such as long-term studies of other people in similar situations, with an amount of effort proportional to the amount of disutility they would experience if they later turned out to be wrong. That being said, if someone says “I’ve reviewed the medical literature on this condition, and talked to a therapist about it, and after careful consideration I think I’ll have an overall happier life without my left arm,” then I don’t see that I have any grounds to tell them differently.
Similarly, with the heroin addict example from above, I think the optimal solution would be to say something along the lines of, “Medically we recommend against using heroin, as people who remain addicted to heroin tend to die younger and have lower quality-of-life than people who are not addicted, and this is usually not what they want. Also, former addicts who quit using tend to later regard that as a positive change in their lives. Here is some information about various treatment programs, which we strongly suggest you look into. If you’re still not interested, here’s where you can buy unadulterated heroin and clean needles.”
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@Lawrence d’Anna
I agree that the closest analogy to voluntary amputation is trans people going through surgery. But I think the broader analogy applies because “you’re not allowed to destroy part of your body” is in my view an argument of the type “you’re using your body wrong”. As TK-421 says, defining what exactly counts as “destruction” is a little fuzzy, but even setting that aside, I just think destruction is a type of use. Normally if you own something, you’re allowed to destroy it. Sometimes destroying something is the right thing to do; sometimes you use something by consuming it, which also destroys it. Sometimes you’re happier without the thing. I still don’t see why destruction is so different from any other use that it’s therefore bad. I mean, if you’re doing something irreversible you should be really careful making the decision, but if someone did a lot of thinking and made the decision then that’s fine.
Based on what Ozy says in this post, we don’t actually have that much data about how trans people fare after transition, unfortunately, but I agree that anecdotally it seems that it usually makes them happier.
Re: wireheading, what exactly do you mean? If you mean that somebody is entirely overwritten with happiness, then that’s basically like death, and as Vadim says above we can’t really check later to see if they regret it – the wireheaded being is no longer really the same person as the one who made the decision. (But I don’t think it’s necessarily always bad for someone to choose this.)
Removing a limb doesn’t change someone into such a different person that you can’t have continuity of preferences. If anything, self-modifying to no longer desire a thing that you used to desire is closer to destroying your mind.
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“allowed to” is a much lower standard than “there’s nothing wrong with it”. I wouldn’t dream of forcing someone to keep their limbs, but I still might think it’s unethical to help them remove them. And I would consider it really bad to tell a trans person “I think what you are doing to your body is a terrible mistake, I think it’s destructive and wrong, you shouldn’t do it”. But I might say that to someone considering removing their limbs. I might also not say it because it might be none of my business, but I wouldn’t refrain from saying it out of a universalizing conviction that their subjective preferences for not having limbs is just as legitimate as a normal persons subjective preference not to to be mutilated. I’m not willing to take subjectivism that far. All of that caveated with “this might all be justified by harm reduction”.
“wireheading” is using brain-manipulating technology to directly produce euphoria. Presumably it is so effective that once you start using the euphoria box you just keep using it until someone takes it away from you or you die.
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I’m anti-BIID amputation in general , but making them do it completely alone imposes a gangrene risk, doesn’t it?
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@1angelette
(cw: suicide, holocaust, Godwin)
You can make that objection against other bad things too:
– If we don’t make doctors help you with suicide, you may mess it up and merely hurt yourself or you may hurt others (my grandfather was a train driver and it’s very unpleasant for them if people jump in front of trains)
– If we don’t supply professional military snipers for the mafia, innocent people are much more likely to end up dead due to crappy hit jobs
– If we don’t build professional gas chambers to kill Jews, Hitler will have them shot, which causes them to suffer more.
Ultimately, that argument completely makes you a hostage to people with extreme desires and a disregard for others in the pursuit of those desires. Meanwhile you enable them to do things that many otherwise probably would not do.
Ultimately, you get into a trap where you are at best slightly less bad than the worst people in society, but more likely, you end up sliding along that slippery slope, changing your morals along the way to resolve cognitive dissonance, so suicide becomes normal, government hit men become normal and the holocaust becomes normal. You’re doing it, you aren’t a bad person, so doing it can’t be bad, right?
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Aapje, I don’t think anyone is proposing an open ended commitment harm reduction that would encompass your mafia and nazi examples. We fight guys like nazis and mafia even knowing it’s negative sum, because we are not willing to be taken hostage. We have a whole insult word just for “allowing oneself to be taken hostage by nazis”: “appeasement”.
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I was going to say something like this, but just to add my own spin on it:
What got me was “if a Deaf person chooses to remain Deaf.”
Society/gov’t pays a lot in time, money and resources to accommodate the needs of deaf people – in the form of sign-language translators, descriptive video for television. Even if you have a close friend or relative who’s deaf, it’s costly for you to learn sign-language. There is a reasonable argument that everyone should pay some of the costs for people who have no choice in the matter, but the argument looks a lot less reasonable for the sake of “autonomy.”
How about some responsibility, to go with those rights?
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Gah – Closed captioning, not descriptive video. DV is for the blind. Duh.
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roe: Is your claim that no one should ever make a decision that has costs for other people, or that the benefit Deaf people who wish to remain Deaf receive from Deafness is universally smaller than the cost it takes to accommodate them?
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@Ozy
I think that there is a clear conflict between demanding a society that provides help for people with disabilities (which is a burden to others who have to accommodate and pay for this) and the desire by people to remain or become disabled in some ways.
At that point, you are crossing over from accommodating people who didn’t get a choice, to enabling people to get or stay in a position where they continually impose costs on society by choice. The issue here is that we will never be able to grant everyone the resources to get all of their desires met. As such, a demand that the government pays to meet the desires of some, automatically reduces the ability for others to meet their desires. So all wealth transfers & other accommodations are inherently a trade off that cannot be resolved by merely listing the benefits to the beneficiaries, but requires weighing those benefits against the burdens on others.
Of course, one can then still decide that the wealth transfer & other accommodations improves society more overall, but it is never a decision that can follow from abstract ethical ideals.
For this reason, I am very wary of people who reason from abstract ideals (Utopians), because IMHO those ideals can only be taken to their extreme in an abstract world without the limitations that exist in ours.
I am also very wary of advocates, for in my experience, they tend to be extremely biased in judging the benefits to the group they advocate for, while downplaying the burdens to others.
This is why I strongly believe that we must not give Utopian thinkers (like communists) or advocates the keys to the kingdom (although they can do good work if checks and balances exist to counter their weaknesses).
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Your argument doesn’t just apply to disabled people, though. It also applies to, like, people who don’t want to take modafinil regularly (accommodated with an eight-hour work day), learn a new language (accommodated by interpreters), lift weights (accommodated by other people carrying heavy things for them), learn to drive (accommodated by public transit and friends who drive), become attracted to people they aren’t currently attracted to (accommodated by other people not getting laid)…
Of course, the benefits of many people not taking modafinil or not driving outweigh the costs. But so might the benefits of a person remaining Deaf.
That said, I think bodily autonomy is a good rule for medicine, because I don’t trust doctors that much. I do not want doctors to have the capacity to force me into Lasik against my will because they think the costs of society to me wearing glasses are too great. And allowing me to stay blind while refusing to blind a sighted person who has the exact same strength of desire that I do is blatantly treating people unequally based on their disability status.
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It does apply to the cases you gave. Some people feel that foreigners who migrate to a country should learn the language, to have a good chance at a job. So these people may want to not give people (as much) welfare if they apply for it and refuse to learn the language.
My argument that is that such a proposal should be decided on by weighing the various arguments, not based on just a single principle, like: ‘autonomy.’
By definition, you are not autonomous if you demand things from others, so in itself that is a rather weak argument.
PS. Frankly, I strongly suspect you of being selfish here and not supportive of allowing a violent rapist/murderer to turn down treatment due to bodily autonomy. If you want to be kept safe from such people, you have to violate autonomy at some level.
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I feel the need to point out that Ann Coulter is often attacked by the left with misdirected transphobia.
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I think that while this post is a broadly correct arguments against really silly anti-trans arguments, it might be overstating some points a little bit.
Does it really make a whole of sense to call women who are attracted to anyone masculine-presenting heterosexual, especially given that in many First World settings masculine presentation is almost acceptable for women? Especially if the notion of “masculine” includes jeans, combat boots, and a Nightwish T-shirt, in which case even a log haircut wouldn’t count as a gender marker. But even if not, if two women can be equally attracted to a same butch woman, I find it odd that one of them would be called lesbian, and the other one straight rather than bi.
Likewise, it seems to me that it’s at least very common among men to have attraction based specifically on body type AND gender presentation. In this case one ask two different questions:
(1) “I fapped to Bailey Jay, and I gay now?” To this the answer is “No, you idiot. First, if you’re attracted (which you probably are, since you’re asking this question) to cis feminine-presenting conventionally attractive women, you can’t be gay by any sensible definition, you can at most be bi, and stop confusing these categories. Second, Bailey Jay has a body of a typical conventionally attractive cis woman, and she presents very feminine. There’s literally no difference between your attraction to her and to any cis woman, until the moment you’re actually having sex with that woman.” If that’s what we mean by “attraction to trans women is 100% gynephilic,” then sure, it is. But on the other hand,
(2) “I find myself frequently attracted to trans women with fairly masculine bodies, who are presenting masculine or gender-neutral, and their identity comes up in conversations fairly rarely – does that mean that I may be capable of being attracted to men?” Answering “nope, still 100% gynephilic” to that seems kinda odd. There certainly may be men out there whose attraction is in fact solely based on others’ gender identity, and they only find strangers attractive based on their guesses about their identity, and for them it would in fact be true. But given how incredibly prevalent gender essentialism is, I seriously doubt that there a lot of people like that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they umber was similar to or even smaller than the number of people who are bi, but don’t realize it.
It seems to me that the primary issue here is that people are so batshit homophobic that they go on a murderous spree from having a thought “I might be gay.” Sure, getting the point across that no, gynephilic attraction doesn’t magically become anrdophilic if an attractive woman has a penis (and especially if she doesn’t but used to) is very useful, but due to the existence of situations like the aforementioned (2), I think fighting homophobia is a more sound strategy here.
Isn’t it the case that radfems and even a sizable portion of third-wave-but-burn-your-bra feminists believe exactly that?
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“any feminine clothing is uncomfortable and therefore worn as a result of fetishism or brainwashing” is a fairly common radical feminist stated belief. However, being part of that community myself, I’ll concede that the amount of trans woman appearance discourse is disproportionate, like, obviously there are many more cis women than trans women, so you think there’d be 500x as much discourse (one post for Emma Watson, one for Lana Pulver, etc) but there’s not. The reasons are presumably unflattering; perhaps because radical feminists are predisposed to be reading and having issues with the arguments of trans women; or, maybe radfems have sympathy for the rock and a hard place of cis women trying to dress, and are not as charitable to trans women whose condition seems self inflicted, etc.
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How does that discourse handle the issue that sufficiently formal masculine clothes, while substantially more comfortable than equally formal feminine clothes (although not always – http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-22828150; presumably gym bros who wear leggings for workout are doing it for comfort reasons as well), they’re still substantially less comfortable than clothes actually optimized for comfort (e.g. combat uniforms, workout clothes, etc.), as well as the entirety of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men's_skirts ? Are men who wear that also considered brainwashed victims of oppression?
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You know, that is a good question. I am afraid that I have never read direct discourse about any of these examples, so I will try to make a fresh analysis then, using this extreme lens (which is not necessarily my personal belief).
To start out, it is obvious that very few people consider comfort to be the sole factor in an article of clothing. In fact, even radical feminists are not leading a crusade to eliminate stiff leather, or starting a charity to provide everyone with undyed weatherproof jumpsuits. There are other factors in the gendered quality of clothing anyway. For example, https://fitisafeministissue.com/2013/02/26/whats-so-bad-about-pink-anyway/ Also, it is true that the respective comfort of trousers or skirts is kind of subjective. There are other uncomfortable things, like, girl’s jeans have a tighter fit, or, you aren’t allowed to wear a thin T-shirt without a bra, and they don’t make thick T-shirts that have room for cleavage.
In your first point I will just state that the *relatively* high comfort of the masculine formal dress would be sufficient to reinforce the radical feminist perspective. For example it is harder to run in an ankle length dress than in a suit. (Note: I have never worn an extremely formal suit like a tuxedo. Just a blazer over a button down shirt and stiff slacks. So I may not have perfect information about suit quality. Please let me know if so.)
In regards to your second point I would presume that the distinction is obvious. They just wanted to wear whatever had the right coverage:temperature ratio. One guy even says in the article that he will continue to wear trousers in cooler weather. Can you find out what the heck was their company rationale for banning shorts? A shorts ban seems pretty uncommon.
Now as for the final broadest point. Okay I am not an expert I did not click on every single link to a specific type of masculine skirt so maybe I’m off base here but in my understanding the “tunic” and , in an extreme case the modern American pencil skirt, are not really the same thing. Example:
https://churchpop.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/1-2.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/2c/c9/a4/2cc9a4130ded6e8cc2257bf5575513b3.jpg
Apparently men were not expected to run around in these skirts while they were skirtlike. Whereas American women in gowns do not have this option in a wisely approved fashion.
However a medium long skirt has some advantages over the modern miniskirt. In fact some women wear miniskirts in spite of cold. Obviously whether this is because of social pressure will depend on which you ask. Here is just documentation of the dress itself, admittedly not proof of social pressure.
http://web-japan.org/trends/fashion/fas040123.html
My understanding is that medium long skirts were/are common in warm desert climates where it would be good to loosely cover a skin and prevent sand damage while minimizing warmth. These skirts are not uncomfortably tight like pencil skirts, damaged by sitting like petticoat supported skirts, or easily flipped for modesty nagging like every skirt I’ve ever worn including but not limited to skorts HAHA I’M TOTALLY NOT BITTER OR BIASED…
So to summarize, there are some cases where masculine formal dress is a little uncomfortable. Radical feminists have not taken up the charge of optimizing all clothing for comfort, but hey who has? (This question serves a rhetorical purpose but if you actually know, please hook me up with them, actually.) Men’s skirts meanwhile were usually developed with comfort and not modesty foremost.
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My experience is that a reasonably well-fitted suit will not substantially impact your range of motion at the hip and knee (though it will still be more restrictive than proper* casual clothing), but suit jackets will ruin your shoulder/elbow range of motion, even if you don’t button them.
It’s also worth noting that for most “higher” grades of formality men have essentially a single prescribed set of clothing that is acceptable (“no skirts” is a less restrictive example of the same phenomenon), while women can vary their outfits and generally express more style. This lack of choice does also mean a lack of confusion, but I personally would rather be making choices carefully than not at all. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind the relativistic greenness of grass.
* I strongly believe that clothing is not casual if you do not have full range of motion. I think this puts me at odds with the world of fashion, but I’m not a huge fan ofus that world anyway.
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I should specify: I’m talking about formality above “business attire”. At that level and below, things are relatively equal except for the “no skirts” restriction, I think.
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This analysis overlooks (IMO) the thesis that gender is psychologically perceived as a fundamental ontological category.
“Did I accidentally fap to a trans woman” might not be homophobia, but emotional disturbance at having fundamental categories breached. (Even if the question is “Am I gay?” – well, people don’t always say what they mean on their first articulation, especially on something that reaches so deep into the psyche) (It’s also possible, of course, to draw sexual pleasure from the violation of categories).
That is, this is something that should be broken down into a very fine grained explanation, not dismissed with a pat “no, you idiot”
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> “people who have testicles, prostates, penises, flat chests, bears, testosterone-dominant hormone systems, XY chromosomes, etc.”
Wait, why haven’t I got a large shaggy animal of the Ursidae family? I have all the other things on the list. Did I miss a notification?
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Beards I guess? Since the corresponding space is “no beard” in the other list.
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Then I guess I’m one of the odd ones. I’m gynephillic, not remotely bi that I’m aware of, and at this point in my life I should have had at least one opportunity to make me question that. And yet if Ifell in live with a transwoman, regardless if she had the transition surgery or not, I honestly believe I wouldn’t have a problem with that. After our first sleep over or even make out session, assuming I’d have given it enough to time to get to know her and like her as she presented cis. I might have to think a bit of how to best proceed in the relationship as it would a surprise. But if I liked her well enough I would expect to carry the relationship along like any other one I’ve had. But in no way would that reorient my natural sexual preference. Sure. I love vaginas just fine, but I love the person she is even more.
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I need to make this a proper post a can link people to, but I have made the argument before that some people are attracted to a sort of gender/presentation cluster, and some people are attracted to a phenotype cluster.
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“Fourth, love is weird.”
Humble suggestion: better to say “love is compensatory” 🙂
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>1. Do transgender theories undercut or contradict the idea that sexual orientation is unchangeable?
Initially, I thought it’s referring to the change in sexual orientation that happens to some trans people, which is well documented. See for example here (a poll): http://transguys.com/polls-surveys/shifting-sexual-orientation, and here (a study): http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0110016
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I would certainly never discriminate against an otherkin or Stefonknee and I am happy to do any little courtesies that would make their lives more comfortable, such as referring to an otherkin as a “being” instead of a “human”.
This isn’t the salient point. The salient point is whether you believe that someone else not doing those courtesies makes them a terrible person, and that the practice of calling someone human against their wish is as terrible as intentionally misgendering a trans person. These are the difficult questions; “am I personally bothered about otherkins?” is a fake easy question.
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If the answer is “actually, Burkett doesn’t share many gendered experiences other than the purely biological with female subsistence farmers in India”– which I think is probably true– then by her own argument either she or female Indians subsistence farmers are not really women. This seems somewhat silly.
On the contrary, it seems perfectly reasonable evidence that gender essentialism is nonsense and that “real woman” is an entity in the same category as “invisible green unicorns.”
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“Second, many heterosexual women– in my experience– are not literally solely attracted to people who identify as men, present as men, and have male primary and secondary sexual characteristics. It is quite common for heterosexual women to be attracted to people with testosterone-dominant hormone systems, regardless of identity, or to people who identify as men, regardless of body type, or people who present as men, regardless of self-identification or sex. If a woman is attracted to people with strong jawlines and penises, she may very well continue to be attracted to her trans female partner. But that doesn’t mean her orientation has changed. She is still orientationally attracted to people with strong jawlines and penises.”
Agreed. I identify as a heterosexual man, but my attraction is really toward the group “people who present as women”, not “people who identify as women”. Maybe I’m typical minding, but I kind of thought most people were this way. For instance, are there really straight men who are more attracted to someone that looks like Daniel Radcliffe holding an “I am a woman” sign than they are to someone who looks like Emma Watson holding an “I am a man” sign?
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When leaving who are attracted to butch lesbians get asked why they don’t like similar looking men, the classic retort is that gummy worms and earthworms are shaped similarly but one tastes sweet and has no blood inside while the other does not.
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While I really liked what you said in 6 you didn’t really address the asked question. It was not, why are we justified in challenging transracialism but why aren’t we justified in challenging transgender identifications.
I mean ultimately the answer must be that transgender identifications are subject to the same standards/rules as other factual claims. Presumably, the issue is whether they are statistically so unlikely to be incorrect/in error/etc.. as to justify almost always taking them at face value (and there is also the social politeness angle…even if you are justified in factually disputing something it is not always appropriate to dispute it to someone’s face).
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In particular, I think your answer here overlooks the important distinction between people who identify as trans men/women and intermediates thereof and people who identify as versions of non-binary that eschew the one dimensional man/woman scale.
It’s not at all clear to me if these two types of identity claim really have anything to do with each other at all (other than perhaps reflecting a basic confusion/emotional engagement with gender).
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More generally, it’s not even clear to me that there is a single concept which can contain both transitioning gender identities and non-binary identities (in the sense above). The concepts of trans man and woman refer to the idea of gender as the social roles and expectations associated with male and female in the culture. That is why there can be a trans man absent an operation (they slot into the role society has defined as man). But if gender identity means what social role you adopt re: gender then (until mainstream culture adds more genders) it doesn’t make sense to call things other than male/female gender identities.
A better interpretation would be that there are both socially recognized gender roles (male/female) and also attitudes towards those roles. If so much of what is expressed by non-binary gender identities isn’t really the same sort of thing that is meant by gender identities as used by cis/trans-men/women. Rather many of those labels indicate attitudes towards these cultural roles rather than alternate roles. If so it does everyone a disservice to lump these two concepts together.
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As an aside I think trans advocacy digs itself an unnecessary hole by attaching itself too closely with a certain continental philosophy style approach to the subject where no fixed point is ever offered and the entire edifice remains frustratingly opaque.
For instance, people like myself who want to understand in what sense someone who claims to be “really a woman/man” are left SOL because any attempt to chase down what it means to “really be a man/woman” are explained only in terms of identity and vague generalizations/analogies while identity in turn is explained in terms of examples like man/woman.
What is needed is explanations that explain the desire to be trans in particular practices (I like being treated in such and such ways men/women are usually treated in our society) that explain the very real emotions and needs people have here in terms that require one accept the identity theory approach/explanation of what is going on.
Many people who would be perfectly inclined towards compassion and would otherwise be trans-supportive are instead needlessly at odds with trans rights because the only context in which it is ever explained suggests that one has to buy into a certain highly suspect theoretical approach to even make sense of the notion.
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My problem with modern trans activism is the “cotton ceiling” and the denial of sex based oppression.
I am all in favor of supporting trans lesbians, cis lesbians who partner with trans women, spreading sex education resources relating to trans women, etc. However, its gotten to the point where I can’t say something online like “I am a lesbian and I love eating pussy but dicks gross me out” without a bunch of maladjusted creepers telling me that only shallow, selfish people care about what their partner’s genitals look like and that I’m an evil TERF who hates all trans women and wants them dead.
I’ve seen “believes in sex based oppression” as another Evil TERF characteristic a lot. How can you have a useful feminist movement if you can’t talk about pregnancy, contraception, abortion, menstruation, breastfeeding, etc?
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I think it is probably a bad idea to talk about other people’s body parts as being gross in general. I also think that you solely like pussy because you are a lesbian is unfair to lesbians without a genital preference (in the same way that it would be unfair to assume that all lesbians like butches). IME, “I love eating pussy” does not get a negative response, but I agree that it is wrong to criticize a person for expressing a genital preference.
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I’m glad you haven’t experienced that kind of criticism but I definitely have, and I can link you to a bunch of receipts.
IRT talking about body parts as gross – I think dicks are a perfectly fine body part and I have no problem interacting with them in a non-sexual situation (I am a nursing student) but the thought of interacting with one sexually grosses me out, while the thought of interacting sexually with a pussy makes me happy and turned on.
That’s why I identify as a lesbian – I want to partner with people who have pussies + estrogen-dominant features and IDing as a lesbian is the best way to communicate that. I understand that other lesbians have different desires, and I can’t stand the people who act like Sappho appeared to them personally and revealed the one true definition of lesbianism. I just don’t want to be told that I’m not a real lesbian because real lesbians are attracted to all women when it doesn’t work like that for me.
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There are clearly women such as “Alice” out there who are specifically attracted to people with pussies. There are apparently women out there such as “Charlotte” who are specifically attracted to people who identify as women (though this raises questions about identity as pointed out by shemtealeaf). Obviously Alice is not Charlotte. These are two different women. While there is logical grounds for either woman to consider herself a lesbian and get annoyed by being called “not a lesbian”, there’s also a stance out there that Alice is committing a deep moral wrong. I am grateful to Ozy for respecting the rights of individuals to have a genital preference. That respect is not universal.
I don’t understand why sexual dimorphism is so completely impossible for the trans community (at large) to acknowledge. As noted by Ozy in the OP, the clusters seen in most human beings remain unnameable. Even accepting the intersex issue as proof a human body’s limits are unknowable – there exists a system of “designation at birth” that produces distinct societal legal categories (yes, not every culture has only two such legal categories). I mean, is “male socialization” an indelible coat of uniform paint? No, I’m not pushing that theory in this instance at all. I just want a way to say “all I wanna do is [gunshot gunshot cash register noise]” without, like, asterisks. It would be nice to have a “WLW” community tier catchier community name than the “people who like people with pussies” community. Do we have to call the blind community the “people whose eyes don’t work” community?
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This is simultaneously the most important question, and the wrong phrasing, since “transgender theories” is pretty broad.
The vast majority of public discussions about transgender folks issues relate to practical stuff, not theoretical stuff. And almost all address interactions which relate to others: Should we pass or repeal certain laws? Should we create a new protected class? Should we cover or deny certain expenses out of group funds? Etc. Like all lobbies for regulation, these issues can generally be summed up as “To what degree should we use the power and force of the government, to force folks to behave the way we want?”
And when you’re considering those issues, the initial question is usually whether being trans falls in the category of “mutable/voluntary/non-essential,” versus the category of “immutable/involuntary/essential.”
Both have costs and benefits. Neither require you to change your conclusion regarding orientation.
If it’s voluntary/mutable/nonessential then it’s basically subjective. The only real protected analogue is religion. You’ll have a harder time pushing for protected status and you’ll have less justification for anything similar. But on the upside, if it’s subjective then it can’t be challenged or investigated, so you have excellent support for the “what you say you are, is what you are” claim. I support this level of personal autonomy and choice, though I don’t support using this to make more laws.
If it’s immutable/involuntary/essential like the rest of the protected classes, then it’s objective. But objective facts are objectively verifiable (if not now, at some point in the future,) and merely because you say or think you’re trans doesn’t mean you are. Hello, Rachel Dolezal! But at least the ones who make the cut will have better standing to claim status as a protected class. I support this alternative too, including passing more protective laws, so long as we can agree on an objective way to classify folks.
Right now, though, I can’t help but feel that those arguing are refusing to pick a side. They claim it’s voluntary insofar as they hotly dispute any third party opinions… but they claim it’s involuntary when it comes to rights. I can support either one, but not both. So I support neither. Make up your mind!
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